Hybrid Cloud Adoption Enables IT Transformation

By: Anshuman Rai, Director Sales– Converged Platform & Solutions Division (CPSD) at Dell EMC

Over the last few years, private cloud solutions have grown in number, concerns over the public cloud have reduced, and hybrid cloud has gone mainstream. The question in front of executives is not whether to use the cloud or how to instrument a private cloud, but how to capitalize on the benefits of the cloud by moving to a hybrid cloud model.

As the market begins to move to hybrid cloud solutions, there are few questions that must be answered: Where does each application belong, and where do you source new applications—in the public cloud, a private cloud, a hybrid cloud, or the organization’s legacy computing environment? Where can you realize the best performance, cost, and flexibility? How can you design today’s private cloud to be compatible with the hybrid cloud model you’ll likely adopt within the next two years?

Applying a cloud-native approach is not merely a technology shift, it first and foremost requires a very different set of skills and cultures than a traditional approach. A cloud operating model is aimed at making it easy to deliver the digital systems on which most organizations rely. Cloud deployment can bring cost savings in addition to better use of manpower amongst other resources. This also allows for an improvement in security and performance for business applications. Deploying services to the cloud also holds strategic importance. Cloud deployment gives a company the opportunity to build its digital transformation skill set, and to begin learning the pitfalls and best practices in digitally enabled business. Public cloud IaaS can help reduce data center management needs and reduce the overall cost of providing service. These reductions arise from factors like greater flexibility, monitoring & control and better scalability. There are similar factors which lead to the adoption of private cloud. Enterprises moving to private cloud are still strongly motivated by reduction of their total cost of ownership while maintaining high performance, security, and IT control. It is witnessed that in most cases where security is a top priority, enterprises would tend to choose private over public cloud.

According to the Power of Hybrid Cloud report by IDC and Dell EMC, the reasons commonly given by enterprises for deploying applications to the cloud extend beyond expected cost savings to include ease of use and management (23% of enterprises surveyed), speed of provisioning (18%), better global reach (27%), and scalability (18%). Enterprises seeking to deploy applications to the cloud face a critical decision at the outset on what kind of Infrastructure-as-a-Service architecture to choose. Their options include public cloud, do-it yourself (DIY) private cloud, and vendor-provided hybrid cloud. According to Gartner, Hybrid cloud will remain a focus for enterprises and infrastructure technology vendors with its market poised to touch $92 billion by 2021 with a CAGR of 22.5%. Public clouds such as AWS, Azure, etc. have become more advanced with respect to scalability, security, and performance factors.

All the major public cloud providers are providing compute, storage and networking infrastructure and a platform to abstract away needless details from developers. Dell EMC, sensing the desire of most of its customers to retain at least some on-premise applications and data, are building the same platform, but from a different perspective. Our turnkey platforms, Dell EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and Dell EMC Native Hybrid Cloud, integrate hardware, software and automation to simplify IT service delivery and reduce time to market for customers. Making hybrid cloud platforms simple and turnkey enables businesses to rapidly develop and deploy new applications, optimise resources, control costs and deliver the best possible customer experiences. Having said that, most enterprises are still testing with the best hybrid cloud (integrated private and public cloud) possibilities and how private clouds perform with the same factors. Over a period of time, enterprises will deploy an authenticated private cloud platform from a vendor and a matching public cloud for their hybrid cloud.

Hybrid cloud is a holistic approach to the consumption of IT. It is about matching the right solution to the right job. Hybrid cloud curtails trade-offs and simplifies technical hurdles to get maximum value and improved performance from each component. A hybrid cloud architecture can offer a high level of security, control, performance, and compliance while maintaining flexibility. Enterprises deploying new workloads to the cloud most commonly list ease of use and management and performance among their top decision criteria. The use of a turnkey provider can overcome challenges with internal expertise and the lack of availability of the management tools internal teams know and prefer. It can provide fast time to value since turnkey solutions are delivered ready to run. A hybrid cloud solution may be a good fit for the enterprise's total set of needs without encouraging the proliferation of platforms and vendors. IDC's CloudView Survey finds that 79.7% of large organizations (with 1,000 or more employees) report that they already have a hybrid cloud strategy in place. 51.4% report using both public cloud and private cloud infrastructure, and an additional 29.2% expect to do so in the next year.

A potential option for enterprises that are interested in private cloud IaaS but feel daunted by the challenges posed is a turnkey private cloud solution. Turnkey vendors take on all aspects of planning, building, deploying, and maintaining the private cloud. By integrating offerings from multiple vendors into a single platform based on direct knowledge of these products' proven interoperability, a turnkey vendor can take a great deal of risk and headache out of running a private cloud.

By delivering a complete, integrated solution that includes self-service tools for the customer to use, turnkey solutions can go a long way in alleviating these concerns. Hybrid cloud help maintain the levels of security and compliance required for sensitive or mission-critical enterprise applications while enjoying enhanced flexibility and time to delivery. As they make the inevitable move to an enterprise cloud, companies seeking to maximize their agility and speed while still meeting their other requirements should think about a hybrid cloud approach.