infoTECH Feature

April 14, 2015

Eight Key Factors to Lead You to a Successful Hybrid IT Environment

By TMCnet Special Guest
Penny Collen, Senior Financial Solutions Architect, Cloud Cruiser, Inc.

IT Transformation is far more than moving some workloads and apps to a public cloud provider.  Transformation is about learning to manage technology and business relationships in new ways.   No longer are you solely managing within the confines of your own data center.  You now function with support from different sources and locations, provisioning without IT intervention, introducing new apps without solid business cases and line of business (LoB) users provisioning their own workloads.   

  1. Cloud Strategy: Before you decide to make the transition, ask the hard questions about what you are trying to achieve: Agility?  Scalability? Productivity? Control? Cost Savings? Better collaboration?  The more clearly defined your goals and the more closely they align with corporate goals, the more successful you’ll be in funding and deploying your future hybrid infrastructure.
  2. Provisioning and Governance: In order to stay current, you must expand the governance process to include SaaS (News - Alert), IaaS, and PaaS to consider all workloads in the cloud. Cumbersome, slow-paced governance procedures need to be streamlined.  The IT Service Catalog must consider the integration of both internally and externally provided resources.  Risk assessments need to cover the impact of off-premise access and data storage.
  3. Capacity Planning and Forecasting: IT capacity will come from multiple sources, including a mix of public and private cloud.  Budgets will transition from CapEx and long-term commitments to OpEx with short-term flexibility.  Workloads must be evaluated on an application-by-application basis with a lookout for cyclical and seasonal trends to optimize spending and reduce costs.  Forecasting needs to be more granular with greater involvement from LoB’s to align procurement with overall business strategies.
  4. Data Security, Access Management and Compliance: Mobile devices, BYOA (bring your own application) and BYOC (bring your own cloud) are empowering workers to engage in work activities from anywhere at any time.  Applications which are especially appealing include Google Drive, Apple iCloud, Dropbox and Skype (News - Alert).  CIO’s and CSO’s must beef up security practices to protect data and restrict access to only those authorized, while at the same time enabling access from more end points.  Failure to comply with industry and government regulations can mean fines, penalties, as well as significant loss of business reputation.  Recurring education for employees about their obligations is the only way to be successful in a mobile world.
  5. Network Services: It takes more than bandwidth to manage hybrid cloud operations.  Quality and reliability are as important as the security aspects.   Traffic patterns will need to be analyzed to determine how critical data flows can be supported. A move to hybrid cloud will require a complete network architectural redesign, not just an increase in capacity.
  6. Financial Controls: Increase your decision-making power by leveraging IT consumption-based analytics. Collecting usage at granular levels, across all environments, provides data about supply and demand.  This usage, transformed with business intelligence (BI) to identify consumption by application, user, and geography, gives you actionable information about your current IT use.   Analysis of usage patterns and costs across hybrid environments increases accuracy and confidence in your forecasts.  Detailed information facilitates validation of costs, provides audit trails, reduces billing disputes and improves decisions about resource choices.
  7. The CIO as an IT Services Broker: Accurate, real-time information about IT’s contribution to the business will enhance communications with LoB’s.  The CIO will increase focus on any security risks of shadow IT that also impacts overall budgets.  The image of the CIO must be that of an enabler rather than an enforcer or a barrier.  Balancing flexibility with risk will be key.
  8. Technical Skills and Vendor Relations: The operations technical staff will focus more on the Internet and virtualization.  Architects will design for workloads sourced on a combination of internal and external resources, giving extra care to networking.  Contract negotiations will include new metrics for cloud performance and technical support.  Those with the ability to integrate and analyze data will be highly prized.

Identify Tools and Put them in Place before You Start to Deliver Value

The decision to modernize your technology infrastructure is not a decision to be made lightly. The move to a hybrid operation involves rebuilding your infrastructure one piece at a time, not a wholesale replacement.  It’s a challenging undertaking, but a necessary one for businesses that wish to remain competitive over the long term.  An evaluation of existing tools and people skills should be performed early in the transformation process. This should include a comprehensive review of where your company’s workloads reside, focusing on uncovering any shadow IT deployments. Acquiring management solutions in advance of any wholesale adoption will ensure the success and a smoother transition to a hybrid environment.

About the Author: Penny Collen is the Senior Financial Solutions Architect at Cloud Cruiser, Inc., a company that optimizes the delivery of consumption-based IT services for hybrid cloud and traditional computing environments. The IT Financial Management Association (ITFMA) recently named Ms. Collen IT Financial Educator of the Decade.




Edited by Dominick Sorrentino
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