The cloud gambit: what chess can teach you about a winning hybrid cloud strategy

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Business success in today’s competitive landscape depends upon the strength, effectiveness and agility of your IT. Too many business leaders become convinced that moving to the cloud is the ballgame – migrate your applications to a cloud environment and you’ve won.

Don’t get me wrong. Cloud is a powerful tool and a fantastic platform for a variety of purposes and workloads. That’s why its adoption is so widespread. And it’s only continuing to grow. But it’s not the ballgame. In fact, it’s a lot more like chess than any sport you play with a ball.

The reality of cloud today as well as its foreseeable future is hybrid. Hybrid cloud delivers the agility, flexibility and cost savings of public cloud together with the strength and capabilities of private cloud and traditional, on-prem IT.

Organisations need to be agile and responsive. They have to deliver value quickly and consistently to keep their customers happy. Fall behind in the race for innovative applications, serve up inaccurate data, or leave people staring passively at a screen too long without an answer, and you’ll be losing a growing number of customers. Hybrid cloud solves this problem by extending the reach of business IT closer to the data and reducing latency, while simultaneously preserving the ability to scale securely, maintain compliance and safeguard control over sensitive data. In short, it’s the best of all worlds.

The question I see many enterprises wrestling with is how best to build and manage their hybrid cloud to maximise success… which brings us back to the game of chess.

With chess, as in business, to be successful you need a strategy. Play the game without one and you’ll be treated to a quick exit. And, just as each chess piece has a specific strength and use, so too does each technology or platform in your enterprise’s IT environment. The key to “winning” in both contexts is to get all your pieces working together in a strategic and integrated manner across the full breadth of your landscape. To do that you must understand and leverage the unique capabilities each piece offers so they can work in concert with one another. The challenge is to run applications on the technologies that are best suited to handle those workloads.

So, how do you make that determination? Focus on business value first. What outcome are you trying to drive? What capabilities are you aiming to deliver? Those considerations point the way. Technology decisions should come after that, and should be based on selecting platforms that will give you the most impact with the greatest efficiency.

Now, technically, a cloud architecture is “hybrid” if it combines both public and private cloud elements. Practically, however, enterprises can select technologies to include based on either their private cloud pedigree, or simply their cloud-like capabilities. As long as a technology can be integrated and share data easily with the cloud, it can be part of a hybrid cloud architecture. This allows enterprises to keep “in play” those on-prem technologies that consistently deliver value, especially those with unique strengths, such as your existing datacentre, storage or mainframe, and blend them with newer technology investments to achieve the greatest results.

Take the mainframe for example. For certain workloads – those that are chatty and do a lot of I/O, or require high throughput – or if you need business-critical level of security, the mainframe is hands down the right choice. Today, with an open-first approach, one that fully leverages open APIs, command line interfaces, and other modern open-source technologies, it’s easier than ever to integrate across technologies with mainframe without the need for rewriting or duplicating code. This spares businesses the trouble of moving to a different platform, which could otherwise introduce unnecessary risks.

Ideally, cloud technology should co-exist and align with other successful business and IT strategies, not replace them. After all, enterprise applications are typically multi-platform with mobile, web and cloud front-ends connecting to backend mainframe systems where the heavy lifting takes place. Think of it this way… your cloud for your customers is really every part of your IT that delivers service to them.

How you build your hybrid cloud ultimately comes down to a strategic calculation of which technologies are going to help you drive value to the customer and improve their interaction with you. The elegance of the interface. The speed of the transaction. The ability to tie information together for actionable insights that yield more tailored results. Integrate and co-ordinate those technologies and you’ll be well positioned to beat the competition. Check, and mate!

Broadcom has helped many leading enterprises plan, build and manage successful hybrid clouds. Connect with a Broadcom expert to discuss strategies and technologies for your enterprise today.

Originally published on Business Reporter