Advocacy

Moving from Hybrid IT to Hybrid Cloud

Treb Ryan, Dimension Data’s Chief Strategy Officer for cloud, shared a small joke about how one could argue every American company already has hybrid systems.

“In the US, somewhere in every single company,” he said in an interview, “every single piece of corporate information sits somewhere on Dropbox.”

“What they have is an IT environment that they traditionally manage one way and a cloud environment that they manage another way,” he said. “It’s very difficult to move applications and workload and data and resources across those two environments.”

That may not sound funny to many CTOs because it demonstrates how business users aren’t necessarily waiting for their IT departments before signing up for storage and services in the cloud. The joke also serves as a springboard for Ryan to vent one of his ongoing frustrations – confusion over hybrid IT vs. hybrid cloud solutions.

“This is where people make so many mistakes on both sides,” he said. “We’ve seen way too much of it on the mislabeling of the cloud. We normally hear people calling something cloud that is really just a bunch of virtual servers sitting inside the data center. It doesn’t make it ‘cloud’ at all.”

Ryan said almost all companies now have hybrid IT that uses “at least Software-as-a-Service and storage solutions” even if they haven’t adopted it on a departmental level.  “But that’s not the same as hybrid cloud,” he noted.

“What they have is an IT environment that they traditionally manage one way and a cloud environment that they manage another way,” he said. “It’s very difficult to move applications and workload and data and resources across those two environments.”

Separate Worlds

With a hybrid IT environment, users will find they can do some new things in the cloud through SaaS services and others through the applications on a traditional on-premise datacenter. But they can’t necessarily access the data they need in a SaaS tool or develop new apps in-house without time-sucking, laborious efforts. To do that, they’d have to use a hybrid cloud architecture that unifies the efforts.

“When we talk about the hybrid cloud, what we talk about is presenting a unified environment that may have on-site physical infrastructure, may have off-site public cloud capabilities and may even integrate with what they have already,” he said.

That means companies can take advantage of the investments they’ve already made in a traditional architecture but still get all the advantages of the cloud, including rapid application development that allows for an agile response to shifting competitive landscape while fostering innovation.

Try Something New

“In the old days, if I wanted to get new systems in place to experiment or because we needed additional capacity, there was such a long planning and acquisition process that it really slowed down the adoption of anything new and different,” Ryan said. “Now if I want to try something new or different, I can have those resources [available] to me in a company of minutes. We can have it right now.”

Ryan said he’s seeing a lot of hybrid cloud activity in the financial sector because of the amount of data banks and brokerages use.  He’s also seen the hybrid cloud adopted in healthcare where “it’s tougher because they tend to deal with even more legacy systems” than other types of companies.

But the fastest growth, he said, is likely to come in the mid-sized corporations with revenue of $2 billion to $5 billion range. Giant corporations have a “humongous” range of resources to help them with the transition, but themid-sized firms “and even the smaller guys” may not have a lot of existing infrastructure. That should make it easier for them to make the next big leap into the cloud.