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Hybrid IT: The New Reality

Kong Yang

IT infrastructures are evolving from traditional on-premises-only to a hybrid strategy that links internal and external IT services driven by the existence of the cloud. To shed more light on the new concerns and pressures created by this evolution, SolarWinds recently released the SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2016: The Hybrid IT Evolution, our annual study consisting of survey-based research that explores significant trends, developments and movements related to and directly affecting IT and IT professionals.

The findings of this year's report — which are based on a survey fielded in December 2015, which yielded responses from 257 IT practitioners, managers and directors in the U.S. and Canada from public and private sector small, mid-size and enterprise companies — paint a clear picture: cloud adoption is nearly universal, but it's not and will likely not ever be suitable for all workloads. The result — one set of on-premises services connected with another set of services in the cloud — is called hybrid IT. At the center of this evolution is the IT professional.

With that foundation, here's an overview of the report's key findings:

IT infrastructures have evolved from traditional on-premises-only to a hybrid strategy that links internal and external IT services driven by the existence of the cloud.

■ Nearly all (92 percent) of the IT professionals surveyed say adopting cloud technologies is important to their organizations' long-term business success; more than a quarter (27 percent) say it is extremely important.

■ Only 43 percent estimate that half or more of their organizations' total IT infrastructure will be in the cloud within the next 3-5 years.

■ 60 percent say it is unlikely that all of their organizations' infrastructure will ever be migrated to the cloud.

■ Overall, only 9 percent say their organizations have not migrated any infrastructure to the cloud.

■ The number of small businesses that have not migrated anything to the cloud went from 18 percent in 2015 to just 6 percent in 2016.

IT professionals are faced with a dual mandate: increase efficiency through cloud services while also ensuring critical systems, databases and applications are secure.

■ The top three hybrid IT benefits by weighted rank are infrastructure cost-reduction, increased infrastructure flexibility/agility and relieving internal IT personnel of day-to-day management of some infrastructure, respectively.

■ 62 percent say that security is the biggest challenge associated with managing current hybrid IT environments.

■ The top three barriers to greater cloud adoption by weighted rank are security/compliance concerns, the need to support legacy systems and budget limitations, respectively.

■ 69 percent say they have already migrated applications to the cloud, followed by storage (49 percent) and databases (33 percent).

■ The top three areas of infrastructure with the highest priority for continued or future migration by weighted rank are applications, databases and storage, respectively.

IT professionals require new skills, tools and resources to successfully drive the hybrid IT migration forward and enable their organizations to better meet business objectives.

■ Only 27 percent are certain their IT organizations currently have adequate resources to manage a hybrid IT environment.

■ The top five skills needed to better manage hybrid IT environments are hybrid IT monitoring/management tools and metrics (48 percent), application migration (41 percent), distributed architectures (32 percent), service-oriented architectures (31 percent) and automation/vendor management (tied at 30 percent).

■ 56 percent indicated they have the level of support needed from leadership and the organization as a whole to develop/improve the skills they feel they need in order to better manage hybrid IT environments.

So, what precisely are IT professionals to do? In conclusion, consider the following recommendations:

Establish an End-user Focus and Service Orientation

The ultimate goal of modern IT is to deliver greater Quality-of-Service (QoS) for end-users to ensure business productivity. To that end, minimizing friction across departmental silos will speed updates, changes, deployments and time-to-resolution for problems, all of which deliver a better end-user experience. IT professionals operating in hybrid IT environments should consider leveraging the principles of a DevOps approach to achieve faster and more provisioning choices, greater agility and organizational efficiency. Doing so will enable them to quickly make updates and changes to infrastructure, which makes IT services, whether on-premises or in the cloud, more agile, lean and scalable.

Optimize Visibility

With both on-premises and cloud resources to manage in a hybrid IT environment, a management and monitoring toolset that surfaces a single point of truth across those platforms is essential. The normalization of metrics, alerts and other collected data from applications and workloads, regardless of their location, will enable a more efficient approach to remediation, troubleshooting and optimization.

Apply Monitoring as a Discipline

In a hybrid IT world rife with new complexities, monitoring can no longer be an afterthought. By establishing monitoring as a core IT responsibility (a.k.a. monitoring as a discipline), organizations can benefit from a much more proactive IT management strategy, while also optimizing infrastructure performance, cost and security protocol.

Improve Business Savvy

As more IT services are delivered by cloud service providers, IT professionals must improve upon the following trifecta: business savvy for vendor management, technical expertise to understand and use the available cloud services and project management. These will all require the ability to effectively manage project budgets, workflows and deadlines; dissect terms and conditions; and understand service-level agreements and how they relate to the overall QoS that needs to be delivered.

Focus on Developing or Improving Key Technical Skills and Knowledge

Today's IT professionals need to extend across traditional generalist or specialist roles and become polymaths in order to be successful in the hybrid IT world as they pivot across multiple technology domains. The most important skills and knowledge IT professionals need to develop or improve to successfully manage hybrid IT environments are service-oriented architectures, automation, vendor management, application migration, distributed architectures, API and hybrid IT monitoring and management tools and metrics.

Kong Yang is a Head Geek at SolarWinds.

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Hybrid IT: The New Reality

Kong Yang

IT infrastructures are evolving from traditional on-premises-only to a hybrid strategy that links internal and external IT services driven by the existence of the cloud. To shed more light on the new concerns and pressures created by this evolution, SolarWinds recently released the SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2016: The Hybrid IT Evolution, our annual study consisting of survey-based research that explores significant trends, developments and movements related to and directly affecting IT and IT professionals.

The findings of this year's report — which are based on a survey fielded in December 2015, which yielded responses from 257 IT practitioners, managers and directors in the U.S. and Canada from public and private sector small, mid-size and enterprise companies — paint a clear picture: cloud adoption is nearly universal, but it's not and will likely not ever be suitable for all workloads. The result — one set of on-premises services connected with another set of services in the cloud — is called hybrid IT. At the center of this evolution is the IT professional.

With that foundation, here's an overview of the report's key findings:

IT infrastructures have evolved from traditional on-premises-only to a hybrid strategy that links internal and external IT services driven by the existence of the cloud.

■ Nearly all (92 percent) of the IT professionals surveyed say adopting cloud technologies is important to their organizations' long-term business success; more than a quarter (27 percent) say it is extremely important.

■ Only 43 percent estimate that half or more of their organizations' total IT infrastructure will be in the cloud within the next 3-5 years.

■ 60 percent say it is unlikely that all of their organizations' infrastructure will ever be migrated to the cloud.

■ Overall, only 9 percent say their organizations have not migrated any infrastructure to the cloud.

■ The number of small businesses that have not migrated anything to the cloud went from 18 percent in 2015 to just 6 percent in 2016.

IT professionals are faced with a dual mandate: increase efficiency through cloud services while also ensuring critical systems, databases and applications are secure.

■ The top three hybrid IT benefits by weighted rank are infrastructure cost-reduction, increased infrastructure flexibility/agility and relieving internal IT personnel of day-to-day management of some infrastructure, respectively.

■ 62 percent say that security is the biggest challenge associated with managing current hybrid IT environments.

■ The top three barriers to greater cloud adoption by weighted rank are security/compliance concerns, the need to support legacy systems and budget limitations, respectively.

■ 69 percent say they have already migrated applications to the cloud, followed by storage (49 percent) and databases (33 percent).

■ The top three areas of infrastructure with the highest priority for continued or future migration by weighted rank are applications, databases and storage, respectively.

IT professionals require new skills, tools and resources to successfully drive the hybrid IT migration forward and enable their organizations to better meet business objectives.

■ Only 27 percent are certain their IT organizations currently have adequate resources to manage a hybrid IT environment.

■ The top five skills needed to better manage hybrid IT environments are hybrid IT monitoring/management tools and metrics (48 percent), application migration (41 percent), distributed architectures (32 percent), service-oriented architectures (31 percent) and automation/vendor management (tied at 30 percent).

■ 56 percent indicated they have the level of support needed from leadership and the organization as a whole to develop/improve the skills they feel they need in order to better manage hybrid IT environments.

So, what precisely are IT professionals to do? In conclusion, consider the following recommendations:

Establish an End-user Focus and Service Orientation

The ultimate goal of modern IT is to deliver greater Quality-of-Service (QoS) for end-users to ensure business productivity. To that end, minimizing friction across departmental silos will speed updates, changes, deployments and time-to-resolution for problems, all of which deliver a better end-user experience. IT professionals operating in hybrid IT environments should consider leveraging the principles of a DevOps approach to achieve faster and more provisioning choices, greater agility and organizational efficiency. Doing so will enable them to quickly make updates and changes to infrastructure, which makes IT services, whether on-premises or in the cloud, more agile, lean and scalable.

Optimize Visibility

With both on-premises and cloud resources to manage in a hybrid IT environment, a management and monitoring toolset that surfaces a single point of truth across those platforms is essential. The normalization of metrics, alerts and other collected data from applications and workloads, regardless of their location, will enable a more efficient approach to remediation, troubleshooting and optimization.

Apply Monitoring as a Discipline

In a hybrid IT world rife with new complexities, monitoring can no longer be an afterthought. By establishing monitoring as a core IT responsibility (a.k.a. monitoring as a discipline), organizations can benefit from a much more proactive IT management strategy, while also optimizing infrastructure performance, cost and security protocol.

Improve Business Savvy

As more IT services are delivered by cloud service providers, IT professionals must improve upon the following trifecta: business savvy for vendor management, technical expertise to understand and use the available cloud services and project management. These will all require the ability to effectively manage project budgets, workflows and deadlines; dissect terms and conditions; and understand service-level agreements and how they relate to the overall QoS that needs to be delivered.

Focus on Developing or Improving Key Technical Skills and Knowledge

Today's IT professionals need to extend across traditional generalist or specialist roles and become polymaths in order to be successful in the hybrid IT world as they pivot across multiple technology domains. The most important skills and knowledge IT professionals need to develop or improve to successfully manage hybrid IT environments are service-oriented architectures, automation, vendor management, application migration, distributed architectures, API and hybrid IT monitoring and management tools and metrics.

Kong Yang is a Head Geek at SolarWinds.

Hot Topics

The Latest

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

An overwhelming majority of IT leaders (95%) believe the upcoming wave of AI-powered digital transformation is set to be the most impactful and intensive seen thus far, according to The Science of Productivity: AI, Adoption, And Employee Experience, a new report from Nexthink ...

Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts ...