If the figures are anything to go by, hybrid cloud is here to stay. Gartner recently said that according to its research, 50% of enterprises will use some kind of hybrid cloud technology by 2017 while other analysts actually put that figure at 80%.
Regardless, most Irish enterprises will be interested not in the figures but in what the technology can do for them. But in a sea of complexity, understand exactly what that is and how best to go about it can be challenging.
“The simplest piece of advice I’d give any client looking to embark on the use of hybrid cloud is to first know what you’re trying to achieve,” said Kevin Kimber, managing director for cloud and line of business for SAP in the UK and Ireland.
“Typically chief executives are focused on how to grow or transform their business or stay ahead of their competition. Six or seven years ago, the decision around moving to a cloud model was largely IT driven and focussed on cost reduction or rationalising the number of applications in data centres. Today, it’s much more focused around business decisions and driving innovation.”
You could have an organisation that’s well structured and knows exactly what it’s doing and suddenly word comes down from high saying ‘our corporate strategy is changing we are now using x, y or z’ and then suddenly the whole ballgame has changed. For a lot of organisations the move to hybrid cloud is not intentional and it happens organically without the strategic direction of a CIO, Peter Trevaskis, Dell
Kimber’s advice is for companies considering the move to be crystal clear about what they are trying to do, while also knowing what the key data and regulation compliance areas are that they need to focus on to make sure that their activities are fully in line with the law and best practice.
Lack of control
“When cloud first exploded on the scene, there was a lack of control across the business. It enabled decision making in such a way that you’d find line-of-business executives going off and procuring software-as-a-service products for their own needs without the IT department being involved.”
“Today, there is a much better understanding of the cloud and its offerings and there’s much more openness from an organisational perspective in terms of adoption. We typically find that our customers want to know where their data is located, how secure it is, if it’s in transit who has access to it, etc. So we have to go through a trust-earning exercise to show that we’re good safeguards for their data. That’s quite a development,” he said.
It is also true that many companies that do not consider themselves to be users of hybrid cloud might find that actually, they are. Shadow IT is a growing trend in the corporate environment.
“The reality of it is that many organisations are finding themselves in a hybrid or even public cloud environment without intentionally going there and without the strategic direction of their own IT department,” said Peter Trevaskis, enterprise marketing manager for Dell Ireland.
Shadow IT
“The classic example is shadow IT where the sales director is fed up with the IT director not giving him what he wants and so he goes off and signs up for Salesforce or something along those lines and three months later IT discovers that it’s actually in existence and being used extensively for the organisations data.”
Less obvious examples of how this can happen also include corporate mergers and acquisitions, when a company is bought, sold or merged with the result that its IT systems suddenly have to accommodate other ways of handling data.
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