As their cloud strategies mature, companies are entering a period of rebalancing workloads across cloud services and moving some cloud-based workloads back on-premises. Here’s how HPE can help you optimize your hybrid cloud.
In the past decade or so, companies migrated in a big way, and for cogent reasons. They love the flexibility and pay-as-you-go simplicity of public cloud and the way it enables them to develop new services and push them out faster. Those motivators are powerful, and there’s no going back to the pre-cloud days. The world is hybrid, and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. (See: What is hybrid cloud?)
At the same time, in the past couple of years we’ve been seeing articles in the industry press and analyst reports about companies deciding to move some workloads residing in the public cloud back on-premises.1 Workload ‘repatriation’ may be a sign that workload mobility is reaching a new level of maturity.
Interestingly, a recent report from venture capital firm Andreeson and Horowitz sees the economic cost of public cloud as a major driver of the trend (see The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox). The report notes that the cost/benefit calculus changes as a company matures: “While cloud clearly delivers on its promise early on in a company’s journey, the pressure it puts on margins can start to outweigh the benefits as a company scales and growth slows.”
The search for cost savings is an important driver of the trend, but it’s not the only one. An IDC InfoBrief, sponsored by HPE, identifies data security concerns and data privacy concerns as the primary reasons why companies are repatriating workloads from the public cloud, based on survey data from more than 2,300 respondents (see the chart below.) Performance issues were the next most commonly cited reason (24%), closely followed by concerns over pricing of public cloud services (22%). (See the full IDC InfoBrief: Workload Mobility Will Be a Common Practice of IT Operations. There’s also an excellent Q&A with the author of the InfoBrief in this IDC Analyst Connection: Balancing IT Environment Choices for Workloads)
IDC InfoBrief, sponsored by HPE, Workload Mobility Will Be a Common Practice of Modern IT Operations #US48107521, July, 2021
This tracks pretty closely with what we’re hearing from customers. Data security is a concern. Companies expect great response time and performance integrity from the cloud, and they don’t always get it. Updates tend to happen on the provider’s schedule, not yours; some businesses with mission-critical apps running in the cloud are understandably uncomfortable with the possibility that the provider might say “Well, we're going to update your firmware about now. So we're going offline here for a while.”
In all of these decisions, though, there’s an element of normality – of finding the optimal and continually rebalancing. It’s part and parcel of running a hybrid cloud. As HPE’s Toby Weiss puts it in a recent CIO.com article, “The act of bringing a workload back on premises or to a colocation is merely selecting the ideal location/platform to balance data security, sovereignty, privacy, latency, and upgrade requirement constraints.” (See: We’re Seeing a Wave of Workload Repatriation. Here’s why.)
That’s not to say that it’s straightforward, or that finding the time to do it is easy. HPE can help you balance and optimize your hybrid cloud in two ways: with HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform and with HPE Right Mix Advisor.
4 big advantages of HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform
HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform accelerates your business outcomes in four ways. You gain self-service agility. You gain flexibility with a pay-per-use approach that enables you to avoid heavy upfront costs and overprovisioning. We work with you to make sure you always have enough capacity, and you can scale up or down quickly and easily. And because it’s managed for you by HPE, you offload the burden of operating IT.
Why is HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform a great destination for repatriated workloads?
1. Rock-solid security. HPE has long experience and deep expertise in cybersecurity solutions and services. With HPE Server Security and Infrastructure Security Solutions, you can protect your infrastructure down to the silicon with HPE Trusted Supply Chain and Silicon Root of Trust technologies.
2. No surprise costs or unpredictable fees. With HPE GreenLake platform, what you pay is based on what you use, which is measured by HPE’s advanced metering technologies. You get full access to your data through HPE GreenLake Central, our unified self-service platform, so you can see what you've used and what you can expect to pay for it. There are no hidden costs – no egress fees, for example, because you're not moving your data around.
3. You’re production-ready for the long run. After repatriation, you can run your apps the way your business needs them to run, with the confidence that HPE is there to maximize availability and deliver the support and management services you need. You avoid the performance issues associated with multitenancy and ‘noisy neighbors.’ With heavy-duty workloads like SAP, for example, we offer a COE ready to optimize your ongoing operation. Just like we work with you to plan your capacity needs, we also plan with you when something big needs to happen, like an upgrade to a mission-critical app.
4. You can take advantage of colocation. You may be thinking – “Well, we consolidated some data center space by moving workloads to the cloud. Will we need to reconfigure the physical footprint?” If that’s a concern, consider HPE GreenLake with colocation. We can deliver any HPE GreenLake cloud service through our colocation partners, Equinix and CyrusOne, giving you the simplicity of a single contract, a single point of contact, and a single monthly invoice.
Find your right mix of cloud services
I mentioned HPE’s extensive expertise in all things cloud, and there’s one service I’d like to highlight that brings a new level of simplicity and effectiveness to your hybrid cloud strategy. HPE Right Mix Advisor helps you choose the right destination – whether it’s public cloud, private cloud, or on-premises – for your data and apps. It brings together a combination of our custom IP, automated data collection capabilities, and services expertise to build an overall plan. We do that in a way that minimizes the dependency on your staff and provides results within weeks, instead of months or even years, accelerating time to value.
No matter which direction you’re intending to move workloads, HPE Right Mix Advisor can give you the confidence to do it right and with minimal risk.
Read more about HPE Right Mix Advisor.
Learn more about HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform and how our cloud services deliver business outcomes faster.
1. See, for example, this ITProToday article: Cloud Repatriation – Why It’s More Than ‘Just’ Public Cloud Retreat
Related articles:
- The state of enterprise cloud adoption. Read the new report from HPE's Enterprise.nxt
- Measuring enterprise cloud maturity via HPE's Enterprise.nxt
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Don Randall
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
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