{"id":15227,"date":"2015-06-15T09:03:16","date_gmt":"2015-06-15T09:03:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.businesscloudnews.com\/?p=228082"},"modified":"2015-06-15T09:03:16","modified_gmt":"2015-06-15T09:03:16","slug":"is-force-of-habit-defining-your-hybrid-cloud-destiny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/is-force-of-habit-defining-your-hybrid-cloud-destiny\/","title":{"rendered":"Is force of habit defining your hybrid cloud destiny?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Experience<\/a><\/p>\n

Experience breeds habit, which isn’t necessarily the best thing strategically<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

I’ve been playing somewhat of a game over recent months.\u00a0 It’s a fun game for all the family and might be called \u201cGuess my job\u201d.\u00a0 It’s simple to play.\u00a0 All you need to do is ask someone the question; \u201cWhat is a hybrid cloud?\u201d then based upon their answer you make your choice.\u00a0 Having been playing this for a while I’m now pretty good at being able to predict their viewpoint from their job role or vice versa.<\/p>\n

And the point of all this?\u00a0 Simply, that people’s viewpoints are constrained by their experiences and what keeps them busy day-to-day, so often they miss an opportunity to do something different.\u00a0 For those people working day-to-day in a traditional IT department , keeping systems up and running,\u00a0 hybrid cloud is all about integrating an existing on-site system with an off-site cloud.\u00a0 This is a nice, easy one to grasp in principal but the reality is somewhat harder to realize.<\/p>\n

The idea of connecting an on-site System of Record to a cloud-based System of Engagement:\u00a0 pulling data from both to generate new insights is conceptually well understood.\u00a0 That said, the number of organisations making production use of such arrangements is few and far between.\u00a0 For example, combining historical customer transaction information with real-time geospatial, social and mobile data and then applying analytics to generate new insights which uncover new sales potential.\u00a0 For many organizations though, the challenge in granting access to the existing enterprise systems is simply too great.\u00a0 Security concerns, the ability to embrace the speed of change that is required and the challenge to extract the right data in a form that is immediately usable by the analytical tools may be simply a hurdle too high. \u00a0Indeed, many clients I’ve worked with have stated that they’re simply not going to do this.\u00a0 They understand the benefits, but the pain they see themselves having to go through to get these makes this unattractive to pursue.<\/p>\n

So, if this story aligns with your view of hybrid cloud and you’ve already put it in the \u201ctoo hard\u201d box then what is your way forward?<\/p>\n

For most organizations, no single cloud provider is going to provide all of the services they might want to consume.\u00a0 Implicitly then, if they need to bring data from these disparate cloud services together then there is a hybrid cloud use case:\u00a0 linking cloud to cloud.\u00a0 Even in the on-site to off-site hybrid cloud case there are real differences when the relationship is static compared to when you are dynamically bursting in and out of off-site capacity.\u00a0 Many organizations are looking to cloud as a more-effective and agile platform for backup and archiving or for disaster recovery.\u00a0 All of these are hybrid cloud use cases to but if you’ve already written off ‘hybrid’ then you’re likely missing very real opportunities to do what is right for the business.<\/p>\n

Regardless of the hybrid cloud use case, you need to keep in mind three key principals which are:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Portability \u2013 the ability to run and consume services and data from wherever it is most appropriate to do so, be that cloud or non-cloud, on-site or off-site.<\/li>\n
  2. Security, visibility and control \u2013 to be assured that end-to-end, regardless of where the ‘end’ is, you are running services in such a way that they are appropriately secure, well managed and their characteristics are well understood.<\/li>\n
  3. Developer productivity \u2013 developers should be focused on solving business problems and not be constrained by needing to worry about how or when supporting infrastructure platforms are being deployed.\u00a0 They should be able to consume and integrate services from many different sources to solve problems rather than having to create everything they need from scratch.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Business applications need to be portable such that they can both run as well as consume other services from wherever is most appropriate.\u00a0 To do that, your developers need to be more unconstrained by the underlying platform(s) and so can develop for any cloud or on-site IT platform.\u00a0 All this needs to be done in a way that allows enterprise controls, visibility and security to be extended to the cloud platforms that are being used.<\/p>\n

    If you come from that traditional IT department background, you’ll be familiar with the processes that are in place to ensure that systems are well managed, change is controlled and service levels are maintained.\u00a0 These processes may not be compatible with the ways that clouds open up new opportunities.\u00a0 This leads to the need to look a creating a \u201ctwo-speed\u201d IT organisation to provide the rigor where needed for the Systems of Record whilst enabling rapid change and delivery in the Systems of Engagement space.<\/p>\n

    Cloud generates innovation and hence diversity.\u00a0 Economics, regulation and open communities drive standardization and it is this, and in particular open standards, which facilitates integration in all of these hybrid cases.<\/p>\n

    So, ask yourself.\u00a0 With more than 65 per cent of enterprise IT organizations making commitments on hybrid cloud technologies before 2016 are you ensuring that your definitions \u2013 and hence your technologies choices \u2013 reflect future opportunities rather than past prejudices?<\/p>\n

    Written by\u00a0I’ve been playing somewhat of a game over recent months.\u00a0 It’s a fun game for all the family and might be called \u201cGuess my job\u201d.\u00a0 It’s simple to play.\u00a0 All you need to do is ask someone the question; \u201cWhat is a hybrid cloud?\u201d then based upon their answer you make your choice.\u00a0 Having been playing this for a while I’m now pretty good at being able to predict their viewpoint from their job role or vice versa.<\/p>\n

    Written by John Easton, IBM distinguished engineer and leading cloud advisor for Europe<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I’ve been playing somewhat of a game over recent months. It’s a fun game for all the family and might be called “Guess my job”. It’s simple to play. All you need to do is ask someone the question; “What is a hybrid cloud?” then based upon their answer you make your choice. Having been playing this for a while I’m now pretty good at being able to predict their viewpoint from their job role or vice versa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[183,799,2819,1976,1297],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hybrid-cloud","category-ibm","category-john-easton","category-news-analysis","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15227"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15228,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15227\/revisions\/15228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}