Elevology Blog

As everyday consumers themselves, today’s workforce has explicit expectations for mobility that mirror the demands of the customers they serve. In fact, more than 90% of IT decision makers (ITDMs) see enterprise mobility as the critical function for customer engagement, competitiveness, and operational productivity in 2016.1

Enterprise mobility plays a leading role in the digital workplace. However, the digital workplace is transforming how IT services are delivered to endusers. Employees want to access network resources from any device, at any time, and from any location. Not only is this good for employee morale, general satisfaction, and productivity, it also gives the business a competitive advantage, thereby enabling a fast response to market changes and customer needs more efficiently.

Intel® has released Xeon® processor E5-2600 v4 product family delivers the foundation for modern, software-defined clouds. New Intel® SSDs, including Intel’s first 3D NAND drives optimized for cloud and enterprise workloads, deliver fast, dependable data access.

Collaborations with leading cloud software and solution providers, new industry programs help accelerate businesses’ access to enterprise-ready, easy-to-deploy cloud solutions.

The software-defined data center is either an overused buzzword for a sector filled with tire kickers, or the breakout trend of 2016, depending on which industry experts are quoted. Yet IT managers know there’s a profound transition taking place as control of data center gear shifts from hardware to software.

The latest data show they’re allocating budgets accordingly. According to an April 2016 survey, 66% of CIOs plan to expand their use of software-defined data center technologies this year.1 Spending for software-defined data centers is forecast to increase 14% in 2016, although present deployments represent just 21% of data centers surveyed in early 2016.2 For many enterprises, it’s not an option; Gartner estimated that by 2020 75% of organizations will need to implement a software-defined data center3 in order to support the DevOps approach and hybrid clouds they need as part of agile digital business initiatives.

Red Hat, Inc. has announced the general availability of Red Hat Cloud Suite and Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8, helping to bridge the gap between development and operations teams at the scale of cloud computing. With today’s newly-available products, Red Hat now offers a complete, integrated hybrid cloud stack with a container application platform (OpenShift by Red Hat), massively scalable infrastructure (Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8) and unified management tools (Red Hat CloudForms), all available individually or via a single, easy-to-deploy solution with Red Hat Cloud Suite.

A growing number of organizations are building private clouds1, to give them massively scalable and modern infrastructure, while maintaining increased security and control. According to the Red Hat Global Customer Tech Outlook 2016, a global survey of Red Hat customers, private cloud deployments are expected to outpace public cloud by 6x. In addition, development teams are looking to streamline the creation and deployment of new cloud-native applications while IT leadership is hoping to meet growing business demands with cloud-based automation.

Cloud vendors are quick to tout the benefits offered by on demand IT compared to traditional on premise IT service models. Their marketing materials offer many examples of the benefits realized from moving to the cloud for increased service agility, efficiency, and cost savings. The lure of cost savings generated by moving from a capital expenditure to operating expense based, on-demand service is often cited by IT leaders as a key factor in their decision to move to cloud service support.

Indeed many federal agencies have committed significant dollars to the promise of cloud efficiencies and IT cost savings. As of 2014, it is estimated that cloud investments represent 5% of total IT spending, the equivalent of approximately $3B annually (IDC Press Release from 9/16/14).