Page 24 - GCN, March/April 2016

TRANSITION 2016: NEXT-GEN CLOUD TOOLS
HOW TO ACHIEVE AGILITY
Agencies shifting to the hybrid cloud need to focus on information - not infrastructure.
SPONSORED CONTENT
TOM KENNEDY
VICE PRESIDENT AND GENERAL MANAGER, VERITAS PUBLIC SECTOR
GOVERNMENT AGENCIES
are moving quickly to modernize and transform their technology infrastructure and service delivery. Accelerating that shift means
embracing the hybrid cloud to have workflows, data, and services flow seamlessly between private and public cloud infrastructures. This is essential for maximizing speed, flexibility, and agility.
The hybrid cloud is experiencing the fastest growth rate of any cloud model, with 90 percent of enterprises pursuing a hybrid cloud solution within the next 12 months. However, that extra agility can come with some baggage—possibly higher costs, new risks, and less control.
So agencies looking for extra IT agility need to answer one central question—how do they take advantage of the full promise and potential of the hybrid cloud platform without incurring the corresponding inefficiency, chaos, and
risk? To truly gain the instant scalability, lower infrastructure costs, and freedom to innovate across on- and off-premises environments, agencies need to shift their focus from infrastructure to information.
Embracing this shift means agencies
need extra visibility to uncover, understand, and remediate the blind spots hybrid cloud environments often create as information moves across different platforms. It means agencies must keep all their applications and services healthy—and available—all the time.
It means agencies need to protect, manage, and govern all the data flowing through the complex, multi-vendor hybrid environment. And it means agencies need to create a reliable way to monitor and maintain the efficiency of the complete hybrid cloud system.
Hybrid cloud architectures are inevitably complex. They can quickly become difficult to manage and support. Predictable hybrid cloud services start with the ability to assess
and understand where the different pieces
of the hybrid cloud infrastructure connect
and interact. With nearly limitless potential combinations and interactions among multi- service, multi-vendor cloud and on-premises environments, government agencies need a way to accurately assess their total infrastructure.
Remediating these blind spots and removing the weaknesses can help agencies manage all their data, application, and storage tiers across their entire hybrid cloud environment. This can reduce the risks of downtime, provide predictable service delivery, and ensure data is backed up and protected.
It’s time to embrace the agility of the hybrid cloud. A unified point of control can transform that extra visibility into efficient, automated, and centralized management. Government agencies at all levels are realizing that goal.
This combination of deep visibility and centralized control helps agencies harness the power of their information. They can quickly recover services and applications when they go down, store data where it makes the most sense, embrace cost-effective data protection models, and defensibly delete worthless data.
“Always on” value means government agencies benefit from creative deployments of existing applications, combined with a sound strategy for executing emerging capabilities. Embracing agility means replacing chaos,
risk and inefficiency with the freedom to innovate. This way, government agencies can conquer that triple threat by building visibility, management, security, and governance into every part of the hybrid cloud infrastructure. Embrace the hybrid cloud revolution and accelerate your agency’s cloud adoption plans with confidence.
Tom Kennedy is the Vice President and General Manager, Veritas Public Sector
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