Business white paper

The Right Mix: Transforming to a Hybrid IT InfrastructureHow to define, power, and optimize your right mix of IT

The Right Mix: Transforming to a Hybrid IT Infrastructure

Table of contents

3 Introduction

3 Competitive challenges businesses face today4 External forces5 Internal forces

6 Business consequences of doing nothing

7 The solution to today’s challenges: an open, hybrid infrastructure strategy8 Define your right mix9 Power your right mix10 Optimize your right mix

11 Hybrid Infrastructure Use Cases

13 Conclusions

A hybrid infrastructure strategy needs to define your right mix of cutting edge infrastructure, power your right mix with the best internal and external resources and optimize your right mix with leading management tools to ensure success every step of the way.

Introduction

Enterprises move at a faster pace today than ever before. The challenges mid to large global enterprises and service providers face are compounded by the ease of entry into markets by new players that can move at a faster pace than entrenched companies. To combat this challenge, businesses need to respond faster to changing market conditions. Yet many times, it takes too long to get access to needed IT services, which delays the development and release of critical, innovative applications. IT departments are typically not providing technology leadership to support business innovation. Shadow IT continues to be an issue, and IT costs are out of alignment with the business.

To accelerate their businesses, enterprises are seeking to implement the right mix of private cloud, public cloud, managed cloud and traditional IT infrastructure, thereby speeding innovation and growth. A solution that focuses on a hybrid infrastructure design is the top choice of many mid to large enterprises.

The main advantage of implementing a hybrid infrastructure solution is the ability to provision infrastructure and applications in minutes, which increases agility and scalability. Benefits include increased IT productivity, reduced costs, and a further shift of funding from a capital expense to an operating expense model.

Although the advantages and benefits of cloud are well-known, the challenge of weaving it into an existing IT environment is not always easy. Minefields can be waiting at every turn, causing the move to cloud computing to be complex and risky. However, the consequences of not acting far outweigh the risks and costs of doing nothing.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the basics of a hybrid infrastructure strategy using cloud resources, describe how the cloud can help businesses respond faster to changing market conditions and demonstrate how a business can use the cloud to maintain technology leadership. Lastly, typical use cases will be detailed to provide the reader with concrete examples of how companies today are using hybrid infrastructure to accelerate their businesses.

Competitive challenges businesses face today

The business environment today is more competitive than it has ever been. Product lifecycles are shorter. Time to market is compressing. Product designs are more complex. Dozens of new marketing channels have arisen and even new sales channels are needed to be competitive. A whole new set of external and internal forces are driving enterprises to respond, adapt, and change—or become yet another industry name that went out of business because they couldn’t or wouldn’t embrace change.

Page 3The Right Mix: Transforming to a Hybrid IT Infrastructure

External Forces Are Disrupting Businesses and Government

The Idea EconomyTurning ideas into new products or services has never been easier

New, Disruptive Business ModelsNo business, industry, or government is safe

Internet of Things, Explosion of Devices Cloud is redefining how applications and devices are written and delivered

Page 4

Businesses are in a fast-moving, relentless state of disruption and those who can envision a better, simpler, or smarter way to do things will succeed.

External forcesThe exponential growth of connected devices is having a dramatic effect on how technology is bought, secured, and managed. This in turn is redefining how applications are written and how fast they are delivered. Traditional IT infrastructures are no longer able to support this swift and innovative model of product development.

The Internet of Things has created an explosion of devices. New business models have arisen and big data is paramount to knowing and responding to customers’ wants and needs. Collecting, organizing, and making use of this data is critical to the success of any enterprise and the products/services they produce.

Examples of new and disruptive business models are all around us. Uber’s ride-sharing instantly connects drivers with riders and offers both parties what traditional cab services would not offer, a safe ride and a hassle-free fare. Nest reinvented the thermostat and gave customers not only the ability to monitor and control one of the biggest energy costs in a home, but they also made the scheduling process so intelligent that the thermostat creates its own schedule based on heuristics.

Both of these examples focus on companies that did not look to see what the leading competitor was doing first and then emulate it. These are companies that completely embraced new business models to deliver services and products that never existed before. Their competitors who owned their respective markets are still scrambling to recover their former stature. Taxi services are struggling to offer an experience and price that comes even close to Uber. Honeywell was the de facto, premier home thermostat control in the industry, but they have now lost significant market share to a company that was virtually unknown a few short years ago.

These examples also highlight the Idea Economy—where businesses are in a fast-moving, relentless state of disruption and those who can envision a better, simpler, or smarter way to do things will succeed. Companies must have a vision combined with technical agility as well as embrace the latest IT ideas and tools in order to quickly turn ideas into a reality—or risk becoming irrelevant. No industry is immune to disruption.

The Right Mix: Transforming to a Hybrid IT Infrastructure

Internal Forces Are Pushing You to Evolve IT

Technology is business strategy

Developers are the new Kingmakers

Shadow IT iseverywhere

DevOps driving �culture shifts

Page 5

Growing regulatory environment, higher business complexity, and increased focus on accountability are requiring enterprises to pursue a broad range of governance, risk, and compliance initiatives across the organization.

Internal forcesEnterprises are particularly affected by internal forces including complex and siloed traditional systems, workforces using shadow IT resources to meet departmental and market demands, and developers demanding the right tools to solve problems. The interoperability between architects, developers, and operations is typically poor, creating a slow (or complete lack of) response to the needs of internal and external customers. Data management, security, governance, and compliance are all under more scrutiny due to increases in hacking and data misuse. These factors place added pressure on companies that strive to deliver products and solutions to market quickly.

Even worse, almost 90 percent of IT budgets are for existing IT operations. It’s hard to be on the leading edge of product and service offerings when only 10 percent of an IT budget is left for innovating and implementing a competitive business strategy.

The Right Mix: Transforming to a Hybrid IT Infrastructure

Business Consequences of Doing Nothing�Fortune 100 Companies in the Year 2005—Where do they rank today:

One-third of the Fortune 100 companies from 10 years ago have fallen o� today’s list

68% Fortune 100 32% Not in Fortune 100

Page 6

Business consequences of doing nothing

The consequences of not adapting and taking advantage of the new IT tools available today are huge. Enterprises that choose to do nothing will lose market share to those organizations that embrace the new tools available to them. Customers and consumers are expecting a more instantaneous response to their needs. A faster response requires a faster evolution of the product and services creation cycle.

Data vulnerability and loss of control is also a risk for businesses who do not respond to today’s new technologies. Employees are already using public cloud computing resources without the knowledge of the companies they work for. Bypassing internal IT processes and cost controls is putting enterprise capital at risk as files are stored in places that are too easy to access by unauthorized people and not properly backed-up or secured.

The corporate highway is littered with the names of companies who chose to ignore and not act on disruptive technological changes or the simple, ever-pressing move to the commoditization of technology. Companies are tempted to stick their head in the sand, ignoring internal and external forces that will lead to their inevitable market irrelevance. Kodak ignored digital photography. The Swiss ignored the quartz watch. DEC ignored Linux® and commodity processors in their servers.

To be a leader in any industry today, an enterprise has to lead not only with their adoption of new ideas and innovation, but must also be early adopters of the technological tools that help them bring their products and services to market faster and at less cost.

Being a late adopter or follower of technological changes has significant negative consequences to companies that previously lead their respective industries.

The Right Mix: Transforming to a Hybrid IT Infrastructure

The Solution to Today’s Challenges: an open, hybrid infrastructure strategy

Define Your Right MixExpertise to help you identify your right mix of traditional IT, private and public cloud, to fuel the unique apps and services needs of your enterprise

Evolve your IT infrastructure to a flexible, cost optimized, hybrid environment that powers your current and future IT services

Simplify your IT operations with automation and orchestration for managing, securing and continuous delivery across your hybrid environment

Power Your Right Mix Optimize Your Right Mix

Page 7

The solution to today’s challenges: an open, hybrid infrastructure strategy

The advantages and benefits gained from adopting a hybrid infrastructure are compelling; the potential consequences of not doing so are devastating. It’s imperative that enterprises develop a sound strategy and plan that incorporates both private and public cloud computing resources in the right places while integrating with traditional processes and systems.

Companies need to focus on implementing an open, hybrid infrastructure strategy that combines defining their right mix, powering their right mix and optimizing their right mix to get maximum value and benefit from a combination of assets—each one best suited to the specific problem.

The Right Mix: Transforming to a Hybrid IT Infrastructure

• Reduce cost, increase agility

• Simplify management complexity

• Reduce shadow IT

• Deploy workload to the most appropriate environment

• Optimize placement for security, performance, cost, etc.

There is a Right Mix for YouGoal is to Optimize for the Right Mix of Traditional IT, Private and Public Cloud

What Will the Right Mix of Hybrid IT Do for Your Enterprise? Enterprises are Moving to Public, Private, and Hybrid Clouds

Statistics provided by 451 Research.

26% Non-cloud

19% Public Cloud (IaaS and SaaS)

47% Private Cloud: On-premises and hosted

9% Hybrid

Page 8

Define your right mixThe first step in deploying an optimal hybrid infrastructure strategy is to define your right mix of information technology—including private cloud, public cloud and traditional IT. Private cloud is ideal for workloads that have specific security or compliance requirements or that require specific hardware to meet performance expectations. Public cloud is ideal for temporary workloads or workloads that have large variances in demand. Traditional IT is best for supporting legacy applications, applications that are not economically or technically feasible to move into a cloud platform, and for applications that have a very steady, unchanging demand profile.

To determine your right mix, each application needs to be deployed on the best platform weighed against its cost, performance, security, regulatory compliance, and other criteria. Determining where to begin defining the right mix of infrastructure depends on where a company is starting from. Virtually all enterprise companies are starting with a legacy of traditional hardware, and they typically have some cloud-based solutions that have sprung up over the years.

To define the right mix, a company needs to look at each application in its production inventory and analyze where that application would best be deployed based on the following:

• Cost to migrate

• Cost to operate

• Regulatory requirements

• Geo-political requirements

• Performance requirements

• Security, confidentiality

• Availability and reliability

• Corporate IT standards

• Contractual terms and conditions

Knowing the answer to these requirements for an application will determine the ideal deployment: which platform, where to deploy, and which partners to work with.

Hybrid infrastructure combines traditional deployments with public and private cloud resources, blending hybrid cloud with traditional IT.

The Right Mix: Transforming to a Hybrid IT Infrastructure

Power Your Right Mix

Build On-Premises

Built on Open Standards and Open Source

Consume O�-Premises

Traditional IT Virtualization �Automation

Private Clouds

Managed Clouds

Hybrid �Infrastructure

Global Public Clouds

Page 9

Power your right mixAfter defining your right mix, the second part of implementing a hybrid infrastructure strategy is powering the right mix by implementing the strategy with the right hardware, services, and partnerships. Any enterprise, no matter how large, will not have all of the skills, knowledge, and resources to implement and manage this complex, hybrid infrastructure strategy.

A private cloud running the appropriate applications is a great place to start powering your right mix. By doing this, an enterprise can set the standards, that will be required for future cloud services, such as using OpenStack® for the cloud operating system. This also helps further define your right mix. When creating a hybrid infrastructure environment, make sure your private cloud can directly integrate with your traditional environment, including the IT management tools. This is a critical step in creating a sustainable hybrid IT environment, not just a hybrid cloud solution.

The next step in powering your right mix is to identify and start utilizing public cloud services that meet application requirements appropriate for public cloud. Microsoft® Azure and Amazon AWS are good choices to start with and are partners of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. These services can then be selected not just on application fit, but also for a match to the standards and criteria set by the enterprise’s private cloud implementation.

It’s critical to select and deploy the best solutions and right partners that have solutions-focused, end-to-end enterprise IT expertise that match the enterprises’ defined hybrid infrastructure and hybrid cloud standards. Infrastructure, services, and partners need to be backed by global services, support, and a partner ecosystem. Partners that can bring cloud-skilled professional services with deep expertise in open source technologies are vital. Partners should also be certified in security, data management, and performance in order to effectively implement these types of comprehensive solutions.

The right partners will help offer a more unified view of the overall hybrid infrastructure environment both for IT management and end-users of the hybrid IT environment. It takes significant expertise to make a hybrid infrastructure work together properly. Finding a partner with the expertise to help a customer plan and implement their cloud environment is paramount. An experienced partner must also be able to help with the business process change, which is often a far bigger issue than the technology—and one that needs to be addressed early on.

Standards such as supported open cloud operating systems and management tools, APIs and other features ensure enterprises are not locked into proprietary solutions.

The Right Mix: Transforming to a Hybrid IT Infrastructure

Corporate compliance demands a way of enforcing corporate policies in regards to data security, confidentiality, and contractual standards.

Optimize: Ensure 100% Visibility and Control across Your Right Mix of Hybrid Infrastructure

E�ective Management of Hybrid Infrastructure

• Performance management to meet SLAs

• Data locality management for performance and protection

• Security/compliance to meet regulatory requirements

• Services cost visibility for e�icient usage and placement

• Capacity management to maximize utilization

• Open architecture provides greater agility and flexibility

• Infrastructure management for issue prevention and rapid resolution

Page 10

Optimize your right mixThe third and final part of the right mix is optimizing your right mix. Optimizing your right mix is the ability to deliver effective administration of hybrid infrastructure, workload migration, applications, data, users, compliance, and security.

Users should be able to seamlessly access the full complement of hybrid infrastructure resources specific to their job requirements. The service catalog should present to each audience (QA, developers, testers) only the cloud and traditional IT resources that is right and approved for their function. IT organizations need to offer private and public cloud services that appear uniform to the customer including the APIs that drive the services. The service catalog should present the options and differences of the services in an easy to understand manner.

Systems administrators must be able to easily manage existing traditional IT resources as well as private and public cloud resources from a single pane of glass. They also need a way to virtually move assets from the traditional environment to the private cloud as resources are freed up. Divisions within a corporation also have important cloud requirements. Corporate compliance demands a way of enforcing corporate policies in regards to data security, confidentiality, and contractual standards. Enforcement and compliance to industry regulations like HIPAA, PCI, ITAR as well as government regulations around data sovereignty are critical as well.

Optimizing your right mix should include the security, governance, and compliance required by the application and enterprise. It should regulate workloads and user access, provide on-demand provisioning of applications and workloads, and optimize resources across a complex open hybrid infrastructure. The advantages of optimizing your right mix are numerous and include delivering greater efficiency, meeting service level agreements, ensuring compliance with industry and governmental requirements, increasing utilization of resources and providing protection from security breaches. The resulting benefits are lowered costs, reduced risks, and greater productivity for the entire organization.

The Right Mix: Transforming to a Hybrid IT Infrastructure

Forecast of primary infrastructure usage by industry by 2018% of respondents (weighted by TAM)

33%

23%

44%

Public

Private

Traditional 39%

14%

47%

Public

Private

Traditional

24%

49%

Public

Private

Traditional

27%

Banking Healthcare UtilitiesData from HPE analysis based on Mckinsey cloud survey and IDC Workloads Marketshares. Traditional category includes virtualized IT. Private cloud includes on-premises and virtual private cloud.

Page 11

Organizations need to define their Right Mix of hybrid infrastructure based on their own strategy. Hewlett Packard Enterprise commissioned the 451 Research group to survey over 1000 customers around the world about their plans for hybrid infrastructure. The chart above shows how organizations plan on adopting private and public clouds over the next 2 years, by industry.

Hybrid Infrastructure Use Cases

Given all the possibilities to define, power and optimize your right mix, where are the sweet spots for planning and executing an open hybrid infrastructure strategy to reap the greatest possible benefits in the shortest amount of time?

Modernize your Enterprise Application Foundation to deliver higher performance at a lower cost to drive business growth. Only HPE has the expertise and end-to-end workload-optimized infrastructure solutions to speed application performance and improve business continuity, while simplifying management and reducing the total cost of ownership. Available on-premise, hosted or in the cloud, HPE offers pre-built, factory integrated systems that offer ease of purchase, implementation, management and support to address customer’s needs at every step of their modernization.

Virtualize Clients and Applications to deliver services anytime, anywhere with lower cost and higher utilization. HPE offers innovative all-in-one virtualization solutions that integrate compute, software-defined storage and intelligence so you can deploy VMs at cloud speed, simplify IT operations, and reduce costs. Built-in enterprise features, performance and resiliency enable HPE HyperConverged Systems to easily handle a wide variety of virtualized applications, including general purpose virtualization, client virtualization, and cloud workloads.

Use Data Center Automation to reduce IT operations costs, increase speed of delivery, automate IT tasks and orchestrate IT processes for provisioning, patching, and compliance across servers, networks, databases and middleware in heterogeneous environments. HPE Data Center Automation is a unified, virtual appliance based solution that reduces costs, increases speed of service, and scales to meet your needs.

Rapid infrastructure provisioning is one of the easiest ways to show benefits for cloud computing. Development and testing, infrastructure-as-a-service resources for deploying production applications and quick expansion of web services are examples of this use case. This is the most common use case and has the most impact for increasing innovation, improving speed-to-market and increasing agility and scalability.

The Right Mix: Transforming to a Hybrid IT Infrastructure

Page 12

Deploying traditional apps to the cloud is the second most common use case. Traditional applications that need greater scalability, experience large variances in demand or aren’t meeting performance expectations are good candidates for moving to the cloud. In some cases, applications are modified to work in a cloud environment. In other cases, applications are implemented unchanged. This use case increases agility and scalability.

Deploying an AWS hybrid cloud is another ideal use case for hybrid infrastructure. Many enterprises are using AWS because it’s easy to access and seemingly inexpensive. Yet some applications are now being moved back to a private cloud for a variety of technical and economic reasons. Ideal candidates for a private cloud include applications that require specific hardware to meet performance expectations, applications that have compliance requirements that cannot be met by AWS, or applications that are less expensive to run in a private cloud. By deploying an AWS compliant private cloud, applications can be moved between AWS and the private cloud without rewriting the applications.

As enterprises increase their adoption of cloud technology, many are managing multiple private and/or public clouds. Becoming an internal service broker enables an IT organization to manage and optimize services from external service providers. Successfully brokering and managing multiple clouds requires a cloud management platform with extensive integration capabilities.

Implementing tools to operate complex clouds is critical to all use cases. As companies increase their use of hybrid cloud, they often want better management capabilities such as performance management, capacity management, asset management, showback/chargeback, enhanced security and financial management. To simplify operations, enterprises also look for management tools that can manage both their traditional IT and cloud environments.

Another popular hybrid infrastructure use case is implementing storage in the cloud for a content repository, as an enterprise file sync and share, or for an archive and backup. This type of deployment can cut storage costs by 10X—all while increasing agility, innovation, and speed to market.

Developing and deploying cloud-native applications on IaaS/PaaS or for mobile application development can increase application releases by 30X. New applications are often developed using cloud native architectures combined with DevOps methodologies to bring applications to market significantly faster.

The Right Mix: Transforming to a Hybrid IT Infrastructure

Page 13

Deliver innovation at the speed of business with Continuous Delivery and Deployment through automation, infrastructure as code and release management across the delivery value chain. The HPE DevOps solution automates and integrates across build, test, and release processes to deliver higher quality apps faster with integration for analytics, cloud, security, mobility and open source tools needed to give both developers and operations a one stop shop for efficiency. You can enable immediate feedback loops to drive continuous improvement and improved customer experiences through more predictable application release cycles at a reduced cost to the business.

Conclusions

Companies can no longer take a wait and see attitude to adopting and integrating hybrid infrastructure technology into their IT strategy. The advantages are clear and the benefits are now proven. The risks to adopting early are less than the risks of adopting late. Enterprises must get their products and services to market faster than ever before and must be more creative and innovative than their competitors in order to survive. Employees must be empowered with the tools they need to unleash their creative potential. New tools must be deployed faster and with greater ease—all while keeping costs under control.

Employing and accelerating a hybrid infrastructure strategy that properly defines your right mix, powers your right mix and optimizes your right mix is the answer to remaining competitive and relevant. Those enterprises that effectively implement a hybrid IT strategy based on these three principles dramatically increase their odds of success.

Building this strategy on a platform of open standards and software provides a future-proof IT deployment.

The Right Mix: Transforming to a Hybrid IT Infrastructure

“IT is in the Midst of Transformation as Enterprises Look to Drive Down Cost and Increase Efficiency.”– 451 Research

Sign up for updates

40% of the Fortune 100 is running HPE Helion

50+ Years of enterprise experience

$3 Billion in cloud infrastructure sales

The #1 provider of cloud infrastructure

3,000+Private cloud clients

600+Managed cloud clients

10,000sApplication transformation experts

100sDeeply Technical OpenStack and Cloud Foundry® Professionals

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has built its reputation on helping customers move to a hybrid infrastructure. HPE enables enterprises to define, power, and optimize their right mix for a hybrid infrastructure world. The HPE difference includes:

• Industry leading traditional, converged, hyperconverged and composable infrastructure with integrated management

• An open architecture: third-party hardware support, third-party software integration through APIs, open source: OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, and Docker

• Support for a wide variety of environments: VMware®, MS Hyper-V, AWS, Azure, OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, and Docker

• Broad portfolio: Integrated systems, cloud management software and managed services

• Expertise in planning and implementing complex cloud projects

Quickly deliver IT services, respond to fast-changing business conditions, and get applications to market faster with HPE. This complete portfolio of products, services, and solutions offer enterprise-class security, scalability, and performance. HPE solutions provide simplicity, security, governance, and speed for your private, hybrid, and managed clouds. It’s no wonder that Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the number one provider of cloud infrastructure. With over 3000+ HPE Helion customers, Hewlett Packard Enterprise dominates the cloud infrastructure industry with its extensive cloud experience, industry-leading infrastructure solutions, and growing list of skilled and reliable partners.

Learn more athpe.com/helion

© Copyright 2016 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for Hewlett Packard Enterprise products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Hewlett Packard Enterprise shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

Linux is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries. Microsoft is either a registered trademark or trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The OpenStack Word Mark is either a registered trademark/service mark or trademark/service mark of the OpenStack Foundation, in the United States and other countries and is used with the OpenStack Foundation’s permission. We are not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by the OpenStack Foundation, or the OpenStack community. Pivotal and Cloud Foundry are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Pivotal Software, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions.

4AA6-3270ENW, June 2016, Rev. 1

The Right Mix: Transforming to a Hybrid IT Infrastructure