Why it’s Time to Implement IT Consumption in Your Own Data Center
The cloud is not a place. It isn’t some magical ecosphere. While the term, “cloud migration” infers there is a targeted geographical destination involved, that doesn’t have to be the case. That public cloud you migrated to merely resides in someone else’s datacenter. In fact, an AWS or Azure datacenter probably looks a lot like yours, just on a larger scale. Thanks to new consumption models for IT, the next cloud you migrate to could in fact reside in your very own data center.
Cloud is about Capabilities
The cloud isn’t about physicality, it is about capability. Cloud capabilities include the ability to scale your infrastructure up and down to meet fluctuating workload demands. Another capability is universal access as users dispersed across a wide geographical area can access an enterprise’s applications. The cloud has also changed the way that IT infrastructure paid for, as equipment is no longer capitalized in mammoth purchases and implementations. Instead, the cloud offers a “pay as you go” model where you only pay for what you use. This is in sharp contrast to the costly practice of over-provisioning that IT managers were forced into to anticipate future business growth.
One of the beauties of the cloud is its enablement of experimentation. For a few hundred bucks you can try something out in the cloud on a small scale, thus allotting the opportunity to determine proof of concept. This is not possible in on-premise environments if you don’t own the infrastructure necessary to implement your experiment in the first place. This ability to implement “what if” scenarios is accelerating both IT and business innovation.
Consumption Based Pricing
You don’t need infrastructure; you need IT services. Imagine for a moment if your IT services could be allocated in a measurable unit, much like a watt of electricity. Like electricity, you would use more IT units during certain parts of the year. Like your electric bill, it would be easy to predict how much IT you needed on a month-to-month basis. The CEO, CFO, or COO wouldn’t need to have the CIO’s word that all this infrastructure is needed, because the business metrics tell the story. The ability to know how many units of those services you needed is highly beneficial to any business because if you know how many units you are using, you can easily determine the value that those IT services are bringing to your business. This is what consumption-based pricing it all about.
Consumption-based pricing for IT is a pricing model that allows customers to only pay for what they consume rather than paying a fixed price regardless of usage. It gives you the ability to only purchase things as you need them. You may not require extra storage this quarter, but you will for the next one. We tend to automatically associate on-premise environments with CAPEX and the cloud as OPEX, but that no longer must be the case. Pricing models are no longer dictated by location.
Your Own Private Cloud
Organizations don’t migrate to public clouds because they are the only clouds. Anyone can be a cloud provider. They do so because these cloud providers already have the infrastructure and more importantly, a service portal that shows customers how much IT they are using. Their consumed IT comes in the form of resources including computing, storage, bandwidth etc. But what if you could have your own private cloud on your own premises? What if suddenly had the financial flexibility to only pay for the IT that you used? Consumption-based pricing for IT isn’t just possible for your on-premise environments, it is being done by enterprises everywhere. It’s time to not just think about network or IT engineering. It is time to consider financial engineering as well because cash is the lifeblood of a business.
Financial Engineering with HPE GreenLake
HPE made a commitment in 2019 to ensure that their entire business portfolio could be delivered as-a-Service, and that’s exactly what they did. HPE GreenLake is a customizable service model that facilitates the consumption of software, hardware, and services for your organization. In a nutshell, they can provide variable pricing for your ________ (you fill in the blank). Whether your business experiences expansive growth, reduced growth, minimal growth or no growth at all, a consumption approach allows you to right size your storage, networking, and server infrastructures on day one, while allowing you to easily increase that capacity when needed.
They make the automated cloud come to you by offering a broad range of pre-configured, fully customizable end-to-end modular solutions that can reside within your own data center. They supply the infrastructure and put it in place within your establishment. They also supply support staff who are highly trained in those products, ensuring that everything is configured according to best practice. It also means you don’t have to toil with obtaining and retaining the IT talent to manage those toolsets. What’s more, they provide you a self-service portal that allows you to track usage, costs and support tickets that are created automatically and often remediated in the same fashion thank to integrated AI observability.
Conclusion
If you’re a hybrid organization, you no longer must deal with the complexity of CAPEX in one sector and OPEX in another. Consumption-based IT is no longer restricted to the public cloud. It can be utilized wherever you want it. It is time to consider the technology and financial implications of your IT purchases. Don’t purchase infrastructure, purchase the IT services that power your business.
