Common Business Challenges Facing

Cloud Customer
The service-oriented architecture and hardware virtualization offered by cloud computing has
increased its demand from companies looking for utility and autonomic computing.

Also, the mass endorsement of cloud-based architecture has been a result of the easy
availability of computers and storage systems along with high-capacity networks.

So, what are the common business challenges customers are experiencing?

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In this course, we are going to look at the

following FOUR business challenges and the unique sub-
challenges the customers are experiencing:

Data

• Security and Privacy

• Compliance
• Portability
• Availability and Reliability

Management

• Interoperability
• Lack of Resources and Expertise
• Governance
• Managing Multiple Clouds

Cost

• Lack of visibility
• Poor Application Architecture design
• Lack of Accountability
• Sprawl

User Experience

• Applications
• Access
• Collaboration
So how can you help customers solve these business
challenges with Lenovo Cloud Solutions offerings?
A successful cloud strategy means thinking about the whole lifecycle – from securely and
rapidly migrating your customer's data, to managing it all, and helping it grow with them.

You will begin by not limiting yourself to only offering one or two solutions. Lenovo
recognizes every customer’s cloud journey is unique and as a result, we fully support the
following cloud platforms.

• Amazon Web Services (AWS)

• Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
• Microsoft Azure
• Red Hat Hybrid Cloud
• VMware Hybrid Cloud
• Nutanix Hybrid Cloud

We also have partnered specifically with Microsoft, VMware, Nutanix, and Red Hat to
provide validated engineered solutions on Lenovo's industry-leading infrastructure platforms.
Whether it be a completed customized cloud solution on ThinkSystem Servers and Storage or a
more completely turnkey ThinkAgile solution, Lenovo can design a cloud solution that will
address customer's specific business problems.

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Data Challenges
We live in a digital age, where data discovery and big data simply surpass the traditional
storage and manual implementation and manipulation of business information.

Organizations are searching for the best possible solution for handling data. Traditional
spreadsheets no longer serve their purpose - there is just too much data to store, manage, and
analyze. Be it in the form of online BI tools, or an online data visualization system, a company
must address where and how to store its data. Even the most traditional sectors must adjust.

A significant part of the adjustment is the implementation of cloud, whether it be public,

private, or hybrid.

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Within the data challenges are the following

smaller subsets:
Security and Privacy

Compliance

Portability

Availability and Reliability

Let's discuss each subset in more detail.
Security and Privacy
When we say security and privacy, we are talking about customers' user data and where that
information physically sits.

Customers set policies for not sharing confidential data or any data that matters to the users.
However, there is always concern about the actual location of the data, where it is stored and
processed. Elevating these concerns for organizations are the many potential cyberattacks,
hacked API and interface, compromised credentials, etc.

Before implementing or continuing a cloud journey, customers must evaluate the cloud
computing platform and check their Data Protection policies to see how it will affect their
current and future plans.

There has been a misconception that having confidential information in the cloud instead of
in-house servers could make it more susceptible to hackers. Hence, fear of security risks has
been one of the primary reasons why businesses have hesitated to implement or continue
cloud strategies.

However, as the popularity of cloud has grown, cloud vendors have made considerable
efforts to propel its security to advanced stages. Customers must look to a partner who can
assist them with these decisions and help tailor their unique solution to address their specific
security and privacy challenges.

Compliance
One of the data challenges organizations face today is compliance. Even if an organization is
only using backup services or cloud storage, it is faced with being compliant with industry
regulations and laws for every time it moves data from the internal storage to a cloud. For
example:

• Healthcare organizations in the USA must comply with HIPAA (Health Insurance
Portability and Accountability Act of 1996)
• Public retail companies must comply with SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002) and PCI
DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard).

Cloud customers need to look for vendors that can provide compliance and check if they are
regulated by the standards they need. Some vendors offer certified compliance, but in some
cases, additional input is needed on both sides to ensure proper compliance regulations.

Organizations need to be able to comply with regulations and standards, no matter where its
data is stored.

Depending on the industry and requirements, every organization must ensure these
standards are respected and carried out.
Portability
Portability is how easily can an organization move their data from on-premise to the cloud
and back or from one public cloud provider to another.

With the different laws over data in different countries, every global organization wants to
migrate data in and out of the cloud when needed.

Ensuring data portability is very necessary. Usually, customers complain about being locked in
the cloud technology from where they cannot switch without restraints.

• There should be no lock in period for switching the cloud.

• Customers must have capability with their data to integrate efficiently with the on
premises and cloud resources.
• Customers must have a proper contract of data portability and must have an updated
copy of the data to be able to move it, should there be any urgent requirement.

Availability and Reliability

Organizations expect their data to be available whether it sits in a private or public cloud or
sits on-premise in a SAN. They also expect the data to be intact and reliable.

The data and the services that are utilized to access it should always be available irrespective
of the external condition. A customer plan must be designed to reduce the system failure rates
and more importantly increase the availability and reliability of a particular server or service.
And the key behind it is the redundancy and failover features that are core to cloud platforms.
This extends to the computing resources as well for its availability, operability, and reliability.

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Lenovo Cloud Solutions for Data

Challenges
Cloud adoption has become standard practice among most enterprises looking for flexibility,
efficiency, and agility.

This means organizations need to understand best practices and take advantage of
exciting new tools to ensure proper management of data at rest, in flight or in the
cloud.
Lenovo is positioned to play a critical role in a customer’s data management, aiding them in
their organizations’ deployment and optimization of their cloud solution and meeting their
desire to have the right data in the right place at the right time for both operational agility and
economic efficiency.
 Why Do Customers Trust Lenovo?

Lenovo can help your customer understand key risk considerations and help them develop
solutions that deliver intrinsic security at the infrastructure layer and apply policies at the
application layer that are deployed consistently across environments.

Reason 1
#1 in Reliability

With the right data management strategy, Lenovo helps organizations get the most from
their cloud deployments by supporting a full range of data-centric actions, including:

• Security
• Data migration
• Data sovereignty
• Data protection and more

And to get the most from data management, Lenovo helps IT decision-makers make smart,
thoughtful choices about enterprise storage hardware and software.

Reason 2
Industry Leading Supply Chain Security

Lenovo covers this in our cloud workshop for customers. In the workshop we will discuss
security and compliance strategies used for Private and Public environments. Identify security
and regulatory requirements applicable to client's use-cases. Identify guidelines for operating
Infrastructure as code. For example, Configuration Management enforces OS configs,
Orchestration enforces 3rd party deployment standards, vNets, Code Promotion etc.
Reason 3
Highly Ranked in Customer Satisfaction

For more than 6 years, Lenovo has delivered the best uptime among Intel x86 servers
according to the annual ITIC Reliability Study. Lenovo’s Trusted Supplier Program has been
recognized as an industry leader by experts in supply chain security. Gartner recognized
Lenovo as a Top 35 Supply Chain in the world since 2013, and International Data Corporation
(IDC) also praised Lenovo’s auditable supply chain as “best practices” in the industry. And
Chain Security, LLC, a leading supply chain security firms in the United States, spent almost
three years examining Lenovo’s security processes, corporate governance and supplier
programs and determined that Lenovo is “ahead of the industry” in its commitment to these
areas. Finally, 1H19 marked the 11th consecutive North America-based TBR study and fifth
consecutive EMEA- and APAC-based TBR study in which Lenovo outperformed Dell EMC and
HPE in overall x86-based server customer satisfaction. Today, Lenovo remains highly ranked,
and TBR believes the results reflect Lenovo’s ability to consistently meet customer expectations
for high-quality hardware across multiple regions.

Let's discuss further about how Lenovo Cloud Solutions take care of
customers' data challenges.

End-to-end Data Management

Lenovo data management is architected and implemented for requirements from the core
(data center) to the edge to the cloud. Additionally, those solutions offer enterprise-wide
support that is engineered into the storage and software from the start, not bolted on after the
fact.

Security and Data Protection

Security is an integral element of cloud data management, and Lenovo solutions protect data
in motion, at rest and in the cloud.

The solutions help organizations to quickly recover from data breaches by delivering disaster
recovery on prem or in the cloud impact. And, encryption-based data protection is resident
across the storage infrastructure in the data center, on the edge and in the cloud. Lenovo can
provide additional extended services that can include security and compliance governance at
the virtual compute, storage, and networking layer. Lifecycle management of OS ensures
security and compliance, with reports proving that it is updated with best practices.

Additionally, Lenovo ThinkShield offers built-in protection from delivery to deployment

updates, and Lenovo Services provide essential support across the entire system lifecycle.
Product level highlights: self-encrypting drives, Intel Chip Level Security, etc.
Data Protection for ThinkAgile: Native Capabilities and Partner Integrations

Integrations
Lenovo data management solutions seamlessly link with leading public cloud platforms
including Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, IBM Cloud, Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud, as well
as with major enterprise applications and workloads, regardless of whether they reside on
premises or in the cloud.

Intelligence and Automation

• Automated functionality to ease implementation
• Reduce risk and free up IT teams to work on more strategic issues.
• Support embedded analytics for future-proofed data management, delivering superior
long-time economic and operational value to the organization.

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Management Challenges
Managing the cloud is not an easy task for an organization.

Organizations must have the ability for a complete control of their cloud environment. As a
result, it has been one of the most disruptive forces in the IT world over the last several years.
While a cloud solution offers your customer a lot of advantages, they must establish an
efficient organizational cloud management strategy. The organization’s strategy will be defined
by overcoming numerous technical challenges.

Let's discuss some of those technical challenges your customers will face.
Interoperability
Organizations must have the ability for their current systems to work efficiently and
collaborate effectively across different cloud and on-premise platforms. It is an essential
element in their cloud strategy as they seek to mitigate vendor lock-ins, ensure business
continuity, and navigate through fluctuating workloads.

• Shared processes, APIs, containers, and data models across a multi-cloud environment
to enable communication between application components.
• Dynamic discovery of application components, along with real time data
synchronization.
• Positive outlook towards diversions. The most rewarding adventures often start with
an unexpected detour. Perhaps that distraction will guide your customer onward.

These requirements centered around data and application component synchronization

across various cloud platforms make interoperability a challenging proposition! Ultimately your
customer is looking for the freedom to retain their current systems and take advantage of new
cloud solutions they choose.

Lack of Resources and Expertise

As the usage of cloud technologies is increasing, tools to manage it are getting sophisticated,
finding experts on top of this in cloud computing is becoming a bottleneck to many
organizations. It is complicated process and migrating an organization to a cloud solution
requires an experienced team with the proper knowledge and skill set to meet its complex
demands.

For this reason, organizations see the value in seeking out partners to help them implement
and manage the process, finding it an easier and most cost-effective approach.

Governance
In today’s cloud-based world, IT does not always have full control over the provisioning, de-
provisioning, and operations of infrastructure. This has increased the difficulty for IT to provide
the governance, compliance, risks, and data quality management required. To mitigate the
various risks and uncertainties in transitioning to the cloud, IT must adapt its traditional IT
governance and control processes to include the cloud.

To this effect, the role of central IT teams in the cloud has been evolving over the last few
years. Along with business units, central IT is increasingly playing a role in selecting, brokering,
and governing cloud services.

IT teams will rely on their chosen vendors to assist them in determining governance policies
as they implement cloud solutions.
Managing Multiple Clouds

Instead of using a single cloud, companies today are using multiple public and private
clouds. Managing a multi-cloud environment if not approached properly can hinder overall
management of the resources for the organization. Organizations will need to use proper tools
that will include control cost management, automations, auto-scaling and allow them to
manage the environment efficiently as possible.

Organizations will need to have an experienced partner with experts who can guide them in
determining the best multi-cloud management solution.

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Lenovo Cloud Solutions for

Management Challenges
Lenovo provides a variety of cloud management solutions to address customer requirements
within any operating model or ecosystem.

Lenovo can help your customers build cloud management around ThinkSystem data center
infrastructure to construct customized cloud infrastructure for any cloud operating model.

Lenovo can also leverage the management of our ThinkAgile based solutions that will take
advantage of our partners native management capabilities of pre-integrated and validated
solutions for Microsoft, VMware and Nutanix software-defined platforms.

The ThinkAgile portfolio provides management for any cloud operating model (single cloud,
multi-cloud, hybrid cloud) with both private deployments and leveraging public cloud
providers, whether for seamless hybrid cloud or integrated hybrid IT operations such as cloud-
connected backup or DR. The management can even support IoT/Edge use cases and
operations with VMware, Nutanix, Microsoft and public cloud provider services.
Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group
(ISG) has a vision to:
• Provide Cross-platform Operational Intelligence across all of these data center, cloud, and
edge/IoT solutions
• Help customers more effectively plan, optimize, and efficiently operate their applications and
workloads on any data center, cloud, or edge infrastructure with full operational awareness,
insightful analytics, and optimal guidance
• Maximize the value of customer's IT investments and successful business-driven outcomes

ISG Hybrid IT for Data Center, Cloud and Edge: Providing Differentiated Customer Choice and
Ecosystem Enablement

Let's discuss further about how Lenovo Cloud Solutions take

care of customers' management challenges.

Interoperability
Lenovo’s partnership with other industry leaders provides our customers with the ability to
minimize the risks with interoperability challenges that arise from their cloud journey.

VMware
A customized cloud-like experience can be developed by customers or Lenovo services using
additional VMware SDDC software platform components and vRealize operations,
orchestration, and automation.
vRealize
vRealize can also be used to orchestrate and arbitrate workload deployments among the
VMware-based HCI and the major public cloud providers, offering a multi-cloud model for
customers with a diversified cloud strategy built on partner certified Lenovo solutions.

Vmware SDDC
VMware has also partnered with AWS, GCP, and Azure to host the VMware SDDC platform on
public cloud provider-managed infrastructure (running ESX with NSX and vSAN) -- delivering a
common operating platform spanning both on-premise and cloud provider infrastructure to
enable seamless hybrid cloud operations.

Vmware Cloud (VMC)

This “VMware cloud (VMC)” offering is delivered as a managed service by VMware, with
customer or Lenovo services configuration and integration of the on-premise VMware
infrastructure.

Microsoft
Microsoft provides multiple platform offerings with Lenovo that can be used to manage a
customer’s cloud vision.

The Azure Stack Turnkey Cloud

The Azure Stack turnkey cloud platform may be operated as a hybrid cloud model when
connected to Azure public cloud, as well as a private cloud deployment when in disconnected
mode. The hybrid cloud mode enables seamless operations between the on-premise Azure
Stack infrastructure and Azure public cloud. Azure Stack includes all the orchestration, self-
service, connectivity, multi-tenancy, and scalability necessary to deliver a cloud operating
model, with no customized development or integration required.

Azure Stack HCI

The other option is the Azure Stack HCI platform which delivers a Microsoft-based hyper-
converged infrastructure for the WSSD solution (Windows Server Software-Defined). Azure
Stack HCI also includes integrated hybrid IT services with Azure public cloud, such as backup,
site recovery and Azure AD.

Microsoft System Center Suite

Using Azure Stack HCI, a customized cloud experience can be developed by customers or
Lenovo services using the additional Microsoft System Center Suite software portfolio. System
Center Suite can also be used to orchestrate workload deployments among the Azure Stack HCI
and the major public cloud providers, offering a multi-cloud model for customers with a
diversified cloud strategy.

Azure IoT management services

Additionally, for edge operations, Microsoft provides Azure IoT management services hosted
within Azure public cloud. Azure IoT Hub provides coordination and manageability across
Azure IoT Edge deployments, which may be further secured with Azure IoT Sphere. Azure IoT
Hub may also be operated on-premises with Azure Stack, enabling a private cloud-to-edge
solution.

Cloud and Edge with ThinkAgile MX and SXM: Microsoft based HCI foundation and Turnkey
Cloud for On-premise, Private Cloud, Multi-Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, and IoT Edge Operations
Nutanix
A customized cloud-like experience can be developed by customers or Lenovo services using
additional Nutanix software products like Calm, Flow, Beam, and Prism Central.

Calm and Beam

Calm and Beam can also be used to orchestrate and arbitrate workload deployments among
the Nutanix HCI and the major public cloud providers, offering a multi-cloud model for
customers with a diversified cloud strategy.

Xi Leap
Nutanix also provides a turnkey hybrid IT service, Xi Leap, to deliver integrated DR, with
virtualized instances and storage replicated to Nutanix-hosted data centers.

Xi IoT
For edge operations, Nutanix provides Xi IoT services hosted by its own data centers, as well
as hosted by AWS and GCP public cloud providers.

Cloud and Edge with ThinkAgile HX: Nutanix based HCI foundation for On-premise, Private
Cloud, Multi-Cloud, and IoT Edge Operations

Red Hat
The Lenovo Physical Infrastructure Provider for Red Hat CloudForms provides IT
administrators the ability to integrate the management features of Lenovo XClarity
Administrator with the hybrid-cloud management capabilities of Red Hat CloudForms.

Lenovo expands physical-infrastructure management for on-premise cloud configurations

extending the visibility of connected physical and virtual infrastructures. This facilitates the
configuration, monitoring, event management, and power monitoring needed to reduce cost
and complexity through server consolidation and simplified management across physical and
virtual component boundaries.

Lack of Resources and Expertise

So how does Lenovo help customer compensate for lack of
resources and expertise?
Lenovo starts by acknowledging customers are moving their workloads to the cloud they're
discovering that it isn't easy to do and it takes time to build a cloud for their unique business
needs and experienced staff to not only deploy it but manage it. Lenovo begins setting the
customer up for success at the start of the customers engagement with us on their cloud
journey. Here are the steps we bring customers though on their journey.

Initiate Phase
Project kick off (Pre-Sales)

Lenovo to perform necessary logistics and coordination to plan and schedule the deployment
and configuration plan with support from customers. Activities may include developing high-
level milestones to track the execution of cloud implementation and identifying key resources
from customer’s side

Discovery Phase
Cloud Workshop

Lenovo conducts a white-board workshop to understand customer requirement, identify

gaps and gather technical details for a right-sized cloud solution. In the discovery phase, Lenovo
gathers baseline information on customer’s business needs, future vision for application
delivery, existing application portfolio and the current application delivery environment.

Delivery Phase
Design and Deploy

Based on findings from the workshop and assessment, Lenovo Professional Services
conducts architecture design sessions to formulate a suitable implementation plan for
deploying and configuring the Cloud Solution with functional test validation.
Project Close
Knowledge Transfer

After configuring, testing, and validating that the solution is up and running for the customer,
Lenovo Professional Services will conduct knowledge transfer session with the customer to
address additional questions related to the implementation.

Additional Facts about Lenovo's Expertise

Lenovo does not leave the customer after the project closes, we continue to be there for
them with around the world and around the clock, our experts are standing by 24x7 to
safeguard their IT investment.

Additional Fact 1
Customers Peace of Mind
Lenovo’s partnership with VMware, Microsoft, Nutanix and Red Hat gives customers peace of
mind that their staff will be able to quickly gain the expertise to manage their cloud
environment. Because we can provide a cloud solution with the partner of their choice it is a
shorter learning curve because of the familiarity of the existing management interface.

Additional Fact 2
Lenovo’s Open Cloud Automation
We can also take it a step further for customer currently looking at a Red Hat or VMware
solution with Lenovo’s Open Cloud Automation (LOC-A) LOC-A is the set of workload, services
and runtime components which are configured and combined to deliver an end-to-end cloud
solution on proven Lenovo Think System compute. Lenovo starts with a bootstrap toolkit which
is provided by Lenovo but not left on site, we deploy a runtime component to provide a service
provider domain. The service provider domain is virtualized on proven technologies provided
by Red Hat or VM Ware. Our services then run to discover, manage, and deploy the hardware.
On top of the hardware we can deploy several virtualization technologies. For now, we only
support VM Ware or Red Hat, we can provide container technologies like Kubernetes and we
can even manage and deploy bare metal resources. We can provide a customized cloud
solution that can be deployed with low or no touch and then we can provide day two
operations lifecycle management after deployment is done.
Governance and Multi-Cloud
Lenovo overcomes this issue by defining any governance challenges from customers during
the cloud workshop and because of our partnerships with VMware, Microsoft, Nutanix, and
Red Hat using the built-in management tools.

With these tools’ customers can control user operations based on permissions (user role &
group), and centrally log all actions. Customers can have a single pane of glass to manage both
Private and Public Cloud thereby implementing cloud governance and using policy-based
automation allows customers to govern multiple clouds and provide visibility and optimize for
each specific cloud in their cloud solution.

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Cost Challenges
Cloud solutions can become expensive if your customers don’t know how to manage their
computing resources and take maximum advantage of them.

Many times, organizations focus on a pay-as-you-go mindset and spend more on cloud than
they would have on on-premise infrastructure. Organizations should always optimize the cost
with sound financial analytics and accurately reporting the usage for better monitoring of cost.

So, what are the cost challenges associated with cloud?

Lack of Visibility
Organizations will have done their initial sizing and defined costs ownership but often have
issues with day to day insight into the costs.

Because it’s very easy to create resources in the cloud (within minutes), waste becomes a
concern. Resources may be created for temporary use but never shut down. The problems with
lack of visibility can be due to stakeholders not having granular visibility and actionable insights
into their cloud landscape, continuous monitoring not in place, resulting in Month-end Bill
shocks and no availability of projections on cloud utilization trends.

Organizations must plan for how they will obtain this visibility, whether it is through native or
third-party tools.
Poor Application and Architecture Design
As organizations have discovered many applications can’t simply move to the cloud. There is
more to the decision than just rehosting, replatforming, or refactoring.

How an application is designed can greatly effect costs for the organization. This is due to
cost often being calculated differently in cloud then data centers, so applications must account
for certain tasks that are unusually expensive in the cloud.

-------

Specifically, there are FOUR common elements that can stand in the way of a cost-effective
cloud application. Any of these can drastically effect cloud costs.

- Overcomponentization

Application componentization is a popular development trend, as it enables applications to

scale more easily. Overcomponentization happens when developers break an application up
into too many separately hosted components. Each component means a separate hosting
instance and a separate fee, which can cause an organization to inflate its cloud budget.

- Unnecessary overhead

Cloud providers charge for the applications that run on their platforms based, in part, on the
size of the machine image. It's easy to end up with unnecessary elements in a machine image,
such as middleware that's no longer referenced.

To standardize application platforms, many companies will try to pick a common OS and
middleware, but that could cause cloud costs to climb.

- Overlooked cloud borders

When your customer plan for scaling and overlook cloud platform borders, it can wreak
havoc on a cloud budget. Many architects separately break out application components that
need to scale to accommodate larger loads or require high availability. Sometimes, the
deployment process for these components involves scaled instances that burst onto another
cloud platform or from the cloud to the data center.

These types of border crossings generate traffic charges.

- Overloaded cloud databases

Cloud providers charge users for the total number of database instances, storage, access, I/O
bandwidth, licensing, and other fees. In hybrid or multi-cloud deployments, there may be
additional traffic charges to access a database outside the cloud or data center where it's
hosted. Depending on how these various costs work out, some designers might push all their
data into a common database to reduce the number of instances. However, this can hammer a
cloud budget with other increased database costs.
Lack of Accountability
While self-service is a major benefit of a cloud-smart approach, it can also lead to significant
cost.

Organizations need to properly track who has access and where resources are assigned to
manage cloud cost. With the absence of individual login credentials, any user can login to the
cloud platform at any time and may add/delete/modify operations. Due to this nature of
anonymity, it is challenging to figure out who modified what and when. This is also true of
assigning resources to cost centers or departments. This has direct cost implications on the
organizations.

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Sprawl
Cloud sprawl is the unintentional proliferation of spending on cloud and is often caused by a
lack of visibility into resources and communication between business units.

Managing cloud sprawl can be the hardest part of aligning cloud usage and costs to a
business strategy.

Any time the conversation turns to cloud sprawl, “shadow” IT enters the picture. Based on
purchasing convenience or immediate needs, employees can freely order computing power
and storage without the oversight, planning, and direction of IT.

This lack of governance means that visibility into the cloud is myopic at best, with rogue
cloud resources that may never see decommissioning or align with IT’s objectives.
Unfortunately, because of this, it's common to find development servers that are built but
dormant and that are compromised from a security standpoint without anyone realizing it

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Lenovo Cloud Solutions for Cost Challenges

As IT departments are constantly asked to do more with less budget, cost is always an
overriding factor for most organizations.

A subscription model has become increasing popular as cloud has grown to reduce cost and
conserve cash for core business services. Lenovo understands the cost challenges and can help
customers solve this challenge with Lenovo TruScale.

It is a one of kind subscription offering that allows customers to get the most out of their
budget and stay ahead of capacity changes with Lenovo’s proprietary power and usage
monitoring. Customers benefit with no minimum capacity commitments and provides them
with a monthly fee and removing the burden of high upfront capital expenditures. Additionally,
any Lenovo cloud solution can be used on the TruScale subscription model and customer have
the equipment on premise but only paying for what they use.

Let's discuss further how Lenovo Cloud Solutions take care of customers' cost challenges.

Lack of Visibility
For customers to combat their lack of visibility they must be able to have more granular
visibility into the resources to prevent costs from spiraling out of control.

XClarity Integrator
Lenovo helps customers address lack of visibility by starting with XClarity Integrator.

• It allows customers to manage Lenovo infrastructure right in the console of partner

software tools they are already using.
• It requires little or no customization of external IT applications.
• It assists customers with visualizing and identifying trends, correlating, and analyzing
events, alerts, and logs with automated responses to faults and triggers.
 XClarity Integrator uses industry standard protocols (REST API, SNMP, SYSLOG, etc.)
augmented with custom integration packages. With this integration of XClarity Integrator
provides customer’s management tools to have greater insight using a single pane of glass
across entire operations.

Each partner has unique management tools that can provide your customers further insight
into applications' deployment across a multi-cloud environment.

TruScale
TruScale comes with all the managed services needed to install, configure, and run
customer's on-premise cloud with full visibility to the environment, so they can focus on the
bigger challenges of the business.

Customers can balance with assistance from Lenovo to ensure the right workloads sit where
they are needed but also knowing that they can have on-premise infrastructure with the data
that they need on their premise but still get the benefits of no upfront capital expense, a pay-
as-you-go consumption-based model and that the infrastructure is going to be managed for
them and that the lights will stay on.

Poor Application and Architecture Design

Personalized cloud strategy that blends smarter technology and takes your customers' goals,
infrastructure, and teams to heart.

The Lenovo Cloud Workshop

The Lenovo Cloud Workshop is designed to evaluate customer requirements around their
cloud platforms, allowing cloud experts to make actionable recommendations in attributes
related to:

• Hypervisor management
• Hosting management
• Guest O/S management
• Backup and recovery solutions

It helps you find the best strategy for your customer's business.
OSIG

Lenovo Server Operating System Interoperability Guide (OSIG) is a comprehensive source of

information about operating system compatibility with Lenovo servers. It includes servers in
the ThinkSystem, ThinkAgile, System x, ThinkServer, NeXtScale, Flex System and BladeCenter
product families and covers servers that are currently supported by Lenovo under warranty to
ensure architecture design will be reliable and provide a partner supported environment.

All of this is saving customer from future costs of having to

band-aid a poor application and architecture design.
Let's look into how Lenovo is partnering with VMware, Microsoft, Nutanix, and Red Hat to to
tackle customer's poor application and architectural design issues.

VMWARE
Lenovo and VMware vCloud Suite provides businesses with an affordable, interoperable, and
reliable industry-leading cloud solution to handle all their virtualized workloads. Built around
the latest Lenovo ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile solutions, Lenovo can provide customers:

• VMware sizing recommendations

• Deployment best practices
• Validated configurations for compute, management, networking, and storage

Microsoft
Lenovo and Microsoft worked together to engineer the solution components—the Azure
Stack software and Lenovo software-defined infrastructure—to make sure they perform
seamlessly. There is no need to worry about configuring and tweaking settings for virtual or
physical infrastructure.

Your customer's IT personnel can now focus more on building proficiencies in deploying and
operating cloud services—such as IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS—and less on their infrastructure.

Nutanx
Lenovo and Nutanix have partnered together to codevelop a best-in-breed Lenovo-branded
hyperconverged/hybrid cloud Integrated Systems. These Integrated Systems combine Lenovo
and Nutanix intellectual property (IP) and offer a suite of fully integrated hyperconverged
solutions that allow organizations to drive the agility and scalability of public clouds within
their own datacenter environments.
 Lenovo and Nutanix developed fully validated cloud solutions to include integrated
hardware and firmware, certified with Nutanix suite of software, to ensure customers
implementing a Nutanix cloud solution that will have an architectural design to solve their
unique challenges.

Red Hat
Lenovo has developed Red Hat OpenStack Platform reference architecture by providing a
blueprint for accelerating the design, piloting, and deployment process of an enterprise-level
OpenStack cloud environment on Lenovo hardware.

The reference architecture reduces the complexity of OpenStack deployments by outlining a

validated system configuration that scales and delivers an enterprise level of redundancy across
servers, storage, and networking to help enable HA.

Lack of Accountability
Lenovo works with IT and business managers to identify who is using what amounts of
which resources; usage can be controlled by building approval requirements and limits into
workflows.

Transparency across business units...

• IT and business managers can get a better picture of technology usage across
departments
• Resource usage can be coordinated so that assets are optimized
• Consolidated information is available for analytics and strategic planning

Lenovo will account for Business rules, standards, data security requirements, industry
regulations and build them into your customer’s workflows so they are consistently enforced.
We assist customers with operational efficiencies to develop automated processes and
workflows to reduce manual intervention for provisioning workloads, setting up new
environments and approving requests.

Sprawl
During a customer’s cloud workshop we can offer Lenovo extended services.

This is a cloud management service for customer's dedicated hybrid cloud data center
infrastructures, which can be based on Nutanix, VMWare and similar infrastructures. This
offering differs from Lenovo Managed Services as it is dedicated to supporting and managing
hybrid cloud platforms.
 Lenovo tools along with our partners have efficient management of both VMs and
containers helping customers maintain enterprise-class policies for resiliency, QoS, security and
access controls for modern apps.

• Customers can manage their environments from a single point of control and boost
compliance.
• Customers will then easily be able to reduce unauthorized and over provisioned
resources.

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User Experience Challenges

While the cloud has the potential to disrupt how an organization’s IT manages resources in
the data center, it also has the potential to disrupt how it delivers services to end users.

To understand how cloud will disrupt end-user computing, organizations need to look at how
the cloud can change application development patterns and how that will change how IT
delivers services to end-users.

Let's look at some common user experience issues organizations face.

Applications
Clients using applications that connect to local servers but when they move these servers to
a remote data center or the cloud, it can introduce performance issues for the organization.
This can lead to:

• Longer application load times

• Increased transaction times
• Reports taking longer to preview and/or print

Access
Many organizations need to provide access to and use different classification domains. This
typically results in different request processes and different approval processes. The result is
the users wait to get cloud accounts or get access to accounts. And, once they do get access,
they're often having to context switch between access methods to get work done.
Collaboration
It’s hard to collaborate when your customer's organization is spread all over the map. If their
employees are outside the office or their clients are not physically accessible, it can be difficult
to work on the same task when everyone is limited to their own local workspace. Further, for
most people, mobility and constant connection are both natural parts of their everyday lives
now.

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These problems make employees less productive, and it has an impact on the efficiency and
profitability of the business. The overriding goal for the organization’s IT is to delivers end user
resources whenever and wherever the user wants it – on any device used.

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Lenovo Cloud Solutions for User

Experience Challenges
Cloud-based services enable people to communicate and collaborate with increased
productivity.

Cloud being an internet-based service means that all the resources in the cloud are
accessible through the internet.

A person just simply logs into their account and access the resources they have on the cloud.
This makes the user flexible to access services from anywhere in the world. Cloud services are
also accessible by using a mobile phone. Applications like Facebook, Instagram, Gmail etc. are
available on mobile as well. So that user experience is something that our customers want to
create for their end-users or for their internal customers.

Much more flexibility, much more agility, simpler to use, simpler to

manage, more cost-efficient...

Lenovo assists customers with User Experience by partnering with industry-

leading and well-known vendors, Microsoft, VMware, Nutanix and Red Hat.

Last Discruption
Most customers are already familiar and comfortable with at least one of these partners, if
not most of them. This allows a more seamless integration into an existing customers
infrastructure with the least disruption.
Detailed Assessments
During a scheduled cloud workshop Lenovo can provide specific detailed assessments and
solutions to assist customers with improving their user experience.

Measured service
Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource usage by leveraging a metering
capability at a level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service. Resource usage can be
monitored, controlled, and reported, providing transparency for both the provider and the
consumer of the utilized service.

Applications
Lenovo helps customers maintain or improve the application experience for their users
through architecting solutions determined from Lenovo cloud workshops.

Whether customers develop and deploy their own customized cloud platform, deploy a
turnkey cloud platform, or choose to utilize a public cloud provider, they all face the next step
of migrating their workloads from their current infrastructure architecture to leverage the
cloud platform.

During the workshop, we work with customers to determine whether they will re-host, re-
platform or refactor their application. Lenovo will also collaborate with the customer to
determine the best location for the application to optimize performance; whether that be in
the customers private cloud, in their data center, or on the edge. The goal of allowing users to
be as close to the application and data as they need to maximize the performance.

Migrating workloads into a cloud platform: How are customers leveraging

cloud platforms for their workloads?
Access
As customers adapt applications to a cloud-smart model, their users expect the experience
to be the same or better.

Users expect the same access experience as if they accessed an application locally on their
local desktop/laptop. However, new, or existing apps that are being deployed in clouds that IT
does not control present an additional security and control challenge.

Lenovo helps simplify this challenge through our partnerships with VMware, Microsoft,
Nutanix and Red Hat. Each of our partners has efficient management of both VMs and
containers to maintain enterprise-class policies for resiliency, QoS, security and access controls
for their modern apps. Lenovo can also design the solution that can leverage network
virtualization and extend security policies from the application VM on-premise into any cloud.

Collaboration
As more and more customers’ users use tools to collaborate online and are geographically
spread out, they are turning to more cloud smart ready tools to provide the best experience
possible.

Lenovo portfolio of ThinkAgile and ThinkSystem are engineered to handle the most
demanding business applications and designed with specific features to better run workloads
like collaboration in addition to database, ERP, business intelligence and data warehousing.
Included in the portfolio are cloud-ready partner validated solutions to provide customers
seamless operations of their collaboration application whether they are on-premise or in a
public cloud.

Key Takeaway
Establishing a broad-based cloud strategy for its end users is the opportunity for Lenovo to
provide enterprise-grade leadership and become a trusted partner in the IT leaders’ journey
across the edge, core, and public cloud.

With Lenovo Cloud solutions, your customer get more than a piece of hardware. They get
peace of mind!
Lenovo can offer your customers:
• Cloud solution planning services that balance security, scalability, and agility and a
system designed around their needs – public, private, or hosted, single or multi-cloud
– that works within whatever technology ecosystem they’re currently running.
• Turnkey options with partner-supported building blocks, all tailored to customer's
desired business outcomes, workloads, applications, migration planning, team skills,
and budget.

Remember, Lenovo engineers every aspect of the cloud solution, from server to storage to
software. So instead of making your customers rely on multiple vendors—or worse, vendors
who must rely on other vendors—Lenovo offers one orchestrated solution and one partner to
trust and rely on.