Escaping the complexity of the hybrid cloud

Hybrid Cloud Management

Hybrid Cloud Advantages and Disadvantages

More and more companies are using public and private cloud platforms in parallel. This offers many advantages, but dramatically increases the complexity of this, HPE offers an interesting service-based solution.

The use of cloud computing continues to increase rapidly. Gartner predicts a market volume of $266 billion this year, up 17 percent from 2019. Analysts expect the greatest growth to come from Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas), where it is expected that there will be an increase of almost ten billion dollars.

"Iaas benefits above all from the trend towards multi-cloud environments." Most companies are pursuing a multi-cloud strategy to reduce dependence on a single vendor and take advantage of 'best-of-breed'," writes Michael Warrilow, vice president at Gartner in a blog post. Rightscale reports in its latest "State of the Cloud Report" that 84 percent of the companies surveyed are already using multi-cloud infrastructures, with an average of five clouds being used in parallel.

Cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-hybrid cloud

"This trend can also be observed in Germany." "Multi-cloud computing is gaining momentum, which is why interoperability and openness of the solutions offered are becoming increasingly important," writes ISG analyst Heiko Henkes in a research note on the German cloud market.

An essential element of multi-cloud is the integration of hybrid cloud environments, that is, the integration of one or more in-house clouds. In an IDC survey, 48 percent of respondents said that moving applications was the most important reason for operating a hybrid cloud. With a hybrid cloud infrastructure, businesses can deliver apps and services to business users, partners, and customers faster and more flexibly than ever before, streamline workloads, scale services cost-effectively, and respond quickly to change.

A bundle of challenges

At the same time, however, the complexity of managing hybrid cloud infrastructures is increased by a number of challenges:

• Low automation at the start of implementation. In the initial phase, the manual management effort for the development and optimization of cloud workloads is still high and the automation is low. This can be a challenge in terms of the time required for management, as well as the know-how that IT employees have to muster for this task.

• Continuous control and management of all platforms is required to ensure the reliability and efficiency of all services. But many companies are not technically able to do this and the necessary tools are missing.

• Data exchange and management between public and private cloud. In hybrid cloud environments, comprehensive data management is essential to ensure consistent and seamless data exchange between different cloud areas.

• Uniform deployment on all this way, especially operational disruptions and interruptions can be minimized.

• Homogeneous security policies across all platforms.

• Backup and disaster recovery of all applications across the entire hybrid cloud.

• Platform flexibility by moving the applications or workloads to the optimal platform

• Cost transparency across all hybrid cloud platforms.

It all depends on the right tools

Despite these many challenges, IDC assumes that hybrid clouds will already be in widespread use in two years. The reason for this optimism is the emergence of new approaches and services to use and manage hybrid cloud architectures." "Consumption-based services pave the way for broad acceptance of hybrid cloud," their white paper says.

IDC refers to the use of IT resources in an on-demand model with pay-per-use billing." Consumption-based services offer interesting usage models, which offer both the 'public cloud-like' advantages for the on-premises area, as well as various options for the flexible provision of IT assets. "This means shorter procurement cycles, more flexible payment models, and far-reaching automation, deployment, and scaling of IT resources," according to IDC analysts.

HPE Greenlake from Hewlett Packard 

Enterprise provides such a flexible and consumption-based service. In practical terms, this is a kind of hybrid cloud-as-a-service, in which, unlike a "normal" in-house cloud, external system administration is carried out by HPE and everything is billed according to consumption and volume." Whether it’s data storage, computing capacity or network traffic - only what is actually used is paid for," says Scott Yow, Vice President and General Manager of the HPE Greenlake product line.

HPE Greenlake to be further expanded.

Meanwhile, Hpegreenlake is used by more than 700 customers and the industry spectrum ranges from manufacturing to retail to healthcare. They all use Hpegreenlake to gain more flexibility, gain more control and reduce operating costs.

Meanwhile, the further expansion of the platform is under high pressure. Support is sometimes planned for the recently launched HPE Container Platform, which can be deployed on virtual machines or bare metal servers. In a meeting with analysts, CEO Antonio Neri also pointed out that Hpegreenlake will also connect edge computing with hybrid cloud and data management to further relieve Cios.

Conclusion: Hpegreenlake as a hybrid cloud-as-a-service addresses many challenges of modern cloud environments. It uses a forward-looking, cloud-native, modern automation approach that ensures consistently high service quality in a hybrid multi-cloud.