How to go cloud-first while maintaining traditional workloads
There’s a lot to be said for the power of the public cloud. But a cloud-first business strategy can bring its own challenges, especially if you – like most organisations – have business applications that you’d really rather keep on premises.
So, what’s the solution?
It’s big. And it’s clever. But public isn’t always the answer.
There are advantages to using the public cloud – you’ll know them already. Yet despite these advantages, many enterprises are understandably reluctant to place the data assets that represent their intellectual property into the public cloud, due to concerns about security and control of those assets.
When you take latency, security and privacy into account, or the fact that you may have core business applications that run commercially sensitive in-house algorithms, most organisations will have a need to keep certain applications on premises.
Privacy has its limitations, too.
Legacy IT infrastructures are built on a mix of separate compute and storage and can vary significantly, even within a single organisation. Once the design and service catalogue are set, altering, expanding, or upgrading the private environment to take advantage of new technologies can be impractical – and costly.
This is where composable infrastructure comes in to bring you a cloud-like experience on-premises.
When you combine the two… the magic happens.
A composable infrastructure is a solution that enables you to maximise the speed, agility, and efficiency of your core infrastructure and operations, enabling you to meet new business demands on the fly while providing the security and predictable performance needed to support core workloads. It eliminates the need for workload-specific environments: think of it as a resource pool from which you can draw to meet the specific needs of any application. It’s based on three core principles:
- Run anything
Optimise any application and store all your data on a single infrastructure with fluid pools of physical and virtual compute, storage, and fabric that can be easily and rapidly reconfigured and redeployed to meet each application’s changing needs. - Move faster and more efficiently
Accelerate application and service delivery through a single interface that precisely composes logical infrastructures at near-instant speeds, while template-driven, frictionless operations reduce operational effort and cost. - Unlock value
Increase productivity and control across the data centre by integrating and automating infrastructure operations and applications through a unified API.
Having a software-defined infrastructure that’s managed via a web interface gives you the flexibility to deploy your resources as you require. And by adding a cloud management service, such as HPE GreenLake, you can then introduce the economic benefits of a pay-as-you-go model, and the flexibility of everything-as-a-service.
Add more resources with a click
As well as helping you to control costs, HPE GreenLake’s consumption-based model lets you easily manage capacity, avoiding the need to over-invest now to cater for unknown future needs. Start with what you need, then add more as and when your business grows – and when you cut back on usage during quieter periods, your costs will go down too. Everything’s managed for you but still controlled by you: your public and private cloud resources are all brought together in a single window.
Think long-term, think big picture
A composable infrastructure enables IT to directly impact business strategy and revenue by creating software-based services that have a huge operational and commercial impact. Agility enhances innovation, driving growth and productivity. Efficiencies enable you to manage costs, reduce risk and optimise workloads. Speed to market and responsiveness put you ahead of the competition.
Thanks to this approach, the overall step-change you’ll experience in enhanced performance, flexibility and resourcing will help your organisation to improve the customer experience, boost profitability and secure a competitive advantage in your market, now and in the future.
To find out more (and discover what your digital infrastructure might sound like!) check out our free composable infrastructure resources.
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