Why the heck do I need a hybrid (cloud)?
In the first article of our series, I walked through five things you shouldn’t do if you want to have a successful hybrid cloud. Now, let’s dive a bit deeper into these areas on what you should do, or at least consider doing. We’ll start with: “why do I need hybrid cloud?”
You may have seen in some of your feeds that all of the hyper-scalers are now getting into this hybrid cloud business — run your workloads anywhere and use that particular hyper-scaler as your preferred (i.e., “sole”) provider. You’ve also likely heard that many organizations are struggling with how to get this going and are not locking themselves in, because why should they put all their eggs in one basket? Hybrid cloud, when done right, enables organizations to have infinite scale and infinite freedom all at a low cost, right? But, you could be saying to yourself, “if my organization is good enough, where I’m managing the infrastructure complexity across my public cloud and my on-premises environment, and I’m considered a “boss” for all of it, why should I care about hybrid anyway?”
Let’s take a fictitious example of an IT leader; we’ll call her Sam.* Sam’s boss, the CIO of the company, just got back from a great virtual conference (juggling attendance between regular CIO meetings and the kids’ virtual pandemic school in the kitchen) and texts Sam: “What are we doing about hybrid cloud? Think it could help with complexity and outages…”
Sam thinks, “Outages? What is the CIO talking about anyway? And what’s with the “…”? Is that a place holder for a question mark or something else?” After pondering for a second, Sam curses and realizes that however much this question should have been expected, she doesn’t have an answer that shows they’re well underway. She waits three minutes and then responds to the CIO with one of the following answers:
a) “PO is being submitted.”
b) “New phone. Who is this?”
c) “Should talk ASAP.”
As satisfying as it is to have an answer to your boss that clearly shows you’re on top of the next trend in technology (option a), something as important as a new platform warrants some upfront discussion and thoughtfulness (option c). Hybrid cloud isn’t simply about implementing some new technology, nor is it about changing your entire IT operating environment all at once. Knowing what you need, and what to expect to see as part of your journey, is critical to making sure you’re approaching it in the right way. (Oh, and kudos to you if you can essentially ghost your boss and still have a job the next day — option b.)
For us, we were getting good speed and scale in public cloud, but we had reservations about the level of effort needed to secure our most critical data, so we kept that data on premises. The lack of a straight-forward, high-security solution that everyone could adopt and embrace quickly was going to be taxing.
On the other hand, our on-premises private cloud was where we had the level of security we were comfortable with. With new private cloud technology, we were getting the speed we expected, but we were still limited in the scale for new projects. We couldn’t have a huge amount of excess capacity doing nothing for most of the time.
Connecting our private cloud and public cloud platforms into a single fabric for our hybrid cloud platform is what we saw as the potential solution to get us everything we needed: speed, scale, and security. We focused on the speed, scale, and security as critical elements for why we were investing in hybrid cloud and all that it entails. That focus enabled us to implement the right capabilities at the right time and make the right decisions. It also helped ensure that we would measure the things that mattered most to us against those dimensions.
So let’s go back to your hybrid cloud why. Let me sound like your therapist: why do YOU think you need hybrid cloud?
You should realize that your answer, or even your boss’s answer, is not: “because everyone else is doing it”. The answer to this question needs to come from the needs of your organization.
Maybe it’s optimization of your platforms and reducing spend due to cloud sprawl; maybe it’s increasing your security posture through better automation of the infrastructure and application code; maybe it’s looking for a way to build applications faster to help innovate for the business. There are many possible answers, but your organization’s own unique answer fundamentally informs your approach and how you measure the value of your hybrid cloud. Most importantly, it helps to rally the team behind what you’re looking to achieve — and do it quickly. As you’ll learn from us in our next article, this isn’t some massive multi-year project that we’re trying to plan out here. This is about moving quickly and gaining new value each and every step of the way.
In our next two articles, we’ll introduce some other thought leaders, discuss our hybrid cloud why, and how making key leadership and technical changes influenced our operational behaviors to get better results.
In May, we’ll get into how we started small to move fast and showed value with every step.
*All characters and events are fictional. We made them up to illustrate a point and for good humor. Any resemblance to objective reality is purely coincidental.
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.
