By Oliver Presland, SVP Consulting Services Portfolio and Country Manager, Ensono These six critical steps will put you on the path to hybrid cloud mastery.
Businesses worldwide have recognized its potential, but the stark reality is that very few have successfully harnessed its full power.
The journey to a truly efficient hybrid cloud environment is fraught with challenges, yet it’s one that can yield unparalleled rewards for those who navigate it wisely. It’s time to dive deep into these challenges and chart a bold path forward.
The vision for a hybrid approach to IT is certainly not new and the motivation for taking it is both well-known and elegantly simple: some workloads just work better in different environments, with better performance, stability, economics, security and the ability to innovate more quickly.The journey to a truly efficient hybrid cloud environment is fraught with challenges, yet it’s one that can yield unparalleled rewards for those who navigate it wisely. It’s time to dive deep into these challenges and chart a bold path forward.
The vision for a hybrid approach to IT is certainly not new and the motivation for taking it is both well-known and elegantly simple: some workloads just work better in different environments, with better performance, stability, economics, security and the ability to innovate more quickly.
A recent survey of executives and IT decision makers conducted by The Harris Poll found 86 percent of all respondents plan to increase investment in hybrid cloud environments, and those technologies have already been critical to the success of 95 percent.1 Yet despite the increasing investments in hybrid IT, most enterprises are still struggling to master hybrid cloud.
1Erin Chapple, “Cloud trends show customers increasing investments in hybrid and multicloud,” Microsoft.com, January 2022.
To achieve a higher degree of hybrid maturity and realize the complete value of hybrid cloud, three things must be true:
All workloads are running in their optimal environment
Business data can be easily accessed by the appropriate systems and transformed into meaningful intelligence to enable better and faster decision making
You have adopted a truly modernized operating model—everywhere
So, what is blocking enterprise IT organizations from achieving this vision? In a word… complexity! Let’s start by considering six critical steps to achieving hybrid cloud mastery and asking some difficult questions.
Step 1: Get your applications running in the right environment
One of the primary hurdles to hybrid cloud mastery is ensuring the right workload is in the right place. Too often, applications are running in sub-optimal locations due to a variety of reasons: antiquated codebases, licensing constraints, tightly coupled legacy ecosystems, lack of investment, merger and acquisition, or a “we have always run it that way” philosophy.
While the virtues of public cloud are well understood today, there are legitimate reasons why certain applications cannot move or are better placed elsewhere.
These may include performance/resilience, regulatory compliance, and economics/risk. For a legacy application to be optimal in public cloud, it often requires some level of re-architecture and adoption of cloud native capabilities to realize maximum benefit including agility, scale and optimized cost. And indeed, the adoption of cloud native capabilities frequently enables the realization of the key benefits and potential of public cloud for businesses.
Although there is no getting around certain regulatory issues, it is time to challenge the notion that an application cannot move because of economics and/or risks associated with the perceived complexity of migration. Complexity can come in many forms—whether the application is running in a tightly-coupled low-latency ecosystem of legacy applications in an x86 environment, or even within a mainframe environment.
Step 2: Get access to the right intelligence to make better and faster decisions AND be ready for AI
A recent IBM survey of more than 3,000 CEOs in over 30 countries revealed that 75 percent of all respondents feel they have everything they need to capitalize on AI internally, yet only 29 percent of their direct reports agree.2 What do they consider the biggest blocker to realizing this dream? You guessed it: data!
2“CEO decision-making in the age of AI,” IBM Institute for Business Value, June 2023.
The most significant challenge lies in the segregation of critical data. While some of this separation is mandated by regulatory and compliance needs, there are also plenty of other unacceptable reasons that data silos have been created in legacy enterprise environments over the last several decades. Often, it’s the result of disparate data initiatives, internal business processes, insufficient skill sets or cultural resistance. This fragmentation hinders the ability to make the informed and timely data-driven decisions essential to modern business strategy.
Bringing siloed data together in a modern data platform and preparing the data to be analyzed through machine learning or generative AI is crucial. This enables faster, better decision making, powered by predictive analytics and AI. By dismantling data silos and readying that data for use with AI, organizations can unlock the full potential of their data assets.
Step 3: Adopt a truly modernized operating model
Perhaps the most formidable challenge is the human factor in achieving true agility. Legacy teams may still operate in a waterfall model, while public cloud teams thrive in an agile CI/CD environment. This disparity in processes, levels of automation and tooling creates friction and fiefdoms. Not surprisingly, many CIOs are hesitant to initiate yet another painful organizational transformation, having weathered several in the past.
There is no avoiding it though: addressing the cultural and operational divide between legacy and cloud teams is essential. This involves not only adopting new tools and processes but also nurturing an organizational mindset that embraces change and continuous improvement.
It is critical to think about “cloud” (both public AND private) as a verb, not a noun. It should be something you do–not a destination. Hybrid cloud should be a better operating mode—one that includes software defined infrastructure as code, zero-trust security by default, and the automation of absolutely everything that can be automated. It is about deploying live code into live environments when the capabilities are ready—not according to some internally mandated release window. Ask yourself, are we truly agile or are we still doing waterfall in three-week sprints?
If you determine that you are not getting the same agility in your data center that you are getting from your public cloud environments, take note—you are not alone. Changing from a waterfall to a truly agile operating model (in your legacy environments) requires addressing your people, processes and tooling (not to mention economics), which is why many digital transformations have failed in the past. Done correctly, even a well-run shift from waterfall to agile on-premises can take years.
Step 4: Understand and mitigate your latency and resiliency risks
Quite often we find legitimate reasons for business-critical applications to run in an enterprise data center. These are usually complex systems of record—a core banking application, for example, that requires 100 percent uptime, incredibly high transaction volume and exceptionally low latency between its core system components.
But it is no longer true that the systems of engagement (such as the mobile banking app) must live next to the core banking application or face unacceptable latency issues that render the application unusable. In addition, there are often many other applications residing in the data center that communicate with key systems of record but could also be moved to the cloud without either performance or economic risk.
The level of communication dependency, particularly latency-related performance risk, is not always clearly understood. Some applications will be very sensitive to latency impact if they or their dependents are migrated out of the data center; others will have minimal or no latency risk and are resident in the data center because that is where they were originally deployed. Distinguishing between the two is essential when planning a move toward hybrid cloud.
An experienced partner can help you safely assess the decoupling of these systems and ensure they run in the most appropriate environments. Armed with this insight, many organizations are coming to realize that systems of record and systems of engagement can be decoupled—safely and more easily than they had ever imagined.
Step 5: Reduce complexity and technical debt
CIOs frequently grapple with the challenge of technical debt. Legacy platforms, often vital to operations, consume a disproportionate share of the annual budget, leaving little room for innovation. This perpetuates a cycle where technical debt is carried forward year after year, stifling growth and agility.
Whether your symptoms experience excessive downtime, struggle to meet ESG goals, increase third party costs or lack flexibility to respond to the unexpected, finding a way to address technical debt should be a constant business priority.
Complexity continuously grows without estate-wide insight and visibility, combined with ongoing conscious effort to reduce it. Opportunities to eliminate complexity and consolidate services, databases and infrastructure are often missed when business teams and application owners are siloed.
Step 6: Harvest cost savings and self-fund your journey to hybrid cloud mastery
Organizations that are most successful at self-funding this transformation often start small and scale. They begin with manageable projects that promise financial savings or eliminate downtime, then use these early wins to fuel and fund the broader transformation. This approach builds momentum and demonstrates the tangible benefits of hybrid cloud, making the case for further investment. Choosing the path of self-funding through cost savings realized through outsourcing hybrid cloud management fundamentals (including deployment, automation, patching, monitoring and tickets), can then be re-invested into business application transformation.
The path to a bold new hybrid cloud future can start now.
The journey to an efficient and effective hybrid cloud environment is not without its challenges, but the rewards are significant. By understanding antiquated misconceptions, technical debt and cultural resistance, organizations can unlock the full potential of hybrid cloud. It is a transformation that demands bold, strategic thinking and a steadfast commitment to innovation. Those who succeed will not only enhance their operational efficiency but also gain a significant competitive edge amid the ever-accelerating pace of technological change.
