Today’s businesses are rapidly changing – and that is all part of a wider digital transformation initiative that is sweeping the industry
Yet as businesses move to the public cloud seeking lower costs and greater flexibility, they’re discovering some challenges. These challenges are coming in the form of unexpected costs. Others arise while trying to move traditional workloads off-premises to locations that are sometimes less than ideal.
More and more enterprises are recognizing that a hybrid IT strategy solves many of these challenges. A hybrid IT environment provides a balanced combination of traditional on-premises infrastructure, private cloud, and off-premises public cloud. And through careful analysis, a hybrid IT estate allows IT teams to select the best deployment model for each application. Mission-critical workloads can remain on-prem where employees can confidently retain complete control. Whereas a newly-developed, revenue-generating app can hum along beautifully in the public cloud. And a non-revenue generating app can run extremely well on a private cloud, where it’s available for all to use within the constraints of an existing budget.
So, all is well…right? Actually, not quite.
Bridging the gap between on- and off-premises workloads
Even when each workload is placed where it is best suited, another challenge still needs to be solved. On-premises and off-premises worlds can become very siloed, increasing complexity and slowing digital transformation. IT can’t easily manage them as one because they don’t have the visibility they need across their entire hybrid estate. What IT needs is a single view to easily manage everything at the same time, regardless of where it is being hosted.
In 2017, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) commissioned 451 Research to thoroughly determine why and how companies are digitally transforming their businesses and what challenges they must overcome to provide and manage the ultimate hybrid IT platform. The research, Seeking Digital Transformation? Eight Essentials for Hybrid IT, provides interesting insights into the digital transformation journey, and what is still needed to bridge the gap between on- and off-premises IT infrastructure.
451 Research’s Eight Essentials for Hybrid IT:
- Hybrid IT requires a unified, software-defined control plane that is simple and quick to deploy across traditional enterprise and private and public cloud infrastructure, and bridges the worlds of public and private clouds seamlessly.
- Hybrid IT must support the current and emerging OS and virtualization layers that businesses are using to host their applications, such as VMware, OpenStack, and Microsoft AzureStack, as well as bare-metal and container-based applications.
- Everything should be software-defined and available in multiple packaging formats, but for real efficiency and performance of on-premises deployments, hyperconvergedand composable infrastructure are necessary baselines.
- Developers should be able to build their applications anywhere and deploy them anywhere as soon as they are ready. They need a hybrid workspace supporting traditional workloads in VMs, modern apps in containers, and flexibility across bare metal and private and public clouds.
- Developers and IT operations need a ‘no-ops’ hybrid IT management-as-a-service portal and app store. This will enable developers to compose, deploy and scale hybrid clouds that support all applications, and to manage production compliance and lifecycle governance.
- Integrated, software-defined data services will become more necessary as the data explosion progresses. Data efficiency, resiliency, management, and mobility are all key requirements that should be abstracted away from the underlying storage and made available across the hybrid platform.
- An analytics-powered business dashboard should provide business and IT operations managers with visibility on costs and utilization across private and public infrastructure, breaking up the data into the separate lines of business to calculate the cost of individual projects.
- A hybrid IT architecture must have room for emerging and future technologies, such as APIs, microservices, hybrid computing, memory-based computing, and the extension of intelligence to the edge though the Internet of Things.
HPE OneSphere, a hybrid cloud management solution
When HPE announced HPE OneSphere in November of 2017, they delivered a solution that met the 8 essentials for hybrid IT that 451 Research described in its report. Through its software-as-a-service (SaaS) portal, HPE OneSphere provides customers access to pools of IT resources that span the public cloud services they subscribe to, as well as their on-premises environments.
The solution works across virtual machines, containerized workloads, and bare metal applications, so users can compose hybrid clouds capable of supporting both traditional and cloud-native applications. Delivered as a service, HPE OneSphere provides a single point to access all applications and data across an organization’s hybrid estate.
Digital transformation is here to stay…and the journey just got easier
The digital transformation is here, and it is disruptive. Companies that are willing to embrace change will not only survive, they will flourish. Yet, it’s not an easy journey. Industry experts can help organizations learn about solutions that will make digital transformation simpler. Read 451 Research’s full report here: Seeking Digital Transformation? Eight Essentials for Hybrid IT.
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.
