Cloud is changing at the speed of light.

CTO and CIO say commercial public clouds present serious business-limitations including:
• Loss of control
• Security and data sovereignty
• Latency; and
• Hight TCO

Then, when asked about the inverse – on the barriers and challenges faced to deliver in-house cloud services as part of a private, community or public cloud model, CTOs and CIOs identify:
• Project-risk and high-complexities due to a lack of standardisation
• Risk of vendor lock-in
• Lengthy lead times; and
• High capex.

This is a major problem!

CIOs and CTOs need to realise the promised benefits of cloud computing. But with each cloud strategy alternative offering a unique set of organisational problems and challenges, which cloud strategy, AKA ‘cloud path’ does IT select? 
This paper aims to assist enterprises and their incumbent suppliers and service providers (channel partners), determine and select enterprise IT’s cloud strategy ‘of least resistance.’
 Download White Paper – Selecting IT’s Cloud Strategy ‘of Least Resistance’

Keynotes for Enterprise IT:

• Retain control over your infrastructure and your data
• Retain in-house security capabilities across the entire stack
• Large data sets = LAN to avoid latency and bandwidth issues
• Eliminate data costs with WAN (public cloud)
• Mitigate project risk via pre-engineering & standardisation
• Become a cloud provider, not cloud customer
• Asses each cloud path using five-year TCO capex + opex

Step 1 - Requirements Gathering, Analysis and Definition of Selection Criteria. Documented.

Start with a snapshot | blueprint of the enterprise’s current: Standard Operating Environment SOE. Remember, an enterprise’s SOE is very unique and ultimately, a decision will have to be made. To either:

Step 1.1

Commoditize the enterprise’s software-IP as part of an appliance. That can carry the full SOE software stack: From apps and programmes, to operating systems, to orchestration software options, to hypervisor or bare metal options, all the way down to file and storage system options and choice of OS again. Or;

Step 1.2

Take up an existing appliance, complete with all the necessary functions needed to carry an enterprise’s apps, programmes and operating systems.

This is no easy decision. And there’s simply no way to prove which is the right alternative going forward until thorough quantitative, qualitative and risk analysis is performed to test and asses each alternative. Only then, could the best possible alternative be selected.

Step 2 – Select: Commoditize Your Software-IP | or, Take-up an Existing Appliance

In step 1 we gathered the requirements, done the analyses and had defined the selection | test criteria. Step 2 is all about working through the selection criteria using various processes, tools, system architectures, and methods to determine and select the best possible appliance-alternative. These include:
• LaaS Lab as a Service is ideal for enterprises needing to test-drive real workloads on multiple existing appliances with the view of finding the right one(s), for their business. LaaS is available either over the internet – WAN (Public Cloud), or from Hyperscalers’ network – LAN (Private Cloud)
Find out more - LaaS
• Lab to You is a laboratory that’s sent out to enterprises on loan with all the network, storage, compute and GP-GPU systems needed, to qualify own software-IP in house. Engineering support provided by Hyperscalers; or
Find out more – Lab to You
• HS-Labs are permanent laboratories open to all Hyperscalers’ channel partners and their enterprise customers that are seeking a special level of support in their PoC of commoditising the software makers’ IP as part of holistic appliance(s).   
Find out more – HS Labs

To commoditize this software-IP, Hyperscalers has developed both a ‘design process’ and a utility being the Virtual Machine Performance Management Utility ‘VMPMU’ which together, assists in developing and proving designs for Hyperscale appliances. Pre-engineered and standardised, these appliances offer macro and micro: SDDC IaaS PaaS SaaS providers, including enterprise service providers - IT a newfound means of ‘springing-up’ capacity from any datacentre floor, quickly, reliably, and at a fraction of historical costs. 

Hyperscale Defined: Hardware used by the macro service providers – Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Alibaba.

Growing adoption by small to large cloud service providers.

Tier 1 Original Defined: Hardware currently in use, or planned to be in use by the Tier 1 OEM.