How Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Helps to Deliver a Consistent User Experience

December 23, 2019

To become a data-driven organisation in the multicloud world, you may need to rethink your cloud strategy and approach to data services in order to remain competitive. Read on to learn more, or download our latest white paper to find out how you can gain full control over your data.

20 years ago, organisations were focused on consolidation and driven by the capability to virtualise — i.e. make one physical server look like hundreds of virtual servers.

Between 2010 and 2017, tools became more policy-driven, with organisations taking advantage of technologies like automation.

The turning point came shortly afterwards when cloud technology entered the popular market. This allowed organisations to host some of their workloads in the cloud, driving increased flexibility and agility, as well as enhancing their ability to respond to new opportunities fast. This is inextricably linked to delivering business value to the consumer (Time to Value).

Although on-premise solutions aren’t going away anytime soon, today’s Hybrid Multicloud Experience brings together the best of the public and private cloud for a consistent user experience.

Download the white paper to discover the benefits of hybrid cloud infrastructure.

The Hybrid Multicloud Experience: Here to stay?

Hybrid cloud infrastructure offers numerous benefits to organisations. Now, with different hyperscale vendors offering various cloud services, customers are empowered to pick and choose as they wish.

In addition to this flexibility, customers can move applications from one cloud to another easily to achieve consistency in the way their organisation operates, while also delivering the capability at the right cost.

Compute is becoming more and more commoditised. With Kubernetes and containers, applications can be lifted, moved, and run from anywhere. The ability to do this between all of your clouds, as well as on-premise, provides organisations with a significant advantage. For more information on this, download our white paper.

One of the key benefits of hybrid cloud is reduced costs, as the approach is the same — wherever you are. This concept aligns with NetApp’s Data Fabric message:

Helping your organisation unleash the power of data to meet business demands and gain a competitive edge.

With a mixture of vendors offering services that deliver reliability, availability, and service availability (known as RAS features), customers now have a real opportunity to select the features they want and transform their business.

The market has long been saying that hybrid multicloud will replace the one-cloud-fits-all approach, becoming the default cloud strategy as organisations avoid vendor-locking. All in all, it’s clear that the Hybrid Multicloud Experience is here to stay.

Consumption experience becomes the new standard for IT

When it comes to multicloud, it’s about creating a consistent consumption experience for the customer. This has become the new standard for IT and is driving organisations’ decisions. Expectations are also growing in terms of provisioning and selecting the right features. IT must respond with a consistent approach to deliver services in the private and public clouds.

This shift is enabling a whole new tier of users to consume IT in a way that they would have in the cloud. This relies on just four simple questions:

What should I call it?
How much do I want?
Where do I want it?
What class of storage do I need?

Instead of having to seek help from the IT department, whose job it would have been in the past, users are empowered to make their own decisions, when they need to, on their terms.

To ensure business compliance with local regulation legislation, the ability to template the provisioning process ensures that business rules are followed. This results in quick, easy provisioning and orchestration that is business defined and enabled.

Data Fabric: Start anywhere, run anywhere, manage everywhere

NetApp began introducing services to the multicloud, including Cloud Volumes in the hyperscale cloud providers: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Azure, providing consistent data provisioning, data management, insights, and metrics across public and private clouds.

In short, Data Fabric represents the ability to do anything, anywhere in a consistent, repeatable, predictable way — reducing costs and simplifying business processes.

The Data Fabric brings together the best of public and private cloud, allowing users to start anywhere, run anywhere, and manage everywhere for complete consistency.

To be successful and grab opportunity when it comes, the IT function becomes a key business enabler. Maintaining legacy provisioning, development, and operating modes which often restrict new production service delivery by many months of wait time are no longer viable if you want to compete.

Hybrid multicloud represents cultural change

We are seeing a cultural change in the way consumers are now serviced. The service that your organisation provides today must be low-friction, self-service orientated — and where possible — automated.

Investing in the Hybrid Multicloud Experience now will ensure your organisation is able to remain competitive and embrace the latest opportunities that come its way. But if you do invest, make sure you have a consistent, repeatable, and predictable compute and data management across your hybrid multicloud.

To summarise, NetApp offers solutions that enables organisations to transform how they consolidate, manage, and run workloads in the hybrid multicloud. This helps to ensure a consistent user experience, everywhere.

To learn more about the benefits of hybrid cloud infrastructure and the NetApp Data Fabric, download the white paper, ‘Inspiring Innovation with the Cloud’ today.