“Digital transformation is about innovating and acting faster, and a big part of that speed will come from the way technologies are consumed and delivered. In the near future, we believe everything will be delivered as-a-service,” said Antonio Neri, CEO of HPE, in his HPE Discover 2019 keynote.
For that to happen, however, companies must effectively manage increasingly hybrid environments, where a mix of on-premises and cloud resources presents challenges for IT teams — such as integration, security, and data flow.
That’s why the journey to “Everything-as-a-Service” (EaaS) should involve three steps.
- Adopt an on-prem IT consumption solution. This is where organizations only pay for the capacity resources — storage and compute, for example — that are actually used. It allows quick scaling for all workloads that must remain in private data centers, enabling IT to meet business demands for faster time to market.
- Support IT staffing resources. With the right EaaS solution, for example, companies can add management services—effectively extending their IT teams. Depending on areas of need, the partner could help automate remedial tasks like patching, assist with the transition to self-service functionality, and/or manage an entire hybrid cloud environment.
- Adopt a single EaaS console. This unified view provides IT with an integrated view of the entire hybrid IT environment and deliver everything with a click.
Centralizing IT Services
As IT infrastructure continues to expand — from on-prem to the edge to the cloud — companies stand to gain significant benefits by shifting to an EaaS delivery model. That’s because these mixed environments create new complexities.
“In order to compete in the digital economy, the need for robust management and governance across various clouds becomes table stakes,” said Daphne Chung, Research Director of Cloud Services & Software at IDC Asia/Pacific.
A single platform, like HPE GreenLake Central, helps organizations better manage these environments, while boosting efficiency and offering greater visibility. GreenLake Central provides:
- A unified portal for the entire IT estate. Organizations can run, manage, and optimize their hybrid estate through a single self-service portal and operations console.
- Point-and-click insights and control. This lets IT keep tabs on key KPIs across the infrastructure — including IT spending, capacity, and compliance.
- Intuitive consumption analytics. Robust analytics provide self-service visibility into IT usage and costs across environments using the IT consumption model, including on-prem and cloud. This enables better decisions about where to align IT spend, how to optimize costs, and when to plan for more capacity.
- Fast provisioning of IT resources. Developers can simply and quickly deploy resources in a managed private cloud or on-prem from the same unified portal.
- Continuous compliance. HPE GreenLake, for example, monitors more than 1,500 business and technical controls, so compliance officers can quickly see issues for fast remediation.
- Data-driven capacity planning. IT Ops can always see how much capacity is being used across ITaaS resources, compare to committed capacity, and project future needs.
For more information, visit https://www.hpe.com/us/en/greenlake.html.