The Future of Infrastructure Management Strategy - Hybrid

In a recent Data Center Knowledge article, Dropbox, the cloud storage and collaboration platform provider, revealed the cost savings realized by pulling a large percentage of its data out of AWS’s cloud services.  “Over two years, it turns out, Dropbox shaved $74.6 million off its operational expenses primarily because of the move.”

Now, not every company can make a change of this magnitude. It takes deep pockets, time, and talent. Dropbox created and migrated to its own platform, but still utilizes a hybrid approach including colocation services and AWS in an effort to stay close to its geographically distributed customers.

The Hybrid Trend is Gaining Popularity

In addition to this news from Dropbox, Morgan Stanley recently updated their view of IT Hardware growth from “cautious to attractive.” Katy Huberty wrote, “although enterprises have been shifting software applications from on-premise data centers to the cloud, there’s much more to this year’s story.”  Huberty goes on to say, “The upshot: While companies plan to migrate a larger share of their workloads to the cloud, they aren't abandoning on-premise computing. Instead, many are adopting a hybrid IT model in which applications move between a public cloud and their own internal data centers.”

These actions and statement from notable industry players underscore an interesting point: Most companies will use the cloud for only some workloads. No matter how big or small your company is, your on-premise infrastructure isn’t going anywhere. It has to be managed, optimized, and automated.

Finding the Right Hybrid Balance

Understanding the true costs of managing your entire hybrid compute infrastructure is critical to determining where you will place your workloads.  Nlyte’s Discovery identifies all assets and workloads across the network giving you a complete picture of where assets exist and their relationship to the workload.  Advanced Analytics from Nlyte’s Machine Learning provides predictive insight to the future performance of the physical data enter.  Nlyte’s Platinum DCIM Solution provides real-time information about assets, power usage, workflow, and a host of other monitoring solutions.  All of this provides the needed insight for planning, architecting, and managing an optimized hybrid IT strategy for data center, colocation, edge compute, and cloud.

While every business is different with its own specific objectives and needs, each company or agency has to determine the perfect balance among cloud, colo and on-premises for its particular business model.  In order to properly accomplish this balance, you must also take into consideration other things besides the physical IT devices, such as headcount, physical space, security and available talent.

For now, the on-premise model looks like it’s here to stay. So, organizations must have plans in place to optimize their infrastructure by selecting and deploying a strong IT Asset Management solution that includes DCIM, Discovery, and Machine Learning.