Hybrid IT: challenges and opportunities

Chapter 2

Hybrid IT: challenges and opportunities

Challenges Does it make business sense? Moving toward a hybrid IT strategy made good business sense for all 25 of our roundtable attendees. But implementing that strategy right now made sense for 23. For two people the economics weren’t there yet. “They [the business] call us a cost centre, but I call us a value centre. The same engineer that would look after exchange looks after another 600 applications that we run. So there is no real cost benefit for us to move to the cloud or hybrid now, but we look at it every year.” Adrian Lewis, CIO, Super Group

Challenges Is it a business strategy? A hybrid strategy may make sense for your IT teams, but has it been embraced by the business? Getting them onboard is vital for success. “We are trying to communicate the awareness of cloud, and we’re trying to get the digital thinking entrenched. What we found out from previous transformation efforts is not to rush into these big, new, shiny technologies, but rather to get the awareness and readiness of the organisation in place. That means also the execution teams on the ground. And just be wary of the organisational readiness, the skills required, and some of the technological limitations.” Lester Masher, Head of Enterprise Architecture, WesBank

Challenges There is no one right way Security concerns, zealous regulators, data sovereignty concerns, taking a bimodal approach: every business is different. Fortunately, there’s a hybrid IT approach that’s right for almost all of us. “It is a journey. What we see for sure is that there’s no one style fits all There are different levels of maturity in organisations that we’re engaging, who are trying to understand where to position, where to break into, what would be their legacy environment, as we begin to move that out into various forms of cloud.” Kevin Leahy, Group General Manager for the Data Centre Business, Dimension Data

Opportunities Identify your low hanging fruit Building momentum is important for any project, and hybrid IT is no different. Find the easy wins, wherever they are. “Disaster recovery is an opportunity; I think it’s a low-hanging fruit that we’ve got to look at. And then our test environment, our UAT (user acceptance testing), and our dev environment, I think there’s opportunities there. And then also with the SQL server, the whole concept of the stretch databases, where you can actually start moving your historical data. And that’s something that we’re really looking at.” Mark Brouwer, CIO, RTT

Opportunities Data is the new oil Nina Du Thaler was named Utilities CIO of the year at the fourth Annual iT News Benchmark Awards in February 2016. She won for her work integrating data from across Queensland Urban Utilities’ estate, in real time, providing the business with holistic picture of its operations. Hybrid IT plays a vital role in Du Thaler extending this work. “One of the key challenges for us over the next period of time is how we get data out of what we call our ‘SCADA environment’, essentially our ‘Internet of things’, the sensors, probes and pieces of equipment that measure the water quality, pressure, vibration, all sorts of different things. There’s a rich data set that comes out of this environment, which at this point in time, is only seen within that environment. We expect that we can get much greater value out of this data by combining it with other data and making it available to our planning teams. We’ll get much, much better reads on population growth, and how our networks are performing. That will enable us to invest in maintenance and growth in a far more accurate way and deliver better customer outcomes.” Nina Du Thaler, CIO, Queensland Urban Utilities

Opportunities

Timing and flexibility Equipment nearing end of life + need for quick and easy scalability? Hybrid IT is for you. “We are reaching end of life on a lot of our equipment, storage and servers, and networking. So we had to make a big decision: invest a considerable amount of money to upgrade our datacentre and everything that was within it, or let someone else, essentially, worry about that. We decided to take a hybrid IT approach, so that we have the ability to grow out as we need. As our different business units are expanding, as our storage is being consumed more rapidly, it’s not something we have to worry about at this point in time. And then, as things might start to slow down in the next year or two, we can bring that back down to the levels that we need.” Jeremy Bree, CIO, Henley Properties