Hybrid Cloud and Regulated Enterprise
Two of the benefits of working for a leading Cloud and DevOps consultancy are being invited to private events run by leading global enterprises, and working with internationally respected thought leaders. Last Friday, I was privileged to see the intersection of these two.
As I walked across Midtown Manhattan from my hotel to the Hilton conference center, I was curious what to expect for a private technology conference put on by Citi Bank. Admittedly, it was the second of the two-day event, but this day my colleague, Jesse White, was invited to speak on the Hybrid Cloud Panel as an anchor of the event.
Quickly there were several themes that jumped off the schedule to me:
· Security
· Analytics
· Cloud
And this is no surprise, given the companies on the badges all being in large enterprise and that we were in the middle of the Equifax data breach just getting global attention.
As we settled into the room for Jesse’s panel, it quickly reached standing room only status, and finally there had to be a cutoff of more people attending. It was quickly established by the panel that the large enterprise that while public cloud is a real accelerator for innovation, hybrid cloud is much more a reality for large regulated enterprise. Public cloud only represents 20% of the IT spend, according to one of the experts. Gartner projects an additional growth of 18% in 2017. But all agree, the cloud is a complex ecosystem. Especially when you are an enterprise running over 7,000 applications.
So what is “hybrid cloud”? Hybrid cloud is a way that an enterprise approaches op-ex/cap-ex with an existing data center. The pressure we feel from compute devices is only going to increase, and organizations need to decide which they want to plan develop and run on their own.
Hybrid cloud architecture is the integration of on-premises resources with cloud resources.
For most organizations with on-premises technology investments, operating in a hybrid architecture is a necessary part of cloud adoption. Migrating legacy IT systems takes time. Therefore, selecting a cloud provider who can help you implement a thoughtful hybrid strategy, without requiring costly new investments in on-premises hardware and software, is important to simplify operations and more easily achieve your business goals.
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/enterprise/hybrid/
Containers are an enabler for enterprise portability in hybrid cloud. Large enterprise is looking at the inflection point of containers and hybrid cloud, with a fixed eye on security. For the enterprise, they need to utilize the container as an abstraction the market has vetted through extensive production workload experience. You need an atomic discrete unit to divide the work, and up the stack you have to look at the orchestration layer to move containers around the various providers and environments, seamlessly.
More traditional approaches were highly adverse to vendor lock-in, but there is a rising voice at the modern executive layer around the total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) with that stance. In a vacuum, the fear of “stickie” services is real. From a pragmatist’s view, it is very difficult to do service-by-service because often there is too much overhead and compromise nested in that journey. It is the decade old build versus buy debate, and as usual, it comes down to the telemetry layer. Jesse summed it up best when he said “Most companies do not actually need the absolute best of the best for every service. You can drastically overspend chasing that last mile.”.
Looking ahead…
As we look at the emerging enterprise hybrid cloud landscape, a few patterns seem undeniable:
· Security is paramount
· Datasets are going to increase in size at an increasing rate; we need to build systems and service to leverage this
· Bi-modal resiliency; both at the strategic layer and in the tactical
As the panel drew to a close, several leaders and industry analysts hung back to connect with Jesse. It was impressive to hear how the themes discussed on the stage directly resonated with what these speculators and investors were tracking in the market. The conversation was anchored on digging another layer deep on each of the three bullets above. There was a keen interest in understanding vendors, enterprises and service providers that Contino has seen in our engagements that were well suited for growth in hybrid cloud applications. Beyond the affirmation that the message resonated, it was interesting to see how significant the impact of technology has had on traditional enterprise. A few years back, banks were banks, retailers were retailers and insurers were insures, now, they are all specialized technology companies — or they are dying.
