Four advantages of offloading your hybrid cloud management

Hybrid cloud enables companies to digitally transform and gain huge business benefits from on-premise private cloud’s reliability and control on one hand, and public cloud’s scalability and power on the other. This infrastructure combination means they can innovate, and respond more quickly to change, roll out new services to employees and customers faster, scale their services up and down rapidly, and generally be more agile and competitive.

However, hybrid cloud management requires a high level of investment and technical expertise to operate and maintain multiple applications across a number of different platforms and infrastructures. Consequently, many enterprises are turning to cloud managed service providers and their sophisticated management tools to help; service providers like HPE, with its GreenLake Hybrid Cloud: an agnostic multi-cloud managed service for public and private clouds.

According to 451 Research, 65% of enterprises with hybrid cloud deployments are contracting out some of their workloads, with IT systems monitoring and management being the most popular managed services. [https://issuu.com/dcdmagazine/docs/offloading_hybrid_cloud_management_for_strategic_a]  

Here are four common advantages businesses are getting from offloading hybrid cloud management to third-party service providers like HPE.

1.Cost efficiency

Outsourcing hybrid cloud management creates cost efficiencies in a number of areas. Many public clouds such as AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, and indeed HPE GreenLake — which works with these and others, are available as pay-as-you-go services, so you only consume what you use.

Secondly, organisations tend to massively underutilise their on-premise cloud resources [https://www.businessinsider.com/companies-waste-62-billion-on-the-cloud-by-paying-for-storage-they-dont-need-according-to-a-report-2017-11?r=US&IR=T ], which is where a service provider can help you optimise your utilisation and spend by managing the infrastructure for you.

Thirdly, outsourcing management enables you to reduce internal IT staff, technical resources, and time spent on manual tasks, thereby saving money. And by centralising and unifying management across the hybrid estate, it’s even possible to reduce rogue subscriptions to shadow IT across the organisation, driving costs down further.

2. Free up staff through automation

Third-party service providers can bring an IT maturity and levels of automation that are difficult to develop and implement in house. A hybrid cloud infrastructure like HPE GreenLake enables you to automate routine tasks, freeing IT staff to focus on other projects, particularly ones that benefit the business more directly. This means they can innovate new digital processes and business models; improve internal processes, increase profitability, and optimise costs.

3.Combat the IT skills gap

Similarly, technologically-advanced service providers can offer access to specialised expertise and tools that organisations don’t tend to have, either because they require significant development, or are expensive to buy in. This can help combat the IT skills gap as cloud managed service providers add more and more sophisticated service innovations, automation, AI, data analytics and so on, developing their own expertise and skill sets to benefit their community of clients.

4. Greater manageability

Finally, by outsourcing hybrid cloud management to experts, businesses can gain a range of advantages from better performance, availability and reliability, to end-to-end security, compliance and manageability across the hybrid estate. For example, HPE GreenLake offers CIOs unified dashboard management; a single “workbench” for developers; and a real-time view of technology spend for CFOs. This level of management and oversight is difficult to develop in-house.

However, GreenLake offers this functionality as a service, simplifying IT operations and management by unifying an organisation’s datacentre, edge, and public and private cloud systems, and offering management for the entire IT estate to a single, unified portal. It thereby offers a solution to IT infrastructure complexity, creating cost efficiencies, freeing IT staff, combating the skills gap and delivering greater manageability.

To discover more benefits about HPE Greenlake, and how it can help optimise your hybrid cloud management, click here to visit the HPE website.