| | DECEMBER 20198CIOReviewHYBRID IT -THE NEW REALITYBy Ramesh Munamarty, Group CIO, International SOSHybrid IT is the result of combining internal and external services, usually from a combination of internal and public clouds, to support business outcome. Businesses can leverage Hybrid IT by optimizing the mix of public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises solutions to place applications and workload in the IT environment where it is best suited. According to Fujitsu Hybrid Hive IT Decision Maker Survey, 81 percent of the corporations believe that they will deploy a hybrid IT environment to achieve company objectives.What are the challenges with the current options of hosting?Traditionally, IT used to house its infrastructure on its own premise or co-locate with a provider. Then public cloud became available and a number of companies became excited as it drove a significant reduction in time-to-market for business functions and perceived cost reduction funded by Operating Expense as opposed to Capital Expense.However, although public cloud did drive reduction in time-to-market, pay-as-you-go scalability and provided flexibility to move workloads, public cloud does pose some key concerns and challenges. Privacy, security, and control issues are a major obstacle today. This combined with cloud outages, latency issues, escalating costs, and increased cost per transaction sum up the silos business currently face.According to Forbes Insight of 302 IT Executives, 65 percent have discontinued or scaled back the use of a public cloud service within the past two years.The other model for hosting was private cloud, where the infrastructure was still at the provider's premise but rather than sharing with other tenants, dedicated infrastructure was provided to a client. This is clearly a more expensive option than public cloud that benefited from economics of higher utilization of shared resources. The trade-off for the higher cost was the attractiveness of private cloud is related to promise of better security, the ability to tailor and control the server and the flexibility to burst into public cloud if needed.However, private cloud has its downsides too. Some of the challenges of private clouds are--high implementation expenditure, technological complexities, management tool inefficiencies, and virtualization challenges with scalability issue.What can be done to mitigate the challenges of Public and Private Clouds?Hybrid IT is an approach that offers a middle ground by hosting some IT resources in-house and using cloud-based services for others. It helps keep the balance among the clouds and addresses Ramesh MunamartyIN MY OPINION
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