The short answer is that we promote ‘the cloud’ because: 1/ at LCL Data Centers, our ambition is to contribute to making you as successful as can be. The performance of your IT infrastructure is key to your business success. And: 2/ we offer you the best possible deal when it comes to connecting you to ‘the cloud’ in all its formats.

The longer answer
What we can do to help, is to offer you first and few atoremost a safe housing infrastructure - including a choice between three back-up sites - for your IT infrastructure backend and your data. On top of that, and even more importantly, we offer you the best connectivity on the market, at the best conditions. Most companies today have hybrid infrastructures, containing equipment on-premise, (a) rack(s) in an external data center, and data in one or more clouds. Connectivity is the most important aspect for all IT infrastructures, whatever the setup.

The importance of connectivity
It is important that all your systems and data – central, regional and cloud-based – are connected with each other. Otherwise how can it all be accessed by the entirety of your personnel, partners, clients etc, and how can you only have one version of everything? This reminds me of old times, when every department had its own spreadsheet with data, so before CRM was considered a standard tool in any organisation. It took ages before a new contact person at a client had been changed in all the spreadsheets…
It is also important that all your systems are connected with the internet, as that connects you with the rest of the world, even if you should have dedicated lines between your different locations (which is far from always the case). In a data center, you always have a lot more carriers available, at better conditions. We actually have clients for which the lower telecom prices they get in our data centers more than offset the cost of the housing.

Cloud connectivity
If you have some type of cloud solution as part of your IT infrastructure – be it multicloud or just one public cloud, or, more probably, a hybrid cloud – connectivity between the cloud platforms is key to be able to integrate different applications. Say you work with a public cloud for a CRM application, and with a different cloud for a VoIP system. You need to integrate both to be able to do direct dial-ups from your CRM system through your VoIP platform.
As importantly, the data & apps on premise in your different sites, the data & apps in your external data center(s), and the cloud infrastructure, have to be connected. The data from your invoicing system for instance, should be the same as the data in your commercial CRM. There are data centers – indeed, as you already guessed, like LCL -  where you get a direct, flexible, powerful and yet very manageable access to the main cloud platforms over the whole world, through the Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric (ECX Fabric™) in our data centers.

So that’s why…
We put ourselves in your shoes. The integration of cloud platforms into your IT infrastructure – via best of breed connectivity – is important for you to be succesful