How HPE Managed the Challenge of COVID-19
While HPE was doing its part to help organizations across the globe stay up and running, it faced challenges of its own when the pandemic hit.
“Like many organizations, we learned a lot during this event,” said Liz Joyce, CISO for HPE. “We have a good history at HPE when it comes to business continuity and resilience, but even we were not prepared for a global pandemic, so we had to very quickly adapt and react.”
Joyce said HPE has been thinking in terms of a new normal rather than managing through a finite crisis. “How do we work remotely and still get the same or better outcomes, but also keep people safe as they return to work sites?” she said.
From the Information Age to the Age of Insight
The past decade has been all about the information age. It has seemed that everything is now connected to the web and has a sensor, from your phone to your refrigerator and your car. The Internet of Things was born, and vast amounts of data exploded.
“The next decade must be about insights and discoveries that are shared to elevate every human being on this planet,” said Neri. “Today, we are entering the age of insight.” This is where insights and data can combine with other insights and data, and ideas can have ideas of their own, he said. Everything from the edge to the cloud can be connected by a single force to help create a better experience and new opportunities. From analysis at the edge to operations in the cloud, wherever your data and applications are, they will be faster, accessible and more secure.
“This new form of digital transformation is to build an edge-to-cloud platform that connects, protects, analyzes and acts on all your data,” said Neri. This will bring agility to applications to unlock a business’s full potential, he added. The edge-to-cloud platform will allow data to move without constraint.
“Almost 10 years after the public cloud emerged, more than 70 percent of apps and data are still outside the public cloud,” noted Neri. As a result, there exist two divergent operating models, one in the cloud and one on-premises, and organizations are paying to maintain them both, he continued. “In the next wave of digital transformation, we will shift from a cloud-first mandate to a cloud-everywhere mandate,” said Neri.
WATCH: Dive deeper into the new normal of networking.
HPE Shifts Its Platform as a Service Strategy
The world is shifting from large centralized data centers to small data centers at the edge, where data is being collected that is highly distributed. “This new shift demands a common cloud platform that can put the agility and intelligence close to your data sources to create real-time insights everywhere,” said Neri.
Today, public clouds have extended their platforms into the data center in what Gartner refers to as distributed cloud. “The problem is that these solutions were architected to be very centralized and rely on connectivity to their control plane,” said Neri. That’s a challenge for businesses, he said, because “data transfer and egress is expensive.”
HPE announced the next generation of HPE GreenLake cloud services, designed to help businesses resolve the costs and complexity of managing multiple operating models when it comes to their applications. “This will allow you to quickly deliver services to your developers, data scientists and lines of business so that they can create solutions that align with a business’s customers, protect your business from risk and streamline your operations,” Neri said. All the new cloud services can be deployed and run on the user’s choice of 17 pre-integrated, workload-optimized configurations, available in small, medium or large sizes. These solutions can be delivered to the edge, colocation or data center and are pay-per-use and fully scalable.
HPE also rolled out solutions for private clouds, allowing users to generate new virtual machines or containers in as little as five clicks.
To help with cloud services on the intelligent edge, HPE is creating the Aruba Edge Services Platform (ESP). “This product will unify, secure and automate network operations and serve as the foundation for realizing the full potential of the edge,” said Neri. “HPE GreenLake is the cloud that comes to you.”
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