UPDATED 17:37 EDT / SEPTEMBER 24 2015

NEWS

Control hybrid clouds before they control you, experts advise

The tone for today’s Hybrid Cloud Summit in Cambridge Massachusetts was summed up by Bruce Richardson, chief enterprise strategist at Salesforce.com Inc.

“We’re a pure public cloud vendor, so I was wondering why I was asked to speak on the topic of hybrid cloud,” he told the audience during a panel session.  “Then I realized that when I log on to Salesforce in the morning, I can choose from 48 different apps, and they’re all in other companies’ clouds. It became clear to me that our business is built on hybrid cloud.”

That’s probably true at most businesses. Even if their corporate cloud is strictly private, employees are probably tapping into services like Gmail, DropBox or Constant Contact for point purposes. This self-service phenomenon –  which one speaker called “bring your own cloud” –  can steamroll so quickly that businesses quickly lose track of what cloud services they’re using.

Today’s event, which was hosted by the Cloud Standards Customer Council, focused on the issues of managing hybrid and multi-cloud environments and building IT architectures that deliver flexible, scalable and secure applications with unprecedented speed. Speakers agreed that cloud computing is an unstoppable force for all the right reasons, but it also presents a host of new complexities and governance issues that need to be wrestled to the ground.

IT no less critical

Jim Walsh Constant ContactThe role of the IT organization changes in a cloud environment, but it isn’t diminished, speakers agreed. When Jim Walsh (right, @jwalsh99), CIO at Constant Contact Inc., joined the company in 2009, the IT organization had 18 employees. Today it has 65. While some of that increase was driven by growth, the company’s broad-based move to the cloud has also meant hiring people with a different set of IT skills.

“We had zero business analysts in 2009. We have about a dozen today,” he said. Similarly, the number of people devoted to data integration has swelled from one to 10 in that time.

An effective hybrid cloud strategy demands planning, governance and rigor, speakers said. That can be frustrating to executives seeking a quick payoff, but accumulating services without a set of standards and governance principles is a formula for chaos.

The process begins with changing the IT mindset from command and control to empowerment and enablement, said Judith Hurwitz (@jhurwitz), CEO of Hurwitz & Associates. In short, CIOs need to stop being seen as “Dr. No,” she said.

David LinthicumIt’s also critical to put standards and policies in place. Unfortunately, cloud services have proliferated so quickly that few organizations have had a chance to do that said David Linthicum (@DavidLinthicum), senior vice president of Cloud Technology Partners. “In many cases, multi clouds are created out of laziness,” he said. “Enterprises adopt each service for a different reason.”

That presents a host of problems, not the least of which is security, which speakers said should be at the top of every CIOs cloud checklist. Other governance factors to consider include data portability between applications, quality of application program interfaces, use of open standards and ease of data integration.

A cloud management platform, which is a suite of integrated tools that enables enterprises to manage many clouds as one, is an absolute must, Linthicum said. “If you’re able to manage and secure everything around a well-defined set of APIs, it doesn’t matter how many clouds you have,” he said.

Hurwitz defined five new responsibilities for the IT organization in a hybrid cloud environment:

  • Respond quickly to changing business demands;
  • Deliver on required service-level agreements;
  • Secure data and intellectual property at every level;
  • Control costs; and
  • Simplify hybrid cloud management.

Bond with the business

Most importantly, IT organizations must bond with business users to make hybrid cloud work. If they don’t, users will simply go their own way. The self-service phenomenon, which is sometimes called “shadow IT,” is actually an important yardstick for measuring IT effectiveness, said Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar), chief digital evangelist at Salesforce.com. “Some CIOs are actually embracing shadow IT because it’s an indication of how well they’re delivering their own services,” he said.

Business alignment is something CIOs have been seeking for decades, so they shouldn’t reject the opportunity the cloud provides. Constant Contact’s Walsh said his company’s six-year migration from 98 percent in-house IT to 70 percent cloud was driven by close cooperation with the sales team, and that bond has persisted. Ironically for a SaaS provider, the Constant Contact culture used to be strongly biased toward hosting all its own computing equipment, he said.

That changed when the company discovered that users of its free trial service converted to paying customers at a much higher rate if contacted by a salesperson immediately after beginning their trial. By scrapping a batch overnight process and moving to Salesforce.com, the company was able to deliver subscriber reports immediately instead to sales reps, driving sales and commissions higher.

“It was a huge win,” Walsh said, and it helped drive a complete turnaround in thinking at the board level. “Today I have to justify making a technology acquisition on-premise,” he said.

Ultimately, cloud is just another platform shift, and we’ve been there before. Mainframes, minicomputers, client/server and network computing were all disruptive in their early days, but IT organizations and vendors figured out how to adapt.

Hurwitz predicted that the term “cloud” won’t even be meaningful in a few years. “I believe that five years from now we won’t use terms like public and private cloud,” she said. “We’ll call it computing.”

Watch Judith Hurwitz on theCUBE from IBM Impact 2014 (22:04)

Image by stux via Pixabay

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