76% of IT decision makers say they are facing challenges implementing a hybrid IT model.1
Business leaders today recognize two facts when it comes to their respective companies:
- They know that they must continue to interject elasticity into their businesses processes and corporate culture in order to succeed.
- In order to accomplish this endeavor, the cloud is no longer optional when it comes to the enterprise (by 2020, cloud spending will eclipse spending on traditional data centers).2
Added to that is the omnipresent fact that continually permeates all facets of business—the necessity to lower costs that affect the bottom line. It is for these and other reasons that hybrid IT is becoming mainstream and will inevitably become the primary enterprise model, if it is not already. According to Gartner, hybrid IT is transforming the very role of IT and like all transformational archetypes; this new enterprise model brings new opportunities, benefits and challenges.
OPPORTUNITIES
The dictionary defines an opportunity as a situation in which it is possible for you to do something that you want to do. Chances are, most IT departments would welcome the following opportunities that hybrid IT provides:
- The opportunity to be a greater contributor and benefactor to the profitability and success of the company
- The opportunity to work in cohesion with other business units within the company and pursue innovative solutions that benefit the organization
- The opportunity to work with ground breaking technologies and best-of-breed applications and solutions
- The opportunity to no longer perform manual repetitious tasks and elongated migrations and instead focus on valued added projects
In the words of the immortal song by Sam Cooke, “What a wonderful world this would be,” Hybrid IT is not a visionary pipedream; it is a reality for a growing number of companies today as 63% of them are in the process of pursuing the hybrid IT approach.
Traditional IT is characteristic of two types of opportunities—opportunity cost and opportunity lost. For too long, corporate data centers subsisted on large capital expenditures involving large sums of capital that were diverted to the financing of proprietary hardware, rather than revenue generating innovation that would contribute directly to the objectives and profitability of the company. New application deployments involved months of planning, purchasing, racking and configuration of hardware, as well as the required learning curves for personnel to master the new solution. Due to the prolonged and cumbersome deployment process, project deliveries were often too late to provide the maximum benefit. All of this led to lost opportunities. Once deployed, updates to existing static infrastructures involved long development cycles that required considerable time and resources of internal IT. Upon completion, the updated solution was most likely outdated, perpetuating another migration deployment… a cycle that proved never ending.
Hybrid IT is all about automated deployment provisioning so that short-lived opportunities are fully realized. Applications are hosted in the cloud, if at all possible, on top of computer virtualization that utilizes commoditized hardware, thus reducing infrastructure complexity. Those applications that are not cloud-ready are hosted onpremises.
BENEFITS
A benefit is defined as an advantage or profit gained from something. Hybrid IT has definite inherent advantages that your business can certainly profit from:
- Cost Savings – There is not a more direct way to contribute to the increased profitability than finding ways to cut costs. The “tear down and replace” methodology that has been characteristic of traditional IT is an expensive model. Hybrid IT is about maximizing the cloud, eliminating typical data center costs for hardware, electricity and cooling, as well as personnel hours for maintenance and support. Even for those resources that cannot be immediately migrated to the cloud, hybrid IT can serve as an affordable bridge between the bi-modal existence of both legacy and modern day IT.
- Flexibility and Agility – Hybrid IT is not to be confused with the hybrid cloud, and an enterprise should not be limited to a single cloud provider. Workloads should be assigned to the cloud platform that provides the best combination of host and cost structures. The utilization of multiple cloud platforms provide near limitless scalability and reachability for both users and customers. Hybrid IT is about locating digital services and information close to the users that need them. Hybrid IT is not a solution that your enterprise must conform to. Every IT environment is unique, thus, every hybrid IT strategy is unique as well. Hybrid IT is about tailoring customized solutions that meet business needs through continuous innovation, integration and on-demand service delivery. Hybrid IT is a roadmap that adapts to your environment, while getting you to your destination.
- Security – The cloud offers many great benefits for hosting digital services and information, but some organizations are unable to take advantage of this platform due to stringent security requirements and industry or government regulations. In the same manner that hybrid IT is able to match workloads with the right platform, it allows IT to match data with the proper hosting location based on security mandates and preferences. This allows companies to push as much of their resources at the edge of the cloud for performance, while storing critical and proprietary data behind the secure protection of the local firewall on-premises.
CHALLENGES
A challenge is defined as a difficulty in a job or undertaking that is stimulating to one engaged in it. According to a 2017 report concerning current trends in IT, 58% of IT Managers cited an IT skills gap as one of the biggest challenges of hybrid IT.3 This is not surprising concerning the relative newness of this architecture. In addition, IT specialists with years of experience and specialized training may feel threatened by these new approaches to IT management. Because hybrid IT environments are constantly innovating, integrating new tools and services, the rate of change can be challenging—and IT professionals must be committed to learning new technologies in order to be considered valuable. Other challenges of implementing a hybrid IT approach will simply entail the process of growing accustomed to new ways of operating, such as the transition from a CAPEX model to a variable cost model. In many cases, internal politics and justification of the status quo may be the largest hurdles to overcome. Convincing people at large to embrace change is never easy.
The fruition of any goal that brings about innovative change is always laden with challenges, most of which are short term and transitive in nature. The benefits and opportunities however, are everlasting.
Sources:
1. IDG Research commissioned by WEI, June 20, 2017.
2. https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2017/8/hybrid-cloud-10-notable-statistics
3. http://networkcommunicationsnews.co.uk/2017/06/solarwinds-trends-report-2017-2/
