Feeling pressured to move to the hybrid cloud?

Transcription

1 Solution Guide Feeling pressured to move to the hybrid cloud? Don t like change? 10 tips to assure failure (if that s your goal)

2 One of the longest-lasting and most glorious traditions in the computer industry is one of intransigent, stubborn and petulant behavior in the face of change. Back in the days when mainframes ruled the earth and information technology (IT) was called management information systems (MIS), there were COBOL-encrusted contrarians cantankerously claiming that personal computers (PCs) were a fad that would never catch on. Then came the World Wide Web (WWW) and there were those who bravely stood up to tell us with great certitude and alacrity that, no, this would never work because, really, who would want to be connected all the time? And now, once again, we are in the midst of another sea change in computing, driven by major trends such as cloud computing, mobility, social networking and big data analytics. A major aspect of this shift, particularly for IT decision makers, is the movement toward hybrid cloud environments. By 2017, more than 50% of large enterprises will be using hybrid clouds, according to research firm Gartner, Inc. 1 Marketing hype, you say? That s the spirit! Just a new way for pundits to pontificate pointlessly for pay? Go for it! We say it s high time to follow in the well-worn footsteps of those who came before us, those great PC deniers and WWW naysayers who stood up against the future and planted their webbed feet firmly in the past. An old saying tells us: Sometimes it is better to bend like the willow than to be strong and break like the oak. If you would rather not go with the flow and join the herd of organizations moving toward hybrid cloud environments, then you can follow this advice and learn from these 10 tips to assuring failure in the hybrid cloud. Step No. 1: Don t Even Think About Increasing Bandwidth and, Whatever You Do, Don t Do a Bandwidth Capacity Plan A hybrid cloud requires significant improvements in infrastructure performance and flexibility that legacy data centers may not be able to address. The infrastructure will typically be handling far more data and transactions, and it will be required to handle these increases in capacity with concurrent increases in speed. If you wanted to successfully deploy a hybrid cloud, one of the first things you would do is work with a trusted partner to create a bandwidth capacity plan. This would help you to determine where you might need to invest in 10- or 40-gigabit Ethernet, Ethernet fabrics and software-defined networks (SDNs), among other new technologies. If you really want to make sure your hybrid cloud initiative fails, don t do a bandwidth plan and watch gleefully as users deal with latency while waiting impatiently for packets that will never arrive. Step No. 2: Don t Bother with Application Performance Monitoring Hybrid clouds offer organizations the opportunity to reduce costs by more fully utilizing shared resources, and to be much more flexible by using public cloud providers to address challenges of elastic scalability. If hybrid clouds proliferate, organizations will increasingly attempt to achieve these benefits across their 1 Gartner Says Nearly Half of Large Enterprises Will Have Hybrid Cloud Deployments By the End of 2017, Gartner, Oct. 1, Feeling pressured to move to the hybrid cloud? 2 of 5

3 most important applications, such as e-commerce, online-transaction processing, big data analytics and others. The mobile end users may not be geographically near their application processing, and the application data and protocols used must flow through an eroded enterprise Internet perimeter. Business leaders will be concerned that application performance is not degraded and, in fact, will be looking for improvement. If you don t monitor application performance, they ll never know and neither will the IT department. The business will suffer, users will be unhappy and customers won t be able to get what they are looking for. The result: Management will blame the hybrid cloud. Step No. 3: Forget About Adding Storage Capacity and Ensuring Replication and Backup Hybrid clouds require organizations to strategically deploy flash storage to meet the performance requirements of many applications, and they will demand the use of storage architectures that support technology advances such as intelligent tiering, deduplication, thin provisioning, snapshots and compression. If you don t address the storage challenges of the hybrid cloud, your company will have to keep buying additional drives to keep up with capacity, without necessarily addressing the growing requirements for increased speed and performance. The hybrid cloud will be a money pit, a bottleneck and a big investment that will actually increase the company s risks of downtime. Put that in your hybrid cloud business plan, and see how it flies. Step No. 4: Don t Leverage APIs or Customize in Any Way Customization and application program interfaces (APIs) are critical to hybrid cloud success because they allow you to take advantage of the resources that your public cloud supplier can deliver, while adjusting certain features and functions to meet the specific needs of your business. Writing automation and orchestration tools to leverage the public cloud provider s APIs takes some effort, but it has its rewards. Customization and APIs will make life much easier for users and for the IT department, and will lead to a self-service environment where business decision makers can be more involved in building new services and applications. Why would you want that? Step No. 5: No Exit Plan That s the Ticket Hybrid cloud is a platform for agility and flexibility, so organizations should want to avoid vendor lock-in wherever possible. If you want the hybrid cloud to fail, once you create the plan to migrate mission-critical applications to a hybrid cloud environment, convince management to double down on the bet and move forward without an exit plan. This way, if a particular application is not performing as expected or your organization encounters a security breach, there is nothing you can do except accept the consequences and be beholden to the response of your public cloud supplier. Imagine the horrified looks on the faces of your management team members as they watch problems escalate with no end in sight. Priceless. Feeling pressured to move to the hybrid cloud? 3 of 5

4 Step No. 6: Forget About TCO A successful hybrid cloud deployment will require systems that monitor costs, manage capacity planning and use sophisticated models to assess total cost of ownership (TCO), all of which are available from leading companies such as Global Technology Resources, Inc. (GTRI). Don t use these unless you want the hybrid cloud to succeed. The first question corporate management will ask about any IT project and particularly one as highly visible as hybrid cloud will be: How much is this thing going to cost us? There are many ways to answer that question to ensure that the hybrid cloud will never get off the ground in your company. You can try: A. A helluva lot! B. Beats me. C. Only time will tell. D. Unfortunately, no one will ever know the answer to that question. It is one of the great mysteries of the universe. Be creative just don t tell the truth about how the hybrid cloud can significantly improve TCO and reduce capital expenses, and don t mention how important it is to work with the right partner company to measure and monitor TCO. Step No. 7: Don t Ask About Your Public Cloud Provider s Security If the cost of the project is the first question from management, security is likely to be the second. More than 50% of respondents to InformationWeek s 2013 State of Cloud Computing 2 survey cited security as their top cloud risk, and security was also cited as the main inhibitor to cloud deployment in the Future of Cloud Computing Survey. 3 Play on these fears and use them to set your company up for failure. Although there are many in-depth questions you can ask about the security practices of your public cloud supplier everything from their technologies to their policies to the ways in which they ensure the protection of data as it moves between public and private clouds asking those questions will only ease the concerns of management. Want the hybrid cloud to fail? We advocate a don t ask, don t tell philosophy when it comes to security. Step No. 8: No Need to Understand Which Workloads to Run Doing a careful analysis of workloads will help you determine which ones to move into the cloud and how to budget for and allocate resources for each of these workloads. It will also help you integrate applications across various workloads, technologies and cloud environments. Alternatively, you can take the ludicrous posture that all workloads are basically the same and there s no need to do an analysis of which workloads to run in the private cloud, the public cloud or the hybrid cloud. You know that s not true, of course, but it will lead to hybrid cloud failure which, indeed, is our mission here. 2 Research: 2013 State of Cloud Computing, InformationWeek, March 2, Future of Cloud Computing Survey Reveals Business Driving Cloud Adoption in Everything as a Service Era; IT Investing Heavily to Catch up and Support Consumers Graduating from BYOD to BYOC, North Bridge Venture Partners, May 2013 Feeling pressured to move to the hybrid cloud? 4 of 5

5 Step No. 9: Assume Your Needs Will Never Change Hybrid cloud success requires constant adjustments as the needs of the business change. If you want to fail, start with the assumption that your needs will never change: that you won t be adding new services; bandwidth requirements will remain static; whatever storage capacity you put in place will stay the same; there will be no new applications; users won t care about mobility or bring your own device (BYOD); social media usage will stop growing; management won t want to add self-service capabilities; the sophistication of hackers will not grow. Start with those assumptions, and we promise you your hybrid cloud initiative won t make it till the end of the week. Step No. 10: And For Heaven s Sakes, DON T Hire Experts to Help You Hybrid cloud is complex and strategic. It offers businesses the opportunity to reduce costs, improve agility and drive new business initiatives through big data analytics, enhanced mobility, elastic scalability, self-service resources and many more benefits. There are companies such as GRTI that have valuable insight and experience in making hybrid cloud initiatives successful in a wide range of environments and industries. Partnering with a company like GTRI will make it much more likely that your hybrid cloud initiative will be successful in reducing costs and driving the business forward. Whatever you do, if you want the hybrid cloud to fail, stay away from an expert partner. Conclusion So there you have it, the fool s guide to making sure your hybrid cloud initiative fails, giving you all of the tools you need to take your place among the ranks of unemployed IT professionals who bravely stood up against the future and ensured that they would never work in IT again. Of course, you may actually like your job and may not want to see the hybrid cloud fail. In that case, we have just one piece of advice for you: Contact GTRI and get started on making the hybrid cloud a success. ( About GTRI GTRI is an award-winning national solutions integrator enabling both private and public sector organizations to exceed their complex business objectives through technology innovation and adoption. Solution areas include private and public cloud architectures, datacenter infrastructure, network design, mobile workforce solutions, network security, information security, managed IT, professional services and consulting. GTRI delivers innovative, enterprise-grade technology solutions built to solve business challenges [email protected] CERTIFIED TechTarget 2014 Feeling pressured to move to the hybrid cloud? 5 of 5