Analyst Chat #82: Hybrid IT 1 - The Basics

Welcome to this KuppingerCole Analyst Chat. I'm your host. My name is Matthias Reinwarth, I'm lead advisor and senior analyst with KuppingerCole Analysts. My guest today is Mike Small. He is a senior analyst with KuppingerCole acting out of the UK. Hi Mike. Good to see you.

Hi, Matthias. Great to have you. And we want to start a series of episodes around, um, a special topic, which is really interesting. I hope to most and everybody of our audience, because we want to look at the future of cloud and the future of hybrid it because there are lots of developments going on right now, and we want to look at different facets of that topic.

Uh, w uh, over the course of the next episodes together with you, Mike, um, to, to start out, we are the future of hybrid it to start it. What is hybrid it today? Okay.

Well, ultimately, in order to look into the future, you have to look into the past. And when you look into the past of, um, it, one of the things that is most remarkable is how difficult it is to get rid of the past four years. People were dancing on the grave of the mainframe, and yet the mainframe is still with us. And so hybrid it whilst it is kind of a, an interesting concurrent piece of, uh, terminology. It actually really refers to the way it has been for most of my working life, which is to say that whatever you used to have will not go away, or it's very difficult to get rid of.

And so it co-exists with whatever has come next now, in terms of what it actually means today, uh, some years ago, the cloud arrived and the cloud came with great promises. Uh, in particular, these promises were that, uh, the systems which, uh, the it department previously had had difficulty in making work or delivering where suddenly delivered as a service.

And, uh, you simply brought along your credit card as a business owner, and you could get access to a CRM system and all kinds of systems that you've been asking for for years. Um, and then, uh, people who wanted to develop software, but couldn't afford to buy the hardware. They needed to do this, to try out their business ideas found that they could just with a credit card by incredible amounts of computer power in order to do this development now. So this was great.

So you got the born on the cloud, uh, use of it, and you got the business service delivered a software as a service and all that sounded really good. However, the problem and the problem that this was overcoming was that the current or the previous way in which it was delivered was very expensive and very slow to change and required lots of capital expenditure expenditure. So cloud services came along and offered flexibility and cheapness as well as solutions that actually work so, so far so good.

But once organizations started to use these systems, they realized that they had to comply with regulations. There were all kinds of issues to do with who was responsible for security. And so the cloud comes with this shared model for security, which causes some kinds of difficulties when people don't understand it. If you think that cloud service provider is going to deal with security and compliance, that is true. To some extent, they have a part responsibility, but you also have some responsibility.

So what this led to was that the business or the chief risk officer and the chief compliance officers started to say, well, now we're using the cloud. How can we be sure that we're still compliant because we don't understand the controls. So now you have, as well as the fact that simply using the cloud, didn't actually remove many of your previously existing applications that were running on premises.

It actually meant that, um, uh, some of those systems became more difficult to move because you could not easily prove that if you move them to the cloud, that they would become, uh, compliant and would be the security objectives. And so, uh, that those things together led to this, uh, this problem that now you don't have everything in the cloud and you don't have everything on premises. You have an unholy mixture of the two, which takes us back to where I started.

The, the notion that the beginning of all of this was that the cloud service providers were bringing up, uh, an idea of, uh, uh, a golden future where you a business would no longer have to bother itself with managing the intricacies of delivering it services that all that would be done for them. And they could concentrate on that business. So what we've ended up is is that the cloud is actually extremely useful for some things, and on premises systems have not died, the death that people predicted. So you have both of these things to manage, and that is hybrid it, Right?

So we have an added level of complexity by having infrastructure twice. We have infrastructure on prem and we have infrastructure in the cloud. And the challenge for, for it departments for you've mentioned risk officers, and for understanding risk in general, um, has not doubled, but actually it has. Yeah.

Um, it's to the power of two. So it really, really is multiplied. It has multiplied exactly, um, hybrid. It does solve problems, but it creates its own kind of problems, right?

Yes, that's right. So, so when you look at the, the, the, the causes, there are many reasons why people want to use cloud services for many, uh, many of the things that organizations depend upon today. You have to have an it service some years ago that it service was, uh, a differentiator, but having a CRM system is something every organization has to have having an email system is something every organization has to have.

And so, uh, the, the differentiation that you get by running, those does not, uh, outweigh the cost. On the other hand, many of the things that are really giving you, uh, your business value may be so sensitive and, uh, hold data that is so important that you don't really want to put them at risk by putting them in the cloud. Some of the things that your business depends upon, um, uh, cannot easily be moved to the cloud because they depend upon intricacies of the way that they have been written or the way, or the environment, which they run in, which is not easy to reproduce in the cloud.

And so what you end up with is this multiplicity of security management and governance tools, which is, uh, which is the problem that comes from this diverse, uh, environment. And, uh, so it isn't simply cloud non-cloud.

It is, uh, in a way it is each delivery mechanism brings with it, its own, uh, management systems. So each of the cloud service providers themselves provides their own management tools. And those are different depending upon when you're looking at infrastructure as a service, or whether you're looking at software as a service and, um, uh, different perhaps to what you had on premises and, uh, in, in, uh, so th the, the, the, the single tool that, um, uh, people wanted in the first place doesn't, uh, does not currently exist.

There are nevertheless some, uh, some of the vendors are trying to produce those things, but there isn't anything. There isn't a single game in town, which everybody could say, uh, works for that. So the problems that are to do with, uh, the hybrid environment come from the increased complexity, or that has been being brought along by organizations, moving to the cloud, uh, and the complexity comes from, uh, governance, security and, uh, compliance. Great.

So that's a first starting point towards looking at hybrid it and understanding the benefits and the risks that come with it and the, and the problem of how to do this, right. Um, we will continue that discussion in further episodes.

And we, I think we still have to increase complexity and have to look deeper into the challenges of hybrid it and how hybrid it will change over time. And I expect there are many trends to look at as well, um, for today.

Uh, thank you very much, Mike, for giving that first introduction into, um, hybrid it. And, um, I hope that the audience is looking as much forward to the further episodes to drill deeper into doing things right, and looking at future of the hybrid it for the time being, thank you very much, Mike, for being my guest today. Thank you. You're welcome. See you. Bye. Bye.