Hybrid IT: the practical issues confronting the CIO today

For the foreseeable future IT will be truly hybrid for most organisations and that is set to give the CIO headaches as they attempt to formalise the management of a Hybrid IT environment. This is the prognosis from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) following extensive research into the current and projected IT estates.

The research, conducted in Q3 2013 polling 250 senior IT and business decision-makers, part of the fourth annual body of research to determine the level of Cloud adoption also gleaned insights into attitudes, experiences and trends across a broad range of IT estates in both private and pubic sectors.

The research identified four core influencers impacting the CIO or IT Director when making IT deployment decisions:
· Current IT maturity: in other words the level of IT adoption and enablement, the degree of legacy technology baked into the IT operations will play a central role in choice of future IT deployments.
· Economics: The level of existing investment in IT, constraints in capital or operational expense budgets and ability to access the wider business impacts to calculate RoI, reduced maintenance activity, improving time to market, and increasing agility.
· Operating environments: Clarity and scope of the operating environment including the service window, performance criteria and access to network bandwidth are essential in making confident and effective deployment decisions.
· Emotion and education: Imbibing confidence and enabling effective control over distributed IT is not just about tools and processes, but about attitude, comfort, confidence and ability to weed out both hype and FUD.
Specific findings that compound to give todays’ CIO a headache include:
· Most companies are already hybrid in some shape or form. 86% of organisations have on-premise applications, 47% have hosted or managed services, 27% SaaS, 22% colocation services and 19% have private Clouds
· Other practical constraints identified by businesses as issues that impact their choice of deployment model relate to the levels of integration between applications, the degree of flexibility in scale of use required over time and the perception of risk associated with the sensitivity of the data
· Avoiding data replication was cited by 41% of organisations when asked what the biggest challenge they faced in managing IT across multiple deployment models
· Managing data protection was referenced by 39%, having a single view of the IT estate was raised by 38%, mitigating costs at 37% and enabling data transfer and interoperability by 34%
· 67% or organisations are seeking to operate a single governance model regardless of IT deployment models used. 32% believe that they have this practice in operation today but only 5% have a unified management platform today.
· 85% of organisations want their IT department to maintain overall control of the entire IT stack, regardless of platform
· 79% want a single monitoring solution to oversee all IT operations, but only 30% perceive that they have this capability today

Andy Burton, Founder of CIF, stated: “We can conclude that most organisations will continue to use a mix of deployment models for the foreseeable future, and that the combination of on-premise, hosted and Cloud services, along with the expansion of BYOD, means that the future challenges for an executive managing IT delivery relate more to the distributed nature of IT platforms. As if this mixed environment is not challenging enough, the real focus for the CIO in the near future is ensuring good governance, increased agility and effective delivery across a range of in-house and outsourced services given that it is the new norm. In other words what will be keeping them awake a night will be how to effectively build, control and sustain an effective Hybrid IT estate while meeting the business requirements of the organisation and the expectations from end users themselves.”

When asked if the CIO was setting out a single IT governance framework that overseas all IT regardless of deployment model 68% stated that they did not. Of the same sample 70% of organisations do not have a single reporting capability providing executive overviews and operational management. Finally a staggering 95% had no unified IT management platform that enables them to manage IT workloads that are both on-premise and Cloud-based.

Andy continued: “End users continue to express a range of concerns when considering the appropriate deployment model for an IT solution. The internal concerns that the CIO needs to investigate and allay as part of the transition to use Cloud services include such aspects as data security and privacy as well as the practicalities of access to, and bandwidth of, Internet connections. When operating in a hybrid model, the concerns of the CIO typically embrace the issues of maintaining overall control, ensuring reliability and efficiency, and, avoiding commercial issues like lock-in.”

The research did also put one common myth to bed, bearing in mind that much of the fear associated with the use of Cloud-based services is often associated with the perception that the IT department will be cut back, it is clear from the evidence provided in the CIF research that 90% of firms do not reduce head count in IT. Rather they are increasing their focus on new value-creating projects, ease the burden on over-stretched resources and implement new service enhancing practices.