HYBRID IT - DIGITAL DETOX

For many organisations hybrid IT has become a critical consideration when building out their digital transformation strategy to compete successfully in an increasingly digital-first world. 

But what does “hybrid IT” really mean? In reality, it can have quite a few interpretations, such as the co-location of IT services, a mixture of on-premise and cloud-based infrastructures, or even a mix of cloud-managed and on-premise managed services. Essentially, hybrid IT usually blends cloud architectures (public, private, or hybrid) with on-premise or in-house centres to deliver work, making it ideal for the hybrid world of work. 

However, before looking into a hybrid IT digital transformation, the first question often asked is what are the benefits? Why would an organisation consider hybrid IT?

Incorporating legacy systems

For many businesses, hybrid IT represents a digital transformation from legacy, often in-house, systems to a mixture of both legacy and brand-new off-premise services. Many organisations opt for hybrid IT in their digital transformations, as a strategy incorporating old and new systems can be a sensible way to manage the transition in the short term.

By using this staggered approach businesses can drive cost efficiency, ensuring continuity for staff, and means that those legacy systems which fulfil a business need or are mission-critical can be phased out gradually. - ie. critical software that’s been built and personalised over time to play an essential role in enabling business output. 

Hybrid IT can be also considered a necessity in some cases, as migrating on-premise legacy software systems sometimes throws up significant technical and financial challenges that are unjustifiable. Therefore, many organisations opt for a mix of legacy IT with brand-new systems. However, increasingly, organisations are also choosing to keep some legacy systems in place for sustainability purposes. Rather than disposing of usable technology, they are instead upgrading it with purpose-built cooling systems, for example.

In this way, legacy systems are useful stepping stones in an organisation’s hybrid IT journey as they can minimise the disruption felt within the organisation. 70% of digital transformations fail and, in our experience, everyday disruption plays a significant role in this statistic. Accordingly, our agency finds that prioritising avoiding disruption for our clients and their users is key when implementing hybrid structures in digital transformations. We try to create an infrastructure where all the different systems can cooperate and potentially be replaced without impacting the front-end applications too much, or not at all. 

We have found that the more you embed a people or human-first mentality into your tech strategy and consider how each change will affect your staff, the more likely your digital transformation is to succeed. 

Saving on cost

Converting to hybrid IT can often be used as a cost-saving initiative when undertaking a digital transformation project. Digital transformation is expensive. In a 2019 survey of 1,200 US-based senior executives across all major global regions and industries, Deloitte found the average spend on digital transformation over the year to have been $11.3 million. Moreover, Gartner estimates EMEA tech spending to continue increasing over the course of this year, forecasting a spending rise of 4.7%, to total $1.3 trillion, in 2022.

Investing in hybrid IT can be a means to mitigate these costs as, although optimising costs can take some time, hybrid IT structures lend themselves to allowing solutions partners like digital design agencies to customise pricing, as organisations have a lot of freedom over how they would like to structure their architecture. For instance, an organisation may choose to spend less on cloud storage solutions and instead rely on existing in-house systems, or vice versa. 

Similarly, turning to a hybrid structure allows organisations to evolve their IT architectures over time, meaning businesses can spread the cost while allowing for internal teams to adjust at a more manageable pace. Overseeing your modernisation with a longer-term hybrid infrastructure strategy can allow a business to optimise its ROI (return on investment), as needs can be assessed as progress is made, helping to avoid any unnecessary expenditure. As we like to say ‘you don’t get married on the first date’. If you treat your digital transformation journey the way you treat a relationship, i.e., one step at a time, you can build a bigger, stronger and more optimised architecture.

This is especially helpful for boot-strapped startups looking to maximise their IT budgets or larger organisations looking to undertake major, expensive changes to their IT infrastructures. 

Security and flexibility

Hybrid IT environments also allow organisations the security of on-premise environments, with the flexibility of cloud or managed services. 

By having both environments to hand, IT teams are able to keep sensitive data on-premise and store the rest of their data or manage other workloads elsewhere. This is helpful from a security standpoint as it helps to diminish the threat of a cyberattack. Additionally, should an accident occur and data is lost, co-locating or having separate locations for your information can be useful for keeping backups in separate places.

Having a hybrid environment also frees up IT teams from having to manage the maintenance of hefty on-premise systems and cloud infrastructure, as service providers will often maintain cloud environments on a business’ behalf.

Moreover, introducing a hybrid environment can help IT teams reduce downtime stemming from on-premise upgrades and maintenance work. Users can continue working online using the off-site infrastructure, saving the company from losing valuable employee work hours. Likewise, when building out the organisation’s digital transformation strategy, hybrid IT allows employees to work in a separate environment and not necessarily experience disruption from the transformation work being conducted. 

Innovation

By moving away from a focus on maintenance and by having the ability to work in a separate environment, teams will at last have the time to prototype, test new features and to properly innovate, in preparation for a full migration to the cloud. This is the real long-term benefit of SaaS and ‘headless’ systems and they are crucial to understanding the future of digital transformation.

This future-proofed approach, combined with the clear cost benefits and the advantages of transitioning legacy systems into brand-new architecture means that hybrid IT is a natural choice for businesses looking to build out their digital transformation strategies. By improving flexibility while temporarily maintaining security and in-house control over mission-critical systems, organisations have the time and space to manage cultural change in tandem with technological development.