In a recent report by Frost & Sullivan, 81% of Line of Business (LoB) managers said they bypass IT to purchase cloud applications.
At a time when CIOs are trying to get funding for private cloud initiatives, LoB buy-in can be a significant barrier. How do CIOs convince key enterprise constituents that their IT team can build a better, faster, cheaper, more flexible and more reliable cloud? With HP CloudSystem.
CloudSystem is a fully integrated cloud solution that delivers a complete (hardware, software and services), open (based on OpenStack standards) and simple-to-use platform for cloud services. CloudSystem brings together an impressive array of HP technology—ConvergedSystems, Helion and OneView—to help IT departments overcome the three main challenges to cloud-building: a lack of experience, a limited budget and long deployment cycles.
“But we don’t know how to build a cloud.” Most companies will look to external partners to help fill their cloud skills gap. CloudSystem dramatically reduces that gap with a pre-built, proven architecture that makes it simple to build a robust cloud environment using OpenStack standards. And HP offers over 200 Cloud Maps that help IT departments design and build their cloud applications based on the most common scenarios. So if you’re planning to migrate your Microsoft SQL database environment to the cloud, for example, there’s a Cloud Map to help you do it.
“But we don’t have the time/money to build a completely new infrastructure.” With HP ConvergedSystems for Virtualization, enterprises can purchase a complete cloud infrastructure—computing, storage, networking and virtualization—in a single, scalable appliance. HP’s converged infrastructure drives down costs, reduces procurement time and features pre-integrated, pre-optimized hardware and software that can be shipped in as little as three weeks and operational in less than 48 hours.
Now that you don’t have any more excuses for why you shouldn’t build your own cloud, let me give you a few reasons for why you should build it with HP CloudSystem:
- It’s safer. You’re using a pre-built OpenStack architecture, so you know it will work with other cloud environments right off the bat. That’s a big advantage when you’re looking at solutions that may need to scale into public clouds as workloads increase (i.e., cloudbursting).
- It’s very user friendly. LoB types (and other internal users) can easily purchase cloud services through a simple ordering screen just as they would purchase public cloud services. Internal customers can even stipulate the service level agreements and pay only for the performance/capacity they need.
- It’s easy for IT departments to manage. The familiar HP OneView interface makes cloud building a familiar, intuitive experience, while CloudSystem’s built-in safeguards eliminate common errors and ensure that IT departments can easily modify services over time. ▪