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Three Reasons Your Data Center Is Still Relevant In An Edge-Cloud World

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This guest post is by John Gray, Sr. Product Marketing Manager for Data Center Networking at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. We thank Aruba for being a sponsor.


There is no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted society in a myriad of ways, ranging from being a public health crisis to a stalled economy. I have been fortunate enough to have remained healthy so far and wish the same for everyone else.

The pandemic-related challenges have accelerated the use of technology to act as a digital bridge to get a global populace through this pandemic. And it has really worked, keeping companies moving even without their traditional offices. Here at Aruba and HPE, we have adopted new tools and technologies to quickly adapt to remote working and employing our business continuity plans, just as many of you have had to do.

Some of these tools are cloud-based, with others hosted on-premises. Ensuring reliable, secure connectivity is essential, regardless of where an application is hosted or where a user is connecting from. What is clear to me is that IT infrastructure is now everywhere.  As more and more organization adapt to this new edge-to-cloud reality, existing (and evolving) “data centers” will remain a very important and relevant part of your IT infrastructures for the following reasons:

It’s A Hybrid World

The reality for most organizations is that roughly 70%1 of applications either don’t – or can’t – run in the public cloud for various reasons (legacy, latency, regulatory compliance, security). We expect this will continue for many years and as a result, IT departments should look to optimize operations around the idea that their world will be hybrid.

Cloud Is An Experience, Not A Destination

As a result of the hybrid nature of IT, many enterprises have two divergent operating models – one for cloud and one for on-premises workloads. The good news is that we are finally beginning to see solutions that address this bi-modal operational challenge.  We are very optimistic that many organizations will embrace innovative new solutions that deliver a simplified and consistent “cloud-like” operational experience – including for their on- premises IT resources.

The Definition Of  “Data Center” Is Evolving

Data is now everywhere, thanks to the data explosion at the edge, largely driven by IoT. This has created a digital foundation of edges, data centers, and distributed multi-cloud networks – located in on-prem silos, often replicated several times with sovereignty, and compliance needs driving data gravity.

The shift is on from traditional centralized approaches in large data centers to many interconnected small centers of data where nearly 30 percent of the world’s data will need real-time processing2, analysis and be acted on, driven by IoT, AI, machine learning apps, and workloads.

But as enterprises make this shift, many find themselves unprepared, lacking agility to drive insights in order to act quickly to support their organization’s business objectives. Despite the promise of the cloud to speed delivery of new applications, many organizations’ digital transformation efforts have become more complex, costly, and slow-moving.

Part of what’s slowing down the process is an increasing number of enterprises edges with siloed compute and storage systems connected with disjointed network architectures and operating modules which prevents insights from flowing freely across the enterprise. As more and more organizations adopt hybrid IT (public and private cloud computing) the problem becomes even more complex.

The Next Wave Of Digital Transformation Is Coming – Are You Ready?

What is really needed is a new, architectural approach, one that is edge-centric, cloud-enabled, and data-driven. Ultimately this is all about bringing a cloud experience and unified operating model to IT operators that help them accelerate the IT applications and services they are charged to deliver, wherever they may be processed, be it in a traditional data center, a colocation site, or at the edge – with simplicity, speed, and scale packaged into whatever consumption model works for them.

HPE and Aruba can help you refine and accelerate your edge-to-cloud strategy. To learn more, check out the links below or get in touch with us here.

Aruba Data Center Networking Solutions

Digital Next Advisory Service from HPE Pointnext

1Source: IDC Cloud Pulse Q1 2020

2Source: IDC Report for Seagate: #US44413318