KPIT is a global IT Consulting and Product Engineering partner focused on co-innovating domain intensive, technology solutions for corporations specializing in automotive & transportation, manufacturing and energy & utilities.

Our journey to digital transformation at KPIT started in 2009 with the implementation of Private cloud using VBLOCK architecture from VCE.  Post successful private cloud implementation, we began to move to hybrid cloud in 2012.We were looking for the following from our hybrid cloud deployment:

• Consistent and secure network extension into public clouds
• Seamless capacity augmentation into the public cloud to fulfill surge requirements
• Seamless workload placement to and from public clouds without any infrastructure dependencies
• Single point of management across multiple public clouds

Unfortunately, we soon discovered the challenge of realizing these requirements when forced to navigate multiple, independently managed connections to our various public cloud providers.  Inconsistent connectivity proved to be the downfall of our initial efforts at hybrid cloud.

A New Approach with Cisco Intercloud Fabric

Cisco Intercloud Fabric (ICF) provides us with a different approach.  An approach that establishes one consistent hybrid cloud environment.  Our deployment consisted of the following:

• Cisco ICF deployed as a virtual appliance to minimize the entire deployment and configuration timeframe
• Cisco ICF Secure Extension to establish a highly secure network extension to the provider cloud
• Cisco ICF Director as a unified end user self-service portal and management pane for our cloud and IT administrators.
• Installation and configuration of all the Cisco ICF core services, including cloud security, switching and routing capabilities, workload placement, management visibility, and workflow automation.

Our New Road to Hybrid Cloud

While we are still on this road to hybrid cloud, Cisco Intercloud Fabric has brought significant benefits to KPIT.  It has enabled our end users to create, manage and monitor workloads in our public clouds from a single self-service IT portal.  Our administrators can create custom service catalogues to enable our end users to quickly provision workloads either on private or public clouds.  In addition, workload placement has become astonishingly simple, allowing our users to seamlessly move workloads between clouds with few mouse clicks.

Additional core services such as Cisco ICF firewall and routing have allowed KPIT to securely route inter-VM communications in the cloud. Our confidence in Cisco Intercloud Fabric has allowed us to continue to extend our internal network into the public cloud, essentially making the public cloud a virtual datacenter for KPIT. In fact, we have placed our production Active Directory and other managed services in the public cloud and manage the public cloud as our disaster recovery site for critical services.

Cisco Intercloud Fabric has also made an impact when it comes to management, orchestration, and automation.   VM lifecycle management and approval workflow orchestration has eased our day-to-day operations to a great extent, while Cisco ICF's automation capabilities have enabled us to augment capacity into the public cloud on demand for surge workloads and release the resources once the demand falls.

The promise of hybrid cloud is now real and in our experience successful hybrid cloud adoption is a key milestone to the road to digital transformation.