Published on the 20/07/2016 | Written by Beverley Head
By 2018, IDC says 80 per cent of IT organisations will be committed to hybrid cloud architectures by 2018 – but who controls what?…
According to IDC’s report released this month, public cloud services are popular for their promise of speed and agility. In terms of global demand for infrastructure as a service (IaaS), IDC predicts that public IaaS revenues will grow from $US12.6 billion last year to $US43.6 billion in 2020 with a growth rate of over 28 percent over the five years.
On top of that there is continued demand for software as a service (SaaS) from the likes of Salesforce, SAP, NetSuite and Oracle. Gartner has forecast that SaaS demand globally will rise more than 20 percent this year to almost $US38 billion.
In a hybrid world where the CIO plays ringmaster rather than owner, how is the performance of the overall system monitored?
According to Joe Kim, CTO for monitoring specialist SolarWinds, while the cloud offers significant enterprise benefits – it also introduces challenges. For example – ensuring the company is getting what it paid for, and can pinpoint when it isn’t.
The 2016 Australian SolarWinds IT Trends Report, revealed that 92 percent of Australian organisations have already migrated some infrastructure to the cloud, yet 61 percent will likely never transition all services offsite. Kim, who was in Australia this week, told iStart that the reason cloud was so pervasive was that it offered; “Opportunities to reduce costs, increase agility and scalability.”
But he said that the recent global survey found that almost two thirds of organisations quizzed, regardless of location, said they would never move everything to the cloud – rendering them eternally hybrid.
“The cloud is super useful, but hybrid is the reality,” said Kim. That he said posed an “interesting visibility problem.”
The most recent release of SolarWinds’ system includes a facility that allows an organisation to examine the performance of its systems at a granular level, and identify if any issues it is experiencing are in house, associated with the internet connection, or at the public cloud end.
While the system has yet to be installed at any of the company’s local clients, Kim said SolarWinds was using it internally, and during a recent incident, when the company felt it was suffering a Salesforce problem, it was able to identify the problem was actually being caused by a network issue out of Dallas which allowed it to call its service provider and arrange to be rerouted.
Kim said that it was the visibility of the overall hybrid solution that was valuable in being able to determine where the problem actually arose, and hence who needed to be tapped to solve it.
But he acknowledged that in a hybrid environment an IT department could only ever expect to have a degree of control. But “if you’re not armed with that information then it’s hard to have that conversation.”
“Visibility is a good power to have.”
