How hybrid IT models are impacting digitalization efforts
Digital transformation is impacting a host of industries, including media, healthcare, manufacturing, government and beyond. Although the term encompasses an umbrella of meanings, generally speaking, digital transformation is understood as the incorporation of digital technologies into daily operations. In aiding the transition, hybrid IT is expected to play a pivotal role. To gauge how companies are implementing hybrid IT models, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) recently commissioned an IDC study conducting interviews with IT professionals and LOB executives at Fortune 1000 enterprises. Based on the IDC report, the following is a list of ways hybridization in aiding digital transformation.
Cost optimization
Among the report’s top findings, the researchers said hybrid IT allows companies with an on-premises and multi-cloud approach to optimize cost and application performance. A dashboard tailored for business executives can provide a bird’s eye view of IT operations to keep tabs on metrics and measure overall cloud performance. By having insight into these areas, the researchers said companies can ultimately save money and minimize risk.
Continuous DevOps platform
Moreover, the authors of the report found hybrid IT serves as a continues DevOps platform by providing a common pool of application program interfaces (APIs) for both on and off-premise resources. In particular, it allows DevOps teams — the integration of developers and operations staff — to dedicate their time to application deployment and delivery rather than infrastructure management. Moreover, DevOps teams can leverage baked-in applications-centric performance tools, which provide insight into all infrastructure locations.
Virtual cloud services
Hybrid IT allows IT organizations to embrace the title of a “virtual cloud service provider” as part of its core competencies. With hybrid IT, IT professionals can choose the appropriate combination of public and private resources with clouds of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), container-as-a-service (CaaS), and virtual machine-as-a-service (VMaaS). According to the report, this provides a self-service portal that offers a vantage point spanning the whole state, continuously checking the pulse of hybrid IT deployments.
Time management
Hybrid IT also permits provisioning and deprovisioning of autonomous compute, storage and fabric instances from fluid resources pools, according to the report. By leveraging a low ops model that sees infrastructure as a code through a single API, hybrid IT can provision tasks in minutes that typically take hours with conventional IT provisioning.
Conclusion
The authors of the report forecast companies are and will continue to invest in on-premise infrastructure. Consequently, the IDC researchers concluded businesses may want to consider a hybrid approach along their journey to digitalization. “This multicloud strategy will eventually lead to an unmanageable asset sprawl (if it hasn’t already) — that is, unless it is bound together with an overarching hybrid IT strategy,” wrote the authors.
