The New Cloud Ops Experience: How AI Powers an Invisible Infrastructure

IT organizations are losing ground. As we fast-forward into a multi-generational IT landscape, the brutal truth is, despite major investment in digital transformation, most companies are still catching up. And while budget, schedule, and staff shortages each play a role, the primary obstruction to rapid digital transformation is more fundamental. To move your business forward, your organization needs to shift from traditional IT operations to a model that can provide the cloud experience anywhere.

It’s a shift that’s happening all around us in the consumer world. For example, sophisticated tools make online banking infrastructure invisible and simplify the management of consumer spending. Personal budgeting tools ensure you are not over-spending and even look for ways to save money in the future, based on account spending history. These AI-based tools have been broadly adopted for personal finance because they are centered around applications, simple to operate, and focused on outcome.

Your IT infrastructure should be no different. New use cases and workloads shouldn’t require hours of assessment, skimming through reports that describe storage systems and server capacity headroom. In a streamlined IT organization, storage and compute would be delivered as a service whenever new resources were required – and in fact, they can be. This is the promise of a cloud operational experience focused on applications and business outcomes.

Data-driven business requires a new modus operandi

For the longest time, IT and storage administrators have used spreadsheets and BI reports to assess data center capacity when business teams requested new applications to be deployed. There’s no time for that now.

Businesses are using data to transform operations, products, and customer experiences. They are moving fast, deploying new use cases and applications at warp speed, putting increasing pressure on enterprise IT. With every new application, administrators need to provision the right underlying infrastructure to support everything from storage capacity and computational power to data protection and governance, while still meeting application SLAs. Administrators are struggling to keep up. In a 2021 ESG survey, 64% of IT professionals report that the complexity of their organization’s IT infrastructure slows operations and digital initiatives.

Cloud set the stage for streamlining IT operations. Spinning up capacity and deploying new applications has become as simple as click, click, click with a pay-as-you-go model. But, as agile and simple as it is, public cloud is not the ideal destination for every workload, which is why 50% of corporate data remains on-premises. There are serious data gravity issues, latency, privacy, and data governance considerations that regulatory-heavy industries such as healthcare and aviation, as examples, care about. Data gravity defines these enterprise IT environments, and that’s where a hybrid cloud makes sense.

You shouldn’t have to choose between operational simplicity and data security. It’s time you had the agility and the operational experience of the cloud wherever your data lives. It’s time for the cloud to come to you, so you can have simplicity, intelligence, automation, and ease-of-use in workload management for all your applications – existing and new – across your entire hybrid environment.

Powering a cloud operational experience with intelligence

Artificial intelligence has transformed IT operations. Capable of continual learning through the collection and analysis of huge quantities of data, HPE InfoSight leverages the power of AI to make the underlying infrastructure invisible. In hybrid cloud environments driven by AIOps, IT operations shift from being infrastructure-centric to app-centric, allowing line of business (LOB) owners to move faster with an on-demand, self-service experience. There are three essential elements for this sort of simplicity and agility in modern workload management:

1. AI-driven infrastructure provisioning. The manual process of pulling reports to assess available capacity for every new application can be replaced with instant provisioning of on-premises storage. The only inputs required are the business context of the application and its SLA; the rest should be automated. The process of determining the resource headroom and identifying the right storage volume for the job, for instance, could be fully AI-driven, automated and in the cloud. At HPE, you will find this as part of our HPE Alletra, powered by the intent-based provisioning capability.
2. Application-level intelligence. Businesses undergoing digital transformation require their applications to be always-on and always-fast. Enterprises are looking for improved visibility into their application workloads, including being able to identify anomalous behavior. IT teams need the next-level visibility that can seamlessly track and correlate performance metrics from applications down to storage. HPE InfoSight offers such intelligence with a capability called App Insights, bringing truly AI-driven visibility to application performance monitoring. This is a new approach of developing unique multi-variate correlations between datasets and offering recommendations that are specific to your enterprise.
3. Cloud-based control plane. For decades, it has been commonplace for IT administrators to use a variety of infrastructure management tools that are disjointed and that come with their individual deployment guides and upgrade schedules. It’s time to change that! The manageability of your global fleet—essentially the control plane—should be extracted out and moved to the cloud. This allows a secure, role-based access control experience for all your data infrastructure via a simple, unified web browser interface. The HPE Data Ops manager delivers this cloud-based, point-and-click self-service experience along with global visibility of your hybrid cloud environment. It also comes with an API interface so you can programmatically automate the deployment and management of your IT operations.

Combining all of the above is what constitutes an end-to-end cloud operational experience. As you scale your business and navigate through your digital transformation journey, an AIOps platform with the power to solve intricate infrastructure problems specific to your IT environment is essential.

HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform can bring much-needed agility and unlock new levels of operational efficiencies in your IT. Learn how HPE GreenLake delivers a unified, best-in-class cloud operational experience, and why it is quickly becoming the de-facto standard for hybrid cloud environments.

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About Sandeep Singh

Sandeep is Vice President of Storage Marketing at HPE. He is a 15-year veteran of the storage industry with first-hand experience in driving innovation in data storage. Sandeep joined HPE from Pure Storage, where he led product marketing from pre-IPO $100M run rate to a public company with greater than $1B in revenue. Prior to Pure, Sandeep led product management & strategy for 3PAR from pre-revenue to greater than $1B in revenue – including four-year tenure at HP post-3PAR acquisition. Sandeep holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from UC, San Diego and an MBA from Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.