Hybrid cloud management without the angst: HPE GreenLake Management Services

[Cloud_Experts]

As businesses add new venues for IT assets, the complexity of managing everything increases. HPE GreenLake Management Services lifts the burden from your shoulders.

By Brian Ott, Vice President, HPE GreenLake Hybrid Cloud Managed Services Practice

It’s pretty much conventional wisdom these days to say that the world is hybrid, and becoming more so. But more than that, the nature of hybrid cloud is evolving quickly, as we move towards cloud-everywhere models. Businesses are adding new target platforms and locations for workloads to run in – on-premises infrastructure, private clouds, colocations, edge locations, public cloud, multiple clouds – at a rapid clip. And as they do so, the level of complexity involved in managing everything increases exponentially. (See: What is hybrid cloud?)

So do the demands on skill sets. Think about what your teams need to know to operate in a cloud-everywhere world. They need to know what services are available, what capabilities and functionality are offered by each of the cloud platforms. They need to know how you can tie them together operationally, and how to get visibility into the best way to use those capabilities to meet the needs of customers. The right skills are hard to find; there's a global demand for people who have the breadth and depth of knowledge to run complex cloud environments effectively, no matter where the workloads are.

For any organization that’s considering a managed services approach, these needs are usually top-of-mind. By offloading operations to a third-party provider, you can relieve the burden on IT, focus on core competencies, free up staff to work on new projects and access skills that aren’t available internally. These are big advantages, and HPE GreenLake Management Services can certainly deliver them. But we also bring a lot more to the table. Here are five big benefits that you might not have considered. With HPE GMS, you can:

1. Improve security, risk management and compliance. HPE has developed a consistent security, risk and compliance framework that enables us to bring inherent security to your hybrid cloud. Whether we're running workloads in an HPE data center, a colocation with our partners, or a public cloud venue, we take accountability and responsibility for ensuring that the infrastructure layer, up to the OS, is secure. And, depending on the relationship with the customer, we can go all the way up into the application layer. We do patching, updates and routing maintenance to keep everything running smoothly.

We also cover industry-specific requirements. For example, if you accept credit cards in your business, anywhere in the world, you need to be in compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). We can help you demonstrate to your internal or external auditors that you’re in compliance, wherever the workloads are running.

Similarly, we can help you ensure compliance with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework. In addition, we can help you with country-specific security control frameworks that apply in countries like Australia, Singapore, and Japan. We maintain the frameworks through our contacts with government agencies and regulators around the world as part of the service that we provide, built in to HPE GreenLake Management Services.

Regulatory controls are as much about processes as they are about technologies. There may be tools that enable you to automate a given technical control. But a regulatory control process might be, for example, a 10-step workflow which says that every 90 days a staffer has to review a set of security logs for a given location, sign off on those and create a log event that says he or she approves it. HPE GreenLake Management Services can tie all of those processes together for every line in a regulatory control framework.

And we can customize your internal controls approach, if needed, depending on how you want to run it for your business – for example, by country, business unit or department.

2. Avoid lock-in. We're agnostic when it comes to where the workloads run. We can help you avoid the kind of lock-in that can happen when you pick one particular public cloud vendor and you end up taking whatever comes your way, whether it’s unexpected costs or lack of services that you had thought would be available, but turn out not to be. With our cloud managed services, you always have the flexibility to move to a different cloud vendor, or a colocation, or on-premises. Freedom of choice is a hot topic with the customers I talk to: “I don't want lock-in, I don't want to be tied to one vendor.”

3. Constantly optimize your managed environment. Traditional outsourcing arrangements or cloud managed services  don’t include optimization as a standard part of their offering. HPE GreenLake Management Services does. We always have people on our team looking for ways to improve your environment. Is there a better sizing that can reduce costs or increase speed or performance? Is there a better place to move a workload? Optimizing spend is an important aspect of this, but it's really a broader goal – a continuous improvement of the environment.

4. Leverage a global and local coverage model with certified expertise. HPE’s reach is truly global. HPE GreenLake Management Services runs nine IT operations centers around the world that use consistent underlying platforms, dashboards and training. So let’s say you’re a worldwide enterprise headquartered in Europe. We can provide some services out of Sophia, for example, to cover your European requirements. We can deliver other services from Bangalore at a lower cost to cover your global shared services capabilities. This blended model of global and local hybrid cloud expertise, available where you need it, is a key differentiator for HPE GreenLake Management Services.

5. Resolve issues quickly. We’ve achieved a high level of automation in our IT service management and IT operations management platforms. (You can read here why the Technology and Services Industry Association awarded HPE its STAR Award for innovation: TSIA STAR Award Winner for Managed Services.) So let’s say 20 people or 50 people experience an outage. Our systems can determine if these are all related. And we have almost 80% automated remediation of those issues when they do come up. It's not quite self-healing, but it's getting closer and closer to that on a global basis.

Our operations management platform is supported by an ecosystem of 40-plus tools that deliver everything from monitoring to self-service provisioning. Our teams use a consistent, integrated set of dashboards in our IT operations center to keep your environments running at peak performance and maximize availability. And if you’re interested in a managed-with-you model (as distinct from a managed-for-you model), you can see the same dashboards that we see, and you can provision new infrastructure in the same platform.

The cloud that comes to you – and hybrid cloud everywhere

HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform brings cloud-like simplicity and flexibility to your IT assets, wherever they are located – it’s the cloud that comes to you. We see HPE GreenLake Management Services as the ideal complement to that pay-per-use, self-service, highly scalable platform. HPE GMS lightens your operational load and delivers the seamless as-a-service experience you need to thrive in a hybrid-cloud-everywhere world.

Learn more about HPE GreenLake Management Services and how we help you manage, operate and optimize your IT environments.

View this short video to learn to learn how HPE GreenLake Management Services enables you to enjoy the cloud experience from edge to cloud with workload automation.

Check out this infographic for a quick overview of how to simplify hybrid cloud management.

Brian Ott leads the HPE GreenLake Hybrid Cloud Managed Services practice. He is responsible for the overall success of the managed hybrid cloud services business.

Cloud Services Experts
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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