Hybrid IT – miracle cure-all or just another tech buzzword?

But doing so usually come with often-understated side effects, including symptoms like additional costs, complexity, and compliance risks. So, should we really be prescribing hybrid IT for every organisational issue?

Following iTWire’s article titled “FaaS, SaaS, Blockchain and a few other buzzwords for 2017” where Solarwinds Patrick Hubbard stated that Hybrid IT was not just a concept anymore but a reality, his cohort and head Geek at Solarwinds, Kong Yang has penned further thoughts on hybrid IT.

He says it is important to understand that Hybrid is no longer “snake-oil” – unlike other so called miracle cures Hybrid IT can work with a bit of due diligence and the right tools. Following are his words.

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Hybrid IT has been touted as a miracle cure-all for just about every enterprise technology challenge. And to be sure, employing a mix of on- and off-premises services certainly offers IT professionals more options than rigidly sticking to one or the other. But doing so can come with often-understated side effects, including symptoms like additional costs, complexity, and compliance risks. So, should we really be prescribing hybrid IT for every organisational malady?

The simple answer is yes – at least, most of the time. Most organisations should treat hybrid IT as a permanent destination for their infrastructure services, as it balances business and technology requirements in a manner that pure on-premises or pure off-premises solutions struggle to do. However, IT leaders must read the label and understand the scope of their hybrid solutions i.e. what problems are they trying to solve? Failure to do so can end up costing them an arm and a leg.

If symptoms of digital disruption persist…

Hybrid IT allows businesses to deal with digital disruption more effectively. On the one hand, a hybrid approach provides organisations with the agility and scalability which they need to respond to changing marketplace conditions. In fact, we typically see hybrid IT perform best when it’s being used for test and development, auto-scaling of infrastructure services for peak demand, and other use cases where IT needs to move fast or get left for dead. Hybrid IT services also help organisations quickly beef up their capabilities in areas where they mightn’t have huge amounts of expertise, particularly complex and fast-evolving disciplines like security operations or Big Data.

Moreover, hybrid infrastructure and services allow businesses to maintain continuity and control over their most prized assets: intellectual property. No matter how well a fully-outsourced IT solution can perform, it can neither guarantee nor take responsibility for the possibility that an organization’s intellectual property won’t fall into others’ hands. And since intellectual property is the key to transforming digital disruption into new sources of competitive advantage aka innovation, business leaders can justify spending more to keep their IP secret sauce under their internal IT organization’s control and governance.

In other words, hybrid IT lets businesses have their cake and eat it too, enhancing their agility while maintaining strict control over sensitive assets. However, having the best of both worlds comes at a cost, one which IT leaders often fail to properly account for.

A slightly bitter pill

Hybrid IT’s hidden costs typically stem from the “-as-a-Service” components of hybrid IT solutions. In a hybrid infrastructure environment, even simple tasks like adding VMs, GET, PUT or POST requests, and setting up public IP addresses often come with additional costs per instance. Multiply those costs over thousands or millions of transactions, and hybrid IT suddenly becomes far less attractive than it used to be – particularly for agile development, auto-scaling, and other use cases that involve high volumes of requests. Plus, cost is a running tally that is due at the end of the month unless you have paid for reserved instances, which means proper planning and execution to be cost effective and efficient.

There’s another, non-monetary cost that enterprise IT leaders should also beware: potential downtime. Hybrid IT vendors often only commit to small, fractional penalties for missing SLAs in performance and availability – often much lower than organisations may be accustomed to getting from on-premises solutions. If IT leaders overestimate the level of uptime provided by hybrid IT, they may end up compromising their business-critical workloads – often the ones that drove a move from off-premises IT in the first place.

Are these reasons to reject hybrid IT? They shouldn’t be. With a few precautions and monitoring with discipline in place, IT leaders can receive the full benefits of hybrid without the bitter side effects.

Always read the label

Before committing to a hybrid IT solution, IT leaders should sit down with their finance and legal counterparts and go over the exact terms and conditions, the cost structure, and the SLA schedules. This enables them to not only negotiate better terms with their service providers, but also communicate the potential risks to the rest of the C-suite. That understanding can then inform how the organisation splits its workloads between on- and off-premises services, balancing business agility and performance benefits against the potential for elevated costs.

Any hybrid IT solution should also be accompanied by monitoring tools to baseline and track its performance and efficiency. The best monitoring tools will alert IT managers to any performance oddities either on- or off-premises, and give them the visibility to quickly troubleshoot and resolve them. I call this visibility, the single point of truth. IT managers, for their part, need to use these tools with discipline and a solid understanding of the hybrid systems and applications that they’re monitoring – which often introduce new layers of complexity in comparison to incumbent on-premises solutions. IT leaders must support and encourage their managers to train and achieve certification in the -as-a-Service providers they consume services from.

Hybrid IT may not cure every organisational problem, but it certainly helps businesses become more agile without compromising the integrity of their mission-critical data and applications. With a bit of due diligence and the right tools, IT leaders can minimise hybrid’s IT potential risks and focus instead on using it to optimise business performance and improve service delivery. Don’t treat hybrid IT like snake-oil: unlike other dubious miracle cures, this one can actually work.