IT organizations are under intense pressure to ensure their infrastructures are fast and agile, which is pushing demand for hybrid cloud solutions. With hybrid cloud, companies have a way to meet their compute, storage, creation and management demands in multiple locations, both on-premises and at off-site facilities, by using hyperscalers. 

Cloud migration is now happening fast. By 2024, most enterprises intend to have $8 out of every $10 for IT hosting go toward the cloud, including private cloud, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS), according to a report by McKinsey and Company.

That report also warns about the frequency of cloud migration missteps, noting that “cost overruns at a global level can add up to more than $100 billion in wasted spend over the course of migration in three years. Left unchecked, the costs of moving workloads to the cloud could wipe out more than $500 billion in shareholder value over that same period.”

Achieving Hybrid Cloud Nirvana

So what’s causing the disconnects—and the cost overruns--between the vision and the reality of hybrid cloud migration? According to Hitachi Vantara, several factors can stand in the way for companies to achieve hybrid cloud nirvana.

First, cloud hyperscalers make it very easy to add compute and storage. Because of that, developers tend to spin up new containers as needed. But rarely do they go back and turn off the lights when they’re done. 

Another obstacle is insufficient staffing. Companies that have even the best intentions of controlling cloud usage are often stymied by a lack of knowledgeable staff. The Cloud Security Alliance, in its study “State of Cloud Security Concerns, Challenges and Incidents,” reports that 79 percent of respondents in its survey had staff-related issues, highlighting that organizations are struggling with handling cloud deployments and a largely remote workforce.

Off-site facilities provide part of the answer in finding cloud nirvana by addressing performance and cost issues, but management can be elusive. Off-site facilities can have security challenges, including the potential exposure to threats or attacks that are inherent when a company’s valuable information leaves the security and control of its own data center.

Hitachi’s Cloud Connection

Hitachi Vantara can help solution providers and their customers address some of the challenges of using off-site facilities with its Cloud Connection strategy. That plan centers around Hitachi’s long-time partner, Equinix. Hitachi has been installing equipment and supporting customer needs at Equinix sites around the world for years. With Hitachi Cloud Connect for Equinix, companies can deploy in the cloud the same enterprise-class security and resilience that Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) delivers in their own data centers. 

The solution provides management, monitoring and predictive analytic capabilities to properly control a company’s storage environment, regardless of location. Deployments that span multiple Equinix locations worldwide and a company’s data centers are empowered from a single location to monitor and review information about all their environments, which provides the tools for better-informed decision making.

For current Hitachi Vantara VSP customers and partners, this option means they now have the same familiar storage in the cloud and getting it up and running at Equinix uses similar processes as those in their own data center. VSP storage at Equinix can connect to and replicate any VSP systems currently in an on-premises data center and vice versa. The storage at Equinix can directly connect to any public clouds a company uses, copying and moving data between storage arrays as needed, regardless of location.

Learn more about Hitachi Cloud Connect for Equinix.

See all the benefits of the Hitachi Vantara and Equinix partnership.