There’s a real change happening among business leaders with regard to IT operations. The da
ys of IT being some secretive, hidden department full of technical people are thankfully coming to an end.
As business becomes more digitized, the whole organization is more aware than ever of the importance of IT. Adding to the awareness trend is cloud. The ability for any line of business to procure an online service on demand has made IT even more notable to the broader business.
The challenge is many workloads are being spun up without a broader strategy. Human nature being what it is, we love a fast solution to even the most complex problems and often have to be forced into thinking about long-term impacts.
That’s why I like communicating the virtues of a hybrid cloud – it’s the long-term IT strategy we’ve been waiting for.
Customer interest in hybrid is growing by the day, but when I meet with IT and business managers there remains a lot of uncertainty over the technical aspects of hybrid. While business leaders don’t need to become overly technical, it is certainly in their interest – and the organization’s – to get more involved with the hybrid cloud strategy.
There’s a funny meme about hybrid floating around social media. The joke is about replacing one misunderstood term (cloud) with another even more misunderstood term (hybrid cloud). To a certain extent that is true, but when people see hybrid for what it is, it makes more sense than the nebulous “cloud” term that is now bandied around by everyone.
Understand hybrid and the benefits will follow
I encourage IT and business leaders to learn as much as they can about hybrid cloud and plan for the future. You can’t flick a switch and immediately transform a whole organization to a hybrid architecture, it will take time to plan your hybrid architecture and establish the right mix of application hosting options.
Hybrid cloud is bringing a new era in cost savings, infrastructure flexibility, redundancy and security, and innovation potential. For these reasons it can’t be ignored by anyone involved in developing the strategic direction of the organization.
And I should mention with so many mission-critical business applications still hosted on aging, integrated systems, hybrid cloud presents the best opportunity for you to modernise your IT infrastructure. A hybrid architecture is all about application mobility and that will prevent the all-to-common quagmire of poor performance and agility resulting from too much reliance on single systems.
Now is a great time for business leaders to get involved with the future of IT infrastructure and digital business. Get on board with hybrid cloud and I look forward to hearing any details about your journey.