Most senior IT strategists and business leaders agree that hybrid IT and cloud technologies offer organisations a wide range of benefits. However, they also understand they will face many challenges on the journey to modernise their enterprise technologies. A key challenge is convincing CEOs and CFOs of the value of moving to cloud and hybrid IT.
CEOs and CFOs typically have the same questions about cloud and hybrid IT: ‘How do we provide more innovation?’ ‘How do we do more with less?’ ‘How do we let our IT developers be more nimble and agile?’ ‘How do we take all the applications that we’ve built over the years and migrate them to a more cost effective platform?’ These are all reasonable questions that must be answered.
The boardroom also needs the IT team to address their concerns regarding security, data governance, performance, reliability, loss of control, migration and integration. They need to assess and advise CEOs what steps the organisation should take to enable the move to cloud and modernise its legacy IT environment.
Many organisations choose to adopt a hybrid IT approach to overcome the challenges of cloud migration. This approach offers a highly-customisable solution to meet business IT needs and gives organisations the best of both worlds: the increased flexibility, agility and cost-efficiency of public cloud with the security, control and power of private-clouds.
Understanding the staged process of adopting hybrid IT and cloud solutions can put many boardroom concerns to rest. Organisations that acquire a customisable hybrid IT solution will first reach out to a cloud vendor to take over their entire infrastructure and manage it remotely. This provides the organisation with the freedom to innovate in a more agile way, and lets them use infrastructure they don’t need to own up-front.
Often at this point, CEOs will have questions about how to manage legacy applications that aren’t transferable to the cloud. The answer is hybrid IT. The cloud vendor should be able to manage an organisation’s legacy and private-cloud applications, while the company’s developers work on new operations support systems and applications in the cloud. This lets developers familiarise themselves with the new cloud platform and helps to maximise their time to develop solutions for the business.
Once the development team has gained confidence working with the cloud platform they can adapt, transfer, and integrate the organisation’s legacy applications to the public cloud environment, providing it is secure and scalable.
CEOs that understand the process of moving to hybrid IT and cloud solutions will have a clear roadmap of how they can modernise their legacy IT environment in the most appropriate manner for the business’s needs.
Organisations don’t need to move their complete IT environment to the cloud all at once. Instead, a better option in many cases is to work with a cloud vendor that can support private-cloud or legacy systems, while developing a scalable, secure public cloud solution. CEOs that choose to move to hybrid IT can give their organisation the benefits of an agile, scalable and secure IT environment that meets their specific business needs.
