Improve your infrastructure and operations (I&O) maturity to deliver the full benefits of hybrid cloud
The right technical expertise can help you avoid the pitfalls that undermine many cloud implementations.
Learn about the four disciplines that are key enablers for hybrid cloud success to ensure optimal results for your business.
Summary
Infrastructure and operations leaders that want to effectively achieve the full benefits from their hybrid cloud deployments must improve maturity in each of four areas — virtualization, standardization, automation and instrumentation.
The ultimate goal of a cloud deployment is to build a self-service infrastructure that enables an organization to achieve agility, elasticity, cost control, and dynamic event and policy-based optimization. This hybrid cloud infrastructure will be provided by a combination of dedicated private cloud resources (for example, built and supported by the internal IT staff or a third party, where it is either deployed on-premises or hosted) and/or public cloud services.
Private Cloud Deployments Aren’t Delivering
Gartner inquiries with customers have shown that the majority of the existing private cloud deployments have failed to deliver on the initially anticipated benefits. Often, these organizations are lacking the prerequisite technical capabilities necessary to be successful with their private cloud deployments. This is even after they have done the nontechnical due diligence (such as identifying use cases and potential benefits, addressing process deficits, and so on) prior to pursuing a private cloud deployment (see “Cloud Computing Deployments Should Begin With Service Definition” ). Note that private cloud success is required for hybrid cloud computing success.
Organizations must be totally objective in evaluating their competencies in a set of infrastructure and operational (I&O) disciplines — virtualization, standardization, automation and instrumentation — before beginning a cloud project.
These disciplines are key enablers for successful and complex hybrid cloud deployments that deliver the anticipated benefits, and are defined as:
- Virtualization – Abstracting the compute, storage and network services from the physical hardware.
- Standardization – Limiting the diversity of infrastructure service offerings.
- Automation – Eliminating manual, repeatable infrastructure and operational tasks.
- Instrumentation – Providing real-time visibility into infrastructure and application components, and linking the monitoring with automation.
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