CIF says hybrid is `everything’ – and a source of CIO pain

The Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) has come up with a piece of research which, on the face of it, can be said to be a statement of the blindingly obvious. But by the same token can at least be used by everyone as the shovel to finally bury all the arguments about arbitrary divisions between `private’, `public’ and `hybrid’ cloud. That way, the research suggests, CIOs can turn their attention away from such discussions and onto more important issues such as trying to meet user expectations.

In practice, most users will continue to use a `hybrid’ environment as they have for many years before cloud was ever invented. At best, therefore, cloud services should just be called `cloud services’, with the division of private and public fading way. In the end, of course, even `cloud’ should be become a contributor to a wide, richer `business services’ environment, to call it something.

As CIF Founder, FastHosts CEO, Andy Burton observed, hybrid IT is hardly a new phenomenon as it relates to the co-existence of multiple IT deployment models, which has been true for most business since the move away from mainframes in the 1980’s.

“However, most causes of a hybrid environment have been the product of a transition process rather than an explicit strategy,” he said. “Arguably this is no longer the case today and to further test the extent to which on-premise will continue to co-exist alongside Cloud-based services, we asked participants that already use Cloud services if they would ever consider moving their entire IT estate to the Cloud.

“The results were quite enlightening in that almost 50 percent of firms could eventually see themselves one day being wholly based in the Cloud (12 percent as soon as possible, 17 percent based on IT refresh cycles and the balance when they perceived the cloud was able to accommodate all of their business IT needs). The remaining 50 percent cannot see a day when they will be entirely based in the cloud, but only 4 percent had no expectation of ever using a cloud service.”

That maps well onto the general realities of business life, as there are some applications that  simply need to be on-premise – usually because of issues such as the need to reduce operational latencies to a minimum. For others, particularly where there is no requirement for scalability or future growth requirements, it may not make economic sense to move them, certainly in the foreseeable future. But many existing applications will make the move and add more value from it. Other applications and services, as yet to be created, will only because achievable in the cloud.

And some of those will be the result of trying to meet growing user expectations of what should be possible with such hybrid environments. That will be one of a series of headaches that CIOs will now be starting to face, according to the CIF survey.

Managing this is going to be the biggest headache for the majority of CIOs, and it is interesting to note that the survey showed how poorly prepared many businesses and their CIOs are at the moment. For example, when asked if the CIO was setting out a single IT governance framework that overseas all IT regardless of deployment model, 68 percent stated that they did not have such a framework. 

Of the same sample, 70 percent of organisations do not have a single reporting capability providing executive overviews and operational management. Finally a staggering 95 percent had no unified IT management platform that enables them to manage IT workloads that are both on-premise and cloud-based.

The research, conducted in Q3 2013, polled 250 senior IT and business decision-makers. It was part of the fourth annual body of research to determine the level of Cloud adoption, but also gleaned insights into attitudes, experiences and trends across a broad range of IT estates in both private and public sectors. It identified four core influencers impacting the CIO or IT Director when making IT deployment decisions.

One of the key ones is the current IT maturity in a business. This involves the level of IT adoption and enablement, where the degree of legacy technology baked into the IT operations will play a central role in choice of future IT deployments.

The level of existing investment in IT is also important, for it applies constraints in capital or operational expense budgets. In addition, the ability to access the wider business all impacts RoI calculations and, reduces maintenance activity, improving time to market, and increasing agility.

There is a need for clarity about the scope of the operating environment, including the service window, performance criteria and access to network bandwidth, as all are essential in making confident and effective deployment decisions.

Emotion and education also play an important role increating confidence and enabling effective control over distributed IT. And this is not just about tools and processes, but about attitude, comfort, confidence and ability to weed out both hype and FUD.

The issues unearthed by the research that will give CIO’s headaches are wide-ranging. For example, it showed that most companies are already hybrid in some shape or form with 86 percent of organisations have on-premise applications, 47 percent have hosted or managed services, 27 percent SaaS, 22 percent colocation services and 19 percent have private Clouds.

Other practical constraints identified relate to the levels of integration between applications, the degree of flexibility in scale of use required over time and the perception of risk associated with the sensitivity of the data. For example. avoiding data replication was cited by 41 percent of organisations when asked what the biggest challenge they faced in managing IT across multiple deployment models.

Managing data protection was referenced by 3 percent, having a single view of the IT estate was raised by 38 percent, mitigating costs at 37 percent and enabling data transfer and interoperability by 34 percent. As many as 67 percent of organisations are seeking to operate a single governance model regardless of IT deployment models used, while 32 percent believe that they have this practice in operation today but only 5 percent have a unified management platform today.

A massive 85 percent of organisations want their IT department to maintain overall control of the entire IT stack, regardless of platform, and 79 percent want a single monitoring solution to oversee all IT operations. In practice, however, only 30 percent perceive that they have this capability today

“We can conclude that most organisations will continue to use a mix of deployment models for the foreseeable future, and that the combination of on-premise, hosted and Cloud services, along with the expansion of BYOD, means that the future challenges for an executive managing IT delivery relate more to the distributed nature of IT platforms,” Burton observed.  “As if this mixed environment is not challenging enough, the real focus for the CIO in the near future is ensuring good governance, increased agility and effective delivery across a range of in-house and outsourced services given that it is the new norm.

“End users continue to express a range of concerns when considering the appropriate deployment model for an IT solution.  The internal concerns that the CIO needs to investigate and allay as part of the transition to use Cloud services include such aspects as data security and privacy as well as the practicalities of access to, and bandwidth of, Internet connections.  When operating in a hybrid model, the concerns of the CIO typically embrace the issues of maintaining overall control, ensuring reliability and efficiency, and, avoiding commercial issues like lock-in.”

The research did also put one common myth to bed, bearing in mind that much of the fear associated with the use of Cloud-based services is often associated with the perception that the IT department will be cut back, it is clear from the evidence provided in the CIF research that 90 percent of firms do not reduce head count in IT. Rather they are increasing their focus on new value-creating projects to  ease the burden on over-stretched resources and implement new service enhancing practices.