Why attaining hybrid IT nirvana means a mix of digital growth and ‘digital trust’

In many organisations today, IT is more than a utility: it has become an essential platform for their ongoing business development. Therefore, they crave a superior IT experience for their employees and other key stakeholders. For most, cloud computing is a fundamental ingredient of the digital transformation agenda.

The common commercial use cases for public cloud services have already been exploited by many organisations. Front-office applications, such as customer relationship management, online commerce, and numerous consumer-facing apps, constitute the bulk of the workloads that reside on cloud service provider shared infrastructure.

These initial use cases have validated the proven benefits of cloud computing architectures that are appealing to software developers – including speed of deployment, dynamic resource acquisition, application elasticity, and service reuse across workloads.

Leveraging the inherent benefits of cloud service offerings, organisations are now focused on the potential of utilising IT infrastructure for innovation, process improvement, streamlined operations, entering new markets, and the creation of a preemptive response to potential disruption by new tech startups.

According to the latest worldwide market study by the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV), organisations report success with public cloud initiatives, especially those forward-looking business transformation projects related to digital growth.

Meanwhile, mission-critical, security-dependent applications — such as customer databases, transaction processing, finance and accounting, supply chain, and manufacturing — are somewhat less likely to reside on a public cloud service provider’s platform.

This is particularly true for highly regulated industries, such as financial services and healthcare, where the greatest proportion of their online business processes have yet to move to a cloud service delivery model.

In many cases, these computing and storage workloads are better suited to the private cloud — or a mixture of public, private, and non-cloud traditional IT infrastructure.

In order for the next phase of cloud computing benefits to be realised, an open and adaptable approach to IT infrastructure architecture is required to address the multitude of use cases.

The evolution of cloud services adoption

The hybrid IT model permits public clouds, private clouds, and on-premises non-cloud IT infrastructure to connect across all three standardised technology interfaces: Linux OS, Open Container Initiative, and Kubernetes. These technologies enable developers to innovate with scale and agility, improving responsiveness and constraining cost, despite growing complexity.

Hybrid IT enables workloads to be deployed on the optimal compute and storage environment.

  • Public clouds are well suited for many front-office workloads.
  • Private clouds are well suited for many of the mission-critical workloads where the benefits of cloud are desirable — but the security and assurance of a private environment are preferred.
  • And traditional IT environments are suited for workloads that don’t inherently take advantage of cloud benefits — and demand the dedication of computing resources.

According to the IBM IBV assessment, as hybrid cloud solutions become widespread, there will be more variations of cloud service adoption across all industries. However, in the more regulated industries, the cloud service mix will tilt toward private cloud adoption, rather than public cloud. In the less regulated industries, the cloud service mix will likely tilt the other way.

In all cases, there’s a universal need to interoperate between public, private and traditional IT.

Hybrid cloud’s intrinsic interoperability and portability can mean that organisations are less likely to become locked in to a proprietary environment or to one particular public cloud service provider. Savvy CIOs and CTOs will choose to place their workloads on the best-fit platform and maintain interoperability between IT environments and between different public cloud service providers.

Why freedom to choose matters

Hybrid cloud can also help to address security concerns and other potential barriers to an otherwise successful cloud service deployment. The IBM IBV research study findings indicate that IT security and governance are the two top reasons cited as justification to keep enterprise workloads on-premises.

Armed with hybrid cloud solutions, organisations can run applications and store data in the specific IT environments best aligned with security, regulatory, and governance requirements.

Hybrid cloud also allows enterprises to manage their cloud transition dynamically, selecting acceptable levels of downtime and overcoming the possibility of operational constraints.

The next chapter in the evolving cloud computing story is about gaining access to enhanced capabilities – in particular, the cloud-enablement of complex mission-critical software apps.

The IBM IBV outlined key steps toward the hybrid cloud model:

Architect the destination: Think open, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud. Your organisation will live with the decisions you make today for years. Think through which of your workloads fit best in the public cloud, private cloud, and traditional IT environments. Avoid both environment lock-in (to only one of the three) and vendor lock-in, and reassess approaches that might not survive as standards and technologies evolve.

Sequence the journey: Avoid “ready, fire, aim” approaches. Layout a careful, clear roadmap of what you want to do and in what order. You may experience pressure to skip ahead without building a solid, open foundation. Resist it.

Mobilise the right skills and assets: Draw upon talent within and outside your enterprise. It’s important to develop and maintain in-house skills, but working with trusted third-party services providers, enabled by greater interoperability, can help bridge short-term gaps while reducing fixed costs.

Manage to create clear outcomes: Establish meaningful qualitative and quantitative measurements and be tenacious in holding to them. Remain flexible and incorporate new technologies as they emerge. Always stay true to your business, architectural, and technical principles.

The hybrid IT strategy questions to ask include:

  • To what extent do your people understand the implications and opportunities of next-generation cloud on your business and your competitive environment?
  • How is your organisation, and your competition, taking advantage of hybrid cloud, particularly data and processes that, until recently, have been difficult to move?
  • What adjustments have you made in hiring and training to have the right people at the right time working on the right things in dynamic ecosystems powered by hybrid cloud?

The quest for hybrid IT nirvana

In summary, organisations will continue to seek the essential benefits of a hybrid model because it offers them the freedom of choice that forward-thinking CIOs and CTOs require. Put simply, they’ll need the flexibility and agility of a Hybrid IT environment to achieve their bold goals for digital transformation.

From the C-suite perspective, this quest isn’t about technology. Rather, it’s about applied IT enabling strategic business outcomes. The goal: deliver a unified experience across platforms that abstracts the underlying IT infrastructure. The ‘everything-as-a-service’ platform accelerates the achievement of commercial objectives. It also reduces the risk of cyber threats by assuring digital trust.

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How delivering seamless UX and improving business outcomes will dovetail in 2020

The way that consumers and end-users interact with businesses and their services has changed dramatically in the last decade. Today, nearly every transaction is supported by applications, meaning the role of IT has evolved from being a back-office function to a strategic enabler that makes the difference between success and failure for everyone in the business. 

If organisations want to succeed in 2020 and beyond, they need to deliver seamless user experiences. The only way to achieve this is with a multidisciplinary view of user experience and digital services across the organisation. Digital business application owners, IT and DevOps teams need to understand the direct link between user experience, application performance and business outcomes.

Struggling with tunnel vision

However, while the data to unlock that insight is already flowing through the business and being analysed, it’s usually siloed across disparate tools. This makes it nigh on impossible to understand data in context and turn it into actionable answers that can improve business outcomes.

These silos have evolved as different teams within the organisation have adopted their own tools for a variety of use cases. These tools all provide important information, but their siloed nature leaves individual teams with tunnel vision, as they are unable to see the wider context of what each set of data means for the business as a whole.

As a result, it is very difficult to determine the impact IT performance has on business outcomes without a lot of manual correlation. That takes time and in some cases is nearly impossible to do at all given the dynamic and complex nature of modern cloud environments. As such, it fails to provide actionable answers when they’re needed most – in real-time.

Looking at the bigger picture

To make more informed decisions and prioritise efforts to optimise digital services based on the impact on business outcomes, organisations need access to software intelligence that provides context. For example, IT teams and application owners could use business and application performance data to prioritise initiatives to improve customer journeys based on how revenues and conversions are being affected. This can only be achieved by breaking down the silos between tools and implementing a common data model that ties user experience, customer behaviour and application performance data together with business metrics.

If that data model is combined with deterministic AI, which provides precise insights into the root cause of anomalies, it’s possible to analyse the vast quantities of data flowing through the organisation and uncover real-time answers to business questions. In some cases, these answers can be used to automate remediation, so teams within the business don’t even need to manually intervene and resources can be used more effectively to provide better outcomes for the organisation.

Getting ahead of the game

Ultimately, today’s businesses live or die based on the ability to deliver perfect software and seamless digital journeys. In such an environment, it’s crucial that everyone in the organisation has access to real-time answers that reveal how business outcomes are being impacted by application performance. That’s impossible to achieve if everyone is just looking at their own piece of the puzzle.

Digital business application owners, IT and DevOps teams need to put their heads together and work collaboratively to see the full picture of what’s happening. By breaking down the walls between tools and taking a new, multidisciplinary approach to how they run the business, organisations can leap ahead of their competitors in 2020, by unlocking the answers they need to improve business outcomes.

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Goodbye 2019, hello 2020: The year in cloud reviewed – and what is on the horizon

To say 2019 was a busy year for cloud would be no surprise. Yet the past 12 months has seen innovation, expansion, and drama which represents a poke in the eye for those who dismiss the industry as being consolidated and saturated.

Without any further ado, here is CloudTech’s traditional look back on the year in focus – and what the following 12 months will have in store for industry players and watchers alike.

The new hybrid cloud: Outposts leads and others follow

It was the hottest topic as 2018 drew to a close; the launch of AWS Outposts, with VMware as partner in crime, which promised to deliver a ‘truly consistent hybrid experience’ to ‘virtually any’ on-premises facility.

Naturally, as Microsoft and Google’s big events rolled around in 2019, attention turned to this area above all others. Google Cloud Next in April saw the launch of cloud services platform Anthos. Or, rather, it was a relaunch: to ‘build and manage modern hybrid applications across environments’, as well as accommodate AWS and Azure. In November, Microsoft launched Azure Arc, and outlined its theory of ‘hybrid 2.0’. Hybrid capabilities ‘must enable apps to run seamlessly across on-premises, multi-cloud and edge devices’, as Azure CVP Julia White noted at the time.

This means that the three largest cloud vendors are in a state of ‘collaborative détente’ right now, in the words of Pivot3 CMO Bruce Milne. Speaking to CloudTech at VMworld in August, Milne noted of the ‘obvious strategic tension’ to “watch this space because that friction is sure to generate sparks eventually.”

Kurian’s busy year as Google’s cloud chief

Another area industry watchers pencilled in for 2019 was how Thomas Kurian would take over the mantle left behind by Diane Greene as Google Cloud’s CEO. Among the in-tray items for the new boss were expansion and enterprise sales – or in the case of the latter, at least talking a good game.

This was exemplified in Kurian’s debut speaking slot as chief executive. At a Goldman Sachs conference in February, the former Oracle executive told delegates that old-school sales tactics were key to pushing Google’s message of differentiation. How has that gone? It’s hard to say; while Google still remains shy when it comes to revealing specific cloud figures, the overall soundbites have been solid around customer momentum and partnerships, while Anthos was well received.

As far as 2019 went, Google was the busiest hyperscaler in terms of acquisitions. While AWS had CloudEndure at the start of the year and Microsoft moved for Movere in September, Google’s shopping list had four items in total. Alongside Looker, the biggest deal, were moves for enterprise data pipeline provider Alooma, storage firm Elastifile, and VMware workload runner CloudSimple. New expansion areas included Poland, Switzerland, and Japan.

Open source providers open a can of worms

Maintaining your open ethos and turning a profit is frequently an area of tension, particularly for companies who deal in cloud and big data software. Indeed, 2019 was set to be a vital year for open source development in this context; the IBM-Red Hat acquisition hinted at it.

So it proved. In February, Redis Labs modified its licensing terms with this in mind, before having to change them again to appease open source and developer communities. The change meant developers were free to use the software, modify the source code et al – which they of course were always allowed to do – stipulating that the end result could not be a database, caching, search, indexing or stream processing engine, or anything to do with machine learning, deep learning, or artificial intelligence.

The month before, Confluent secured a $2.5 billion valuation having undergone a license change of its own. At the time, co-founder Jay Kreps maintained that the way forward building fundamental infrastructure layers was with open code. “As workloads move to the cloud we need a mechanism for preserving that freedom while also enabling a cycle of investment, and this is our motivation for the licensing change,” he wrote.

Speaking to CloudTech at the time of the change, Redis CEO Ofer Bengal said that, aside from AWS – frequently cited as the primary culprit for this behaviour – ‘the mood [was] trying to change’ between the big clouds and open source software providers. The proof of this theory was borne out in April, when Google Cloud announced at Next what it described the ‘first integrated open source ecosystem’ with seven vendors. Confluent and Redis Labs were both part of this group, with Bengal joining Kurian on stage to announce the deal.

Trump’s turn: Microsoft pips AWS to JEDI contract in shock decision

For the vast majority of 2019, the common consensus was that Amazon Web Services would secure the $10 billion JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) cloud contract. Yet many were not banking on the intervention of the US President. In July, around the time Oracle’s legal challenge was running out of gas, President Trump announced he was looking at the procurement process, citing complaints from multiple rivals.

In October, the Department of Defense announced Microsoft had won the contract. Many industry pundits took to link the stormy relationship between the president and Jeff Bezos to explain the decision; a book from former secretary of defence James Mattis alleged that President Trump told him to ‘screw Amazon’ out of the contract.

AWS has, not surprisingly, sought to appeal the ruling. Aside from the procurement process itself, this publication explored the definition of multi-cloud in a federal context. The award was, and always had been, for a single provider – a bone of contention in itself. Yet given AWS has been running the CIA’s cloud for years, what does this mean? “The DoD argued [it needed] one supplier simply because [they] need the level of tight integration and security,” cloud pundit Bill Mew told CloudTech in October. “I totally buy that if that’s their argument – but then why are they not going to the same supplier the CIA has?”

2019’s major cloud mergers and acquisitions

October: Digital Realty acquires Interxion for $8.4bn in biggest data centre deal of them all
August: VMware moves in for Pivotal and Carbon Black at combined $4.8bn
June: Google Cloud looks to Looker in $2.6bn all-cash deal for greater multi-cloud analytics
June: Salesforce to acquire Tableau for $15.7bn to combine AI with BI bulk (link to MarketingTech)

2020 outlook

Henrik Nilsson, vice president EMEA, Apptio

As seen in other software industries, overly aggressive price wars would likely upset the cloud market. As a result, AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform will all continue to enhance their specialities in 2020 – for instance focusing on scale, or a specific sector, or AI capabilities – to provide differentiation.

This will have a knock-on effect on costs. Apples to apples comparisons of pricings is already difficult, but moving forward businesses will have to do a much better job of tying value to cloud to make the right decisions for their business needs. In 2020 companies will need to establish a cloud centre of excellence and a ‘FinOps’ mindset, whereby all areas of the business have greater understanding of, and accountability for, cloud spend.

Dave Chapman, head of customer transformations, Cloudreach

The new era of enterprise cloud adoption will be among ‘cloud-native businesses’; organisations built directly with the cloud’s scalability and efficiency in mind. We’ve already seen how valuable it can be to have this agility built into a company’s DNA – look no further than the behemoth that is Netflix – so in 2020, expect to see more organisations migrating workloads to the cloud in an effort to meet the growing demands of today’s digital businesses.

Sanjay Castelino, chief product officer, Snow Software

Today’s cloud infrastructure is relatively easy to understand compared to what it will look like in 2020 and beyond. For example, when provisioning a cloud instance today, a user only needs a basic idea of how it operates and what it will cost. But when new cloud approaches like serverless become more popular, cloud usage will be managed by the people writing code.

In serverless computing, the code drives the cost to deliver the service, and businesses are not yet prepared to deal with these new consumption models. In the next year, companies need to priorities understanding consumption models because those models will have a significant impact on their business.

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