Hybrid IT: It's a Strategy Not Something You Build

What do you think when you hear Hybrid IT? Does your mind go to a 3^rd kind of not quite private, not quite public cloud that your team needs to build?

Fear not. Hybrid IT is not another type of cloud but rather a strategy for your organization to quickly and cost-effectively deploy technology across multiple platforms. It is a service delivery strategy that places the right workload into the right environment based on business need. That need could be speed of deployment, performance, cost, or security. The essence of hybrid IT can be summarized in the following quote from EMC World last year:

“I want to be able to tell our business units, if you want to stand up services on the private cloud, go ahead. We have the technologies and operating processes to do that. And when it’s time to move appropriate workloads to a public cloud, we have the technologies and operational processes to do that too.” Eric Craig, CTO, NBC Universal

Workloads are not created equal. Some were designed to be in the cloud, some not so much. Hybrid IT doesn’t force fit workloads. For example, standardized service requests deliver maximum efficiency in a private cloud. Other services make sense to be in public environments. Lastly, some were never designed to be in the cloud and simply perform best in a traditional data center environment. A hybrid strategy enables IT professionals to become the service consumption hub of your organization balancing workload performance with platform cost delivering budgetary efficiencies.

Last week Cisco completed its acquisition of CliQr. This acquisition significantly enhances your organizations ability to become that service delivery hub. The combination of Cisco CloudCenter (formerly CliQr CloudCenter) plus Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite allows your organization to achieve a hybrid IT delivery strategy.

Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite enables the creation of a hybrid cloud to deliver applications and their supporting infrastructure across private and public environments. When teamed with Cisco CloudCenter, developers no longer need to be knowledgeable about cloud platform APIs or the nuances of infrastructure orchestration. They simply create once and deploy to any data center, private or public environment. Cisco CloudCenter’s application-centric approach frees up developers with visual application modeling and deployment of blueprints. In essence, they can purely focus on the application — which is just what they want to do.

Businesses are quickly adopting hybrid strategies but they don’t want IT to build anything. What they want is flexibility to quickly and cost-effectively deploy technology-based solutions to the appropriate environments. Cisco’s hybrid IT duo provides the flexibility your organization needs with service broker tools to make strategic placement decisions that are based on performance and cost-efficiency rather than status quo.

Learn more by watching these videos for Cisco CloudCenter and Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite.