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The Hybrid Cloud Has a New Onramp
The pressure on companies and their IT infrastructures to be faster, more agile, and cost-effective is intense and relentless. No wonder the hybrid cloud is tantalizing to so many. Hybrid cloud promises to satisfy just about everything today’s companies need regarding their data. With hybrid cloud, organizations can meet their compute, creation, storage, manipulation, and management demands in multiple locations: on premises, at off-site facilities, and using hyperscalers. They can choose as needed based on workload requirements and budget considerations.
The proposition is tough to resist. What company wouldn’t want to shed the expense and overhead of building a new data center when the cloud can do it all? Then again, it’s not as easy as it appears. In its reporting on the cloud migration opportunity, McKinsey and Company found, “Cost overruns at a global level add up to well more than $100 billion in wasted spend over the course of migration in three years. Left unchecked, those costs of moving workloads to the cloud could wipe out more than $500 billion in shareholder value over the same period.”
It seems there are significant disconnects between the hybrid cloud vision and reality.
The Hybrid Cloud Challenge
It turns out that quite a few factors stand in the way of achieving hybrid cloud nirvana. Cloud hyperscalers make it incredibly easy to add compute and storage. As a result, developers are free to spin up new containers as needed, but rarely does anyone turn off the lights when they’re done. Companies pay for more and more cloud resources, but with no visibility or management across cloud platforms, companies don’t know what they’re paying for, which data has been stored in the cloud, or where that data resides.
Given the lack of management tools, even companies that have the best intentions of controlling their cloud usage are stymied by a lack of knowledgeable staff. The Cloud Security Alliance, in its 2021 study titled “State of Cloud Security Concerns, Challenges, and Incidents,” revealed that “79 percent of respondents reported staff-related issues, highlighting that organizations are struggling with handling cloud deployments and a largely remote workforce.”
When something of value has been developed to suit a particular cloud, it may have to be refactored entirely, to put it in production on premises and meet security and compliance standards. Substantial latency may create performance issues if the development remains in the cloud, forcing companies to purchase costly direct fiber connections.
Off-site facilities provide part of the answer by helping to address performance and cost issues, but management still remains elusive. And particularly worrying is the potential exposure to hazards such as ransomware attacks inherent when a company leaves the security and control of its own data center.
For the hybrid cloud to work as intended, businesses must solve issues across many vectors: cost, performance, security, management. Hitachi Vantara’s new cloud connection strategy provides the path forward missing from hybrid cloud strategy.
Hitachi’s Cloud Connection Strategy: The Onramp to Hybrid Cloud
When it comes to off-site facilities, the trick to remember is that the deployment is only as good as the components a company chooses to install. That’s why so many companies choose Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP), the gold standard of high-performance enterprise storage, when they shift compute and storage to leading off-site providers like Equinix, a long-time partner of Hitachi. Hitachi has been installing equipment and supporting customer needs at Equinix sites around the world for years.
With the new Hitachi Cloud Connect for Equinix, companies can deploy in the cloud the same enterprise-class security, reliability, scalability, and resilience that VSP delivers in their own data center. They get management, monitoring, and predictive analytic capabilities to properly control their entire storage environment, regardless of location. Even deployments that span multiple Equinix locations worldwide and a company’s data centers are empowered to, from a single location, manage, monitor, and review information about all of their environments for better decision-making.
For current VSP customers, this means they now have the same familiar VSP storage in the cloud. Getting it up and running at Equinix is effectively the same as it is in their own data center. VSP storage at Equinix can connect to and replicate any VSP systems currently in an on-premises data center and vice versa. The storage at Equinix, using the world-class peering connections with all major players, can further directly connect to any public clouds a company uses, copying and moving data between storage arrays as needed, regardless of location.
VSP with Cloud Connect for Equinix is a seamless pipeline between the cloud, Equinix, and your data center, with all the appropriate controls, separations, and connections needed to make the hybrid cloud perform within the company’s expectations. Companies can realize improved performance from cloud workloads using Equinix direct connections to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Cloud Connect for Equinix also enables effortless data migration between cloud solutions.
Driving Enterprise Capability to the Cloud
These days, every board’s first question about the cloud has to do with security. With Hitachi Cloud Connect for Equinix, IT leaders have the peace of mind only possible from choosing the gold standard for enterprise storage. Hitachi Ops Center portfolio in conjunction with the VSP can provide ransomware mitigation that helps customers guard their most vital data assets. Hitachi Ops Center Protector orchestrates the copy creation and agile data movement between on-premises, near cloud, and public cloud environments to provide multi-use copies of the data. By creating an immutable storage environment, critical data snapshots are “locked down,” either in the near cloud or public cloud, to prevent deletion or damage from internal or external malicious threats.
Cloud Connect for Equinix extends trusted VSP capabilities beyond on-premises systems to include near cloud. Powerful, central operations management provides advanced AIOps for monitoring and automation across on-premises and near-cloud VSP E series environments. Hitachi Ops Center offers extensive monitoring and analytics for on-premises and near-cloud VSP assets. Ops Center helps address mean time to repair (MTTR), increase operational efficiencies through automation, and drive greater resiliency through predictive and root cause analysis and automated remediation of network issues.
In short, Hitachi Cloud Connect for Equinix brings Hitachi VSP customers closer to the vision of fully realized hybrid-cloud IT operations by analyzing, managing, moving, and protecting vital data while driving greater resiliency, agility, and efficiencies back into IT operations. To find out more about how Hitachi Cloud Connect for Equinix can get you onto the hybrid cloud onramp, click here.
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Be sure to check out Insights for perspectives on the data-driven world.
Diane Clay is the Senior Product Marketing and Management Expert, Hybrid Cloud Offerings, Marketing Insights and Operations at Hitachi Vantara.
