One of today’s biggest IT challenges is how to manage complex technology landscapes in a uniform manner. With workloads spread across on-premise installations, hosted services, and multi-cloud environments, businesses experience increasing operational costs that do not match the expected benefits by investing in cloud agility; business critical processes such as security, compliance, and governance are handled in siloes by specialists who are experts in their specific domain but might not turn individual knowledge into organisational frameworks; for the same reason it is impossible to scale workflows, processes and policies and create consistent IT practices.
To put it briefly, businesses are getting so absorbed in running their interdisciplinary IT, that they spend more time and money on maintenance than on harvesting the advantages of cloud and AI.
I might be exaggerating a bit to prove a point, but the tendency is clear. Businesses are drowning in resource demanding IT tasks trying to integrate their different delivery models.
As I see it, there are currently three ways to tackle this growing complexity headache cloud is imposing.
Relying on a single-cloud vendor strategy
The first way to reduce complexity in interdisciplinary IT is to reduce the moving parts and follow a single-cloud vendor strategy. If we focus on the positives first, it is evident that relying on a primary cloud vendor – combined with a limited number of third-party Software-as-a-Service solutions – by default makes it possible to run the daily operation efficiently. Platforms, products and tools are designed to work together and provide a better overview of the technology landscape. A single-cloud vendor strategy also makes it easier and faster to build, manage, and develop integrations to both custom-built applications and third-party applications. And furthermore, by using a single-cloud vendor approach you can focus on building and maintaining one set of internal core competencies on cloud native governance, security, and operations.
However, a single-vendor strategy does not come without risk and does not solve the operational complexity related to managing a hybrid technology landscape. History has shown what can happen to organisations that rely solely on technology from one software provider. You become very dependent on the vendor’s ability to innovate, and you can easily end up paying a high price for standard products because you do not have other options. Fair to say, many of those proprietary lock-in experiences derive from a different technology paradigm where architectural openness and flexibility did not have the same appeal as they do today. But nevertheless, businesses choosing a single-cloud vendor must consider that both from a financial and a functionality perspective, you are in the hands of a hyperscaler, and whether you like it or not, you become subject to that hyperscalers’ strategy to develop their own business. For a lot of companies that is probably not going to be a problem; you just have to factor that in when you do your initial assessment.
Best-of-breed cloud optimisation, management and security tools
The second way to reduce complexity in interdisciplinary IT is by picking optimisation, management, and security tools that can operate across your on-prem and cloud landscape. For example, it is becoming increasingly popular to invest in a FinOps tool that does not look at cost optimisations within each IT silo – as the cloud-native cost management tools – but can cut across the entire technology landscape and create comparable views on the total-cost-of-ownership. Based on the same business benefits, software vendors are also launching tools for handling multidisciplinary security, compliance, and governance issues.
I personally think there is a growing market for such well-defined and soon AI-enabled tools that solve a huge problem in many organisations without committing the business to a full stack of operational technology. You can pick your best-of-breed-tools and manage your IT as you choose. However, you should still look out for the additional cost these tools are imposing into managing your hybrid and multi-cloud landscape.
The vision of a single-pane-of-glass
The third way to reduce complexity is to build an operational layer that embraces all your workloads in an overarching meta-cloud architecture and control tower with functionalities to manage FinOps, security, compliance, governance and so on. Hyperscalers are launching these hybrid and multi-cloud offerings, but we are also seeing new and smaller players in the market popping up. These newcomers – of course – emphasize their technology agnostic approach without lock-in constraints. The question is how mature their solutions are, and if they have enough power and scale to challenge the big players in the market. I am not ready to judge or swing either way at this point; just know that you can choose a strategy that takes different positions on future needs into account.
Going back to my opening argument, businesses must decide on a strategy to reduce complexity, cut operational cost, and secure their workloads. Looking at the future of IT, we will only see an increase in cloud and AI-enabled solutions ready to replace existing technology in your datacenter. Logic says that the more systems you place in different environments, the more imperative it becomes to handle your systems in a uniform manner. Now is the time to choose how.
