For customers who have an account on-premise, renegotiating a security approach, policy, standard and SLAs when a service provider partners with public a Cloud provider can be a big problem. At HP Discover in Las Vegas earlier this month, Seamus Dunne, VP of HP Cloud & Data Center Support Services for HP, joined John Furrier and Dave Vellante on theCUBE to discuss what HP is doing to resolve this growing issue.

Partnerships and Indemnification

Dunne said the security policy customers have on-premise would be better aligned if they went with HP Helion, but it would also depend on the customer. He added that HP Helion is building up a set of partners, so customers won’t have just “an on-premise proposition with an OpenStack distribution on top a Cloud system.”

HP is also looking at partners who are Cloud-agile today. If these partners deploy to the Helion platform, then the company will then have an ecosystem that it can broker around, and that will move workloads on and off premises on a consistent platform. Dunne explained that the security benefits improve, but “at the end of the day, it’s still workloads that are moving in and out of your network.”

Dunne also stated HP’s proposition, as a technology services business, is that it will take responsibility for a customer’s SLA on-premise, off-premise and with any service provider being used in its service support arrangement. He said, however, that HP can’t solve a third party decision, but the company can indemnify it on its behalf and may take it on with some customers.

Substantially Identical SLA on HP

In terms of HP specifically, Dunne believes customers’ security SLA will be substantially identical both on-premise and off-premise. Dunne said that Helion is also HP’s OpenStack distribution, which helps customers with their on-premise Cloud solution. He further went on to explain that the benefit of an approach with Helion, which HP is building upon through its services, is that customers have a common platform on-premise with a Cloud system using HP Helion’s OpenStack distribution. Then, when customers go to public Cloud, they still get the very same platform. Additionally, Dunne mentioned that HP is building an ecosystem with other public Cloud providers who will also use the same platform.

The fact that HP’s on-premise and off-premise is substantially identical in terms of SLA, security, compliance, audit and other similar aspects is good news for customers, as it’s designed to save them the hassle and time of negotiating terms. Vellante believes that this is HP Helion’s value proposition.

See the entire conversation below.