For years, data centres and managed service providers have provided customers with the most up-to-date capabilities and services.
But the shift from Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings has put hyperscalers in the driver’s seat of the cloud computing market. They offer the managed services that are the building blocks for modern, cloud native applications.
A better fit
While the hyperscale public cloud model is an attractive proposition for a large number of customers, there are many existing and planned use cases and business models for which the traditional local data centres and MSPs are a better fit. The reasons vary — in some cases, it’s the need for absolute separation of data. In other cases, it’s related to governance and regulations. And, sometimes, customers require customizations related to unique application architectures.
Ridge, a Boston-based cloud services provider, has addressed this challenge with a new computing paradigm in which local data centres’ existing capacity is transformed into modern PaaS offerings. It accomplishes this by enabling data centres that have private cloud or virtual data centre offerings to add modern, cloud native PaaS services, such as managed Kubernetes, containers and object storage.
These managed services — accessed through a single API — enable local data centres to offer customers cloud-native capabilities without needing the expertise to run the services themselves. Ridge’s web services also enable customers to connect with any legacy infrastructure and to customize a hybrid or multi-cloud architecture best suited to their requirements.
Jonathan Seelig, Ridge CEO, said: “With the explosion of cloud-native applications, we’re seeing many companies looking not only for local cloud options, but also for interoperability with their legacy architectures.
“There are so many variations on cloud architecture, and no one size fits all. We’re giving businesses the ability to build an optimised cloud strategy, in the location — or multiple locations — of their choosing.”
Seelig will be speaking further on the work of Ridge and cloud transformation alongside an all-star panel of cloud experts at the Cloud Transformation Congress on July 13, 2021.
The panel discussion, titled ‘Demystifying the cloud for your transformation journey’, will examine the differences between public, private and hybrid cloud, and help organisations to decide which is the right one for them.