Hybrid IT

Delivering IT at the speed of business

An Executive Summary

© Logicalis 2016

The IT department: running to stand still? The relationship between

business managers and IT has changed for good

Business managers can access digital services via the cloud on their mobile devices, tablets and laptops, and realise the benefits in an instant. So, when they need to adapt quickly to market forces, launch a new product, or gain deeper customer insights, they expect the capability they need to be delivered at the speed of business. And if their IT department is unable to respond at that speed, they can choose to buy it elsewhere.

The growth in cloud-based infrastructure and application services in recent years means that business consumers are being bombarded with a massive choice of new functionality and capability directly from external specialist service providers. As a result, the relationship between Business and IT has changed. It had to, because today the business has a choice.

Business is impatient. It’s in its nature. Innovation, competitive advantage and sustained growth are the fruits of impatience. The business needs new capability to develop its products, deliver its services, serve its customers, manage its partners and enable its people. The IT department is struggling to deliver new systems and functionality at the pace that the business needs to consume them. And the business cannot afford to be patient.

Technology consumerism is changing attitudes towards business IT. In the consumer world, new apps for smartphones and tablets appear every day. They are cheap and they deliver immediate value and the public love them. So it’s hardly surprising that technology consumerism is now influencing the hearts and minds of today’s line-of-business managers. After all, they are consumers too.

© Logicalis 2016

In the Logicalis Optimal Global CIO Survey 2015, nearly two-thirds of CIOs said line-of-business managers will decide and spend more of the IT budget in the coming years. Some business managers are exercising that power right now. The Retail IT Survey 2014 revealed that 80% of business decision makers admit they have already purchased technology without the knowledge of their IT department. These findings might suggest that the IT department is about to lose control. In fact the opposite is true; the IT department is set to gain even greater control. But, to do that, it will need to make an important transition.

The relationship between IT and its core platforms must change too

To deliver the services the business needs at the speed it demands, IT will need to adopt a new model for its core operations and its core IT platforms. That new model is the Service Defined Infrastructure.

The adoption of a Service Defined Infrastructure will enable the IT department to switch its focus from physical fix to policy driven service provisioning and decision making. IT will then gain the visibility, agility and control it needs to deliver new capabilities to its customers at the speed of business; with more and more services directly linked to business policies. New instrumentation and control software will enable both IT and the business to monitor the availability, security, and cost of services. And it will enable resources to be provisioned at the push of a button. Logicalis describes the adoption of a Service Defined Infrastructure model as a move to ‘Hybrid IT’.

Hybrid IT:

the route to delivering IT at the speed of business

© Logicalis 2016

The first stage of the transition to the new model is the development of an agile and responsive core infrastructure: Data Centre, Network and Security.

The Data Centre must be able to deliver the right infrastructure for the right applications, and the right information and insight for the right users. It must also have the right policy and security controls for business security and compliance.

The Network must have the capability and control needed to support the Everywhere Generation and deliver the standards of access, service and experience that business users take for granted from the public cloud.

Security is a commercial imperative. The new model core infrastructure must therefore deliver security and compliance, along with the resources the organisation demands, at the speed of business. Whether you’re flying an aircraft, driving a formula one car, or operating an enterprise-class IT department, speed must be coupled with control. Hybrid IT is about achieving greater choice, agility and speed without compromising control.

Hybrid IT:

the five key layers

© Logicalis 2016

Infrastructure: comprises converged platforms (platforms of stability) and hyper-converged platforms (platforms of change) to enable more efficient resource pooling and greater resource control.

Virtualisation: releases resources from being tied to particular physical devices in order to enable portability of services. Virtualisation technologies span compute, storage and networking to improve service abstraction and resource control. The result is a ‘software-defined data centre’.

Automation: comprises cloud automation and Data Centre automation. Cloud automation provides on-premise and off-premise self-service provisioning and lifecycle services for virtual systems and workloads. Data Centre automation applies software defined policies to perform the underlying changes to the Data Centre infrastructure that would otherwise have to be dealt with by the Data Centre administrators. Cloud Integration: divided into in-house directories and external cloud. This provides authentication and authorisation services for in-house Active Directory platforms to control user access to cloud services, such as Office365, Salesforce etc. It also provides the integration of hybrid cloud (Softlayer, Cisco InterCloud, VMware Cloud etc.) with public cloud (Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure) services. Cloud automation platforms make the service definition and provisioning process simpler, more accurate and extremely low-touch.

Instrumentation: this delivers the visibility and control that is needed across the entire Data Centre. The Instrumentation layer includes element managers for the core Data Centre technologies. Analytics platforms provide log and KPI monitoring to watch out for anomalous patterns to proactively identify potential issues, raise alerts and provide reports. Together, the instrumentation and analytics platforms provide a holistic view and protective watch over the entire Data Centre and the portfolio of services in use. The instrumentation platforms can also be integrated with, and provide data to, other systems, including ITSM and security and business analytics. This is Telemetry for IT and the most visible feature of Hybrid IT.

With these five layers in place, the IT department will be perfectly positioned to support digital business innovation and respond immediately to changing demand. IT staff will be able to provision and control resources from the Data Centre instantly to support changing demands and priorities. They will be able to control their networks in real-time and finely tune the service available to users to match their specific needs. They will be able to operate service and software defined platforms with considerably less manual intervention. And they will be better equipped to protect against new and changing security threats.

The Service Defined Infrastructure operated under the Hybrid IT model will make the Data Centre and networks less costly to run, and enable IT to deliver more choice, agility and value to the business.

© Logicalis 2016

In order to make the successful transition to the Service Defined Infrastructure and Hybrid IT, CIOs must adopt more than a new operational model; they must also adopt a new set of principles. These include:

• Focus on delivering a 360° user experience: IT Experience Management

• Operate every IT platform with business outcomes as the primary KPI

• Define Services. Think portfolio. Deliver what your line-of-business wants to buy

• Adopt pre-validated platforms as the first choice for internal IT architectures

• Automate, Automate, Automate: experiences, processes and platforms

• Position IT as the internal service provider rather than technology fixers

• Welcome the market with open arms - and manage what it can deliver for your business

CIOs face a simple choice

In the drive to deliver a better workplace experience, mobility experience, information experience and application experience, CIOs face a simple choice. They can choose to compete with the market to

deliver what their business needs, or they can choose to harness the market to deliver what their business needs. The reality is that the business has decided that it likes what it sees in the open market and it wants to embrace technology consumerism. Therefore, choosing to harness and manage the market as part of a Service Defined Infrastructure must be a big part of the answer.

The CIO can build a new environment that matches the agility and speed available in the open market, but no internal environment can hope to compete with the scale of the public cloud. Therefore, the only sensible and sustainable strategy must be to build and manage a hybrid portfolio that combines best-in-class in-house and cloud-based IT services. And that portfolio will evolve constantly.

The Service Defined Infrastructure will connect seamlessly to the public cloud, building secure connections between on-premises on public cloud services. It will give the business near instant access to the scale it needs for specific tasks, workloads and use-cases, such as Development, and it will provide IT with a new set of options for expensive, but rarely used, services such as Disaster Recovery and Backup.

A new IT model requires a new set of IT principles

Hybrid IT is the future;

for the business, the IT department and the CIO Together, the Service Defined Enterprise model and Hybrid IT enables the IT department to move from physical fix to policy driven decision making. It provides the business with agile and responsive service driven solutions. And it enables the CIO to transform business choice and IT service experience whilst maintaining complete control. Most importantly, it transforms the IT department into something that can deliver greater, faster and lasting value to the business.

It’s the new operational model for both IT and the business, and Logicalis has the blueprint.