SingleHop Adds Free Private Cloud Services to Portfolio

How to Keep Your Cloud Technologies Secure

For many IT organizations, the distinction between cloud services and managed hosting services is already blurry. Both are making use of outsourced infrastructure that have different pricing models attached to them in terms of how they are invoked.

This week, SingleHop, a provider of both cloud services and data center co-location facilities, blurred that line even further by announcing that it will provide a limited amount of free, private cloud computing services via its public cloud to IT organizations that use its data center co-location services.

Jordan Jacobs, vice president of products for SingleHop, says the virtual private cloud service, dubbed ColoPlus, is intended to entice more of its customers to start using the company’s public cloud service. While not all workloads are suited for the public cloud, Jacobs says many organizations that are relying on data center co-location services today could make more economic use of disaster recovery services, for example, that run on a public cloud. Obviously, it’s more economical for SingleHop to move as many workloads as possible into its public cloud service. So, SingleHop is passing those economic incentives along to the co-location customers it gained when it recently acquired Datagram, a provider of data center co-location services.

In general, hybrid cloud computing is starting to look like a three-legged stool. On the one side is the traditional IT infrastructure that most IT organizations still run on premise. On the other side is a raft of public cloud computing services options. In the middle are the data center co-locations services that are seeing increased demand as more IT organizations are deciding against building their own data center facilities.

As a provider of both data center co-location services and a public cloud, Jacobs says SingleHop is ultimately interested in increasing the total number of workloads that it manages on behalf of customers regardless of where they run. Whether other providers of data center co-location service come to the same conclusion regarding public cloud services provided with data center co-location service contracts remains to be seen. But for IT organizations that don’t know exactly what type of services they will need for any given class of application workload, it’s good to have as many options as possible.