Back to the roots. Why many companies are going back to traditional data centres alongside the cloud.

Flexibility and scalability are the two biggest and most obvious benefits of public cloud solutions. And let’s not forget the high and fast availability of data that can be accessed from anywhere in the cloud. It’s no wonder then that many companies ask themselves if it isn’t worth moving the entire IT into the cloud. But is that really the answer? When it comes to data control security and compliance, most businesses are still very unsure. What’s more, some workloads can’t be migrated into the cloud as they have to stay on-site for compliance reasons and sometimes it’s just far too complicated to move older applications.

Public cloud services don’t necessarily mean the end of on-premise IT. For the foreseeable future, there will continue to be legacy applications that run on in-house servers, and there will always be data that companies would prefer to keep within their own four walls. This means that businesses will be forced to tread a tightrope between old and new technologies. One of the downsides to this is such a hybrid IT infrastructure is very complex, presenting multiple challenges to businesses when it comes to deploying applications necessary for their transformation. To ensure that companies can get the most out of their hybrid IT environment in this networked and data-driven world, intelligent solutions and experienced partners with the right expertise are in demand.

Cloud vs on-premise. Navigating both worlds.

When looking at traditional IT, many companies often face similar problems—planning their capacity needs (e.g. servers or storage), and correctly and assessing them accurately. The net result is unnecessary fixed costs thanks to over-provisioning or bottlenecks and protracted procurement processes due to insufficient capacities. The desire for needs-based invoicing is, therefore, understandable. After all, when it comes to electricity, I only pay for what I actually use. This is exactly where agile public cloud solutions pay off as with use-based invoicing, businesses only pay for what they actually use and can streamline their IT infrastructures.

On the other hand, for many companies, outsourcing important core functions from their own data centre to the cloud is associated with risks, so security and data protection are a top priority. SMEs in particular worry that the public cloud leaves them vulnerable and could see them losing control of their sensitive data.

It’s no wonder then that businesses are looking for a way to enjoy the benefits of a modern public cloud in their own data centres. In other words, a cloud that comes to the applications and data wherever they are. Until now, there hasn’t been a simple solution to seamlessly combining the benefits of a local infrastructure with those of a modern cloud solution. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is now closing this gap with HPE GreenLake—a customer-friendly pay-per-use model that combines the scalability of the cloud with lower latency and the high security levels of an on-premise environment. Or in other words, cloud-based cost efficiency and scalability meet the stability and service availability of traditional IT. This creates a model with which businesses can profit from the best of the cloud—in their local data centre, at the edge and in multi-clouds. Another benefit is that businesses can run and manage these mixed environments from a central location.

Count on experienced partners.

So an IT infrastructure that combines the agility and efficiency of the public cloud with the security and performance of local IT really does exist. Careful, though. Combining cloud services and reconciling them with workloads on your own hardware results in highly complex structures that aren’t easy to manage.

HPE GreenLake is based on decades of experience in the deployment of IT as a Service for local environments and offers a wide-ranging portfolio of workloads, e.g. Machine learning processes (ML Op), containers, data storage, data protection and more. Companies can  run, manage and optimise their hybrid IT environments and integrate public cloud providers such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud from the HPE GreenLake Central dashboard, which shows at a glance which IT infrastructures are being used in the public cloud, private cloud, data centre and edge IT environments. It’s also possible to view and manage actual use in the portal, which, along with the reporting tool, is a permanent service component of the HPE GreenLake model.

The result is a cloud that customers can use from anywhere and with only one standardised operating model. This means that applications and data that have to remain on-premise benefit as from the advantages of the cloud with HPE GreenLake and protracted procurement cycles and risks of traditional over-provisioning of resources are consigned to history.