It’s no surprise that today’s enterprise IT manager is making their journey to the cloud and hybrid IT a high priority, board room discussion. But where are you in this journey? What’s the right path for you and your business? A recent Tech Target whitepaper, has outlined a few ways you can get started in your journey as a solution provider to best help your customers in their adoption of the Hybrid cloud. Below, you’ll find more information on the opportunity and market size and learn how you can take advantage of the growing market.
Opportunity and Market Size
It’s safe to say that cloud computing has turned out to be much more than just a buzz word. Cloud computing has changed the way customers consume infrastructure and applications and the way partners must sell services to their end users.
This has led to the belief that with the fast growth in moving to the cloud, hardware will also become fast extinct. In a recent Tech Target whitepaper, that idea is dispelled as they discuss the key solution components of hybrid cloud, and where exactly hardware fits.
Key Solution Components
It would be easy—but a mistake—to think that moving to a cloud computing solution means that organizations no longer have to buy hardware infrastructure. While it’s true that moving to the cloud helps significantly reduce the need to expand on-premise infrastructure, that doesn’t mean VARs and solution providers won’t have opportunities to sell more hardware. After all, one of the tenets of hybrid cloud computing is the ability to utilize both on-premise equipment with that of VARs or cloud service providers that are hosting customers’ applications and content.
- One technology area where VARs and systems integrators can either purchase or recommend on behalf of their customers is network infrastructure. Getting information to and from off-premise clouds means network bandwidth is essential. In addition to traditional network products like routers and switches, hybrid computing requires the integration of such software technologies as wide area network optimization, network acceleration and high-speed file transfer. After all, being cloud-enabled doesn’t do a lot of good if those very large files customers send to the cloud can’t get there because of bandwidth constraints. VARs and solution providers also will need to step up their game when it comes to enterprise mobility solutions, such as Wi-Fi infrastructure and mobile device management and enterprise mobility management tools.
- Storage also is a strategic technology for hybrid clouds, whether it’s designed to improve customers’ on-site infrastructure or the hosting infrastructure of VARs and integrators. Storage virtualization is an invaluable technology to help expand and logically organize storage cost effectively and as a natural bridge to hybrid clouds.
- On the other side of storage are data protection, backup, archive and recovery. That means VARs need to be up on the latest in backup hardware and software—network backup appliances are becoming increasingly popular in this area for their small size, easy deployment and relatively low acquisition cost.
- Converged Infrastructure brings agility to cloud deployments. Whether a service provider is leveraging converged infrastructure in their own datacenter to provide public/hybrid cloud services or a VAR sells a converged solution to a customer to run a private cloud, Converged Infrastructure allows for simplified ordering and deployment of a cloud optimized stack of server, storage and networking Technologies.
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