Of all the choices you can make about the direction of your information technology, hybrid IT might be the easiest.
It’s easy because if you don’t make any decision, hybrid IT is the default environment you’ll probably end up with: a mix of cloud and on premises technology.
It’s easy if you do make a decision, because hybrid IT gives you the most flexibility in managing your IT to match the needs of your business—not at the highest level, but at the level of every business unit and every business application.
That doesn’t mean you’ll get the same results with hybrid IT whether or not you deliberately choose it. If you simply fall into hybrid IT, you’re likely to end up with a difficult to manage environment filled with technology that solves individual problems without meeting overall business needs. If you actively choose hybrid IT, you end up with a strategically crafted environment that not only meets business needs, it helps transform the business.
Reasons for Choosing Hybrid IT
Why, then, should you choose hybrid IT? There are multiple reasons:
• controlling costs. For all the talk of cloud’s ability to reduce IT spending, there are a lot of costs associated with cloud. Cloud requires a significant investment in planning, migration, and ongoing monitoring to control cloud spending. By crafting a hybrid environment, you can balance those new costs and the sunk costs in your existing infrastructure and licenses.
• availability and disaster recovery. The cloud offers high levels of reliability and high availability, no question. But the many cloud outages that even major cloud vendors have experienced means you may want to have a backup solution that doesn’t rely on your cloud vendor.
• compliance and security. It’s well-known by now that cloud security is at least as safe as corporate IT security, but you still might not want to let the crown jewels of your company data out of your control. Deliberately designed hybrid IT environments let you keep your most sensitive data in-house while taking advantage of low-cost cloud storage for the rest of it.
• flexibility. With hybrid IT, you have more choices about where and how you meet your technology needs. Every workload can be placed in the cloud or on premises location that offers the best fit in terms of technology, support, and budget.
Managing Hybrid IT Effectively
The downside of the flexibility of hybrid is that it’s harder to track, control, and manage. With resources scattered across one or more clouds in addition to your data center, it becomes harder to know exactly what resources you have and how they’re being used. Look for tools that are able to consolidate data from multiple clouds to make it easier to see what’s going on. Make sure your people have the right skills too, by investing in training to bring them up to speed on all your technologies.
Get help designing, building, and managing your hybrid IT environment from VAST IT Services. Our vision, insight, and expertise help you leverage the three pillars of IT to create flexible, high-performing IT infrastructure that meets your business needs now and in the future. Contact us to learn more about using hybrid IT strategically rather than haphazardly.
Optimize Your Hybrid IT With These Additional Resources:
7 Challenges You Need to Overcome to Succeed With Hybrid Cloud
