Hybrid Cloud is the likely cloud strategy for the majority of our customers’ organisations according to the results of the Brightsolid 2019 State of the Nation survey. This matches the general market trend towards hybrid cloud, with predictions for Enterprise workloads across all clouds growing next year.

As initial adoptions of Hybrid Cloud solutions become business-as-usual the likelihood is that optimisation will be the next hot topic of conversation for larger organisations. Hybrid Cloud optimisation is likely to focus on simplicity and integration in 8 key areas:

Identity Management will be a focus area with need for a seamless user experience that considers geographically dispersed users, accessing tens or even hundreds of applications or tools, located across the gamut of cloud deployment options. Organisations will need a 360-degree view of access across their organisation to ensure the balance between user flexibility and effective privilege and multi factor access control models.

Security Integration – Identity will only be part of a wider focus on optimisation of security. Lack of visibility, training and control over security are inevitable consequences to the decentralisation of security that is already being seen in cloud deployments. A recent security study by FireMon indicates that only 56% of respondents indicated that their traditional ‘network security, security operations or security compliance teams are responsible for cloud security’.  As this decentralisation of responsibility is also coupled with a lack of tools allowing organisations to holistically manage and secure hybrid cloud environments organisations will need a focus on how to efficiently manage their security.

Data integration both in terms of managing portability of data and retaining data governance will be an area ripe for optimisation. Gartner suggests that “The demand for flexible delivery of data integration capability has grown as enterprises increasingly use connected platforms and “things,” and collaborate with external parties, all of which need more connections to data. Many of these activities will result in the creation of shared data sources, which no party exclusively owns, but all must help to manage.”

The diversity of hybrid options from infrastructure model to service models that include IaaS, PaaS and SaaS will challenge organisational best practices. Organisations running ITIL based models will need to optimise their models to take account of cloud. For example;

• Service Strategy will need new demand management approaches that consider the ever-increasing speed of innovation brought with cloud options;
• Service Design elements such as capacity management forever change when the preconception is that cloud means no limits to scalability.
• Service Transition will need new approaches to knowledge management, knowledge is likely to be transient and change rapid.
• Service Operations functions such as incident management will change with the complexity of integrated parts of hybrid cloud.
• Service Management will need new methods of combining Service Management and reporting data into useable management information

Finally, productivity, communications and professional services will also be an area that’s likely to come under scrutiny as hybrid cloud options become more prevalent. The cloud brings innovation which allows business teams to create solutions based on ‘off-the-shelf’ solutions that don’t rely on traditional internal technical teams. It is easy to see a future where multiple teams are using the same communications, or productivity platforms without knowing or using similar professional services expertise to develop or customise their solutions. Organisations will begin to look at consolidating supplier engagements to optimise best value.

Deploying hybrid cloud technology is only the first step for many organisations… the possibilities for optimisation will continue for years to come.