Conversations in the Clouds

[EIC_Alliances]

By Drew Denkhaus

During my travels this year, I have chatted with fellow travelers while in-flight and during layovers. If the conversation gets to the “What do you do?” level and I reply with “I work for Hewlett Packard Enterprise,” they usually say something like, “Oh, I have an HP printer!” They ask if I work with printers, then I politely say “no,” and explain the new HPE and its many business facets including hardware, software, and services specific to enterprise customers.  To clarify, I drop a few company names to help them understand what I mean when I say enterprise customers.

If the conversation gets a little deeper, I test the waters with topics like cloud or hybrid infrastructure. I may lose them and get the usual response like, “My music and pictures are in the cloud.” Once in a while, I will make the acquaintance of someone more aligned with technology, data centers, development, operations, IT, etc. This broadens the conversation with additional questions on cloud or advancements in IT. I can tell you from experience that most everyone has a different perspective on cloud. I always try to stress that cloud is like a journey and that everyone is at a different stage of the journey.   

Today, many HPE clients are leveraging the flexibility and speed of public clouds, while others have IT virtualizing beyond just servers, and still others are beginning to automate and orchestrate across the enterprise. Those clients automating and orchestrating today are now focused on the innovation capabilities of a private cloud technology.  While they investigate private cloud technologies they should also be anticipating the needs of a hybrid cloud in the near future.

What should the cloud enable?
Reasons for hybrid innovation include displacing the competition and a faster time-to-market by leveraging the benefits from shared pools of compute, storage and resources.  Customers like the flexibility of cloud technologies and are focusing on integrating their public cloud efforts with the controls and compliance of a private cloud. This is where IT is becoming more of a broker of the resources and can take advantage of the capabilities from Hybrid IT and Hybrid Infrastructure.

Customers are driving the change
One thing that is common from conversation to conversation is that the future will be a multi-Cloud world. IT will be using a combination of clouds based on a number of factors, including security, availability, resiliency, compliance, data sovereignty, performance, accessibility and cost. Customers have realized that workloads may leverage public clouds for general purpose applications, but enterprise workloads with sensitive data will need to remain in private clouds.

The Hybrid Infrastructure Approach
A true hybrid infrastructure begins with managing the complexities of a hybrid world and providing insight into cloud environments. There are a-la-carte-based private clouds that use many different offerings and still others that provide a turnkey solution which can deploy and manage a private cloud in a short amount of time. This out-of-the-box or rack unit approach includes everything for a private cloud like storage, compute, and networking. In this way, customers can take advantage of a private cloud for their traditional applications right away.

One thing these different cloud environments have in common is a centralized management software layer to pull it all together providing a single pane of glass methodology.  The single pane of glass allows IT to manage workloads on public clouds as well as private clouds.

The critical components for achieving your unique vision and strategy are actually available and delivered today. In fact, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and PwC are continually investing, contributing, developing the skills, delivering technologies, and combining them with our support and guarantees to ensure customer success at every point along the way.

Unlock the full potential of your business by joining HPE and PwC at HPE Discover 2015 London to learn how you can “Transform to a Hybrid Infrastructure.”  Make it a point to attend our session titled: "PwC shares market insights on hybrid infrastructure, the new IT frontier."

If you are not attending the event, you can get information on the powerful HPE-PwC transformation solutions available to you at www.hpe.com/partners/pwc and http://www.pwc.com/us/hp.

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