Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016. Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Matt Gerber, CEO of Digital Fortress
2016: The year to address midmarket IT complexity
The year 2015 was the best of times for our mid-market customers. Companies in all sectors and of all sizes began to realize that digital innovation could propel their companies to efficiencies and opportunities in their markets like never before. Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Agile development and software-defined data centers meant less drudgery for IT, and more benefits for the business.
Talk of agility and hybrid infrastructure became the norm. It was also the worst of times. These realizations drove huge collisions between strategic desires and the reality of organizational limitations and legacy system constraints. New workloads in the public cloud needed to be built and managed within the confines of corporate security, governance and compliance, and built quickly by teams of professionals that lacked the skills to do so.
These two worlds needed to collide, but how? We predict that in 2016, companies will get a handle on this complexity and conflict in a positive way. Here’s how it’s going to happen:
1. Midmarket companies embrace hybrid cloud for the right scenarios.
Large enterprise users and companies born in the cloud have proven that the public cloud has many great use cases: test and development, archiving, big data analytics and content delivery. Now, midmarket companies, often the conservative holdouts in corporate America, will see little reason to hold back on adopting public cloud hybrids to enable agility for specific use cases. The ecosystem of third-party service providers and toolsets has matured to the point where risks are manageable and affordable for nearly every scenario, barring highly compliant or sensitive data sets. The midmarket companies who get it know that their stretched IT departments cannot handle every task cost-effectively. They will outsource wherever they can, and rely upon the help of VARs and MSPs to manage the complexity of migrating to the on-demand cloud environment.
2. Midmarket CIOs will deliver a governance wrapper for shadow IT: everybody wins.
The scenario of one of our customers is all too common: a divisional vice president is spending $40,000 a month on running new customer data collection applications in AWS. The CEO and CIO are finally asking if the proper security, governance, and cost controls are in place to manage risk? For the sake of cost alone, CIOs need complete visibility into technology spending across the business. There are also of course, other risks: lack of standards, integration issues, vendor and cloud sprawl, and security and privacy concerns. CIOs don’t need to shut shadow IT down, but they do need to establish processes for integrating those business-unit led initiatives into the corporate IT umbrella. Furthermore, when the CIO extends a friendly hand to line of business managers, it will most likely be returned with a smile. Typically, those business unit heads don’t have the skills, expertise nor time to properly manage cloud applications and services. By monitoring and managing all corporate spending on IT using the same tools and process framework, the CIO can steer a more sensible path toward business innovation and results.
3. Midmarket CMOs, CTOs, CIOs, COOs and CFOs will finally recognize the benefits and imperatives of working together on strategic technology initiatives.
It goes without saying that tight business and IT alignment is table stakes today, given the rapid infiltration of technology across every aspect of the business. Technology is enabling business disruption in many industries; without collaboration between IT and business stakeholders, there’s no hope for competing effectively. The first order of business will be a reorganization of IT, which should have likely happened years ago. There’s no room for departmental silos any longer. Those staffers who can’t take on cross-functional roles, and support the agile development environment, won’t have much of a future. Skill sets will be more fluid and IT departments might be smaller and more decentralized than ever. IT managers who possess solid business communications skills will have the opportunity to take on strategic roles within business functions and units. These changes will enable the business to pursue new markets and initiatives faster, which also involves building and deploying the required supporting IT infrastructure. These partnerships may be slow to develop in more traditional industries; CIOs will need to take on a more visible and proactive role to lead the transition.
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About the Author
Matt Gerber is CEO of Digital Fortress, which helps customers effectively manage the combination of public cloud and customer-owned IT infrastructure. Digital Fortress delivers the tools, people and facilities to make managing Azure, AWS and customer-owned infrastructure easy.
