TRANSFORM TO A MODERN HYBRID INFRASTRUCTURE

By Gary Thome (Reposted from CIO magazine with permission from HPE)

As I travel the world and talk with customers, each has a similar yet different story: Their business is changing and often factors completely out of their control are disrupting the status quo. These businesses understand that they need to rethink IT and make some dramatic changes, but there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

Instead of letting infrastructure hold them back, these companies are succeeding by implementing today’s newest technologies and partnering with industry experts. And what they’re finding may surprise you: The new era of hybrid IT is improving the way they run their business and is helping them deliver new and differentiated services. By embracing the additional values hybrid IT provides, businesses can create their right mix of public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises solutions, while deploying services where they are best suited to be run.

Key steps toward one company’s digital transformation

One such company is a cloud service provider that is experiencing rapid growth. Their expertise is in hosting SAP ERP applications for manufacturing, biotech and financial services. To run their own company efficiently and meet the growing needs of their customers, their vision was to create a scalable, robust and efficient infrastructure that wouldn’t restrain them as they continue to grow.

Every business is different, so their needs may be different than yours. Yet, the steps this company took on their path to a successful digital transformation may give you some insights into what is needed to succeed.

Step 1: Strategic planning

The first step in the digital transformation process for this company was to develop a plan – without proper planning, a rapid expansion could prove catastrophic. Like most companies, this service provider realized that it didn’t have all of the in-house expertise it needed to ensure that its digital transformation vision succeeded.

It sought out a long-term partner, one who would understand its vision and help develop and implement its plan. It selected a partner who would put its business outcomes first using a holistic approach — instead of just trying to sell it on a particular technology.

Step 2: Application acceleration delivery

The next step was vital: When it comes to application delivery, speed is everything. This cloud provider needed the flexibility to respond faster to customer needs, so it required a platform that was powerful yet agile enough to adjust for change.

To achieve its goal, the company researched and then beta tested a new category of infrastructure called composable infrastructure. It gave the company a cloud-like experience with instant access to compute, storage, and networking resources, allowing it to choose what was needed, when it needed it. Instead of taking days or weeks to configure these resources, the company could now deliver the services its customers wanted at near-instant speeds.

Step 3: Operational efficiency

In today’s marketplace, everyone wants more for less. This company needed to be able to quickly provide customers with more capacity and performance – but it also needed to do it cost-effectively. And a key part of their operational efficiency vision hinged on automation and orchestration.

Composable infrastructure met those needs, allowing the company to deliver applications faster yet under budget. And software-defined intelligence with automated templates ensures that any changes are made quickly without human intervention, which minimizes the possibility of misconfiguration.

Step 4: Future-proof technology

Like most companies, this service provider wanted to be certain that any solution it purchased today would serve it well for years to come. Because this provider had a vision of where it wanted to be in the future, it was confident in its digital transformation strategy and the solutions that would take it there. This provider chose composable infrastructure and cloud because it knew that the combination would fit in well with future innovations.

The next step: Continual innovation

Since technology is always improving, this service provider must keep moving forward to deliver the best possible business outcomes for themselves and their customers. A hybrid IT strategy allows businesses to do just that. The right mix of public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises solutions, lets each company run their business more effectively and offer new services to its customers.

Yet, a hybrid IT strategy still presents a challenge. How do you easily manage all of these resources? HPE OneSphere is a hybrid cloud management solution that allows customers to seamlessly compose, operate, and optimize the right mix of workloads across on-premises, private, hosted, and public clouds. Using a single management dashboard with built-in analytics and controls, application developers and IT operators will be able to simply click, compose and consume resources across their entire hybrid estate. This integrated cloud management and infrastructure solution will deliver more control, lower cost, and higher utilization rates.

Don’t let infrastructure hold you back

The company I describe in this article is embracing digital transformation to meet its goal of becoming a global service provider and cloud-hosting company. And through their success, they’re helping their customers succeed as well.

HPE has assembled an array of resources to help you transition into a new, hybrid IT world. You can learn more about composable infrastructure by reading the Composable Infrastructure For Dummies guide. Or learn about HPE’s approach to hybrid IT by checking out the HPE OneSphere website. And to find out how HPE can help you determine a workload placement strategy that meets your service level agreements, visit HPE Pointnext.

Gary Thome is the Vice President and Chief Technologist for the Software-Defined and Cloud Group at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). He is responsible for the technical and architectural directions of converged datacenter products and technologies.
To read more articles from Gary, check out the HPE Shifting to Software-Defined blog.