Analyst Chat #83: Hybrid IT 2 - The Challenges

Welcome to the 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 again Mike Small, and we are continuing our series of episodes around hybrid IT, uh, the security channel challenges and the future of hybrid IT.

Hi, Mike. Good to see you again.

Hi, I'm Matthias. Uh, pleased to be with you again. Great to have you. And we really, we, we, we use the material that you provided in the first of this series of episodes, where you explained what hybrid it is, the combination of on-prem infrastructure plus cloud and all the, um, challenges that come with dealing with more than one infrastructure. And today we want to dig a bit deeper into these aspects. We want to have a look at challenges of hybrid it, and hopefully how to overcome that if possible.

So now that organizations have more or less planned moved towards a hybrid it infrastructure, um, what are the challenges that they face that you see in reality and from your research work? Okay. So as we discussed in the first episode of this, uh, today's hybrid, it consists of it services that are deployed and delivered using different models. Some of them are delivered from the cloud. Some of them are delivered on premises. Some of them are delivered around the edge and, uh, some of them may well be delivered through hosting.

And so these different delivery methods have added to the complexities and the confusion, the days when everything was delivered from a single main frame where, uh, it providing you kept that secure have gone. So the problems that you face are how are you going to govern these services in a way that is consistent? And by governance, what I'm talking about is something that's different from the management is higher level than the management governance is a process of saying, well, here are the objectives that I want from this service or this set of services.

Here are the objectives, and here are the, the rules within which you going to run them. And now it's up to you, the management of these people of these things to, to, to actually run and deliver those services, uh, and I can, uh, then monitor them. So you must give me information to be able to monitor them.

Now, this is something that many, it, people find very hard to get a grip of because the whole training of it, professionals, it security professionals is focused on how to do it, right? So you go through lots of training about how you are going to deliver a service or how you are going to secure a service or how you are going to defend yourself against a cyber attack and that's important, but the governance problem is not actually doing it yourself is how you manage and govern the people that are doing it.

And so the key element of, um, this hybrid it governance approach is to find a way of abstracting yourself to a higher level, so that you can set clear objectives for all of these different things. And you have ways of, um, determining how, uh, how well they are being delivered against those objectives. And so that then leaves you, uh, w th the delivery of those services have the problem of how they are going to deliver the service.

And you have the problem of being able to make sure that they've done it now in a way, um, uh, that is, is, uh, is, is a really interesting, uh, challenge because each of these cloud services is going to have their own sets of tools, their own sets of controls and, um, their own certifications. And so it's your problem of making sure that you understand how all this maps on to what your needs are and, um, how you're then going to, uh, to, uh, deliver, uh, your overall business against these needs.

And, uh, to kind of look at some of the things that are making this even more difficult. Um, if you thought that just having the cloud was, uh, was bad enough, you have the problem that increasingly the bone on the cloud or the modern way of developing applications involves containers.

Now, for those that are a long in the tooth like myself, I can remember us a thing that was called a service oriented architecture, and in a way, the idea of, uh, the container model of developing things is great. It is a service oriented architecture where what you do is you decompose how the whole thing works into a series of simple, um, and predictable services, which each of which is delivered individually, uh, and each of which is easy to understand and easy to secure.

But of course, what you've suddenly done is you've taken one application and this is maybe, uh, spawned into hundreds of services. And each of those services can now be delivered themselves.

So, so you no longer just have cloud non-cloud. You have to say, how are each of the services being delivered? Because some of those services may be being delivered on premises. Some of them may be being delivered in your infrastructure as a service. Some of them may be bought in as a third, uh, uh, from a supplier of a service.

And, um, so what we've not talked about up to now is to find the integration glue for all of this is in fact, the network. And so we've kind of the thing that enabled the cloud in the first place was, uh, was the fact that we could interconnect things with, uh, a highly secure and highly reliable network.

Uh, but that was just simply based on the view that you had a predictable traffic going down, a thick pipe between you and the, uh, the, um, the provider now in fight, you've got all the bits of your application may have to intercommunicate and that adds another degree of problem. So basically you've got an even more complicated world than you, uh, had originally envisaged when you were moving to the cloud, because you've added containers and, and different parts as a service.

And the challenge is how do you integrate all this together with some kind of, um, uh, governance process Understood. So it's important for you to really understand what you add to your infrastructure by adding cloud, by adding containers, by introducing software, as a service being provided by third parties for you, and how to, to deal with the challenges that come with that.

So it's, it's not that easy approach that the promise that the cloud was coming with is real. It's true. We can scale up, we can use infrastructure that is not our own, but managing, but governing. It is really a challenge that needs to be well done. Like everything needs to be well done to be profitable and appro appropriate. That's right.

And, uh, there is also a further challenge that is coming down the, uh, the turnpike as the Americans say, which is the so-called software defined data centers and hyperconvergence where, um, your you're actually trying to reproduce on premises or under your own control. Some of the things that the cloud service providers were doing for you. So all of those things are things we're going to talk about in future episodes. Absolutely looking forward to that, um, evening more increasing the complexity, but nevertheless, this is the reality we have to deal with it. So we have to do this properly.

So again, for today, um, thank you very much, Mike, for giving that insight into the challenges of hybrid it. I know there's lots of research around that you provided an hour colleagues at KuppingerCole provide around securing these infrastructures, but also around governing those infrastructures properly, integrating them in an overall governance approach. And I think that is something that we will talk about in the next episodes as well, how to do things well to manage and to govern these infrastructures.

So again, for the time being, thank you very much, Mike, for being my guest today. Thanks Matthias and welcome for you. Bye-bye