3 essential considerations for hybrid cloud technology
We couldn’t very well have a series of articles on how to drive your hybrid cloud implementation without talking about the technology, right? Throughout our series, we’ll have deep dives by technical team members on how we accelerated our hybrid cloud value to help the business innovate.
To start off though, let’s take an example you may be familiar with: the CIO comes back from a conference and sends an email to the relevant team member that says, “I think we should use X to enable our cloud.” X is the latest tool from your favorite vendor.
Sue, our platform leader who has been focusing on how to derive value from cloud migrations, receives the request. After counting to ten and practicing some deep breathing techniques that she learned from her therapist to help manage stress, she can respond to her boss’s email with one of the following scenarios:
a) “Already on it. I’ve just scheduled a meeting to update you on the progress.” Forgetting, for a moment, that most of her message is a series of alternative facts rather than the straight-up truth — that this request would create more confusion to the team and to the broader organization.
b) “Attached please find my resignation letter.” This is the one that Sue had written two bosses ago. She has finally had enough pivots for the bright-and-shiny new technology with little context of the operating environment and unintended consequences.
c) “Here’s the last update of our two-year view. That technology is on the radar for next quarter. Will schedule time to walk you through the plan and get your input.” All of these statements are factual.
The last scenario is the best option (provided that Sue is still satisfied with her working environment) to show the strategy and context for how the new technology will bring value to the IT organization. Sue can offer this scenario because she understands that a critical part of her role is being two steps ahead.
As we started our own hybrid cloud journey, we took time to establish how we were going to approach the invariably ever-changing technological ecosystem — which effectively inhibits creating a multi-year roadmap — and how we needed to think about decisions and our path each step of the way. We sum it up with three considerations: hybrid, integrated, and open.
Let me break it down for you:
Hybrid
We needed business application teams to have the same experience with our hybrid cloud platform, regardless of whether the underlying infrastructure was on the public cloud or on our private cloud.
Why?
Because this is how we enable better security, resiliency, and platform availability for our most critical workloads. Most importantly, the application teams need the ability to move fast within our enterprise IT environment. A true hybrid cloud platform that has integrated and open elements, as described below, is how we do this. From the technical perspective, this means starting with technology that allows us to take advantage of public and private in a singular, unified way.
Integrated
Any technology that we install into our environment needs to do more than just run. It needs to be fully integrated with how we do IT. This includes everything from change management, to information security standards, to alerting, logging, event management, and even how the application teams will build and deploy their applications.
You get the picture. This is where most of the work is. Without a fully integrated hybrid cloud platform, we lose visibility into the IT operation, which increases risk, and ultimately increases the complexity and sprawl that we have to manage.
Open
If you need to move fast — and you do — and you need to build things, you need to have a good way to prioritize (I know, a word the boss hates, because we need to get it all done). There are standard capabilities we need to implement, such as integration into your CMDB (that some application teams won’t see much value in), and other capabilities, such as multi-region support for mission critical workloads, that they desperately need but take time to build.
You’ll discover that some teams won’t find value in standard capabilities that are quick and necessary to implement, such as integration into your CMDB. But those teams will desperately need capabilities like multi-region support for mission critical workloads, which take time to build.
So, what do you do?
Have an open approach to implementing these capabilities on your platform. For us, we targeted 60% of the capabilities implemented to be directly driven (and yes, prioritized) by the application teams using the platform. By doing it this way, it ensures that we don’t accidentally implement GPUs before multi-region if we have a long line of mission-critical applications wanting to use the platform.
Moving quickly is about implementing capabilities that the technology doesn’t provide out of the box, and doing it at the right time. We call this our “opinionated” version of the platform and the technology — how we build and operate for our specific IT environment. Simultaneously, we applied these concepts of hybrid, integrated, and open to ensure that we were able to move fast as we selected the technology.
Have comments or feedback on things you’d like to hear about? We’d love to hear from you!
Matt Lyteson is Vice President of CIO Hybrid Cloud Platforms at IBM based in RTP, North Carolina. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
