GUEST BLOG: A hybrid approach to IT for business

By David Delaney, head of Managed Infrastructure Services in Ireland, Fujitsu

For many business leaders and decision makers, the term ‘hybrid IT’ may seem technical and not overly relevant on a day-today basis. However, the reality is that if your business uses IT, hybrid IT is a consideration you should be aware of.

Indeed, according to the latest Hybrid Hive Habits survey of more than 1,000 key IT decision makers, 40% of respondents claim to have a hybrid IT environment currently in place, and a further 51% are open to it.

Cloud adoption is surging as organisations seek the benefits delivered by new technologies such as mobile, social, big data and the internet of things. At the same time CIOs and their departments are increasingly faced with the issue of striking a balance between the many conflicting demands being placed on the IT infrastructure.

How do you ensure that business units have the agility to act and deploy new solutions, increasingly cloud-based, yet ensure governance and compliance are not compromised? How do you nail down data availability 24/7, across geographies and across devices and yet be certain that privacy and security will not be breached? How do you achieve all of this and yet have a prudent IT budget?

Hybrid IT is a means of future-proofing your organisation, and keeping pace with ever-changing business needs

The answer lies in a cleverly architected and seamlessly integrated hybrid IT environment with a governance framework that matches the new pace of business, and the flexibility to adapt and evolve with changing business needs.

By blending the best of cloud powered and on-premise IT, the balance that large organisations seek is the balance that hybrid delivers. Quite simply, it is an approach to IT that enables organisations to manage an IT estate comprising traditional in house elements and multiple external cloud computing services. It delivers the agility and cost competitiveness demanded by the business without compromising on security.

Focusing on security and accessibility, hybrid IT enables organisations to access their IT any time, in any location and on any device. Evolving mobile work practices and the 24-hour global economy means that employees of all levels now need to be able to work flexibly and seamlessly to meet the needs of clients.

GOING GLOBAL

Hybrid IT is a means of future-proofing your organisation, and keeping pace with ever-changing business needs. In particular, the desire to ‘go global’, offering organisations opportunities to scale and grow.

David Delaney

With this desire, companies need to ensure that their IT can meet their needs and those of their clients. At Fujitsu, we have noted that those businesses that have already migrated to the cloud and adopted a hybrid IT model, have gained significant competitive advantage.

With hybrid IT, local expansion that allows for going global is a real possibility

They’ve been given the agility to rapidly deploy new services, improve customer engagement and offer consistent service delivery. For example, 37% of those surveyed by Hybrid Hive agree that increased speed to market is a benefit of a hybrid IT model. With hybrid IT, local expansion that allows for going global is a real possibility.

A major objective of hybrid IT is to increase business and user productivity. Productivity can allow businesses to innovate and stay ahead of their rivals, and the ability to innovate is more important than ever as globalisation and digitalisation make many industries increasingly crowded and competitive.

Hybrid IT allows you to retain appropriate operational and governance control while enhancing business user mobility and customer reach through applications, services and information, which are made available at any time, in any place and on any device.

Hybrid IT is at the heart of Fujitsu’s Workplace Anywhere and Connected Retail services. 45% of Hybrid Hive respondents cite the ability to innovate as a main driver for Hybrid IT adoption.

Hybrid IT keeps you globally networked providing high performance connectivity and end-to-end managed networks, it can free up your organisation to focus fully on business innovation and not on managing IT complexity.

WEIGHING UP THE OPTIONS

By connecting on-premises resources to cloud-based IT, businesses can see huge reductions in overall IT costs. For example, a public cloud may be a more cost-effective service for the computer-intensive task of processing analytics.

For large, global enterprises that are planning to run hundreds of applications on the private cloud and store massive amounts of data, the costs can be significant. A hybrid system allows companies to keep what data they want on their internal IT systems and still benefit from the increased business agility of cloud services.

Photo (main): Andrew Hart