Embrace hybrid IT and become a broker of services

The reason for this is traditional IT operating models have several shortcomings:

• They don’t offer the business agility or fast innovation companies need to stay competitive.
• They’re heavily dependent on capital investments and manual provisioning of applications and other IT services.
• They tie organizations to in-house or leased equipment that’s often not replaced for 5 to 7 years.
• They don’t connect developers’ work with operations processes and workflows, which results in long release cycles, production defects and unplanned outages.

Many companies initially limit their adoption of cloud technologies to only simple infrastructure as a service (IaaS), instead of focusing on what the business really wants: access to multiple IT platforms and applications on demand. While much effort might go into consolidating on a single private or public cloud, organizations may be missing out on the agility and cost savings of a hybrid IT operating model that mixes public and private clouds and enables self-service provisioning andadvanced automation of key processes.

As traditional companies become digital enterprises, IT departments must transform from managers of discrete IT software products and infrastructure into cloud service brokers that manage multiple cloud applications and services. To do this, three things must happen:

• First, line-of-business managers need to become comfortable that they don’t have to go around IT but can rely on the IT department to procure these new cloud services in time frames that meet the company’s needs.
• Second, IT managers must explain to line-of-business managers that the IT department can get maximum leverage from various suppliers by buying IT services for the company across numerous departments. Integrating these services in the organization’s normal internal procurement processes makes it easier for business managers to comply, as it saves them the hassle of expensing departmental credit card spend on cloud services.
• Third, in becoming a cloud service broker, the IT department creates a single console that offers visibility across all the company’s cloud services. By default, each provider — whether Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or another cloud service provider — typically has its own unique service provisioning portal.

Each can use different terminology and use different methods to accomplish common tasks. All of these differences can be a source of confusion, human error and increased training requirements. These disparate sources have to be integrated into a single, unified portal and dashboard that delivers maximum visibility.

The view from the CIO’s desk

We have found that CIOs typically focus on five key business goals:

• Reduce costs
• Improve the customer experience
• Support innovation
• Deliver a high quality of service
• Stay compliant with a wide range of government and industry regulations and policies

To decrease costs, the existing business applications running on legacy infrastructure need to transform and be deployed on a pay-as-you-go cloud solution as often as possible. Along with cost reduction, the CIO should also support a new breed of fast-changing applications that drive benefits to the business.

Following is a real-world example of how the CIO of a very large insurance company describes this ongoing challenge.
Several years ago, one of our clients asked us to support the client’s data centers and IT infrastructure across nine countries. At the time, the client had several requirements defined. The client wanted:

• Scalable infrastructure to meet its growing business
• Global standardization of infrastructure and processes
• Infrastructure costs aligned to revenue
• Robust disaster recovery (DR) capability, tighter integration with applications operations and innovation to bring in new technologies

Not having these capabilities was constraining the client’s ability to grow and stay profitable.

At the outset, our client’s ability to work under a hybrid IT operating model was further hampered by legacy processes, methods and tools, including manual processes for provisioning virtual infrastructure that resulted in inconsistent deployments, requiring frequent remediation before environments were usable. Additionally, agile development patterns (such as DevOps) were not well supported by existing virtualization platforms and tooling.

The solution was to deploy a hybrid IT operating model, which provided a single control plane across our client’s established virtualization platforms and its emerging private and public cloud platforms. The client adopted standard server configurations and transitioned to a true utility compute mind-set that encourages cloud-optimized design patterns and architectures. With these changes, our client could automate virtual server provisioning and management, and also integrate with the company’s enterprise infrastructure services.

By embracing a hybrid IT operating model, our client reduced costs and added consistent quality of service through automated virtual server provisioning and management, integrated with infrastructure services such as storage, DNS, backup, DR, monitoring and antivirus. The client also increased responsiveness and shortened services cycle time through support for intermediated or self-provisioning of Windows 2012/2008 R2, Linux 6.x/5.x, IIS 8.0/7.5 and SQL Server 2014/2012.

Our teams in the field confront and ultimately overcome many of the same IT issues and obstacles over and over again. The chief information officer gets stretched in two directions, looking for ways to take the cost out and get more stable, while at the same time helping to move the organization faster with a new set of applications.

Our recommendation? Take the hassle out of IT services delivery by moving to a hybrid IT operating model where the IT organization ultimately becomes a cloud service broker to the business.

Potential benefits of the hybrid IT operating model

Although it can be challenging to change from a traditional model, a corporate IT department stands to gain significant benefits by transforming to a hybrid IT operating model:

• Rapid time-to-market. In a traditional IT environment, for example, it could take several weeks, even months, to procure a server. In a hybrid IT operating model applying self-service and high levels of automation, the IT staff and business users can spin up the servers and services needed for a business application in a matter of hours, often in less than 15 minutes.
• Increased visibility. By providing a dashboard, working in a hybrid IT operating model can show how many legacy IT and public and private cloud services the organization uses, and whether it achieved savings and provisions IT efficiently. In a recent DXC Technology study, we found that the vast majority of IT departments run a significant number of their servers at 10 percent or less utilization, meaning they are dramatically overprovisioned — or had just forgotten to deprovision these servers when a business application was decommissioned. The hybrid IT operating model dashboard strives to eliminate this kind of waste.
• More efficient and agile DevOps. The ability to easily spin up development environments in the cloud lets developers provide information and services when the company needs them. In addition, the hybrid IT operating model lets developers work in the most cost-effective mode at each stage. For example, for development they may want to run servers in the public cloud for maximum flexibility, but once in production, to run the database part on a private cloud for security reasons. Working with a cloud service broker makes it possible to span multiple clouds, which reduces costs and overall cycle time and increases visibility into all of the company’s cloud activities.
• Improved governance. When all IT activities are managed via a hybrid IT operating model, the IT department can handle security, regulatory compliance and the IT budget. An efficient hybrid IT operating model also makes it unnecessary for the organization to provision shadow IT services, thereby saving costs and eliminating the risk of duplication or paying for services no longer in use.

How to transform to a hybrid IT operating model

To gain the potential benefits of working in a hybrid IT operating model, DXC believes that organizations must develop the following eight capabilities:

1. Become a service broker. Corporate IT departments need to adopt the role of service broker, offering self-service applications to business users so they can provision the services they need, when they need them. They can deliver an array of possible services either on-premises or offsite, including IT infrastructure, middleware, and horizontal and vertical applications.
2. Migrate applications to the cloud. Companies often need assistance in determining which applications can be migrated to the cloud and which must remain in more traditional in-house IT environments. To be successful, the service broker must support both options by enabling continuous improvement across all aspects of service delivery. We find that by doing so our clients can increase spend on business innovations and digital strategies. Many have reduced costs 15 to 40 percent through applications portfolio rationalization and transformation.
3. Support DevOps. An increasing number of business applications are built to use application release automation and artificial intelligence, as well as scripts of their favorite tools to automate management of the full applications life cycle, usually under the umbrella of DevOps.
4. Create an open, flexible and agile system. The service broker needs to support multiple cloud providers and types of cloud options, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), business processes as a service (BPaaS) and traditional in-house IT. The IT department will want to quickly onboard new service providers as business demand dictates, whether they are public or private cloud options.
5. Implement strong governance. When a company provides self-service applications to its business users, it becomes critical to enforce company policies on security, regulatory compliance and financial accountability from within the service broker. By using Service Integration and Management (SIAM), companies can also deploy a governance service framework that includes a defined set of integrator packages and features that can be tailored to a company’s specific requirements.
6. Define landing zones. The service broker must set up a process for defining and enforcing application criteria for security, regulatory compliance, performance, and price for the service providers that have been selected to support the business, enable the current app portfolio, and develop a future strategy. For example, an application could be hosted on an inexpensive cloud service for development purposes but must be deployed on a private cloud as a production app to protect sensitive data.
7. Provide end-to-end visibility. There are a growing number of service providers of various types with different systems to deliver services. A company will need a single place to gain insight into all aspects of its hybrid IT landscape and understand spending trends across providers and across the organization.
8. Ensure continuity. Becoming a service broker is a good first step, but it’s even more important to thrive over time. As it evolves, the service broker working in a hybrid IT operating model will become a key enabler of the business, so top management will want it to be managed, sustained and kept current with the fast-changing IT service provider market. As the service broker evolves, the IT department will become less a purchaser of hardware and software products and more a manager of software-based IT services delivered via the cloud.

Navigate the challenges

Deploying a hybrid IT operating model to become a cloud service broker requires that everyone in the organization supports the new strategy. That’s why it’s crucial for the IT organization to take the lead in developing and implementing an all-encompassing plan that addresses the organizational and mind-set changes needed to get to a successful hybrid IT operating model.

DXC can help you navigate the journey through discovery workshops, demos, proofs of concept and specialized professional services. Some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated companies in financial services, healthcare and other highly regulated industries rely on us to rapidly deliver applications and services that leverage a diverse range of private and public clouds. By moving to a hybrid IT operating model, companies have significantly reduced costs and time-to-market and accelerated the delivery of new applications.

With more than three decades of experience working with numerous business and government organizations, DXC is uniquely qualified to help transform your IT organization into a more cost-effective and flexible hybrid IT operating model.

Contact us to learn more about embracing hybrid IT management.