| |SEPTEMBER 20198IT PAYS TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT LAUNCHING PAD FOR SUCCESS IN ANY HYBRID CLOUD JOURNEYBy B.S. Nagarajan, Senior Director and Chief Technologist, VMware IndiaVMware, one of the leaders in cloud infrastructure and digital workspace technology, accelerates digital transformation by enabling unprecedented freedom and flexibility in how our customers build and evolve IT environments.M ost enterprises we interact with have either explored the Hybrid Cloud paradigm or are quite convinced about its effectiveness, economics and agility or are on the verge of moving to it. Many understand the opportunities offered by Hybrid Cloud technologies. They have witnessed several success stories or have experimented with it in isolated sections of their IT environments. They are largely convinced and want to make the leap of faith, but, do not necessarily know how to minimize risks and maximize success.They would like to arrive at a low-risk way of getting started before scaling it by either experimenting with a starter configuration or a hands-on lab to become fully conversant with technological intricacies first. A `Start small and expand' or a `Crawl-Walk-Run' approach is indeed a responsible and pragmatic strategy to deal with their live mission-critical applications. However, in reality, resolving to embrace Cloud as an organization is more complex and time-consuming.An effective Cloud strategy encourages enterprises to establish an infrastructural foundation with SW-defined compute, storage and networking, start with private Cloud before extending it to public Cloud, set up an effective Disaster Recovery(DR)Service and finally, move apps to Cloud to be able to scale on demand. But, the key may lie in picking one of the various possible use cases that is opportune for their specific business.The Launching PadThere are generally two key growth vectors that inevitably nudge enterprises toward Cloud. They are the need to activate robust DR and to extend capacity in tune with unpredictable demand spikes. Data Center (DC) capacity can, in turn come in various forms and hence, the solutions vary.Disaster RecoveryThe traditional solution of investing in a duplicate set of infrastructure that mirrors production does not make practical sense anymore both in terms of capital expenditure and operational overhead. Many enterprise customers also run their DR Service on their first Cloud infrastructure as a `low risk' strategy. However, a recent decision by one of our customers was quite innovative. Their existing on-premises infrastructure was 5 years old and their hardware(HW) needed to be refreshed. Hence, they used a leading DC technology along with its collaborative service with AWS (Amazon Web Services) to move all their production applications to Cloud while establishing DR on their legacy, on-premises infrastructure. They could thus use the latest infrastructure for their critical production systems which can be dialed up/down on demand while their occasionally-used DR needed zero additional HW investment. Capacity GrowthThe need for new capacity takes on many forms as there could be several motivations for it. It could come Expert Opinion
< Page 7 | Page 9 >