How Hybrid IT Enhances Market Agility

The pressure is on for CIOs to investigate the benefits of hybrid IT.

Growth in cloud-first initiatives and IoT has CIOs reconsidering their large expenditure on data centers, which typically amounts to a quarter of their budget.⁽¹⁾ Yet, there still remains a requirement to maintain some on premises workloads for mission-critical, compliance and cost reasons.

The one-size-fits-all IT infrastructure has given way to a more agile hybrid IT approach that allows for easy customization in the face of a rapidly moving market. The hybrid paradigm offers what today’s enterprise need–a scalable, flexible and cost-efficient IT infrastructure that quickly adapts to current and future business requirements.

The Many Upsides of Hybrid IT

A hybrid IT infrastructure enables enterprises to dramatically improve operations while reducing costs. It offers the flexibility of maintaining mission-critical workloads on-prem and in colocation facilities, while moving others to the cloud and to edge data centers. This hybrid IT framework feeds business growth by ensuring that key IT resources are available on demand. This, in turn, accelerates time to market and drives new product innovation.

Creating a Business Priorities Construct

The business needs of an enterprise will guide the right construct of services needed to stay competitive. Once business priorities and metrics are defined, they can be dovetailed to the IT “must haves” a company needs to move forward. So how does one arrive at the right hybrid IT infrastructure to support the many moving parts of a successful enterprise? These parts would naturally include risk and security, operational expenditures, capital outlays, and operational agility. Weighing risk against agility, for example, has led more CIOs to consider colocation in place of or in addition to on-prem when evaluating their mission-critical applications.

The essence of colocation is that it allows current workloads to be outsourced to third-party data centers, along with performance and risk. Uptime is assured in service level agreements (SLAs). Consider too that many enterprises use on-demand and pay-as-needed cloud to help mitigate unpredictable business events should the need to scale up their infrastructures arise. Knowing that one has a dedicated infrastructure and managed services for predictable workloads provides peace of mind to CIOs and their teams.

Best Approach for Enterprises

Gartner predicts that by 2020, 90 percent of enterprises will adopt hybrid IT infrastructure management capabilities. The promise of far greater agility and lower total cost of ownership compared to on-premises IT services is simply too enticing to ignore. Add to that, hybrid IT infrastructures also bestow a number of key cloud advantages—like rapid application deployment, elastic pricing and scalability.

A few caveats remain, however. Enterprises must fully define their cloud-first strategy to better understand the role public cloud plays in their overall hybrid IT. Such infrastructure should be designed to work well not only today but many years down the line.

Finally, enterprises must strive to make on-prem and cloud infrastructures play well together to derive the most value. Leveraging a DCIM software and tools can help CIOs do just that, while also removing the inherent complexity in hybrid IT.

Clearly, the one-size-fits-all infrastructure is becoming obsolete. The new norm is hybrid IT because it offers what today’s businesses need: a scalable, agile infrastructure that delivers reliable performance at a reduced cost.

(1) Source: Gartner, Hybrid IT Infrastructure Management and Cloud Migrations, Sep 2016