“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,” said Trevaskis.
“For a lot of organisations the move to hybrid cloud is not intentional and it happens organically without the strategic direction of a CIO.”
One of the many challenges companies may face in adopting a hybrid cloud strategy is how to handle application integration.
“The odds are that you’re not going to move 100% of your organisation into a hybrid model on day one. It’s much more likely that you are going to evolve into it,” said Trevaskis.
Agility is key because commercial arrangements change and your data needs to be able to move. You need to be able to move both your application and your data seamlessly from public to private or from private to public or from public to another public provider. That’s where the true value of being agile lies, Ben McGahon, Comsys
“It’s great to have something like Salesforce at your disposal, it’s absolutely wonderful but if your payroll or enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is still in-house and the level of integration between the two is near zero then that’s a challenge.
Trevaskis suggests that companies seeking to avoid adoption pitfalls in moving to a hybrid cloud environment would do well to keep an eye on the small print.
“Be aware that even if you decide you are going to build your private cloud on a particular infrastructure or with a particular service provider, things can suddenly changes. It could be that you become subject to regulatory compliance that changes and suddenly your external service provider doesn’t meet the criteria.”
“If you need to move to a different cloud provider for the public aspect, then you need to know you can do that,” he said.
This is something that Ben McGahon, managing director of Comsys, agrees with. For him, openness is most important when it comes time to commit to any particular platform.
Open and orchestrated
“Openness and orchestration are the two most important parts. You’ve got to be able to easily move from one public provider to another within the hybrid model. There’s no point going down the route of adding public cloud if you’re going to get siloed into a proprietary or non-open standard provider,” he said.
The crux of this is that you need to be able to move your data if you need to, and for this reason it’s important to consider more than just the cost of the service.
“The most famous example of this is Netflix, which went down this route with Amazon and built a huge environment on a platform that is basically not open. The trick is that if you’re going with a hybrid cloud provider, whichever hypervisor you’re using needs to almost become irrelevant because if it’s not an irrelevant topic then you’re not going into an open public cloud provider, and therefore you’re not going to have an agile hybrid cloud model,” said McGahon.
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