The migration to hybrid IT environments has companies scrambling to allocate human IT resources who can manage, maintain, and secure on-prem and cloud environments.
“It can be a painful transition because there is a tremendous amount of new knowledge that has to be understood and new skills that need to be obtained. It’s a lot like drinking from a fire hose,” J.R. Storment, co-founder of the nonprofit FinOps Foundation, recently told NetworkWorld.
To ease this pain, the right IT consumption solution, where IT is delivered as a service (ITaaS), can help.
Optimizing Mixed Environments
ITaaS solutions let organizations pay for capacity — servers and storage, for example — both as and when it’s needed. Whether that infrastructure is on-premises or in co-located data centers or in a private cloud, the provider supplies it on-demand, with the flip of a switch. Using this model, organizations only pay for the actual capacity used, based on metered usage.
In addition, some ITaaS providers offer management services, where their expertise can serve as an extension of the IT team. Depending on areas of need, they can automate remedial tasks like patching, assist with the transition to self-service functionality, or manage an entire hybrid cloud environment.
Specifically, management services can improve IT staff efficiencies by an average of 35%, according to a recent report by IDC, freeing an equivalent of 10 staff members to focus on growth and strategic initiatives. The study found other benefits, including:
- Optimization of server and IT infrastructure
- Reduced or limited operational risk with improved threat response
- Minimize unplanned outages, thus improving IT and business operations
Management services help enterprises not only modernize their IT environments with IT consumption, but also as they journey into complex, hybrid architectures.
There are three areas where HPE can help fill the gaps:
- HPE’s Right Mix Advisory services assist with workload placement for balancing security, financial, and operational needs. This can be a time-consuming task, because it’s not often immediately apparent whether applications should be placed in a cloud, on-prem, or a mix. In addition, these decisions require skills and expertise across all the relevant architectures.
- For workloads that need to remain on prem, HPE GreenLake offers consumption-based IT services that combine the flexibility and cost savings of public cloud with the security, control, and performance of on-premises IT — all in a pay-per-use model.
- If organizations needs additional support, HPE GreenLake Management Services will monitor, operate, administer, and optimize resources in a customer’s environment to help them gain operational efficiency.
For more information on how HPE experts can help address security, operations, automation, cost control, compliance, and more to help simplify hybrid cloud management, visit https://www.hpe.com/us/en/greenlake.html.
