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Top Six Skills Needed to Manage Hybrid IT Environments

Kong Yang

The market is evolving from traditional on-premises IT to a hybrid strategy where one set of critical services is maintained on-premises, but it’s connected with another set in the cloud. Whether it’s cost savings or improvement in agility organizations are after, one thing is for sure — this migration cannot be done without skilled IT professionals at the helm.

Although the new role of IT professionals in this hybrid world will vary based on individual business needs, all will need to become polymaths in order to be successful. In fact, SolarWinds recently conducted a survey among nearly 100 global IT professionals in its thwack community that revealed the top six skills they say are needed to manage hybrid IT environments.

1. Service-oriented architectures (SOAs)

As more companies move to a hybrid IT model, they will need to be more agile, lean and cost-effective. To meet these needs, the barriers to consumption will need to decrease. So, IT professionals will need to leverage templates and services from the marketplace and understand application architectures, distributed systems, APIs and IT operations.

2. Automation

In a hybrid world, where infrastructure resources are only one part of the equation, businesses will need more than scripts to enable automation as they reduce the friction to consume services. Automation in a hybrid IT environment must abstract away the operations layer and be integrated with machine learning algorithms that will automatically scale, move and remediate services. IT professionals will need to integrate their automation and orchestration workflows with provider APIs.

3. Hybrid IT monitoring

For hybrid IT environments, a complete view of the on-premises data center and the cloud is even more critical. IT professionals must build a tool to aggregate, consolidate and visualize key performance and events metrics, and glean the key points from the data to discern the most valuable pieces of information from their application stacks. Alternatively, they can leverage a monitoring vendor that has an end to end solution that can provide the single point of truth for their IT needs from their premises to their clouds.

4. Vendor management

Vendor management is two-fold, as IT professionals will need to manage the technology aspect of cloud environments, as well as the business side of service provider T&Cs and variable pricing. Most IT professionals are not currently involved in business dealings that include legalese and pricing, but as contracts become more nuanced, IT professionals must improve upon the following trifecta: business savvy for contract negotiation, technical expertise to use cloud services and project management.

5. Application migration

Application migration to the cloud can be time-consuming, as it typically takes weeks for a single application. However, some service providers are making it much easier. But IT professionals must remember that application migration is just step one — the management required following initial migration is arguably more important. They should apply the core competencies they would employ in a traditional IT environment, while having a firm understanding of the application’s key events and performance metrics. Troubleshooting and remediation are also key, because things will change and fail. Therefore, having backup and disaster recovery plans can ensure business continuity.

6. Distributed architectures

Working with distributed architectures will require working across multiple service providers and geographies. It’s important to remember that these architectures abstract the underlying resources, so IT professionals will need to translate speeds and feeds into acceptable quality-of-service for their users. In hybrid IT, they will need to become accustomed to multiple providers handling remediation in case of outages or other performance issues. The control and responsibility for maintaining the distributed architecture will shift beyond IT’s purview, but in their place will be choice, scale, agility and availability of services to build distributed architectures.

Adding and mastering these skills will go a long way to ensuring not only business success in this new hybrid world, but IT career longevity.

Kong Yang is a Head Geek at SolarWinds.

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Top Six Skills Needed to Manage Hybrid IT Environments

Kong Yang

The market is evolving from traditional on-premises IT to a hybrid strategy where one set of critical services is maintained on-premises, but it’s connected with another set in the cloud. Whether it’s cost savings or improvement in agility organizations are after, one thing is for sure — this migration cannot be done without skilled IT professionals at the helm.

Although the new role of IT professionals in this hybrid world will vary based on individual business needs, all will need to become polymaths in order to be successful. In fact, SolarWinds recently conducted a survey among nearly 100 global IT professionals in its thwack community that revealed the top six skills they say are needed to manage hybrid IT environments.

1. Service-oriented architectures (SOAs)

As more companies move to a hybrid IT model, they will need to be more agile, lean and cost-effective. To meet these needs, the barriers to consumption will need to decrease. So, IT professionals will need to leverage templates and services from the marketplace and understand application architectures, distributed systems, APIs and IT operations.

2. Automation

In a hybrid world, where infrastructure resources are only one part of the equation, businesses will need more than scripts to enable automation as they reduce the friction to consume services. Automation in a hybrid IT environment must abstract away the operations layer and be integrated with machine learning algorithms that will automatically scale, move and remediate services. IT professionals will need to integrate their automation and orchestration workflows with provider APIs.

3. Hybrid IT monitoring

For hybrid IT environments, a complete view of the on-premises data center and the cloud is even more critical. IT professionals must build a tool to aggregate, consolidate and visualize key performance and events metrics, and glean the key points from the data to discern the most valuable pieces of information from their application stacks. Alternatively, they can leverage a monitoring vendor that has an end to end solution that can provide the single point of truth for their IT needs from their premises to their clouds.

4. Vendor management

Vendor management is two-fold, as IT professionals will need to manage the technology aspect of cloud environments, as well as the business side of service provider T&Cs and variable pricing. Most IT professionals are not currently involved in business dealings that include legalese and pricing, but as contracts become more nuanced, IT professionals must improve upon the following trifecta: business savvy for contract negotiation, technical expertise to use cloud services and project management.

5. Application migration

Application migration to the cloud can be time-consuming, as it typically takes weeks for a single application. However, some service providers are making it much easier. But IT professionals must remember that application migration is just step one — the management required following initial migration is arguably more important. They should apply the core competencies they would employ in a traditional IT environment, while having a firm understanding of the application’s key events and performance metrics. Troubleshooting and remediation are also key, because things will change and fail. Therefore, having backup and disaster recovery plans can ensure business continuity.

6. Distributed architectures

Working with distributed architectures will require working across multiple service providers and geographies. It’s important to remember that these architectures abstract the underlying resources, so IT professionals will need to translate speeds and feeds into acceptable quality-of-service for their users. In hybrid IT, they will need to become accustomed to multiple providers handling remediation in case of outages or other performance issues. The control and responsibility for maintaining the distributed architecture will shift beyond IT’s purview, but in their place will be choice, scale, agility and availability of services to build distributed architectures.

Adding and mastering these skills will go a long way to ensuring not only business success in this new hybrid world, but IT career longevity.

Kong Yang is a Head Geek at SolarWinds.

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E-commerce is set to skyrocket with a 9% rise over the next few years ... To thrive in this competitive environment, retailers must identify digital resilience as their top priority. In a world where savvy shoppers expect 24/7 access to online deals and experiences, any unexpected downtime to digital services can lead to significant financial losses, damage to brand reputation, abandoned carts with designer shoes, and additional issues ...

Efficiency is a highly-desirable objective in business ... We're seeing this scenario play out in enterprises around the world as they continue to struggle with infrastructures and remote work models with an eye toward operational efficiencies. In contrast to that goal, a recent Broadcom survey of global IT and network professionals found widespread adoption of these strategies is making the network more complex and hampering observability, leading to uptime, performance and security issues. Let's look more closely at these challenges ...

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AWS is a cloud-based computing platform known for its reliability, scalability, and flexibility. However, as helpful as its comprehensive infrastructure is, disparate elements and numerous siloed components make it difficult for admins to visualize the cloud performance in detail. It requires meticulous monitoring techniques and deep visibility to understand cloud performance and analyze operational efficiency in detail to ensure seamless cloud operations ...

Imagine a future where software, once a complex obstacle, becomes a natural extension of daily workflow — an intuitive, seamless experience that maximizes productivity and efficiency. This future is no longer a distant vision but a reality being crafted by the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence ...

Enterprise data sprawl already challenges companies' ability to protect and back up their data. Much of this information is never fully secured, leaving organizations vulnerable. Now, as GenAI platforms emerge as yet another environment where enterprise data is consumed, transformed, and created, this fragmentation is set to intensify ...

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