Optimizing Hybrid Cloud Environments with Storage as a Service

Hybrid cloud is a computing environment that combines elements of both traditional data center with public and private clouds. In a hybrid cloud setup, some resources and services are hosted in a public cloud infrastructure, while others are in private cloud or on-premises infrastructure. Such an ecosystem provides the ability to use and manage data infrastructure resources regardless of where data was created or needs to be consumed.

Managing data storage in a hybrid cloud environment – leveraging all of these resources – has its advantages,delivering the flexibility and cost benefits of the cloud while providing necessary control of an organization’s regulated data and critical workloads on-premises. Hybrid strategies also support continued use of valuable on-premises asset investments. However, as data infrastructure becomes more dispersed, so can the complexity. 

When this happens, organizations can end up with locality issues, as well as gaps in data protection coverage. These risks, along with balancing costs, capacity and utilization – added to quality and performance issues – are just a few of many areas of growing concern for organizations with hybrid cloud storage environments. And the complexity of managing it is growing. Consensus is that organizations should plan for data volumes to continue to grow in size and complexity in the next several years, with more and more data being stored in the cloud. 

As we expect most organizations to be operating in a hybrid environment by 2025, they’ll need to get savvy about effective management, and fast. This presents a challenge, because many organizations cite skills and resource gaps as major obstacles to their digital transformation plans.

Closing the gap with Hitachi Vantara STaaS

Storage as a Service from Hitachi Vantara (STaaS), part of the Everflex portfolio of products, can solve for many of these concerns, providing needed support in gaining a more strategic approach around usage. Thereby pointing the way to realizing the full promise of hybrid cloud and of digital transformation.  

Here are just a few important ways STaaS can help you optimize your hybrid cloud environment:

1. Improved data management 

Through more sophisticated data management, STaaS can save organizations money by reducing data storage, backup and recovery costs. Centralizing data management processes and leveraging a single view on performance and utilization enables a strategic approach to assure existing storage is getting used as much as possible, as well as prevent over provisioning. This can also result in increased data availability and accessibility, on top of Hitachi Vantara’s 100% data availability guarantee.

2. Managed and supported

With STaaS, organizations can take advantage of a managed solution that leaves mundane and technical management tasks to a trusted third party. This can not only free up IT resources and solve for skills gaps, but it can also reduce both risks and costs. With dedicated monitoring and reporting that looks closely at things like performance and availability, organizations gain a strategic partner to help them build in efficiencies and optimize use to reduce storage management overhead, improve performance and create better customer experiences. This, along with regularly scheduled and automated maintenance that is part of fully-managed STaaS, means organizations can avoid downtime, security issues and compliance violations, keeping them operational in times when they need it most. 

3. Enhanced performance 

Leveraging a more thoughtful, strategic approach using STaaS, organizations can realize higher levels of performance. Enhanced agility and flexibility mean they can augment storage in ways that optimize configurations and place data more strategically, both on-premises and at co-locations. For example, organizations can store data in ways that assure business critical workflow support or multimedia content delivery is located in closer proximity, fully-supported and prioritized, getting the data where it needs to go as quickly as possible. This drives operational resilience, competitive agility and improved customer experience.

In today's dynamic market landscape, there's a noticeable shift towards the consumption as a service model. At Hitachi Vantara, we're at the forefront of this transformation, offering the most adaptable consumption options. Our approach involves minimized capacity commitments and embraces cloud economics, ensuring that you pay only for the storage resources you actively utilize.

Learn more about how your organization can benefit from Storage as a Service from Hitachi Vantara.

Learn more about Everflex IaaS