Kathy Gibson reports – Enterprises the world over recognise the need for a hybrid cloud IT model – but too often these environments end up as a hodge-podge of solutions that don’t necessarily address the business’s core issues.
Sandile Dube, country manager of HPE South Africa, tells delegates to the HPE GreenLake Day in Johannesburg today that the move to the cloud hasn’t panned out the way many in the industry expected.
“In the past we had all our data in data centres,” he says. “With the emergence of cloud we thought all data would move to the cloud – but it turns out that only 30% of that data has done so. But, given the ability we all have now to produce data at the edge, we now have an explosion of data. Today, we have data everywhere; and we have infrastructure everywhere.”
Enterprises have to figure out what to do with the distributed data across all their estates. “It introduces significant complexity, cost and loss of control – and leaves customers with a great deal of uncertainty.”
This leads to the question about whether the hybrid journey that many enterprises are on is ideal, Dube says. And more often than not the answer is absolutely not. “Indeed, some experts are calling it hybrid by mistake.”
The ideal solution, he adds, is a hybrid by design model.
“And customers can do this by leveraging HPE GreenLake in a data-first approach, given that data is the new currency of business.”
Dube explains that HPE GreenLake is a single unified platform that can run, manage and secure the distributed enterprise. “Customers can connect, process, protect and orchestrate their data in one place. Their data can be in the private cloud, public cloud or at the edge.
“This is what we call hybrid cloud by design.”