Making The Case for Hybrid IT on the Path to Business Value
The five forces of consumerization in IT (CoIT) - mobile, social, cloud, Big Data, and video and unified communications - factor into the changing role of IT in the enterprise. As a result, IT budgets continue to drop while technology spending increases. Why? The business is making more and more technology purchasing decisions. Rapidly changing business requirements coupled with aging infrastructure create a groundswell of demand for business-led change. Consequently, today’s CIOs and IT leaders must proactively prepare for an emerging world of Hybrid IT.
Hybrid IT models will emerge as the norm in the next 12 to 24 months. These models deliver not only value-added specialized services, but also commodity services with greater scale and elasticity. While working with fewer providers and standard platforms is normally preferred, Hybrid IT supports more sophisticated relationships with a greater number of service providers. The result: organizations will optimize their deployment approach between cloud-based delivery models (private and public cloud) and traditional on-premises server deployments. As a result, they will achieve faster innovation, better mission-critical success, and cheaper cost of ownership.
As IT adjusts for this new approach, four personas of the next-generation CIO emerge. Each persona supports this shift to a Hybrid IT strategy. Chief Infrastructure Officers rely on the cloud to drive savings. Chief Integration Officers provide the glue in ensuring Hybrid IT success. Chief Intelligence Officers harmonize data to create actionable insight. Chief Innovation Officers utilize the cloud to innovate and ensure mobility.
Constellation recommends five guiding principles in the journey toward Hybrid IT: balanced governance; change management; business level integration; security; and enterprise flexibility and choice. Organizations can expect Hybrid IT models to play a key role in the strategy of innovative businesses that must deliver value, profitability and market differentiation.
This trends report addresses several questions commonly asked by clients and client research panel members. How quickly will I be able to move elements of my technology infrastructure to the cloud to address innovation? What steps will I need to take to leverage the cloud to my advantage? Can I achieve business value through Hybrid IT approaches? How do the four personas of the next generation CIO and Hybrid IT work with each other?
