There are variations of Cloud being utilised in the enterprise market, be it public, private and/or hybrid Cloud. True hybrid Cloud solutions have a way to go in their maturity. Public Cloud is here to stay and its attractive cost model that removes high capital expenditure for infrastructure, with security embedded at a physical datacentre level, as well as the solution components, such as compute, storage, operating systems, databases and application, will be appealing to many, based on the X-as-a-Service subscribed to.
As the market is experiencing “the good, the bad and the ugly” with public Cloud, the rise of regaining control over data egress and ingress is clear. This has been a contributor of bill shock for many enterprises. The outlook to a private Cloud solution is on the rise, but the concern that prevents scale in a privately owned infrastructure is also front of mind. This is where hyper-converged infrastructure appliances enter the fold.
Hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI) is a combination of networking, storage, compute resources and software virtualisation in a small form factor (from 1U) to minimise datacentre footprint, along with allowing you the freedom to scale up/down incrementally. This alone isn’t the silver lining, however adding this to an automation pipeline, which establishes integration with internal systems is closer to the mark.
If you’re looking to reduce your shadow IT turbulence, which includes business visibility to costs; governance; regulatory compliance; data and information security; and alike, there is a need to understand your business’ IT user requirements and pain points. For example, a developer can be limited by internal red tape to organise a development and testing environment to access and commence their coding. The frustrations of traditional change procedures and lead times are in direct competition with business and project timeframes, which inevitably lead projects to run sandbox environments in public Cloud. The project resource can sign-up within minutes and start coding away, being productive, but at a risk, where the business has no governance mechanisms in place to control the risk(s).
To allow your organisation to meet the demand of today’s socio-economic state and continue to be a competitive force against many types of threats, all parts of the business need to be enabled. For IT, the ability to have control, stability, traceability and governance in their day-to-day operations is critical to keeping services alive, which map to business services consumed by your customers.
Hyper-converged infrastructure solutions with automation, orchestration and integration into your IT environment is the ideal goal to aim for, even for the case of a proof of concept. The solution should provide fast turnaround in provisioning virtual machines with the tested and compatible software/run time environment stack that a developer can obtain through your internal service catalogue. This includes the capability to integrate the solution into the organisation’s IT service management toolset, its monitoring and alerting systems, as well as any other data insights that are utilised within. Governance and risk management is given the best chance to succeed, as well as allowing your business to innovate faster, without compromising on security that may not be in your control.
