Hybrid cloud – hype or business imperative

Hybrid cloud - hype or business imperative

For most, this has resulted in huge investments moving their business applications to the cloud, embedding a cloud-first model which can support networking, scalability, and flexibility across enterprises.

Now more than ever, business decisions must consider how leveraging the cloud can influence their business strategy. In short, where integrating new technologies can be compelling, the success or failure of cloud deployments are not technology stories: they are business transformation stories.

At a recent press meeting, Tan Jee Toon, country manager of IBM Vietnam said, “Being conversant in the language of the cloud to articulate the 'why' and deliver on it has never been more important for business leaders. Organisations who are leading in the cloud must be discerning in which cloud model they adopt, from on-prem, off-prem, public, and private cloud, open-source, Kubernetes, and recognise the impact of their cloud model is no longer a matter reserved for the IT department.”

What is more, business leaders’ understanding of how a cloud strategy should be orchestrated to achieve business goals – from cost optimisation and delivering a great customer experience to grow or shrink operations or areas of business at warp speed as circumstances shift – is a requisite. Tan added. Today’s business leaders need to understand how the cloud can enable their organisations to be both agile and resilient while unlocking increase value from workflows and data.

Dipping the toes or diving deep: the difference is in the rewards

The fact is most businesses are only 20 per cent of the way into their cloud journeys. The early days when getting on to the cloud was what business wanted to do saw one part of a processor workload to the cloud. Enterprises now understand the importance of examining the role of cloud in their enterprise – and its challenges – from shifting core business applications and the most complex of workloads to the cloud, extracting more data, and optimising every part of the business from supply chains. It requires industry-specific expertise in the modernisation of mission-critical business processes to accelerate the transformation, supported by a strong partner ecosystem.

This business is enabled with the ability to store, access, and move data from a public or shared cloud environment, a private one, and across multiple cloud providers. The openness enables companies to select the best possible innovations and new technologies from the open-source community that provide the best advantage for the business. Ultimately, cloud enables the elasticity to shrink and grow different parts of the business, common control points to ensure data is protected, and drive workloads where they need to be delivered.

Openness demands trusted security

To truly take advantage of an open architecture brought by the cloud, organisations need to both trust the data they have access to and maintain the trust of their employees and customers that they will protect it. In fact, an IBM survey of more than 13,500 global C-level executives found market leadership is most frequently attained when an organisation establishes a high level of trust in the data from its customers, its own business processes, and across its partner ecosystem.

This just drives home the focus that organisations need to have on ensuring that whatever cloud decision they make, enterprise-grade security is part and parcel of this. Companies need to have confidence that their business can maintain control over the data and the most sensitive of workloads to protect against breaches – a relatively common occurrence in some early cloud deployments.

Enabling the cognitive enterprise

The speed and pace with which business becomes a truly agile, cognitive enterprise lie in the hands of its IT department. As the orchestrators, they have the powers to bring together the different parts of the organisation around the hybrid cloud strategy.

By having a clear view of where the value of IT will be and the roadmap to get there, by focusing on developing business-building capability and not just new business, and by locking in an agile operating model, businesses will join those smart leaders and enjoy 2.5 times the value from a hybrid, multi-cloud platform technology.