Introducing a hybrid cloud strategy means more environments, from different providers, but deployed in a strategic way that meets the needs of apps and services, and, by extension, the business. But there is a risk that rather than removing the need for legacy skillsets, all CIOs end up with is a need for different cloud skill sets. So a legacy issue, digitised. What then, is the answer? There is still a missing layer – management. Elliott says that by taking a managed cloud route, ‘organisations can work with managed service providers to build dedicated hosting platforms that are bespoke to their operational needs, covering everything from application demands to security and compliance requirements.” With this approach, organisations have a single point of contact – the managed service provider (MSP) – without sacrificing the choice of different environments. As well as simplifying what could be a complicated environment management process, it also means CIOs can get dedicated SLAs and additional support via the MSP, and the need for different skillsets is removed. There is significantly more control on where environments are hosted too – whether in the MSPs’ data centres, a third-party data centre, or even on-premise at a site, depot, or office. Plus, there is the opportunity to integrate further MSP services, whether business continuity or disaster recovery, increased automation and self-service development and even application support service. The latter in particular would free up development teams to focus on user experience innovation, rather than ongoing maintenance, which could be pivotal in the context of squeezed IT resource. Perhaps most importantly, today’s MSPs are fully aligned with as-a-service consumption models. Whereas initial public cloud migrations were stimulated in part by a choice between either CAPEX (for on-premises compute) or OPEX (for cloud compute), nowadays on-premises, managed private clouds can be financed through OPEX models, just as public clouds are. So, a switch to hybrid clouds which incorporate private or on-premise environments alongside public clouds becomes very much a technical exercise, rather than one in which financial flexibility has to be sacrificed.
