The next BriefingsDirect Voice of the Innovator discussion focuses on the growing complexity around multicloud management and how greater accountability is needed to improve business impacts from all-too-common haphazard cloud adoption.
Stay with us to learn how
new tools, processes, and methods are bringing insights and actionable analysis
that help regain control over the increasing challenges from hybrid cloud and multicloud sprawl.
Listen
to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Here to explore a more
pragmatic path to modern IT deployment management is Harsh Singh, Director of
Product Management for Hybrid Cloud Products and Solutions at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). The interview is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: What is driving the need for multicloud at all? Why are people choosing multiple clouds and deployments?
 |
| Singh |
Initially, when people began moving
to public cloud services, the idea was speed, agility, and quick access to
resources. IT was in the way for gaining on-premises resources. People said, “Let
me get the work going and let me deploy things faster.”
And
they were able to quickly launch applications, and this increased their
velocity and time-to-market. Cloud helped them get there very fast. However, as
we now get choices of multicloud environments, where you have various public
cloud environments, you also now have private cloud environments where people
can do similar things on-premises. There came a time when people realized, “Oh,
certain applications fit in certain places better than others.”
From cloud sprawl to cloud smart
For example, if I want to run a serverless environment, I might want to run in one cloud provider versus another. But if I want to run more machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI) kinds of functionality, I might want to run that somewhere else. And if I have a big data requirement, with a lot of data to crunch, I might want to run that on-premises.
So you now have more choices
to make. People are thinking about where’s the best place to run their applications.
And that’s where multicloud comes in. However, this doesn’t come for free,
right?
Gardner: It’s
become too much of a good thing. There are very good reasons to do cloud,
hybrid cloud, and multicloud. But there hasn’t been a rationalization about how
to go about it in an organizational way that’s in the best interest of the
overall business. It seems like a rethinking of how we go about deploying IT in
general needs to be part of it.
I look at people, process, and
technology as the three pillars of this tool sprawl, which is absolutely
necessary for any company as they traverse their multicloud journey.
Gardner: This is
a long-term, thorny problem. And it’s probably going to get worse before it
gets better.
Singh: I do
see it getting worse, but I also see a lot of people beginning to address these
problems. Vendors, including we at HPE, are looking at this problem. We are
trying to get ahead of it before a lot of enterprises crash and burn. We have
experience with our customers, and we have engaged with them to help them on
this journey.
You
must deploy the applications to the right places that are right for
your business -- whether it's multicloud or hybrid cloud. At the end of
the day, you have to manage multiple environments.
It is going to get worse and
people are going to realize that they need professional help. It requires that
we work with these customers very closely and take them along based on what we
have experienced together.
Gardner: Are you
taking the approach that the solution for hybrid cloud management and
multicloud management can be done in the same way? Or are they fundamentally
different?
Singh: Fundamentally,
it’s the same problem set. You must deploy
the applications to the right places that are right for your business -- whether
it’s multicloud or hybrid cloud. Sometimes the terminology blurs. But at the end
of the day, you have to manage multiple environments.
You may be connecting private or off-premises hybrid clouds, and maybe there are different clouds. The problem will be the same -- you have multiple tools, multiple environments, and the people need training and the processes need to be in place for them to operate properly.
Gardner: What makes
me optimistic about the solution is there might be a fourth leg on that stool. People,
process, and technology, yes, but I think there is also economics. One
of the things that really motivates a business to change is when money is being
lost and the business people think there is a way to resolve that.
The economics issue -- about
cost overruns and a lack of discipline around procurement – is both a part of
the problem and the solution.
Economics elevates visibility
Singh: I am
laughing right now because I have talked to so many customers about this. A CIO
from an entertainment media company, for example, recently told me she had a
problem. They had a cloud-first strategy, but they didn’t look at the economics
piece of it. She didn’t realize, she told me, where their virtual machines (VMs)
and workloads were running.
“At the end of the month, I’m
seeing hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills. I am being surprised by all
of this stuff,” she said. “I don’t even know whether they are in compliance. The
overhead of these costs -- I don’t know how to get a handle on it.”
So this is a real problem that
customers are facing. I have heard this again and again: They don’t have
visibility into the environment. They don’t know what’s being utilized. Sometimes
they are underutilized, sometimes they are over utilized. And they don’t know
what they are going to end up paying at the end of the day.
Gardner: We
have seen these kinds of problems before in general business procurement. Many times
it’s the Wild West, but then they
bring it under control. Then they can negotiate
better rates as they combine services and look for redundancies. But you
can’t do that until you know what you’re using and how it costs.
So, is the first step getting
an inventory of where your cloud deployments are, what the true costs are, and
then start to rationalize them?
Guardrails reduce risk, increase innovation
Singh:
Absolutely, right. That’s where you start, and at HPE we have services to do
that. The first thing is to understand where you are. Get a base level of what
is on-premises, what is off-premises, and which applications are required to
run where. What’s the footprint that I require in these different places? What
is the overall cost I’m incurring, and where do I want to be? Answering those
questions is the first step to getting
a mixed environment you can control -- and get away from the Wild West.
Put in the compliance
guardrails so that IT is again looking at avoiding the problems we are seeing today.
Gardner: As a
counterpoint, I don’t think that IT wants to
be perceived as the big bad killjoy that comes to the data scientists and says,
“You can’t get those clusters to support the data environment that you want.”
So how do you balance that need for governance, security, and cost control with
not stifling innovation and allowing creative freedom?
You don’t say, “Hey, you have
to put in a request to us to do these things.” You have to be more behind-the-scenes,
hidden from view. At the same time, you need to provide those budgets and those
controls. Then they can perform their tasks at the speed they want and access to
the resources that they need -- but within the guardrails, compliance, and the business
requirements that IT has.
Gardner: Now
that HPE has been on the vanguard of creating the tools and methods to get the
necessary insights, make the measurements, recognize the need for balance
between control and innovation -- have you noticed changes in organizational
patterns? Are there now centers of cloud excellence or cloud-management bureaus?
Does there need to be a counterpart to the tools, of management structure changes
as well?
Automate, yet hold hands, too
Singh: This
is the process and the people parts that you want to address. How do you align
your organizations, and what are the things that you need to do there? Some of our
customers are beginning to make those changes, but organizations are difficult
to change to get on this journey. Some of them are early; some of them are at
much later stage. A lot of the customers frankly are still in the early phases
of multicloud and hybrid cloud. We are working with them to make sure they
understand the changes they’ll need to make in order to function properly in
this new world.
Gardner: Unfortunately, these new requirements come at a time when cloud management skills -- of understanding data and ops, IT and ops, and cloud and ops -- are hard to find and harder to keep. So one of the things I’m seeing is the adoption of automation around guidance, strategy, and analysis. The systems start to do more for you. Tell me how automation is coming to bear on some of these problems, and perhaps mitigate the skill shortage issues.
Singh: The
tools can only do so much. So you automate. You make sure the infrastructure is
automated. You make sure your access to public cloud -- or any other cloud
environment -- is automated.
That can mitigate some of the
problems, but I still see a need for hand-holding from time to time in terms of
the process and people. That will still be required. Automation will help tie in
a storage network, and compute, and you can put all of that together. This [composability]
reduces the need and dependency on some of the process and people. Automation
mitigates the physical labor and the need for someone to take days to do it.
However, you need that expertise to understand what needs to be done. And this
is where HPE is helping.
Automation
will help tie in a storage network and compute, and you can put all of
that together. Composability reduces the need and dependency on some of
the process and the people. Automation mitigates the physical labor and
the need for someone to take days to do it.
You might have heard about our
HPE
GreenLake managed cloud services offerings. We are moving toward an as-a-service
model for a lot of our software and tooling. We are using the automation to
help customers fill the expertise gap. We can offer more of a managed service
by using automation tools underneath it to make our tasks easier. At the end of
the day, the customer only sees an outcome or an experience -- versus worrying
about the details of how these things work.
Gardner: Let’s
get back to the problem of multicloud management. Why can't you just use the
tools that the cloud providers themselves provide? Maybe you might have
deployments across multiple clouds, but why can’t you use the tools from one to
manage more? Why do we need a neutral third-party position for this?
Singh: Take
a hypothetical case: I have deployments in Amazon Web Services
(AWS) and I have deployments in Google Cloud Platform
(GCP). And to make things more complicated, I have some workloads on premises
as well. How would I go about tying these things together?
Now, if I go to AWS, they are
very, very opinionated on AWS services. They have no interest in looking at
builds coming out of GCP or Microsoft Azure. They
are focused on their services and what they are delivering. The reality is, however,
that customers are using these different environments for different things.
The multiple public cloud
providers don’t have an interest in managing other clouds or to look at other
environments. So third parties come in to tie everything together, and no one
customer is locked into one environment.
If they go to AWS, for example, they can only look at billing, services, and performance metrics of that one service. And they do a very good job. Each one of these cloud guys does a very good job of exposing their own services and providing you visibility into their own services. But they don’t tie it across multiple environments. And especially if you throw the on-premises piece into the mix, it’s very difficult to look at and compare costs across these multiple environments.
Gardner: When
we talk about on-premises, we are not just talking about the difference between
your data center and a cloud provider’s data center. We are also taking about
the difference between a traditional IT environment and the IT management tools
that came out of that. How has HPE crossed the chasm between a traditional IT
management automation and composability types of benefits and the higher-level,
multicloud management?
Tying worlds together
Singh: It’s
a struggle to tie these worlds together from my experience, and I have been
doing this for some time. I have seen customers spend months and sometimes
years, putting together a solution from various vendors, tying them together,
and deploying something on premises and also trying to tie that to an
off-premises environment.
At HPE, we fundamentally
changed how on-premises
and off-premises environments are managed by introducing our own SaaS management
environment, which customers do not have to manage. Such a Software as a
Service (SaaS) environment, a portal, connects on-premises environments. Since
we have a native, programmable, API-driven infrastructure, we were able to
connect that. And being able to drive it from the cloud itself made it very
easy to hook up to other cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP. This
capability ties the two worlds together. As you build out the tools, the key is
understanding automation on the infrastructure piece, and how can you connect
and manage this from a centralized portal that ties all these things together
with a click.
Through this common portal,
people can onboard their multicloud environments, get visibility into their
costs, get visibility into compliance -- look at whether they are HIPAA
compliant or not, PCI
compliant or not -- and get access to resources that allow them to begin to manage
these environments.
And then
we can bring in cost analytics. We have consumption analytics as part of our HPE GreenLake
offering, which allows us to look at cost for on-premises as well as
off-premises resources. You can get a dashboard that shows you what you are
consuming and where.
Gardner: That
level of management and the capability to be distributed across all these
different deployment models strikes me as a gift that could keep on giving.
Once you have accomplished this and get control over your costs, you are next able
to rationalize what cloud providers to use for which types of workloads. It
strikes me that you can then also use that same management and insight to start
to actually move things around based on a dynamic or even algorithmic basis. You
can get cost optimization on the fly. You can react to market forces and dynamics
in terms of demand on your servers or on your virtual machines anywhere.
Are you going to be able to
accelerate the capability for people to move their fungible workloads across
different clouds, both hybrid and multicloud?
Optimizing for the future
Singh: Yes,
absolutely right. There is more complexity in terms of moving workloads here
and there, because there is data proximity requirements and various other
requirements. But the optimization piece is absolutely something we can do on
the fly, especially if you start throwing AI into the mix.
You will be learning over time what needs to be deployed where, and where your data gravity might be, and where you need applications closer to the data. Sometimes it’s here, sometimes it’s there. You might have edge environments that you might want to manage from this common portal, too. All that can be brought together.
And then with those insights,
you can make optimization decisions: “Hey, this application is best deployed in
this location for these reasons.” You can even automate that. You can make that
policy-driven.
Think about it this way -- you
are a person who wants to deploy something. You request a resource, and that
gets deployed for you based on the algorithm that has already decided where the
optimal place to put it is. All of that works behind the scenes without you
having to really think about it. That’s the world we are headed to.
Gardner: We
have talked about some really interesting subjects at a high level, even some
thought leadership involved. But are there any concrete examples that
illustrate how companies are already starting to do this? What kinds of
benefits do they get?
Singh: I
won’t name the company, but there was a business in the UK that was able to
deploy VMs within minutes on their on-premises environment, as well as gain cost
benefits out of their AWS deployments.
We
were able to go in, connect to their VMware environment, and allow them
to deploy VMs. We were up and running in two hours. Then they could
optimize for their developers to deploy VMs. They saved 40 percent in
operational efficiency. They gained self-service access.
We were able to go in, connect
to their VMware environment, in this case,
and allow them to deploy VMs. We were up and running in two hours. Then they
could optimize for their developers to deploy VMs and request resources in that
environment. They saved 40 percent in operational efficiency. So now they were
mostly cost optimized, their IT team was less pressured to go and launch VMs
for their developers, and they gained direct self-service access through which
they could go and deploy VMs and other resources on-premises.
At the same time, IT had the visibility
into what was being deployed in the public cloud environments. They could then
optimize those environments for the size of the VMs and assets they were
running there and gain some cost advantages there as well.
Are there any precursor activities
that companies should be thinking about to get control over their clouds, and
then be able to better leverage these tools when the time comes?
Watch your clouds
Singh: Start
with visibility. You need an inventory of what you are doing. And then you need
to ask the question, “Why?” What benefit are you getting from these different
environments? Ask that question, and then begin to optimize. I am sure there
are very good reasons for using multicloud environments, and many customers do.
I have seen many customers use it, and for the right reasons.
However, there are other
people who have struggled because there was no
governance and guardrails around this. There were no processes in
place. They truly got into a sprawled environment, and they didn’t know what
they didn’t know.
So first and foremost, get an
idea of what you want to do and where you are today -- get a baseline. And
then, understand the impact and what are the levers to the cost. What are the
drivers to the efficiencies? Make sure you understand the people and process --
more than the technology, because the technology does exist, but you need to
make sure that your people and process are aligned.
And then lastly, call me. My
phone is open. I am happy to have a talk with any customer that wants to have a
talk.
Singh: All
three are good places for innovation. I see IT Ops at the center of the
innovation. They are the ones who will be effecting change.
Finance and procurement, they could benefit from these changes, and they could be drivers of the requirements. They are going to be saying, ‘I need to do this differently because it doesn’t work for me.” And the innovation also comes from developers and line of businesses managers who have been doing this for a while and who understand what they really need.
Listen
to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
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