The shift to hybrid, app-specific IT

According to 451 Research, there is a growing preference for IT hybridisation as the analyst firm expects 25% of applications to be deployed via a hybrid model by 2015. Interest in hybrid solutions is being driven by the need to manage diverse applications and workloads both on-premise and off using far more sophisticated and flexible infrastructure options. To meet the requirements of specific apps or workloads, IT managers can now use the best combination of in-house and outsourced IT infrastructure services and no longer be forced into an all-or-nothing choice between on-site IT and outsourcing to the public cloud.

Even as cloud adoption accelerates, there are multiple reasons why some companies maintain on-site infrastructure. These might include maximising the use of existing assets on an amortisation schedule or part of an IT strategy to maintain specific apps or data on-site. It’s also worth noting that for predictable workloads, the public cloud can end up being more expensive than using on-site infrastructure because the customer ultimately pays a premium for on-demand, scalable capacity that they rarely end up needing.

Conversely, where the cloud excels is the agility it gives IT to support applications or workloads with dynamic spikes in traffic, such as new product launches or big data analytics. The accessibility and immediacy that the cloud brings to IT is ideal for supporting new projects that need first-rate performance and the ability to easily scale capacity on-demand. While the cloud was initially used for test and development projects, companies of all sizes are moving line-of-business applications to the cloud and many high-growth start-ups that are ‘born on the Internet’ base their entire infrastructure there.

Previously, IT departments may have felt the need to keep everything completely on-site or shift it all to the cloud for cost or infrastructure management reasons, but the clear trend and emerging best practice is a more pragmatic, blended approach. This shift recognises that IT’s value is not confined to the infrastructure it ‘owns’ or ‘manages,’ but rather a more strategic view of its role in optimising the infrastructure, applications and service delivery to support a company’s key business objectives.

A great example of this new IT flexibility comes from open-source projects, like OpenStack, that have dramatically increased IT teams’ ability to provide their organisation with a truly flexible infrastructure. OpenStack allows real interoperability between cloud services so applications can easily be shifted between clouds and help companies use multiple third-party tools and avoid vendor lock-in.

In addition, the emergence of bare metal solutions allows IT managers to outsource big data analytics and other performance-intensive applications to an environment that combines the performance of dedicated servers with the scalability of the cloud. Bare-metal environments are seeing greater traction as more datacentre operators offer this option in the UK and across Europe. Based on this trend, we’re seeing more data being moved beyond on-site legacy datacentres to multi-tenant, managed and unmanaged environments. Interoperability and real choice are coming of age and IT managers are finding that investment in hardware can be kept to a minimum by combining existing owned infrastructure with outsourced infrastructure when needed.

In fact, as organisations increasingly have access to more infrastructure choices from public and private and even ’bare metal cloud’ services, hybridisation is accelerating quickly. Gartner recently ranked IT hybridisation models as one of the top 10 strategic technology trends of 2014.

With the help of infrastructure services providers, datacentre managers are matching applications with the most suitable platform to create their hybrid models. Due to a more user-centric approach to service management portal design that gives customers a simple and easy way to monitor and manage fully hybridised environments via a ‘single pane of glass,’ moving workloads and scaling capacity on-demand to meet changing business needs has become much easier. The end result is a flexible set of infrastructure options for IT professionals to build hybrid, app-specific IT solutions that best fit their specific technical requirements and business goals.