I recently had the opportunity to exchange views with Cloud providers about the infrastructure needs’ evolution. One word was on all lips : Hybrid. Assuming this infrastructure revolution will further more enable and accelerate the business digital transformation of our corporate customers. Here are my takeaways from our discussions:
Cloud and Hyperconvergence lead to Hybrid
Before fully entering an ITaaS (IT as a Service) reality the groundwork begins with building and adopt flexible -but still solid- infrastructures. In this way, we observe two different converging streams.
First, we obviously note an increasing adoption of Public Cloud computing to build native development or either to operate existing platforms. At the same time corporate customers are accelerating their investments on “hyperconverged models” including their on premises infrastructure.
As a matter of fact, Cloud brokers are sealing more and more technological partnerships with hardware vendors to evangelize the market with container native storage technology to enable the full Open Hybrid Cloud approach. According to the Building Trust in a Cloudy Sky: The State of Cloud Adoption and Security survey “Hybrid cloud adoption grew 3X in the last year, increasing from 19% to 57% of organizations”.
Open Hybrid Model to foster “IT liquidity” within the organisations
Let’s face it, having a 100% Cloud IT today is no credible : only 23% of organizations today completely trust public clouds to keep their data secure.
Hybrid is seen as THE solution to break silos – unless mandatory for regulatory reasons – into IT and business organisations. Thus, having a full open hybrid approach appears to be the way to allow portability and interoperability within the IT.
As an example, among the full range of Red Hat portfolio, the Openshift PaaS remains clearly the flagship product of this hybrid strategy strongly relying on a containerisation approach. If I dare a comparison of Red Hat approach with capital Markets, I would say that their baseline is intending to generate “IT liquidity” within the organisations in order to foster flexibility among the business lines and shorten front to back interactions.
To capitalize on this evolution, business and IT teams have to be organizationally prepared. Having private and public clouds requires tools and management capabilities to make it efficient and profitable. Hybrid Cloud appears to be in its early stages, but it’s becoming the IT infrastructure’s new hype!