Intel and PhoenixNap Co-Innovate
Cloud Spend at a Glance
There seems to be no stopping Cloud Computing. According to Gartner, the total worth of the world wide public cloud end user spending was $371.4 billion at the end of 2020, with expected growth to $832.1 billion as we close out 2025. (1)
According to Deloitte, CIOs surveyed spend an average of 22 percent of the IT budget on cloud-based services, an amount they expect to double (44 percent) in the next three years. (2)
The cloud managed services market size is expected to grow from USD 86.1 billion in 2021 to USD 139.4 billion by 2026. (3)
It’s clear that enterprises across verticals are consuming cloud at a rapid pace and they are looking for knowledgeable managed cloud providers.
Next Generation Managed Cloud Service Providers
There are hundreds of managed cloud providers globally and Intel powers many of them. In addition, Intel works with ecosystem partners such as VMWare and Red Hat as well as top cloud service providers such as AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure to ensure that customers can use a combination of public and private cloud resources from the managed cloud provider of their choice.
From a capabilities standpoint, managed cloud providers offer support at the infrastructure and the application and tools level. From an infrastructure standpoint, these managed providers offer services like architecture guidance, system administration and operations, system monitoring, alerting and reporting, security and compliance management, backup and disaster recovery as well as database administration.
In the application and tools arena, managed providers offer managed virtualization, application deployment, scaling and lifecycle management.
Enterprise IT teams are seeking out next generation managed cloud service providers that are able to keep pace with a rapidly growing cloud ecosystem and their ever evolving needs. Cloud Service Providers like PhoenixNap, accelerated by Intel®, go beyond offering traditional managed services like day to day support and instead offer expert cloud guidance as well as a portfolio of customizable services and multi-cloud technologies.
Intel® and PhoenixNap Co-Innovate
Founded in 2009, PhoenixNAP is a global IT infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider offering a broad range of options, including innovative cloud solutions, bare metal servers, hardware leasing, and colocation, available from six locations worldwide. PhoenixNAP’s mature managed cloud solution provides public cloud, virtual private cloud, and managed private cloud capabilities, along with backup and recovery, disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), and various storage services.
Cloud Service providers are under increasing pressure to differentiate and build services on top of the infrastructure they rent to customers.
PhoenixNap has had a long term partnership with Inte®l. Intel® engineering and marketing have played pivotal roles in product offering and development at PhoenixNap for years. From a product portfolio perspective, driving innovation and offering advanced solutions has been a key focus of the co-innovation that has happened between the two teams.
In 2019, PhoenixNap collaborated with Intel® to develop and offer a dedicated server platform with vertical CPU scaling capabilities—FlexServers. By leveraging the 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable process and Intel® Speed Select Technology (Intel® SST), PhoenixNap was able to offer a solution that changed CPU configuration with a simple reboot.
Fast forward to April 2021, when PhoenixNap rolled out its Bare Metal Cloud Portfolio powered by the latest 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors. As Intel’s launch partner, PhoenixNap was among the first providers to offer systems based on the latest generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors.
Bare Metal Cloud is a dedicated server platform provisioned in a fully automated way on a pay-as-you-go model. The environment integrates with various APIs to let you deploy, configure, and scale your IT resources easily. This simplified provisioning model gives clients increased flexibility in IT planning, while hourly billing and monthly reservations options let teams maximize resource use and control cost
Designed for organizations that have adopted an automation-first approach to IT and DevOps practices, Bare Metal cloud is an API-first solution. The platform allows for almost real time physical server deployments and provides management through Infrastructure as Code integrations. This type of Intel® powered technology allows for not only hourly billing but also reserved instances options.
Reserved instances offer a discount billing concept. An organization can capitalize on significant discounts compared to standard “On Demand” cloud computing prices, by committing to a specified level of usage. For steady workloads, reserved instances offer significant financial value.
Intel® accelerated technology at PhoenixNap allows for not only hourly billing but also reserved instances options. This is the type of choice that differentiates a CSP in the marketplace and the type of choice that customers are demanding.
Collaboration with industry leaders like Intel® not only allow PhoenixNap to gain technology speed to market but also brand awareness in communities like DevOps where cloud built on Infrastructure as code is happening real time and Intel® is already a presence.
An Approach to Data-In-Use
Cloud security, whether within the cloud or in adjacent environments is a huge organizational concern. Customer workloads sit in private, public, hybrid and multi clouds and on-premises. Many clients are supporting several of these different types of cloud footprints.
According to a recent article in CSO Online, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), has named misconfiguration, inadequate change control, and limited cloud usage visibility as some of the top cloud security concerns that organizations are looking to address. (4)
Imagine if organizations could better protect their data-in-use? Well PhoenixNap did just that. Working with Intel® engineers, PhoenixNap looked at the area of Confidential Computing as they envision what is next for their customers.
Confidential Computing, an up and coming area of cloud security, calls for the adoption of data-in-use encryption. Workloads are encrypted while being processed, thus reducing the risk of cyber breaches. As a complement to data-at-rest and data-in-transit encryption, in-use encryption is the concept of end to end protection.
Additional benefits include minimized risk of outsider and insider threats,, improved environment controls, greater transparency, and increased confidence in cloud providers.
Data-in-use encryption can be implemented by creating hardware-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEE), also known as enclaves. Enclaves help isolate the application from the rest of the system including OS, providing better control over access to encryption keys. These enclaves dramatically reduce the possibility of a data breach, even if a bad actor gets privileged access to the production environment.
The creation of these enclaves are enabled via hardware security technologies such as Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel®SGX). The Intel® SGX technology enables data processing within the enclaves. Data is processed in memory, meaning it is not exposed to the entire system. Through full memory encryption and accelerated cryptographic performance, Intel® SGX helps enable confidential computing on both dedicated and virtualized platforms.
As the cloud continues to mature, customers will continue to look at co-innovation between PhoenixNap and Intel® for what’s next.
Learn More
Bare Metal Cloud: https://marketplace.intel.com/s/partner/a5S3b0000016OlLEAU/phoenixnap?language=en_US
PhoenixNap: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/customer-spotlight/stories/phoenixnap-cloud-customer-story.html?cid=spon&source=Jo
1. Gartner Reference
2. Deloitte Reference
4. CSO Online Reference
https://www.csoonline.com/article/3638780/5-top-hybrid-cloud-security-challenges.html