Hybrid Cloud Opportunities: Is IT

Ready?
At Cloud Connect conference, IT leaders warned to avoid creating management tool
silo as they adopt hybrid cloud model.
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Cloud computing poses a challenge, not necessarily to well-staffed, polished and

accomplished IT shops, but to those "who didn't necessarily fully deploy the previous
generation of on-premises network and systems management," said Jeffrey Kaplan,
managing director of Think Strategies, an IT consulting firm.
Kaplan moderated the opening day workshop, "New Tools and Techniques for Managing
Hybrid Cloud," at Cloud Connect, a UBM Tech event in Santa Clara, Calif. The show
started Tuesday and runs through Friday. For struggling IT staffs, hybrid cloud computing
promises to deploy an additional layer of computing atop the complexity it is already
trying to master, Kaplan told about 40 attendees of his half-day workshop.
Spending on external cloud services will take over 14.5% of the IT budget by 2020,
according to an estimate by Research and Innovation Estimates, cited by Kaplan, whether
IT staffs want it to or not. Developers tend to lead the way to the cloud from inside the
enterprise, using credit cards to commission servers from public cloud providers rather
than allowing their projects to be delayed for days waiting for internal IT provisioning.
Gatepoint Research/ScienceLogic asked IT managers whether they needed new tools to
manage cloud computing, either on-premises private clouds or public clouds. Sixty-four
percent said they needed new tools, 30% said they "weren't sure," while only 6% said
new tools were not needed. Kaplan was puzzled by why nearly a third were undecided,
but Gatepoint researchers said the data indicated that these fence-sitting or neutral
answers weren't really neutral at all. When a large group answers "unsure," it means
they're dissatisfied with existing tools but don't know what should take their place, he
said.
[ Want to see one option for building a private cloud that could work with public
clouds? See Nebula One Debuts: OpenStack As Hardware. ]
Kaplan turned to Dave Bartoletti, senior analyst for infrastructure and operations at
Forrester Group, to discuss some steps to bring an IT shop into a position where it's better
able to adopt hybrid cloud -- a combination of private cloud, where users self-provision

and scale out virtual servers as needed and then are charged for their use, and public
cloud, where standard, non-sensitive workloads or overflow demand are sent to
supplement the private cloud.
Bartoletti said interest in public or hybrid cloud computing is widespread, but 38% of
1,058 IT decision makers surveyed by Forrester said they had no formal strategy or plan
for adopting it. That figure, however, is expected to drop to 15% by the end of 2013,
according to the Forrester Forrsights Services survey conducted in the fourth quarter of
2012.
In a Forrester software survey of 2,444 IT software managers at the end of 2012, 50% of
companies said they will be using some form of infrastructure-as-a-service by the end of
2013. That compares to only 14% in 2010, Bartoletti said.
The movement to the cloud is being lead by developers who are going around IT to get
the virtual servers they say they need and can't wait for in their development projects.
Sixteen percent of IT decision makers said in the Forrsights Services survey they saw
business making unsanctioned use of outside cloud resources, but they said that figure
will drop in 2013 to 9%.
"Developers are much more aggressive about cloud than any other part of the
organization. Developers are bringing sensitive data, your core IP, to the cloud. Whether
they're doing it with your permission is another question," warned Bartoletti. He
expressed skepticism about the IT managers' confidence that unsanctioned cloud use
would drop significantly in 2013. "I think that's funny data. I think those are highly
optimistic answers," he said.
As cloud use evolves toward a hybrid combination, IT has the opportunity to take charge
of both sanctioned and unsanctioned use, if it can position itself as delivering what the
business users, and the developers working for them, need.
"Reach out and offer to be the cloud operator for anyone using cloud services," he
advised. "Give developers what they want: a self-brokered service with autonomy from
IT," not a service laced with a series of IT-imposed delays and approvals.
But IT can also impose chargeback, so developers and business users are accountable for
the resources they're using. "You can make sure they're getting the best deal" and manage
their bills for them. But like Alcoholics Anonymous, "you first have to acknowledge that
it's happening," he added.

The longer range goal for IT is to unify the tools used to manage the internal private
cloud and public cloud use. That probably will be done by the holder of a new job title,
the cloud administrator, who may (or may not) rise out of the ranks of virtualization
administrators already in the IT organization. He will learn from the example of public
cloud providers, ration the number of virtual servers offered on-premises and in the
public cloud, and find a way to monitor and manage both from a single management
console.
"You have to be concerned about building another silo of management tools," the bane of
the previous generation of specialized and isolated resource providers, he said.
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