Cloud services encompasses a wide range of on-demand services delivered to businesses and customers via the internet. These services are intended to provide simple, low-cost access to applications and resources that do not require any internal infrastructure or hardware. Whether they’re aware of it or not, most employees use cloud services throughout the workday, from checking email to collaborating on documents.
Any modern company seeking long-term success must maintain a secure, up-to-date, and dependable IT infrastructure. Several of these infrastructure services require colocation as well. Many people believe that colocation is nothing more than a data centre with floor space, electricity, and an Internet connection. Data center becomes an important step in the facilitation of servers. Hence, colocation evolved over the years, as a need to mitigate the limitations arising from building a data center, and harboring key networking equipment in a third-party data center. We spoke with Nilotpal Kumar Dutta, Director-India, Green Lake Cloud Services, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, to learn more about the various cloud services available as we adjust to the new normal.
What is the need for establishing an infrastructure that can be scaled up as needed? How does such infrastructure-as-a-service benefit businesses?
IT managers come across scalability challenges regularly and it is difficult for them to predict storage capacity usage, bandwidth and growth rates of applications. When any workload reaches beyond capacity limits, how is it possible to maintain the performance while keeping efficiency to scale?
Infrastructure-as-a-service, commonly known as “IaaS” is a type of cloud computing that delivers network, storage resources and the compute to consumers over the internet using a pay-as-you-go model.
You or your IT team maintains the applications and operating systems you want to work with as a business. On the other hand, in IaaS, cloud service providers manage the entire infrastructure, including data centers, servers and networking.
Infrastructure-as-a-service benefits businesses in the following ways:
- Reduced Expenses
In IaaS, third-party cloud service providers provide you with the cloud infrastructure, eliminating the cost of maintaining a physical on-premise IT infrastructure.Since providers offer you a pay-as-you-go model, you can move your business’s fixed capital to operational expenses. - Improved Security
Using IaaS, you don’t have to worry about data security. Cloud providers secure data with multiple safeguards, including firewalls, OS patching and OS hardening. Therefore, when choosing an IaaS cloud service provider, it is essential to ask them about the security mechanisms they implement to protect data. - Increased Support for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
One of the essential benefits of IaaS computing is that it is prepared for worst-case scenarios. You can continue to run your business operations even in events like floods or earthquakes. Various reputed providers offer disaster recovery as a service to replicate your data in multiple data centers kept in different geographical locations.
HPE GreenLake delivers infrastructure-as-a-service for your workloads – on-premises, in colocations, fully managed at the edge and in your data centers.
How can businesses manage their infrastructure remotely? What options are available as a result of the technological revolution?
As organizations globalize and servers increase, it becomes difficult to monitor every server locally. When demands for responsiveness and efficiency rise, remote management becomes crucial, even in data centers with onsite administrators.
Infrastructure remote management is a process of managing and monitoring IT infrastructure from a remote location to take remedial actions and enable continuous availability.
There are many tools available that help enterprises manage digital infrastructure remotely when they are away from the office or at home.
Those capabilities include:
- Support Tools allow administrators to manage multiple devices at once, help efficiently handle servers, resolve issues quickly and keep your business running from anywhere.
- Real-time Telepresence Tools offer support for isolated or remote sites using live, visually guided collaboration.
- Analytics Tools use AI and ML to provide insights for managing and supporting infrastructure.
Using these tools, your enterprise doesn’t need to worry when support is required. HPE has also built technologies and tools to simplify IT infrastructure management so that customers can focus on their skilled IT resources and core operations instead of infrastructure management.
How has colocation benefited end users? What will the future of colocation devices look like?
When your business grows to a specific size, you seem to have a lot of resources and budget tied up in managing, maintaining, and housing your servers. Growing IT infrastructure could seem an essential cost for a successful business. However, you can reduce those levels of cost and resources and enable your business to grow with a strategy known as colocation.
Colocation is the practice of installing your servers in a professionally-managed data center instead of on your premises. Instead of looking for a space in your building, handling the maintenance of servers and paying for cooling, you pay an external provider to do it for you.
Using IaaS vendors like HPE GreenLake, Colocation can manage and maintain enterprise data centers on a subscription and consumption basis. According to Grand View Research, the colocation market is expected to grow at an annual growth rate of more than 13 percent from 2021 to 2028.
What are the various ways that companies can use cutting-edge technology to unlock the potential of the future?
Organizations across every sector are taking advantage of opportunities presented by fast-advancing digital technologies. The technological revolution is transforming the way we all live and work.
Following are some of the ways that companies can use cutting-edge technology to unlock the potential of the future:
- Shifting to the as-a-service model
- Expanding industry boundaries with emerging technologies
- Re-inventing the portfolio
- Modernizing the enterprise
- Building resilient supply chains
