Finding the right hybrid IT cloud strategy: why one size doesn't fit all

When it comes to hybrid IT, there is no such thing as 'do it this way', which is where automation can help

Businesses are pursuing multi-cloud strategies to create the service delivery speed and flexibility they need in competitive markets where digital transformation is a necessity. With this year's dramatic rise in remote work and customer contact, IT transformation has become even more urgent - and moving to the cloud is a significant part of this.

A core challenge of digital transformation is the need to prioritise a whole spectrum of demands -ranging from improving the efficiency of current offerings to quickly providing new cloud services. This tension between new and old has always existed, but additional complexities stemming from multiple hybrid IT environments and technologies can slow IT down.

Ultimately, every organisation is different and must craft its own cloud adoption journey. An effective cloud strategy allows IT to boost delivery speed while aligning to business priorities. The goal is to simplify the creation and management of complex hybrid deliverables. IT must therefore adopt hybrid automation options that unlock value for their business, while recognising staff skill, existing technology and funding constraints. Yet, achieving simplification during changing business conditions is difficult, as each new application, technology and tool adds another element of intricacy.

Hybrid cloud complexities

Hybrid cloud environments are complex organisms with many connection points. Private cloud services may be linked to public cloud offerings from vendors such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google to gain commonality. Overseeing hybrid environments requires working across cloud silos using a set of interlinked tools. As a result, deployment and administration processes become time intensive and complicate automation - which is why some organisations have abandoned hybrid and defaulted to a multi-cloud silo approach.

Cloud silos become entrenched due to the fact that separate processes and toolsets support single environments. This approach limits the ability to provide oversight and governance across platform silos. Sometimes organisations will add even more specialised automation solutions in a bid to achieve end-to-end process automation, resulting in a fragmented toolset.

The effort and resources required to combine these tools is often underestimated or overlooked when cloud delivery speed is the primary goal. Teams also occasionally fail to capitalise on existing capabilities within their toolset. On the surface deploying new tools seems the easy solution, but it may fail to address the organisational shift required to solve the underlying problem.

To address this issue, IT should be encouraged to lift its focus from the tool level and view cloud automation in an abstracted way - where the technology used in each individual section is separate from the overall blueprint/design itself.

If IT adopts a business-architecture aligned process to creating services - wherever they may operate - tools or technologies can be changed or inserted as needed and become replaceable building blocks. This enables automation workflows and content to work across cloud silos and teams, and best practices can be instantiated within flexible, shareable designs.

Standardising management tools

Adopting a standardised set of hybrid-capable management tools is key for supporting a hybrid IT strategy. This type of toolset is able to work across hybrid boundaries to provide delivery management and automation for all types of cloud and on-premises environments - from bare metal to cloud native.

Crucial to multi-cloud success is implementing a master control system with the functionality to deliver flexible automation and governance for technology-abstracted service blueprints. By adapting to changes in targets, tools and technologies, each master service blueprint provides a common business service approach for all environments and teams within the organisation.

Blueprint-driven services employ parameters and options to allow each catalogue design to fulfil a wide range of resource environments. Adaptive blueprints streamline the IT service catalogue while enabling on-demand deployment of off-standard requests - preventing them from becoming slow IT delivery projects. This is more effective than attempting to create and manage an ever-expanding set of rigid templates.

Hybrid-capable tools allow IT to utilise existing point tools while automating across the gaps without needing to re-architect the entire service. By abstracting the business process from the technology, high level service blueprints allow teams to rotate out a tool while keeping the same service blueprint that has been tailored to the business.

Importantly, blueprint abstraction gives IT full visibility of the consumption and governance of deployed resources, while simultaneously tracking lifecycle automation. Teams are then able to flexibly adapt their hybrid strategy to their own unique business conditions.

Cultural change

A hybrid IT strategy will only be successful, however, if cultural change is a central priority. Good multi-cloud management is dependent on collaboration between separate siloed management teams.

Despite having different objectives and measurements, using a common set of abstracted blueprints can help teams work together more efficiently. The end-goal is not to force teams to merge, but rather to standardise the automation of resources between each silo in a consistent way. IT teams should therefore feel inspired to look at processes and automation through an abstracted lens.

When it comes to hybrid IT, there is no such thing as "do it this way". Each organisation has evolved its teams and toolsets based on how the business has grown and changed in relation to market conditions.

The value of employing an abstracted, multi-cloud management toolset is that it can help businesses with these unique requirements, recognising that every organisation is at varying levels of technology adoption or maturity. This way, IT teams can simplify processes and set their own modernisation pace.

Neil Miles is senior product manager at Micro Focus