Before undertaking a data center extension, it’s important to think about your needs (such as connectivity, capacity and cost) and your goals for the data center extension. Consider whether you need to perform live migration of workloads into and out of the cloud, for example, and whether you need to migrate workloads without changing their IP addresses. Why are you planning to extend your data center, and what do you hope to achieve by doing so?

Once you’ve outlined your needs and goals, you can a choose a service that meets those needs. It’s also a good idea to use a service that’s based on the same underlying technology that you use in your on-premises data center, so that your IT team is already familiar with the technology.

Technically, the cloud can’t replace data centers completely. After all, the cloud itself still runs on physical data centers somewhere. But when most people say “data center,” they’re referring to an on-premises data center, and by this definition, there is indeed a strong trend toward increasing adoption of cloud infrastructure. In one survey, 73 percent of respondents reported that the cloud would be their primary deployment venue for a majority of workloads in 2020. However, security and compliance considerations make it unlikely that the cloud will ever completely replace the on-premises data center. For organizations that have strict compliance requirements or want to make the most of their existing investments in their data center infrastructure, leveraging the cloud as a data center extension offers the flexibility of cloud with the security and control of an on-premises data center.

Since cloud computing runs on data centers, the cloud itself does need data centers. But an organization running its workloads on a public cloud doesn’t need to build and maintain its own data center—it can simply use the offsite data centers provided by the cloud provider. However, some organizations may still prefer to maintain an on-premises component to their hybrid cloud architecture. This could include organizations that have already invested in an on-premises data center, that have special security or compliance requirements, or that simply prefer the control and customization that a data center provides.

There are many costs involved in setting up and maintaining an on-premises data center. Some of the biggest expenses include: 

• Hardware and facilities costs: An on-premises data center requires not only an investment in expensive hardware, but also facility space to store that hardware, electricity to run it and systems to cool it. 
• Maintenance: All that hardware takes labor to maintain, test and upgrade.
• Staff and training: Facilities, IT and security staff must be trained on data center operations and then paid to staff the data center.

These costs can be reduced or minimized by balancing use of an on-premises data center with public cloud services.

The data center is evolving, and new trends and technologies are allowing businesses to take advantage of innovative architectures and techniques, including data center extension. Here are three of the biggest trends affecting how businesses use their data centers:

Software-defined data centers (SDDCs): Businesses are increasingly adopting this data center model, in which compute, storage and networking are virtualized so that they can be managed and provisioned flexibly and easily. With the right solution, an SDDC can easily integrate with public cloud services for effective data center extension.

Cloud adoption: Although the cloud may never fully replace the on-premises data center, more and more businesses are turning to cloud-based architectures, products and services. This increase in adoption is changing how businesses think about and use their data centers. 

Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud: When choosing a cloud solution, rather than migrating everything to the public cloud, many businesses turn to hybrid cloud or multi-cloud solutions. These allow them to take advantage of the scalability and flexibility of public cloud while also maintaining an on-premises data center and the security and control it provides.