Public clouds offer an incredible breadth of features and services and elastic capacity that allows for rapid application development. Public clouds also offer cost savings, as enterprises must pay only for the resources they consume, and public clouds can scale easily to ensure high availability.

On the other hand, private clouds excel in situations where low latency is critical, or where data sovereignty regulations necessitate specific location requirements. Private clouds can also offer cost savings on operations where capacity consumption is predictable, and many organizations prefer that certain workloads be kept on-premises because of policy, security or compliance requirements.

As the capabilities of public and private clouds continue to evolve, application and data portability enable enterprises to continually choose the best cloud resource for a given workload. But to ensure seamless portability and the cohesive use of resources, organizations need a cloud platform that can deliver consistency across all environments, providing a common set of tools for managing policies, security, compliance and optimization.

Enterprise need to adopt a holistic network infrastructure strategy to cope with the unique performance, security, and management challenges of highly distributed applications, data, users, and devices. Legacy approaches that have relied on manual processes to secure data and applications and control access to them are no longer adequate or sustainable.

The networking industry has recognized these challenges and is addressing them in the form of an intent-based architectural approach that builds on software-defined networking to allow continuous, dynamic network alignment with IT and business policies. This means that application, security, and compliance policies can be defined once and enforced and monitored between any groups of users or things and any application or service – or even between application and services themselves – wherever they are located.

In Hybrid cloud environment it is becoming more and more challenging to maintain a homogeneous enterprise operational model, comply with corporate security policies, and gain visibility across hybrid environments. Cisco Cloud ACI is a comprehensive solution that provides simplified operations, consistent policy management and visibility across multiple on-premises data centers and public clouds or hybrid cloud environments. Cisco Cloud ACI allows customers running Cisco ACI in their on-premises data centers to extend their Cisco ACI policies to public clouds.

Large service provides are also deploying VXLAN EVPN open standard based fabrics. With the industry moving from Frame Encapsulation (MAC-in-MAC) to Packet Encapsulation (MAC-in-IP), many vendors embraced VXLAN within its Data Center Switching portfolio to provide a standards based encapsulation technique. Initially, VXLAN was introduced as a Layer 2 service only, with simple Flood and Learn semantic as Ethernet. Since VXLAN was enhanced with own control plane to overcome limitations of VXLAN Flood and Learn. Multiprotocol Border Gateway Protocol with Ethernet Virtual Private Network (MP-BGP EVPN) was introduced as the control plane, with VXLAN being used in the data plane.

To automate the provisioning of their networks, service providers implement DevOps methodologies and GitOps tools for Continuous Integration/ Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) that is streamlines operations and increases infrastructure agility.

Great demands are placed on a modern server platform. It should not only be reliable and deliver good performance. It must also be possible to scale up and down in a predictable way. Integration with networks, storage platforms, virtualization, and other solutions must be reliable and straightforward. And it must be easy to manage.

A popular way to row all challenges in port is to use a Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution. Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) combines compute, virtualization, storage, and networking in a single cluster. Starting with as few as three nodes, enterprises can easily scale out to match computing and storage resource needs. Hyperconvergence brings cloudlike simplicity on-premises and within a single, easily managed platform.

HCI delivers deeper abstraction and higher automation and scalability than converged infrastructure. HCI simplifies administration by providing a single point of management. HCI fully integrates with your entire data center, eliminating the need for separate servers and network storage and delivering on-demand infrastructure for data-centric workloads.

Enterprises are facing unprecedented challenges storing and managing data. Not only must they handle greater amounts of data, but they must also work with different types of data, much of it unstructured. At the same time, workloads have become more complex and varied and are often distributed across multiple geographic regions.

With the rise of next-generation applications driven by trends like big data and the Internet of Things, organizations are turning to software-defined storage solutions to achieve greater agility, resilience, scalability and cost-efficiency. This approach to storage architecture uses a layer of software to provision, orchestrate and manage physical data storage capacity on industry-standard servers. By decoupling storage management software from hardware, software-defined solutions enable hardware and software to be acquired independently rather than locking organizations into proprietary platforms.

The key to making software-defined storage work is choosing solutions that are fast to deploy and simple to manage, that support multiple workloads and a variety of use cases, and that relieve IT teams of the complexity of managing a heterogeneous collection of storage media.