Pexip Private Cloud provides the ease and scalability of a shared cloud with the control, security and privacy of a self-hosted video conferencing solution. Planning the migration thoroughly is essential in ensuring everything goes as smoothly as possible.
Advanced video solutions have established themselves as everyday tools for carrying out meetings and collaborating. At the same time, the needs of users have become more versatile. When something that was once a novelty evolves into a routine tool, the chosen video conferencing service is expected to be able to adapt quickly to these required changes.
This has led to organisations' growing interest towards moving their self-hosted infrastructure into a cloud environment, where, for example, capacity increase can take place promptly. While the flexibility of a cloud environment is undeniable, certain doubts exist, and issues like data security and control have slowed down this development.
Many of these obstacles were removed in December 2020 as Pexip, a leading provider of enterprise video conferencing and collaboration solutions, announced the launch of the Pexip Private Cloud – a deployment option for video conferencing that provides the ease and scalability of a shared cloud with the control, security and privacy of a self-hosted solution.
“During the pandemic, we saw a huge increase in organisations moving to virtual cloud environments," John Burnett of Pexip explains. "Now that it has become commonplace, we want to continue to be part of how they can do business: conferencing efficiently but still maintaining control over their security and data privacy."
Pexip Private Cloud enables organisations to manage their video network as an on-premises solution even though a portion of it is located in the cloud. As the name implies, this dedicated portion is not shared with others – and enables leveraging services also from the cloud standpoint.
Burnett points out that, most of all, Pexip Private Cloud is a tool that makes managing the video conferencing infrastructure a lot more efficient. The services can be expanded, even to new locations and continents, literally within minutes. This frees organisations from having to invest in on-premises capacity that they might need only occasionally.
In addition, there is the benefit of freeing the staff to work in a more productive way. While making cloud migration easier for organisations, Pexip Private Cloud also allows them to focus on business growth and innovation instead of infrastructure management.
"Every organisation needs to operate efficiently," John Burnett adds. "Pexip Private Cloud empowers the IT professionals to concentrate on more important tasks."
Burnett adds that, according to initial customer trials, Pexip Private Cloud can reduce IT overheads by up to 80%. Add the fact that Pexip Private Cloud's speed of deployment is up to 10 times faster than that of a typical self-hosted solution, and there is little doubt about its ability to take video collaboration and conferencing further.
Eero Heikkilä, MVC Videra's Head of Professional Services, sees virtual clouds as a natural way to increase capacity whenever there is a peak in the overall use. As deployment takes place quickly and without any additional security or data privacy challenges, Pexip Private Cloud does bring out the best elements of both on-premises and cloud environments.
"As the traffic between any Pexip Infinity components takes place over an end-to-end secured IPsec connection, the use of Pexip Private Cloud does not introduce any additional interfaces for possible security vulnerabilities. Even in this sense, Pexip Private Cloud is an excellent tool to burst capacity, even on a larger scale."
As a part of MVC Videra's offering, Pexip Infinity and the Private Cloud are available also as a licensed solution for organisations that prefer to host and manage it themselves.
"Even though there are no additional security concerns, many organisations still feel it more convenient hosting the operating environments themselves," Heikkilä points out.
Eero Heikkilä adds that planning the migration thoroughly is essential in ensuring it goes as smoothly as possible—especially when the existing environment includes equipment from various manufacturers.
"The best overall solution is the kind that provides the best usability, manageability and cost-efficiency. Manageability is typically best in situations where most of the workflow is maintained on-premises while cloud is being used mainly for temporary capacity increases."
John Burnett agrees that hybrid models are one of the features that make Pexip Private Cloud a truly unique solution, because of the flexibility it provides. The customer can choose how much of the required capacity remains on-premises and how much of it is moved to the cloud.
"Along with its ability to expand capacity quickly—even to multiple geographic locations—and make the administrative function operate more efficiently, Pexip Private Cloud is an extremely convenient first step to moving gradually into a cloud environment. The first responses are extremely exciting, and I believe this kind of model will soon become the default in video communications."