Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reader Forum section. In an attempt to broaden our interaction with our readers we have created this forum for those with something meaningful to say to the wireless industry. We want to keep this as open as possible, but we maintain some editorial control to keep it free of commercials or attacks. Please send along submissions for this section to our editors at: [email protected].
Mobile start-ups have attracted a lot of attention from entrepreneurs and investors. Given the right combination of a strong service and the right timing, the potential for growth is absolutely stunning. Take, for example, the photo-sharing app Instagram: after Facebook bought the company in 2012, user growth has sky-rocketed 500%.
Given this kind of unpredictable and rapid growth, the mandate to scale infrastructure to preempt user and business needs has pushed many mobile service providers, particularly early-stage companies without a heavy compliance burden, to house data and services in public cloud environments that can deliver real-time flexibility to meet volatile growth and short-term changes in demand. As businesses grow, though, relying solely on the public cloud won’t always be cost effective and can often introduce performance challenges. Around that point of maturation, many companies start to look at private cloud options a little more closely.
Consequently, more businesses are combining public environments with private clouds, effectively creating a hybrid cloud solution for infrastructure needs. So, while mobile companies are deciding to leverage public clouds initially, many end up using both. To really plan for the future, though, businesses should consider launching hybrid cloud solutions from the start.
Public clouds out of the starting gate
The increasing, yet unpredictable, demand for mobile services across sectors is making it difficult for mobile companies to plot an accurate map for growth. That’s what has made the flexibility of public cloud hosting providers so appealing for businesses coming out of the starting gate. In general, tech solutions today are in constant upheaval. Businesses are scrambling to determine what mobile app is going to be on top down the line, but it’s often hard to predict what’s going to be popular a year from now, let alone a decade.
Public cloud solutions accommodate the roller-coaster ride of the mobile industry well, particularly given the fact that some apps see spikes in popularity around certain events or different seasons. Yet, companies that have outgrown the “peaks-and-valleys” phase have found that there’s a certain point when public cloud storage solutions can no longer meet all of the needs of the business. Latency, for instance, is an ongoing issue for mobile companies and often increases as a company’s customer base becomes more disparate.
In fact, one of the major differentiators for any mobile company is connectivity, especially in the context of reducing latency through partner and inter-regional connectivity. Mobile companies often start globally rather than locally, but latency can be prohibitive in gaining ground in new markets abroad. Thus, real-time service delivery is, and must always be, a priority. Mobile ad exchange platforms, for example, need to deliver relevant content within milliseconds; any delay can undermine the business model, and, consequently, negatively impact customer experience.
In its rawest sense, “speed” matters to any mobile company. A higher degree of latency means that customers are more likely to churn. Being “slow” has become an unacceptable attribute in the crowded mobile market and demands for connectivity continue to grow. Latency is the cornerstone of success for mobile companies. A mobile ad firm can suffer in lost relevance, impressions and profitability for clients when running from a public cloud with higher latency. A mobile app for streaming video, too, can lose customers if there’s too much buffering or jitter.
When businesses are expanding overseas or experiencing an influx of new customers, high bandwidth requirements in public clouds can become costly, erasing the advantages from the start-up days. So what’s the answer? Combine the public with the private.
Giving the public cloud a private anchor
When it comes to speed, there’s a private cloud solution that trumps public clouds: the carrier-neutral data center. An independent data center that is not solely supported by any one network, hardware or software vendor can leverage centralized resources to provide connectivity to every business involved. Rather, by allowing companies to choose from hundreds of different carriers, costs can be reduced and connectivity vastly improved. Not only that, if one carrier goes down, it’s possible to quickly switch to another carrier with no interruption in service.
A great example of what this looks like in real life is the capital market trading industry. Many of these firms have moved to carrier-neutral co-location data centers to reduce the latency involved in each exchange or trade. In such a time-sensitive business, a slow connection can mean a revenue loss for the traders that rely on those speeds every day. Improving connectivity hinges on finding local locations with physical connections and duplicating the infrastructure there. Many high-growth U.S. and Asian companies have executed this strategy within European markets to provide the same speed of service as regional competitors, preventing churn among customers that are frustrated with a low quality of service from foreign providers.
Latency is just one of the reasons for a hybrid cloud solution. Although it has been something of a tradition to position the debate between public clouds and private clouds as a choice between one or the other, the truth is that the solutions complement one another quite well. Depending on the industry and the stage of a company’s growth, a hybrid cloud solution can be used as a way to play up the strengths of each option.
Mobile finance or healthcare app providers do this by relying on public cloud environments for low-bandwidth, low-security documents: brochures, reminders and other communications. For sensitive information about finances or confidential health data, though, they turn to private clouds housed in secured data centers. Protecting patient and customer information isn’t just a legal necessity, it’s a public relations necessity; one data leak can do irreparable damage to a brand’s reputation. It isn’t necessary to build a company-specific data center, though. By virtue of co-location and carrier-neutral arrangements, there are data centers that can provide affordable, off-premise private cloud solutions to any business.
Making the solution a win-win
Businesses can’t always plan for their successes or failures, but it’s possible to prevent latency and improve security for future customers. Public cloud environments are dynamic and flexible solutions, perfect for early-stage companies, but those that are growing more steadily are likely to also need a solid (literally) model in place – one that differentiates based on latency and security.
With increased public scrutiny on keeping private data private and a more demanding mobile audience than ever before, it’s clear
that relying solely on public clouds isn’t a tenable option. But because public cloud environments can be flexible for fluctuating infrastructure needs, and carrier-neutral co-location data centers reduce the latency and cost of infrastructure, a hybrid environment provides a solid foundation for any company. Businesses can’t plan for the future, but with a hybrid environment, they can be prepared for it.
