A consistent hybrid cloud enables unique enterprise flexibility
By WP BrandStudio
The ideal computing environment empowers IT with consistent management across cloud infrastructure platforms
Enterprises tasked with choosing between cloud computing platform options often find themselves using multiple clouds—both public and private. The use of multiple cloud platforms with a common management plane is a great strategy to create a best-of-breed tech environment without sacrifices or trade-offs..
But the challenge of operating in disparate cloud environments is that it easily fragments into separate tool sets for each cloud platform. This results in islands of disjointed cloud use and makes it difficult for IT to achieve consistency in management aspects of policy enforcement, security, compliance, cost management and maintaining service levels. Developers see limited application and data portability and attempt to jam every application, regardless of fit, into the cloud island with which they are most comfortable. The organization is allowing technology limitations to dictate its cloud strategy instead of benefiting from a true, consistent hybrid cloud experience.
For a decade, this has been a challenging issue to solve. Multiple cloud software platforms have been designed for use across public and private clouds. OpenStack, for example, saw private cloud adoption but no high scale public cloud availability. More recent hybrid options from public cloud providers are limited to the providers’ specific private cloud infrastructure configurations. Enterprises can deliver on the vision for hybrid cloud value with optimal flexibility provided to all teams. The challenge is to do so without separate silos that complicate management and use.
A challenge becomes an opportunity
Within organizations, teams often disagree in setting the course for the right cloud strategy. For example, application teams often want to prioritize highly elastic infrastructure capacity particularly due to applications that have variable or inconsistent capacity footprints. Also, the ability to flexibly provision capacity without specific budgeting eliminates the risk of unavailability and possible delay to projects. This approach also eliminates speculative spending on infrastructure can go underutilized.
Another common reason to favor a public cloud platform is the plethora of platform services capabilities, such as hosted databases, application components and cognitive services. Additionally, almost all enterprises must ensure high availability of their applications in their normal hosting environment and their ability to operate in disaster recovery scenarios involving large scale power outages, extreme weather and other worst-case scenarios.
In contrast, there are numerous use cases where private cloud continues to be the optimal solution for applications with specific requirements on performance, control, cost and location. When the application has a performance profile requiring bandwidth not achievable in public cloud, private cloud is optimal. Users or devices running applications requiring tight turnaround from public cloud for a near real-time request/response experience also face the sustained throughput and latency struggles. Edge devices in manufacturing and healthcare requiring tight timing on analytics informing automated decision loops on alarms and actions can similarly require private infrastructure.
Another common private cloud use case is deployment of applications where organizational policy requires use of private infrastructure. Custom private infrastructure control can be necessary for compliance and security regulatory requirements. And global enterprises may require private cloud infrastructure in countries without public cloud regions or in locations not close enough to a public cloud region.
Because of their largely opposite use cases, public cloud and private cloud options are highly complementary. They enable purpose-built cloud infrastructure solutions for the different application lifecycle stages, such as the transition from experimental development to production operation and from unpredictable capacity needs to a relatively consistent footprint.
But continued change in what each cloud can address influences the choice of public versus private cloud per application and creates inconsistencies across the enterprise’s IT environment. Public clouds continue to progress in performance capabilities with higher performance networking. Meanwhile, private cloud elasticity continues to improve to rival that of public cloud for the needs of most applications. What results is continuing enterprise reconsideration of the optimal operating environment for many of its applications.
Consistent hybrid cloud as the optimal solution
This continuing consideration of migration of applications across cloud infrastructures illustrates the utility not just of hybrid cloud use but the importance of application and data portability to enable ongoing optimization. Without a cloud platform delivering consistency across all your cloud environments, usage fragments based on disparate tool sets per cloud results in disjointed use that lacks portability.
To enable the organization to choose the right landing zone for applications based on business value and requirements, IT must provide a consistent hybrid cloud experience across all environments. This means holistically defining the optimal use of public and private clouds across an organization’s application portfolio and having common infrastructure and operations models to enable portability across clouds. It also creates a consolidated management view, customized network and storage implementations, and scale efficiency.
Dell Technologies offers a consistent cloud platform experience across cloud environments, spanning private infrastructure and the top public clouds of AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. By pairing VMware Cloud Foundation’s consistent hybrid cloud experience with uniquely integrated Dell EMC infrastructure options (spanning integrated HCI, CI and Dell Technologies Cloud Validated Designs), enterprises can implement a comprehensive, best-of-breed solution that delivers the simplicity of cloud as it was originally intended.
IT leaders challenged with inconsistent management capabilities across the various public and private cloud platforms adopted by their organization should consider extending their investment in VMware from private infrastructure to create a hybrid cloud that spans their data center and public clouds. With tight integration between Dell Technologies infrastructure and VMware Cloud Foundation, organizations can deliver a consistent experience and bring as-a-Service levels of consumption and automation to the data center.
As the only infrastructure and cloud platform provider with a cloud platform available across the top public and private cloud infrastructure platforms, Dell Technologies uniquely offers the consistency that frees application teams to achieve optimal use of their public and private cloud options across their portfolio—from new cloud-native applications to improvement and modernization of existing applications. Dell Technologies deserves strong consideration as strategic advisor and provider in your cloud journey.
This article quotes material that appeared first in the research paper “Dell Technologies Delivers Consistent Hybrid Cloud Enabling Unique Enterprise Flexibility,” © 2019 Moor Insights & Strategy. For the original, please see:http://www.moorinsightsstrategy.com/research-paper-dell-technologies-delivers-consistent-hybrid-cloud-enabling-unique-enterprise-flexibility/.
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