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Finding the right balance
Hybrid IT for small and midsize businesses
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Outlook
If you’re a small-to-midsized business (SMB), you know that you’re operating in a fast-paced, ever-changing
business environment. Customers want their demands met instantly, and increasing competition multiplies
the pressure you’re under. If you can’t deliver, you can be sure somebody else will.
Fortunately, the technology landscape is changing the way you do business. Mobility, social media, and
Big Data are leveling the playing field and making it possible for companies like yours to access more
sophisticated technology, reach bigger audiences, target their messages, and innovate in their offerings.
Yet nothing has changed the landscape so much as the cloud.
Not long ago, your only choice when investing in technology was to deploy it on-premise. On-premise IT
provides you with control over your data, security, and performance, but these benefits sometimes come
with a cost: On-premise IT can be hard to manage, and it may lock you into an upfront investment that
might not meet your needs a few years down the road.
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Best practices for implementing
hybrid IT
1.Analyze your IT environment. How can
you leverage current IT investments? What
do you need to change? For example,
do you need faster processing, higher
bandwidth, or more flexible storage? Is your
existing IT environment efficient and easy
to manage?
2.Create a hybrid IT plan. What business
goals do you want to accomplish with your
infrastructure? How do you plan to do it?
Determine the timeline, resources, and
investments you need. Decide whether you
will pay up front or as you go. Your plan
needs to include business, operational, and
financial considerations.
3.Decide what current applications and
data belong in-house. Consider issues
such as processing latency, security,
and compliance. Anything not adversely
affected by these considerations may be a
good candidate for the cloud.
But the emergence of the cloud means you now have options. The cloud gives companies access to
world‑class solutions for nearly any business task. With minimal effort, you can add cloud solutions to handle
functions such as CRM, ERP, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, and communications.
Even better, you don’t need to make a big investment in additional hardware and software or the people to
manage them.
Still, you may be hesitant to move to the cloud, based on legitimate concerns:
4.Determine what the future holds. What
applications do you plan to run in the next
three years? Will your IT environment
accommodate these new workloads and
apps? Will these new workloads stay
on‑premises? Which are good candidates
for the cloud?
•Is the cloud secure enough to entrust with my data?
5.Seek guidance. You will need help in
planning, developing, and implementing
your new IT environment. Find a trusted
source that can help you build a hybrid
infrastructure based on your specific needs.
There is a way to address these questions that enables you to have the best of both on-premise IT and
cloud. The answers lie in hybrid IT.
•Will I have enough control over the solutions I use?
•Can I use the cloud while still leveraging existing IT investments?
•Will applications perform to the level I need?
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A hybrid cloud infrastructure can meet
your needs because it provides the flexibility
and control you want without breaking the
bank. A growing number of businesses are
embracing this approach.
According to AMI, the amount of IT budget
that SMBs worldwide are spending on cloud is
expected to increase from nearly
15%
20151
19%
20182
76%
of SMBs said they are interested in a hybrid
approach to IT.3
1, 2
3
AMI SMB research 2015
ESG SMB survey 2015
Hybrid IT decoded
Hybrid IT is a combination of on-premise IT and cloud that gives you the freedom to tailor your own
individual approach to IT. You decide which workloads to move to the cloud and which to keep on-premise,
creating a customized infrastructure that provides some serious benefits:
•Increased scalability. The cloud can scale instantly to meet changing business conditions. You don’t have
to invest in new hardware and software to accommodate spikes in demand. Cloud solutions scale up and
down whenever you need them to.
•Lower costs. Because the cloud can scale, you avoid costly capital purchases. By shifting CAPEX to OPEX,
you achieve a more predictable method of managing your budget. Hybrid IT can be particularly ideal if
your organization experiences dramatic and seasonal workload changes. For example, a tax firm’s demand
for IT resources peaks from January through April. By using cloud as part of its IT mix, the firm can scale
its usage accordingly, paying only for what it uses. And as your business grows, hybrid IT enables you to
rein in spiraling cloud subscription costs by keeping some of your infrastructure on-premise.
•Flexibility addresses security concerns. While you may feel safe using a cloud-based application to
manage sales leads, compliance regulations may restrict you from hosting other types of data outside your
firewall. For example, a law firm might need to keep customer documents on-premise but see minimal
risk in using a cloud-based marketing solution. A hybrid approach to IT empowers you to choose which
applications to keep in-house and which to move to the cloud.
•Managed services save time and resources. When you move certain applications to the cloud, you no
longer need the specialized resources to manage them. Updates happen automatically and seamlessly,
ensuring you always have access to the latest features and security patches.
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HPE Just Right IT
Some businesses need to decrease operating costs and build efficiencies into their processes. Others want
the ability to embrace IT as a competitive differentiator. The problem: neither is sure how to effectively use
the cloud while keeping other workloads on-premise for better control, security, and customization.
Enter Hewlett Packard Enterprise Just Right IT solutions, designed to handle both on-premise and
cloud workloads. With HPE Just Right IT, limited resources, staff, and budget won’t hold you back.
Modernize the infrastructure. Outdated infrastructure can make it challenging to compete successfully
in this digital age. When running applications in a hybrid IT environment, you need modern servers for
faster processing of new applications to decrease latency. Modern networking gives you higher bandwidth
to ensure fast transfer of data from your on-premise IT environment to the cloud and back again. Modern,
high-performing storage can scale and minimize data-access latency.
HPE Just Right IT virtualization solutions for servers, storage, networking, software, and services deliver
the performance and bandwidth necessary for all kinds of workloads—on-premise, in the cloud, and in
virtualized environments—giving you exactly the performance gains, lower maintenance costs, and lower
energy consumption that you need.
HPE’s affordable, high-performance servers, storage, and networking are designed to work together,
creating IT perfectly sized for your budget.
•HPE ProLiant Gen9 servers provide performance gains of up to 25%4
•HPE StoreVirtual and MSA storage array systems provide the performance, scalability, and low latency that
modern applications require
•HPE Aruba 3810 Switch Series enables you to raise the data rate to 2.5, 5, and even 10GbE for
bandwidth-hungry applications and to future proof your network infrastructure
•HPE VMware® Flex solutions and HPE Flex Solutions for Hyper-V drive down costs through consolidation
and virtualization, helping to minimize unplanned downtime
4
PC and TPC-H are trademarks of the Transaction Processing Performance Council. Results as of March 31, 2016; see tpc.org for more information.
T
Performance gains may vary. Broadwell chip performance vs. Haswell chip performance.
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A managed hybrid IT
solution removes the worry
of having to refresh IT
resources and makes it easy
to predict IT costs for a
UK‑based property
management company.
Simplify management. Your first step on the hybrid IT journey is to ensure that your current IT
environment is efficient and easy to manage. You need simple, effective management tools that provide
end-to-end visibility and can proactively alert you to potential hardware issues, automatically triggering
orders for replacement parts. Hewlett Packard Enterprise offers management tools for both simple and
complex IT environments.
HPE OneView streamlines IT management across compute, storage, and networking resources. It’s designed
for the way people work—not how devices are managed—so your IT team can deploy infrastructure faster,
simplify operations, and increase productivity. IT generalists can quickly and easily configure, monitor,
update, and repurpose server, networking, and storage resources with a single line of code.
HPE OneView for VMware vCenter™ enables a centralized management of compute, storage, and virtual
machines from inside VMware vCenter Server™. This means that an IT generalist can manage the entire
virtual infrastructure from a single interface without any specialized expertise. Virtual machines can be
viewed and managed at the system level to simplify operations and increase administrative efficiency.
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Virtualized appliances smooth the way to hybrid IT. The HPE Hyper
Converged 250 System and the HPE Hyper Converged 380 System offer
a pathway to a hybrid cloud. HPE Hyper Converged 250 and 380 systems
provide built-in virtualization, shifting the focus back to workloads. These
preconfigured and tightly integrated virtualized blocks of compute, storage,
and networking are easy to manage and come with built-in backup and
recovery capabilities, high availability, and data protection. You can also choose
hypervisors—VMware or Microsoft® Hyper-V—to simplify integration and
support your journey to a hybrid IT environment.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise extends hyper-convergence into Microsoft
environments with an integrated cloud solution built with Microsoft Hyper-V,
Microsoft System Center, and Windows® Azure Pack running on HPE Hyper
Converged 250 system. This combination of proven hardware and software
reduces complexity and lowers risk by giving you a cloud-in-a-box with the
services and automation to help you deploy most popular applications.
For organizations with limited IT staff, the HPE ProLiant EC200a solution
for small businesses is a tightly integrated compute, storage, networking,
and virtualization appliance deployed on-site. It comes integrated with
Office 365 and Azure cloud services and is managed remotely from the cloud.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise provides a self‑healing solution with included
break‑fix service, significantly reducing server management time.
Take advantage of a rich partner network. Whether you’re just getting
started, building momentum, or planning expansions, Hewlett Packard
Enterprise and its local channel partners have products, solutions, and services
right-sized and affordable for every business. Hewlett Packard Enterprise has
spent years building a robust network of partners. Today, you can work with
more than 1,500 HPE Partner Ready Services delivery partners worldwide.
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Affordability is critical factor for SMBs. HPE Financial Services offers a number of flexible financing options
to get the technology you need at payments you can afford.
Move into the future with hybrid IT
In a world of always-constrained resources, hybrid IT represents a real choice that doesn’t come along often.
HPE Just Right IT delivers the agility you need to be successful and drive growth.
Learn more at
hpe.com/info/justrightit
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© Copyright 2016 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties
for Hewlett Packard Enterprise products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing
herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Hewlett Packard Enterprise shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions
contained herein.
Microsoft and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. VMware,
VMware vCenter, and VMware vCenter Server are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions.
All other third‑party trademark(s) is/are the property of their respective owner(s).
4AA6-7397ENW, October 2016