Let me know if this sounds familiar. Your organization starts with a data center, a physical building. Then you added some satellite installations, either in the form of server racks, co-loans, or additional physical data centers. Then the management reorganized, and suddenly your IT team goes from producing applications in a few months or years to expecting to produce them in a few weeks.
So you’ve switched to a cloud service. Now that you have hundreds of accounts and logins, most of your data is in SaaS applications run by competing companies, and even single sign-on seems like an aspiration. Billing, provisioning, backup, and security are scattered among dozens of unrelated stakeholders.
Also: Edge-to-cloud powered digital transformation comes to life in this scenario of a big box retailer
When something goes wrong (and it often does), it takes a long time to find the fault of the system. Half the time, it’s not just a system. Instead, it’s the fact that your different infrastructure components don’t work well together. Now you not only have cloud services and contentious providers, but also mobile apps and confidential data not only in a few secure data centers, but also on the phones and laptops of most of your managers.
Worse, have you noticed that the world is changing at breakneck speed? Follow Quarterly teleworking report for Q1 2022 by career platform Ladders, almost a quarter of all professional jobs are now working remotely permanently. Employee data, devices, and the problems that come with them are scattered everywhere.
Marketing, operations, and HR are all begging for new, customized apps to help them keep up. But it’s hard enough to keep existing systems from melting. How can you and your IT team members find the time to deploy new solutions?
Digital transformation and cloud operation
All very overwhelming. Fortunately, your organization is not the only one facing these challenges. The cloud revolution and digital transformation have led to new ways of doing IT that help manage IT infrastructure as a whole, while making infrastructure new and affordable. The new solution to the need to be practical, accessible, and even smooth. different business needs.
Much of this has to do with the explosion of cloud computing. But we’re not just talking about software-as-a-service applications or even on-demand infrastructure that resides in some remote data center run by one of the big tech companies. Sure, that’s how it started. But over time, something very important happened.
Companies are beginning to see the benefits of cloud computing and want to apply them to all levels of infrastructure – from inside data centers, to warehouses and shipping centers, to locations shared computing resources, to remote sensors. How great it would be if you could scale and deliver on-demand self-service right from the web browser and scale and deliver everything?
And this is where the time savings start to really add up. By using a glass one-panel interface with orchestration and automation tools, you can set up systems that can build services and infrastructure within on-premises data centers and at the edge, as well as in the cloud.
For those companies that don’t want to build all these systems themselves, there are platforms like HPE GreenLake – also sponsor of this ZDNET editorial series – designed to help remove complexity. We’ll come back to GreenLake a bit later, but first let’s talk about where edge computing fits into this new paradigm.
Rise of edge computing
If the data center is the building with all your servers and the cloud is the building someone else owns with all the servers you rent, the advantage is everything else – where it all happens . Those are the sensors in the smart city. It’s medical equipment in a hospital. These are the systems for manufacturing and transporting materials in factories and warehouses. It’s the individual retail store in your chain of thousands.
Also: What is edge computing? Here’s Why Advantage Matters And Where It Heads
The problem with edge computing is that it needs to run at the speed of life. A self-driving car can’t take the time to send a query and wait for a response when a truck pulls in front of it. It must have all the necessary intelligence in the vehicle to decide what action to take. While this is an extreme example, the same is true for factory processes and even retail sales. Intelligence, data analytics, and decision-making must be available without propagation delay and therefore must exist at the edge.
Of course, all of this adds to administrative costs. Now you have a management console from a large number of vendors to compete with, plus a dashboard for your on-premises service and then all the content in the cloud.
This is where integration is needed, when all your IT resources – from the edge to the cloud – need to be managed from a single, consistent system, manageable display.
It’s not just about ease of use. It’s about preventing mistakes and being able to track and mitigate threats. If you have to open and launch a new management console for every application and subsystem, you might miss a lot. Some of those things could be system errors that you don’t see any sign of. And some of those things could be signs of a hacker or unwanted malware intrusion.
The key to managing all of this is a comprehensive edge-to-cloud platform that provides all the services needed to maintain, grow, and protect your infrastructure over the long term. .
Understand the benefits of the edge-to-cloud platform
So what characteristics make up a comprehensive edge-to-cloud platform? If you’re starting out looking for solutions from vendors, you’ll want to explore four key features: self-service, rapid scaling, pay-as-you-go, and managed infrastructure.
All of these are interconnected, and you almost need them all for the platform to deliver full value. Self-service is the dashboard we’re talking about. It’s a cross-vendor installation and monitoring interface, allowing you to view the performance and issues of your currently installed edge-to-cloud infrastructure and order capabilities. new features and services – and including public cloud apps like all your private activities.
Rapid scaling goes hand in hand with that, because you want to be able to claim a new virtual machine, a new container, or even a brand new bare metal environment, and that happens quickly, if I don’t mean immediately. The key to this, from an operational standpoint, is to have extra capacity available to carry when you need it.
I know. I know. Over-construction was a big part of the mistake in previous versions of the IT strategy. But that’s where pay-as-you-go comes into play. If you are working with a partner provider, it will cost them to have more capacity available and all you do is pay for the actual capacity you use. That puts this in the OPEX category, which is also a boon over many CAPEX payloads that depreciate over your returns.
And finally, the last major feature is managed infrastructure. This is where your partner provider does most of the infrastructure management, and you focus on your operational needs. For example, at a much smaller scale than you might need, I use a managed infrastructure provider to manage my company’s websites. Really, there’s nothing better than being able to open a support ticket and know that someone there will fix any issues I’m having with the server while I get back to writing my next post.
On the larger scale that you might have, you’re looking at all levels of provisioning, management, and support, including security and attack prevention. Headache relief and “What the hell do I do now?” feeling can be So very worth it.
Also: Cybersecurity: Here are the new things to worry about in 2023
We’ve already explored how digital transformation requires a comprehensive edge-to-cloud strategy, so now let’s look at some of the operational benefits.
The most important thing is more agility. As we have seen over the past three years, the world can change at breakneck speed. Your services and operations need to be able to respond to (or even predict) those changes at the same rate. There may be systems that can speed up or down quickly that can give you the responsiveness you need in today’s world.
Once you have agility, the door will open. You can modernize your apps to meet the needs of your home workers and highly mobile customers. You can optimize a hybrid cloud solution to perfectly fit your business needs without incurring all the costs of the chaos of trying to make multiple vendor configurations work together. You can put your industry’s needs and customer desires first, scale to meet the needs of market forces, and capitalize on opportunities as they arise.
HPE GreenLake and other platforms
This is where HPE GreenLake and their competitors come in. Their infrastructure management is ongoing, so you can provide co-lo and cloud services off-site, but they’ll also deliver the equipment to your facility within 14 minutes. days and without upfront costs. It’s all cost-controlled with careful calculations and usage billing to track your usage — whether it’s up or down.
HPE manages all of this through the HPE GreenLake Lighthouse, which, according to HPE, “eliminates the entire process of having to order and wait for new configurations by allowing customers to add new cloud services with just a few clicks.” mouse in HPE GreenLake Central and run them simultaneously in just a few minutes.”
HPE GreenLake Central is their unified dashboard. It’s the interface where you control operations, view data-driven insights, and manage your entire network. This is also the interface where you request new functions and receive up-to-date payment information.
As managed services have become more capable and flexible, I have become a huge advocate for them. I used to be someone who insisted on being able to get my hands on all of my hardware, but that purely hands-on approach can often be very time consuming, while my time can be spent My business’s unique services are better. I guess the same applies to most of you reading this.
But we live in an age where rapid change means “next week” not “next quarter”. We need to utilize all the resources and capabilities of the systems that allow us to better manage and respond better to predictable and unpredictable events at the network level, at the network level, and at the network level. Local, and at the global level. Services like HPE GreenLake can help remove bottlenecks in the process, improve systems, keep users safe, and maybe even allow you to take the weekend off from time to time.
