AUTOMATE EVERYTHING ^TM: What it means for Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Strategy?

Hexaware Shrink IT, Grow Digital makes a fundamental impact on how future enterprises will consume hybrid cloud services. The initiative is primarily based on the fact that the cost of managing datacenters and cloud services should fundamentally fund organizations to focus on digital initiatives, At Hexaware, we strongly feel that in today’s CIOs and infrastructure heads are spending way too much in managing legacy, brittle architectures of systems which are becoming complex day by day.

We strongly feel it can be addressed with a holistic approach. These legacy architectures are not fit for the digital age, where new capabilities like DevOps, Big Data needs to be developed, which requires Fail Fast, Webscale based architectures. Fundamentally, the entire drive to reduce the cost in data centers can be driven in three facets :-

• Reduce the cost of management by introducing automation (it’s an old-fashioned term now – but its more relevant now than ever)
• Changing the consumption pattern of how enterprises are consuming services
• Bringing some new age technology choices

Operations cost or management cost is the big-ticket item and constitutes to almost 60 % of the entire budget, the cost primarily is a factor of P*Q (Unit Rate and Quantity of instances it supports) – For example ($/VM * 1000 instances). This is a typical outsourcing construct or a RU (Resource Unit) that outsourcers charge customers on delivering managed services for hybrid cloud. Our approach to automation is to look at opportunities to reduce the cost of management by bringing automation V/s traditional people led service delivery model – Hexaware’s RAISE IT Platform which powers our managed services framework delivers extreme automation, cognitive capabilities to not just reduce cost but better optimize the infrastructure landscape

Consumption pattern changes in organizations are fundamentally behavioral changes, rather than technical or operational ones. Today, most organizations are used to building infrastructure capabilities within themselves, which obviously include cost to procure those capabilities, cost to deploy them, cost to train/enable teams to leverage, and finally cost to manage them. The Next Generation enterprises instead should follow Consume First (as a service), Config Next (reconfigure existing infrastructure) and Build Last pattern, in order to consume the infrastructure services.

Lastly, with the adoption of new age Hyper Scale technologies like Hyperconverged and Commodity web scale platforms. It is easier than ever for organizations to start taking a cost out initiative to replace their existing systems with these modern age platforms without having to worry about performance, migration related issues etc. The cloud too plays a very important role in reducing cost only if leveraged intelligently and for specific use cases like leveraging cloud as a disaster recovery target and pay per use. Or, it can be using the infrastructure only at the time of disaster recovery, test and development.

Author Bio:- Saurabh Vadhera is the Director – Hybrid Cloud Practice of Infrastructure Management Services at Hexaware Technologies. He has more than 12 years of experience in product management for cloud & infrastructure practice.