Success Through a Hybrid Data Center Management Framework

The company’s goal was to effectively, efficiently and quickly fulfill IT service requests. It also wanted to have a pay-per-use option for data storage for short-term projects.

Solution

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David Mossinghoff

Managing Director, Forsythe IT-as-a-Service Practice

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Joe Wolke

Director, Forsythe IT Strategy Practice

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The organization defined a cloud strategy and lifecycle framework.

From this it determined that a transition to a hybrid on- and off-premise cloud delivery model made sense for select application workloads.

The company then:

• Established a business case to justify the establishment of a hybrid cloud delivery model in addition to their legacy IT environment.

• Created a “technical service catalog” that defined what services their user could provision in the new model.

• Evaluated and selected service management, orchestration, and automation software.

• Developed a standard workload transformation and migration plans from the legacy environment to the new hybrid environment.

• Evaluated and selected a new converged infrastructure appliance for their on-premise, private cloud environment.

• Assessed and selected off-premise cloud service providers.

Results

The company developed a standard cloud program lifecycle framework, enhanced its use of new and existing enterprise management software tools, improved IT staff project efficiency, and increased its responsiveness to new business requests.

This initiative also provided enhanced security and compliance control over off-premise cloud deployments. The organization also was able to reduce new infrastructure deployment time from two months to less than one week for on-premise cloud deployment and less than one day for off-premise cloud deployment.