SolarWinds, the three biggest challenges of hybrid IT

By Kong Yang, SolarWinds Head Geek ™

Cloud computing and the strategic use of hybrid IT to stimulate innovation are bringing changes in organizations of all sizes and formats. Although end users may not be aware of this, you, the IT professional, are probably going through a new era of demand-driven work – an era when your organization is leveraging cloud services and hybrid IT to become more Innovative, economical, agile and interconnected than ever before.

The newly published SolarWinds IT Trend Report for 2017: A portrait of a hybrid IT organization has revealed some of the key challenges that hybrid IT environments present to Brazilian IT professionals. This article explains why these challenges exist and how to overcome them.

Increased infrastructure complexity

According to the survey, 64 percent of IT professionals at large, medium and small companies agree that hybrid IT introduces greater infrastructure complexities into their day-to-day responsibilities. The continuous change of the cloud in terms of volume, speed and variety of services brings the promise of innovation, but also brings new levels of responsibility.

This is transforming the roles and responsibilities of IT professionals in everyday life. The volume and speed of new cloud services and technologies are enabling a variety of options, which in turn brings greater responsibility. For example, you can provision an on-premise solution and deliver email via Exchange ™, or you can consume it as a Microsoft® cloud service via Microsoft Office 365® Business Premium, Google® via G Suite ™, and even the fresh – Announced productivity suite for Amazon office, among others.

Today, the burden of managing all changes and integrating them seamlessly rests with IT professionals. IT is responsible for data in your organizations, from multiple devices with different operating systems, to application stacks, different delivery mechanisms, consumption patterns, and so on. These elements begin to resemble a multi-variable equation of calculation in which services, suppliers, processes, technology, and personnel may change over time. However, regardless of the size or industry of the organization, hybrid IT presents the opportunity to realize the value of what can be categorized as innovation in your revenue-generating applications – in other words, intellectual property.

To address the demand for innovation, while managing the increase in complexity, IT professionals must predict future migration to remain flexible. Hybrid IT deployments take different forms and shapes in different organizations. Every organizational environment is unique. In the future, IT departments should create processes for proof-of-concept and migration that illustrate ROI, or lack thereof, to their business leadership team. This includes an understanding of how to achieve stack-wide visibility with hybrid IT monitoring tools, establishing migration protocols and application quality / reliability testing, and learning about cost-effective models and data planning.

Cloud-based infrastructure performance and control visibility

In addition to addressing the complexity of cloud infrastructure services, there are also visibility and control issues that must be addressed. One surprising finding, however, is that 48% of IT professionals interviewed feel they need the control and visibility they need to succeed in their projects. IT professionals must work in tune with managers to ensure and implement a comprehensive toolset to gain control and visibility across the entire hybrid IT infrastructure.

Without a comprehensive set of tools, it is difficult for the IT professional to maintain control and satisfactorily meet the compliance and governance needs of your organization, as well as delivering the quality of service (QoS) required to meet service level agreements. In other words, the only way to achieve these goals is to have visibility across the entire stack of applications, from infrastructure services that support the application layer to networks that connect an organization’s secret formula to its clients. This applies especially to end-users who are experiencing performance problems on the local or mobile network.

Also, there is often the misconception that visibility in the cloud is only needed once your business reaches a certain size. However, the reality is that if there are infrastructure services in the cloud, any organization – be it a small or medium-sized enterprise or a Global 100 company with a fully integrated DevOps strategy – must be able to ensure centralized visibility of the environments On the spot and in the cloud. Workloads are increasingly distributed between the site and the cloud in different geographic locations. Faced with the exponential pace of changes in business technology, it is essential to have the ability to unleash a single point of truth on all these platforms. The ability to consolidate and correlate time series data to provide more breadth,

Gap of IT Team Skills

The third biggest challenge associated with hybrid IT environments is that 43% of all IT professionals recognize the existence of a skill gap in the industry – aggravating increased infrastructure complexity and lack of visibility. Traditionally, certifications from Cisco®, Oracle®, Microsoft®, or VMware® have proven that you were able to juggle vendor-specific solutions to any problems in those environments. However, in the world of hybrid IT, where volume, speed, and variety prevail, it becomes increasingly difficult to specialize in the various workable solutions available. There lies the skills gap, which will be present wherever you work.

Despite this, there remains a need to deliver solutions anywhere, anytime for the right price. Different providers may offer services of a similar nature but with different names and specifications, and it is up to you to standardize these experiences and put them into practice. For example, if you are working in tiered applications for an e-commerce transactional site, you can either create a fully local multi-tiered project or you can opt for hybrid IT and migrate the application and web services to the cloud while maintaining Customer data in place.

As time goes by and more services and options become available, it will be more important than ever to prepare your work for the cloud. With the continued convergence of traditional silo-based IT functions, focus on cultivating key skill sets that drive you to the cloud, such as hybrid IT monitoring / management tools, distributed application architecture, automation, and data analysis. Inquire in the communities of colleagues to better understand and put into practice more quickly the various variants and technological abstractions, such as software-defined constructs, containers, microservices and serverless architecture. Finally, establish monitoring as a basic IT function, also known as monitoring as a discipline,

summary

The bottom line is that as an IT professional, you need to arm yourself with a new set of skills, tools and resources to succeed as the hybrid IT era continues to evolve. And while cloud challenges still persist in the near future, organizations must develop future integration plans, ensure centralized visibility across all environments, and actively work to help IT professionals bridge the skills gap.

About SolarWinds

SolarWinds delivers advanced and affordable IT management software to customers around the world, from Fortune 500® companies to small businesses, managed service providers (MSPs), government agencies, and educational institutions. We have an exclusive commitment to IT, MSP and DevOps professionals, and we work to eliminate the complexity imposed on our customers by traditional corporate software vendors. Regardless of where IT assets or users are located, SolarWinds delivers products that are easy to find, buy, use, maintain, and scale, and provide the ability to serve key infrastructure areas from physical installations to the cloud . This focus and commitment to excellence in end-to-end management of hybrid IT performance has ensured SolarWinds’ global leader position in both network management software and MSP solutions and is driving similar growth across the board. Range of IT management software. Our solutions are based on a deep connection to our user base, which interacts in our online community, THWACK, to solve problems, share technologies and best practices, and participate directly in our product development process. Learn more at SolarWinds. As well as driving similar growth across the full range of IT management software. Our solutions are based on a deep connection to our user base, which interacts in our online community, THWACK, to solve problems, share technologies and best practices, and participate directly in our product development process. Learn more at SolarWinds. As well as driving similar growth across the full range of IT management software. Our solutions are based on a deep connection to our user base, which interacts in our online community, THWACK, to solve problems, share technologies and best practices, and participate directly in our product development process. Learn more at SolarWinds