11 February 2020

Jelle Frank van der Zwet, segment director IT service providers at Interxion

Chief among these is the growing need for flexibility. As businesses move towards hybrid and multi-cloud environments, the IT operation becomes the glue that connects their services and technology together. But this “glue” can vary wildly in nature depending on your cloud configuration. If you’re using public cloud, for example, the network becomes more important. As a result, Service Providers need to build-up the knowledge and expertise to include network services as part of their portfolio. Where traditionally enterprises would go to carriers, this now needs to be integrated into the managed services of an Service Providers. The flexibility and agility needed is increasingly challenging to deliver on, as a growing number of disparate services need to be easily managed and work seamlessly.

The other major trend is security. The complexity of linking different clouds, instances, and workloads together, allowing them to move across platforms breeds vulnerability. To offer the aforementioned seamless services, a complex and disparate network – often across many different types of infrastructure (on-premise, public, colocation etc.) – needs to be secured. There’s no “right” way to do this, and questions around cost and compliance will determine which workloads go where. If you’re using a multi-cloud model and are regularly sending data back and forth, you need to balance your security and latency – it’s no good having the tightest security setup if you can’t access information quickly and efficiently. There’s a fine balance to be found here – no two setups are the same and Service Providers will need to think carefully about how to deliver such bespoke services while managing costs.

It wasn’t too long ago that Service Providers were almost entirely focused on infrastructure and applications. That time has passed. In the future, they will need to be much more focused on the network, because it’s an integrated part of the workload. As this trend takes hold, there will be those who adapt better than others. Service providers with network assets and capabilities related to interconnection will be at a distinct advantage. The ones that don’t face a real challenge. It’s a similar story with security, the Service Providers that can apply intelligent identity and access management systems across multi-cloud will be the winners. As technology evolves, this market determining differentiator will change. My prediction is that the ability to automate and integrate more elements of the service chain will soon play an important role in who wins business, and who loses out.

Jelle Frank van der Zwet, segment director IT service providers at Interxion