So, for many in IT, turns out that hybrid IT was an accident!

Change can happen at any time and oftentimes, completely by accident. We change jobs, we move to a new house, we swap perfectly good cars for the latest model. All around us we see change and for the most part, we are in the middle of it all. As a community, NonStop users are always looking at the HPE product portfolio to see what new product or feature they can leverage to their advantage. Gone are the days where we studied Sort / Merge utilities to see how best to optimize the use of the storage peripherals and the channel to which they were connected – in-channel sort, anyone? Today, we are looking to technology at a macro level in order to have technology work for us and to have a positive impact on our business and yet, we still make mistakes.

In the never ending cycle of centralized versus distributed, we are at the crossroads once again as we consider our options for handling the volume (and velocity) of data headed our way. Industry pundits have been predicting for some time now that a tsunami of data is headed our way and we best change our infrastructure to handle the onslaught of data from a raft of intelligent devices newly deployed on the very edge of our networks. No surprises here – IoT and the IIoT are just ramping up and as major players in industry from GE to John Deer to Monsanto add intelligence to everything they ship. We know data is headed our way and while it may just be a relative trickle for now, that tsunami is rising up and is far from cresting.

We now have become a lot better educated about clouds. One answer to the imminent arrival of massive amounts of data is to ship it off to a cloud somewhere. For now, at least! Another answer is to challenge the usefulness of the data on its way in from the outer limits of our networks – is it truly “digital exhaust” as we have heard or is it in fact “precious stones!” My own take on this is twofold – deploy analytics at the edge but still push raw data to the cloud. Right now, we don’t know what secrets we could unlock from the information buried within the data. When a tsunami finally crashes ashore it washes away everything leaving few structures standing but even so, with the “cleansing” there is always something new revealed, be that a rare antique or a major change to the landscape itself. Where did that stretch of land come from and how was that river formed?

We are also now better educated about hybrid IT. When discussions center on clouds, usually one option that comes up a lot is to contract with an off-premise cloud service provider like Microsoft or Amazon. Of course, the other option is to build-out an on-premise cloud and this is often mandated for security as well as regulatory reasons and there are plenty of Global 1000 companies that have elected to go down this path. Either way, the enterprise so involved with clouds is taking more than a tippy-toe approach to hybrid IT – they are getting themselves well and truly immersed in hybrid IT oftentimes not fully aware of where this will lead.

In a recent post to the NonStop community blog, Real Time View, I referenced a HPE newsroom article, Survey Says: Composability and Continuous Delivery Accelerate Business Initiatives and Deliver a Competitive Advantage. “We were curious to better understand how IT is dealing with this transition, so we commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a survey to evaluate the current state of Hybrid IT,” said HPE blogger, Gary Thome. “While Hybrid IT is the new normal,” Thome noted, “two-thirds of businesses ended up with a hybrid estate by accident – not design.” Now, there are all sorts of ways to accidental IT these days. Sorting out IT following a major merger (or breakup), changing the IT leadership and with it, changing the applications and perhaps more commonplace these days, migrating to open platforms.

Whatever the cause, IT can suddenly wake up to find it has inherited a completely foreign mish-mash of technologies with the directive to get it all working. And now! On the other hand, clouds and embracing clouds shouldn’t be among the accidents IT inherits unless, unhappily, IT is deliberately kept in the dark. And there are plenty of instances where change was not only an accident but a deliberate sidestepping of normal IT oversight. Yes, we can change jobs and homes and cars but when it comes to IT and key infrastructure components, we should never allow ourselves to become accidental proponents. Particularly when it involves NonStop systems – physical or virtual! To read the complete post, check out the Real Time View blog and click on this link to take you to How did that happen – I have hybrid IT?

NonStop users are beginning to acknowledge that they are very much part of the discussions involving clouds and hybrid IT. Where once there was concerns about connecting NonStop systems to the Internet, for instance, where the major concern was security, today security for all sakes and purposes is assumed as a given and now the conversations have turned to how best to support mobile (and online) applications and how to interact with a dazzling array of gateways. Almost everyone I have talked to of late tells me how business units within the enterprise all want to access the data on NonStop. After all, it is oftentimes the first touch point any of their customers have with the enterprise – so, where do they go and what are they looking for? NonStop and the cloud are at a pivot point where the interaction between the two is starting to happen – hybrid IT surprise, surprise! It needs NonStop … and who would have thought that just a few years back.

Richard Buckle
Cofounder and CEO
Pyalla Technologies, LLC