Some tech sectors, such as search and to a certain extent social networking, are dominated by a single entity.
The public cloud space is different. Far from being a winner-takes-all scenario, there is a veritable smorgasbord of options to consider.
This is good news for business enterprises as it gives them choice. With Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform pushing the envelope in different directions, many are starting to mix and match, selecting the best services to suit their needs. Yes, running your tech stack across many different locations can be complex, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Giving customers what they need
Harnessing services from a multitude of cloud deployment models makes you more responsive. Consider events such as Black Friday, an international football tournament, or even an individuals’ day-to-day engagement with online banking. More than ever, businesses need to be able to meet surging demand for increasingly personalized and immersive customer experiences. However, as the world tries to recover from the pandemic and social distancing rules evolve, demand trends are difficult to predict.
Every time a business makes acquisitions, forms joint ventures or explores new markets, a ton of new IT baggage is added to the mix. IT strategies are no longer reactive bolt-ons. Nowadays, they are—or are becoming—the business strategy, and the variegated use of cloud is right at the heart of it all.
There is also a growing desire to avoid inflexible lock-in to an environment where the cost of new deployments is likely to keep rising.
Variety is the spice of life
Cloud diversity can make it tricky to centrally manage your tech stack. Visibility gets splintered and disjointed. At the same time, attaining a level of control can require a complex stitching exercise or orchestration automation effort across all the environments in play.
The challenge is how to best connect and secure multi-cloud application deployments without unnecessary cost and complexity—all while enforcing consistent policy and end-to-end visibility.
F5 has evolved alongside these market concerns, and we’ve significantly enhanced our solutions portfolio with a distributed cloud platform that can deploy, connect, secure, and operate apps and data across multiple clouds and edge sites. This allows for delivery of a much broader multi-cloud solution to support a dizzying array of use cases and initiatives. Importantly, these span multiple clouds and CSPs, and can deliver a consistent network and security services.
The platform also offers an integrated set of services for multi-cloud deployments through a single console, relieving the struggle of managing multiple disparate implementations, and unlocking the benefits of accelerated deployments and simplified infrastructure. Whether you are leveraging a private network infrastructure and/or the Internet, complete control is maintained. Now, you can radically reimagine architectures to achieve the flexibility required.
In world that's increasingly driven by application programming interfaces, business-to-business traffic, and infrastructure-on-demand, this means you don’t have to compromise in the cloud.
Instead, you can employ the best tool, application service, and service provider for the job. Whenever and wherever needed. Ultimately, the benefits and use cases of distributed cloud deployments are only limited by our imagination.
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