Johannesburg, 01 Oct 2020
Digital transformation is an imperative for governments, and using hybrid clouds, virtualisation and everything as a service is the answer to scaling and modernising infrastructure while retaining control over cost, security and compliance.
This is according to speakers at an HPE webinar on Robust IT Infrastructure for Government, hosted in partnership with ITWeb this week.
HPE experts said now more than ever, it was crucial for the government to improve public sector efficiency and service delivery by transforming its infrastructure and the digital tools it uses to enable its employees.
Manageability and scalability
Tsoanelo Takaendesa, HIT pre-sales at HPE, said: “The most important thing government CIOs should be focusing on right now is finding solutions that are easy to manage and monitor, especially with the challenges of lockdown in which administrators are sitting at home remotely monitoring and managing infrastructure. They also need to ensure they can easily scale up their infrastructure to meet growing and changing demand.”
She pointed to solutions such as HPE Nimble Storage disaggregated HCI (dHCI), which delivers a hyperconverged experience that includes business-critical speed and resiliency alongside independent scaling of compute and storage.
Moving further into cloud
Francois Aucamp, GreenLake sales lead at HPE, said governments and major enterprises were now moving into the next wave of digital transformation. “In the first phase, applications that could be moved to the cloud were moved. But around 70% are still outside the cloud and many of these are business critical applications which could need to be recalibrated or may never be ready,” he said.
“Through HPE GreenLake we can help bring the benefits of the public cloud to those applications that live in the data centre and on-site environment. It brings the cloud experience to you through a self service portal, allowing you the ability to request and provision those in real time, with a pay per use model which enables you to scale up or down, and it can be managed for you.”
Among the benefits, he said, were that this simplifies capacity planning, governance and compliance. It helps accelerate digital transformation with a 75% shorter time to deploy digital projects, delivers 85% less unplanned downtime and a 30 to 40% capex savings due to reduced overprovisioning; as well as enabling up to 40% increased IT productivity by reducing the load on IT.
Sarel Naude, HPE solutions architect, noted that everything as a service (XaaS) had been cited by Gartner as one of the key trends government CIOs should be focusing on now.
“XaaS covers the full range of services and offers an alternative to legacy infrastructure modernisation,” he said. “Organisations today need fast access to resources and the pay as you go economics of the public cloud.” However, he said, there were still objections to public cloud, such as security and privacy concerns, lack of features, and vendor lock-in. This was driving uptake of private and hybrid cloud.
“For government organisations, HPE has found the hybrid cloud model to be beneficial because it offers a very realistic IT environment,” he said.
Enabling remote workforces
Christopher Mphatsoe, CTO and solutions architect at HPE, said Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) as a service presented an important solution to the challenge of enabling a remote and mobile workforce while ensuring security and compliance. “With VDI, data is stored centrally and users can access it from any device. If the data is kept in the data centre it is secured, and it is easier to manage, patch and update,” he said.
“One use case in the public sector is where a department uses VDI to minimise the need for expensive desktops and mobile devices, while minimising security risks in the environment. Another use case we see a lot is in the high performance application space – such as high res scans, MRI scans and CAD drawings. With centralised infrastructure, users are able to share expensive infrastructure to support highly graphical content. VDI has been around for some time, but we are seeing growing demand especially from the public sector, healthcare and banking.”
VDI as a service based on HPE GreenLake consumption model – a pay per use model – offers a cloud-like on-premise experience, Mphatsoe noted. ”The entire VDI stack with compute, storage, hypervisor and application layer is consumed as a service, and billed per user. This means you don’t have to invest upfront for your infrastructure, and you avoid overheads you don’t utilise.”
Share