{"id":15992,"date":"2015-07-17T11:12:44","date_gmt":"2015-07-17T11:12:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.businesscloudnews.com\/?p=230461"},"modified":"2015-07-17T11:12:44","modified_gmt":"2015-07-17T11:12:44","slug":"hybrid-cloud-issues-are-cultural-first-technical-second-ovum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/hybrid-cloud-issues-are-cultural-first-technical-second-ovum\/","title":{"rendered":"Hybrid cloud issues are cultural first, technical second \u2013 Ovum"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"CIOs<\/a><\/p>\n

CIOs are still struggling with their hybrid cloud strategies<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

This week has seen a number of hybrid cloud deals which would suggest the industry is making significant progress delivering the platforms, services and tools necessary to make hybrid cloud practical. But if anything they also serve as a reminder that IT will forever be multimodal which\u00a0creates challenges that begin with people, not technology, explains Ovum\u2019s principle analyst of infrastructure solutions Roy Illsley.<\/p>\n

There has been no shortage of hybrid cloud deals this week.<\/p>\n

Rackspace and Microsoft announced a deal<\/a> that would see the hosting and cloud provider expand its Fanatical Support to Microsoft Azure-based hybrid cloud platforms.<\/p>\n

Google both announced it would support Windows technologies<\/a> on its cloud platform, and that it would formally sponsor the OpenStack foundation<\/a> \u2013 a move aimed at supporting container portability between multiple cloud platforms.<\/p>\n

HP announced it would expand its cloud partner programme<\/a> to include CenturyLink, which runs much of its cloud platform on HP technology, in a move aimed at bolstering HP\u2019s hybrid cloud business and CenturyLink\u2019s customer reach.<\/p>\n

But one of the more interesting hybrid cloud stories this week came from the enterprise side of the industry. Copper and gold producer Freeport-McMoRan announced it is embarking on a massive overhaul of its IT systems. In a bid to become more agile the firm said it would deploy its entire application estate on a combination of private and public cloud platforms \u2013 though, and somewhat ironically, the company said the entire project would wrap up in five years (which, being pragmatic about IT overhauls,\u00a0could mean far later).<\/p>\n

\u201cThe biggest challenge with hybrid cloud isn\u2019t the technology per se \u2013 okay, so you need to be able to have one version of the truth, one place where you can manage most the platforms and applications, one place where to the best of your abilities you can orchestrate resources, and so forth,\u201d Illsley explains.<\/p>\n

Of course you need all of those things, he says. There will be some systems that won\u2019t fit into that technology model, that will likely be left out (i.e. mainframes). But there are tools out there to fit current hybrid use cases.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen most organisations \u2018do\u2019 hybrid cloud, they tend to choose where their workloads will sit depending on their performance needs, scaling needs, cost and application architecture \u2013 and then the workloads sit there, with very little live migration of VMs or containers. Managing them while they sit there isn\u2019t the major pain point. It\u2019s about the business processes; it\u2019s the organisational and cultural shifts in the IT department that are required in order to manage IT in a multimodal world.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s happening in hybrid cloud isn\u2019t terribly different from what\u2019s happening with DevOps. You have developers and you have operations, and sandwiching them together in one unit doesn\u2019t change the fact that they look at the world \u2013 and the day-to-day issues they need to manage or solve \u2013 in their own developer or operations-centric ways. In effect they\u2019re still siloed.\u201d<\/p>\n

The way IT is financed can also create headaches for CIOs intent on delivering a hybrid cloud strategy. Typically IT is funded in an \u2018everyone pitches into the pot\u2019 sort of way, but one of the things that led to the rise of cloud in the first place is line of businesses allocating their own budgets and going out to procure their own services.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis can cause both a systems challenge \u2013 shadow IT and the security, visibility and management issues that come with that \u2013 and a cultural challenge, one where LOB heads see little need to fund a central organisation that is deemed too slow or inflexible to respond to customer needs. So as a result, the central pot doesn\u2019t grow.\u201d<\/p>\n

While vendors continue to ease hybrid cloud headaches on the technology front with resource and financial (i.e. chargeback) management tools, app stores or catalogues, and standardised platforms that bridge the on-prem and public cloud divide, it\u2019s less likely the cultural challenges associated with hybrid cloud will find any straightforward solutions in the short term.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt will be like this for the next ten or fifteen years at least. And\u00a0the way CIOs work with the rest of the business\u00a0as well as the IT department will define how successful that hybrid\u00a0strategy will be, and if you don’t do this well then whatever technologies you put in place will be totally redundant,\u201d\u00a0Illsley says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week has seen a number of hybrid cloud deals which would suggest the industry is making significant progress delivering the platforms, services and tools necessary to make hybrid cloud practical. But if anything they also serve as a reminder that IT will forever be multimodal which creates challenges that begin with people, not technology, explains Ovum’s principle analyst of infrastructure solutions Roy Illsley.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[803,1989,1990,344,573,183,1991,51,1976,2037,443,3003],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-azure","category-enterprise-it","category-features","category-google","category-hp","category-hybrid-cloud","category-interviews","category-microsoft","category-news-analysis","category-ovum","category-rackspace","category-roy-illsley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15992","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\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15992"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15993,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15992\/revisions\/15993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}