Making decisions about 20% of your hybrid IT is easy. (But to succeed, pay attention to the other 80%.)
by Mike Bullock.
IT leaders continue to be under huge pressure from their business counterparts to ensure that their IT drives innovation and growth.To meet the demand, organizations are adding a growing mix of hybrid cloud environments to their traditional IT in order to run their businesses better and offer more services to their customers.
It’s clear that hybrid IT helps businesses deliver more to customers, save money, improve outcomes and ensure security. However, without tight business and IT alignment, organizations may not achieve the full value of the cloud—or may even risk a costly failure. But aligning business and cloud strategies can be unexpectedly complex. It requires a strategic and informed assessment of current and future business goals, and an understanding of how the cloud can support them. It also requires buy-in and active support from business leaders, as well as a change management program to help ensure the initiative is fully adapted.
As organizations make it a priority to take advantage of the value and performance benefits of various cloud services, the IT team needs to be able to evaluate workloads and target the right technology platform, effective ways to integrate data and applications, and be able to orchestrate a smooth, efficient migration process.
Unfortunately, there are many roadblocks to making sound and informed IT decisions. I often see IT teams find it easy to make decisions for placement of about 20% of the workloads. But being aware of how those decisions impact the rest of the workload placement is vital.
You may find that critical dependencies stop you dead in your tracks. Or the data isn’t accurate, up to date or doesn’t reflect today’s business priorities. You may have a limited view into the interdependencies between applications. All of this makes it tough to make those remaining placement decisions.
My counsel is that you begin by making that critical linkage with your business counterparts and commit to ongoing communication. Be sure you understand the needs of the business and are fully aware of the applications and infrastructure which must work together to address critical business services. Be aware of how regulatory compliance and security impact every application when determining where to place a particular workload.
There is no “easy button” to making workload decisions. Instead, CIOs must lean on a methodology that aligns the business priorities with the IT strategies and provides the most secure, compliant, and cost-effective solution to meet the demands of their particular organization.
