Hybrid cloud architectures

The study offers insights into what challenges enterprises face in their transformation, how to implement a future-proof cloud and data center strategy, and highlights the key use cases, benefits and process models of hyperconverged infrastructures.

The study results show that a majority of companies are absolutely aware that only the further development of rigid, outdated IT into a dynamic, flexible and powerful IT infrastructure will help to meet the increasing requirements within a digital world.

The continuing high demand for IT solutions for location-independent working as well as storage and evaluation of large and sensitive data volumes is ensuring stable growth in the market for private and hybrid cloud services. The range of use cases is increasing rapidly.

It ranges from the storage and evaluation of digital patient records to the processing of industrial mass production data or e-commerce customer data to scale-out solutions in the context of SAP Hana. In order to provide high-performance services in a timely and local manner, the need for colocation services with modular standards and broadband, low-latency carrier connectivity is increasing.

The core idea behind these offerings is that companies outsource their servers to data centers where they are operated comprehensively by themselves or by other service providers. This also emerges from the study "ISG Provider Lens Next-Gen Private/Hybrid Cloud - Data Center Services and Solutions Report Germany 2020" by the Information Services Group.

Cloud computing has thus become an important component of IT strategies. The future focus of company managers is clearly on the use of hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures. In the future, 40 percent of companies - in large companies already every second company - want to significantly increase the flexibility and agility of their IT infrastructure by using mixed cloud models.

Such an IT infrastructure is an essential and necessary feature, especially in times of the Covid 19 pandemic, in order to be able to react quickly and purposefully to unexpected events and developments. However, hybrid cloud infrastructures quickly become a complex undertaking and not infrequently lead to disillusionment.

For example, 43 percent of companies are dissatisfied with the lack of provider independence, and for around a third of companies, management and administration, access and rights control (IAM) and a lack of internal expertise and resources are no less problematic in the operation of their hybrid cloud infrastructures. The result: the actual goals such as agility, flexibility, scalability, less management effort, increased security and cost benefits fall by the wayside.

Hyperconverged infrastructures

"Without the use of external experts, automation tools or innovative technologies like HCI, these problems are difficult to solve. Infrastructure modernization incorporating hyperconverged solutions offers midmarket companies the opportunity to set up IT infrastructure and data centers in a future-proof and flexible manner, while at the same time mastering the complexity of hybrid infrastructures," says Frank Schmeiler, Senior Analyst at Techconsult.

Rapid deployment and simple management offer all the benefits of the cloud without having to forego the advantages of an in-house IT infrastructure. It is therefore hardly surprising that almost two-thirds of companies are already looking at hyperconvergent infrastructures and that these are either already part of the IT infrastructure, are planned within the next twelve months or are being considered in principle as an alternative.

The benefits that companies expect to gain from this are, in particular, greater scalability, improved data management and data protection, and increased efficiency and profitability.

Another key factor for the respondents is a uniform management interface that makes it easier to administer, monitor and control hybrid cloud infrastructures. This eliminates the need to maintain separate management solutions for servers, storage, virtualization and cloud services. (pmf)