Hybrid multi-cloud enables greater agility and flexibility with lower costs.
I had the opportunity to speak with Nikolaos Koletsas, Product Manager and Karmen Dijkstra, Product Marketing at Leaseweb Global about the introduction of their Cloud Connect solution.
Leaseweb has been around for 21 years initially hosting websites, then providing dedicated servers, cloud migration, and colocation. During that time, they made several acquisitions and wound up with 25 data centers around the world.
Leaseweb’s primary vertical industries are gaming, SaaS, Martech, AdTech, and FinTech. They began with European clients but attracted a number of U.S. clients also when GDPR went into effect. Today, they are providing cloud solutions for start-ups and SMBs.
They differentiate themselves from other providers by offering the best price to performance ratio, by being global but local, and personal and flexible. For example, by giving customers an account manager free of charge. There’s an additional expense for an account manager from the large public cloud companies.
During COVID-19, enterprises are doing more online including business, video, and education. All companies are looking to put the right workload in the right cloud, and manage costs. When a company starts using a large public cloud provider, they receive a lot of credits. As these credits run, public cloud costs increase and there’s interest in and demand for other solutions.
Companies will keep their public cloud for development and then go on-premises in a high-quality, secure network for production and to process data. Combining the two environments enables faster time to market with greater cost management and efficiency.
Leaseweb is launching Cloud Connect on AWS since that’s where most of their clients are. However, Cloud Connect on other major public clouds in on the product roadmap. The new solution is designed for businesses that require the flexibility to move workloads in line with changing demands and budgets and includes different connectivity speeds ranging between 100Mbps to 10Gbps.
The new offering provides a tailored and cost-effective solution to address the lack of customization that many businesses experience when they decide to scale their infrastructure, services, applications, and data within a public cloud environment.
“Leaseweb Cloud Connect provides businesses with an efficient way to build secure networks that interconnect Cloud infrastructures across Leaseweb and public clouds,” said Nikolaos. “The new offering delivers a hybrid cloud solution that allows businesses to use a public cloud for development, PaaS functions, one-off workloads, and big data platforms, all while leveraging Leaseweb for business-critical applications and associated data or specific production environments. Megaport’s Software Defined Network provides the scalable, secure connectivity to cloud onramps to ensure peak performance. This approach minimizes infrastructure costs and increases the speed at which organizations can bring new products and services to market.”
By using Leaseweb Cloud Connect to create a hybrid cloud environment that leverages Leaseweb's global network, businesses can develop and distribute their services while gaining more control over their cloud-based infrastructure. Leaseweb provides a fast and secure connection to the public cloud, which ensures a dynamic and cost-effective allocation of resources across the hybrid cloud environment.