Building A Future-proof Hybrid Cloud

Almost all businesses are rapidly modernising all areas of their IT architecture, including infrastructure, applications, processes, resource rationalisation, data centres, and the critical role that IT plays in organisational success.

However, no company wants to bear the economic and operational costs of constant modification in order to obtain a genuinely contemporary IT platform and architecture. Senior IT and business leaders are firmly dedicated to employing IT in novel, inventive, and game-changing ways, which cannot be accomplished successfully or efficiently without a strategy to future-proof the enterprise's IT infrastructure. Without a future-proofing plan, initiatives like digital transformation, machine learning, virtualization, cloud computing, big data analytics, edge computing, and linked devices are merely aspirations and dreams.

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Not long ago, IT professionals and infrastructure managers based their operational strategy, budgeting, and resource deployment on the assumption that physical infrastructure — servers, storage, and networks — needed to be renewed on a regular basis, often on a 3-to-5-year cycle. This was done for a variety of reasons, including aligning with businesses' capital cost depreciation requirements, but also to capitalise on the high pace of progress in hardware price/performance.

Storage, in particular, was viewed as a component that needed to be renewed more regularly as data quantities grew and the demand for higher-performance, lower-latency storage became more apparent. "Storage should be a just-in-time affair, driven by storage consumption rates and DASD performance," Computer Economics, a research group that investigates the economics of IT hardware and software, noted. "If a quick change is required, IT firms cannot afford to be caught off guard."

However, in today's fast-paced business cycles, where technology is frequently a vital component in organisational performance, IT professionals and infrastructure managers have attempted to shift away from regular, and often dramatic, forklift upgrades of servers, storage, and networking gear. This has become more critical as they have embraced the hybrid cloud and contemporary application strategies, which are inextricably linked to their digital transformation and IT modernization activities. These will be as follows:

• Managing rising infrastructure diversity (physical and virtual, on-premises and cloud, 3-tiered and HCI) in a way that lowers complexity, improves responsiveness, and increases scalability.
• Driving for the ability to relocate workloads to the appropriate environment as needed, rather than as an expensive, time-consuming, and resource-draining forklift overhaul.
• Moving away from an IT staff paradigm that relies heavily on component specialists (e.g., experts in servers, storage, or networking) and toward a more integrated infrastructure strategy that better employs IT talent.
• Developing, deploying, and maintaining mission-critical applications when and where it makes sense.
• Getting the most bang for your buck when it comes to Capex and Opex investment.
• Dismantling IT and operational silos
• Providing strong security and data protection.
• Adherence to business compliance and governance standards.

The goal to assure a more future-proof infrastructure approach to enable hybrid cloud and application modernisation has led to widespread acceptance of HCI among business IT purchasers.

Download to read the full whitepaper by Fujitsu to learn how to get future-ready infrastructure for hybrid cloud and modern applications.