“A world with millions of clouds distributed everywhere – that’s the future as we see it.” – HPE CEO Antonio Neri
When cloud computing first began disrupting traditional IT over 10 years ago, who would have imagined millions of clouds would soon follow? According to industry experts, that is exactly where the industry is heading. The next wave of digital disruption will store and analyze data at the edge and in the cloud instantly, compliments of millions of clouds distributed everywhere.
To cope with this tsunami of widely distributed data, businesses will need to go beyond on-premises environments and multi-cloud deployments. They must connect a hybrid system that stretches from the edge to the cloud and everywhere in-between. A recent report from 451 Research, From Edge to Cloud, Managing the Next Wave of IT Disruption, explains this new reality.
8 Essential Steps for Managing Edge-to-Cloud
The report details 8 essentials businesses need to consider as they enter the next wave of IT disruption.
1. Proactive cloud strategy
Organizations everywhere are pursuing a proactive hybrid cloud and multi-cloud strategy, balancing performance, cost, and compliance. At the same time, they are meeting specific needs of applications and workloads. All of this takes planning, along with time and skills – which are in short supply in today’s fast-paced, competitive environment. Organizations must seek ways to unify access to multiple clouds and simplify management.
2. Modernize and automate
Traditional, manual-laden IT processes will become outdated, as orchestration and automation tools transform the data center. Hyperconvergence and composability are providing the agility of public cloud through software-defined strategies, which increases automation and saves time.
3. Take out the complexity
An ideal hybrid IT environment must be simple and quick to deploy and manage — and capable of seamlessly bridging multiple workloads across traditional, private, and public cloud infrastructure. A hybrid cloud management platform must allow IT administrators or business managers to view all available infrastructure resources without requiring detailed knowledge of the underlying hardware.
4. Future-proof for emerging technologies
Hybrid IT must support not only OS, virtualization, and popular cloud options that businesses are using, but also fast-growing new alternatives. These include bare-metal and container platforms, along with extensions to the architecture, such as the distributed edge. Unified APIs will help with the integration of existing apps, making everything easier to manage.
5. Deliver everything as a service
Enterprises that want to optimize resources are moving toward deploying everything as a service. Software-defined and hybrid cloud management help to integrate off-premises services with workloads that need to stay on-premises.
6. Deal with the data and gains insights faster
As data explodes from the edge to the cloud, software-defined services and hybrid cloud data management will become vital. Organizations will need to decide where to generate data, how to analyze it quickly, and what actions to take based on their analysis.
7. Control spending and utilization
Public cloud providers are expanding their portfolios to provide more options, which include more pricing models, increased instance sizes, smaller time increments, better reporting, and competitive pricing. Because the price of cloud is falling only marginally, providers differentiate themselves by offering flexibility in procurement and products. Yet, as more choice is offered, complexity also increases, driving the need for hybrid cloud management solutions.
8. Extend to the edge
Edge computing marks the beginning of a massive increase in a vast infrastructure of endpoints that will be part of tomorrow’s IT. Moving data centers such as cars, airplanes, trains, robots, and drones will increase rapidly. Enterprise customers need to invest now by integrating their private and public cloud resources with an eye toward expanding to a highly distributed infrastructure in the future.
A world with millions of clouds distributed everywhere will soon become commonplace. While the rest of the world is moving toward the cloud, multitudes of smart endpoints are starting to force computing closer to the edge. Analytics, edge processing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are also on the rise. Combining cloud and hybrid IT models with edge computing—all tied together with a multi-cloud management platform—is an important milestone to combat the next wave of IT disruption.
Read the full report from 451 Research, From Edge to Cloud, Managing the Next Wave of IT Disruption. Learn more about hybrid cloud management here.
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 which include HPE OneSphere – multi-cloud management, HPE SimpliVity – Hyperconverged Infrastructure, HPE Synergy – Composable Infrastructure and HPE OneView – Integrated Management.
To read more articles from Gary, check out the HPE Shifting to Software-Defined blog.
