One of the great names in IT has come, in a sense, late to the cloud services market. HP Enterprise has, on the other hand, embraced hybrid IT. Long a systems supplier to data centres and so to cloud services, it has launched the HPE Helion portfolio of cloud products and services based on open standards. “We are aiming to offer the ultimate in private cloud simplicity and flexibility in a single hybrid cloud-ready solution,” said Keith Perrin.
It’s all too often forgotten in the tech hype that most organisations have persistent and consistent workloads that support back office and routine administrative tasks. The benefits of cloud around scalability and agility, spinning up and down, usage-based pricing and so on are simply not very relevant to those workloads, Martin Carry, Evros
A fluid thing
“Many vendors are trying to define Hybrid IT and are specialising in a single or a few types. But I think it’s a fluid thing, driven by the market as much as nay technology. When I look at our clients it is clear they want to mix just about everything, from public and private cloud to software and development methods and everything in between that performs a useful function for them. It has really come down to what organisations and people need and want to do, the results they want, rather than the tech.”
So there is really no such thing as ‘implementing hybrid IT’, Perrin said, so much as the results of the ongoing interactions between the business, the organisation and the many IT groups, internal or external, which are trying to put together solutions for the identified needs. “The real world solutions can be a mix of the super scalability of public cloud with the details of governance in traditional and proven on-premises systems. We are linking many very different worlds. But the end goal is to give the business what it needs, when it needs it and in the manner in which it needs it.”
“The struggle to manage all of this is fascinating. Take the movement towards IT services brokerage in organisations — and we offer a Helion-based managed cloud brokerage service. This gives the business side choices of services that IT can help deliver or mediate or pro-actively oversee. When it works it can be brilliant and very powerful. We’re seeing service brokerages as a significant and growing trend across Europe.”
New normal
“Hybrid IT is quite simply the new normal,” said Keith O’Leary of Sungard Availability Services. “The IT industry — and its clients — have simply moved on to this mixed environment as the new steady state. Cloud service adoption is rising but there are also many business-critical processes working away on legacy systems. Even the mainframe is still with us. So anything like universal rip-and-replace is not feasible and we have to utilise the range of technology currently available. Cloud can replace traditional core functionality but more often it’s about augmenting and complementing other technology.”
“Our customers very often are buying into the capacity to scale rapidly and cost-effectively for certain activities — or to try new things which may or may not turn out to require longer term solutions. But it has to be pointed out that sometimes the result is welcome but introduces further complexity into the overall IT environment. There can also be unexpected costs. We did some recent research that established that over half of Irish businesses encountered some kind of unexpected cloud spend. Things like software maintenance, upgrade costs, systems integration, patching, recovery are part of the price for the agility we prize so much today.
The real world solutions can be a mix of the super scalability of public cloud with the details of governance in traditional and proven on-premises systems. We are linking many very different worlds. But the end goal is to give the business what it needs, when it needs it and in the manner in which it needs it, Keith Perrin, HPE
“We reckon that cloud hangover cost totals over €100 million per annum for Irish businesses. Actually, that’s a bit lower than many other European markets, where we have also been doing research for a number of years. That is probably because we are generally a little bit later and so coming to more mature cloud services.”
Learning curve
But in this whole new normal of cloud and hybrid IT and software-defined systems, O’Leary reckons, there is a learning curve for the industry as well as the clients. “It is the price of innovation and in that sense nothing new in business. Being first to market, competitive, constantly forward-looking will inevitably bring costs that are not amenable to accurate budgeting.”
“In general, I see most businesses grasping very readily the advantages of Hybrid IT, which also means understanding that there are complexities and downsides, which can affect born-in-the-cloud new businesses as well as the traditional ones, and living happily with that as normal because of the multiple advantages. Our research shows upwards of 80% of organisations identifying Hybrid IT as a critical component for their future success and 60% of the Irish ones see it as critical to staying competitive in their sector.”
Right place, right time
The practical realities of working with Hybrid IT come down in many ways to putting the right workload in the right place and at the right time, according to Martin Carry of Evros. “From our point of view, we can help with a wide range of options because we have a track record in on-premises IT, our own cloud platform in Digital Planet and a partnership with Microsoft so lots of work with Azure and Office 365 and so on. There is a clear distinction between public cloud and what we offer ourselves, which I like to call ‘service provider cloud’. It is built for enterprise with an enterprise IT stack and above all it is customisable. It combines fixed service propositions with the ability to provide customer-specific solutions.”
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