Hybrid Cloud is Not Just a Term – It’s About the Outcome
Many of our clients are facing multiple pressures to become more agile, make new technology available more quickly and easily, but also contend with the financial, operational, cultural, skillset realities that IT teams face running and maintaining their existing data center footprint. How do organizations address what are clearly opposing forces? They dive into the world of “Hybrid Cloud.”
Pursuing “Hybrid Cloud” is a challenge in of itself. What does that term even mean? To some, it is as simple as running business capabilities in both a public cloud and private data centers. For others, it could mean operating in a combination of multiple public clouds, private clouds, and/or private data centers. While aligning to a term such as “Hybrid Cloud” can help an organization feel like they’re adopting a strategy to meet the needs of their stakeholders, the term is not the important part. The important part is determining what solutions the organization will use to best align to those needs.
From a Burwood perspective, talking about “Hybrid Cloud” turns into a conversation about just that – what are the outcomes an organization is trying to accomplish – and devising a strategy that utilizes the right technology concepts to meet those needs.
These strategic discussions often result in shaping the way to leverage, but evolve existing data center-based technologies, along with either introducing or optimizing/growing cloud solutions – but doing so in a manner that is outcome-based, and accounts for where the organization is at and where it needs to be.
It’s the outcome of these conversations and strategy builds that often results in defining the term “Hybrid Cloud” for the organization itself, despite what the generic industry concepts may say.
Once the term and strategy are aligned to the desired organizational outcomes, it is a matter of breaking that strategy into consumable, executable plans that allow for delivering high-quality value at speed, while helping the organization with the culture, process, and skillset changes required to support “hybrid cloud” solutions.
For example, an organization may have a need to improve security and/or deliver more robust end user computing technologies for its developers. The solution could very well be a public-cloud desktop hosted by Microsoft; at the same time, an organization still needs to deliver, maintain, and support “traditional” PC and desktop applications. This might make an IT organization start to sweat, but there are ways that Burwood can help clients deploy, manage, and continuously evolve both initiatives while accounting for the budgetary, skillset, and team-size constraints often put on an end user experience team.
In another scenario, there may be reason to consider enabling services available via Google Cloud to deliver new KPIs, data analytics, visualization, and AI/ML capabilities to what seems to be a never-ending list of stakeholders. Burwood can help assess current capabilities, help facilitate conversations to help identify what the true desired outcomes are, and align cloud-based solutions that are often paired with some form of on-premises data sourcing and flow.
Finally, and most importantly, Burwood strongly believes that “Hybrid Cloud” is rooted in the ability to define and deliver capabilities using infrastructure as code and embracing a DevOps culture – regardless of whether the underlying technology is on-premises, in a public cloud, or anywhere in between. At Burwood, we help organizations understand where they are, where they can be, and help them get where they need to be. By taking this approach, the ultimate goal is less about the technology and more about exposing the right pieces and parts, pulling them together in a software-defined fashion, and aligning them to the desired outcomes. This process can be intimidating for many organizations. That’s why Burwood helps its clients through this mindset and technology change, again, meeting them where they’re at and working through an executable plan on getting them where they want to be.
“Hybrid Cloud” is what an organization makes of it, and Burwood is there to help define the term, the strategy, and execute so that organizations are optimizing to outcomes, not overly used generic terms and concepts found in research articles du jour.
We talked about a lot here, from end user computing data to infrastructure as code and DevOps. Stay tuned for more hybrid cloud blog posts coming soon!
January 31, 2023
