The cloud landscape continues to change and evolve. Our current assumptions about cloud and how it will influence IT and our IT investments will need to evolve as well. When you consider the fluidity of the cloud vendor landscape, it is important to consider price/performance market intelligence to make the best decisions for your cloud strategy – your hybrid cloud strategy.
neXt Curve hosted a discussion with our cloud intelligence partner, Cloud Spectator, to share our collective perspectives on what CIOs need to do to continually adjust their cloud strategy to meet the challenges and capitalize on the opportunities of a fast-changing IT landscape and the emerging hybrid cloud. Leonard Lee was joined by Ken Balazs, CEO, and Eric Marks, VP of Cloud Consulting, of Cloud Spectator.
The CIO’s Dilemma
The key challenge that CIOs have today is the assault on the IT organization. Cloud technologies have changed the way that IT services can be delivered to the enterprise in both the public and private domains. Cloud continues to disarm the IT organization as public cloud providers commoditize and consumerize IT services in easy to procure, access and deploy ways that are taking the IT organization out of the digital conversation.
IT organization are facing increased pressure to reconsider their business of IT and their role within the enterprise and its continual digital evolution. CIOs have a great opportunity to position their organizations as brokers of cloud services in an increasingly hybrid landscape that requires management, orchestration and securing of IT services provided by a complex portfolio of cloud and edge computing service providers.
The Hybrid Cloud Challenge
According to Eric Marks, hybrid cloud is the next big cloud challenge for the CIO. He defines it as a catalog of public and private cloud services that can be provisioned, managed and released/returned by the business and ideally managed through an integrated portal. The key question for and IT organization is how to optimize value across their portfolio of internal and externally sourced IT services?
Not all cloud service providers are created equal and do not provide the same quality of service for a particular workload in a particular geography. To make things even more frustrating for the cloud service end user, the comparative levels of performance change constantly presenting arbitrage opportunities between public vendors and your own private cloud services.
In order to capitalize on these arbitrage opportunities, IT leaders need to have visibility to the economics of the hybrid cloud portfolio they are working with. This means gaining continuous visibility of price and performance economics of the public cloud vendors that the organization uses.
Based on Cloud Spectator’s benchmark data, the price-performance variance between vendor can be significant for a workload. The best-value vendor for a workload may not be the likely suspects such as AWS or Azure. As IT organizations continue to modernize their data centers, they will find that their private cloud services may provide the best value and be best suited for a workload – but they need to benchmark to determine what they are good at.
The Hybrid Cloud Bill of Rights
The hybrid cloud is a new journey for many IT organizations. The challenges of managing a hybrid cloud portfolio can be significant and will likely require your organization to rethink its business of IT. It is vital that IT organizations devise a hybrid cloud strategy for managing IT services provided by public cloud service providers and their own data centers.
There are seven “Bill of Rights” for hybrid cloud, which represent critical practices for realizing a successful hybrid cloud program:
- Get your cloud strategy RIGHT
- Get your cloud economics (business case) RIGHT
- Get your IT and cloud organization RIGHT
- Implement the RIGHT technologies & tools
- Get your cloud SLAs RIGHT
- Get your cloud governance & PMO RIGHT
- Get the RIGHT hybrid cloud results
As you put your hybrid cloud strategy into play, granular intelligence on price and performance across your hybrid cloud portfolio will be critical for making the best economic decisions and provider choices for the workloads that your IT organization and your business demand. Economic transparency of your hybrid cloud portfolio will be important throughout your journey especially as you mature your hybrid cloud practices and optimize the value of your hybrid cloud investments.
Implications for Business Leaders
Cloud continues to change. The vendor landscape is very fluid and catalog of services that cloud service providers are offering continues to expand wildly. A successful hybrid cloud strategy means making the right decisions and extracting the most value out of your hybrid cloud portfolio.
IT leaders should gain economic visibility on their hybrid cloud portfolio and establish a real-time decision support model for selecting the best vendor for a workload based on the prevailing price-performance benchmarks. By taking this important step, IT leaders can optimize the value of their cloud investment from the beginning of their hybrid cloud journey.
The neXt Curve-Cloud Spectator partnership is about providing innovative, data and insight-driven advisory services. We bring together strong knowledge of the ICT market and enterprise needs with analytics-driven, strategy, planning and transformation expertise to help CIOs and their organizations through the full-lifecycle of their cloud journey from strategy to value realization. Contact us if you are interested in how we can help your organization optimize its cloud investments on a continuous basis.
You can listen to the audio replay of our The Hybrid Cloud Bill of Rights webcast by playing the media below or downloading the Podcast available on iTunes. Subscribe to our Podcast channel and keep up to date on the latest insights from neXt Curve.
Audio replay of the Hybrid Cloud Bill of Rights webcast
Presentation Materials
The Hybrid Cloud Bill of Rights Presentation (PDF)
Related Content & Media
by
Leonard Lee
Managing Director, neXt Curve
April 2, 2018
© 2018 neXt Curve. All rights reserved.
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