Hybrid Cloud For Dummies

Understanding the Challenges of Transforming IT

Increasingly, companies are beginning to understand that their competitive value in the markets they serve is directly related to the way they empower their ecosystem of customers, partners, and suppliers to be a strategic advantage. It’s simply not enough to resort to the traditional techniques of managing these relationships. At the same time, companies are recognizing that their longevity depends on their ability to innovate and offer new products and services that leverage their intellectual property.

Without thinking about the use of IT in a new way, this transition cannot happen. Organizations that are transforming themselves are moving away from thinking about IT as a backroom activity. These companies are putting IT in the forefront of empowering innovation and transformation. What does this mean? In brief, it means leveraging all the IT resources across the organization to create a flexible and scalable platform for innovation and change. This level of change requires a dramatic reinvention of IT. A hybrid cloud strategy that leverages the assets and computing models that exist with a continuum of emerging cloud models is at the heart of this transformation.

Setting the stage for action

To change the concept of computing to a hybrid cloud model, management’s first step is to understand that the value of information technology is based on the ability to integrate and connect with resources both internally and externally. ...