As times progress, the idea of storing all your enterprise’s valuable assets in the public cloud is archaic. Solely utilizing either private or public cloud is limiting to a companies business process. The implementation of a hybrid cloud infrastructure has benefits that prove itself better than a single cloud system.

Hybrid clouds can offer flexibility, resiliency, and faster deployment times, all the while being cost effective. With a multi-cloud environment, workloads are capable to be deployed into the best possible location, private or public cloud, based on its security, scalability, and performance needs. The option to have both clouds permits your company to take advantage of the best solutions offered by a public and private cloud. This allows for firms to keep their private documents and data close to home while offloading low value materials to the cloud. By adopting the hybrid cloud infrastructure, migration to and from clouds is seamless.

Though costs may be low for some sectors of the public cloud, paying for storage and bandwidth will eventually rack up a hefty bill. By adopting a hybrid cloud, IT costs as a whole are lowered. Managing the clouds is less complex allowing for quicker deployment and turnover rates.

Rackware has designed a complete solution for enterprises seeking flexibility, cost benefits, maintenance and management of legacy systems with resources across a vast variety of environments through the utilization of newer technologies like the cloud. Here are the top five benefits that Advanced Hybrid Cloud Management can offer to help resolve company challenges.

1. Activity Efficiency

By recording and retaining all aspects of User and Organizational activities, HCM permits Administrators as well as Users to view, search and detail activities. Among those activities monitored are provisioning, authorizations, metering, cost data, server operations, alerts, failures due to users, organization, certain resources, and or geographies. By allowing users to view activities, HCM offers transparency and knowledge that could be used to assess and refine.

2. Cost and Workflow Improvements

Management teams say they lack adequate control and visibility into cloud costs. Billing by cloud vendors are confusing and don't include sufficient cost breakdowns resulting in the inability of IT management to allocate cloud resources and gauge cloud costs across business units, teams, and geographies. With HCM, management admin can set budgets and policies with alerts and enforce spending limitations for users and sub-groups. Users can stay on track by viewing their current and past usage of resources while staying informed of costs. From current usage patterns and trends, reports can be generated to forecast expenses with the ability to configure alerts for breaches past the budgeted threshold.

HCM logs initial distribution of resources and monitors for uptime, CPU memory stats, power off time, and parked time. Checks are employed to flag and alert server usage. Parking and Unparking resources based on schedule or inactivity can aid in reducing costs. Although metering is handled via cloud APIs, administration can set customized metering costs for datacenter and private environments. With HCM, users can choose from predefined system specifications and associated estimated costs with it before deploying. Additionally, HCM can offer shorter and improved processes that reduces time and resource usage.

3. Simplicity

HCM has allowed for ubiquity across any environment, public, private, and or datacenter, instilling ease and simplicity in data management. Templates that were made in one environment can also be deployed in any other environment without any extra action by users. Images and workloads are configured and ensured to run in target environments and target hardwares. HCM also provides special accommodations for integration with VMware environments like providing additional physical servers, installing and configuring VMware vSphere and adding the new resources to the existing environment.

4. Improved Approval Process and Control

HCM offers a high leveled automation to speed up approval process while maintaining management control. Workflow for budgets, permissions, access and deployment are provided through HCM that can filter audit logs and create custom reports for management.

5. Optimization

Active monitoring and algorithms offered with HCM helps identify opportunities for optimization. Optimization includes accurately sizing a server, identifying candidates for AutoParking via schedule, or trigger based AutoScaling. HCM can spotlight and automatically park inactive and underutilized resources.