by Eric McVey, CIO – Tier4 Advisors
After reading the white paper from The Aberdeen Group entitled “The Best Of Both Worlds: Using A Hybrid Approach To Boost IT Agility”, authored by Jim Rapoza, Senior Research Analyst & Editorial Director, published in TechTarget, I was intrigued by the following statistics:
- 59% of SMB have security, privacy and compliance in their infrastructure
- 42% of SMB list controlling costs as a main driver behind evaluating cloud-based systems
- SMB are obtaining a 6.3x improved performance in their applications
- SMB utilizing a Hybrid approach to IT solutions are seeing marked (2x) improvement in their ability to quickly increase capacity
The author recorded a great point; “With a hybrid IT approach, small and midsized businesses can leverage the greater control, faster access, and increased security that comes with on-premise, while taking advantage of the increased agility, reduced costs, and better flexibility that the cloud offers.”
The article validated the conversations I have every day with IT Leaders who are trying to make the decision to replace or upgrade their existing infrastructure or migrate to a managed private cloud or even public cloud. The discussion then moved to what applications can be moved to managed private or public. This is where a lot of companies struggle due to the application’s inability to be easily migrated up and down to the cloud from on-prem. Security and Performance is of great concern obviously.
The author suggested that a Hybrid approach was the best of both worlds. Moving certain devops workloads, storage archival and disaster recovery made good use cases for public cloud while legacy applications unable to perform “cloud-like” would live in on-prem or managed private cloud environments. The critical mechanism often forgotten is the management and monitoring of both environments in one pane of glass. Companies should also look at internal processes such as change, incident, configuration and lifecycle management and how these processes would need to function in a Hybrid environment.
Tier 4 has done many of these assessments and would be happy to help your organization work through all the details for an environment that elevates your business to the next level. Let us know how we can help. Contact us and let us know How Tier4 Can Help you with your IT Procurement projects.
Tier4 Blog Edition 7: September 27, 2017