92% of companies are implementing some form of hybrid IT.1
The role of today’s CIO or IT Director is not an easy one. Today’s IT leaders must contend with an ever-accelerating rate of modernization and technological change along with the responsibility to discern which innovations are relevant and worth pursuing. At the same time, business leaders within the organization continue to demand greater agility, responsiveness and efficiencies from internal IT. They want optimized solutions and low cost services in one neatly wrapped package, while maximizing ROI at the same time. The task at hand for IT is challenging at the least.
It is within this environment that the concept of Hybrid IT has quickly gained popularity as a solution that can deliver the combination of flexibility, manageability and security that today’s enterprise demands. The concept of Hybrid IT is simple; match workloads to the right platform that optimizes the user experience while maximizing ROI. Severing the dependency of a single type of infrastructure however brings with it vast degrees of complexity that IT must learn to master and simplify. This is why planning and preparation are key.
In order to ensure a successful transition to incorporating your Hybrid solution, it is critical that the required groundwork be properly implemented. A working Hybrid IT environment is contingent on three key foundational prerequisites of architecture, automation and applications. Let’s dig into the importance of these three foundational components.
ARCHITECTURE
The traditional data center is fast becoming an antiquated relic. If IT is expected to transform IT service delivery, they need a flexible architecture that provides an assortment of options for every workload that minimizes risk. Hybrid IT incorporates a multi-cloud environment. This includes the conglomeration of multiple public cloud vendors that can provide near limitless scalability as well as private clouds that securely protect core functionality and proprietary data. The ability to integrate both public and private and infuse their strengths into a complimentary infusion that offers cloud bursting as well the ability to accommodate east-west traffic between front and backend resources in hybrid style is also essential.
In order to be an IT hero, it is imperative that you either become the integrator, or partner with an impartial integrator who will help connect the independent solutions that are aligned with your needs. One of the very principles of Hybrid IT is the avoidance of the restrictive nature of vendor lock-in, which was an inherent characteristic of the traditional legacy data center. However, simply moving the reliance of your enterprise to a single cloud provider will produce similar constraints as well. All public cloud providers are orchestrated in different ways, making them technically, architecturally, and commercially different from one another. For that reason, it is important to understand each of their limitations. An over-commitment to a single cloud vendor undercuts the very reason for pursuing a Hybrid IT model in the first place.
Cloud vendors have relied on the advantages of Hyperconverged technology for years now. Hyperconverged infrastructure integrates the components of compute, storage, networking and virtualization resources into a single package of commodity hardware. All of the included components are driven by software-centric architecture and supported by a single vendor. These solutions utilize software defined storage technology and are sometimes directly integrated with a particular cloud vendor that provides a pre-packaged hybrid cloud solution. This can be easily achieved when selecting a pre-integrated solution from a vendor such as HPE, which certifies that all of the components are supported. These types of solutions can be implemented in minutes and have the fastest time to value. However, some enterprises may require more flexibility than these appliance-like solutions may offer. For those who choose a build-your-own solution, it is important that they ensure that all hardware, firmware and drivers are compatible with the governing software or cloud architecture.
AUTOMATION
IT departments today are under constant pressure to do more with less. As a result, IT is on an eternal quest to reduce human intervention through the integration of automation platforms. This chase to expedite the modernization and automation of internal processes is not singular to just IT. All business units within today’s companies and organizations are pursuing it.
One of the primary goals of Hybrid IT is to automate the IT tasks within your enterprise from end-to-end. This means any repeatable process within your enterprise, such as:
- Patch management
- OS and application and resource provisioning
- Operational management such as monitoring and analytics
- Security management including vulnerability scanning and reporting
- Asset management
- Migration of workloads from one location to another
By automating these recurrent tasks sequences, you increase the agility and scalability of your systems, while reducing both the risk of human error and the reliance on manual operations. This in turn liberates your IT personnel from these mundane tasks that provide little to no value.
APPLICATIONS
In the end, the justification for this endeavor of digitizing the internal operations of companies today is to deliver that quintessential tool utilized by all members within your organization – the application. The core principle of Hybrid IT is to be able to deliver applications and entailed data to both your internal users and customers in the most efficient manner possible. IT must juggle the balance of maintaining some applications and infrastructure on-premises while leveraging cloud-based services for others. This involves an understanding of the business needs and objectives within all parts of the organization as well as a dedication to enduser focus and service orientation. In order to do this, IT must divest itself of the silo culture that has characterized IT resources and personnel up until recently.
When it comes to the delivery and deployment of applications, Hybrid IT assimilates the DevOps culture throughout the enterprise itself. This demands that IT become a cross-disciplinary community working in conjunction with one another, imparting its talents in a jointed effort to deliver a streamline experience to the end user within an environment that is constantly evolving and rapidly changing on a perpetual basis. It also requires an interaction between internal IT and their cloud partners, working as a single IT team to produce collaborative results. This requires transparency and visibility that can only be achieved through the teamwork and the utilization of new monitoring and analytical tools.
SUMMARY
Hybrid IT is about expanding the enterprise to new frontiers in order to deliver a better end-user experience that everyone within IT is responsible for achieving. It is indeed the next logical step for IT and the modernization of the enterprise. For those who focus on the three prerequisites of architecture, applications, and automation, it will be a step that will successfully transform not only the enterprise, but also IT service delivery.
Sources: 1. IDG Research commissioned by WEI, June 20, 2017.
