It’s time to deliver on the journey to hybrid cloud – to bring the power of automated, on-demand, self-service capabilities within IT’s grasp and begin to accelerate the business.
That’s the opinion of Servaas Venter, country manager of EMC Southern Africa, who says only 43% of business leaders consider IT integral to the business.
“This is because reducing costs is just not enough. Business leaders not only want greater agility, they also want greater control to use technology to solve their business challenges,” Venter says. “They want to build new applications, they want to analyse data, and they want a faster way to consume IT services.”
With their “Journey to the Cloud” IT transformation framework, EMC and VMware have provided a blueprint for IT organisations which saw the benefits of commodity public clouds and are seeking that value for business applications.
The first two phases of the framework – Consolidate; and Virtualise Mission-Critical Applications – helped move IT organisations to virtualised environments, significantly reducing costs for both infrastructure and application licensing. This laid the foundation for integrated IT organisations by enabling converged infrastructure and multiple points of automation.
“Now, IT has the ability to complete the transformation to IT-as-a-Service with EMC Cloud 2.0, which brings together a framework and solutions that are architected, tested and documented to enable rapid service creation,” Venter says.
The EMC Cloud solutions offer the following highlights:
* Self-service, automated, policy-driven Infrastructure as a service – easier for business users to consume, and simpler for IT to manage.
* Integrated automation services that enhance application performance and operations – automated backup/recovery; automated storage tiering; application SLAs; intelligent infrastructure monitoring.
* Enhanced security – secure multi-tenant architecture that ensures corporate information is properly managed for risk and compliance.
* Financial transparency – resource and group-level chargeback services.
* Open API (application programming interface) integration – enable rich data services for legacy and modern applications.
The EMC Cloud Solution 2.0 is built on an architecture that provides the technology agility the business desires. According to Venter, adding new data services or APIs for Web-applications will be as simple as enabling a new service that business users will see in their self-service portal.
Giving business users more granular control over their environments is just a click away in that same self-service portal. Everything is enabled as a service, through either a simple portal or open API.
“It’s time for IT to regain well-deserved respect within the business and have the right tools to enable the agility and services the business needs to compete and succeed.
“To gain competitive advantage and to help make IT more relevant to the business, EMC has also developed the IT Transformation Workshop designed to help customers prioritise their own IT initiatives and create an action plan – with specific recommendations – to accelerate their transformations,” he says.
“The EMC Cloud Solution 2.0 is the framework to help get IT back to driving business value.”
