Hybrid IT: Helping enterprises increase agility, balance demands

Hybrid IT is emerging as a way for organisations to balance growing demands on their infrastructure, and the increasing need to be agile.

The accelerating pace of business change as well as the increasing importance of IT in traditionally non-IT focused business departments, such as sales and marketing, is creating a number of challenges for IT teams.

According to CenturyLink, these teams are turning more and more to hybrid IT as a solution to such challenges.

Stuart Mills, CenturyLink regional director ANZ, says, "With IT systems underpinning so many elements of a business, IT solutions need to be agile, affordable, and available 100% of the time.

"IT infrastructure needs to deliver new business capabilities faster, often on diminishing budgets.

The drive to maximise IT agility in support of new business needs, while managing costs, is leading to a re-imagining of core infrastructure, according to CenturyLink.

Outsourced services are playing an increasingly integral role in an organisation's entire IT infrastructure footprint, the company says.

"Businesses are adopting a hybrid IT strategy, so they can use a mix of outsourced and in-house IT services.

"This outsourcing of services in a hybrid approach lets IT teams focus on delivering digital innovation and strategic development rather than managing data centers and keeping track of day-to-day IT infrastructure updates," says Mills.

The old IT model of building and operating every element of the IT infrastructure has become too unwieldy and costly for many organisations to deal with, the company says.

When it comes to the data center, many organisations are now opting for an outsourced colocation service, rather than having to internally manage an expensive on-premise data center, CenturyLink has found.

"This is just one of the many IT services organisations now have the option to outsource as a way to maximise agility and minimise costs.

"However, just because outsourcing a particular IT service can save an organisation money while increasing agility, this is not necessarily true for every element of the IT infrastructure," says mills.

Each organisation needs determine its optimal mix of services: there is no one-size-fits-all.

By analysing an organisation's business needs along several dimensions, such as: risk and security; operating expense versus capital expense; and agility, it is possible to determine the right mix of IT services to support those needs, he says.

This is where the true value of a hybrid IT approach can be appreciated. The key is being able to selectively integrate outsourced and in-house IT services to ensure the optimal delivery of business capabilities according to allocated budgets.

"Many companies start with one outsourced service and work their way up to more. It makes sense to partner with a hybrid IT provider that can deliver a broad range of established outsourced IT services from data centers across the globe. This provides the business with the ability to leverage all the benefits of a hybrid IT approach," says Mills.