As the result of increased demand for Azure Hybrid Cloud services from businesses in the north of England, Node4 has upgraded its Leeds data centre to deliver the service in closer proximity to customers.
Previously, customers could only access Azure through the Northampton data centre serving central UK. Now customers in the North can access Node4’s Managed Azure Hybrid Cloud solutiton through the upgraded Leeds data centre, which offers low latency due to physical proximity, additional UK-wide capacity for Node4, and regional diversity for the company’s infrastructure.
Andrew Slater, Technology Practice Director Cloud at Node4, said: “We are delighted to extend our Azure Hybrid Cloud solution to our Leeds site and provide a hew hybrid region for the UK based in Yorkshire. The expansion continues our steadfast commitment to significant and sustained data centre investment.”
In a Future of Hybrid Cloud Report released by Node4 earlier this year, IT leaders in the UK expressed shortcomings with public cloud that are leading them to consider private or hybrid alternatives.
“As demonstrated in our research, businesses are increasingly in need of a simple, effective, and reliable way to migrate more of their legacy structure into an Azure environment without the challenges that often frustrate their digital transformation process,” added Slater.
The shortcomings of public cloud according to those surveyed include:
- 51% found public cloud more expensive than forecast
- 22% encountered issues with service or capacity
- 21% experienced performance issues
- 17% had problems with compatibility
These issues with public cloud are, in part, driving businesses to explore hybrid cloud solutions as an alternative to using only public cloud. Slater noted: “Our research underscores that many UK organizations have encountered challenges in getting the final 20-30% of their production workloads into public cloud environments.”
With the upgrade of the Leeds data centre, Node4 can now offer Azure Hybrid Cloud solutions to an expanded audience.
“We have seen the emergence of a new hybrid cloud model where organizations bring the public cloud providers’ software into their controlled IT environments. While respondents identified potential barriers to longer-term hybrid cloud adoption, we’re confident that these can be overcome with developing hybrid cloud technologies,” said Slater.
The Node4 Managed Hybrid Azure solution allows customers to scale on demand, introduces Azure tooling across the entire hybrid environment. Customers can use Azure to manage disaster recovery, backups and updates, while Node4 manages infrastructure setup, configuration, and hardware.
