Today’s IT leaders are at a crossroads. Behind them, there’s a long legacy of hardware and software deployment decisions that have served the business well for years. But new business requirements and application development methods have begun to test the status quo, and as they seek to modernize, they will face several difficult decisions. IT leaders can either commit to the cloud, go all in with on-premises infrastructure or evaluate something entirely new.
Hybrid IT and flash storage are an impressive match. With hybrid IT’s structure combining a mixture of on and off premise resources, it delivers services in a more optimized, balanced and automated fashion, while flash storage has the ability to offer agility and impressive backup and disaster recovery capabilities. The two together can provide:
Over the years, the public cloud has been promoted as the panacea of innovation and reduced costs where companies could host their network infrastructure and service their workloads. In doing so, many companies have found out that not everything is ideally suited for the cloud. Latency prone applications, data sovereignty, and security compliance are just some of the challenges that have reduced the luster of the public cloud recently. As a result, two-thirds of enterprises are scaling back or discontinuing their use of public cloud services and shifting workloads to on premises private and/or hybrid cloud environments.
The ability of an enterprise to keep up with changing technology depends on the skills of its IT employees. The pace of innovation can be overwhelming even for the most experienced professionals, but this isn’t the only challenge organizations face. As companies understand the importance of digital transformation and take it on within their company, the demand for IT professionals with the required skillsets to transform legacy driven data centers into hybrid infrastructures is skyrocketing. As a result of this move towards hybrid IT, the demand is outpacing supply.
When discussing hybrid solutions and digital transformation, there is often some confusion between Hybrid IT and Hybrid Cloud. While there are certain striking similarities, it is critical to understand that there are also very important differences between the two and how enterprises use them within their organization.
Those who are pursuing the latest architype known as hybrid IT in order to revolutionize their enterprise and complete the digital transformation of their organizations know the dream. The dream is to free ourselves from the isolated silos of the traditional data center and obtain the flexibility of a free flowing ecosphere in which workloads are matched with the right platform that both optimizes the user experience and maximizes ROI at the same time. Hybrid IT is about obtaining an unparalleled degree of elasticity in order to migrate applications at will amongst hosting structures (cloud and on-premises). This agility not only delivers infrastructure plasticity, but peace of mind as well by delivering on the ability to achieve near absolute levels of business continuity and disaster recovery.
It is a truly amazing world in which we work today. While the flow of capital is still essential for businesses to grow, materialize, and sustain them, it is ideas today that feed the global economy. Today’s businesses rely on innovators and visionaries. The delivery method for these ideas and revolutionary concepts is IT. IT is a part of nearly every business today because they depend on one or more essential apps to either communicate with their customers or manage their business. Just as the flow of capital is attracted to the most fluid and efficient markets, customers, and business transactions, tech stacks are attracted to those businesses with the most innovative, efficient, and flexible apps and technology. Those that can simplify and streamline the transaction experience will have an advantage over their competitors. In order for your business to make the most of any web related advantage, you need an adaptable ecosphere that is conducive to the constant evolution of those apps through DevOps.
Hybrid IT is many things. It is a new approach to the enterprise that requires new architectures, skills and toolsets. It also brings a whole new verbiage with it. These are terms that your management and staff need to become accustomed to because hybrid IT incorporates a number of new technologies. Many of these concepts are a divergence from the traditional IT structure of which we are all conversant. For those unfamiliar to this new approach to managing enterprise IT, we present to you a glossary of the primary hybrid IT terms.
There are a number of compelling reasons to migrate your services and resources to the cloud such as cost savings, agility, scalability, and redundancy. Another reason is to escape the entrapment of vendor lock in. Ironically however, some enterprises find themselves moving to the cloud, only to constrain themselves with the same restrictions that plagued them in the traditional datacenter. Others are finding themselves in a problematical situation of competing organizations that muddle the cloud landscape.
The digital transformation we are witnessing today has catapulted IT to a role of prominence, innovation, and leadership. IT must now understand more than just technology architectures, it must understand the business drivers and goals of the company that it serves. Innovation and new ideas are the building blocks of business today and it is the job of IT to provide the technology to help make those ideas come to fruition. This is one of the factors leading companies to adopt a Hybrid IT model. But this shift has less to do with technology and more to do with operations management, policies and procedures and the delivery of IT services. A good exercise for developing a hybrid IT strategy begins with asking leadership to re-examine the role that the IT department holds within the organization, with questions such as:
