Every industry faces a specific set of business and technical challenges in managing hybrid and multi-cloud IT platforms, which can be solved with HPE’s next-generation multi-cloud management platform. This article covers some key challenges, potential solutions, and use cases.
By Piyush Jain, Hybrid Infrastructure Solution Lead in HPE’s Hybrid IT Global Competence Center
Various industry verticals have different challenges with respect to hybrid cloud/multi-cloud management – see the figure below – which makes it hard for them to choose the right set of solutions. This blog will look at some possible choices.
Figure 1: Major hybrid/multi-Cloud challenges for various industry verticals
The HPE Multi-Cloud Management Adoption Service helps businesses avoid vendor lock-in and leads to lower pricing. HPE hybrid/multi-cloud management can also be used to deploy various applications at scale using containers. An example of hybrid cloud architecture would be LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) software running on the public cloud with support for databases in a private cloud, or an on-premises data centre that also incorporates serverless processing from other providers.
HPE hybrid/multi-cloud management can provide a blend of benefits that come from public and private servers. For instance, customers can enjoy the scalability of a public cloud environment without forfeiting all control to a third party. The figure below shows some common use cases.
Figure 2: Use cases of hybrid/multi-cloud management
Let’s look at some specific verticals, the challenges they face, and how the HPE Multi-Cloud Management Adoption Service can help.
Finance
This sector comprises a broad range of organizations including banks, investment companies, insurance companies, and real estate firms.
Banking, insurance, and financial services providers have been slower than others in moving to hybrid cloud due to concerns over security, data residency, and privacy. Government regulations, such as data protection laws, impose constraints on where the data is kept. Interoperability and data integration are additional challenges for adopting a cloud strategy in the Finance domain.
HPE hybrid/multi-cloud management enables these organizations to:
- Address challenges around security, interoperability, integration and data sovereignty in much more effective ways.
- Avoid unnecessary capital expenditures, as well as large upfront costs for infrastructure, since cloud computing is available on-demand. For example, a bank can choose a cloud services approach – a pay-as-you-go model for both software and hardware. (See, for example, HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform.)
- Standardize systems – this is easier to achieve with cloud computing, which in turn makes it easier for a financial services provider to integrate new technologies and applications. This would also enable mobile and core banking solutions to be more quickly adapted.
Cloud Service Providers
A CSP is a company that provides scalable computing resources that businesses can access on demand over a network, including cloud-based compute, storage, platform, and application services. The challenges for these organizations include:
- Shortages of technical talent with specialized cloud and software skills
- The need to purchase tons of hardware, software and applications that must be maintained and managed
- Multiple public clouds that they need to plug into and manage for their clients
- An expensive cost model (because of the points listed above)
- The need for an integrated front end for provisioning and to track utilization, governance, policy, etc.
The HPE Multi-Cloud Management Adoption Service delivers:
- Cost Reduction
- Provides self-service capabilities
- Allows customers to repurpose and upscale engineering resources
- Reduces Asset and Facilities costs
- Reduces hardware and software expenses
- Provides the freedom to use open technologies in the backend.
- Increased consumption by customers (resulting in revenue growth)
- Drives more consumption with ease of use. For example, Morpheus, a cloud management and automation platform, makes it easy for the CSP’s customers to access their environments and consume more infrastructure.
- Expose offers for up-sell: Self-service catalogs and automation enable clients to browse offers and get what they what, when they want it
- Visibility into usage patterns for resources and workflows enables CSPs to see opportunities for growth within the client’s environment
- Seamlessly deploy on-prem, public cloud, bare metal, and Kubernetes
- Evolve services by defining a service once and instantiating it many times without going back to the drawing board each time.
- Compliance
- Improves governance and reduces risk
- Improves governance and reduces risk
Telecommunications
Telcos make communication possible on a global scale, whether through the phone or the Internet, or over airwaves or cables. They face several challenges in managing hybrid/multi cloud environments, such as:
- Relying on a specific cloud provider's proprietary tools and services for their business requirements. This makes it challenging to migrate applications and data to another provider's platform due to differences in technology.
- Each cloud provider or platform uses different security, compliance, and policy tools, which can result in compatibility and interoperability issues.
- The digital era makes it crucial to introduce new services faster in order to compete with other telcos. 5G is a great example. The timing of market entry is the key strategy for telcos.
HPE hybrid/multi-cloud management enables telcos to choose the cloud provider that best meets their needs for specific workloads, such as deploying their service in a cloud provider's VM instance for network functions virtualization. They can choose which cloud provider's computing power to use when deploying the instance, which provides more flexibility.
This service also ensures consistent security and compliance policies across all clouds, reducing the risk of security breaches and non-compliance. For example, telcos can use a centralized identity and access management system to manage access control across all clouds, ensuring consistent policies and reducing the risk of unauthorized access.
Retail and Distribution
Retail and distribution is the strategy a business uses to source products from a manufacturer and sell them to the end customer.
The retail and distribution industries struggle to automate and orchestrate their hybrid cloud environments, resulting in increased complexity and reduced operational efficiency. For example, a company may use one cloud provider for their e-commerce website and another for the stock management system. The company may have difficulty automating and orchestrating the data flows between these two systems in a hybrid cloud environment, resulting in manual intervention and increased risk of errors.
Retail and distribution companies do have many tools and platforms to drive marketing and sales, but those platform and tools don’t seem to work together. This is a significant challenge.
The HPE hybrid/multi-cloud management platform provides a single pane of glass for retail or distribution companies to simplify the complexity of managing multiple cloud providers. This allows them to streamline operations and reduce the risk of errors. For example, a company can easily host its e-commerce platform on a combination of on-premises infrastructure and cloud infrastructure provided by multiple vendors such as AWS, Azure, and GCP.
The HPE Multi-Cloud Management Adoption Service provides automation and orchestration capabilities, allowing the company to automate the deployment, scaling, and monitoring of its platform across multiple environments. This can help to reduce errors and improve the scalability of operations.
Manufacturing
The manufacturing sector comprises establishments engaged in the mechanical, physical, or chemical transformation of materials, substances, or components into new products.
Manufacturing companies are witnessing far more challenges these days with data management, lack of visibility into the supply chain and other key areas like infrastructure cost, which can result in reduced production and production outages. Big-ticket initiatives such as image processing and the Internet of things (IoT) are major use cases for the manufacturing industry.
HPE hybrid/multi-cloud management platforms provide automation and orchestration capabilities that enable developers and DevOps teams to effortlessly deploy and manage their applications and services. They can use predefined blueprints or templates to automate the deployment of Kubernetes clusters, making it faster and more efficient to deploy new clusters across multiple cloud environments.
The HPE Multi-Cloud Management Adoption Service enables manufacturing companies to leverage the public cloud for non-critical applications or data while reserving the private cloud for handling more sensitive information. By doing so, businesses can benefit from the flexibility and scalability of the public cloud while maintaining control over their vital data and processes.
Education
The education sector can be broadly classified as primary education, secondary education, higher education, and vocational education.
Inconsistent application development practices across multiple clouds lead to challenges in deploying, testing, and maintaining applications. Educational institutions may have limited IT resources and expertise, which makes managing a multi/hybrid cloud environment difficult without a centralized management platform.
Tracking and analyzing cloud usage and costs across multiple clouds becomes complex and time-consuming. This results in unexpected expenses and difficulties in budget planning.
Using the HPE hybrid/multi-cloud management console can help organizations address this challenge by providing automated workflows, self-service catalogs, and a centralized management tool that can reduce the need for manual intervention from IT staff in hybrid cloud environments.
This can also help manage costs across multiple clouds. For example, an educational institution can use a cost management feature to track usage and costs across all clouds to identify opportunities for cost savings and optimize spending.
It can also help optimize resource utilization across all clouds. For example, an education organization can use a self-service catalog to enable students and faculty to provision resources on-demand, while implementing policies to ensure resources are not overprovisioned or underused.
Public Sector or Government
The public sector includes agencies and governmental services such as the military, law enforcement, infrastructure, public transit, public education etc.
Government or public sector organizations may face challenges when they use a specific cloud provider’s proprietary tools and would like to move to more open solutions.
It can be difficult for IT teams to keep up with the constantly evolving technologies and best practices of multiple cloud providers, resulting in suboptimal use of cloud resources and potentially increased security risks.
Government or public sector organizations mostly work in silos, which leads to a lack of visibility into overall cloud usage, costs, and performance across the organization. Without a unified policy framework, it can be challenging to enforce consistent policies across all cloud environments, leading to potential vulnerabilities and compliance gaps.
Data sovereignty and data residency are two more big issues for public sector customers.
With The HPE hybrid/multi-cloud management platform, public sector organizations can enable applications to run seamlessly across various environments, including data centres, cloud, and edge locations.
This can also help solve the problem of skills gaps in the multi/hybrid cloud strategy by providing intuitive user interfaces and self-service catalogs that simplify complex cloud management tasks.
It also provides a centralized console to manage and enforce governance and policies across multiple cloud environments.
A solution that fits your needs
In summary, the HPE Multi-Cloud Management Adoption Service allows organizations in various industry verticals to choose from many cloud vendors. It provides the flexibility to match specific features and capabilities by avoiding vendor lock-in to a specific cloud. HPE multi/hybrid-cloud management enables you to deploy and scale workloads while also implementing security policies and compliance consistently across all of your workloads, regardless of service, vendor, or environment.
Organizations in each industry vertical will have their own requirements around hybrid/multi-cloud management depending on the tools, technologies and applications they use. HPE Advisory and Professional Services can help you define the best strategy, design and delivery for your hybrid/multi-cloud management platform. We can accelerate the adoption of these technologies and customize them according to your business needs.
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