Bringing clarity to a discussion of cloud strategy is tricky. One reason for this is the shortage of management tools which can be used across the whole estate of public, private and on-premises cloud platforms.
While most large organisations are running mixed environments far fewer have properly integrated all them onto one management system or to have thought strategically about how they can work together. Most have grown organically according to business demands, often powered by shadow IT, rather than long-term thinking about how the business and its technology is evolving.
But getting this part right is crucial to keep the organisation safe from security issues and to get the most in terms of cost savings, flexibility and scalability out of their technology investments.
Later this year Hewlett Packard Enterprise and VMWare will offer VMWare Cloud Foundation to run on HPE Synergy – a composable infrastructure which will allow customers to run bare metal, virtualised SAN environments and vSAN workloads from one unified platform.
This will allow IT departments to provide private clouds and infrastructure as a service within minutes of requests from the business or customers.
Serious savings are possible both compared to a traditional on-premises data centre and when compared to a public cloud provider. It will also ease workloads on IT staff by easing and automating tasks by integrating with HPE’s OneView.
Ric Lewis, senior vice president and general manager, Software-Defined and Cloud Group, HPE. “HPE Synergy with VMware Cloud Foundation will deliver a private cloud experience that empowers IT to be an internal service provider and enables rapid response to business needs with single-click DevOps delivery.”
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Financial benefits are not limited to shifting spending from capital expenditure to operating expenses – it is also available through HPE’s Flexible Capacity programme which allows customers to over-spec systems in-house but only pay for them when they are actually used. Pay-as-you-go consumption can bring the savings and scalability benefits of the cloud to the enterprise data centre.
There’s more from HPE here: https://news.hpe.com/hpe-to-deliver-the-industrys-first-composable-infrastructure-for-vmware-private-clouds/ The solution is expected to be certified and available from HPE and partners later this year.
Digital transformation continues to accelerate and impact on organisations across the economy. But building and securing truly hybrid cloud infrastructures which will bring real business benefits to the business is a challenging task.
While there will always be demand for staff with the right skills those people also need the right tools to automate house keeping tasks so that they can shift applications and call up resources as they are needed.
As applications mature and their demands on the technology become more predictable it often becomes more economical to run them on in-house infrastructure. While new services and applications, with far less predictable demands, are better run on a properly secured public platform which can provide instant, and almost infinite, scalability.
For as long as the IT department has to deal with these competing and conflicting demands there will be a need for hybrid cloud environments.
Making the best use of this technology will become a key differentiator for organisations of the future.
