Get More Out of Your Hybrid Cloud: 3 Keys to Success

Many organizations today have adopted a cloud first strategy aimed to take advantage of on-demand agility, cloud-based elasticity, and charges for services based on actual use. But public cloud is not a one-size-fits-all infrastructure. All too often, IT leaders adopt this strategy to enable innovation, only later to realize the overwhelming cost and complexity of managing a disparate collection of clouds. The fact is, while it’s easy to see the promise of agility and sky’s-the-limit elasticity in hybrid cloud, the day-to-day reality can be very different.

In most cases, public and private clouds have to be managed separately, and the different policies, APIs, and portals make that extremely difficult for IT teams. Cloud lock-ins that restrict resource usage, inconsistent data services that require application refactoring, and the inability to move data freely across clouds, all serve to exacerbate the management challenges. Complex, fragmented infrastructure pulls staff away from more productive work, limiting the potential of your business and increasing IT headaches and costs.

Move to Cloud Everywhere

Instead of a cloud first approach, many data-driven companies are moving to a “cloud everywhere” approach. After all, cloud is not a destination – it’s an experience. The experience of cloud everywhere is a seamless and invisible fabric of infrastructure where apps and data move freely across all your clouds. Cloud everywhere breaks down silos and accelerates business transformation, providing flexible access to data and maximizing resources. It also offers consistent enterprise data services both on-premises and in the cloud, with the same agility, simplicity, and cloud consumption for every application.

So, how does an organization move from fragmented clouds to cloud everywhere? Let’s look at three ways to overcome public cloud limitations and unlock the full potential of hybrid cloud.

1. Bring the Cloud Experience On-Premises Cloud is popular with IT organizations because of its simplicity and agility. However, it wasn’t built to support mission-critical applications, so it’s not surprising that these apps cannot easily run in the public cloud. These essential apps require the highest levels of performance and resiliency, levels that typical cloud solutions cannot deliver. The apps take hours of refactoring or rewriting code, and data gravity makes the data and the ecosystem supporting them simply too heavy to move to the cloud without substantial risk.

The right hybrid cloud solution starts with having a cloud experience on-premises without burdening IT staff or compromising mission-critical apps. For agility, simplicity, and cost-effectiveness, choose infrastructure that can be delivered as-a-service with the flexibility to support any application and the elasticity to scale on demand.  

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI brings this cloud experience on-premises with enterprise-class performance and availability, and the agility needed to accelerate business. The hyperconverged platform combines automated simplicity for VM-centric operations with better performance, resiliency, and economics than traditional HCI, making it ideal for business-critical applications and mixed workloads at scale. Built-in artificial intelligence predicts and prevents issues before you’re aware of them, and HPE GreenLake delivers the entire experience as-a-service.

2. Enable Enterprise Data Services Anywhere A true hybrid cloud solution should provide the same advanced data services — such as replication, efficiency, and resiliency — that you expect from mission-critical applications whether your data is on-premises or in the cloud. But inconsistent data services and a fundamentally different architecture in the public cloud leaves data locked away on-premises. Some storage vendors try to solve this by allowing you to run your enterprise storage operating system in the cloud, but that only shifts the point of administration. Your team still needs to initialize, configure, and manage those systems, negating many of the benefits of the cloud.

Cloud-native enterprise storage services are a better choice, because they offer enterprise-grade storage capacity consumable on demand and delivered instantly. HPE Cloud Volumes, for example, provisions capacity in a matter of minutes. The suite of enterprise cloud data services unifies the data experience and delivers extremely high reliability and performance to both on-premises infrastructure and the public cloud. The solution supports consistent enterprise cloud data services, so you’re able to get the same experience optimized for different aspects of the lifecycle of applications and data.

With HPE Cloud Volumes, your developers can start test/dev in the cloud. When the application is ready to move into production, it can seamlessly be brought back on-premises to drive better cost control. The same applies to an application born in the cloud – you can bring it back on-premises and get the same agility of the cloud that you’re used to. As your organization uses analytics to garner insights, you can replicate on-premises data in the cloud with open and direct access to the computing power of every cloud. And finally, you can securely and reliably extend data protection to the cloud. 

3. Move data seamlessly between on-prem and public cloud  It’s also important to be able to move data where it needs to be along its lifecycle – whether you want to maximize developer agility and innovation, drive cost control for production, provide limitless compute for analytics, or deliver cost-effective data protection. But egress costs for moving data to and from the public cloud can add up very quickly— and may deter you from getting the most value out of your data.

Find a solution that offers seamless data mobility, bridging every cloud to eliminate silos and public cloud lock-in. With HPE Storage, you have the option to move your on-premises data and applications to HPE Cloud Volumes – without egress costs – and leverage the hyperscaler compute resources of your choice to access that data for test/dev, reporting, analytics, compliance, and archive. This multi-cloud flexibility lets you take advantage of every cloud without having to migrate your data across clouds. 

Finally Unlock the True Potential of Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid cloud doesn’t need to be complex — and if leveraged correctly in a cloud everywhere model it can catapult your business forward. Take advantage of an on-premises cloud with enterprise data services and seamless data mobility across all clouds, and you’ll reduce the complexity and fragmentation that’s been a hallmark of hybrid cloud. With that foundation, and no longer bogged down with managing complex infrastructure, planning capacity changes, or worrying about varying application requirements, your IT staff can focus on the thing that’s actually going to drive your business: innovation. 

Want to learn more about HPE Cloud Volumes? See how it strengthens enterprise data protection in this video.

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About Ashish Prakash

^{Ashish Prakash is the Vice President & GM of the Cloud Data Services team in the HPE Storage & Big Data group. In this role, Ashish is responsible for defining and developing simple and consistent customer cloud experiences that can deliver private, machine learning, data protection, and connectivity as-a-service.}

^{Prior to his current role, Ashish led Product Management responsible for HPE Nimble Storage, HPE Cloud Volumes, and HPE Infosight.}