Navigating Your Way to the Hybrid Cloud

Background

Whilst IT automation techniques for systems and software are well understood, cloud computing has made possible the extensive automation of the IT support processes for managing and administering information technology (IT) systems, thereby providing many unique benefits when compared to traditional IT models. Cloud services can automatically reconfigure infrastructure components to cope with rapidly changing workload demands. The time required to move a suite of computer programs to a state in which the users are able to use the systems can be dramatically reduced through automation. These are the primary advantages of cloud computing as a tool to support businesses. Additionally, cloud provides a new way of exposing business services to customers, partners and suppliers. These business services are presented as application programming interfaces (APIs). A new API economy is emerging in the cloud, where digital services are purchased and combined with additional data or programs to support business activities. The innovation potential of cloud computing allows new business patterns to emerge. These are explored in “The New Patterns of Innovation” (Parmar, McKenzie, Cohn & Gann, 2014).

Organisations want to build on their prior IT or cloud investments. To do this, they must eventually adopt an approach that is inherently hybrid in nature. In this section the authors explain the rationale for this belief.

To understand the different ways that organisations deliver cloud services to their customers and users requires the authors to first describe the differences in IT delivery for organisations whose IT is “born on the cloud” and those using “traditional IT“ delivery models.

The born-on-the-cloud model is typically found within newer, ”startup” type organisations that have developed their IT relatively recently and are using new or non-traditional approaches to create applications, deliver infrastructure and services, etc. Instead of owning any IT themselves, they may procure what they need, when they need it from a service provider. They likely develop applications in modern or emerging programming languages and are focused on the rapid delivery of minimum viable products using agile development approaches. They are also consumers of many different open source technologies, and they consume these services from wherever they deem most appropriate.

Organisations with born-on-the-cloud IT tend to operate in ways very different from those following a traditional IT approach, which is the approach that most readers would think of when business IT is mentioned. Though there are many ways that the traditional IT approach can be realised, these tend to be less agile and process-driven as well as use a much wider range of hardware, software and service components to deliver services. Organisations with traditional IT tend to use open source less often and most have relationships with a relatively small number of hardware and software vendors. Programming, if done at all, likely follows a waterfall delivery model and is supported by traditional project management methods.

These born-on-the-cloud and traditional IT approaches are not mutually exclusive; each delivers value to organisations. It is important to understand the differences in the architectural aspects of each approach, which are mainly related to how applications are designed, created and managed.