As Enterprises Face Mounting Hybrid IT Complexity, New Management Solutions Beckon

Transcript of a discussion on how new machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities are solving hybrid IT complexity challenges.

 

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of the Analyst podcast series.

I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator. Join us as we hear from leading IT industry analysts and consultants on how to best make the hybrid IT journey to successful digital business transformation.

Our next interview examines how new machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities are being applied to hybrid IT complexity challenges. We'll explore how mounting complexity and a lack of multi-cloud services management maturity must be solved in order for businesses to grow and thrive as digital enterprises.

Teich

Here to report on how companies and IT leaders are seeking new means to manage an increasingly complex transition to sustainable hybrid IT is Paul Teich, Principal Analyst at TIRIAS Research in Austin, Texas. Welcome, Paul.

Paul Teich: Hi, how are you, Dana?

Gardner: I’m great. You and I have appeared on a number of panels and videos over the years, but it’s nice to have you on my BriefingsDirect podcast. I have been looking forward to this.

Teich: Same here, thanks.

Gardner: Paul, there’s a lot of evidence that businesses are adopting cloud models at a rapid pace. There is also lingering concern about the complexity of managing so many fast-moving parts. We have legacy IT, private cloud, public cloud, software as a service (SaaS) and, of course, multi-cloud. So as someone who tracks technology and its consumption, how much has technology itself been tapped to manage this sprawl, if you will, across hybrid IT?

Teich: So far, not very much, mostly because of the early state of multi-cloud and the hybrid cloud business model. As you know, it takes a while for management technology to catch up with the actual compute technology and storage. So I think we are seeing that management is the tail of the dog, it’s getting wagged by the rest of it, and it just hasn’t caught up yet.

Gardner: Things have been moving so quickly with cloud computing that few organizations have had an opportunity to step back and examine what’s actually going on around them -- never mind properly react to it. We really are playing catch up.

Cloud catch-up

Teich: As we look at the options available, the cloud giants -- the public cloud services -- don’t have much incentive to work together. So you are looking at a market where there will be third parties stepping in to help manage multi-cloud environments, and there’s a lag time between having those services available and having the cloud services available and then seeing the third-party management solution step in.

Gardner: It’s natural to see that a specific cloud environment, whether it’s purely public like AWS or a hybrid like Microsoft Azure and Azure Stack, want to help their customers, but they want to help their customers all get to their solutions first and foremost. It’s a natural thing. We have seen this before in technology.

There are not that many organizations willing to step into the neutral position of being ecumenical, of saying they want to help the customer first, manage it all from the first.

As we look to how this might unfold, it seems to me that the previous models of IT management -- agent-based, single-pane-of-glass, and unfortunately still in some cases spreadsheets and Post-It notes -- have been brought to bear on this. But we might be in a different ball game, Paul, with hybrid IT, that there’s just too many moving parts, too much complexity, and that we might need to look at data-driven approaches. What is your take on that?

 

Learn More About

Hybrid IT Management

Solutions From HPE

Teich: I think that’s exactly correct. One of the jokes in the industry right now is if you want to find your stranded instances in the cloud, cancel your credit card and AWS or Microsoft will be happy to notify you of all of the instances that you are no longer paying for because your credit card expired. It’s hard to keep track of this, because we don’t have adequate tools yet.

When you are an IT manager and you have a lot of folks on public cloud services, you don't have a full picture.

That single pane of glass, looking at a lot of data and information, is soon overloaded. When you are an IT manager, you are at a mid-sized or a large corporation, you have a lot of folks paying out-of-pocket right now, slapping a credit card down on public cloud services, so you don’t have a full picture. Where you do have a picture, there are so many moving parts.

I think we have to get past having a screen full of data, a screen full of information, and to a point where we have insight. And that is going to require a new generation of tools, probably borrowing from some of the machine learning evolution that’s happening now in pattern analytics.

Gardner: The timing in some respects couldn’t be better, right? Just as we are facing this massive problem of complexity of volume and velocity in managing IT across a hybrid environment, we have some of the most powerful and cost-effective means to deal with big data problems just like that.

Life in the infrastructure

Paul, before we go further let’s hear about you and your organization, and tell us, if you would, what a typical day is like in the life of Paul Teich?

Teich: At TIRIAS Research we are boutique industry analysts. By boutique we mean there are three of us -- three principal analysts; we have just added a few senior analysts. We are close to the metal. We live in the infrastructure. We are all former engineers and/or product managers. We are very familiar with deep technology.

My day tends to be first, a lot of reading. We look at a lot of chips, we look at a lot of service-level information, and our job is to, at a very fundamental level, take very complex products and technologies and surface them to business decision-makers, IT decision-makers, folks who are trying to run lines of business (LOB) and make a profit. So we do the heavy lifting on why new technology is important, disruptive, and transformative.

Gardner: Thanks. Let’s go back to this idea of data-driven and analytical values as applied to hybrid IT management and complexity. If we can apply AI and machine learning to solve business problems outside of IT -- in such verticals as retail, pharmaceutical, transportation -- with the same characteristics of data volume, velocity, and variety, why not apply that to IT? Is this a case of the cobbler’s kids having no shoes? You would think that IT would be among the first to do this.

Dig deep, gain insight

Teich: The cloud giants have already implemented systems like this because of necessity. So they have been at the front-end of that big data mantra of volume, velocity -- and all of that.

To successfully train for the new pattern recognition analytics, especially the deep learning stuff, you need a lot of data. You can’t actually train a system usefully without presenting it with a lot of use cases.

The public clouds have this data. They are operating social media services, large retail storefronts, and e-tail, for example. As the public clouds became available to enterprises, the IT management problem ballooned into a big data problem. I don’t think it was a big data problem five or 10 years ago, but it is now.

That’s a big transformation. We haven’t actually internalized what that means operationally when your internal IT department no longer runs all of your IT jobs anymore.

We are generating big data and that means we need big data tools to go analyze it and to get that relevant insight.

That’s the biggest sea change -- we are generating big data in the course of managing our IT infrastructure now, and that means we need big data tools to go analyze it, and to get that relevant insight. It’s too much data flowing by for humans to comprehend in real time.

Gardner: And, of course, we are also talking about islands of such operational data. You might have a lot of data in your legacy operations. You might have tier 1 apps that you are running on older infrastructure, and you are probably happy to do that. It might be very difficult to transition those specific apps into newer operating environments.

You also have multiple SaaS and cloud data repositories and logs. There’s also not only the data within those apps, but there’s the metadata as to how those apps are running in clusters and what they are doing as a whole. It seems to me that not only would you benefit from having a comprehensive data and analytics approach for your IT operations, but you might also have a workflow and process business benefit by being an uber analyst, by being on top of all of these islands of operational data. 

 

Learn More About

Hybrid IT Management

Solutions From HPE

To me, moving toward a comprehensive intelligence and data analysis capability for IT is the gift that keeps giving. You would then be able to also provide insight for an uber approach to processes across your entire organization -- across the supply chains, across partner networks, and back to your customers. Paul, do you also see that there’s an ancillary business benefit to having that data analysis capability, and not ceding it to your cloud providers?

Manage data, improve workflow

Teich: I do. At one end of the spectrum it’s simply what do you need to do to keep the lights on, where is your data, all of it, in the various islands and collections and the data you are sharing with your supply chain as well. Where is the processing that you can apply to that data? Increasingly, I think, we are looking at a world in which the location of the stored data is more important than the processing power.

The management of all the data you have needs to segue into visible workflows.

We have processing power pretty much everywhere now. What’s key is moving data from place to place and setting up the connections to acquire it. It means that the management of all the data you have needs to segue into visible workflows.

Once I know what I have, and I am managing it at a baseline effectively, then I can start to improve my processes. Then I can start to get better workflows, internally as well as across my supply chain. But I think at first it’s simply, “What do I have going on right now?”

As an IT manager, how can I rein in some of these credit card instances, credit card storage on the public clouds, and put that all into the right mix. I have to know what I know first -- then I can start to streamline. Then I can start to control my costs. Does that make sense?

Gardner: Yes, absolutely. And how can you know which people you want to give even more credit to on their credit cards – and let them do more of what they are doing? It might be very innovative, and it might be very cost-effective. There might also be those wasting money, spinning their wheels, repaving cow paths, over and over again.

If you don’t have the ability to make those decisions with insight, without the visibility, and then further analyze it as to how best to go about it – it seems to me a no-brainer.

It also comes at an auspicious time as IT is trying to re-factor its value to the organization. If in fact they are no longer running servers and networks and keeping the trains running on time, they have to start being more in the business of defining what trains should be running and then how to make them the best business engines, if you will.

If IT departments needs to rethink their role and step up their game, then they need to use technologies like advanced hybrid IT management from vendors with a neutral perspective. Then they become the overseers of operations at a fundamentally different level. 

Data revelation, not revolution

IT needs to keep a handle on costs -- so you can understand which jobs are running where and how much more capacity you need.

Teich: I think that’s right. It’s evolutionary stuff. I don’t think it’s revolutionary. I think that in the same way you add servers to a virtual machine farm, as your demand increases, as your baseline demand increases, IT needs to keep a handle on costs -- so you can understand which jobs are running where and how much more capacity you need.

One of the things they are missing with random access to the cloud is bulk purchasing. And so at a very fundamental level, helping your organization manage which clouds you are spending on by aggregating the purchase of storage, aggregating the purchase of compute instances to get just better buying power, doing price arbitrage when you can. To me, those are fundamental qualities of IT going forward in a multi-cloud environment.

They are extensions of where we are today; it just doesn’t seem like it yet. They have always added new servers to increasing internal capacity and this is just the next evolutionary step.

Gardner: It certainly makes sense that you would move as maturity occurs in any business function toward that orchestration, automation and optimization – rather than simply getting the parts in place. What you are describing is that IT is becoming more like a procurement function and less like a building, architecture, or construction function, which is just as powerful.

Not many people can make those hybrid IT procurement decisions without knowing a lot about the technology. Someone with just business acumen can’t walk in and make these decisions. I think this is an opportunity for IT to elevate itself and become even more essential to the businesses.

Teich: The opportunity is a lot like the Sabre airline scheduling system that nearly every airline uses now. That’s a fundamental capability for doing business, and it’s separate from the technology of Sabre. It’s the ability to schedule -- people and airplanes – and it’s a lot like scheduling storage and jobs on compute instances. So I think there will be this step.

But to go back to the technology versus procurement, I think some element of that has always existed in IT in terms of dealing with vendors and doing the volume purchases on one side, but also having some architect know how to compose the hardware and the software infrastructure to serve those applications.

Connect the clouds

We’re simply translating that now into a multi-cloud architecture. How do I connect those pieces? What network capacity do I need to buy? What kind of storage architectures do I need? I don’t think that all goes away. It becomes far more important as you look at, for example, AWS as a very large bag of services. It’s very powerful. You can assemble it in any way you want, but in some respect, that’s like programming in C. You have all the power of assembly language and all the danger of assembly language, because you can walk up in the memory and delete stuff, and so, you have to have architects who know how to build a service that’s robust, that won’t go down, that serves your application most efficiently and all of those things are still hard to do.

So, architecture and purchasing are both still necessary. They don’t go away. I think the important part is that the orchestration part now becomes as important as deploying a service on the side of infrastructure because you’ve got multiple sets of infrastructure.

 

Learn More About

Hybrid IT Management

Solutions From HPE

Gardner: For hybrid IT, it really has to be an enlightened procurement, not just blind procurement. And the people in the trenches that are just buying these services -- whether the developers or operations folks -- they don’t have that oversight, that view of the big picture to make those larger decisions about optimization of purchasing and business processes.

That gets us back to some of our earlier points of, what are the tools, what are the management insights that these individuals need in order to make those decisions? Like with Sabre, where they are optimizing to fill every hotel room or every airplane seat, we’re going to want in hybrid IT to fill every socket, right? We’re going to want all that bare metal and all those virtualization instances to be fully optimized -- whether it’s your cloud or somebody else’s.

It seems to me that there is an algorithmic approach eventually, right? Somebody is going to need to be the keeper of that algorithm as to how this all operates -- but you can’t program that algorithm if you don’t have the uber insights into what’s going on, and what works and what doesn’t.

What’s the next step, Paul, in terms of the technology catching up to the management requirements in this new hybrid IT complex environment?

Teich: People can develop some of that experience on a small scale, but there are so many dimensions to managing a multi-cloud, hybrid IT infrastructure business model. It’s throwing off all of this metadata for performance and efficiency. It’s ripe for machine learning.

We're moving so fast right now that if you are an organization of any size, machine learning has to come into play to help you get better economies of scale.

In a strong sense, we’re moving so fast right now that if you are an organization of any size, machine learning has to come into play to help you get better economies of scale. It’s just going to be looking at a bigger picture, it’s going to be managing more variables, and learning across a lot more data points than a human can possibly comprehend.

We are at this really interesting point in the industry where we are getting deep-learning approaches that are coming online cost effectively; they can help us do that. They have a little while to go before they are fully mature. But IT organizations that learn to take advantage of these systems now are going to have a head start, and they are going to be more efficient than their competitors.

Gardner: At the end of the day, if you’re all using similar cloud services then that differentiation between your company and your competitor is in how well you utilize and optimize those services. If the baseline technologies are becoming commoditized, then optimization -- that algorithm-like approach to smartly moving workloads and data, and providing consumption models that are efficiency-driven -- that’s going to be the difference between a 1 percent margin and a 5 percent margin over time.

The deep-learning difference

Teich: The important part to remember is that these machine-training algorithms are somewhat new, so there are several challenges with deploying them. First is the transparency issue. We don’t quite yet know how a deep-learning model makes specific decisions. We can’t point to one aspect and say that aspect is managing the quality of our AWS services, for example. It’s a black box model.

We can’t yet verify the results of these models. We know they are being efficient and fast but we can’t verify that the model is as efficient as it could possibly be. There is room for improvement over the next few years. As the models get better, they’ll leave less money on the table.

We’re also validating that when you build a machine-learning model that it’s covering all the situations you want it to cover. You need an audit trail for specific sets of decisions, especially with data that is subject to regulatory constraints. You need to know why you made decisions.

So the net is, once you are training a machine-learning model,

Once you are training a machine-learning model, you have to keep retraining it over time. Your model is not going to do the same thing as your competitor's model.

you have to keep retraining it over time. Your model is not going to do the same thing as your competitor's model. There is a lot of room for differentiation, a lot of room for learning. You just have to go into it with your eyes open that, yeah, occasionally things will go sideways. Your model might do something unexpected, and you just have to be prepared for that. We’re still in the early days of machine learning.

Gardner: You raise an interesting point, Paul, because even as the baseline technology services in the multi-cloud era become commoditized, you’re going to have specific, unique, and custom approaches to your own business’ management.

Your hybrid IT optimization is not going to be like that of any other company. I think getting that machine-learning capability attuned to your specific hybrid IT panoply of resources and assets is going to be a gift that keeps giving. Not only will you run your IT better, you will run your business better. You’ll be fleet and agile.

If some risk arises -- whether it’s a cyber security risk, a natural disaster risk, a business risk of unintended or unexpected changes in your supply chain or in your business environment -- you’re going to be in a better position to react. You’re going to have your eyes to the ground, you’re going to be well tuned to your specific global infrastructure, and you’ll be able to make good choices. So I am with you. I think machine learning is essential, and the sooner you get involved with it, the better.

Before we sign off, who are the vendors and some of the technologies that we will look to in order to fill this apparent vacuum on advanced hybrid IT management? It seems to me that traditional IT management vendors would be a likely place to start.

Who’s in?

Teich: They are a likely place to start. All of them are starting to say something about being in a multi-cloud environment, about being in a multi-cloud-vendor environment. They are already finding themselves there with virtualization, and the key is they have recognized that they are in a multi-vendor world.

There are some start-ups, and I can’t name them specifically right now. But a lot of folks are working on this problem of how do I manage hybrid IT: In-house IT, and multi-cloud orchestration, a lot of work going on there. We haven’t seen a lot of it publicly yet, but there is a lot of venture capital being placed.

I think this is the next step, just like PCs came in the office, smartphones came in the office as we move from server farms to the clouds, going from cloud to multi-cloud, it’s attracting a lot of attention. The hard part right now is nailing whom to place your faith in. The name brands that people are buying their internal IT from right now are probably good near-term bets. As the industry gets more mature, we’ll have to see what happens.

 

Learn More About

Hybrid IT Management

Solutions From HPE

Gardner: We did hear a vision described on this from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) back in June at their Discover event in Las Vegas. I’m expecting to hear quite a bit more on something they’ve been calling New Hybrid IT Stack that seems to possess some of the characteristics we’ve been describing, such as broad visibility and management.

So at least one of the long-term IT management vendors is looking in this direction. That’s a place I’m going to be focusing on, wondering what the competitive landscape is going to be, and if HPE is going to be in the leadership position on hybrid IT management.

Teich: Actually, I think HPE is the only company I’ve heard from so far talking at that level. Everybody is voicing some opinion about it, but from what I’ve heard, it does sound like a very interesting approach to the problem.

Microsoft actually constrained their view on Azure Stack to a very small set of problems, and is actively saying, “No, I don’t.” If you’re looking at doing virtual machine migration and taking advantage of multi-cloud for general-purpose solutions, it’s probably not something that you want to do yet. It was very interesting for me then to hear about the HPE Project New Hybrid IT Stack and what HPE is planning to do there.

Gardner: For Microsoft, the more automated and constrained they can make it, the more likely you’d be susceptible or tempted to want to just stay within an Azure and/or Azure Stack environment. So I can appreciate why they would do that.

Before we sign off, one other area I’m going to be keeping my eyes on is around orchestration of containers, Kubernetes, in particular. If you follow orchestration of containers and container usage in multi-cloud environments, that’s going to be a harbinger of how the larger hybrid IT management demands are going to go as well. So a canary in the coal mine, if you will, as to where things could get very interesting very quickly.

The place to be

Teich: Absolutely. And I point out that the Linux Foundation’s CloudNativeCon in early December 2017 looks like the place to be -- with nearly everyone in the server infrastructure community and cloud infrastructure communities signing on. Part of the interest is in basically interchangeable container services. We’ll see that become much more important. So that sleepy little technical show is going to be invaded by “suits,” this year, and we’re paying a lot of attention to it.

Gardner: Yes, I agree. I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We’ve been exploring how mounting complexity and a lack of multi-cloud services management maturity must be solved in order for businesses to grow and thrive as digital enterprises. And we’ve learned how companies and IT leaders are seeking new means to manage an increasingly complex transition to sustainable hybrid IT.

We’ve also talked about how artificial intelligence, and specifically, machine learning, will be an important element to solve some of these issues. And we’ve talked about some of the early days of the larger vendors coming to the market with solutions.

Please join me in thanking our guest, Paul Teich, Principal Analyst at TIRIAS Research in Austin, Texas. Thank you so much, Paul.

Teich: Thanks, Dana. I very much appreciate it.

Gardner: Paul, how can our listeners and readers best follow you to gain more of your excellent insights?

Teich: You can follow us at www.tiriasresearch.com, and also we have a page on Forbes Tech, and you can find us there.

Gardner: A big thank you to our audience as well for joining this BriefingsDirect Voice of the Analyst discussion on how to best manage the hybrid IT journey to digital business transformation.

I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of Hewlett Packard Enterprise-sponsored interviews. Follow me on Twitter at @Dana_Gardner, and find more hybrid IT-focused podcasts at briefingsdirect.com. Thanks again for joining, please pass this on to your IT community if you found it valuable, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Transcript of a discussion on how new machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities are solving hybrid IT complexity challenges. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2017. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

• How mounting complexity, multi-cloud sprawl, and need for maturity hinder hybrid IT's ability to grow and thrive 
• Get Ready for the Post-Cloud World
• Inside story on HPC’s AI role in Bridges 'strategic reasoning' research at CMU
• Philips teams with HPE on ecosystem approach to improve healthcare informatics-driven outcome 
• Inside story: How Ormuco abstracts the concepts of private and public cloud across the globe
• How Nokia refactors the video delivery business with new time-managed IT financing models
• IoT capabilities open new doors for Miami telecoms platform provider Identidad IoT
• Inside story on developing the ultimate SDN-enabled hybrid cloud object storage environment 
• How IoT and OT collaborate to usher in the data-driven factory of the future 
• DreamWorks Animation crafts its next era of dynamic IT infrastructure

How Mounting Complexity, Multi-Cloud Sprawl, and Need for Maturity Confront Hybrid IT’s Ability to Grow and Thrive

Transcript of a discussion on how companies and IT leaders are seeking to manage an increasingly complex transition to sustainable hybrid IT.

 

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of the Analyst podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator. 

Join us now as we hear from leading IT industry analysts and consultants on how to make the hybrid IT journey to successful digital business transformation.

Our next interview examines how the economics and risk management elements of hybrid IT factor into effective cloud adoption and choice. We’ll now explore how mounting complexity and a lack of multi-cloud services management maturity must be solved in order to have businesses grow and thrive as digital enterprises.

Crawford

To report on how companies and IT leaders are managing an increasingly complex transition to sustainable hybrid IT, we are joined by Tim Crawford, CIO Strategic Advisor at AVOA in Los Angeles. Welcome, Tim.

Tim Crawford: Thanks, Dana. Thanks for having me on the program; I’m looking forward to our conversation.

Gardner: You and I have appeared on a number of panels and videos over the years, but it’s great to have you on BriefingsDirect. I appreciate your time.

Crawford: It’s always a pleasure to get an opportunity to chat with you, and now actually getting a chance to talk to your audience as well. I’m happy to share what I can.

Gardner: Tim, there’s a lot of evidence that businesses are adopting cloud models at a rapid pace. But there is also lingering concern about how to best determine the right mix of cloud, what kinds of cloud, and how to mitigate the risks and manage change over time.

As someone who regularly advises chief information officers (CIOs), who or which group is surfacing that is tasked with managing this cloud adoption and its complexity within these businesses? Who will be managing this dynamic complexity?

To IT and beyond

Crawford: For the short-term, I would say everyone. It’s not as simple as it has been in the past where we look to the IT organization as the end-all, be-all for all things technology. As we begin talking about different consumption models -- and cloud is a relatively new consumption model for technology -- it changes the dynamics of it. It’s the combination of changing that consumption model -- but then there’s another factor that comes into this. There is also the consumerization of technology, right? We are “democratizing” technology to the point where everyone can use it, and therefore everyone does use it, and they begin to get more comfortable with technology.

It’s not as it used to be, where we would say, “Okay, I'm not sure how to turn on a computer.” Now, businesses may be more familiar outside of the IT organization with certain technologies. Bringing that full-circle, the answer is that we have to look beyond just IT. Cloud is something that is consumed by IT organizations. It’s consumed by different lines of business, too. It’s consumed even by end-consumers of the products and services. I would say it’s all of the above.
 

Learn More About

Hybrid IT Management

Solutions From HPE

Gardner: The good news is that more and more people are able to -- on their own – innovate, to acquire cloud services, and they can factor those into how they obtain business objectives. But do you expect that we will get to the point where that becomes disjointed? Will the goodness of innovation become something that spins out of control, or becomes a negative over time?

Crawford: To some degree, we’ve already hit that inflection-point where technology is being used in inappropriate ways. A great example of this -- and it’s something that just kind of raises the hair on the back of my neck -- is when I hear that boards of directors of publicly traded companies are giving mandates to their organization to “Go cloud.”

The board should be very business-focused and instead they're dictating specific technology -- whether it’s the right technology or not. That’s really what this comes down to. 

What’s the right use of cloud – in all forms, public, private, software as a service (SaaS). What’s the right combination to use for any given application? 

Another example is folks that try and go all-in on cloud but aren’t necessarily thinking about what’s the right use of cloud – in all forms, public, private, software as a service (SaaS). What’s the right combination to use for any given application? It’s not a one-size-fits-all answer.

We in the enterprise IT space haven't really done enough work to truly understand how best to leverage these new sets of tools. We need to both wrap our head around it but also get in the right frame of mind and thought process around how to take advantage of them in the best way possible.

Another example that I've worked through from an economic standpoint is if you were to do the math, which I have done a number of times with clients -- you do the math to figure out what’s the comparative between the IT you're doing on-premises in your corporate data center with any given application -- versus doing it in a public cloud.

Think differently

If you do the math, taking an application from a corporate data center and moving it to public cloud will cost you four times as much money. Four times as much money to go to cloud! Yet we hear the cloud is a lot cheaper. Why is that?

When you begin to tease apart the pieces, the bottom line is that we get that four-times-as-much number because we’re using the same traditional mindset where we think about cloud as a solution, the delivery mechanism, and a tool. The reality is it’s a different delivery mechanism, and it’s a different kind of tool.

When used appropriately, in some cases, yes, it can be less expensive. The challenge is you have to get yourself out of your traditional thinking and think differently about the how and why of leveraging cloud. And when you do that, then things begin to fall into place and make a lot more sense both organizationally -- from a process standpoint, and from a delivery standpoint -- and also economically.

Gardner: That “appropriate use of cloud” is the key. Of course, that could be a moving target. What’s appropriate today might not be appropriate in a month or a quarter. But before we delve into more … Tim, tell us about your organization. What’s a typical day in the life for Tim Crawford like?

It’s not tech for tech’s sake, rather it’s best to say, “How do we use technology for business advantage?” 

Crawford: I love that question. AVOA stands for that position in which we sit between business and technology. If you think about the intersection of business and technology, of using technology for business advantage, that’s the space we spend our time thinking about. We think about how organizations across a myriad of different industries can leverage technology in a meaningful way. It’s not tech for tech’s sake, and I want to be really clear about that. But rather it’s best to say, “How do we use technology for business advantage?”

We spend a lot of time with large enterprises across the globe working through some of these challenges. It could be as simple as changing traditional mindsets to transformational, or it could be talking about tactical objectives. Most times, though, it’s strategic in nature. We spend quite a bit of time thinking about how to solve these big problems and to change the way that companies function, how they operate.

A day in a life of me could range from, if I'm lucky, being able to stay in my office and be on the phone with clients, working with folks and thinking through some of these big problems. But I do spend a lot of time on the road, on an airplane, getting out in the field, meeting with clients, understanding what people really are contending with.

I spent well over 20 years of my career before I began doing this within the IT organization, inside leading IT organizations. It’s incredibly important for me to stay relevant by being out with these folks and understanding what they're challenged by -- and then, of course, helping them through their challenges.

Any given day is something new and I love that diversity. I love hearing different ideas. I love hearing new ideas. I love people who challenge the way I think.

It’s an opportunity for me personally to learn and to grow, and I wish more of us would do that. So it does vary quite a bit, but I'm grateful that the opportunities that I've had to work with have been just fabulous, and the same goes for the people.

Learn More About

Hybrid IT Management

Solutions From HPE

Gardner: I've always enjoyed my conversations with you, Tim, because you always do challenge me to think a little bit differently -- and I find that very valuable.

Okay, let’s get back to this idea of “appropriate use of cloud.” I wonder if we should also expand that to be “appropriate use of IT and cloud.” So including that notion of hybrid IT, which includes cloud and hybrid cloud and even multi-cloud. And let’s not forget about the legacy IT services.

How do we know if we’re appropriately using cloud in the context of hybrid IT? Are there measurements? Is there a methodology that’s been established yet? Or are we still in the opening innings of how to even measure and gain visibility into how we consume and use cloud in the context of all IT -- to therefore know if we’re doing it appropriately?

The monkey-bread model

Crawford: The first thing we have to do is take a step back to provide the context of that visibility -- or a compass, as I usually refer to these things. You need to provide a compass to help understand where we need to go.

If we look back for a minute, and look at how IT operates -- traditionally, we did everything. We had our own data center, we built all the applications, we ran our own servers, our own storage, we had the network – we did it all. We did it all, because we had to. We, in IT, didn’t really have a reasonable alternative to running our own email systems, our own file storage systems. Those days have changed.

Fast-forward to today. Now, you have to pick apart the pieces and ask, “What is strategic?” When I say, “strategic,” it doesn’t mean critically important. Electrical power is an example. Is that strategic to your business? No. Is it important? Heck, yeah, because without it, we don’t run. But it’s not something where we’re going out and building power plants next to our office buildings just so we can have power, right? We rely on others to do it because there are mature infrastructures, mature solutions for that. The same is true with IT. We have now crossed the point where there are mature solutions at an enterprise level that we can capitalize on, or that we can leverage.

Part of the methodology I use is the monkey bread example. If you're not familiar with monkey bread, it’s kind of a crazy thing where you have these balls of dough. When you bake it, the balls of dough congeal together and meld. What you're essentially doing is using that as representative of, or an analogue to, your IT portfolio of services and applications. You have to pick apart the pieces of those balls of dough and figure out, “Okay. Well, these systems that support email, those could go off to Google or Microsoft 365. And these applications, well, they could go off to this SaaS-based offering. And these other applications, well, they could go off to this platform.”

And then, what you're left with is this really squishy -- but much smaller -- footprint that you have to contend with. That problem in the center is much more specific -- and arguably that’s what differentiates your company from your competition.

Whether you run email [on-premises] or in a cloud, that’s not differentiating to a business. It’s incredibly important, but not differentiating. When you get to that gooey center, that’s the core piece, that’s where you put your resources in, that’s what you focus on.

This example helps you work through determining what’s critical, and -- more importantly -- what’s strategic and differentiating to my business, and what is not. And when you start to pick apart these pieces, it actually is incredibly liberating. At first, it’s a little scary, but once you get the hang of it, you realize how liberating it is. It brings focus to the things that are most critical for your business.

Identify opportunities where cloud makes sense – and where it doesn’t. It definitely is one of the most significant opportunities for most IT organizations today. 

That’s what we have to do more of. When we do that, we identify opportunities where cloud makes sense -- and where it doesn’t. Cloud is not the end-all, be-all for everything. It definitely is one of the most significant opportunities for most IT organizations today.

So it’s important: Understand what is appropriate, how you leverage the right solutions for the right application or service.

Gardner: IT in many organizations is still responsible for everything around technology. And that now includes higher-level strategic undertakings of how all this technology and the businesses come together. It includes how we help our businesses transform to be more agile in new and competitive environments.

So is IT itself going to rise to this challenge, of not doing everything, but instead becoming more of that strategic broker between in IT functions and business outcomes? Or will those decisions get ceded over to another group? Maybe enterprise architects, business architects, business process management (BPM) analysts? Do you think it’s important for IT to both stay in and elevate to the bigger game?

Changing IT roles and responsibilities

Crawford: It’s a great question. For every organization, the answer is going to be different. IT needs to take on a very different role and sensibility. IT needs to look different than how it looks today. Instead of being a technology-centric organization, IT really needs to be a business organization that leverages technology.

The CIO of today and moving forward is not the tech-centric CIO. There are traditional CIOs and transformational CIOs. The transformational CIO is the business leader first who happens to have responsibility for technology. IT, as a whole, needs to follow the same vein.

For example, if you were to go into a traditional IT organization today and ask them what’s the nature of their business, ask them to tell you what they do as an administrator, as a developer, to help you understand how that’s going to impact the company and the business -- unfortunately, most of them would have a really hard time doing that.

The IT organization of the future, will articulate clearly the work they’re doing and how that impacts their customers and their business, and how making different changes and tweaks will impact their business. They will have an intimate knowledge of how their business functions much more than how the technology functions. That’s a very different mindset, that’s the place we have to get to for IT on the whole. IT can’t just be this technology organization that sits in a room, separate from the rest of the company. It has to be integral, absolutely integral to the business.

Gardner: If we recognize that cloud is here to stay -- but that the consumption of it needs to be appropriate, and if we’re at some sort of inflection point, we’re also at the risk of consuming cloud inappropriately. If IT and leadership within IT are elevating themselves, and upping their game to be that strategic player, isn’t IT then in the best position to be managing cloud, hybrid cloud and hybrid IT? What tools and what mechanisms will they need in order to make that possible?

Learn More About

Hybrid IT Management

Solutions From HPE

Crawford: Theoretically, the answer is that they really need to get to that level. We’re not there, on the whole, yet. Many organizations are not prepared to adopt cloud. I don’t want to be a naysayer of IT, but I think in terms of where IT needs to go on the whole, on the sum, we need to move into that position where we can manage the different types of delivery mechanisms -- whether it’s public cloud, SaaS, private cloud, appropriate data centers -- those are all just different levers we can pull depending on the business type.

Businesses change, customers change, demand changes and revenue comes from different places. IT needs to be able to shift gears just as fast and in anticipation of where the company goes. 

As you mentioned earlier, businesses change, customers change, demand changes, and revenue comes from different places. In IT, we need to be able to shift gears just as fast and be prepared to shift those gears in anticipation of where the company goes. That’s a very different mindset. It’s a very different way of thinking, but it also means we have to think of clever ways to bring these tools together so that we’re well-prepared to leverage things like cloud.

The challenge is many folks are still in that classic mindset, which unfortunately holds back companies from being able to take advantage of some of these new technologies and methodologies. But getting there is key.

Gardner: Some boards of directors, as you mentioned, are saying, “Go cloud,” or be cloud-first. People are taking them at that, and so we are facing a sort of cloud sprawl. People are doing micro services and as developers spinning up cloud instances and object storage instances. Sometimes they’ll keep those running into production; sometimes they’ll shut them down. We have line of business (LOB) managers going out and acquiring services like SaaS applications, running them for a while, perhaps making them a part of their standard operating procedures. But, in many organizations, one hand doesn’t really know what the other is doing.

Are we at the inflection point now where it’s simply a matter of measurement? Would we stifle innovation if we required people to at least mention what it is that they’re doing with their credit cards or petty cash when it comes to IT and cloud services? How important is it to understand what’s going on in your organization so that you can begin a journey toward better management of this overall hybrid IT?

Why, oh why, oh why, cloud?

Crawford: It depends on how you approach it. If you’re doing it from an IT command-and-control perspective, where you want to control everything in cloud -- full stop, that’s failure right out of the gate. But if you’re doing it from a position of -- I’m trying to use it as an opportunity to understand why are these folks leveraging cloud, and why are they not coming to IT, and how can I as CIO be better positioned to be able to support them, then great! Go forth and conquer.

The reality is that different parts of the organization are consuming cloud-based services today. I think there’s an opportunity to bring those together where appropriate. But at the end of the day, you have to ask yourself a very important question. It’s a very simple question, but you have to ask it, and it has to do with each of the different ways that you might leverage cloud. Even when you go beyond cloud and talk about just traditional corporate data assets -- especially as you start thinking about Internet of things (IoT) and start thinking about edge computing -- you know that public cloud becomes problematic for some of those things.

The important question you have to ask yourself is, “Why?” A very simple question, but it can have a really complicated answer. Why are you using public cloud? Why are you using three different forms of public cloud? Why are you using private cloud and public cloud together?

Once you begin to ask yourself those questions, and you keep asking yourself that question … it’s like that old adage. Ask yourself why three times and you kind of get to the core as the true reason why. You’ll bring greater clarity as to the reasons, and typically the business reasons, of why you’re actually going down that path. When you start to understand that, it brings clarity to what decisions are smart decisions -- and what decisions maybe you might want to think about doing differently.

Learn More About

Hybrid IT Management

Solutions From HPE

Gardner: Of course, you may begin doing something with cloud for a very good reason. It could be a business reason, a technology reason. You’ll recognize it, you gain value from it -- but then over time you have to step back with maturity and ask, “Am I consuming this in such a way that I’m getting it at the best price-point?” You mentioned a little earlier that sometimes going to public cloud could be four times as expensive.

So even though you may have an organization where you want to foster innovation, you want people to spread their wings, try out proofs of concept, be agile and democratic in terms of their ability to use myriad IT services, at what point do you say, “Okay, we’re doing the business, but we’re not running it like a good business should be run.” How are the economic factors driven into cloud decision-making after you’ve done it for a period of time?

Cloud’s good, but is it good for business?

Crawford: That’s a tough question. You have to look at the services that you’re leveraging and how that ties into business outcomes. If you tie it back to a business outcome, it will provide greater clarity on the sourcing decisions you should make.

For example, if you’re spending $5 to make $6 in a specialty industry, that’s probably not a wise move. But if you’re spending $5 to make $500, okay, that’s a pretty good move, right? There is a trade-off that you have to understand from an economic standpoint. But you have to understand what the true cost is and whether there’s sufficient value. I don’t mean technological value, I mean business value, which is measured in dollars.

If you begin to understand the business value of the actions you take -- how you leverage public cloud versus private cloud versus your corporate data center assets -- and you match that against the strategic decisions of what is differentiating versus what’s not, then you get clarity around these decisions. You can properly leverage different resources and gain them at the price points that make sense. If that gets above a certain amount, well, you know that’s not necessarily the right decision to make.

Economics plays a very significant role -- but let’s not kid ourselves. IT organizations haven’t exactly been the best at economics in the past. We need to be moving forward. And so it’s just one more thing on that overflowing plate that we call demand and requirements for IT, but we have to be prepared for that.

Gardner: There might be one other big item on that plate. We can allow people to pursue business outcomes using any technology that they can get their hands on -- perhaps at any price – and we can then mature that process over time by looking at price, by finding the best options.

But the other item that we need to consider at all times is risk. Sometimes we need to consider whether getting too far into a model like a public cloud, for example, that we can’t get back out of, is part of that risk. Maybe we have to consider that being completely dependent on external cloud networks across a global supply chain, for example, has inherent cyber security risks. Isn’t it up to IT also to help organizations factor some of these risks -- along with compliance, regulation, data sovereignty issues? It’s a big barrel of monkeys.

Before we sign off, as we’re almost out of time, please address for me, Tim, the idea of IT being a risk factor mitigator for a business.

Safety in numbers

Crawford: You bring up a great point, Dana. Risk -- whether it is risk from a cyber security standpoint or it could be data sovereignty issues, as well as regulatory compliance -- the reality is that nobody across the organization truly understands all of these pieces together.

It really is a team effort to bring it all together -- where you have the privacy folks, the information security folks, and the compliance folks -- that can become a united team. 

It really is a team effort to bring it all together -- where you have the privacy folks, the information security folks, and the compliance folks -- that can become a united team. I don’t think IT is the only component of that. I really think this is a team sport. In any organization that I’ve worked with, across the industry it’s a team sport. It’s not just one group.

It’s complicated, and frankly, it’s getting more complicated every single day. When you have these huge breaches that sit on the front page of The Wall Street Journal and other publications, it’s really hard to get clarity around risk when you’re always trying to fight against the fear factor. So that’s another balancing act that these groups are going to have to contend with moving forward. You can’t ignore it. You absolutely shouldn’t. You should get proactive about it, but it is complicated and it is a team sport.

Gardner: Some take-aways for me today are that IT needs to raise its game. Yet again, they need to get more strategic, to develop some of the tools that they’ll need to address issues of sprawl, complexity, cost, and simply gaining visibility into what everyone in the organization is – or isn’t -- doing appropriately with hybrid cloud and hybrid IT.

I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We’ve been exploring how the economics and risk management elements of hybrid IT factor into effective cloud adoption and choice. And we’ve learned how mounting complexity and a lack of multi-cloud services management maturity must be solved in order for businesses to continue to grow -- and for IT organizations to continue to fulfill what could very well be their new charter.

So please join me now in thanking our guest, Tim Crawford, CIO Strategic Advisor at AVOA in Los Angeles. Thank you, Tim.

Crawford: Thanks for having me on the program.

Gardner: Tim, how can our listeners and readers best follow you to gain more of your excellent insights?

Crawford: There are two great ways to do that. One is on Twitter, @tcrawford or my blog at www.avoa.com.

Gardner: Thanks again, that was really great. A big thank you as well to our audience for joining us for this BriefingsDirect Voice of the Analyst discussion on how to best manage the hybrid IT journey to digital business transformation.

I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of Hewlett Packard Enterprise-sponsored interviews. Follow me on Twitter at @Dana_Gardner and find more hybrid IT-focused podcasts at www.briefingsdirect.com. Lastly, please pass this content on to your IT community, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Transcript of a discussion on how companies and IT leaders are seeking to manage an increasingly complex transition to sustainable hybrid IT. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2017. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

• Inside story on HPC’s AI role in Bridges 'strategic reasoning' research at CMU
• Case study: How HCI-powered private clouds accelerate efficient digital transformation
• Philips teams with HPE on ecosystem approach to improve healthcare informatics-driven outcome 
• Inside story: How Ormuco abstracts the concepts of private and public cloud across the globe
• How Nokia refactors the video delivery business with new time-managed IT financing models
• IoT capabilities open new doors for Miami telecoms platform provider Identidad IoT
• Inside story on developing the ultimate SDN-enabled hybrid cloud object storage environment 
• How IoT and OT collaborate to usher in the data-driven factory of the future 
• DreamWorks Animation crafts its next era of dynamic IT infrastructure