Welcome to Part 3 of WEI’s Cloud Security Foundations series! Click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2. 

Thank you for following along with our cloud security series. Now, it’s time to talk about Azure. If you’re like most organizations, you likely already have a Microsoft footprint. Perhaps Office 365, Active Directory, or a few Windows servers. The good news? can leverage a lot of what you already have. The challenge? Cloud security still requires an entirely fresh approach built on Zero Trust in Azure.

Azure often feels familiar yet different because it assumes a Microsoft footprint while demanding a cloud-first operating model, and today that model centers on Microsoft Entra ID, Defender for Cloud, Azure Policy, and Azure landing zones aligned to the Microsoft Cloud Security Benchmark.

Why Azure Feels Different (And Why That’s Actually Good)

Unlike AWS where you’re starting fresh, Azure assumes you’re probably already in the Microsoft ecosystem somewhere. That’s both a blessing and a curse. The blessing? Your existing Active Directory, Office 365 licenses, and Windows expertise all translate. The curse? It’s easy to assume your on-premises security approach will work in the cloud. Spoiler alert: it won’t.

Azure integrates deeply with Microsoft identity, productivity, and endpoint ecosystems, allowing existing investments to accelerate Azure cloud security adoption without replicating legacy perimeter assumptions in the cloud.

Success comes from reframing security around Zero Trust and the Microsoft Cloud Security Benchmark (MCSB), which provides prescriptive Azure-aware controls that Defender for Cloud evaluates by default.

The Five Pillars

惭颈肠谤辞蝉辞蹿迟鈥檚 security approach maps to five practical areas that align to MCSB: Identity and Access Management, Network Security and Segmentation, Data Protection and Encryption, Threat Detection and Response, and Governance and Compliance.

The differentiation in Azure lies in how these controls are enforced by policy and measured continuously through Defender for Cloud Secure Score and Azure landing zone architectures at scale.

Phase 1 鈥� Getting Your Foundation Right

Prefer Azure landing zones over Azure Blueprints, because Blueprints is being deprecated and Microsoft recommends Template Specs, Deployment Stacks, and policy-driven landing zones from the Cloud Adoption Framework.

Adopt a management group hierarchy with Azure Policy initiatives aligned to MCSB and deploy subscriptions via code to ensure consistent guardrails and inherited controls across platform and application landing zones. 

• Goal: Consistent deployments across subscriptions using landing zone patterns and policy assignments. 
• Success: Every subscription inherits the same baseline via management groups, policy, and RBAC. 
• Key tools: Management groups, Azure Policy, Template Specs, Deployment Stacks, and Azure landing zone accelerators. 

Starting actions:

• Establish platform landing zones for identity, connectivity, and management, followed by 鈥渧ending鈥� application landing zones with pre-applied policies and guardrails. 
• Apply the Microsoft Cloud Security Benchmark policy initiative and begin posture assessment in Defender for Cloud. 
• Centralize logging with Log Analytics and Azure Monitor as part of the management landing zone. 

Phase 2 鈥� Zero Trust in Azure Identity 

This is where Azure gets interesting. Zero Trust sounds fancy, but it’s really “assume everyone’s a potential threat and make them prove otherwise every single time.”

The old way was “you’re inside the corporate network, so you must be fine.” The new way is “I don’t care if you’re the CEO sitting at your desk, you still need to prove who you are.”

Zero Trust means continuously verifying user, device, and session with least privilege enforced by policy across Microsoft Entra ID and connected apps and workloads, the foundation of Zero Trust in Azure.

Make MFA universal, apply Conditional Access with device and risk conditions, and use just鈥慽n鈥憈ime elevation via Entra Privileged Identity Management to eliminate standing admin permissions.

• Goal: Verify every access request with strong authentication, device posture, and session risk. 
• Success: Universal MFA, Conditional Access baselines, Just-In-Time (JIT) admin via Entra PIM, and automated access reviews in Entra ID Governance. 
• Key tools: Entra ID (formerly Azure AD), Conditional Access, Identity Protection, Privileged Identity Management, and Entra ID Governance. 

Starting actions:

• Enable security defaults or equivalent Conditional Access policies to enforce MFA and block risky sign-ins quickly. 
• Configure Identity Protection signals in Conditional Access to restrict access when risk is medium or high. 
• Require PIM activation and approval workflows for all privileged roles, with logging to Sentinel. 

Phase 3 鈥� Network and Data Security (The Boring But Critical Stuff)

Network security in Azure is like an onion. There are lots of layers, and it might make you cry if you don’t do it right. The good news is that Azure gives you plenty of tools. The bad news is that you have to use them.

Design network segmentation with hub-and-spoke or mesh topologies in landing zones, using Network Security Groups and Azure Firewall alongside Private Endpoints to constrain lateral movement and exposure. 

Encrypt data at rest and in transit by default, manage keys in Key Vault, and monitor traffic and flow logs as part of the platform landing zone鈥檚 鈥渕anagement鈥� capabilities. 

• Security layers: Segmentation via NSGs/ASGs, centralized filtering via Azure Firewall, and private access for PaaS via Private Link/Endpoints. 
• Data protection: Default encryption at rest with options for customer-managed keys and policy enforcement to prevent drift. 
• Monitoring: Log Analytics and platform diagnostics for NSG flow logs and resource diagnostics scoped by management groups. 

Starting actions:

• Turn on Defender for Cloud to surface misconfigurations tied to MCSB, including encryption and network exposure findings that affect Secure Score. 
• Enforce policies for 鈥渘o public IPs鈥� where feasible and require Private Endpoints for eligible services via Azure Policy. 
• Centralize key management in Azure Key Vault and require CMK for sensitive stores as a policy-driven exception pattern. 

Phase 4 鈥� Threat Detection (Finding the Bad Guys)

This is where Azure really flexes. Microsoft has two primary tools for this: Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Sentinel. Think of Defender for Cloud as your security posture manager and Sentinel as your full-blown security operations center.

Starting actions:

• Enable Defender for Cloud across all subscriptions and connectors, and remediate MCSB-driven recommendations that most impact Secure Score. 
• Connect identity, endpoint, network, and cloud telemetry to Sentinel, enable relevant analytics rules, and deploy automation playbooks for common incident types. 
• Tune analytics and ML anomalies iteratively to cut false positives while preserving high-fidelity detection coverage. 

Phase 5 鈥� Governance (Proving You’re Doing It Right)

Nobody loves compliance, but everybody needs it. Azure’s approach to governance is innovative. Instead of periodic audits, you get continuous compliance monitoring.

Starting actions:

• Apply the MCSB initiative and any required regulatory initiatives, enabling automatic remediation where safe to do so. 
• Use Secure Score in Defender for Cloud as the KPI for Azure control effectiveness and drive backlog items from the highest鈥慽mpact controls (for example, MFA, secure management ports, and vulnerability remediation). 

Keep Microsoft Secure Score separate to track identity and endpoint posture in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem without conflating the metrics.

Your Azure Security Roadmap

Stage 1 鈥� Foundation
Establish your baseline environment by deploying Azure Blueprints to enforce standard configurations across all subscriptions. Establish your identity controls by integrating existing identity management solutions to enable single sign-on and multi-factor authentication for all users. Set up basic monitoring systems using Azure Monitor and Log Analytics to collect logs and metrics, providing essential visibility into your environment from the start.

Stage 2 鈥� Security
Enhance your security posture by implementing comprehensive network segmentation using Network Security Groups and Azure Firewall. Deploy encryption for data at rest and in transit, ensuring all sensitive information is protected. Activate advanced threat detection tools like Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Sentinel, and begin automating security responses to common alerts to reduce manual intervention and improve response times.

Stage 3 鈥� Optimization
Refine your security operations by fine-tuning detection rules and policies to minimize false positives while maintaining strong security coverage. Automate compliance checks and remediations to ensure continuous adherence to your organization’s standards. Establish ongoing processes, including regular access reviews, incident response exercises, and security architecture assessments, to ensure your Azure environment remains resilient as it evolves.

The Reality Check

Here’s what nobody tells you about Azure cloud security: it’s powerful, but it’s also complex. The integration between services is impressive when it works, but troubleshooting can be a nightmare when something breaks.

The good news? Microsoft has invested heavily in documentation and training. The bad news? You’ll need to read a lot of it.

Wrap-Up

Azure cloud security isn’t just about buying Microsoft licenses and hoping for the best. It requires intentional architecture, ongoing tuning, and a team that understands both security principles and Azure specifics.

The advantage of Azure is that if you’re already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem, you can leverage a lot of what you already have. The challenge is that cloud security still requires a cloud-centric approach.

Got questions about Zero Trust in Azure implementation, Azure Blueprints, or why Microsoft keeps changing service names? Contact WEI for your Azure or cloud questions. We’re here to help you navigate this stuff.

Next up, we’ll tackle the big question: How do you manage security when you’re using multiple cloud providers? Stay tuned for our upcoming post on multi-cloud security strategies! For questions, please contact WEI or send me a message .

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Migrating to the cloud is more than a technical upgrade…it’s a strategic transformation. At WEI, we seek the latest insights to help our clients navigate this journey. Recently, I attended the Accelerate Your Google Cloud Migration Journey聽session at Google Cloud Next 2025, which delivered a wealth of practical advice, strategies, and real-world lessons for organizations considering or actively planning a move to Google Cloud. Here are my聽highlights and actionable takeaways from the session.

Why Migrate to Google Cloud?

The session opened with a compelling case for cloud migration, emphasizing several core benefits:

• Scalability & Elasticity: Google Cloud enables organizations to scale resources up or down to meet demand, ensuring optimal performance for end users.
• Global Reach: Deploying services closer to customers improves user experience. For example, launching new data centers in regions like Sydney helps meet local demand and reduces latency.
• Cost Efficiency: The pay-as-you-go model and server-less options like Cloud Run allow businesses to optimize spending by paying only for what they use.
• Flexibility & Advanced Tools: Google Cloud offers a suite of AI and machine learning services, giving teams access to cutting-edge capabilities.
• Reliability & Disaster Recovery: Built-in redundancy, load balancing, and backup tools ensure high availability and quick recovery from outages.
• Security & Compliance: Advanced IAM (Identity and Access Management), monitoring, and compliance tools help organizations build secure, compliant environments from the start.

Watch: AWS Security Essentials With Keith Lafaso

A Common Theme Across Hyperscalers

A significant theme from the session is that the core strategies, benefits, and challenges of migrating to Google Cloud closely mirror those found with AWS, Azure, and other hyperscale cloud providers. While each platform offers unique features and tooling, the foundational migration approaches (like rehosting (lift-and-shift), re-platforming, repurchasing, refactoring, retaining, and retiring) are common across all major providers.

The best practices emphasized for a successful migration (thorough planning, detailed inventory and dependency mapping, robust tagging strategies, and a strong focus on security and compliance) are universal requirements, whether moving to Google Cloud, AWS, or Azure.

Hyperscalers provide migration support tools and services, such as Google Cloud Migration Center, AWS Migration Hub, and Azure Migrate, offering centralized platforms for discovery, assessment, and migration management. Likewise, data transfer appliances and services (like Google Transfer Appliance, AWS Snowball, and Azure Data Box) address large-scale data movement needs for all three providers.

The drivers for migration are consistent themes in cloud adoption, regardless of the chosen provider. The importance of hybrid and multi-cloud strategies is also a common thread. Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure all emphasize interoperability, containerization, and flexible workload placement to meet evolving business needs.

In summary, the Google Cloud migration journey shares a common DNA with migrations to AWS and Azure. The same strategic principles, migration frameworks, and operational best practices apply, making lessons learned and tools developed in one ecosystem highly relevant to others. This universality helps organizations leverage cross-cloud expertise and accelerate their digital transformation, no matter which hyperscaler they choose.

Overcoming Migration Barriers

Migrating complex, customized applications (often spread across multiple data centers) can be daunting. The speaker stressed the importance of:

• Team Training: Upskill teams on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) before migration to smooth the transition.
• Inventory & Observability: Use observability tools to create a detailed inventory of applications and dependencies. Understanding what you have is essential before moving anything.

Migration Strategies: The 6 Rs

No two migrations are the same, but most fall into one or more of these strategies:

The speaker鈥檚 favorite? Re-architecting for cloud-native, leveraging containers and server-less to maximize flexibility and efficiency.

Best Practices for a Successful Migration

• Plan Meticulously: 鈥淚f you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.鈥� A robust migration plan is non-negotiable. Start by integrating observability tools like Datadog with your GCP account, providing visibility into your infrastructure, applications, and user experience.
• Tag Everything: A consistent tagging strategy (e.g., environment, team, service) is critical for organizing resources, tracking costs, and responding to incidents. If you鈥檙e not tagging, you鈥檙e doing it wrong.
• Build Dashboards & Reports: Visual dashboards and automated reports keep stakeholders informed and help teams monitor migration progress and performance in real-time.
• Establish Communication Channels: Set up channels (e.g., Slack) for incident response and ensure alerts are routed to the right teams using tags.
• Strengthen Security from Day One: Enable security tools and posture management early. Use IAM for fine-grained access control and continuously monitor for compliance, especially if you operate in regulated industries.
• Leverage Synthetic Testing & SLOs: Synthetic tests simulate user interactions, ensuring applications perform as expected post-migration. Define service level objectives (SLOs) before migrating to benchmark and improve user experience.

Final Thoughts

Every cloud migration is unique. The session reinforced that understanding your current environment, planning thoroughly, and leveraging the right tools and strategies are essential for success. At WEI, we鈥檙e committed to helping you accelerate your Google Cloud migration to minimize risk, controlling costs, and unlocking the full potential of cloud-native technologies.

Have questions about cloud migration or want to discuss your organization鈥檚 journey? Reach out to our team, we鈥檙e here to help you move forward with confidence. I’m also available to connect!

Listen: AWS Networking – VPC Architecture & VPC Networking

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Managing AI workloads effectively is no small task. Organizations must navigate the trade-offs between public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises IT to ensure their AI applications run smoothly while controlling expenses and safeguarding sensitive data. Public cloud services offer scalable computing power, but ongoing operational costs can quickly accumulate. On-premises infrastructure, meanwhile, provides the highest level of control, yet it often lacks the elasticity needed for AI鈥檚 rapidly shifting demands. Private cloud solutions, on the other hand, help address security and compliance needs but may require significant investment in maintenance and management.

The hybrid cloud AI model, integrating public and private clouds with on-premises IT, optimizes AI cloud solutions while maintaining operational control. This approach enables organizations to allocate workloads strategically, executing cost-intensive AI processes where it provides the most significant financial and operational advantage. 

To fully leverage these benefits, let鈥檚 explore strategies for balancing workloads and managing costs and data effectively.

Understanding The Cloud Dynamics

Before diving into optimization strategies, it鈥檚 essential to understand the key differences between public and private cloud solutions, especially regarding AI workloads.

Public cloud platforms provide extensive computing resources that allow companies to scale operations without hefty upfront costs. They are ideal for dynamic data processing and high-compute tasks, but ongoing expenses can quickly accumulate as workloads increase.

In contrast, private cloud environments provide enhanced control over data security and compliance. This option is especially advantageous for organizations managing sensitive information, such as those in finance or healthcare. While private clouds lessen dependence on third-party vendors, they frequently demand considerable investments in equipment and management.

Additionally, on-premises IT offers the utmost level of control and security for businesses handling critical data; however, it often lacks the responsiveness of cloud solutions.

Watch: Get On The HPE GreenLake Gridiron With Special Guest David Andrews

Opting For A Hybrid Cloud AI Approach

Adopting a hybrid cloud AI approach enables organizations to capitalize on the strengths of each environment. By evaluating workload characteristics, such as data sensitivity, processing requirements, and financial constraints, businesses can determine the optimal setting for each task. In this scenario, HPE GreenLake provides the essential tools that tie these diverse environments together.

For instance, less sensitive AI computations may be executed in public cloud environments, while highly secure or data-intensive processes can be run within private clouds or on-premises systems. HPE GreenLake鈥檚 offers a consolidated dashboard that provides a comprehensive view of system performance, usage trends, and resource distribution. This integration allows IT teams to coordinate deployments effectively across all environments.

To implement a hybrid cloud AI model successfully, consider these steps:

• Workload assessment: Analyze and classify AI tasks based on their security and processing requirements. Determine which tasks best suit public, private, or on-premises deployment. HPE GreenLake鈥檚 detailed insights into workload performance and resource utilization assist in making these decisions.
• Integrated management: Leverage HPE GreenLake鈥檚 centralized dashboard to oversee all aspects of the hybrid deployment. Its automated cost-tracking features provide transparency into spending and help adjust resource allocation dynamically, ensuring effective cloud cost management. This continuous monitoring minimizes the risk of overspending while aligning operations with financial goals.
• Lifecycle management: HPE GreenLake streamlines the entire AI and ML lifecycle, from development through testing to production, ensuring that every phase of the workflow is executed efficiently. Organizations can maintain performance and adaptability across different cloud environments by simplifying lifecycle management.
• Enhanced compliance and security: With built-in tools for encryption, vendor management, and compliance verification, HPE GreenLake reinforces data protection across the hybrid landscape. Organizations can quickly implement security policies consistently across public, private, and on-premises systems, ensuring that sensitive data remains safeguarded.

How About Data Control And Security?

A hybrid cloud AI approach allows organizations to maintain data control and security while taking advantage of diverse cloud environments. Sensitive data can be managed on-premises or within a private cloud, while less critical tasks are allocated to public cloud services. This balanced distribution meets regulatory requirements and supports effective cloud cost management.

To protect sensitive information while leveraging cloud benefits, consider these integrated strategies:

• Regulatory compliance and secure storage: Identify AI workloads subject to industry regulations and store sensitive data in environments where security is prioritized. HPE GreenLake鈥檚 compliance tools offer automated checks and audits, ensuring that all deployments meet legal standards across public, private, and on-premises systems.
• Advanced data encryption: Implement strong encryption protocols to protect data processed in the public cloud against unauthorized access. HPE GreenLake鈥檚 centralized security framework simplifies the enforcement of encryption policies, ensuring that all data, regardless of location, remains safe.
• Streamlined vendor management: It is essential to choose cloud providers with strong security measures. HPE GreenLake consolidates vendor assessments by offering a unified management platform that delivers a centralized view of security configurations. This allows organizations to ensure that all cloud providers adhere to the company鈥檚 security policies, reducing the risk of vulnerabilities.

HPE GreenLake鈥檚 platform ensures consistent security and compliance across all computing environments, with its real-time monitoring and automated tools for effective cloud cost management and data security. This integrated strategy empowers organizations to navigate the complexities of hybrid cloud AI deployment confidently and securely.

Final Thoughts

Optimizing AI workloads requires a strategic approach that balances cost, data control, and performance. A hybrid cloud AI model, leveraging the best public and private clouds and on-premises IT, ensures businesses can effectively harness AI cloud solutions. With platforms like HPE GreenLake, organizations acquire the tools to manage hybrid cloud environments efficiently.

WEI specializes in helping businesses make complex cloud decisions. Contact us today to discuss how a tailored hybrid cloud AI strategy can optimize your AI workloads while managing costs and security.

Next Steps: Discover how HPE GreenLake delivers an intuitive and cost-efficient cloud experience that enables businesses to scale, manage, and protect their virtual machines across hybrid environments. This video will highlight the following key benefits:

• Zero Overprovisioning for Better Economics
• Performance for Critical Applications at Scale
• Faster Time to Value
• Seamless Fit for Any IT Environment
• End-to-End Data Protection and Security

The post Optimize Costs And Safeguard Data With This Hybrid Cloud AI Solution appeared first on IT 疯情AV Provider - IT Consulting - Technology 疯情AV.

In the previous posts in this series, we explored the fundamentals of cloud governance, strategies for managing shadow IT, best practices for building a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) and implementing continuous compliance on AWS. As organizations increasingly adopt DevOps practices to accelerate innovation, the challenge becomes ensuring that security is seamlessly integrated into this rapid development and deployment cycle. In this post, we’ll explore how to enable secure DevOps practices on AWS, highlighting key principles and best practices for embedding security into every phase of your development workflows.

How to Integrate Security Seamlessly into DevOps

Integrating security into DevOps means making security a shared responsibility across development, security, and operations teams throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC). The goal is to catch and fix security issues early, reducing risk and cost while improving the overall security posture. By shifting security left, integrating security early in the process, and automating security checks, you enable faster, more secure development.

Key benefits of this approach include:

• Identifying and remediating vulnerabilities early, when they are easier and less costly to fix
• Empowering developers to write more secure code by providing automated feedback during development
• Reducing the risk of security breaches and compliance violations
• Increasing the speed and agility of software delivery by catching issues earlier

However, this shift isn’t without challenges. Integrating security into DevOps requires changes to existing processes, tools, and culture. Development, security, and operations teams must collaborate closely to build a shared understanding of risks and responsibilities.

Best Practices for Secure DevOps on AWS

Here are some essential practices for ensuring secure DevOps workflows on AWS:

Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Use tools like AWS CloudFormation and Terraform to define your infrastructure as code. This allows you to version control your infrastructure, apply security best practices consistently, and automate deployments. By scanning IaC templates with tools like and , you can catch potential security misconfigurations early before they make it into production.

Key benefits of IaC for security include:

• Consistency: Security controls are applied uniformly across all resources
• Traceability: All infrastructure changes are tracked in version control
• Automation: Security checks can be integrated directly into your deployment pipelines

Integrate Security into CI/CD Pipelines

Automate security checks within your CI/CD pipelines to continuously safeguard your applications. Implement tools and practices such as:

• Static code analysis to catch security vulnerabilities in the codebase
• Dependency scanning to identify vulnerabilities in third-party libraries
• Container image scanning to detect security risks in containerized applications
• Compliance checks using AWS Config rules to verify that resources meet security and compliance standards

Fail the pipeline if critical security issues are identified, ensuring that vulnerabilities never reach production. This proactive approach has several advantages:

• Early Detection: Vulnerabilities are caught early in development, reducing remediation costs
• Immediate Feedback: Developers receive quick feedback on security issues
• Continuous Compliance: Every change is automatically evaluated for compliance

Use Immutable Infrastructure

Adopt immutable infrastructure patterns to reduce the risk of configuration drift and ensure consistent, secure deployments. With immutable infrastructure, servers are never modified after deployment; updates are made by provisioning new instances from a known-good configuration. Use services like Amazon EC2 Image Builder to maintain secure, up-to-date machine images. Amazon ECR can store and scan images for known vulnerabilities for containerized workloads, while Amazon ECS or EKS helps manage deployments securely.

Security benefits of immutable infrastructure include:

• Consistency: All servers are deployed from a secure, known configuration
• Reduced Attack Surface: Replacing servers, rather than patching them, reduces the risk of configuration drift and vulnerabilities
• Faster Recovery: If a server is compromised, it can be quickly replaced with a clean instance

Implement Least Privilege Access

Follow the principle of least privilege when granting access to AWS resources. Provide users and services only the minimum permissions they need. Use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles and policies to enforce fine-grained access controls and implement IAM best practices such as:

• Using IAM roles for EC2 instances and Lambda functions to assign temporary, role-based permissions
• Rotating access keys regularly to reduce the impact of compromised credentials
• Enforcing strong password policies and enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA) for added security
• Regularly reviewing and pruning IAM permissions to ensure they align with users’ roles

These practices help to:

• Reduce the Blast Radius: In the event of compromised credentials
• Limit Insider Threats: By controlling access to critical resources
• Maintain Granular Audit Trails: For tracking resource access and activities

Monitor and Log Everything

Comprehensive monitoring and logging are vital to detecting, responding to, and preventing security incidents. Use AWS services like Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail to collect logs and analyze resource activity:

• CloudWatch: Provides real-time monitoring and alerts for AWS resources and applications
• CloudTrail: Records all API activity, offering an audit trail for actions taken within your AWS environment

Aggregate logs from multiple sources to create a single pane of glass for security monitoring and incident response. Enable AWS Security Hub to get a consolidated view of your security posture across accounts and services. With comprehensive monitoring, you can:

• Detect and respond to incidents quickly
• Conduct forensic investigations to determine root causes
• Demonstrate compliance with regulations
• Identify trends for proactive risk mitigation

How WEI Can Help

Implementing secure DevOps practices on AWS requires the right tools, processes, and cultural alignment. WEI’s Cloud and DevOps Services can help you build and scale secure, compliant CI/CD pipelines on AWS. Our certified experts can assist you with the following:

• Assessing your current DevOps practices and identifying opportunities for automation and security integration
• Designing and implementing secure CI/CD pipelines using AWS developer tools and third-party solutions
• Embedding automated security checks and compliance controls into your workflows
• Providing training and enablement to help your teams adopt a security-first mindset

Contact us today to learn more about how WEI can help you enable secure DevOps practices on AWS.

Take Your Next Steps With WEI

Next Steps: WEI, an AWS Select Tier Services Partner, collaborates closely with customers to identify their biggest challenges and develop comprehensive cloud solutions. WEI emphasizes customer satisfaction by leveraging AWS technologies to enhance development, maintenance, and delivery capabilities.

Download our free solution brief below to discover WEI’s full realm of AWS capabilities.

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Over the past decade, the cloud has transformed how businesses deploy and manage their IT infrastructure. The scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency of public cloud solutions like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud have driven widespread adoption. According to a , a growing number of companies are now moving certain workloads back on-premises-a trend known as cloud repatriation or “unclouding.”

As a cloud solutions architect at WEI, I’ve observed that while the public cloud offers significant benefits for many use cases, it’s not always the optimal solution for every application. In fact, customers regularly ask me about the potential for repatriating certain workloads back on-premises. Let’s look into the things you need to consider before implementing a cloud repatriation strategy.

When Cloud Repatriation Makes Sense

An found that 80% of respondents had repatriated workloads from public clouds in the past year, citing issues like security, costs, and performance. Repatriating workloads is a strategic decision; it’s about aligning IT resources with business objectives.

What public cloud solutions offer may sound attractive, but there are specific scenarios where on-premises infrastructure can provide a competitive edge.

1. Predictable, stable workloads: For applications with consistent usage that run 24/7, the pay-as-you-go cloud model can be more expensive than dedicated on-prem infrastructure. Repatriating these workloads can provide significant cost savings.
2. Data-intensive workloads: Applications that process large volumes of data or require frequent network communication between components may experience higher latency and data transfer costs in the cloud compared to a local data center.
3. Regulatory compliance: Industries with strict data residency or security requirements, such as finance and healthcare, may find it easier to meet compliance standards with on-premises infrastructure where they have complete control over data location and handling.
4. Avoiding lock-in: Committing to a single cloud platform long-term comes with risks. A hybrid IT model provides more flexibility to use different clouds and on-prem resources for different purposes.

It’s essential to consider that running the wrong workloads in suboptimal cloud configurations compared to an on-premises environment. Ultimately, determining whether to repatriate workloads requires a careful assessment of your organization’s specific needs and circumstances.

Watch: Capitalizing on the cloud with Nutanix, WEI, and the Microsoft commercial marketplace

Key Risks And Pitfalls Of Cloud Repatriation

Crafting a successful cloud repatriation strategy demands a meticulous evaluation of an organization’s unique requirements and objectives. While potential cost reductions, performance gains, and increased control are enticing, organizations must also carefully weigh the associated challenges.

1. Lack of a clear strategy: Jumping into cloud repatriation without clearly defining your goals is a recipe for failure. It’s critical to evaluate the current cloud environment and dial in factors like cost, performance, security, and compliance to determine which specific workloads are candidates to bring back in-house.
2. Complexity and the cost of data migration: Moving large volumes of data and refactoring applications for on-prem environments is complex. Many organizations underestimate the technical challenges involved and can incur high costs — including cloud egress fees.
3. Loss of cloud benefits: Repatriated workloads may lose out on some key cloud advantages like scalability, agility, ease of updates, and advanced services, which could impact efficiency and reliability in the long run.
4. Increased infrastructure management burden: Moving back on-prem means the organization is again fully responsible for deploying, maintaining, and securing the infrastructure, requiring significant IT resources and skills that may be lacking. Organizations must invest in personnel, infrastructure, and processes to effectively manage and maintain on-premises systems. This can be resource-intensive and requires ongoing attention.
5. Potential performance issues: Ensuring repatriated workloads perform well and are highly available on-prem requires careful capacity planning and building resilient architectures, which can be challenging.
6. Compliance and security risks: This should be the top priority throughout the cloud repatriation process. The on-premises environment needs to be properly configured, monitored, and maintained to ensure compliance with data privacy regulations and protect against cyber threats. Any lapses in security or compliance during migration can have severe consequences.

Success hinges on a balanced approach, considering the organization’s specific needs and the potential benefits and drawbacks of both cloud and on-premises environments. To avoid challenges that may arise in moving your workload back on-prem, a well-thought-out strategy and meticulous execution are essential for achieving desired outcomes.

Watch: AWS Security Essentials With Keith Lafaso

Selecting A Partner For Your Cloud Repatriation Journey

To fully realize the benefits of cloud repatriation for your enterprise, partnering with experienced professionals who can walk you through the process and provide ongoing support can be invaluable.

At WEI, we understand the complexities of this approach. Our expertise lies in developing and executing tailored repatriation strategies that minimize risks and optimize outcomes, such as:

• Conducting a thorough assessment of your current cloud environment and business drivers to determine which workloads are candidates for repatriation.
• Developing a detailed migration plan that addresses timelines, costs, application refactoring, security, and compliance requirements.
• Designing and implementing a modern, cloud-compatible on-premises environment to support the repatriated workloads, leveraging technologies like Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and software-defined storage.
  • Nutanix’s HCI solution combines compute, storage, virtualization, and networking into an integrated platform that simplifies management and enables easy scalability.
  • Nutanix’s provides a software-defined storage layer with high performance and flexible provisioning.
• Providing knowledge transfer and training to your IT staff on managing and optimizing the new hybrid environment.
• Delivering ongoing managed services to offload day-to-day infrastructure responsibilities, allowing your team to focus on innovation.

WEI actively guides you through the cloud repatriation process, enabling informed decisions, optimizing your IT infrastructure, and achieving your business goals. Our comprehensive approach ensures a smooth transition, minimizes disruptions, and delivers long-term value.

Final Thoughts

The ideal IT strategy for most organizations today involves a combination of public cloud solutions and on-premises infrastructure. By thoroughly evaluating your workloads and leveraging the right expertise, you can build a hybrid IT environment that maximizes the benefits of cost efficiency, cloud performance, security, and compliance.

The public cloud will undoubtedly remain a critical part of the enterprise IT landscape. However, as the repatriation trend and my customer conversations show, organizations must continually re-evaluate their cloud strategy to optimize cost, performance, and control.

WEI can help you navigate this complex landscape. With our expertise, combined with technologies like HCI and software-defined storage, we empower your business to develop a successful cloud repatriation strategy and find the perfect balance between cloud and on-premises solutions.

Next Steps: WEI, an AWS Select Tier Services Partner, collaborates closely with customers to identify their biggest challenges and develop comprehensive cloud solutions. WEI emphasizes customer satisfaction by leveraging AWS technologies to enhance development, maintenance, and delivery capabilities.

Download our free solution brief below to discover WEI’s full realm of AWS capabilities.

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It is not uncommon for a homegrown data protection strategy to encounter scalability challenges in an evolving IT environment as demands from rapid data growth, lifecycle management, and ransomware protection inevitably surface. Such was the case for a prominent enterprise software company that was in need of a modernized approach to data protection. With assistance from WEI, the customer evaluated Rubrik’s enterprise-class backup and recovery solution, aiming for a comprehensive enterprise data protection approach that enhanced its cyber resilience against ransomware threats and ensured its
mission-critical workloads were protected at scale.

The implementation of Rubrik’s Zero Trust Architecture, centralized
management platform, and advanced recovery capabilities not only protected
the customer’s AWS and Azure environments from ransomware, but also
lowered cyber insurance premiums, decreased recovery times and simplified
their IT operations.

The Challenge: Securing Data in a Modern IT Environment

How to improve upon an existing data protection strategy while continuing to deliver the software solutions its customers required served as the primary challenge. The company’s existing homegrown data backup solution lacked appropriate database protections, leaving the company susceptible to modern ransomware attacks. The lack of visibility into their cloud workloads also hindered their ability to effectively monitor and manage their cloud backup strategy. Decentralized management tools and reporting challenges made it a challenge to manage backups at scale. These issues impacted the company’s cyber resilience and recovery speed.

Watch: CVS & WEI: Growing Together

Identifying 疯情AV Through WEI’s Intensive Assessment Process

WEI focused on developing deeper insights into the customer’s evolving needs of their IT environment, and through this, identified additional considerations for cost savings and optimizations. This included cloud storage costs associated with utilizing AWS Elastic Block Storage (EBS) for snapshots of the environment versus lower cost storage tiers. To address these challenges and protect the company’s data, WEI needed to transform the company’s backup and recovery strategies and deploy a more effective solution.

WEI leveraged its relationship with Rubrik, a cloud data management and data security solution provider, to help build an effective backup and recovery strategy that addressed the customer’s challenges. Rubrik’s enterprise-class backup and recovery solution provides the comprehensive data protection WEI’s customer needed to fortify its cyber resilience. Rubrik’s Zero Trust architecture offers sophisticated security features for online backups, including unalterable snapshots and both encryption at-rest and in-transit which protect the company’s mission-critical workloads against cyber threats. The solution’s advanced recovery capabilities also improved the company’s cyber resilience program, offering on-demand rapid recovery at scale.

Watch: WEI Lifts United Site Services From Paper-Based Operations

Rubrik’s centralized management platform and single-pane-of-glass interface unify and standardize data management across the software company’s AWS and Azure deployments. Rubrik’s world-class reporting resources also provide the data and essential insights to promote more informed decision making. With tiered storage options, the cloud data backup solution also allows the company to place data in the most appropriate tier to minimize storage-related expenditures.

To demonstrate the operational benefits and cost efficiency of Rubrik over AWS native tools, WEI and Rubrik partnered to conduct a proof of concept (POC) for the customer. During this process, the customer validated the technology and assessed operational improvements that were made possible by the solution. Upon exiting a successful POC, the customer purchased the solution to improve their backup and recovery strategy and achieve significant cost savings.

Measured Outcomes

Improved Backup Management Bolsters Cyber Resilience

A comprehensive enterprise data protection strategy for the client has resulted in streamlined data security to simplify IT management, reduce risk of data loss, and enhance its resiliency against cyberattacks and downtime. The company can also manage backups at scale to accelerate recovery times and elevate operational efficiency.

Substantial Cost Savings & Efficiencies

Replacing its existing AWS native cloud storage services with Rubrik’s low-cost, long-term storage is estimated to save the company approximately $27 million over five years. In addition, the company will also benefit from lower cyber insurance premiums with the new solution’s robust data protections.

Strategic Insights Support Future Planning

Rubrik’s powerful cloud management tool and single pane view offer robust, yet simplified IT management functionality that can help the customer identify optimization opportunities. With increased visibility into the cloud environment, the company can build strategic insights that can drive future planning and enable improved cost effectiveness and data security. The combination of heightened awareness and enhanced management capabilities also empowers the company’s internal FinOps team to monitor cloud spend proactively to identify and justify if rising cloud costs are necessary to support the business or if adjustments are needed for operational and cost efficiency. The savings achieved through better controlled cloud costs can be reinvested in the business to continually develop software solutions that enrich project outcomes and the customer experience.

Watch: World-Class Technology Services By WEI

Talk To WEI Today

WEI’s experienced architects engaged with the customer in meaningful conversations around backup and recovery and conducted a thorough assessment of its existing data protection landscape. Through this process, WEI gained an in-depth understanding of the company’s existing situation as well as its business-specific, forward-looking needs.

To explore the potential cost savings, operational efficiencies, and cyber resilience your company can achieve with a modern backup and recovery solution, contact WEI for an assessment of your cloud data protection strategies.

Next Steps: A shareable asset of this case study may be accessed by selecting the button below.

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In the two previous posts in this series, we first explored the fundamentals of cloud governance and then followed up on strategies for managing shadow IT. A key theme throughout has been the importance of establishing a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) to centralize cloud expertise and drive governance across the organization.

In part three of this series, we’ll dive deeper into how to design and operate a successful CCoE. We’ll cover defining the purpose and composition of a CCoE, establishing a governance model, ensuring collaboration, and measuring success.

What is a Cloud Center of Excellence?

A CCoE is a cross-functional team that leads and governs an organization’s cloud adoption and operation. Its primary purpose is to accelerate cloud adoption by establishing best practices, enabling teams, and driving cultural change.

As the AWS whitepaper Overview of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework explains, a CCoE is comprised of two functional groups:

• The Cloud Business Office (CBO): Ensures cloud services meet the needs of internal customers and business services. Owns functions like organizational change management, governance, and cost optimization.
• Cloud Engineering: Owns infrastructure automation, operational tools and processes, security controls, and migration landing zones. Focuses on performance, availability, and security.

The CCoE helps the organization gain traction, provides expertise, and reduces risks in the initial stages of cloud adoption. However, it’s important to note that a CCoE is not always necessary, it depends on the organization’s specific challenges and context.

Determining the Lifespan of Your CCoE

One key decision in designing your CCoE is whether it will be a temporary or permanent team. The AWS blog post suggests that a CCoE is best thought of as a temporary enablement team, as the cloud will eventually become the “new normal” for the entire IT organization.

The functions of a CCoE, such as cloud platform engineering, security, and compliance, will eventually be absorbed into the broader IT organization as cloud maturity grows. The danger is creating a separate silo for the cloud that persists long-term.

However, some organizations maintain a permanent CCoE to continuously optimize cloud operations. The key is ensuring the CCoE enables rather than gates the rest of the organization. As the Microsoft Azure Cloud Adoption Framework states, when successful, a CCoE model creates a significant shift in IT, moving from a control and operations focus to a broker and enablement role.

Key Responsibilities of the CCoE

The primary duty of the CCoE team is to accelerate cloud adoption through cloud-native or hybrid solutions. Key responsibilities include:

• Helping build a modern IT organization using agile approaches
• Developing reusable deployment packages aligned with policies
• Maintaining a functional cloud platform aligned with operational procedures
• Reviewing and approving the use of cloud-native tools
• Standardizing and automating common platform components over time

To fulfill these responsibilities, the CCoE must collaborate closely with application teams, infrastructure teams, security, compliance, finance, and executive leadership. Establishing a regular meeting cadence and clear communication channels is critical.

Establishing a Cloud Governance Model

A core responsibility of the CCoE is establishing a cloud governance model. This includes:

• Defining policies and standards for security, compliance, cost management, etc.
• Establishing processes for provisioning, incident management, change control, etc.
• Clarifying roles and responsibilities across IT and business teams
• Selecting and implementing governance tools and technologies

The CCoE’s role includes creating an initial governance approach for the cloud, with a focus on automating policies and enabling teams. Over time, cloud governance should become integral to overall IT governance.

Ensuring Collaboration and Support

A CCoE requires ongoing collaboration and support from stakeholders across the organization to be effective. Some key strategies include:

• Securing executive sponsorship to champion the CCoE
• Building a cross-functional CCoE team with representation from IT, security, finance, and business units
• Engaging application teams early and often to understand and meet their needs
• Fostering open communication and providing training to build cloud skills

The CCoE should act as a partner and enabler to the business, not a gatekeeper. Building strong relationships and focusing on customer needs is critical. As VMware Tanzu advises, no matter what phase of cloud maturity you’re in, the CCoE can help improve visibility, drive optimization, maintain governance, and align the cloud strategy with business goals.

Measuring Success and Evolving

To ensure your CCoE is effective, establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure its impact. Metrics may include:

• Cloud adoption rate: Track the percentage of workloads and applications migrated to the cloud over time. This measures the CCoE’s effectiveness in driving cloud adoption.
• Cost optimization: Measure the cost savings and avoidance achieved through the CCoE’s efforts. This could include savings from right-sizing resources, reserved instances, or automated shutdown of idle resources.
• Agility and time-to-market: Assess how the CCoE has improved the speed and agility of deploying new applications and features. Metrics could include the time from idea to production or the frequency of releases.
• Compliance and audit readiness: Evaluate the effectiveness of the CCoE in maintaining continuous compliance. Track the time and effort required to prepare for and pass audits.
• Customer satisfaction: Survey internal customers (application teams, business units) to gauge their satisfaction with the CCoE’s services and support. Use Net Promoter Score (NPS) or similar metrics.

Establish a baseline for these KPIs and set targets for improvement. Regularly measure and report on progress to stakeholders.

In addition to quantitative metrics, also gather qualitative feedback from stakeholders. Conduct regular surveys, interviews, and workshops to understand what’s working well and areas for improvement.

Use these insights to evolve and optimize your CCoE continuously. Some areas to regularly reassess and iterate on include 1) Governance policies and processes, 2) Tooling and automation, 3) Skills and training, and 4) Organizational structure.

Remember, a CCoE is not a static entity. Its structure, focus, and services should evolve as the organization’s cloud maturity and needs change. Embrace an agile mindset and adapt the CCoE to continuously meet the needs of the business.

Getting Started

Building an effective Cloud Center of Excellence takes time and iteration. Start small, stay focused on outcomes, and scale as you learn. Some key steps to get started:

1. Define your CCoE’s mission and objectives
2. Secure executive support and assemble a cross-functional team
3. Assess current state and identify gaps in skills, processes, and tools
4. Establish an initial governance MVP and implementation roadmap
5. Communicate early and often to build awareness and gather feedback

By starting lean and delivering value quickly, you can demonstrate the impact of the CCoE and earn the trust and support needed for long-term success.

How WEI Can Help

Designing and operating a successful CCoE requires deep cloud strategy, architecture, security, and governance expertise. A trusted and proven partner like WEI can help with this.

WEI’s Cloud Strategy & Advisory Services help you align your cloud journey with business objectives. Our certified experts can assist you in developing a comprehensive cloud strategy and roadmap to accelerate innovation and drive value from AWS.

By partnering with WEI, you gain access to deep cloud expertise to help you build and operate a high-impact Cloud Center of Excellence. WEI is your trusted guide for cloud success from initial strategy through implementation and optimization.

Next Steps: WEI, an AWS Select Tier Services Partner, collaborates closely with customers to identify their biggest challenges and develop comprehensive cloud solutions. WEI emphasizes customer satisfaction by leveraging AWS technologies to enhance development, maintenance, and delivery capabilities.

Download our free solution brief below to discover WEI’s full realm of AWS capabilities.

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In the era of digital transformation, enterprises are embracing sophisticated cloud strategies to enhance IT operations and ensure cyber resilience. This WEI blog article explores how businesses are leveraging a mix of public, private, and on-premises cloud models to revolutionize their IT infrastructure while also following best practices for cloud security.

At WEI, our cloud solution experts have keenly followed cloud’s evolution from traditional on-premises to advanced multi-cloud deployments, guiding the development of secure and efficient strategies across various industries. A recent study “From Hybrid Cloud By Accident To Hybrid Cloud By Design” by WEI’s longtime partner, HPE, highlights the growing preference for hybrid cloud among enterprise decision-makers due to its substantial business benefits. Hybrid strategies are tailored to meet specific enterprise needs, enhance organizational agility and data analysis capabilities, and address challenges around redundancy, security, and compliance.

Public and Private Cloud

Public cloud services are celebrated for their ability to scale and operating on a pay-as-you-go consumption model that is perfect for variable workloads, disaster recovery, and development environments. Today, approximately 33% of enterprises leverage a mix of private and public clouds, illustrating how this approach effectively balances flexibility and control.

In contrast, private clouds, dedicated to a single organization, offer enhanced security and control, making them particularly beneficial for businesses with stringent regulatory requirements or sensitive data. Private clouds can be hosted on-premises or by a third-party provider, providing similar scalability and flexibility as public clouds but with increased data privacy and compliance. Notably, about 4% of enterprises rely exclusively on private clouds.

Hybrid and Multi-Cloud

Hybrid and multi-cloud strategies are becoming increasingly prevalent as enterprises combine on-premises infrastructure with private and public cloud services to enhance their IT environments. This setup allows for optimal control and performance with latency-sensitive applications on-premises, while scalable workloads benefit from the cost-effectiveness and elasticity of public clouds, and secure applications utilize the heightened security of private clouds.

According to the referenced HPE report, a significant 33% of companies have adopted this flexible and responsive hybrid model, with an additional 15% employing both private and public clouds alongside on-premises setups. Moreover, many businesses leverage multi-cloud strategies, using services from various providers to prevent vendor lock-in and further optimize performance, costs, and resilience. This combination of hybrid and multi-cloud approaches ensures a robust, adaptable, and resilient IT infrastructure capable of meeting a broad range of business needs.

Choosing the Best Hybrid Cloud Combination for Your Enterprise

To choose the best hybrid cloud combination, consider the following:

• Workload Requirements: Assess each workload’s unique requirements, including performance needs, latency sensitivities, security demands, and compliance obligations. It’s essential to match each workload with the environment that best supports its characteristics. For instance, critical applications that require low latency and high security might be better suited for on-premises deployment, while less critical tasks could be allocated to public clouds.
• Data Sensitivity: Identify which datasets are highly sensitive and require stringent security measures. These should ideally be processed and stored in more secure environments such as private clouds or on-premises data centers. Public clouds can be utilized for processing and storing less sensitive information, where the risk of exposure is minimal and compliance requirements are less stringent.
• Scalability: The hybrid cloud solution should offer the ability to dynamically scale resources up or down based on real-time demand. This flexibility ensures that your enterprise can efficiently handle varying workloads without overinvesting in unused capacity or underperforming during peak times.
• Integration and Management: Opt for a hybrid cloud platform that provides seamless integration and straightforward management across your diverse environments. The ability to manage multiple cloud services and on-premises infrastructure from a single dashboard significantly simplifies operations and enhances overall IT efficiency.
• Cost Optimization: Evaluate the total cost of ownership (TOC) for each hybrid cloud configuration. Consider all related expenses, including initial hardware investments, software licensing fees, and ongoing operational costs. A well-planned hybrid cloud strategy should optimize (TOC) by allocating resources in a manner that balances expenditure with performance and security needs.

Hybrid Cloud: Transforming Data into Intelligence

For enterprises to gain a competitive edge, they need to transform mountains of data into actionable intelligence. The challenge lies in choosing the right strategy to do this effectively. Enter hybrid cloud solutions, as they have proven to be more effective than traditional on-premises systems, which often fall short in extracting valuable insights from data.

Recent findings underscore that cloud-based strategies, whether public, private or a hybrid mix, consistently outperform on-premises-only setups in drilling meaningful intelligence from data. For instance, public cloud users reported a 52% success rate in turning data into intelligence, closely followed by private cloud users at 47%. Various hybrid cloud models also showed strong performance, indicating a clear advantage in utilizing cloud infrastructures.

Cloud systems, especially hybrid clouds, stand out because they are fast and resilient. They process data quicker and more reliable than on-premises setups, reducing downtime and offering flexibility. This is crucial for real-time analytics and regular intelligence generation. Hybrid clouds are particularly adept at handling data from multiple sources, integrating it into a cohesive, consistent dataset across various platforms. This setup not only makes data analytics more efficient but also improves the accuracy of decision-making.

Hybrid cloud supports data management by providing a flexible infrastructure that allows data to be processed and stored in the most appropriate setting. Latency-sensitive and critical applications can be kept on-premises for optimal performance and control, while scalable applications can be hosted on public clouds. Private clouds can handle data requiring high security and compliance. This strategic distribution ensures high performance, enhanced security, and cost optimization, allowing seamless data mobility and real-time analytics.

Challenges of Securing a Hybrid Environment

Securing a hybrid cloud environment is inherently complex due to managing different security protocols across multiple platforms. Each component, on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud, has its own set of security measures and compliance requirements, making it challenging to maintain a consistent security posture. For example, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a common requirement.

The mentioned HPE report highlighted in this discussion shows that private clouds are considered the most secure, with 75% of respondents acknowledging their adequacy for enterprise needs. This is followed by on-premises architectures at 63%, and hybrid clouds at 60%. Public clouds were slightly less trusted, with a 59% security approval rating.

Chart 1: Percentage who said their current strategy is successful at achieving: “providing the right level of security.”

Six Strategies for Securing a Hybrid Cloud Environment

Despite these challenges, several strategies can help secure a hybrid cloud environment effectively:

• Unified Security Policies: Develop and enforce unified security policies across all environments. This ensures consistency and simplifies management. A centralized policy framework helps to maintain control and oversight, reducing the likelihood of security gaps.
• Advanced Encryption: Utilize advanced encryption techniques for data both at rest and in transit. Encrypting data ensures that even if it is intercepted, it remains unreadable without the proper decryption keys. This is crucial for protecting sensitive information as it moves across different environments.
• Regular Audits and Compliance Checks: Conduct regular security audits and compliance checks to ensure that all components of the hybrid cloud meet regulatory standards. These audits help identify and address vulnerabilities, ensuring continuous adherence to security protocols.
• Robust Access Controls: Implement robust access controls to restrict unauthorized access to sensitive data and systems. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) and role-based access controls (RBAC) are effective measures to enhance security by ensuring that only authorized personnel can access critical resources.
• Integrated Security Tools: Use integrated security tools that provide visibility and control across the entire hybrid cloud environment. These tools can help detect and respond to threats in real time, offering comprehensive security management. 疯情AV that offer a unified view of security events across all platforms are particularly beneficial.
• VPNs and Secure Transfer Protocols: Use Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and secure transfer protocols to protect data in transit. VPNs create secure tunnels for data to travel through, minimizing the risk of interception. Secure transfer protocols ensure data integrity and confidentiality during transfers.

Another layer to this complexity is meeting compliance with regulatory standards across different regions and verticals. For instance, a private cloud might be configured to offer tighter security controls suitable for sensitive data, whereas public clouds might be configured for broader accessibility and may require additional security layers to meet certain compliance requirements. Ensuring that each part of the hybrid cloud complies with applicable regulations without sacrificing functionality or performance is a balancing act for cloud security leaders everywhere.

Final Thoughts

Strategies focused on efficient, meaningful, and cyber resilient cloud practices are a must-have in today’s enterprise IT landscape. At WEI, we are committed to helping our clients harness the power of hybrid cloud to achieve their business goals. Our expertise in cloud solutions ensures that your enterprise can navigate the complexities of cloud adoption with confidence, unlocking new opportunities for growth and success. Let us guide you on your journey to an efficient and secure hybrid cloud environment.

Next steps: , Protecting The Edge To Cloud Landscape With An Eye On The Future, to discover the widespread effect of hybrid environments on security protocols. Readers will also identify the joint vision of HPE and WEI for embedding security throughout all operations. It emphasizes the transition from isolated to collective security frameworks, a method reinforced by HPE’s GreenLake platform and vigorously advocated by 疯情AV Furthermore, the document examines new strategies for developing cybersecurity talent and the critical role of Zero Trust architecture, providing practical guidance for improving security in a connected digital landscape.

The post Identifying the Ideal Hybrid Cloud Configuration for Your Enterprise appeared first on IT 疯情AV Provider - IT Consulting - Technology 疯情AV.

Disasters come in all shapes and sizes. From natural catastrophes like floods and fires to cyberattacks and hardware failures, unexpected events can cripple a business’s operations. These seismic events cause downtime – which equates to lost revenue, damaged reputations, and a potential competitive disadvantage.

This is where disaster recovery (DR) comes in. Regardless of your business environment – physical, virtual, or cloud-based – we’ll outline how you can craft a well-defined DR plan to ensure you can bounce back quickly from disruptions, and minimize downtime and its associated costs.

Downtime Is Expensive

Unplanned downtime causes significant financial impact in multiple areas of a business. This leads to:

• Lost productivity
• Increased customer dissatisfaction because they can’t access essential services, which could lead to customers switching to a competitor.
• Potential legal repercussions, depending on the nature of your business and the impact of the outage.

Beyond the , as revealed by a Gartner study, downtime inflicts long-term damage on your reputation. This is why a proactive and robust DR strategy is essential to significantly reduce the risks associated with outages.

Tailoring DR Strategies For Optimal Recovery

An effective DR plan goes beyond a one-size-fits-all approach. It hinges on two key elements: prioritizing critical business functions and carefully assessing them. When conducting this assessment, consider classifying your workloads into three tiers.

• Tier 1: Mission-Critical Applications – These are the heart of your business, responsible for core functions like sales processing or financial transactions. Recovery for Tier 1 applications needs to be swift and seamless, often within minutes of an outage.
• Tier 2: Important Applications – These applications support daily operations but aren’t mission-critical. Think of email servers or internal communication tools. Recovery for Tier 2 applications can be less immediate but should still be prioritized.
• Tier 3: Non-Critical Applications – These are applications used infrequently or for non-essential tasks. Backups are sufficient for Tier 3 applications, with recovery times being less time-sensitive.

Categorizing applications allows you to tailor an effective DR strategy. This ensures you focus resources and recovery plans on the most critical applications, enabling a faster and more efficient overall recovery.

Cloud DR: A Cost-Effective And Flexible Solution

Powering public cloud providers such as AWS and Azure, Nutanix offers reliable DR solutions for business continuity. It’s not just limited to cloud-based applications, though, as this solution is also applicable to both physical and virtual business environments.

Cloud DR solutions offer seamless integration with virtual environments. This means your virtual machines (VMs) can be easily replicated and activated in the cloud during a disaster. This ensures a swift recovery of your applications and data.

For physical environments, cloud DR utilizes software agents installed on physical servers. These agents continuously replicate server data to the cloud, guaranteeing a recent copy is always available for restoration in case of an outage at your physical location.

Some cloud providers even offer bare metal recovery options. This allows you to recover your physical servers onto virtual machines (VMs) hosted in the cloud. This approach is flexible and gets your physical systems back online faster.

Regardless of the business environment, cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) offers several advantages that transform your strategy:

• Effortless Scaling: Cloud resources can be adjusted on-demand to meet specific recovery needs. This eliminates the need for excess on-premises infrastructure, saving you money during normal operations.
• Cost-Optimization: The cloud’s pay-as-you-go model eliminates upfront capital expenditure on hardware and DR infrastructure. You only pay for the resources you use, leading to significant cost savings.
• Geo-dispersed Protection: Cloud providers offer data centers scattered across various geographical locations. This allows for swift failover to a secondary site in case of a disaster, minimizing downtime.
• Remote Management Flexibility: DR sites hosted in the cloud can be set up and managed remotely. This eliminates the need for dedicated IT staff at the secondary location, streamlining your DR operations.

Overall, cloud DR offers a versatile solution for protecting both physical, virtual, and cloud-based business environments. It simplifies DR management, reduces costs, and ensures faster recovery times during disruptions.

Nutanix Clusters And NC2 For Seamless DR

Nutanix, through Nutanix Clusters and Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2), is a terrific option for disaster recovery because it offers several advantages over other cloud providers. Nutanix Clusters is the core offering that provides an on-premise hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution combining computing, storage, and virtualization.

Meanwhile, NC2 allows you to run Nutanix Clusters not just on-site, but also in the cloud, with consistent management experience across both environments. This lets you leverage the familiar Nutanix functionality even when expanding your infrastructure to the public cloud.

The benefits of utilizing both Nutanix Clusters and NC2 are:

• Simplified Disaster Recovery to Public Clouds: NC2 extends the Nutanix environment to public clouds like AWS and Azure, creating a hybrid multi-cloud platform. This makes it easy to replicate your data and failover to the cloud in case of a disaster. Nutanix DR solutions use a tool called Nutanix Cloud Connector (NCC) to handle this process smoothly. NCC orchestrates the failover between your on-site environment and the public cloud you’re using for DR.
• Perfect for Cloud Migration: The familiar Nutanix platform simplifies the transition and minimizes disruption to existing processes. Businesses leverage their existing Nutanix expertise to manage their cloud DR environment.

Beyond The Cloud DR Tools

While cloud resources like Nutanix can be a powerful DR tool, a successful plan requires more than just the adoption of technology. Each organization should also consider the following best practices:

• Identity And Access Management (IAM): Strong IAM protocols ensure that only authorized users can access critical systems during a disaster recovery event. Multi-factor authentication and least-privilege access controls are crucial for safeguarding your data.
• Network Connectivity: Reliable and secure network connections between your on-premises environment and the cloud are essential for seamless failover. Our team of experts at WEI can assist you in designing and implementing a resilient network infrastructure to support your DR strategy.
• Cloud Security: Implement robust security measures to protect your data in the cloud, including encryption and access controls.

Final Thoughts

highlight the importance of protecting your business and data. Cloud-based DR tools offer significant benefits, but they are most effective when paired with meticulous planning.

WEI understands that an effective DR strategy requires a solid foundation as our team simplifies cloud DR. We tailor solutions that seamlessly integrate with your existing infrastructure, handling the intricate setup process for a smooth transition. Our services also extend beyond DR to cover , data center modernization, and more.

WEI’s deep technical bench is equipped to assess your specific requirements and assist you in choosing the optimal solution from our diverse cloud DR portfolio. Contact us today to schedule a consultation with our experts and ensure business continuity in the face of any unforeseen disruption.

Next Steps: When considering the implementation of unified storage, WEI has identified two main options for enterprises to consider: a web-based sandbox or rolling out on-prem. Each approach offers distinct advantages, and businesses should choose the option that best aligns with specific needs and business objectives. Listen as WEI’s Senior Architect & Virtualization Ambassador, explains. 

The post Ensuring Continuity: Why Modern Businesses Need A Solid Disaster Recovery Plan appeared first on IT 疯情AV Provider - IT Consulting - Technology 疯情AV.

Picture this: You’ve just been involved in a minor car accident. Thankfully, you have car insurance, and while you hoped to never use it, it sits available at a moment’s notice. In the business world, that’s the essence of (DRaaS). It’s like insurance for your critical data and applications: it might seem unnecessary at first, but when disaster strikes, you’ll be grateful for the investment.

DRaaS is currently one of the leading managed services due to its unparalleled benefits, customizability, and alignment with specific business objectives. In this article, we will explore its rising popularity and the significant value it offers to enterprises.

The DR Revolution

Let’s quickly begin with the origins of the 3-2-1 rule, which can be traced back to the 1960s. It was during this period that early iterations of the computer entered our everyday world. With the 3-2-1 rule, a third copy of an organization’s most critical data would be stored off-site for disaster recovery purposes. This could be due to a natural disaster or a data breach. Though not in the form of cassette tapes or CDs, this 3-2-1 practice is still very popular today, give or take a few nuances.

Before the days of virtualization, businesses were required to uphold a second data center, which meant investing in extra servers and infrastructure. Moreover, keeping everything synchronized and managing replication across various locations was a burdensome task, particularly with physical hosts. All these factors led to the doubling of infrastructure and expenses associated with DR, making it less feasible for organizations with limited IT agility.

However, the emergence of virtual machines (VMs) and the public cloud marked a shift in the DR landscape. With the introduction of orchestration tools, workflows and recovery processes are now automated – including IP and network changes. This automation simplifies the DR process and makes it more manageable and cost-effective for businesses, allowing them to achieve resilience without the burden of excessive expenses.

As technology advanced, public cloud providers teamed up with VMs to offer , enabling businesses to run VMs in the cloud. This breakthrough led to the introduction of DRaaS to deliver flexibility and stability to workloads.

The era of hybrid cloud and the advent of modern and natural threats paved the way for newer DRaaS platforms so it is important that businesses keep their disaster recovery plans up to speed. says, “The value WEI brings to the table is the expertise in running these newer DR-as-a-Service solutions across various public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP (Google Cloud Platform).”

This specialized skill set of understanding networking, security, and other ancillary services from various cloud providers enables WEI to deliver tailored solutions that meet various business requirements.

3 Reasons To Embrace DRaaS

DRaaS comes in different forms, and provides a host of benefits for any type of business, including:

• Scalability: Whether an enterprise runs 1 or 500 VMs, has 20 servers or 100 servers, understanding the business requirements allows for tailored DRaaS tiers that align with existing VM design and needs. , a network virtualization software, plays a vital role in making the service flexible by enabling multiple networks with the same IP range. This streamlines the DR process and ensures a smoother and more forecasted recovery experience for different customers with overlapping IP ranges. Of course, understanding the business requirements of DR-as-a-Service opens up new avenues of discussion where we can really get into the costing model and determine the importance of applications. The need to be recovered at all, versus the need to be recovered in a day, four hours or even a week. The quicker the recovery time, the more expensive the end solution.
• Cost-effectiveness: Moving to an operational expense model eliminates the need for a license to run it and to own and maintain physical equipment, making DRaaS a more affordable option.
• Efficiency in operations: Opting for the as-a-Service option for DR streamlines manpower allocation compared to maintaining a second data center or working through unnecessary IT personnel skill gaps The security and recoverability features of a public cloud also eliminate the need for physical site maintenance.

DRaaS is an attractive solution, but it’s not one-size-fits-all. It should always align with a business’s specific needs and requirements. The key is defining what applications need in terms of availability and recoverability.

What’s Next For DRaaS?

DRaaS is not going anywhere, and IT leaders should take note. Many WEI customers have experienced pain points that could have been prevented with a reliable and tested DRaaS plan. A robust DRaaS plan plays a critical role in minimizing the impacts of disasters, ensuring business resilience, and preparing for the future.

Business leaders should explore possible scenarios when planning to employ DRaaS. highlights these questions to start the conversation around DR:

• What am I planning for?
• How am I planning to recover my workloads should the worst thing happen?

As DR solutions have advanced to become more accessible and cost-effective, he emphasizes DRaaS’ significance as an “insurance policy” for protecting critical data and applications.

The integration of virtual machines (VMs) and personalized DRaaS in the public cloud environment provides businesses with reliable protection and peace of mind amid the ever-growing threats of ransomware, phishing, malware, and growing natural disasters such as tornadoes and hurricanes.

Final Thoughts

At WEI, we understand that each business is unique, and with increasingly escalating cyber threats, DRaaS is becoming a top priority for companies aiming to establish robust IT infrastructures. Having this service in place is something every business will be grateful for, as it provides the assurance of enhanced resilience and protection against potential disruptions.

Whether you choose VMware on-premises or in the cloud, our dedicated professionals can offer expert advice on managing your workloads to meet your objectives and ensure you’re ready for any unforeseen circumstances.

Next steps: WEI’s Mark Gabryjelski, who has been practicing VMware since 2000, and ESX since 2002, explains in the video below why it is wise to regularly perform an optimization assessment on an enterprise’s cluster infrastructure.

The post 3 Reasons To Embrace DRaaS For Your Business appeared first on IT 疯情AV Provider - IT Consulting - Technology 疯情AV.

There is an ongoing shift to hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure, requiring businesses to adopt agile and seamless approaches to workload management across multiple clouds. IT professionals managing enterprise and legacy applications may initially consider virtual machines for on-premise cloud solutions. However, it may be more beneficial to refactor applications using cloud-native technologies like containers, rather than relying on the lift and shift approach.

A lift and shift method may involve moving from traditional VM environments to cloud-based environments like EC2, EBS, or Azure. However, for most modern businesses, a hybrid approach is the best option. , a pioneer in hybrid cloud infrastructure, offers a viable solution to maintain and streamline operations while meeting business needs.

Introducing The Nutanix Cloud Platform

The Nutanix Cloud Platform is a comprehensive enterprise-grade solution that allows enterprises to build a hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure and support workloads and use cases across private and public clouds. The platform is designed to simplify hybrid cloud management, reduce operational costs, and provide a consistent experience across all clouds. It delivers powerful tools and capabilities that enable IT teams to manage, orchestrate, and automate their cloud operations from a single dashboard.

In this blog post, we explore how the Nutanix Cloud Platform helps organizations accelerate value in multiple cloud environments and build a successful hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure.

Reducing Hybrid Cloud Complexity, Costs

Managing a hybrid cloud can be complicated, lengthy, and costly depending on the state of your existing IT infrastructure. Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2), an extension of the Nutanix Cloud Platform, offers a multi-cloud solution, eliminating the need for third-party cloud management. NC2 enables IT professionals to oversee their workloads in both private and public clouds through a single dashboard, streamlining administration while providing a comprehensive infrastructure view. It’s primarily designed to accelerate your hybrid cloud initiative.

NC2 also provides a range of other benefits, including:

• Simplified Deployment: The pre-configured infrastructure is easy to deploy and can be set up in no more than one hour, allowing you to start running workloads quickly.
• Reduced Costs: NC2 provides a portable license for your business and enables a single management system for private and public clouds, thereby reducing costs and the need for multiple management tools. No more cloud lock ins! IT also helps soften the impact of common hidden cloud costs such as:
  • Cloud instance network performance limits require larger instances
  • Egress out from cloud is greater than anticipated
  • Disk performance requires provisioned IOPS, overallocation of disk, or ultra disk
• Improved Performance: Enable consistent performance across private and public clouds, ensuring that workloads always run at peak efficiency.

Improved Risk Management

The Nutanix Cloud Platform offers comprehensive security features such as encryption, access management, and network security to keep data safe and secure in both private and public clouds. This is crucial in light of increasing cyber threats and helps businesses manage risks in hybrid cloud operations.

Additionally, the platform automates management tasks, reducing the need for manual intervention, and ensuring a seamless and up-to-date cloud infrastructure. It also provides tools such as automation, orchestration, and workload mobility to improve efficiency and reduce downtime and costs.

Accelerating Value In The Public Cloud

The Nutanix Cloud Platform offers businesses a consistent management experience across all clouds, allowing for efficient deployment of workloads and applications. This enables companies to leverage the scalability and flexibility of public clouds without compromising performance or security. Additionally, the platform’s automation and orchestration capabilities enable IT teams to optimize cloud operations, automate common tasks, and focus on strategic initiatives.

Nutanix can accelerate your public cloud journey while maintaining security and compliance standards, offering a 30% cost reduction and decreased risk compared to traditional native cloud solutions. The platform provides additional benefits, including:

• Cloud Bursting: The Nutanix Cloud Platform allows you to quickly scale workloads to the public cloud, providing additional capacity when needed.
• Streamlined Migration: It provides tools to simplify the migration of workloads from on-premises to the public cloud. This reduces the time and effort required to move workloads, ensuring a faster time to value.
• Multi-Cloud Management: The platform provides a single management plane for private and public clouds, simplifying the management of workloads across multiple environments.

Final Thoughts

In a world where enterprises are driven to keep up with ever-evolving market dynamics, the Nutanix Cloud Platform provides the necessary hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure for businesses. It simplifies management and reduces operational costs while improving efficiency by aggregating private, public, and edge clouds into one control plane, thereby eradicating the need for multiple cloud solutions. Furthermore, organizations can benefit from NC2’s comprehensive suite of services that emphasize agility without sacrificing security or compliance requirements.

As a Nutanix partner for over a decade, WEI specializes in pre-sales, design, architecture, deployments, and works closely with clients to ensure a seamless hybrid cloud deployment experience. By utilizing Nutanix products, businesses can achieve increased efficiency, improved visibility, cost-effectiveness, and enhanced security for their critical data. Ultimately, WEI and Nutanix make trustworthy partners for any organization seeking resilient hybrid cloud solutions.

If you’re ready to make the necessary changes to your systems, contact our account team at WEI for more information and a comprehensive hybrid cloud demonstration.

Next steps: WEI recently welcomed Nutanix Systems Engineering Director Michael Berthiaume to discuss how the Nutanix Cloud Platform can help build your hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure. He also identified how it can support workloads and use cases across private and public clouds. Here’s a snippet of the conversation:

The post Unify Hybrid Cloud Deployments With Nutanix Cloud Platform appeared first on IT 疯情AV Provider - IT Consulting - Technology 疯情AV.

On September 28, 2021, HPE announced a for HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform. This platform provides customers with unmatched capabilities to power digital transformation for their applications and data.

These modernizations will further accelerate HPE’s transition to a cloud services company, and give customers greater choice and freedom for their business and IT strategy in the hybrid work environment.

This announcement represents HPE’s entry into three large, high-growth software markets – unified analytics, data protection, and Adoption Framework.

What The New Cloud Services Are

The three new offerings, which add to the growing platform of HPE GreenLake cloud services, allow customers to innovate with agility at lower costs.

The new innovations are as follows:

• : Open and unified analytics cloud services to modernize all data and applications everywhere – on-premises, at the edge, and in the cloud. HPE GreenLake for analytics will be available in the beginning of 2022.
• : Disaster recovery and backup cloud services to help customers address ransomware head-on and secure data from edge-to-cloud. HPE GreenLake for data protection will be available in the beginning of 2022.
• : A comprehensive, proven set of methodologies, expertise, and automation tools to accelerate and de-risk the path to a cloud experience everywhere. The HPE Edge-to-Cloud Adoption Framework is available now.

How HPE GreenLake Analytics Are Optimized For Hybrid Environments

This is HPE GreenLake’s first cloud-native unified analytics and data cloud services optimized for hybrid environments. The analytics enable customers to accelerate modernization initiatives. They are built to be cloud-native which avoids complex data migrations to the public cloud. Now analytics and data science teams can leverage the industry’s first cloud-native solution on premises, scale up Apache Spark lakehouses, and speed up AI and ML workflows.

Included in the new are:

• HPE Ezmeral Unified Analytics: Modernized analytics and data lakehouse platform optimized for on-premises deployment.

• HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric Object Store: Kubernetes-native object store optimized for analytics performance, providing access to all data sets within edge to cloud.
• Expanding HPE Ezmeral Partner Ecosystem: Delivers a rapidly growing set of successful solutions from ISV partners that enable customers to build their analytics engines.

How HPE GreenLake Data Protection Innovation Protects Customers’ Data

Within the September 28 , HPE entered the rapidly growing data protection As-a-Service market with HPE GreenLake for data protection. The new cloud services are designed to modernize data protection, overcome ransomware attacks, and deliver faster data recovery.

The new include:

• HPE Backup and Recovery Service: Backup as a service offering that provides policy-based automation to backup and protect customers’ virtual machines across hybrid cloud environments, eliminating the complexities of managing backup hardware
• HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery: HPE plans to deliver Zerto’s industry-leading disaster recovery as a service through HPE GreenLake to help customers recover in minutes from ransomware attacks.

How HPE Adoption Framework Accelerates Cloud Experience

HPE has also a proven set of methodologies and automation tools to enable enterprises to take a data-driven approach to achieve the optimal operation model across all hybrid work environments – the HPE Edge-to-Cloud Adoption Framework.

The HPE Edge-to-Cloud Adoption Framework leverages HPE’s expertise in delivering solutions on-premises to meet a broad range of business needs for customers across the globe. HPE has identified multiple critical areas that enterprises should consider and measure to accomplish an effective cloud operating system.

Are You Interested In HPE’s New Cloud Services?

HPE is a global edge-to-cloud company helping organizations accelerate outcomes by unlocking value from all of their data. Built on decades of reimagining and innovating, HPE delivers unique, open and intelligent technology solutions. HPE’s new cloud services for the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform allows customers to accelerate innovation, deliver compelling experiences, and achieve high-level business outcomes. If you’re ready to make the change now, contact WEI to begin building a custom solution for your business.

NEXT STEPS: this executive brief to learn the power of the OpEX model for IT investments and find the middle ground for future It investments.

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Within the “CIO’s As-a-Service playbook,” it explains how the previous consumption-oriented model of the public cloud system changed everything. However, the previous consumption-oriented model required IT to buy service and resource capacities themselves, which introduced new risks for CIOs. These limitations were identified when contrasted with the scalability and cost efficiencies of the cloud. IT wants to deliver the public cloud experience their users crave, yet some workloads cannot make that transition and must remain on-premises for many reasons.

As-a-Service not only removes complexity, but it also speeds business outcomes and creates cost savings typically only seen with public cloud. The As-a-Service model enables rapid development of hardware, software, and services anywhere and anytime.

Basics Of The As-a-Service Model And How It Works

The As-a-Service model is an on-demand service available in a pay-per use format. There is no upfront capital investment; instead, CIOs utilize resources and pay for what is actually being used. Usage is determined based on metering technology, with units of measure aligned to the hardware and/or software being consumed.

The As-a-Service model mimics the public cloud experience, but in your own environment or co-location facility. In traditional environments, it’s difficult to predict how much infrastructure will be needed but with the new model it is now easier to scale up or down on-demand. Most organizations over-provision for storage capacity, according to . With the improved forecasting and use of IT resources, the As-a-Service model makes a significant difference.

With this model, companies can get the same cloud experience everywhere – in their on-premises data centers, at the edge, and in multi-cloud environments. CIOs can operate, manage, and control multiple business units and environments from one location. Companies are quickly shifting to hybrid cloud environments, where the workload placement can be determined on a best-suited basis. As a result of these changes, integrating, managing, and gaining visibility across newly complex IT infrastructures has become a challenge, making the As-a-Service model attractive to many enterprises.

Why Invest In The As-a-Service Model?

There are three value propositions for the As-a-Service model. First, in the “CIO’s As-A-Service Playbook“ Jason James, a CIO Net Health professional states, “In the next 12 to 18 months, many CIOs are going to focus as heavily on cost optimization as they are on digital transformation.” By paying only for the capacity that is actually used, CIOs can get a better handle on budgeting and forecasting and avoid the risk of over-provisioning resources.

Second, a study by found undoubtedly faster time to market among users of As-a-Service models. The ability to quickly scale on demand brought efficiencies in meeting deadlines. Additionally, it enabled business units to develop products, applications, and launch new projects even faster than before.

Finally, by optimizing costs and speeding project delivery, IT organizations can focus on more strategic tasks. In the “CIO’s As-A-Service Playbook Paige Francis, a CIO at the University of Tulsa states, “It seems by eliminating the need to manage the hardware piece and the budget piece, more time can be spent on focusing on our users, carving out exactly what they need – without having to spend time worrying about the transition period of one piece of hardware to the next piece of hardware.” Francis also explained that the beauty of the As-a-Service model is when companies can quickly deploy infrastructure and optimize their data centers for fast delivery.

How HPE GreenLake Works With As-a-Service

Many enterprise’s applications and data aren’t appropriate for the public cloud. They are still on-premises for a variety of reasons – security, compliance, governance, or legacy entanglement issues. However, this doesn’t mean these workloads can’t achieve the same cloud experience. Enterprises are switching to more hybrid cloud experiences like HPE GreenLake.

On June 18, 2021 HPE announced plans to offer by 2022. HPE GreenLake offers a wide range of cloud services delivered to your data center, co-location facility, or edge location. It provides the agility and economics of public cloud with the security and performance of on-premises IT. With HPE GreenLake, companies can centralized operations and insights across their entire hybrid IT estate using the As-a-Service platform.

works by allowing you to choose your cloud services. They offer a wide range of pre-configured services like VMs, storage, compute, data protection, or SAP HANA. Additionally, you only pay for what you consume. This allows CIOs to free up capital and gain financial flexibility for their business units to take on new ventures and operations. HPE GreenLake allows you to scale with ease with an installed buffer of capacity.

Are You Looking To Transition Into An As-a-Service Model?

HPE is a global technology leader focused on developing intelligent solutions that allow customers to capture, analyze, and act upon data from edge to cloud. HPE enables CIOs to provide a seamless cloud experience everywhere with its As-a-Service model. If you’re ready to make the change now, contact WEI to begin building a custom solution for your business.

NEXT STEPS: Read our blog on other new announcements at HPE.

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Let’s talk about clusters and clouds. We often associate the word “cluster” with terms such as redundancy, resiliency or workload distribution. IT admins have traditionally turned to clustering bare metal systems such as firewall appliances, web servers, and virtual hosting platforms for years. When we consider the “cloud” we think about characteristics such as limitless scalability, elasticity, and simplicity. Of course, the infrastructure that supports these cloud environments is derived from clustered infrastructures, hidden underneath SaaS and IaaS platforms and are thus inaccessible to customers.

Extend Nutanix Clusters Into The Cloud

But what if you extend your clusters into the cloud? You could have then the best of both worlds. That is what has delivered on, cloud-based clusters that reduce both the cost and complexity of today’s most complicated hybrid networks. Think of their solution as a cluster on steroids. For instance:

• In the same way that you are accustomed to firing up additional virtual machines within your on-premises HCI solution, you can now scale out, not only from a capacity perspective, but a geographical one as well. That’s because you can burst added capacity across multiple clouds in order to meet unforeseen demands from multiple regions of the world.
• What you giveth, you can also take back away. Idle machines cost money in an OPEX cloud model so let you spin down virtual machines and shrink capacities when demand fades in order to save money. Nutanix Clustering does one better than that, however. Not only can you hibernate VMs and their supporting resources, you can even hibernate the bare metal instances that support the cluster itself, saving you bare metal compute costs as well. Then simply resume these instances when they are needed again down the road. In other words, you aren’t just right-sizing your VM capacity, you’re also right-sizing your cluster infrastructure in real time as well. This is especially beneficial for , say for DevOps or seasonal-based businesses.

Watch how to hibernate VMs in this 2-minute demo from Nutanix

• Nutanix cloud-based clusters take redundancy to the next level as well as you can leverage public clouds for high availability and even if your primary workloads reside on-premises. Your disaster ready infrastructure can reside in faraway geographic reasons to ensure ultimate redundancy.

Cloud Like, But Not Cloud Only

The Nutanix HCI stack is available on AWS and Azure bare metal instances, fully extending the power of existing on-premises Nutanix HCI clusters into the cloud. But that doesn’t mean it is a cloud only solution. It also doesn’t mean that you are reliant on any third parties as is the usual case with cloud-based services. Nor are you locked into any particular cloud infrastructure. Using the Prism Central management interface, internal IT remains in complete control of their own environment, calling the shots as they see fit. Admins can now manage any Nutanix node, VM or application within their ecosphere from a single pane of glass. This not only simplifies administration but also allows you to maximize your resources to your mission critical workloads rather than management tasks. All of this allows for seamless integration on a number of levels. Here are three to consider:

1. It redefines the concept of “lift and shift” for applications. While lift and shift migrations might not involve a forklift, it often requires rearchitecting your applications in order to transition them to the cloud. By decoupling applications from their underlying platform, Nutanix gives you the ability to migrate on-premises applications to the cloud with minimal changes, thus saving you time and money.
2. Those applications that must be hosted by your on-premises Nutanix cluster can be modernized in cloud like fashion by allotting them direct access to native cloud services such as AI-based analytics and other advanced digital initiatives.
3. Not only are your applications completely portable now, so are your licenses. Current Nutanix customers can utilize existing Nutanix Capacity Based Licenses (CBL) and apply them to the cloud. Simply reduce or retire your existing on-premises clusters and apply them to the cloud. New customers hosting environments that have consistent workloads may want a commitment-based subscription plan while others may be better off with a pay-as-you-go structure.

A True Hybrid Cloud

There was a time when a network was comprised of a single data center. There was a time when an enterprise utilized a single cloud. Those days are long gone as businesses have evolved with the times, and so has Nutanix. HCI is no longer about on-premises hardware environments. Nutanix clusters are about incorporating all aspects of your hybrid cloud whether it be public or private clouds. Nutanix clusters operate in a borderless vacuum so that you can operate your applications and services in a hybrid estate that is void of confining perimeters. In the same way that the first Nutanix cluster solutions began busting up silos within the traditional data center, they’re now doing the same for multi-cloud environments as well. Nutanix clusters offer you the freedom of the cloud in terms of performance and portability. Exciting, right? Maximize your today by clustering everything into one extended platform.

NEXT STEPS: We’ve helped countless enterprise IT teams transform their business with Nutanix. Leverage our team’s extensive knowledge by with us. Whether you’re consider adopting Nutanix, or if you want to know how to get more value from your Nutanix environment, we’re here to help. .

Where are you in your journey to software defined infrastructure?

In this eBook you will learn about the benefits of software defining your infrastructure, why and how hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) plays a critical role, and compare your journey to SDI against IDC’s 7 essential steps for IT transformation. Click below to download your copy of the FREE eBook today!

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By now you’ve heard of hybrid cloud and while the offerings available might still seem a little… ah-hem… cloudy, we’re here to help you figure out the best mix of cloud solutions for your business, as well as the right cloud model. Today we’re talking about how HPE and Morpheus have teamed up to provide a hybrid cloud experience your IT employees will love.

Hybrid cloud environments take the very best of public cloud and traditional on-premises infrastructure to create a flexible, scalable, and cost-effective solution.

If you’ve determined hybrid cloud is right for your enterprise, the next step is to decide which solution or platform will best suit your needs. In this article, we’ll discuss the partnership between and and how they’re bringing increased value to their customers.

HPE And Morpheus Data For Hybrid Cloud

Before we get into how HPE and Morpheus are working together, let’s discuss what each are doing to support hybrid cloud.

On HPE’s side we have , which offers a template-based approach to management that allows businesses to deploy infrastructure faster, as well as simplify lifecycle operations across compute, storage, and network fabric. In doing so, OneView transforms these resources into software-defined infrastructure and enables IT to increase the speed, agility, and efficiency of application and service delivery.

In addition, offers a public cloud-like experience through pools of compute, storage, and fabric resources with their HPE Synergy offering. In doing so, it reduces operational complexity and increases velocity for cloud-native applications and services.

HPE Synergy, a composable bladed infrastructure that powers workloads within a hybrid cloud environment, offers support for both traditional and cloud-native applications in virtual machines, containers, or on bare metal. By combining software-defined intelligence with a unified API, HPE Synergy is a powerful addition to the HPE ecosystem.

Morpheus Data, created initially as an internal solution to quickly deploy and efficiently manage application stacks across cloud environments, offers a simplified route to hybrid cloud by reducing cost by up to 30% and offers provisioning that’s 150 times faster than competitors, while also closing security holes and allowing enterprises to deploy hybrid-cloud automation with increased speed.

Achieve True Hybrid Cloud With HPE And Morpheus Together

When combined, Morpheus takes HPE’s compute infrastructure and turns it into an instant private cloud, allowing it to more easily integrate with public cloud. The integration provided by HPE OneView offers links to HPE Synergy Server Profiles and utilizes the HPE Synergy Image Streamer for certain deployments.

HPE and Morpheus are also lowering costs by enabling users to make informed choices about workload placement with in-line comparison tools. By offering policy-based governance with role-based access, HPE and Morpheus give assured control, as well as improving resiliency through automated monitoring, logging, and backup policy. Automatic scaling of instances and application clusters also improve flexibility throughout the hybrid cloud environment.

Through this partnership, HPE and Morpheus have helped customers provision and manage, “. And we have seen some powerful results in sectors that include financial services, healthcare, government, and more.”

By partnering with HPE and Morpheus early in their cloud journeys, enterprises can take full advantage of the benefits the two offer, including recommended optimal configurations and power schedules. However, those enterprises well established in hybrid cloud computing can still find significant benefit by utilizing HPE and Morpheus for their hybrid cloud needs.

Together, HPE and Morpheus are solving common issues faced by enterprises around the world, including data siloing, solutions that don’t communicate with each other, and IT’s lack of time or resources.

Where are you on your journey to the hybrid cloud?

As a global, edge-to-cloud company, HPE is helping enterprises around the world implement solutions that improve productivity and reduce costs through hybrid cloud solutions. By partnering with Morpheus Data, which has now grown to serve some of the largest Fortune 1000 companies and service providers in the world, the two are simplifying the hybrid cloud journey and propelling enterprises forward. If you want to explore more about this partnership and how it will work in your environment, contact the hybrid cloud experts at WEI today.

NEXT STEPS: There has been a lot of buzz around hybrid cloud for years, and its growth in adoption has plenty of new players emerging with solutions to support the popular cloud model. There are a few things you can do to future-proof your investment in hybrid cloud, and we’ve created a checklist for you below. Click below to grab your copy of the FREE checklist.

The post How HPE And Morpheus Are Revolutionizing Hybrid Cloud appeared first on IT 疯情AV Provider - IT Consulting - Technology 疯情AV.

WEI often works with clients in both areas of backup and disaster recovery at the same time. We find it’s often beneficial for them to be part of a single strategy since the function of backup and DR relates so closely together (recovering from some sort of event). They do have slightly different goals, however. With backup, you might be looking at a smaller data loss, such as accidental deletion or corruption of files.

With DR, you might be looking at a wider event, such as the loss of a facility, or loss of systems. Considering both backup and DR together as one strategy is helpful because it influences where you place data, where you place your disaster recovery location, and how much it costs to achieve the results you want (in both CapEx and OpEx). Both sides of backup and DR should be factored together. They may ultimately be part of one comprehensive solution.

Let’s take a look at a few common scenarios you should factor in to your backup strategy.

Backup Scenario #1: File Restores

It should come as no surprise that the most frequent restore need comes from users wanting to restore individual files. Most of the time, people have to recover from human-error events. They may have to recover a deleted file, a deleted database or an accidentally deleted email. These tend to require the backup administrator to go back in time no later than 7 days to retrieve and restore an earlier version of the file from the backup set. More commonly, we see people needing to go back to yesterday, last night or the backup from two hours ago. Having to go back later than a week, two weeks or even six months is more often a rare occurrence.

In these cases, only storing a few days’ worth of backups on local storage often covers this type of failure scenario. If your organization stores these types of backups in the cloud and gets requests for earlier than seven days ago, you may need to build in more cost to restore. Not only can this type of cloud-based restore cost you more money, it may also take you longer.

Backup Scenario #2: Server Corruption

If a server becomes corrupted, many clients tell us, “Well, we’re just going to fail over to DR.” Many don’t realize all of the implications of doing that. For example, many customers’ networks are not set up to fail an individual component or an individual server from one location to the other. Some major network changes have to happen first when a server fails from one site to another. It does no good if the server comes up in your DR site but nobody can get to it because the network isn’t configured.

A client may tell us they are really concerned about recovering quickly from server corruption, a server crash, or a ransomware attack like CryptoLocker. Based on that concern, it can change how we architect backup and DR. We may opt to have client backups sitting on fast storage so that recovery can be fast and easy. In this case, though, we may also recommend storing those backups for only 2-3 days in order to reduce the cost on that type of storage. Then, after that first few days, we may recommend tiering the backup data. This can involve sending the backups to another storage tier that stores them for 30 days.

This type of scenario might involve a holistic and hybrid backup solution that involves more than one vendor. Rarely do we find one vendor who meets all of a company’s backup or DR requirements in one solution.

Sample Scenario #3: Virtual Server Environments

This scenario also dovetails with Scenario #2. This is because so many server environments are now virtualized. The proliferation of virtual server environments brings with it new opportunities to streamline and improve backup and DR operations. Unfortunately, this proliferation also brings with it new risks: Multiple virtual server environments may now exist on a single physical server. If something happens to that physical server, its downtime impact may be much more far-reaching.

Depending on the individual recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) for each virtual server environment, WEI may recommend replicating some servers offsite to a cloud provider, while other data is handled differently. There are also newer technologies that handle virtual environments differently than traditional backup applications that were built for the physical world. Some of these methodologies may make sense, like the use of virtual machine full image backups that no longer require individual backups or backup agents for each virtual server.

Protecting business data is always #1

If you’re using laptops, PCs, or cloud software to share and store critical data, this could cause problems on two fronts. First, in today’s workplace, employees expect 24/7 access to files and data from any location and on any device. If you’re not providing this capability, well-meaning employees often resort to “shadow IT” to maintain productivity. But if these are outside the control of IT, they leave files open to attack, and your business open to liability. Second, it’s not a matter of if devices will crash or get lost or stolen, but when. And while it can be challenging to make sure that everything is backed up and you’re ready for disaster, it’s also absolutely critical. If data loss could put you out of business for a few hours, or a few days, it’s time to consider a better solution.

with Windows Server and Microsoft Azure Cloud Services provide two use-case options. Configurations optimized for file data provide a central repository for files and data with fast performance so employees can collaborate more easily and securely. Configurations optimized for backup and disaster recovery help minimize downtime by protecting data and making it fast and easy to recover when disaster strikes. Both offer edge-to-cloud computing solutions with the ability to extend your on-premises solution with flexible, secure hybrid cloud options.

Luckily, HPE’s solutions for file and backup are simple to deploy, manage, and support. They’re a one-stop shop for packaged solutions including HPE ProLiant servers, storage, software, services, and top-selling options, all tested, optimized, and validated with Windows Server and Azure Cloud Services. They are based on HPE ProLiant Gen10 servers that are equipped to meet the needs of midsize businesses. They are ideal for the midsized enterprise in that they are equipped with sufficient CPU, memory, and storage resources to enable the server to be used for file and print, backup and recovery, and hybrid file and backup.

Next Steps: Learn more about how to effectively plan for hybrid backup strategies in our white paper below.

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It offers many , including the ability to tap into large pools of resources, and creates dynamic compute environments through which companies can share files, access additional storage or even fulfill customer requests. How do you choose whether public, private or hybrid cloud is right for you?

Public Cloud vs. Private Cloud

The private and public cloud are very similar, but are . The private cloud is owned by an organization and exists behind its firewall and scope of management. Because of this, it unfortunately can’t be accessed at any time from anywhere, limiting its flexibility. The organization which owns the private cloud controls all resources.

On the other hand, the public cloud can be used without restrictions. The crowd-sourcing-type aspect of this model can keep initial startup costs low, but if data and information are stored for longer periods of time, it can become costly. The two main factors that make public cloud more popular are its overall reliability and the widespread accessibility. The downsides to using a public cloud model are any potential security risks associated with being able to access information or resources from any location at any time.

Hybrid Cloud

The hybrid cloud allows IT leaders to use services and resources from third-party cloud computing providers in a partial manner. They can design a custom strategy to fit their needs while gaining the benefits of both public and private models.

Which Option is Better?

Check out this quick video comparing the three cloud models.

Choosing between the public and private cloud is never an easy decision; that’s why many IT leaders are opting for a hybrid cloud version. At WEI, we strongly support this option and think it can provide the best of both worlds for companies looking to make this transition. If you’d like to assess which cloud computing strategy is right for you, don’t hesitate to today.

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