Inquiries to pose to your cloud service provider, should you be a business employing hybrid cloud technologies
In today's dynamic IT landscape, support teams are facing a significant challenge: managing both on-premise and cloud applications within a hybrid environment. Sebastian Grady, President of Rimini Street, shares his insights on how support teams can evolve to meet this complexity.
Firstly, comprehensive monitoring and automation are essential. Support teams should deploy monitoring tools that provide real-time visibility across both on-premises and cloud environments. Automating routine IT tasks, such as patching, backups, and resource scaling, not only reduces manual errors but also speeds up response times, ensuring smooth operation and security compliance.
Secondly, leveraging Application Management Services (AMS) expertise is crucial. Given the technical challenges of hybrid environments, support teams can partner with or develop specialized AMS capabilities to handle workload optimization, patch management, licensing, and integration complexity.
Thirdly, adopting flexible and inclusive hybrid team practices is vital. With hybrid IT environments often requiring hybrid teamwork, adopting flexible work schedules, understanding employee needs, and fostering engagement through virtual meetings or in-person events can help maintain a productive, collaborative support team culture.
Fourthly, strengthening security and governance frameworks is paramount. Support teams must integrate security best practices tailored for hybrid landscapes, including identity and access management, real-time threat detection, continuous compliance monitoring, and policy-as-code enforcement.
Fifthly, adopting cloud-native practices with platform engineering is essential. Modernizing applications through refactoring, replatforming, and decoupling application logic via APIs enables greater scalability and flexibility.
Lastly, optimizing resource management and cost control is crucial. Regularly assessing workloads to allocate them appropriately between on-premise and cloud environments, implementing governance policies to control costs, and integrating FinOps practices for cost visibility ensures that support teams help the organization maximize ROI on its hybrid IT assets.
In addition to these technical and operational practices, customers should verify if vendors provide support for customised environments and security patches. They should also consider the vendor's support engineers' experience, location, and time zone. If customers are unable to answer or are concerned about the vendor's response to pointed questions, they should investigate options with a 'Support First' approach and ethos.
Successful IT landscapes are expected to transform into a hybrid IT landscape of core transaction 'systems of record' and best-of-breed 'systems of engagement' applications. Organisations should adopt a 'Support First' culture, evaluating each situation with the user's needs at its core. Cloud computing and subscription-based models are changing how enterprise IT infrastructures are adopted and maintained. Customers are increasingly seeking options that provide better value, more services, and a better service experience at lower cost.
As Grady points out, support teams must evolve significantly in the next five years, requiring a shift in expertise, skills, and mindset. By following these strategies, support teams can successfully adapt and evolve within hybrid IT landscapes incorporating both on-premises and cloud applications.
- To manage the complexity of hybrid IT landscapes effectively, support teams should consider partnering with or developing Application Management Services (AMS) capabilities that specialize in workload optimization, patch management, licensing, and integration issues, as these technical challenges are intrinsic to such environments.
- In today's cloud-centric enterprise IT infrastructures, finances play a crucial role. Optimizing resource management and cost control is imperative, especially when it comes to assessing workload allocation between on-premise and cloud environments, implementing governance policies to control costs, and integrating FinOps practices for cost visibility to ensure the organization maximizes ROI on its hybrid IT assets.
