A blueprint for delivering the cloud experience for your on-premises apps and data.
Achieving a cloud-like experience is challenging. Line of business managers want IT to operate like a public cloud vendor, yet typical IT delivery models favor traditional project deployments. IT as a Service (ITaaS) on premises delivers many of the things that customers expect from the public cloud:
1. Pay-per-use
2. Elastic IT
3. Simplified IT operations.
They also get the added control that comes from directly operating their data center or edge solution.
For this reason, many organizations are leveraging forward-looking best practices from the experts at HPE to help them deploy their own consumption-based infrastructure. This blueprint describes the critical business and technology practices for achieving the cloud experience on-premises. It covers determining workload destinations, using IT partner resources, applying ITIL features, operations service practices, and funding for infrastructure as a service.
Each organization adopts their unique process to improve IT operations and services and reduce complexities and costs. However, HPE has found that organizations commonly face the following challenges:
Proactively managing IT capacity and costs
- Increased costs due to overprovisioning server and storage capacity. These include both initial capital costs and higher support costs.
- Constant changes in technology. Organizations seek to get the latest hardware without the initial capital outlay to replace their existing infrastructure.
- An increasing amount of data that needs to be stored and accessed. It is challenging to keep up with storage requirements to support growth.
Optimizing staffing and processes
- Continued pressure to reduce IT headcounts and budgets. Organizations find it too costly to dedicate resources to routine support and maintenance activities.
- Standardization of global operations and transparency across usage and consumption within the organization.
- Desire to simplify the IT provisioning process and improve time-to-value. The existing process is taking too long.
ITAAS ADOPTION STRATEGY
Converting a traditional IT organization to delivering ITaaS takes careful planning. Each step must address business goals: to run workloads where they are needed on best-fit platforms, protect the company’s IP, provide security and governance, control costs, and improve engagement with the business. Achieving this positions IT as a direct contributor to business outcomes.
The four essential steps to setting up IT as a service are:
2. Put in place scalability-on-demand processes as part of an everything-as-a-service hybrid cloud model. Adopting an on-premises consumption business model begins with discovery and mapping, followed by portfolio planning, on- and off-premises platform
3. Optimize skill sets within your organization. Organizations are also under pressure to meet growth objectives while reducing budgets and to make better use of existing resources. An honest assessment of resource utilization, including internal technical resources, is key to making the best use of the resources and expertise you currently have.
While the best practices outlined here can be applied in many ways, one way to gain the benefits and performance of a cloud experience is the use of resources-on-demand. HPE’s approach to resources on-demand is most frequently HPE GreenLake an as-a-service infrastructure solution including predictive maintenance and proactive support services for your key workloads.
HPE GreenLake - Consume and Operate IT as a Service
Consumption-based IT takes both experience and breadth of capabilities to get right. A consumption‑based IT vendor must offer robust choices for technology, expertise in solutions, strong financing, global enterprise-grade support, and advanced remote infrastructure management capabilities.
HPE GreenLake is a market-leading IT as a service offering that brings the cloud experience to your on-premises infrastructure and unifies your edges, clouds, and data centers. HPE GreenLake started 10 years ago delivering infrastructure in a pay-per-use mode on‑premises.
HPE GreenLake delivers as-a-service infrastructure including predictive maintenance and proactive support services for your key workloads. This ties technology spend directly to your business outcomes. With the addition of HPE GreenLake Management Services, HPE can operate your consumption-based infrastructure for you to free up in-house staff to focus on core business initiatives that are key to growth.
The benefit of HPE GreenLake is two-fold:
- IT organizations get infrastructure delivered to them as a service, paid for on a monthly based on actual usage. HPE is responsible for maintaining the infrastructure, ensuring capacity is available ahead of demand, and training the IT organization on how best to deploy IT to its downstream customers.
- IT can host workloads on demand for their customers using best practices operational techniques, orchestration, and service catalog technology. IT never has to be concerned with performance limits, since HPE owns the responsibility for the ongoing and buffered provisioning.
As we have discussed, adopting a consumption-based model shifts the way IT typically works to a more value-added resource for the business. Major steps on this journey include:
- Assess portability. Determine best platforms and capacity requirements.
- Support migration. Ensure applications can be hosted appropriately.
- Specify initial environment. Deploy a tightly monitored new infrastructure to set a baseline to grow from.
- Monitor usage and cost. Develop a capacity usage profile to simplify future planning and tightly align charges to resources used—typically in an as-a-service model.
- Adjust capacity. Set a buffer to absorb short term peaks in utilization and growth. Boost total resources as needed to maintain buffer capacity.
- Optimize operations services. Out-task routine services whenever possible to focus in-house resources on innovation.
HPE has consolidated their experiences working with enterprises globally into a comprehensive methodology. HPE GreenLake solutions, coupled with offerings from HPE Pointnext Services, such as Workload Portability and Migration, enable customers to transition to and then operate a successful ITaaS production environment.
Consumption-based IT takes both experience and capabilities to get it right. A consumption-based IT vendor must offer robust choices of technology, expertise in solutions, strong financing, global enterprise-grade support, and advanced infrastructure management capabilities.
Enabling successful deployment of IT as a service enhances traditional IT operations traditions of high‑quality delivery and service. It offers the agility and economics of a public-cloud experience, with the security, control, and performance of on-premises IT. Business users get a proactive, flexible capacity buffer that enables adding new resources quickly.
With guidance and support from HPE, you can successfully:
- Define the Right Mix to remain in control based on your current business needs—HPE Right Mix Advisor is designed to help you identify a trusted path forward by understanding platform destinations for each application based on each application’s need for agility, performance, security, and cost.
- Put in place scalability-on-demand processes as part of an everything-as-a-service hybrid cloud model—Scale up and scale down with capacity ready ahead of business demand, pay only for what you use to eliminate overprovisioning and free up capital.
- Optimize skill sets within your organization—Offload management of your hybrid cloud environment to HPE GreenLake Management Services to free up resources to focus on business growth and needs.
- Assess your operating model to simplify IT—With HPE GreenLake, you have control over your costs, with increased security, control and increased visibility with flexible, consolidated analytics.
HPE GreenLake brings it all together by creating a cloud experience for all your apps and data, and by providing a robust as-a-service portfolio that drives flexibility and time to market.
To learn more about HPE GreenLake, visit www.vlcm.com/hpe-greenlake or download the full Four Essential Steps to Adopting IT as a Service blueprint.
