Optimizing Your Hybrid IT Strategy

Editor's Notes

• #10: Organizations that address cloud and hybrid IT decision-making from a workload perspective and successfully place those workloads in the optimum environments can achieve greater flexibility, scalability, security and lower IT costs.   Flexential Professional Services has created a Hybrid IT Strategy Framework to guide workload placement decisions using 14 technical, operational and financial criteria. Read the white paper to understand how to make optimum workload placements and better cloud decisions.
• #11: Today’s IT environments are changing rapidly and dramatically.   The technology that’s critical to your business is becoming more complex  Workloads are growing larger and more distributed Demands are increasing and the expectations are higher than ever With everything-as-a-service, the role of the IT leader has expanded   To survive in these highly dynamic hybrid IT environments, your business must be flexible and able to adapt quickly.
• #13: One size does not fit all Workloads can be thought of as the applications, servers, data or network services needed to deliver business IT There are lots of options available to customers today Infrastructure options range from on-premise (with customers managing everything from the hardware up) all the way to software as a service (with customers just managing their Data use) Most companies are now fulfilling their infrastructure needs in a hybrid model combining these various options Workload placement is the process of selecting the right hosting option for a given workload based on: Operational resources & expertise needed to support those workloads Technical requirements of the workloads  Business drivers of the organization (business strategy, growth plans, funding models) The companies that are most successful in workload placement have formal long short/term cloud strategies Understanding decision criteria and workload hosting options helps us be part of the customer solution and win our fair share of the hybrid IT market Considerations for workload placements Business App uptime Avail CX Time to market Sec/compliance Costs M/A SLA RTO Technical Performance Scalability Agility Latency –ERP, EOL/S OS, DB, Recovery HA Legacy Apps SLA RPO
• #14: Each of the different options has different strengths and weaknesses It’s important to remember that what might be a strength for one customer might be a viewed as a weakness for another. As they move right, they tend to shed responsibility and have the potential to pick up capabilities more easily. Plus there are other factors such as: Availability (key thing to remember is their SLA is written such that you need to expect an AZ to go dark) Budget Predictability Security Tools/Concerns “Burstability” Cost in general Brand familiarity/reputation App-Dev vs COTS Data Gravity Boomerang research Top 3 – Security, Cost Predictability and overall cost (colo is cheaper at scale). This is why it’s so important to position HYBRID. Think of it as investment protection and flexibility as needs change. Manageability – who controls the administration Where does your data resides – governance laws might dictate this Do you need to scale/agility? How often are you app updated? CI/CD
• #16: The critical issue for making good workload placement decisions is understanding how to evaluate each workload. Flexential Professional Services uses 14 criteria to analyze a workload and its needs. We have grouped these into 3 categories, and any one criteria could heavily sway the placement decision for a given workload in a given organization. There is no ‘one size fits all’ and as each organization, IT department and workload characteristics are unique.
• #17: As we look at the range of hybrid IT workload placement options from on-premises to SaaS, you'll see that Flexential occupies the middle of this diagram with our core services of cloud and colo, but when you think of Flexential’s place in Hybrid IT — we actually extend outward to offer services to customers with workloads in other locations. We can meet customers where they are and we provide professional services that span across all environments. Some examples of how Flexential supports hybrid IT include: We extend private connectivity to public cloud providers and also connect into on-premise systems We provide hosting to SaaS companies in Flex colo or Flex cloud We support on-premises IT resiliency with Flexential DRaaS and DR professional services Professional Services designs, builds and operates DevOps environments – which may be located with public cloud providers, Professional Services’ transformation, architecture, cloud, cybersecurity and compliance services can span across a customer’s hybrid IT landscape
• #18: Transformation in general is never easy, and cloud transformation is no different. Organizations are also grappling with a variety of challenges such as Outdated infrastructure, Monolithic applications, Diverse cloud operating models, Gaps in security – and these all translate to increased requirements on scarce resources. As organizations use more clouds and cloud services in order to meet the diverse needs of their business, and each cloud silo presents unique architectural and operational challenges. At the same time, providing employees with fast, secure access to the apps they need is cumbersome and complex while challenging traditional security models. Our recent Benchmark Study found executives prioritize the following challenges regarding utilization of multiple clouds: Risk related to security, data, or privacy issues 25% Inconsistent infrastructure API, database, network, security constructs 25% Need to hire or maintain new, specialized skills to support Public Clouds 24% Ability to manage/ optimize spend 23% Increased complexity from policies that manage individual environments 23%