Digital transformation is affecting businesses of all sizes and across all industries
Many, including media, entertainment, and retail, have already made the transformation, while others, such as healthcare, government, and manufacturing, are on the cusp of major changes.
In a world where IT is embedded everywhere and data is becoming more readily available, businesses must embrace digital transformation in order to keep up with the competition. Those that are maximizing this opportunity are treating IT not just as another function but as a core competency that drives competitive differentiation while also supporting typical business processes and outcomes.
Embarking on digital transformation can seem daunting for some IT professionals. While they understand the need for innovation, they’re responsible for keeping typical business functions running smoothly without hiccups or downtime – threats that could mean major revenue loss for an organization. They must transform their businesses while offering the best of both worlds – the same security, quality, and user experience of an on-premises solution, plus the scalability, agility, and efficiency of a public cloud.
To that end, digital transformation is ushering in the era of hybrid IT. But don’t be mistaken – the term hybrid IT does not necessarily refer to a mashed up version of public and private cloud. It’s much more than that. It’s a sophisticated combination of multiple, different forms of IT that allow businesses to innovate while meeting their own unique organizational needs.
So how are businesses implementing hybrid IT models, and what have been their experiences? Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) commissioned IDC to find out through complex, in-depth interviews with IT operations staff and line of business individuals at Fortune 1000 enterprises. The results can be found in a comprehensive research report – The Future of Hybrid IT Made Simple. The interviews sought to understand hybrid IT strategies and the opportunities associated with them.
Here are some key takeaways:
- Hybrid IT optimizes cost and application performance across on-premises and public clouds. A dashboard designed specifically for line-of-business executives provides full visibility into IT operations, so businesses can keep track of metrics and measure cloud providers by performance. By having insight into these areas, businesses ultimately save money and reduce risk.
- Hybrid IT serves as a continuous DevOps platform, offering a single, secure, and curated platform with integrated developer tools. This enables DevOps teams to focus on application delivery instead of infrastructure management.
- Hybrid IT enables IT operations to become a virtual cloud service provider as part of its core competency. In doing this, a hybrid IT model becomes a self-service portal that provides a single view across the entire estate and is designed to be used by line-of-business executives, developers, and IT executives.
- Hybrid IT enables provisioning (and rapid deprovisioning) of autonomous compute, storage, and fabric instances from fluid resources pools. By championing a low opsmodel in which the entire infrastructure is software defined and treated as code via a unified API, hybrid IT works with composable infrastructure to provision tasks within minutes. Traditional IT provisioning, on the other hand, can take days – and even months in many cases.
The research pointed to a strong conclusion: Businesses are investing in hybrid IT strategies and will continue to do so because it is a crucial vehicle for them to transform digitally. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) enables digital transformation by making it possible to develop and deploy workloads where they best fit based on business needs. At the same time, HPE makes hybrid IT simple to manage and control across on-premises and off-premises estates.
In an era where change is the only constant, digital transformation is the only way forward. And one approach to tackle that effectively is to implement a robust hybrid IT strategy.
About Paul Miller
Paul Miller is Vice President of Marketing for the Software-defined and Cloud Group at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). HPE has assembled an array of resources that are helping businesses succeed in a hybrid IT world. To learn more about composable infrastructure, download the Composable Infrastructure For Dummies guide. And to find out how HPE can help you determine a workload placement strategy that meets your service level agreements, visit HPE Pointnext. Learn about HPE’s approach to managing hybrid cloud by checking out the HPE website, HPE OneSphere.
To read more articles from Paul Miller, check out the HPE Converged Data Center Infrastructure blog.
