Hyperscalers have exploited their agility and innovative strength to ensure excellent customer experience, usingdisruptive services and use cases. They have set new benchmarks in rolling out services that are ready for consumption by enterprises and organizations. Though these servicescome with discussions about data distancing and a lack of control,the sheer number of innovative services drive enterprises to adopt hyperscalers, albeit with caution.

Organizations prefer a platform or framework that delivers the agility and innovativeness of cloud in rolling out services, yet  ensures that data control and location is restricted within the boundaries of the on-premise data center. Such a solution is also useful to appease demanding customers, internal or external, who expect a cloud like experience, irrespective of the environment size or commercial feasibility, ,and do not want to get entangled with the complexities of infrastructure. These customers want an interface that provides them with innovative, ready to consume services, independence, and also understands their intent. Such an interface requires integration with a foundation that has the capabilities to anonymize underlying processes and technologies, build readily consumable services, and expose them for consumption by using simplified mechanisms such as APIs.

Developing this foundation requires decades of understanding processes, technology, all possible scenarios of intent and interest, as well as the services that are of interest to customers. To meet these expectations, CIOs need a foundation that can extract three key capabilities from their IT estate:

1. Agility: Deliver cloud like experiences and services from on-premise infrastructure.
2. Adaptability: Create an ecosystem where both legacy and modern technologies complement each other to deliver enriched experiences for internal and external customers.
3. Controlled Spend: Facilitate a foundation for change with savings from RUN within the constraints of declining and shrinking budgets.

Delivering agility that is in line with that offered on public cloud requires a change management platform that is programmable, supports event driven scaling and onboarding of multiple data center technologies, and can deliver just in time deployment and autonomous operations. To achieve these objectives, organizations search for holistic tools that can enable and facilitate such a platform.

But  as data center industry reports indicate, tool vendors have historically focused on specific deliverables. As a result, enterprises spend on a plethora of tools, each of which is centered on a specific deliverable such as patching, monitoring, event management, etc.  Some of these tools are necessary. But over time, the sheer numbers of tools purchased for gaining productivity becomes the reason for an unattractive spend to benefit ratio. This problem is further aggravated for enterprises when the need to spend for meeting regulatory and compliance requirements and managing within the boundaries of declining budgets becomes inclined towards RUN operations.

Adopting and anonymizing modern technologies is not difficult because of their open architecture, but it is slowed down by the presence of legacy technologies. Organizations find it hard to maintain the required skill variations and still be productive, so they undertake cross skilling of resources.  After a point, cross skilling becomes ineffective and skill maintenance costs start rising. This drives enterprises towards automation, but the usual methodology of adopting  automation in silos fails to achieve the desired benefits. In addition, automation requires programming skills.  Even if the underlying infrastructure is programmable, huge investments are needed to onboard, develop, and manage automation skilled resources, thereby aggravating the existing challenges associated with managing spend.

Hence, there is an immediate need to establish a foundation that anonymizes underlying technologies, is innovative in creating apt services, prompt in rolling out ready to consume services, enables a symbiotic existence between legacy and modern technologies, centralizes automation and orchestration, helps in managing spend, and delivers quantifiable achievements.

Can there be a solution that helps achieve these objectives? What if there was a solution that saved spends on RUN and is economical enough to survive on those savings as well as build a foundation to facilitate a NextGen platform? Does such a solution exist?

We shall delve more into this in the forthcoming blog- Imitating HyperScalers For On-premise And Hybrid Cloud Environments

Adios!