Cloud or On-Premises? Government Can Have Both

By Ray Miles, Strategic Account Executive

Despite the growth and adoption of public clouds in government, a large majority of their applications remain outside and are maintained on-premises. As the evolution of cloud continues, government customers are faced with making the difficult decisions about which remaining applications should be placed in the cloud and which ones should remain on-premises.

Why remain on-premises?

There are many reasons for keeping applications and data on-premises, including application entanglement, data accessibility and resilience, security and compliance, unpredictable costs, exorbitant egress fees and at times the inability to capitalize on information everywhere.

The next phase of “Cloud First” will require an approach that enables government to innovate and modernize all of their applications and workloads, including those at the edge and on-premises. Organizations will need to connect all of their applications and data to devices to support employees and their customers — and meet their mission-critical objectives.

It is becoming even more complex as environments are starting to incorporate newer technologies for development operations, container management, machine learning operations, virtual machines, storage, high performance computing, data protection and networking to the edge.

Everything as a service delivered on-premises

Several large infrastructure OEMs already have on-premises cloud-like solutions where delivering everything as a service (XaaS) on a FedRAMP-approved platform is quite possible. These are referred to as on-premises XaaS, on-premises consumption-based IT models or on-premises data-center-as-a service (DCaaS) models.

Real-time alerting of monitored control failures and remediation recommendations, as well as continuous synchronization and monitoring controls for compliance, can be built into the architecture to help customers have up-to-date information on what is being monitored and reduce the unintended risks that come from human intervention. This also frees up the IT staff to use their time for more productive tasks.

After joint collaboration on an infrastructure and architecture, the hardware is delivered to the government site and installed behind the government’s firewall for optimum security, yet the infrastructure is owned by the contractor/OEM. The contractor/OEM is responsible for maintenance, availability uptime of the system(s), upgrades, metrics on performance and providing a pay-per-use type billing.

HPE GreenLake

HPE offers a new consumption-based IT model that marks a paradigm shift in the way we operate IT. It focuses on consumption, while radically simplifying IT and freeing up resources. It delivers the best of both public cloud and on-premises IT for customers — so they don’t have to compromise.

HPE GreenLake is a suite of solutions that deliver IT outcomes with hardware, software and expertise on premises with a pay-as-you-go billing metric. It’s a flexible consumption-based model that accelerates the delivery of solutions and allows the system to grow organically as needs change — helping to avoid overprovisioning.

Conclusion

The on-premises data center is now more important than ever. And, with ongoing development efforts from technology companies, they can make it secure, modernized and cost effective. With new consumption-based models for on-premises data centers available, customers can have the best of both worlds.

If you would like to learn more about HPE Greenlake’s consumption-based IT model, please contact me at Ray_Miles@Arrow.com

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