Hybrid cloud solutions blur the line between on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud architecture to give enterprises more options and flexibility.
See below for several case studies to see how organizations and IT teams in various industries are using the hybrid cloud:
1. Grupo Empresarial las Américas
Grupo Empresarial las Américas (GELA) is a group of health care companies with a presence in Florida and throughout Latin America. Group members include clinics, oncology labs, general medical research labs, and outpatient facilities.
GELA needed a hybrid solution that allowed it to increase service quality and maintain consistent capacity and performance across IT-heavy facilities in multiple markets. This system needed to be hardened against disruptions, like weather-related outages and data loss, and capable of performing ongoing automatic data syncs and updates.
An IBM Advanced Business Partner, ne Digital, helped GELA deploy hybrid cloud technology and build an elastic cloud spanning local and IBM-owned data centers. The result is a balance between local control and the resilience of public services. The hybrid cloud also helps GELA comply with data governance rules in their regulated environment.
Industry: Health care
Solutions: VMware hybrid cloud, IBM Cloud Bare Metal servers, SAN-backed storage
Outcomes:
- Increased service availability by 93%
- Consolidated to a single platform for on-premises and cloud workflows
- Fewer personnel needed to manage cloud infrastructure
See the full case study on GELA and ne Digital.
2. West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District
The West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District in New Jersey recently had several intertwined IT needs for many of their schools. Distance learning requires infrastructure flexibility and stability, as many education administrators learned in the pandemic.
The district chose VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware Site Recovery tools to help scale digital operations and span their presence across on-premises and cloud-based IT. Their infrastructure must deliver an equitable experience for all students, whether in the classroom or carrying out lessons over a distance.
The school district needed a hybrid cloud solution that would make it easy to move workloads without refactoring them as well as support virtual classrooms and distance learning apps for as many as 10,000 students and instructors at a time. AWS helped the district fully realize their desired level of flexibility and provided the tools needed for data backup and recovery.
Industry: Education
Solutions: VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware Site Recovery
Outcomes:
- 75% lower hardware costs after migration
- Infrastructure can scale up and down depending on remote workload and telepresence class sizes
- Full disaster resiliency due to newly created redundancies
See the full case study on West-Windsor Plainsboro Regional School District and AWS.
3. McKesson
McKesson is one of the oldest health-focused companies in the U.S., dating back to the mid-1800s. The company has several subsidiaries, like Rexall Health and CoverMyMeds, and a presence in Canada and Europe that provides medical, surgical, and pharmaceutical research, distribution, and logistics services.
McKesson wanted a hybrid cloud partner that could help address their private cloud pain points and facilitate a shift of some services to the managed public cloud to better support patients and their lifestyles.
“We can now say we’re fully private cloud. Having said that, our private cloud needs grew by quite a big margin,” says Vijay Thumma, director of cloud services, McKesson.
McKesson worked with Rackspace to reduce their dependency on dedicated servers as much as possible and secure their complex health care workflows. These changes came with disruptions that were ultimately beneficial due to convenience, resilience, security improvements, and better data governance for compliance purposes.
Industries: Health care, medical, pharmaceuticals
Solutions: Microsoft Azure, managed private cloud on VMware, application services, DevOps
Outcomes:
- Expansion of private cloud to public cloud to meet expanding customer needs
- Smaller dedicated data center footprint, despite growing physical services
- Centralized IT infrastructure and reduced operating costs
See the full case study on McKesson and Rackspace.
4. Money Mart Financial Services
Money Mart Financial Services is a company with 600 branches across Canada and the U.S. They specialize in money transfers, payday and other loans, check cashing, and several other services.
The company’s tech stack had not changed much since their founding. As their client base grew, the company recognized the need to expand and modernize their IT footprint, build new channels for delivering financial services, and set the stage for cloud-enabled growth.
Money Mart worked with Cisco to implement several hybrid cloud solutions, bring down IT costs, and consolidate their tech stack into a more manageable, centralized solution. Despite being geographically diverse, each Money Mart location and customer enjoys the same reliable access to the company’s overarching IT infrastructure and suite of services.
Industry: Financial services
Solutions: Cisco HyperFlex Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI), Cisco AppDynamics
Outcomes:
- Realized $3.5 million in savings over three years on IT operational expenses
- Built a simplified single-pane-of-glass IT management solution
- Refocused key staff from IT administrative tasks to value-adding business tasks
See the full case study on Money Mart and Cisco.
