Transcript of a discussion on the growing need for proper rationalizing of which apps, workloads, services and data should go where across a hybrid IT continuum.

1. How Modern Storage Provides Hints
On Optimizing and Best Managing
Hybrid IT and Multi-Cloud Resources
Transcript of a discussion on the growing need for proper rationalizing of which apps,
workloads, services and data should go where across a hybrid IT continuum.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the
transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of
the Analyst podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions,
your host and moderator. Join us as we learn from leading IT industry analysts how to
make the best of a hybrid IT journey to successful digital business transformation.
Our next interview examines the growing need for proper rationalizing of which apps,
workloads, services and data should go where across a hybrid IT continuum. Managing
hybrid IT necessitates not only a choice between public cloud and private cloud, but a
more granular approach to picking and choosing which assets go where based on
performance, costs, compliance, and business agility.
Here to report on how to begin to better assess what IT
variables should be managed and thoughtfully applied to
any cloud model is Mark Peters, Practice Director and
Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).
Welcome, Mark.
Mark Peters: Thank you, Dana. Good to be with you.
Gardner: Now that cloud adoption is gaining steam, it may
be time to step back and assess what works and what
doesn’t. In past IT adoption patterns, we’ve seen a rapid
embrace that sometimes ends with at least a temporary
hangover. Sometimes, it’s complexity or runaway or
unmanaged costs, or even usage patterns that can’t be controlled. Mark, is it too soon to
begin assessing best practices in identifying ways to hedge against any ill effects from
runaway adoption of cloud?
Peters: The short answer, Dana, is no. It’s not that the IT world is that different. It’s just
that we have more and different tools. And that is really what hybrid comes down to --
available tools.
It’s not that those tools themselves demand a new way of doing things. They offer the
opportunity to continue to think about what you want. But if I have one repeated
statement as we go through this, it will be that it’s not about focusing on the tools, it’s
about focusing on what you’re trying to get done. You just happen to have more and
different tools now.
Peters

2. Gardner: We hear sometimes that at as high as board of director levels, they are telling
people to go cloud-first, or just dump IT all together. That strikes me as an overreaction.
If we’re looking at tools and to what they do best, is cloud so good that we can actually
just go cloud-first or cloud-only?
Cloudy cloud adoption?
Peters: Assuming you’re speaking about management by objectives (MBO), doing
cloud or cloud-only because that’s what someone with a C-level title saw on a Microsoft
cloud ad on TV and decided that is right, well -- that clouds everything.
You do see increasingly different people outside of IT becoming involved in the decision.
When I say outside of IT, I mean outside of the operational side of IT.
You get other functions involved in making demands. And because the cloud can be so
easy to consume, you see people just running off and deploying some software-as-a-
service (SaaS) or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) model because it looked easy to do,
and they didn’t want to wait for the internal IT to make the change.
Running away from internal IT and on-premises
IT is not going to be a good idea for most
organizations -- at least for a considerable chunk
of their workloads. All of the research we do
shows that the world is hybrid for as far ahead
as we can see.
Gardner: I certainly agree with that. If it’s all then about a mix of things, how do I
determine the correct mix? And if it’s a correct mix between just a public cloud and
private cloud, how do I then properly adjust to considerations about applications as
opposed to data, as opposed to bringing in microservices and Application Programming
Interfaces (APIs) when they’re the best fit?
How do we begin to rationalize all of this better? Because I think we’ve gotten to the
point where we need to gain some maturity in terms of the consumption of hybrid IT.
Peters: I often talk about what I call the assumption gap. And the assumption gap is
just that moment where we move from one side where it’s okay to have lots of questions
about something, in this case, in IT. And then on the other side of this gap or chasm, to
use a well-worn phrase, is where it’s not okay to ask anything because you’ll see you
don’t know what you’re talking about. And that assumption gap seems to happen
imperceptibly and very fast at some moment.
Learn More About
Hybrid IT Management
Solutions From HPE
All of the research we do shows
that the world is hybrid for as far
ahead as we can see.

3. So, what is hybrid IT? I think we fall into the trap of allowing ourselves to believe that
having some on-premises workloads and applications and some off-premises workloads
and applications is hybrid IT. I do not think it is. It’s using a couple of tools for different
things.
It’s like having a Prius and a big diesel and/or gas F-150 pickup truck in your garage and
saying, “I have two hybrid vehicles.” No, you have one of each, or some of each. Just
because someone has put an application or a backup off into the cloud, “Oh, yeah. Well,
I’m hybrid.” No, you’re not really.
The cloud approach
The cloud is an approach. It’s not a thing per se. It’s another way. As I said earlier, it’s
another tool that you have in the IT arsenal. So how do you start figuring what goes
where?
I don’t think there are simple answers, because it would be just as sensible a question to
say, “Well, what should go on flash or what should go on disk, or what should go on
tape, or what should go on paper?” My point being, such decisions are situational to
individual companies, to the stage of that company’s life, and to the budgets they have.
And they’re not only situational -- they’re also dynamic.
I want to give a couple of examples because I think they will stick with people. Number
one is you take something like email, a pretty popular application; everyone runs email.
In some organizations, that is the crucial application. They cannot run without it.
Probably, what you and I do would fall into that category. But there are other businesses
where it’s far less important than the factory running or the delivery vans getting out on
time. So, they could have different applications that are way more important than email.
When instant messaging (IM) first came out, Yahoo IM text came out, to be precise.
They used to do the maintenance between 9 am and 5 pm because it was just a tool to
chat to your friends with at night. And now you have businesses that rely on that. So,
clearly, the ability to instant message and text between us is now crucial. The stock
exchange in Chicago runs on it. IM is a very important tool.
The answer is not that you or I have the ability to tell any given company, “Well, x
application should go onsite and Y application should go offsite or into a cloud,” because
it will vary between businesses and vary across time.
If something is or becomes mission-critical or high-risk, it is more likely that you’ll want
the feeling of security, I’m picking my words very carefully, of having it … onsite.
But the extent to which full-production apps are
being moved to the cloud is growing every day.
That’s what our research shows us. The quick
answer is you have to figure out what you’re
trying to get done before you figure out what
you’re going to do it with.
Gardner: Before we go into learning more about how organizations can better know
themselves and therefore understand the right mix, let’s learn more about you, Mark. Tell
You have to figure out what
you’re trying to get done before
you figure out what you’re going
to do it with.

4. us about yourself, your organization at ESG. How long have you been an IT industry
analyst?
Peters: I grew up in my working life in the UK and then in Europe, working on the vendor
side of IT. I grew up in storage, and I haven’t really escaped it. These days I run ESG’s
infrastructure practice. The integration and the interoperability between the various
elements of infrastructure have become more important than the individual components.
I stayed on the vendor side for many years working in the UK, then in Europe, and now
in Colorado. I joined ESG 10 years ago.
Lessons learned from storage
Gardner: It’s interesting that you mentioned storage, and the example of whether it
should be flash or spinning media, or tape. It seems to me that maybe we can learn from
what we’ve seen happen in a hybrid environment within storage and extrapolate to how
that pertains to a larger IT hybrid undertaking.
Is there something about the way we’ve had to adjust to different types of storage
-- and do that intelligently with the goals of performance, cost, and the business
objectives in mind? I’ll give you a chance to perhaps go along with my analogy or
shoot it down. Can we learn from what’s happened in storage and apply that to a
larger hybrid IT model?
Peters: The quick answer to your question is, absolutely, we can. Again, the cloud is a
different approach. It is a very beguiling and useful business model, but it’s not a
panacea. I really don’t believe it ever will become a panacea.
Now, that doesn’t mean to say it won’t grow. It is growing. It’s huge. It’s significant. You
look at the recent announcements from the big cloud providers. They are at tens of
billions of dollars in run rates.
But to your point, it should be viewed as part of a hierarchy, or a tiering, of IT. I don’t
want to suggest that cloud sits at the bottom of some hierarchy or tiering. That’s not my
intent. But it is another choice of another tool.
Let’s be very, very clear about this. There isn’t “a” cloud out there. People talk about the
cloud as if it exists as one thing. It does not. Part of the reason hybrid IT is so
challenging is you’re not just choosing between on-prem and the cloud, you’re choosing
between on-prem and many clouds -- and you might want to have a multi-cloud
approach as well. We see that increasingly.
Those various clouds have various attributes; some are better than others in different
things. It is exactly parallel to what you were talking about in terms of which server you
use, what storage you use, what speed you use for your networking. It’s exactly parallel
to the decisions you should make about which cloud and to what extent you deploy to
Learn More About
Hybrid IT Management
Solutions From HPE

5. which cloud. In other words, all the things you said at the beginning: cost, risk,
requirements, and performance.
People get so distracted by bright, shiny objects.
Like they are the answer to everything. What we
should be looking for are not bright, shiny
objects -- but bright, shiny outcomes. That’s all
we should be looking for.
Focus on the outcome that you want, and then you figure out how to get it. You should
not be sitting down IT managers and saying, “How do I get to 50 percent of my data in
the cloud?” I don’t think that’s a sensible approach to business.
Gardner: Lessons learned in how to best utilize a hybrid storage environment,
rationalizing that, bringing in more intelligence, software-defined, making the network
through hyper-convergence more of a consideration than an afterthought -- all these
illustrate where we’re going on a larger scale, or at a higher abstraction.
Going back to the idea that each organization is particular -- their specific business
goals, their specific legacy and history of IT use, their specific way of using applications
and pursuing business processes and fulfilling their obligations. How do you know in
your organization enough to then begin rationalizing the choices? How do you make
business choices and IT choices in conjunction? Have we lost sufficient visibility, given
that there are so many different tools for doing IT?
Get down to specifics
Peters: The answer is yes. If you can’t see it, you don’t know about it. So to some
degree, we are assuming that we don’t know everything that’s going on. But I think
anecdotally what you propose is absolutely true.
I’ve beaten home the point about starting with the outcomes, not the tools that you use
to achieve those outcomes. But how do you know what you’ve even got -- because it’s
become so easy to consume in different ways? A lot of people talk about shadow IT. You
have this sprawl of a different way of doing things. And so, this leads to two
requirements.
Number one is gaining visibility. It’s a challenge with shadow IT because you have to
know what’s in the shadows. You can’t, by definition, see into that, so that’s a tough thing
to do. Even once you find out what’s going on, the second step is how do you gain
control? Control -- not for control’s sake -- only by knowing all the things you were trying
to do and how you’re trying to do them across an organization. And only then can you
hope to optimize them.
Again, it’s an old, old adage. You can’t manage what
you can’t measure. You also can’t improve things
that can’t be managed or measured. And so, number
one, you have to find out what’s in the shadows,
what it is you’re trying to do. And this is assuming
that you know what you are aiming toward.
What we should be looking for
are not bright, shiny objects —
but bright, shiny outcomes.
You can’t manage what you
can’t measure. You also can’t
improve things that can’t be
managed or measured.

6. This is the next battleground for sophisticated IT use and for vendors. It’s not a
battleground for the users. It’s a choice for users -- but a battleground for vendors. They
must find a way to help their customers manage everything, to control everything, and
then to optimize everything. Because just doing the first and finding out what you have --
and finding out that you’re in a mess -- doesn’t help you.
Visibility is not the same as solving. The point is not just finding out what you have – but
of actually being able to do something about it. The level of complexity, the range of
applications that most people are running these days, the extremely high levels of
expectations both in the speed and flexibility and performance, and so on, mean that you
cannot, even with visibility, fix things by hand.
You and I grew up in the era where a lot of things were done on whiteboards and Excel
spreadsheets. That doesn’t cut it anymore. We have to find a way to manage what is
automated. Manual management just will not cut it -- even if you know everything that
you’re doing wrong.
Gardner: Yes, I agree 100 percent that the automation -- in order to deal with the scale
of complexity, the requirements for speed, the fact that you’re going to be dealing with
workloads and IT assets that are off of your premises -- means you’re going to be doing
this programmatically. Therefore, you’re in a better position to use automation.
I’d like to go back again to storage. When I first took a briefing with Nimble Storage,
which is now a part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), I was really impressed with the
degree to which they used intelligence to solve the economic and performance problems
of hybrid storage.
Given the fact that we can apply more intelligence nowadays -- that the cost of gathering
and harnessing data, the speed at which it can be analyzed, the degree to which that
analysis can be shared -- it’s all very fortuitous that just as we need greater visibility and
that we have bigger problems to solve across hybrid IT, we also have some very
powerful analysis tools.
Mark, is what worked for hybrid storage intelligence able to work for a hybrid IT
intelligence? To what degree should we expect more and more, dare I say, artificial
intelligence (AI) and machine learning to be brought to bear on this hybrid IT
management problem?
Intelligent automation a must
Peters: I think it is a very straightforward and good parallel. Storage has become
increasingly sophisticated. I’ve been in and around the storage business now for more
Learn More About
Hybrid IT Management
Solutions From HPE

7. than three decades. The joke has always been, I remember when a megabyte was a lot,
let alone a gigabyte, a terabyte, and an exabyte.
And I’d go for a whole day class, when I was on the sales side of the business, just to
learn something like dual parsing or about cache. It was so exciting 30 years ago. And
yet, these days, it’s a bit like cars. I mean, you and I used to use a choke, or we’d have
to really go and check everything on the car before we went on 100-mile journey. Now,
we press the button and it better work in any temperature and at any speed. Now, we
just demand so much from cars.
To stretch that analogy, I’m mixing cars and storage -- and we’ll make it all come
together with hybrid IT in that it’s better to do things in an automated fashion. There’s
always one person in every crowd I talk to who still believes that a stick shift is more
economic and faster than an automatic transmission. It might be true for one in 1,000
people, and they probably drive cars for a living. But for most people, 99 percent of the
people, 99.9 percent of the time, an automatic transmission will both get you there faster
and be more efficient in doing so. The same became true of storage.
We used to talk about how much storage someone could capacity-plan or manage.
That’s just become old hat now because you don’t talk about it in those terms. Storage
has moved to be -- how do we serve applications? How do we serve up the right place in
the right time, get the data to the right person at the right time at the right price, and so
on?
We don’t just choose what goes where or who gets what, we set the parameters -- and
we then allow the machine to operate in an automated fashion. These days, increasingly,
if you talk to 10 storage companies, 10 of them will talk to you about machine learning
and AI because they know they’ve got to be in that in order to make that execution of
change ever more efficient and ever faster. They’re just dealing with tremendous scale,
and you could not do it even with simple automation that still involves humans.
We have used cars as a social analogy. We
used storage as an IT analogy, and absolutely,
that’s where hybrid IT is going. It will be self-
managing and self-optimizing. Just to make it
crystal clear, it will not be a “recommending
tool,” it will be an “executing tool.” There is no
time to wait for you and me to finish our coffee,
think about it, and realize we have to do
something, because then it’s too late. So, it’s not just about the knowledge and the
visibility. It’s about the execution and the automated change. But, yes, I think your
analogy is a very good one for how the IT world will change.
Gardner: How you execute, optimize and exploit intelligence capabilities can be how
you better compete, even if other things are equal. If everyone is using AWS, and
everyone is using the same services for storage, servers, and development, then how do
you differentiate?
Learn More About
Hybrid IT Management
Solutions From HPE
It will be self-managing and
self-optimizing. It will not be a
“recommending tool,” it will be
an “executing tool.”

8. How you optimize the way in which you gain the visibility, know your own business, and
apply the lessons of optimization, will become a deciding factor in your success, no
matter what business you’re in. The tools that you pick for such visibility, execution,
optimization and intelligence will be the new real differentiators among major
businesses.
So, Mark, where do we look to find those tools? Are they yet in development? Do we
know the ones we should expect? How will organizations know where to look for the
next differentiating tier of technology when it comes to optimizing hybrid IT?
What’s in the mix?
Peters: We’re talking years ahead for us to be in the nirvana that you’re discussing.
I just want to push back slightly on what you said. This would only apply if everyone
were using exactly the same tools and services from AWS, to use your example. The
expectation, assuming we have a hybrid world, is they will have kept some applications
on-premises, or they might be using some specialist, regional or vertical industry cloud.
So, I think that’s another way for differentiation. It’s how to get the balance. So, that’s
one important thing.
And then, back to what you were talking about, where are those tools? How do you
make the right move?
We have to get from here to there. It’s all very well talking about the future. It doesn’t
sound great and perfect, but you have to get there. We do quite a lot of research in ESG.
I will throw just a couple of numbers, which I think help to explain how you might do this.
We already find that the multi-cloud deployment or option is a significant element within
a hybrid IT world. So, asking people about this in the last few months, we found that
about 75 percent of the respondents already have more than one cloud provider, and
about 40 percent have three or more.
You’re getting diversity -- whether by default or design. It really doesn’t matter at this
point. We hope it’s by design. But nonetheless, you’re certainly getting people using
different cloud providers to take advantage of the specific capabilities of each.
This is a real mix. You can’t just plunk down some new magic piece of software, and
everything is okay, because it might not work with what you already have -- the legacy
systems, and the applications you already have. One of the other questions we need to
ask is how does improved management embrace legacy systems?
Some 75 percent of our respondents want hybrid management to be from the
infrastructure up, which means that it’s got to be based on managing their existing
infrastructure, and then extending that management up or out into the cloud. That’s
opposed to starting with some cloud management approach and then extending it back
down to their infrastructure.
People want to enhance what they currently
have so that it can embrace the cloud. It’s
enhancing your choice of tiers so you can
People want to enhance what
they currently have so that it can
embrace the cloud. It’s enhancing
you choice of tiers so you can
embrace change.

9. embrace change. Rather than just deploying something and hoping that all of your
current infrastructure -- not just your physical infrastructure but your applications, too --
can use that, we see a lot of people going to a multi-cloud, hybrid deployment model.
That entirely makes sense. You’re not just going to pick one cloud model and hope that it
will come backward and make everything else work. You start with what you have and
you gradually embrace these alternative tools.
Gardner: We’re creating quite a list of requirements for what we’d like to see develop in
terms of this management, optimization, and automation capability that’s maybe two or
three years out.
Vendors like Microsoft are just now coming out with the ability to manage between their
own hybrid infrastructures, their own cloud offerings like Azure Stack and their public
cloud Azure. We haven’t seen yet any of the cloud providers say, “We’re going to help
you mix and match workloads among and between our competitors.”
Where will we look for that breed of fully inclusive, fully intelligent tools that will allow us
to get to where we want to be in a couple of years? I’ve heard of one from HPE, it’s
called Project New Hybrid IT Stack. I’m thinking that HPE can’t be the only company. We
can’t be the only analysts that are seeing what to me is a market opportunity that you
could drive a truck through. This should be a big problem to solve.
Who’s driving?
Peters: There are many organizations, frankly, for which this would not be a good
commercial decision, because they don’t play in multiple IT areas or they are not
systems providers. That’s why HPE is interested, capable, and focused on doing this.
Many vendor organizations are either focused on the cloud side of the business -- and
there are some very big names -- or on the on-premises side of the business. Embracing
both is something that is not as difficult for them to do, but really not top of their want-to-
do list before they’re absolutely forced to.
From that perspective, the ones that we see doing this fall into two categories. There are
the trendy new startups, and there are some of those around. The problem is, it’s really
tough imagining that particularly large enterprises are going to risk [standardizing on
them]. They probably even will start to try and write it themselves, which is possible –
unlikely, but possible.
Where I think we will get the list for the other side is some of the other big organizations
--- Oracle and IBM spring to mind in terms of being able to embrace both on-premises
and off-premises. But, at the end of the day, the commonality among those that we’ve
mentioned is that they are systems companies. At the end of the day, they win by
delivering the best overall solution and package to their clients, not individual
components within it.
Learn More About
Hybrid IT Management
Solutions From HPE

10. And by individual components, I include
cloud, on-premises, and applications. If
you’re going to look for a successful hybrid IT
deployment tool, you probably have to look at
a hybrid IT vendor. That last part I think is
self-descriptive.
Gardner: Clearly, not a big group. We’re not going to be seeking suppliers for hybrid IT
management from request for proposals (RFPs) from 50 or 60 different companies to
find some solutions.
Peters: Well, you won’t need to. Looking not that many years ahead, there will not be
that many choices when it comes to full IT provisioning.
Gardner: Mark, any thoughts about what IT organizations should be thinking about in
terms of how to become proactive rather than reactive to the hybrid IT environment and
the complexity, and to me the obvious need for better management going forward?
Management ends, not means
Peters: Gaining visibility into not just hybrid IT but the on-premise and the off-premise
and how you manage these things. Those are all parts of the solution, or the answer.
The real thing, and it’s absolutely crucial, is that you don’t start with those bright shiny
objects. You don’t start with, “How can I deploy more cloud? How can I do hybrid IT?”
Those are not good questions to ask. Good questions to ask are, “What do I need to do
as an organization? How do I make my business more successful? How does anything
in IT become a part of answering those questions?”
In other words, drum roll, it’s the thinking about ends, not means.
Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave there. We’ve been exploring growing need for
proper rationalization of which apps, workloads, services and data should go where
across a hybrid IT continuum. And we’ve learned how managing hybrid IT necessitates
making better choices between cloud -- but also thinking about the ends rather than the
means as we get to more granular tools and have even more options for how to
accomplish things.
So, please join me in thanking our guest, Mark Peters, Practice Director and Senior
Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. Thanks so much, Mark.
Peters: My pleasure. Thank you.
Gardner: If our listeners and readers want to follow you and gain more of your excellent
insight, how should they do that?
Peters: The best way is to go to our website, www.esg-global.com. You can find not just
me and all my contact details and materials but those of all my colleagues and the many
areas we cover and study in this wonderful world of IT.
Gardner: Also thank you to our audience for joining us for this Briefings Direct Voice of
the Analyst discussion on how to better manage the hybrid IT journey to digital business
transformation.
All If you’re going to look for a
successful hybrid IT deployment
took, you probably have to look at
a hybrid IT vendor.

11. I’m Dana Gardner, Principle Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing
series of Hewlett Packard Enterprise-sponsored interviews. Follow me on Twitter
@Dana_Gardner and find more hybrid IT-focused podcasts at www.briefingsdirect.com.
Please pass this content on to your IT community, if you found it valuable, and please
come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the
transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Transcript of a discussion on the growing need for proper rationalizing of which apps,
workloads, services and data should go where across a hybrid IT continuum. Copyright
Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2017. All rights reserved.
You may also be interested in:
• How mounting complexity, multi-cloud sprawl, and need for maturity hinder hybrid IT’s
ability to grow and thrive
• Inside story on HPC’s AI role in Bridges 'strategic reasoning' research at CMU
• Philips teams with HPE on ecosystem approach to improve healthcare informatics-driven
outcome
• Inside story: How Ormuco abstracts the concepts of private and public cloud across the
globe
• How Nokia refactors the video delivery business with new time-managed IT financing
models
• IoT capabilities open new doors for Miami telecoms platform provider Identidad IoT
• Inside story on developing the ultimate SDN-enabled hybrid cloud object storage
environment
• How IoT and OT collaborate to usher in the data-driven factory of the future
• DreamWorks Animation crafts its next era of dynamic IT infrastructure