After the success of last year’s cybersecurity podcast, CDW is now tackling another trending topic in our latest edition of the Get IT podcast series. This time, our focus is on the hybrid cloud, and how Canadian organizations can successfully implement a hybrid cloud strategy.
In the series premiere, What is Hybrid Cloud?, CDW experts Peter Hunter, Architect Manager, British Columbia, and KJ Burke, the series host and Principal Technology Strategist, Hybrid Cloud, for CDW Canada, discuss what is the hybrid cloud, how CDW can help customers build their hybrid cloud and how the hybrid cloud delivers value. Here are some highlights of their conversation:
What does hybrid cloud mean?
When the cloud came along, it wasn’t just about moving out of the data centre into someone else’s data centre. It was about changing how you did things to provide what the business needed. That often led to a two-pronged approach to IT, where you’ve got all the cool, new cloud stuff and then you’ve got the stuff that’s still sitting in the data centre.
Hybrid cloud is bringing those cloud methodologies and approaches, such as APIs, automation and orchestration, into the data centre, using similar or the same tools as in the public cloud, so you can achieve efficiencies. Now, you have a choice of “Can I modernize the operations of this workload, is it better suited to be in the public cloud, or should it be sitting on premises in our data centre?”
When we view things from a hybrid cloud perspective, what does that change?
Part of the reason why the data centre hasn’t changed is because people have their ways of doing things. They have their areas and technologies that they’re comfortable and familiar with. And so, when you’re looking at turning your data centre into a cloud operating model, what are those things that people are holding onto with both fists and don’t want to let go of?
Processes are probably the biggest thing. Maybe people are happy to be on a help desk getting requests rather than exposing an API and letting developers and users request resources as needed. But there’s an opportunity to take that experience and apply it to these new ways of doing things. That’s something you will get in a hybrid cloud model. You’ll also find operational efficiencies, better SLAs for your users and more opportunity for IT to be a real value-add to an organization.
How to get the most out of the hybrid cloud
One of the biggest challenges of migrating to the hybrid cloud is not technical. It’s the culture shift, moving away from silos inside IT. To effectively apply a hybrid cloud model, you need cross-functional teams that have developers, infrastructure and operations working together, and to change the way software is released inside those environments, so that it’s supported, monitored, maintained and updated. So, a huge opportunity to get the most out of hybrid cloud is to think about how things are structured and how things are siloed inside your environment.
One of the concepts we discussed in the CDW Cloud Report was the difference between digitally distraught organizations and digitally determined organizations. Digitally determined organizations, which are seeing greater success across the hybrid cloud – and definitely more in the public cloud – are focused on people and processes. When you talk about breaking down silos, a lot of it is implementing new processes and really investing in your people so that you’re scaling up new people, you’re taking advantage of new processes and you’re able to change the way you handle infrastructure, architecture and resources, whether in the public cloud or your data centre.
For more hybrid cloud insights, listen to Episode 1 now. And tune in weekly for additional podcasts in this series!
