Business white paper

The Right Mix: Transforming to a

Hybrid IT Infrastructure
How to define, power, and optimize your right mix of IT

The Right Mix: Transforming to a Hybrid IT Infrastructure

Table of contents

3 Introduction
3
4
5

Competitive challenges businesses face today

External forces
Internal forces

Business consequences of doing nothing

7
8
9
10

The solution to todays challenges: an open, hybrid infrastructure strategy

Define your right mix
Power your right mix
Optimize your right mix

11

Hybrid Infrastructure Use Cases

13 Conclusions

The Right Mix: Transforming to a Hybrid IT Infrastructure

Page 3

Introduction
Enterprises move at a faster pace today than ever before. The challenges mid to large global
enterprises and service providers face are compounded by the ease of entry into markets
by new players that can move at a faster pace than entrenched companies. To combat this
challenge, businesses need to respond faster to changing market conditions. Yet many times,
ittakes too long to get access to needed IT services, which delays the development and release
of critical, innovative applications. IT departments are typically not providing technology
leadership to support business innovation. Shadow IT continues to be an issue, and IT costs are
out of alignment with the business.
A hybrid infrastructure strategy needs to
define your right mix of cutting edge
infrastructure, power your rightmix with
the best internal and external resources
and optimize your right mix with leading
management tools to ensure success
every step of the way.

To accelerate their businesses, enterprises are seeking to implement the right mix of cloud and
traditional IT infrastructure, thereby speeding innovation and growth. A solution that focuses on
a hybrid infrastructure design is the top choice of many mid to large enterprises.
The main advantage of implementing a hybrid infrastructure solution is the ability to provision
infrastructure and applications in minutes, which increases agility and scalability. Benefits
include increased IT productivity, reduced costs, and a further shift of funding from a capital
expense to an operating expense model.
Although the advantages and benefits of cloud are well-known, the challenge of weaving it into
an existing IT environment is not always easy. Minefields can be waiting at every turn, causing
the move to cloud computing to be complex and risky. However, the consequences of not
acting far outweigh the risks and costs of doing nothing.
The purpose of this paper is to explain the basics of a hybrid infrastructure strategy using
cloud resources, describe how the cloud can help businesses respond faster to changing
market conditions and demonstrate how a business can use the cloud to maintain technology
leadership. Lastly, typical use cases will be detailed to provide the reader with concrete
examples of how companies today are using hybrid infrastructure to accelerate their businesses.

Competitive challenges businesses face today

The business environment today is more competitive than it has ever been. Product lifecycles
are shorter. Time to market is compressing. Product designs are more complex. Dozens of new
marketing channels have arisen and even new sales channels are needed to be competitive.
A whole new set of external and internal forces are driving enterprises to respond, adapt,
and changeor become yet another industry name that went out of business because they
couldnt or wouldnt embrace change.

The Right Mix: Transforming to a Hybrid IT Infrastructure

Page 4

External Forces Are Disrupting Businesses and Government

The Idea Economy

New, Disruptive Business Models

Internet of Things, Explosion of Devices

Turning ideas into new products or services

has never been easier

No business, industry, or government is safe

Cloud is redefining how applications and devices

are written and delivered

Businesses are in a fast-moving, relentless

state of disruption and those who can
envision a better, simpler, or smarter way
to do things will succeed.

External forces
The exponential growth of connected devices is having a dramatic effect on how technology is
bought, secured, and managed. This in turn is redefining how applications are written and how
fast they are delivered. Traditional IT infrastructures are no longer able to support this swift and
innovative model of product development.
The Internet of Things has created an explosion of devices. New business models have
arisen and big data is paramount to knowing and responding to customers wants and needs.
Collecting, organizing, and making use of this data is critical to the success of any enterprise
and the products/services they produce.
Examples of new and disruptive business models are all around us. Ubers ride-sharing instantly
connects drivers with riders and offers both parties what traditional cab services would not
offer, a safe ride and a hassle-free fare. Nest reinvented the thermostat and gave customers not
only the ability to monitor and control one of the biggest energy costs in a home, but they also
made the scheduling process so intelligent that the thermostat creates its own schedule based
on heuristics.
Both of these examples focus on companies that did not look to see what the leading competitor
was doing first and then emulate it. These are companies that completely embraced new business
models to deliver services and products that never existed before. Their competitors who owned
their respective markets are still scrambling to recover their former stature. Taxi services are
struggling to offer an experience and price that comes even close to Uber. Honeywell was the
defacto, premier home thermostat control in the industry, but they have now lost significant
market share to a company that was virtually unknown a few short years ago.
These examples also highlight the Idea Economywhere businesses are in a fast-moving,
relentless state of disruption and those who can envision a better, simpler, or smarter way to
do things will succeed. Companies must have a vision combined with technical agility as well
as embrace the latest IT ideas and tools in order to quickly turn ideas into a realityor risk
becoming irrelevant. No industry is immune to disruption.

The Right Mix: Transforming to a Hybrid IT Infrastructure

Page 5

Internal Forces Are Pushing You to Evolve IT

Technology is
business strategy

DevOps driving
culture shifts

Growing regulatory environment, higher

business complexity, and increased
focus on accountability are requiring
enterprises to pursue a broad range
of governance, risk, and compliance
initiatives across the organization.

Developers are the

new Kingmakers

Shadow IT is
everywhere

Internal forces
Enterprises are particularly affected by internal forces including complex and siloed traditional
systems, workforces using shadow IT resources to meet departmental and market demands, and
developers demanding the right tools to solve problems. The interoperability between architects,
developers, and operations is typically poor, creating a slow (or complete lack of) response to
the needs of internal and external customers. Data management, security, governance, and
compliance are all under more scrutiny due to increases in hacking and data misuse. These factors
place added pressure on companies that strive to deliver products and solutions to market quickly.
Even worse, almost 90 percent of IT budgets are for existing IT operations. Its hard to be on
the leading edge of product and service offerings when only 10 percent of an IT budget is left
for innovating and implementing a competitive business strategy.

The Right Mix: Transforming to a Hybrid IT Infrastructure

Page 6

Business Consequences of Doing Nothing

Fortune 100 Companies in the Year 2005Where do they rank today:

68%

Fortune 100

32%

Not in Fortune 100

One-third of the Fortune 100 companies from 10 years ago have fallen off todays list

Business consequences of doing nothing

The consequences of not adapting and taking advantage of the new IT tools available today
are huge. Enterprises that choose to do nothing will lose market share to those organizations
that embrace the new tools available to them. Customers and consumers are expecting a more
instantaneous response to their needs. A faster response requires a faster evolution of the
product and services creation cycle.
Data vulnerability and loss of control is also a risk for businesses who do not respond to todays
new technologies. Employees are already using public cloud computing resources without the
knowledge of the companies they work for. Bypassing internal IT processes and cost controls
is putting enterprise capital at risk as files are stored in places that are too easy to access by
unauthorized people and not properly backed-up or secured.
Being a late adopter or follower of
technological changes has significant
negative consequences to companies that
previously lead their respective industries.

The corporate highway is littered with the names of companies who chose to ignore and not act
on disruptive technological changes or the simple, ever-pressing move to the commoditization
of technology. Companies are tempted to stick their head in the sand, ignoring internal and
external forces that will lead to their inevitable market irrelevance. Kodak ignored digital
photography. The Swiss ignored the quartz watch. DEC ignored Linux and commodity
processors in their servers.
To be a leader in any industry today, an enterprise has to lead not only with their adoption of
new ideas and innovation, but must also be early adopters of the technological tools that help
them bring their products and services to market faster and at less cost.

The Right Mix: Transforming to a Hybrid IT Infrastructure

Page 7

The Solution to Todays Challenges: an open, hybrid infrastructure strategy

Define Your Right Mix

Power Your Right Mix

Optimize Your Right Mix

Expertise to help you build

your architecture spanning
traditional IT, private and
public clouds

End-to-end open enterprise

technology, software and
services to build or consume
your cloud services

Effective administration of
a multi-cloud environment,
security, compliance,
and performance

Companies need to focus on

implementing an open, hybrid
infrastructure strategy that combines
defining their right mix, powering their
right mix and optimizing their right mix
to get maximum value and benefit from
a combination of assetseach one best
suited to the specific problem.

The solution to todays challenges: an open,

hybrid infrastructure strategy
The advantages and benefits gained from private and public cloud computing are compelling;
the potential consequences of not doing so are devastating. Its imperative that enterprises
develop a sound strategy and plan that incorporates both private and public cloud computing
resources in the right places while integrating with traditional processes and systems.

The Right Mix: Transforming to a Hybrid IT Infrastructure

Page 8

There is a Right Mix for You

Goal is to Optimize for the Right Mix of Traditional IT, Private and Public Cloud
What Will the Right Mix of Hybrid IT Do for Your Enterprise?

Enterprises are Moving to Public, Private, and Hybrid Clouds

Reduce cost, increase agility

26% Non-cloud

Simplify management complexity

Reduce shadow IT

47% Private

Deploy workload to the most appropriate environment

Cloud: On-premises and hosted

9% Hybrid

Optimize placement for security, performance, cost, etc.

19% Public

Cloud (IaaS and SaaS)

Statistics provided by 451 Research.

Define your right mix

The first step in deploying an optimal hybrid infrastructure strategy is to define your right
mix of information technologyincluding private cloud, public cloud and traditional IT.
Private cloud is ideal for workloads that have specific security or compliance requirements
or that require specific hardware to meet performance expectations. Public cloud is ideal
for temporary workloads or workloads that have large variances in demand. Traditional IT is
best for supporting legacy applications, applications that are not economically or technically
feasible to move into a cloud platform, and for applications that have a very steady, unchanging
demandprofile.

Hybrid infrastructure combines

traditional deployments with public and
private cloud resources, blending hybrid
cloud with traditional IT.

To determine your right mix, each application needs to be deployed on the best platform
weighed against its cost, performance, security, regulatory compliance, and other criteria.
Determining where to begin defining the right mix of infrastructure depends on where a
company is starting from. Virtually all enterprise companies are starting with a legacy of
traditional hardware, and they typically have some cloud-based solutions that have sprung
upover the years.
To define the right mix, a company needs to look at each application in its production inventory
and analyze where that application would best be deployed based on the following:
Cost to migrate
Cost to operate
Regulatory requirements
Geo-political requirements
Performance requirements
Security, confidentiality
Availability and reliability
Corporate IT standards
Contractual terms and conditions
Knowing the answer to these requirements for an application will determine the ideal
deployment: which platform, where to deploy, and which partners to work with.

The Right Mix: Transforming to a Hybrid IT Infrastructure

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Power Your Right Mix

Traditional IT

Virtualization 
Automation

Private
Clouds

Build On-Premises

Managed
Clouds

Global Public
Clouds

Hybrid 
Infrastructure

Consume Off-Premises

Built on Open Standards and Open Source

Power your right mix

After defining your right mix, the second part of implementing a hybrid infrastructure strategy
is powering the right mix by implementing the strategy with the right hardware, services, and
partnerships. Any enterprise, no matter how large, will not have all of the skills, knowledge, and
resources to implement and manage this complex, hybrid infrastructure strategy.

Standards such as supported open cloud

operating systems and management
tools, APIs and other features ensure
enterprises are not locked into
proprietary solutions.

A private cloud running the appropriate applications is a great place to start powering your
right mix. By doing this, an enterprise can set the standards, that will be required for future
cloud services, such as using OpenStack for the cloud operating system. This also helps
further define your right mix. When creating a hybrid infrastructure environment, make sure
your private cloud can directly integrate with your traditional environment, including the IT
management tools. This is a critical step in creating a sustainable hybrid IT environment, not
just a hybrid cloud solution.
The next step in powering your right mix is to identify and start utilizing public cloud services
that meet application requirements appropriate for public cloud. Microsoft Azure and Amazon
AWS are good choices to start with and are partners of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. These
services can then be selected not just on application fit, but also for a match to the standards
and criteria set by the enterprises private cloud implementation.
Its critical to select and deploy the best solutions and right partners that have solutions-focused,
end-to-end enterprise IT expertise that match the enterprises defined hybrid infrastructure and
hybrid cloud standards. Infrastructure, services, and partners need to be backed by global services,
support, and a partner ecosystem. Partners that can bring cloud-skilled professional services
with deep expertise in open source technologies are vital. Partners should also be certified in
security, data management, and performance in order to effectively implement these types of
comprehensivesolutions.
The right partners will help offer a more unified view of the overall hybrid infrastructure
environment both for IT management and end-users of the hybrid IT environment.
It takes significant expertise to make a hybrid infrastructure work together properly.
Finding a partner with the expertise to help a customer plan and implement their cloud
environment is paramount. An experienced partner must also be able to help with the business
process change, which is often a far bigger issue than the technologyand one that needs to
be addressed early on.

The Right Mix: Transforming to a Hybrid IT Infrastructure

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Optimize: Ensure 100% Visibility and Control across Your Right Mix of Hybrid Infrastructure
Effective Management of Hybrid Cloud
Performance management to meet SLAs
Data locality management for performance and protection
Security/compliance to meet regulatory requirements
Services cost visibility for efficient usage and placement
Capacity management to maximize utilization
Open architecture provides greater agility and flexibility
Infrastructure management for issue prevention and rapid resolution

Corporate compliance demands a way of

enforcing corporate policies in regards
to data security, confidentiality, and
contractual standards.

Optimize your right mix

The third and final part of the right mix is optimizing your right mix. Optimizing your right mix is
the ability to deliver effective administration of multi-cloud environments, workload migration,
applications, data, users, compliance, and security.
Users should be able to seamlessly access the full complement of hybrid infrastructure
resources specific to their job requirements. The service catalog should present to each
audience (QA, developers, testers) only the cloud and traditional IT resources that is right and
approved for their function. IT organizations need to offer private and public cloud services that
appear uniform to the customer including the APIs that drive the services. The service catalog
should present the options and differences of the services in an easy to understand manner.
Systems administrators must be able to easily manage existing traditional IT resources as well as
private and public cloud resources from a single pane of glass. They also need a way to virtually
move assets from the traditional environment to the private cloud as resources are freed up.
Divisions within a corporation also have important cloud requirements. Corporate compliance
demands a way of enforcing corporate policies in regards to data security, confidentiality, and
contractual standards. Enforcement and compliance to industry regulations like HIPAA, PCI, ITAR
as well as government regulations around data sovereignty are critical as well.
Optimizing your right mix should include the security, governance, and compliance required
bythe application and enterprise. It should regulate workloads and user access, provide
on-demand provisioning of applications and workloads, and optimize resources across a
complex open hybrid infrastructure. The advantages of optimizing your right mix are numerous
and include delivering greater efficiency, meeting service level agreements, ensuring compliance
with industry and governmental requirements, increasing utilization of resources and providing
protection from security breaches. The resulting benefits are lowered costs, reduced risks, and
greater productivity for the entire organization.

The Right Mix: Transforming to a Hybrid IT Infrastructure

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Major Verticals Shifting Spend Over the Next 2 Years, Investing in Different Private and Public Cloud Mixes
Industry Verticals Show a Consistently Strong Private Cloud Mix
23%

33%

27%

19%

77%

67%

73%

81%

Public Cloud

Public Cloud

Private Cloud

Manufacturing

Public Cloud

Private Cloud

Private Cloud

Retail

Telecom

Public Cloud

Private Cloud

Insurance

28%

22%

29%

23%

72%

78%

71%

77%

Public Cloud

Public Cloud

Private Cloud

Healthcare

Organizations need to define their Right

Mix of hybrid infrastructure based on their
own strategy. Hewlett Packard Enterprise
commissioned the 451 Research group
to survey over 1000 customers around
the world about their plans for hybrid
infrastructure. The chart above shows how
organizations plan on adopting private
and public clouds over the next 2 years,
by industry.

Private Cloud

Government

Public Cloud

Public Cloud

Private Cloud

Finance/Banking

Private Cloud

Education

Hybrid Infrastructure Use Cases

Given all the possibilities to define, power and optimize your right mix, where are the sweet
spots for planning and executing an open hybrid infrastructure strategy to reap the greatest
possible benefits in the shortest amount of time?
Rapid infrastructure provisioning is one of the easiest ways to show benefits for cloud
computing. Development and testing, infrastructure-as-a-service resources for deploying
production applications and quick expansion of web services are examples of this use case.
Thisis the most common use case and has the most impact for increasing innovation,
improving speed-to-market and increasing agility and scalability.
Deploying traditional apps to the cloud is the second most common use case. Traditional
applications that need greater scalability, experience large variances in demand or arent
meeting performance expectations are good candidates for moving to the cloud. In some
cases, applications are modified to work in a cloud environment. In other cases, applications are
implemented unchanged. This use case increases agility and scalability.

The Right Mix: Transforming to a Hybrid IT Infrastructure

Page 12

Deploying an AWS hybrid cloud is another ideal use case for hybrid infrastructure. Many
enterprises are using AWS because its easy to access and seemingly inexpensive. Yet some
applications are now being moved back to a private cloud for a variety of technical and
economic reasons. Ideal candidates for a private cloud include applications that require specific
hardware to meet performance expectations, applications that have compliance requirements
that cannot be met by AWS, or applications that are less expensive to run in a private cloud. By
deploying an AWS compliant private cloud, applications can be moved between AWS and the
private cloud without rewriting the applications.
As enterprises increase their adoption of cloud technology, many are managing multiple
private and/or public clouds. Becoming an internal service broker enables an IT organization
to manage and optimize services from external service providers. Successfully brokering and
managing multiple clouds requires a cloud management platform with extensive integration
capabilities.
Implementing tools to operate complex clouds is critical to all use cases. As companies
increase their use of hybrid cloud, they often want better management capabilities such as
performance management, capacity management, asset management, showback/chargeback,
enhanced security and financial management. To simplify operations, enterprises also look for
management tools that can manage both their traditional IT and cloud environments.
Another popular hybrid infrastructure use case is implementing storage in the cloud for a
content repository, as an enterprise file sync and share, or for an archive and backup. This type
of deployment can cut storage costs by 10Xall while increasing agility, innovation, and speed
to market.
Developing and deploying cloud-native applications on IaaS/PaaS or for mobile application
development can increase application releases by 30X. New applications are often developed
using cloud native architectures combined with DevOps methodologies to bring applications to
market significantly faster.

The Right Mix: Transforming to a Hybrid IT Infrastructure

Page 13

Conclusions

Building this strategy on a platform of

open standards and software provides a
future-proof IT deployment.

Companies can no longer take a wait and see attitude to adopting and integrating cloud
computing technology into their IT strategy. The advantages are clear and the benefits are now
proven. The risks to adopting early are less than the risks of adopting late. Enterprises must get
their products and services to market faster than ever before and must be more creative and
innovative than their competitors in order to survive. Employees must be empowered with the
tools they need to unleash their creative potential. New tools must be deployed faster and with
greater easeall while keeping costs under control.
Employing and accelerating a hybrid infrastructure strategy that properly defines your right
mix, powers your right mix and optimizes your right mix is the answer to remaining competitive
and relevant. Those enterprises that effectively implement a hybrid IT strategy based on these
three principles dramatically increase their odds of success.

IT in the Midst of Transformation as Enterprises Look to

Drive Down Cost and Increase Efficiency.
451 Research

The Right Mix: Transforming to a Hybrid IT Infrastructure

100s

Deeply Technical OpenStack and Cloud Foundry

Professionals

The #1 provider of
cloud infrastructure

600+

Managed cloud clients

40% of the Fortune 100 is running HPE Helion

3,000+

50+ Years of enterprise experience

Private cloud clients

$3

10,000s

Billion in cloud infrastructure sales

Application transformation experts

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has built its reputation on helping customers move to a hybrid
infrastructure. Based on open architecture, HPE Helion enables enterprises todefine, power,
and optimize their right mix for a hybrid infrastructure world. TheHPEHelion difference
includes:
An open architecture: third-party hardware support, third-party software integration through
APIs, open source: OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, and Docker
Support for a wide variety of environments: VMware, MS Hyper-V, AWS, Azure, OpenStack,
Cloud Foundry, and Docker
Broad portfolio: Integrated systems, cloud management software and managed services
Expertise in planning and implementing complex cloud projects
Quickly deliver IT services, respond to fast-changing business conditions, and get applications
to market faster with HPE Helion. This complete portfolio of cloud products, services, and
solutions offer enterprise-class security, scalability, and performance. HPE Helion cloud
solutions provide simplicity, security, governance, and speed for your private, hybrid, and
managed clouds. Its no wonder that Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the number one provider
of cloud infrastructure. With over 3000+ HPE Helion customers, Hewlett Packard Enterprise
dominates the cloud infrastructure industry with its extensive cloud experience,
industry-leading infrastructure solutions, and growing list of skilled and reliable partners.

Learn more at
hpe.com/helion

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