November 02, 2020

HPE GreenLake now available to SMEs

Paula Fountain
National Practice Manager - HP and HPE, Data#3 Limited

Hybrid Cloud: Are small to medium enterprises (SMEs) missing out?

It’s not a new story, we see it all the time: businesses that have transitioned to digital in a piecemeal way, without obtaining the benefits of a full digital transformation. And we get it. Many businesses have legacy systems, they’re costly and time-consuming to upgrade and the choices are overwhelming. Instead, SMEs chug along using work styles that are relatively unchanged since the 1990s, and try to make the available technology fit.

The thing is, technology can offer businesses so much more than simply relocating data to the cloud. You can get access to the latest software tools and harness the technology to support the way you want to work now: developing new business models, optimising workflows and fundamentally changing how your business works.

Until now, most SMEs had two main options: either purchase, maintain and manage all IT operations on-premises, incurring both capital and operational expenditure; or move everything to public cloud, where IT teams and managers have less control over data continuity and compliance. Either way, it’s an expensive exercise for a smaller business.

A third option, the hybrid cloud, has not been flexible enough to suit the needs of many businesses. Until recently…

Enter HPE GreenLake, a cost-effective true hybrid cloud experience that enables businesses to maintain control over their data and systems. However, GreenLake was designed for the enterprise organisation, and if you weren’t running hundreds of thousands of dollars of infrastructure, it may not have looked like an enticing option.

But HPE have heard the pleas of SMEs and today I’m excited to announce, GreenLake Swift. Swift is the same GreenLake model, now pre-configured especially for SMEs, reducing the workload for already stretched IT teams and bridging the gap between large enterprise needs and small business budgets.

What is GreenLake?

GreenLake is an “everything-as-a-service” subscription model with a suite of software tools. It enables IT teams to manage their on-premises and cloud-based systems and data, all from one elegant and intuitive portal.

Managing a hybrid system

Need to access data quickly, to ensure productive remote workers? Perhaps you’re worried that a local disaster could lead to downtime. If this is the case, your business can benefit enormously from hybrid cloud. If you need to store critical data, you’ll want it on your premises for reliable access, backup and recovery. Keeping these functions onsite means you can maintain tighter control over your customers’ private data and monitor compliance. However, unless you have an integrated monitoring system, your IT team will spend their time on routine maintenance instead of focusing on strategic business opportunities.

How GreenLake Swift can accelerate your business growth

A lack of agility and ability to scale up or down quickly can be a handicap when you’re trying to pursue business opportunities. Small and medium-sized businesses need the trifecta:

  1. The agility of the public cloud, combined with
  2. the security of on-premises data, as well as
  3. predictability of ongoing costs.

Why choose GreenLake Swift?

The simple answer is: it meets the above trifecta, plus it’s easy to provision and implement. GreenLake Swift removes a lot of the guesswork and comes with a suite of tools to simplify management. However, it’s also a cost-effective model that allows you to pay only for what you use, while providing a host of other benefits such as:

Security

Public cloud does have vulnerabilities. The cloud is expected to house 50% of the world’s data by 20251, making it a very attractive attack target. However, 92% of organisations acknowledge a gap between cloud deployments and the maturity of their cloud security, 44% admit to a wide gap2. If this sounds like you, and your team are still working on establishing robust identity and access policies, reducing over-privileged accounts, deploying multi-factor authentication or enabling event logging, then your data in the cloud is not 100% secure.

Bridging this gap also assumes that you have specialists that know how. The fight for cloud skills can be rough for even the largest companies, retaining a team of cloud or security specialists in-house is simply out of reach for many SMEs. GreenLake Swift offers you an on-premises option to maintain security over your confidential and critical data, paired with built-in controls that allow you to monitor and analyse your compliance and security needs.

Lower cost overall

An OpEx cost structure, with a monthly subscription model, means businesses can predict outgoings. With metered usage, you pay only for what you use. Built-in cost controls enable your IT teams to optimise your spend across cloud instances.

Scalable and Agile

GreenLake Swift allows your business to scale up or down as you need, with the additional security of an on-premises capacity buffer to meet demand. Therefore, Swift means swift. Your developers can put apps and projects in market faster to keep your customers and staff happy.

Data insights

GreenLake tools like Hadoop mean you can capture useful data and unlock its value to create new business models. Hadoop also discards useless data, reducing data storage needs.

Improved productivity

Your staff can work more strategically rather than focusing on the day-to-day maintenance of systems and infrastructure.

Control

The GreenLake portal and management console allows you to track exactly what’s happening across your systems and networks, rectify issues quickly and avoid loss of productivity.

GreenLake Swift: the SME solution

Smaller businesses have been left out in the cold when it comes to agile and cost-effective hybrid cloud systems. No more. With GreenLake Swift, you get all the proven benefits of GreenLake, tailored for SME needs and budget constraints.

Talk to Data#3 about turbocharging your business

Data#3 offers simple and fast quotes for GreenLake compute and Storage as a Service for SMEs. All you have to do is answer a few quick questions. Request a quote today.

1. Cybersecurity Ventures. (June 2020). The World Will Store 200 Zettabytes Of Data By 2025. [Online] Available at: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-world-will-store-200-zettabytes-of-data-by-2025-301072627.html
2. Oracle. (2020). Oracle Cloud Threat Report 2020. [Online] Available at:https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/cloud/oracle-cloud-threat-report-2020.pdf