Customers require flexibility while ensuring continuity in the performance of their IT infrastructure so that they can commit to the service level agreements that they have signed up with their internal and external stake-holders. As a result, they tend to gravitate towards a hybrid and multi-cloud environment giving them the best of all worlds.

 

Core mission critical workloads typically run on-premise or on dedicated single tenant infrastructure (private cloud) while peripheral or non-mission critical workloads are moved to the public cloud (shared multi-tenant infrastructure).

 

A lot of applications are now available with “as a service” as the default or at times the only option. Organisations subscribe to them on a monthly consumption or pay as you grow model. These SAAS providers run their applications on any of the public cloud service providers. At the same time organisations themselves may place their own workloads on multiple cloud providers for a variety of reasons. Consequently, most organisations end up with a multi-cloud set-up.

 

When organisations run their IT infrastructure on-premise or from a dedicated single tenant infrastructure provided by a third party cloud service provider, they are said to be operating a private cloud. Organisations choose a private cloud infrastructure when they want greater control over their IT infrastructure for security or compliance reasons, their workloads are predictable without extreme fluctuations and their data transfer volumes and patterns may be inconsistent. While you can customise the infrastructure to suit your exact needs, your flexibility in terms of scaling up or scaling down in an on-demand mode is definitely compromised.

 

On-premise workloads have transitioned from running on completely physical infrastructure to a virtualized or converged infrastructure to now hyper-converged infrastructure. Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is a software-defined IT infrastructure that integrates compute, storage, networking, and virtualization resources into a single, unified platform. Customers can choose from HCI solutions provided by leading OEMs like VMware vSAN, Nutanix, Dell EMC VxRail, and HPE SimpliVity.

 

Data is the new oil. Traditionally, storage solutions have been about performance and capacity - storing, managing and accessing different types (block, file and object) keeping in mind the volume, velocity, veracity and variety of data, be it at rest or in motion. However, in this hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence era, security becomes a very vital consideration.

Incidence of cyber-attacks including ransomware and outages due to natural calamities, accidents, technical malfunctions or human error seem to be constantly on the rise. It therefore becomes imperative that organisations protect themselves from business disruptions by investing in business continuity and resiliency services (BCRS).

 

BCRS solutions vary from simple high availability solutions to managed Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).

Industry best practice recommends having 3 copies of the data to be protected, stored using two different storage media types with at least one copy being kept in a remote location. Backup solutions vary from on-premise appliances, to cloud back-up services, hybrid back-up solutions, tape, disk-to-disk, disk-to-disk-to-tape, virtual machine backup to endpoint backup solutions.

This is an automated solution where the critical data and workloads are replicated from the primary site to a cloud environment. If a failure at the primary is triggered, the secondary site is automatically switched on and operations using the critical data and workloads continue unabated. Once the primary site is restored, the failback process is initiated and the operations are transferred back to primary site without any disruption.

A public cloud is a cloud computing model where service providers pool server, storage and networking resources and make them available to customers over the internet. Their offerings include Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS – customers bring their own applications) Platform as a Service (PaaS – typically used by application developers) and Software as a Service.

 

Compass IT Solutions & Services Pvt. Ltd. understands where our customers are on their hybrid and multi-cloud journey. We work closely with them to help them navigate through the complexities that changes in the technology landscape add to the demands made of the IT infrastructure by the shifts in the business priorities of the organisation at large, without compromising security. Invariably, our customers see us as their trusted partner and an extension of their own IT team.  

 

We are proud to partner and collaborate with some of the world’s leading IT companies, including HPE, Dell and Vmware. If you would like to learn about how Hybrid Cloud solution can improve your business, contact us today!