Building smarter, scalable hybrid cloud architectures

Enterprises are navigating increasingly complex infrastructure needs—balancing the demands of modern applications, AI workloads, compliance requirements, and cost constraints—and embracing a hybrid cloud architecture is becoming a key part of their strategy.

By integrating on-premises systems with cloud environments, businesses can optimize their IT infrastructure to meet diverse needs. This approach allows seamless integration of legacy systems with modern cloud services, maintaining control over sensitive data while benefiting from cloud flexibility and innovation.

As enterprises adopt multi-cloud strategies to optimize operations and reduce costs, leveraging multiple cloud providers enhances performance and ensures redundancy. However, managing connectivity across different cloud environments can be challenging. Solutions like Flexential Cloud Fabric simplify, scale, and secure connectivity options, streamlining multi-cloud access and improving overall network performance.

In a recent joint webinar, Flexential and AWS brought together technical and strategic leaders to explore how enterprises can meet these challenges head-on with a hybrid cloud strategy that prioritizes performance, security, and agility.

This recap dives deeper into the shared vision behind the Flexential-AWS partnership, the technologies enabling next-gen hybrid cloud deployments, and how real businesses solve real problems with private, scalable connectivity.

Driving enterprise innovation from core to edge

The Flexential-AWS alliance is a strategic partnership rooted in years of shared customer success. As an Advanced Tier Partner in the AWS Partner Network, Flexential brings unmatched cloud integration experience and deep technical expertise. Fewer than 10% of AWS partners hold this designation, which requires rigorous technical certification, documented customer impact, and demonstrated architectural proficiency.

This partnership gives Flexential customers access to:

• Co-selling opportunities and joint support from AWS teams
• Funding mechanisms to reduce barriers to adoption
• Better visibility and trust through AWS search prioritization

“At AWS, we have a motto: partner first. We can’t be successful unless our partners are successful.” 
— Chris Farmand, AWS

By working side-by-side with AWS account teams, Flexential ensures that customers benefit from a cohesive, accelerated path to hybrid cloud deployment—with optimized architecture, joint resources, and shared accountability.

A private bridge to the cloud

At the heart of the hybrid strategy is connectivity—specifically, private, software-defined interconnection that eliminates the unpredictability and inefficiencies of the public internet.

AWS Direct Connect establishes a dedicated, high-performance link from a customer’s environment to AWS, bypassing the internet to offer lower latency, greater security, and more reliable throughput. Integrated with Flexential Cloud Fabric, this connection becomes even more powerful,

• Allowing enterprises to create multiple private virtual circuits over a single physical port
• Enabling real-time bandwidth adjustments through a self-service portal
• Scaling seamlessly with evolving workloads—no overprovisioning or long provisioning delays

This approach ensures performance is predictable and secure—even during peak usage or sensitive data transfers. It also reduces egress costs by moving traffic off the internet and onto private circuits.

“With Direct Connect through Cloud Fabric, you get a dedicated path that doesn’t change. So your performance becomes predictable, which matters.” 
— Scott Crandall, Flexential

Why location matters in hybrid cloud

One of the core advantages of Flexential is its geographic distribution. With more than 40 data centers across 18 U.S. markets, including major metros like Denver and Dallas and emerging Tier 2 cities like Charlotte and Nashville, Flexential helps customers place infrastructure precisely where it’s needed most.

This edge proximity empowers enterprises to:

• Minimize latency by keeping infrastructure close to end users, data sources, and cloud on-ramps
• Improve redundancy and disaster recovery through multi-site deployments
• Enhance compliance with data residency and sovereignty requirements

By bringing workloads closer to the “digital edge,” enterprises can meet the demands of modern applications like AI inference, real-time analytics, and hybrid container clusters without sacrificing control or increasing complexity.

The Flexential carrier-neutral stance also ensures enterprises aren’t locked into a single cloud, region, or provider, supporting a multi-cloud strategy with agility and resilience at the forefront.

Supporting the next generation of intelligent workloads

As AI adoption accelerates, enterprises are discovering that AI workloads behave differently than traditional applications. While training often happens in centralized cloud environments, inference—the real-time processing of AI outputs—requires speed, scale, and geographic distribution.

Flexential enables this AI paradigm by combining:

• High-speed, low-latency interconnectivity to AWS for AI training and storage
• Edge-based infrastructure for inference close to the user
• Flexible bandwidth and self-service provisioning through Cloud Fabric

This infrastructure blueprint supports everything from generative AI to machine learning pipelines and edge analytics. Flexential is already helping AI-first companies deploy distributed inference architectures, reduce time-to-insight, and improve user experiences through proximity and connectivity.

“Milliseconds matter when someone is waiting on an AI response. That's why AI companies are distributing their inference workloads across multiple locations instead of centralizing everything.” 
— Scott Crandall, Flexential

Hybrid resilience at scale

One compelling use case discussed in the webinar involves a U.S. building manufacturer running production workloads in the Flexential Charlotte data center with disaster recovery operations in Louisville and integrating both with AWS.

Using Flexential Cloud Fabric, the customer deployed:

• A 10 Gbps Direct Connect circuit from Charlotte to AWS Ashburn
• A 1 Gbps Direct Connect circuit from Louisville to AWS Chicago

This dual-path architecture enabled:

• Redundant, fail-safe connectivity across sites and cloud regions
• Cost-optimized bandwidth allocation based on workload criticality
• Streamlined management via Flexential software-defined provisioning portal

By leveraging the Flexential private backbone, the customer eliminated the need for multiple separate AWS circuits, cutting complexity, reducing risk, and saving money.

Your roadmap to a smarter hybrid future

Whether you’re migrating from on-prem to cloud, building a new edge deployment, or optimizing a multi-cloud strategy, the Flexential + AWS approach offers a clear and scalable path forward.

Here’s how to get started:

1. Evaluate your network topology. Work with Flexential and AWS architects to identify performance gaps, bottlenecks, and opportunities.
2. Engage Flexential Professional Services. Our white-glove team can configure your Direct Connect circuits, set up routing, and provide full network diagrams.
3. Take advantage of funding programs. Flexential Advanced Tier status unlocks AWS-backed funding and programmatic support for hybrid use cases.
4. Explore proven use cases. The Flexential design library illustrates common deployment patterns—from edge to cloud to multi-region DR.

Connectivity is the cornerstone of cloud success

Hybrid cloud is no longer a transitional state—it’s a deliberate, long-term strategy for enterprises seeking resilience, performance, and innovation. The combination of AWS Direct Connect and Flexential Cloud Fabric gives businesses the power to architect secure, scalable environments with full control over data movement, proximity, and application placement.

Together, Flexential and AWS are committed to helping enterprises modernize with confidence, agility, and cost-efficiency—because where and how you connect truly matters.

Ready to see it all in action? Watch the full on-demand webinar to hear directly from AWS and Flexential experts, explore real-world hybrid cloud strategies, and discover how to future-proof your infrastructure with secure, scalable connectivity.