Hybrid is your reality. Are you ready? | Dec16 Newsletter
Part 1: Start your hybrid journey*
Disruption is here. Current market barriers are breaking down. The accelerating speed of change is fueled by your customers’ realtime behavior and new, nimble competitors using mobile and digital technologies, cloud computing, and advanced analytics to create disruption beyond traditional boundaries.
In this hyper-connected digital economy, enterprise and IT leaders face big challenges, including how to:
- Integrate existing and new technologies, and delivery models
- Manage the potential explosion of vendors and service providers
- Keep your own business units and functions from creating shadow IT
- Avoid being locked in with a single vendor or technology
You must overcome these challenges while maintaining operations, achieving cost savings for business growth initiatives, providing solutions at the pace of web-scale companies, innovating continuously, and keeping your enterprise secure.
You are not alone in your struggles with inflexible, deeply entrenched IT infrastructures. Ones that prevent rapid change and innovation, while running proprietary applications critical to your business processes and outcomes.
Hardware-oriented, standardized, and function-centric IT infrastructure doesn’t provide the value organisations need now. To survive and thrive, you must create and continually deliver business value in an instant. To do that, you need IT that can change quickly, delivering the right performance and the right business outcomes, at the right time and cost.
“72% of organisations say that cloud will become the primary application deployment method over the next two years”1
Hybrid infrastructure is today’s reality in a disruptive, digital economy. In this environment, IT capabilities are sourced from multiple services and platforms—internal and external to the organisation. A hybrid infrastructure allows a mix of traditional IT, private, managed, and public clouds to coexist and interact with one another.
A hybrid model enables organisations to stop committing “random acts of cloud,” and instead, select the right mix of traditional and cloud infrastructures to meet workload requirements, customer needs, and strategic business goals. To do this, a hybrid infrastructure must deliver:
- Agility and flexibility—Leveraging more open and converged management enables organisations to scale resources quickly, provisioning and deprovisioning services in minutes, not days.
- Cost savings and profitability—Optimizing workloads improves traditional IT efficiency, while gaining full cost savings and benefits of cloud platforms. A hybrid environment accelerates application development and reduces time to value.
- Risk management—Using a hybrid environment with integrated security should enable workloads to transition from traditional IT to newer platforms quickly and easily, protect sensitive data, and improve reporting and compliance.
We recommend a simple, proven, three-step journey to a hybrid infrastructure:
- Build the plan
- Execute the plan
- Run the solution
Ask your hybrid transformation journey questions and demand the right answers from a trusted business partner to ensure your success.
*This is the first of a five-part series introducing and examining the key elements required for a successful journey to a hybrid infrastructure. Look for Parts 2 through 4 (coming soon), which explore how to plan, execute, and run your hybrid environment. Part 5 will provide hybrid transformation journey examples.
To download the original brief (PDF) - click here.
1 451 Research: The Transformative Impact of the Cloud, Sean Hackett Managing Director, Advisory Services January 2016