VIDEO: Exploring Hybrid Cloud Use Cases and Benefits

Josh:

Hybrid cloud is really the convergence of your private cloud and your public cloud resources, taking those together, merging them, putting them all into the same pane of glass.

One of the big benefits of hybrid cloud is the ability to expand your environment on demand, to give people more of an elastic environment. Perhaps maybe you only have seasonal workloads that you need to spin up extra capacity, or maybe at month end you have to spin up more capacity as well. You can do that on the fly. One of the benefits, perhaps of a retail customer, is that they can spin up additional resources on demand during holiday seasons so that they can meet their peak workloads. Another good use case of the hybrid cloud is for companies that maybe write their own software in-house. When they need to go and do their QA testing on new builds, they can just spin up that infrastructure out in the cloud and then spin it down when they're done.

We have a lot of customers that come to us now who have issues with public cloud offerings that they've set up. Maybe its shadow IT has gone out and swiped a credit card to set up the instances that IT doesn't actually know about. Now finance is getting upset because they're getting really large bills every month. One of the benefits of having a hybrid cloud is being able to offer that type of service, that infrastructure as a service that your users are demanding now. Being able to offer that in-house, having IT still control it, and to be able to wrap some cost measures around it or maybe some life cycle management, or to be able to just track back and see who owns what infrastructure and see if they're actually still using it. 

While private cloud solutions have been what we've traditionally seen in most IT environments, it doesn't really fit the bill necessarily anymore for what our users need. We have less and less that we're budgeted every year and IT users are expecting more and more out of the IT departments. That's where our hybrid cloud can really play a pivotal role in enabling the users, giving them a single pane of glass to go in to provision new resources on demand without having to buy additional infrastructure or have a huge upfront cap ex.

Some of the misconceptions wrapped around the hybrid cloud and expanding your environment to the hybrid cloud is that it's difficult, that it's time consuming, that you're going to need specialized resources to help you set that up, when in reality, with VMware vCloud, you can actually connect that within probably two hours for most customers to get the initial configuration set up. I think a lot of companies haven't moved yet to hybrid cloud because it sounds really great on paper or in practice, but actually taking that first step in getting there can be difficult. If you're not used to doing it, it's obviously can be a complex process. At WEI though, we have a proven methodology on how to get customers from the private on-prem cloud up into a hybrid cloud solution. I think one of the value adds that WEI brings to the table is that we can help a customer go from an on-prem private cloud environment to a hybrid cloud environment. We can take a lot of the mystery out of the process and help them to get there successfully, quickly, and to immediately start utilizing those cloud resources.