A Multi-Cloud Strategy – The Key to Expansion and Conversion

Web and mobile applications have collapsed geographic barriers to business, bringing brand and commerce experiences ever-closer to increasingly far-flung customers. While web-based business models are powerful enablers for global expansion, they also create new a new challenge in managing availability and performance across diverse and distributed markets: How do you ensure consistent web performance across all markets without investing in physical infrastructure in all of those markets?

Once a business gets its core business on a consistent and reliable provider like SoftLayer, we typically recommend that they consider a multi-cloud strategy that will spread availability and performance risk across a global infrastructure of public and private data centers, delivery networks and cloud providers. Regardless of how fantastic your core SoftLayer hosting is, the reality is that single-source dependency introduces significant business risk. Fortunately, much of that business risk can be mitigated by adding a layer of multi-cloud architecture to support the application.

Recent high-profile outages speak to the problem that multi-sourcing solves, but many web-based operations remain precariously dependent on individual hosting, CDN and cloud providers. It’s a lot like having server backups: If you never need a backup that you have, that backup probably isn’t worth much to you, but if you need a backup that you don’t have, you’d probably pay anything to have it.

A multi-cloud strategy drives revenue and other conversions. Why? Because revenue and conversions online correlate closely with a site’s availability and performance. High Scalability posted several big-name real-world examples in the article, “Latency is Everywhere and it Costs You Sales.” When an alternative vendor is just one click away, performance often makes a difference measured in dollars.

How Cedexis Can Help

Cedexis was founded to help businesses see and take advantage of a multi-cloud strategy when that strategy can provide better uptime, faster page loads, reliable transactions, and the ability to optimize cost across a diverse network of platforms and providers. We built the Cedexis Radar to measure the comparative performance of major cloud and delivery network providers (demo), and with that data, we created Openmix to provide adaptive automation for cloud infrastructure based on local user demand.

In order to do that effectively, Cedexis was built to be provider-agnostic, community-driven, actionable and adaptive. We support over 100 public cloud providers. We collect performance data based on crowd-sourced user requests (which represent over 900 million measurements per day from 32,000 individual networks). We allow organizations to write custom scripts that automate traffic routing based on fine-grained policies and thresholds. And we go beyond rules-driven traffic routing, dynamically matching actual user requests with the most optimal cloud at a specific moment in time.

Getting Started with Cedexis

1. Join the Community
   Get real-time visibility into your users’ performance.
2. Compare the Performance of Your Clouds and Devliery Network
   Make informed decisions to optimize your site performance with Radar
3. Leverage Openmix to optimize global web performance
   Optimize web and mobile performance to serve global markets

The more you can learn about your site, the more you can make it better. We want to help our customers drive revenue, enter new markets, avoid outages and reduce costs. As a SoftLayer customer, you’ve already found a fantastic hosting provider, and if Openmix won’t provide a provable significant change, we won’t sell you something you don’t need. Our simple goal is to make your life better, whether you’re a geek or a suit.

-Julien Coulon, Cedexis

We are very excited to have SoftLayer CEO Lance Crosby, one of the industry’s most successful entrepreneurs, deliver a keynote address this year. I look forward to hearing Lance’s views on the future of the industry in light of the recent acquisition of The Planet. The strategies his team puts in place to capture and increase market share will be of particular interest to me.

Parallels Summit is the leading global gathering of the Cloud industry. More than 1,500 attendees, including hosting companies, communication service providers (CSPs), value-added resellers (VARs), software vendors and web designers from around the world will join forces to discuss trends, strategies and business opportunities in the Cloud. The Summit will take place February 22-24 at the Gaylord Palms Hotel and Convention Center in Orlando, Florida.

I appreciate the opportunity to meet and share ideas at Summit with industry leaders like Lance, Go Daddy President and COO Warren Adelman, AT&T VP of SMB Product Management Ebrahim Keshavarz, and Ingram Micro VP of Managed Services and Cloud Computing Renee Bergeron, among many others. This year’s Summit will again give all attendees invaluable access to potential business partners, Parallels technical and business resources, and other industry participants.

Good luck to everyone in winning the three day lease of a Lamborghini. You will no doubt have fun. For those who haven’t registered yet, there is still time. Summit is free – so register today!

See you all in Orlando!

Jack Zubarev
President of Marketing and Alliances at Parallels