| |July 20199come in the form of DC evacua-tion, DC consolidation, DC expan-sion or DC extension.DC EvacuationThere are many scenarios where a company uses a third-party DC provider on lease. If the lease is expiring and the company does not want to renew it either for cost or service reasons, it can become a big dilemma to find another pro-vider to migrate to or to establish its own on a stringent deadline. Moving to Cloud using one of the proven DC technologies and ser-vice providers can be a very attrac-tive and an effective option.DC ConsolidationInfrastructure grows organical-ly over time by integrating new technologies and new business requirements. Several loosely con-nected DCs on premises are the re-sult. The costs, overhead and oper-ational complexities also increase with a growing DC landscape. A DC consolidation exercise every few years is quite common in the industry and generally includes a major HW upgrade under a high stakes program. This can be an opportune time to consolidate the disparate DCs and their technolo-gies into a consistent, flexible and agile DC on a Hybrid Cloud. DC ExpansionMost enterprises come to a fork several times in their IT infra-structure evolution in terms of refreshing and expanding their aging HW or converting the whole asset acquisition play into a ser-vice on demand. Expansion is an easier leap to make in which they retain their ownership of their ex-isting on-premises infrastructure while they purchase additional growth on a public Cloud. The two sections of the environment re-main separate with regard to their governance. Hence, there will be less perceived disruption to the existing modes of governance and hence, is a ready use case to launch into Hybrid Cloud.DC ExtensionWhile DC expansion is an easi-er choice to start with, there may come a time when the lack of abil-ity to move workloads between the on-premises and Cloud will hamper IT efficiency and econom-ics. There are proven technologies such as Layer 2 extension embed-ded into leading DC technologies that erase the boundaries between the two environments and make workload movement back and forth into a seamless exchange. However, there could be scenari-os where existing workloads have been designed with location (e.g. IP Address) dependency and hence are required to be in a specific environment. In such cases, DC extension helps enterprises to re-tain the same identity (IP address) for their existing workloads even when they move to a public cloud. This is a very powerful capability that is otherwise very complex to achieve. I have come across a Phar-ma customer who not only moved their applications to Cloud, but, moved their legacy systems also to Cloud for a short while till migra-tion is complete before their even-tual EOL (End of Life).Another low-risk option for enterprises is to first move their Dev-Test environments to Hybrid Cloud, gain experience and then, address their Production environ-ment later. There are even single host environments that one can start with before investing further. These require a relatively negligi-ble investment.The Journey of the FutureHybrid Cloud as a concept has come of age and the technologies supporting it and the existing cap-tive/on-premises environments are highly advanced. There are many enterprises around the world that have taken sure steps in this direction as part of their digi-tal transformation. While the Hy-brid Cloud technologies are ad-vanced and proven, enterprises will still need to contemplate on the right way to begin their indi-vidual journey. They need to learn more about the opportunity, as-sess their specific environments deeply, convince themselves about what it can deliver, and choose the right use case as the launching pad for a long, productive and trans-formational journey into Hybrid Cloud. B.S. Nagarajan
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