Simplifying Hybrid Cloud Management

[James_Hall]

IT should be simple; designed to make our lives easier, more efficient and allowing us to focus on innovation and creativity. However, data is exploding, and whilst running analytics on it is relatively easy, making sure it’s managed correctly and protected is a greater challenge. For many organisations, data lies across multiple locations – on premises, at the edge, and in public cloud. That hybrid or multicloud mix is essential in ensuring efficiencies. Getting the right application in the right place simplifies the management of information. This gives colleagues time back to focus on other tasks; innovation that drives the business forward.

The 2022 Flexera State of the Cloud Report showed that 89% or respondents have a multi-cloud strategy, with 80% opting for a hybrid approach, and only 2% with a single, private cloud. The report also showed that organisations are struggling to control the growing costs of cloud, with 59% or respondents aiming to optimise their cloud usage and spend as a top priority this year. There is clearly a need for organisations to look to adopt agile and efficient cloud services to ensure they remain competitive.

Simplifying cloud management

There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to cloud. It’s vital that organisations first assess their workloads and application and, if necessary, take advice on where they should reside. Usually, an efficient and cost-effective cloud set up will combine some public and on-premises infrastructure. However, IT isn’t just managing workloads, it’s maintaining a seamless experience and ensuring your SLAs, costs, business continuity and access always deliver. This agility to deliver on-demand services and features is what differentiates a platform and adds value to an organisation, ensuring they remain competitive.

Here at HPE we like to keep things simple, and we’re all about simplifying the way our customers experience technology. Having the ability to set it up in a couple of hours and then operate on a pay-per-use basis offers flexibility with the ability to scale up and down on demand, without the need for costly over-provisioning. A simple and flexible ‘consumption as a service’ approach increases agility and releases staff to focus on business objectives and driving the organisation forward.

Modern compute management software simplifies day to day management across the entire IT environment, from the home office to the data centre. With a single console, accessible from anywhere, on any device, compute management operations are streamlined and unified, providing a consistent, secure cloud experience. Managing your service and infrastructure used to take 100 clicks – modern management has reduced that to just three clicks, with simplification and automation driving efficiencies. These efficiencies stretch to provisioning, allowing an instant increase in storage capacity, using AI to determine the best place for your data.

Backup and recovery

Let’s talk business continuity and disaster recovery - I know so many of us love this subject! But it’s a vital part of any organisation. Valuable data resides in multiple locations across the infrastructure, and consistent, simple and automated backup is essential. However, data is just growing exponentially, and the task of backup and recovery is complicated, with many different areas to protect. With attacks becoming inevitable, how do organisations ensure that data is managed effectively, stored safely and backed up, in the event of an attack?

Regardless of the size of your organisation, if you can’t recover critical data after an attack, you’re out of business. Ransomware actors are smart – it’s not a scattergun approach, each attack is cleverly targeted at the relevant level, with an awareness of the size and value of the organisation. We work with organisations of every size, from small traders to multinational financial institutions, and the risk is the same for each. For threat actors, it’s as simple as reading an annual report, learning how much the organisation has in the bank and identifying the percentage they think the organisation would pay for recovery of their data.

One protection isn’t enough. Layering protection ensures that if one layer is broken through, the next will remain, and so on. Protection can be set up quickly, with additional layers delivered through a cloud experience and a ‘single pane of glass’ to set up, configure, create policies, monitor, manage and recover data. HPE offers this as a managed or self-managed service, with hardware agnostic solutions, or organisations can take control and manage it themselves.

Data is almost like the new currency. It therefore needs careful and considered management and protection in a cloud that is simple, flexible, cost-effective and secure.

To find out more about protection against ransomware attacks, visit zerto.com.

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James Hall
Chief Technologist - Storage
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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[1] https://info.flexera.com/CM-REPORT-State-of-the-Cloud