Hybrid IT: How to Loosen Your Reliance on Traditional Hardware

Have you heard about the benefits of hybrid IT? In the world of technology, there was a time in which IT drove business needs and the organization was pressured to keep up with its speed. An obvious example was the proliferation of the internet in the 90’s and the integration of shared resources through Ethernet. These technologies launched new paradigms in the same way that the cloud and the progression of software defining the data center are doing so today.

Thanks to these technological innovations along with early adapters (also referred to as disruptors) such as Uber and Amazon, the world is undergoing a digital transformation as the business community struggles to catch up with the consumerization of IT. The race to digitizing between a company and its customers, suppliers, and internal processes is critical in order to outpace competitors, maximize unforeseen opportunities, and manage exponential change before it throws the business into chaos.

IT’s Alignment with Business Operations

IT serves users, whether customers of its parent organization or its internal employees. Like every successful business, IT must know its customer first, then the technology. By doing so, it can provide the services and tools to provide the necessary levels of agility and velocity that companies so desperately need in order to be the leaders of their industries. The time has come for CEOs and CIOs to ask themselves:

What if IT was aligned with business strategy and operated in synchronicity with business operations to innovate together?

Fortunately, they can find those answers in Hybrid IT.

Hybrid IT: Lessening Your Reliance on Hardware

Two critical weaknesses of the traditional hardware dominated data center are cost and vulnerability; hybrid IT solves these issues and more, including:

• Traditional data centers require a long-term commitment of investment capital and personnel
• Expected lifecycles of five years are considered acceptable
• Annual support costs are routine
• Costly migrations take months to plan and even longer to implement
• IT may become risk averse as managers second guess themselves
• Long lifecycles can foster the habit of simply renewing proprietary solutions that IT teams are “comfortable” with over time

The purpose of a data center is to host the applications and services users demand. The lifecycle of apps today is growing shorter as it goes from peak usage to unused to awaiting deletion, all in a matter of months. Application development is about constant patching and continual development of coding. This new way of application conception renounces the necessity of multi-year hardware lifecycles.  

Hybrid IT Provides a Unique Opportunity

Under the traditional hardware centric model, IT must forecast resource demand for the next five years, obtain quotes and order the equipment each time they want to implement a new app. Once delivered, it must be unpackaged, racked and then configured by one or more IT specialists. Only at that point can programmers and web developers begin their assigned tasks. This process alone requires weeks if not months. This organizational “red tape” is expensive and inhibits the ability to take advantage of the very opportunity that spawned the implementation. However, thanks to the instant provisioning tools of hybrid IT, companies can deploy apps to satisfy diminishing windows of opportunity and achieve faster time to value. The fact is the world simply needs less reliance on hardware.

This digital transformation has catapulted IT to a role of prominence, innovation and leadership. To succeed, IT must understand more than just technology architectures; it must understand the business drivers and goals of the company that it serves. This is where hybrid IT will set enterprises apart. 

Want to leverage the benefits of hybrid IT at your organization? Download our white paper, “An Introduction to the New IT Approach Called Hybrid IT.” Contact us if you’d like to learn more.