Many businesses would ultimately like to automate IT service delivery through a self-service catalog using a hybrid cloud. The hybrid cloud delivers the following benefits:

• A single control point for on- and off-premises resources
• Automation streamlines delivery of IT resources, delivering them in a consistent and repeatable manner aligned with business best practices.
• Metering allows the IT team to communicate the value of services while providing visibility to the business on resource cost and consumption.
• Self-service empowers application owners and business users to access the resources they need, when they need them.
• Capacity management allows the IT team to better manage resources across the hybrid cloud.
• Monitoring and reporting provide visibility to the capacity, performance and health of the environment.
• Integrated security protects enterprise workloads.
• Service-level choice aligns workloads to service levels and cost objectives.
• Ability to meet the service level agreements with application level granularity

The vision of hybrid clouds is not new. Businesses have tried to deploy hybrid clouds using traditional infrastructure based on scale-up storage that is accessed over a storage network that is deployed and scaled in big chunks. While it is possible to build cloud capabilities on traditional three‐tier infrastructure with scale‐up storage, this is not the optimal solution.

If businesses want IT transformation to the cloud to support their application environment, Dell EMC can modernize, automate, and transform IT operations with complete turnkey, hybrid cloud platforms built on hyperconverged infrastructure.

Accelerating IT transformation with Dell EMC hyperconverged infrastructure

One of the first steps a business can take in their transformation journey is to simplify infrastructure deployment and management by introducing hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) into the environment. HCI systems essentially collapse the traditional three-tier server, network, and storage model so that the infrastructure itself is much easier to manage.

Adopting hyperconverged infrastructure solutions that natively integrate compute, storage, virtualization, management, and data services significantly reduce IT administrative tasks and create the foundation for a modern IT infrastructure. HCI solutions are optimal for reducing infrastructure costs and simplifying management, regardless of workload deployment and extent of implementation.

Innovate rather than integrate

Businesses do have the option of building a customized solution. Integrating storage, networking, compute, data protection, monitoring and reporting, and then figuring out how to get all of them to work together can be time consuming, but provides the most flexibility for an organization that may want prescribed vendor components as a part of their solution. Planning, designing and building a custom solution is a complex project that often takes months or years to come to fruition—too long if a business needs to roll out a solution to address immediate business needs and it can be costly to maintain or update over the long term.

The challenge for IT is that complexity exists at each of these layers, so building and maintaining a functional, resilient cloud can be difficult. Many companies find that doing it themselves requires more than 70%[2] of their IT resources and budget, leaving few resources to focus on innovation and projects that add real value to the business.

For most businesses, the best way to consume HCI solutions is to buy them fully integrated with lifecycle management and single source of support. Buying versus building delivers the accelerated deployment and operational simplicity with automation and orchestration of system administration tasks that can result in 5-year total cost of ownership savings of 489% over a traditional three-tier, build-your-own approach.[3]