SF August2017 Hybrid

SPECIAL REPORT
The art of the hybrid cloud
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THE ART OF THE HYBRID CLOUD
TABLE OF CONTENTS
03 Hybrid cloud: What it is, why it matters
09 Infographic: Companies are turning to hybrid cloud to save money
11 Hybrid cloud: Which way will the balance tip between public and
private?
14 Bring the clouds together with the hybrid approach

21 Can you really do it all in the cloud? No way, say tech chiefs
25 Hybrid cloud adds fizz for Coke
29 BMCs four-year slog unleashes the benefits of hybrid cloud
31 5 pitfalls to avoid in your hybrid cloud strategy
35 How a hybrid cloud digital transformation saved a 96-year-old
company
39 How Built created a hybrid cloud for construction
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HYBRID CLOUD: WHAT IT IS, WHY

IT MATTERS
BY JAMES SANDERS
For several years, cloud computing
The term hybrid cloud
has been the focus of IT decision
makers and corporate bean was pretty much invented
counters, but the extremely by vendors. It wasnt
security-conscious have been
invented by clients.
hesitant to move their data and
workloads into the cloud. Dave Bartoletti
Now, with the underlying
technology behind cloud services available for deployment inside organizations, a
new model of cloud computing is gaining a foothold in business: the hybrid cloud.
WHAT IS HYBRID CLOUD?

Theres much confusion around what is truly meant by the term hybrid cloud.
Forrester Research principal analyst Dave Bartoletti said that likely has to do
with its origin. The term hybrid cloud was pretty much invented by vendors,
Bartoletti said. It wasnt invented by clients. Carl Brooks, an analyst at 451
Research, agreed that the term hybrid cloud was misleading, noting that there was
a lot of marketing hype behind it.
What customers want to do is simply use multiple clouds, Bartoletti said, thats
very clear. From conversations with clients, he said that Forrester has gathered the
following leading definition: One or more public clouds connected to something
in my data center. That thing could be a private cloud, that thing could just be
traditional data center infrastructure.
With this definition, the hybrid cloud is the combination of one or more public
cloud providers (such as Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform) with
a private cloud platformone thats designed for use by a single organization,
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or private infrastructure. The public cloud and 451 Researchs working definition is slightly
private infrastructure, which operate independently different. According to Brooks, the firm defines
of each other, communicate over an encrypted hybrid cloud as: Two or more disparate cloud
connection, using technology that allows for the computing environments that are used in
portability of data and applications. conjunction to serve a workload or an application
in concert through a single management plane.
The precision of this definition is quite important:
The public and private clouds (or infrastructure) The key here, Brooks said, is the single
in a hybrid cloud arrangement are distinct and management plane. If an organization has its
independent elements. This allows organizations storage on one cloud, and its compute on another,
to store protected or privileged data on a private but its admins have to make the two work together
cloud, while retaining the ability to leverage manually, that isnt necessarily a true hybrid
computational resources from the public cloud to cloud. When it comes down to it, Brooks said,
run applications that rely on this data. This keeps a true hybrid cloud is rare, and only about one
data exposure to a minimum because theyre not in 10 enterprises have it. Many of the others are
storing sensitive data long-term on the public pursuing a simple multi-cloud strategy, or they are
cloud. just managing a bunch of different environments.
image: istock/ Assja
4
THE BENEFITS OF GOING HYBRID

With the hybrid cloud model, IT decision makers have more control over both the private and public
components than using a prepackaged public cloud platform. Or, as Brooks said, you get everything that you
want. This includes increased efficiency and the flexibility to meet disparate needs, Brooks added.
This provides the added benefit of paying for the extra compute time only when these resources are needed.
Accordingly, for businesses that have milestones throughout the year where a much higher than normal amount
of compute time is needed (tax season, perhaps), extending to the public cloud is a cheaper proposition than
building out a private infrastructure that sits idle for most of the year.
It lets you pick the right cloud for the right workload, Bartoletti said. It doesnt artificially limit you.
Building a hybrid cloud with private infrastructure thats directly accessiblein other words, not being pushed
through the public internetgreatly reduces access time and latency in comparison to public cloud services.
Another benefit of this hybrid cloud model is the ability

to have on-premises computational infrastructure that
can support the average workload for your business,
Allowing information to
while retaining the ability to leverage the public cloud for be transported across
failover circumstances in which the workload exceeds the a network that can be
computational power of the private cloud component.
subject to third-party
Building out the private end of a hybrid cloud also allows
interference or tapping is,
for flexibility in server designs. This gives companies the
flexibility to provision rapid and archival storage at a likely to many organizations, an
lower cost. Combined with the announcement of a host unnecessary and reckless
of new SSDs and helium-filled drives, data storage can be
security risk.
achieved without the use of backup tapes.
WHERE HYBRID DOESNT WORK

Although hybrid cloud provides a variety of advantages over the public cloud alone, it still suffers from the
same privacy and security issues that plague the popular perception of public cloud platform providers.
Allowing information to be transported across a network that can be subject to third-party interference or
tapping is, to many organizations, an unnecessary and reckless security risk.
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In addition, hybrid cloudas well as public cloudis a poor fit for circumstances in which data transport on
both ends of the cloud is a mission-critical operation that is sensitive to the delay from transporting data across
a network and the latency in ping times. For example, Tatsuya Kimura, the head of international affairs at the
Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), has questioned the ability to offload weather prediction data to the cloud.
Currently, the JMA supercomputer is an 847-teraflop system designed by Hitachi. This supercomputer helps
the meteorologists determine whether a tsunami warning should be issued following an earthquake. Its also
used to predict earthquakes in the Tokai region, where the tectonic movement is particularly well understood.
As these predictions are intensely time-critical, attempting to offload this computational workload to the cloud
is not feasible.
Then theres the issue of money. Organizations that have a thin IT budget probably cant afford a rollout of
a hybrid cloud solution. The upfront cost of the servers on the private end of the spectrum isas one might
expect for racks of server hardwarea substantial one, and the needs of smaller businesses likely to have small
IT budgets can be served adequately using the services of a public cloud provider.
Another issue is the humongous complexity brought about by the hybrid cloud, Brooks said. Customers
absolutely need to live and breath, and sink or swim in this automated world, Brooks said. You also need the
talent and the skills to be able to understand the different environments and be able to marry them together.
If admins arent on the same page, and teams arent unified in their rollout, companies could also end up
creating more silos, Bartoletti said. For example, companies could end up with one team managing AWS
products, one managing Azure, one managing Google Cloudcreating new levels of complexity.
image: istock/Alfredo Allais
6
WHO USES HYBRID CLOUD?

The industries that are moving to hybrid are the ones Assembling a private
that are already inclined toward cloud-native, Brooks
said, such as media and finance.
cloud to handle a standard
workload, with burst
Hybrid clouds are frequently deployed in the
financial sector, particularly when proximity is compute offloaded to the
important and physical space is at a premiumsuch public cloud, can be a
as on, or adjacent to, a trading floor. Pushing trade
long-term, budget-friendly
orders through the private cloud infrastructure and
running analytics on trades from the public cloud arrangement.
infrastructure greatly decreases the amount of
physical space needed for the latency-sensitive task of making trade orders. This is
crucial for data security, as well. Threshold-defined trading algorithms are the entire
business of many investment firms. Trusting this data to a public cloud provider is,
to most firms, an unnecessary risk that could expose the entire underpinnings of
their business.
Assembling a private cloud to handle a standard workload, with burst compute

offloaded to the public cloud, can be a long-term, budget-friendly arrangement.
Hybrid cloud technology is also widely used in the healthcare industry, as the need
to relay data between healthcare providers and insurance companies for hundreds
of thousands of patients is a daunting task. Compliance with HIPAA (the Health
Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) in this regard is a regulatory hurdle,
since compartmentalizing information to comply with HIPAA over not disclosing
protected health information requires extensive permissions settings.
For similar reasons, law firms utilize hybrid cloud infrastructures with private
elements, often as encrypted offsite data stores, to safeguard against the potential for
loss due to theft, hardware failure, or a natural disaster such as a hurricane destroying
the original documentation or evidence.
Retail sales is another industry that makes use of hybrid cloud services. Transporting
sales information, and the analytics derived from that data, is a computationally
intensive task.
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CONCLUSION
Hybrid cloud adoption can be an effective strategy for a wide variety of businesses that have a tighter focus on
security or unique physical presence demands. Although there is seemingly less risk in a hybrid cloud model,
allowing access from a public cloud has the potential of being insecure, or being the conduit through which
data can be harvested. This, however, is true of almost any public network communication.
And while the upfront cost of server hardware for the private component of the hybrid cloud is high, the
control that IT departments can wield over hardware selection and system design for the private component
offers an invaluable way of properly tailoring resources to the needs of the organization. Assembling a private
cloud to handle a standard workload, with burst compute offloaded to the public cloud, can be a long-term
budget-friendly arrangement.
Ultimately, hybrid cloud allows organizations to leverage the capabilities of public cloud platform providers
without offloading the entirety of their data to a third-party data center. This provides a great deal of flexibility
in computing tasks, while keeping the most vital components within the company firewall.
8
INFOGRAPHIC: COMPANIES ARE

TURNING TO HYBRID CLOUD TO
SAVE MONEY
BY AMY TALBOTT
Ideally, a hybrid cloud deployment
combines the stability and reliability
of a private cloud with the on-demand
capabilities of the public cloud.
Companies are increasingly embracing
hybrid cloud as a strategy on its own, or
as a stop on the way to an entirely public
cloud model.
When ZDNets sister site Tech Pro

Research surveyed IT professionals on
hybrid cloud in 2016, the majority of
respondents said they were familiar with
the concept, and just over a third said
their company had already implemented
a hybrid cloud model. Respondents to a
2017 update of that survey echoed the
responses from the 2016 group; however,
this batch of respondents indicated that
more companies are currently evaluating
the hybrid cloud option.
A big reason behind moving to a hybrid

cloud model is cost. As TechRepublics
James Sanders pointed out in his guide
IMAGE: ERIK UNDERWOOD/TECHREPUBLIC
to the hybrid cloud, For industries with
seasonal or variable workloads, assembling a private cloud to handle normal workloads while relying on public
cloud providers to handle burst workloads can be a budget-friendly IT strategy.
9
When asked why their companies chose a hybrid cloud model, two of the top three survey responses chosen
pertained to budgeting.
Our infographic contains some key results from the 2017 hybrid cloud survey. For more results about topics
like cloud vendor selection, the future of cloud systems, and challenges of moving to a hybrid cloud model,
plus how those compare to previous survey results, check out the full report: Hybrid cloud 2017: Deployment,
drivers, strategies, and value (Tech Pro Research membership required.)
10
HYBRID CLOUD: WHICH WAY WILL

THE BALANCE TIP BETWEEN PUBLIC
AND PRIVATE?
BY LARRY DIGNAN
You cant talk to any technology vendor that touches a datacenter without mentioning the three flavors of
cloud computing: private, hybrid and public. Meanwhile, enterprise customers are working to integrate the three
styles of cloud computing.
Heres the hurdle: Determining whats the proper mix today, and figuring out how the flavors will split up in the
future.
Today, its all about the hybrid cloud. Enterprises are using public cloud services, but also have a ton invested
in their current infrastructure. This infrastructure wont simply be dumped. The public cloud crowd would like
you to believe that everything will go their way, but its not reality.
SOURCE: TECH PRO RESEARCH
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Why?
Depreciation. Simply chucking infrastructure you can write off doesnt make sense.
Regulation. Some companies need their own facilities for regulatory purposes.
Culture. It will take time and a lot of boldness that Corporate America lacks to be 100 percent public
cloud.
Time. The hybrid cloud may be around for decades.
All of that said, there are a few tweaks to the cloud definitions that should be added.
Private cloud, more often than not, is pitched by a hardware vendor selling you a server. Private cloud
revolves around the idea that an enterprise has to deliver a secure and distinct service that only it can
control. To me, private cloud is basically a virtualized datacenter maybe with a self-service twist to
provision compute resources. Private cloud as a term is dying.
Hybrid cloud is one where you run your own infrastructure and then connect it with public cloud
resources for bursting, dev projects and, increasingly, mission-critical apps. Hybrid cloud is the reality
today, and also tomorrow in some fashion.
Public cloud is your standard infrastructure-as-a-service approach where you tap into Amazon Web
Services, Google, IBMs SoftLayer, Microsoft Azure or other on-demand compute resources from HP,
Oracle and Rackspace. Think of it as a utility approach where you pay for what you use.
Now you can waste your time arguing about cloud definitions and what model serves you best, but your time
is better spent trying to gauge where the IT market will be going. Clearly, enterprises will have hybrid models
for the foreseeable future. But you need to assess what hybrid will mean for your organization. Consider the
following:
Today, hybrid at your company probably means you own 90 percent of the infrastructure with 10
percent of computing power being pulled from the public cloud. What does that percentage look like in
five years time?
If that percentage tips more to 50-50 between infrastructure you run and public cloud services, then you
need to ask why youre buying servers today.
What do the long-term cost models look like for public versus private cloud?
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How equipped are you to run your own infrastructure? Is that chore something you want to do?
Will your chief financial officer favor capital spending (datacenter investment) or operating expenses
(public cloud)?
Can you run your own cloud service in a way that a) doesnt lock you in, and b) doesnt impede your
ability to be nimble?
All of those factorsand Ive probably omitted a dozen more play into what your ultimate hybrid mix
will look like. On one end of the spectrum there will be 100 percent cloud enterprisesBoxs corporate
applications for instance balanced out by companies that insist on avoiding the public cloud. The reality will
be somewhere in the middle, and whether an enterprise is 60 percent private cloud and 40 percent public or
50-50 or 30-70 will largely depend on company-specific issues.
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BRING THE CLOUDS TOGETHER WITH

THE HYBRID APPROACH
image: istock/ Matt Leung
BY DREW TURNEY
A recent survey predicts that growing proportions of IT budget will migrate from on-premise capabilities to
off-premise services like hosted IT and public cloud. While this seems like an inevitable progression, it will be
gradual, and hybrid cloud is the enabling bridge between the two service deployment models.
Many enterprises have massive capital investments in their on-premise technology, and often will have budgeted
for two or three years of depreciation costs that will beef up their profits. So despite the allure of public cloud,
enterpises will sweat their IT assets until depreciation is no longer a P&L benefit.
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Step forward hybrid cloud. With the opportunity There are as many
to get higher utilisation from on-premise tech
assets, and the flexibility to exploit cost and agility
hybrid cloud use cases
benefits from public cloud, hybrid will become a as there are users
well-trodden path toward the next level of enter- it can include any
prise tech services.
number of infrastructure
Commissioned by Microsoft and carried out by
builds spread across
451 Research, the Hosting and Cloud Study 2014
polled over 2,000 companies about their cloud public cloud, private
strategy and spending. Today, 41 percent of the IT cloud, colocation, and
budgets of those who responded were dedicated
on-premise servers.
to data centres or sites they operate themselves,
with 59 percent going to outsourced services,
heights of US$79.12bn in 2018. Key market
co-location, software as a service or platform as a
drivers, the firm says, will remain those weve seen
service. In two years, they expect the split to be 38
so farreduce IT spending, improve organisa-
versus 62 percent.
tional productivity, and enforce strict security and
The takeaway was that hybrid cloud is shaping up regulatory policies.
as the go-to model for enterprise users.
The experience of the cloud industry seems to
The reason for hybrids popularity seems to bear the above findings out. Australian telecom-
be twofold. Many organisations still have an munications provider Telstra is following a
investment in legacy, onpremise hardware thats new strategic direction, expanding into systems
needed for specific tasks. On the other hand, integration services in the US, and Erez Yarkoni,
public cloud hosting offers the scalability and executive director of cloud, talks about the profile
flexibility that buying and maintaining hardware most of their customers fit.
doesnt. Hybrid is the crossroads between the two.
We see these mega-infrastructures in the
There are as many hybrid cloud use cases as there public cloud, and emerging business clouds like
are usersit can include any number of infra- SoftLayer, and also on-premise automated infra-
structure builds spread across public cloud, private structure installations, Yarkoni says. All our
cloud, colocation, and on-premise servers. customers live somewhere in between and are
going to do so for a long time.
According to a report by technology research and
advisory firm TechNavio, the hybrid cloud market Surprisingly, that also applies to both enterprise or
was worth US$21.18 billion in 2013 and will reach government-scale customers and the SME market.
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They absolutely talk about their need for their own private applications or localised access database they cant
really move to a public cloud, Yarkoni adds.
A MILLION STORIES
So what do users get out of a hybrid cloud approach, when it seems that parking and running all processes in
one place would be much easier?
There are always trade-offs, says David McKnight, COO of Leisure Interactive, a provider of online
reservations, property management, and point of sale (POS) systems. The key is to define the trade-offs that
add value.
In his case, hybrid is about security. Microsoft Azure was a good fit for most systems apart from onestorage
of encrypted customer credit card data, which couldnt be hosted in a public cloud environment. With US$50
million in transactions in 2013, Leisure Interactive had no choice but to host the payment system separately
from the reservation system to meet payment card industry (PCI) compliance.
When a reservation is made through the companys publicly hosted website, the payment is processed by
connecting to a payment gateway, with the details stored in Leisure Interactives private cloud. Although
Microsoft announced PCI compliance in Azure at the beginning of 2014, and McKnight is looking into it,
financial data is a common roadblock to a completely public cloud service for many.
In another case, a private cloud is the best solution for a specialised workflow, while other applications can run
in public environments. IT strategy consultant Kris Kelso has a marketing/production company client that
initially housed most of their systems either in-house or at a co-location host facility. After an ROI analysis, he
helped the company move most of their customer-facing systems to Amazon Web Services, apart from one
critical function.
The largest system kept in house was a video editing/production platform which required a lot of storage
and bandwidth with fiber-connected editing workstations, he says. Since they needed a server and storage
footprint anyway, we housed a few other servers for file storage and network services with replication to the
external cloud for backup purposes.
Hybrid is also the perfect way to get your feet wet says Chris Poelker, enterprise solutions VP for FalconStor
Software and author of Storage Area Networks for Dummies.
Instead of radical change, a hybrid approach lets us get acclimated with concepts and contracts while still
giving us control over all primary applications and data, he says.
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A LONG LEGACY
There might also be something of an ownership With the opportunity
mindset among decision makers, as large organi- to get higher utilisation
sations catch up to what cloud computing can do.
As ZDNet reported recently when we investigated
from on-premise tech
private versus public clouds, theres an own it or assets, and the flexibility
rent it duality, and some IT managers might not to exploit cost and agility
consider a computing platform rightly theirs unless
its under their roofhowever figuratively.
benefits from public
cloud, hybrid will become
Or you may run critical legacy systems that just a well-trodden path
dont translate. Telstras Erez Yarkoni says the
biggest driver to hybrid environments he sees
toward the next level of
among clients is applications and processes that enterprise tech services.
just cant live in most cloud systems.
In some cases, the choice to adopt a hybrid
They werent born there and they werent written cloud strategy is a business decision on the
to live there so they cant go there, he says. part of the vendor or third-party cloud systems
When those customers want to benefit from a integrator. Greg Archbald, CEO of oil and gas
more utility-type offering they use a private cloud data management provider GreaseBook, has seen
offering so they can run it themselves. plenty of users adopt far more than they can
handle.
With the opportunity to get higher utilisation from
on-premise tech assets, and the flexibility to exploit If a project isnt managed correctly or the
cost and agility benefits from public cloud, hybrid company doesnt have the necessary expertise to
will become a well-trodden path toward the next manage their hybrid or private cloud, the volume
level of enterprise tech services. of customer support some bigger customers need
can be debilitating to the provider, Archbald says.
Chris Poelker agrees, adding that so far, the easiest
applications to migrate to the public cloud are Finally, a hybrid environment can be a simple
the ones generally available off the shelf from matter of redundancy. Imagine running two copies
multiple vendors such as email, sales support, of the same data, one private and one public, and
CRM, and back-office financials. each performing the same workload. For minimal
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cost, you have a ready-made clone of the business constantly communicating with the on-premise
in one as a backup of the live copy in the other. private cloud.
When youre in the midst of a steady workflow, Snapshots taken every 15 minutes mean if theres
you can run your private cloud copy and save an issue with the on-premise virtual machines,
on pay-as-you use public costs. If theres a jump the ones on AWS are integrated with them to
in traffic that calls for a quick scale-up, you can restore service. As VP and director of IT Scott
flick a switch and make the public cloud copy live McGillivray says: We wanted to expand our
to absorb the flexibility the workload needs. Or infrastructure for disaster recovery and business
as Esmerelda Swartz, CMO of billing provider continuity. Public cloud providers offered it
MetraTech, puts it: The hybrid approach is also a without needing a new data center.
nice hedge against vendor lock-in.
Seattle Bank uses hybrid cloud for just such AN INDUSTRY GROWS UP
protection. Using a third party plug-in for VMware Public cloud is indeed where many companies
vCenter, the data stored in the companys AWS have wet their feet by moving simple processes
public cloud environment is fully integrated and like email or data storage to external providers.
image: istock/ luchschen
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Such moves are often enough to encourage further cloud

Thanks to the hybrid
adoption and at a certain point, many sit up and realise
theyre running their own cloud environment. cloud approach we can
From there it can be just a short step to migrate fully
tailor a solution to fit even
to a public cloud service, or a private cloud if your the largest of clients while
public cloud experience has given you confidence to still staying flexible enough
run one. From that perspective, hybrid cloud might be
a long process of industry evolutionin every possible
to offer smaller companies
direction and at every possible pace. one heck of a solution.
Thanks to the efficiencies offered by the mobile Greg Archbald
workforce, many SME operators are also incorporating
consumer electronics and buying (or building) apps to
work smartervirtually all of which Archbald says are driven by the public cloud.
Thanks to the hybrid cloud approach we can tailor a solution to fit even the largest of clients while still staying
flexible enough to offer smaller companies one heck of a solution, he says.
Its also going to further enable the service industry that helps users make it happen, as Telstra is finding in
their pursuit of business in the US.
We invest in the layer that integrates those clouds with service management offerings, Yarkoni says. So if
you do need an application that resides on multiple clouds, you can service-manage it from a layer above, which
Telstra offers.
TREAD CAREFULLY
But despite interoperability of data being the sort of thing cloud computing was built for, sometimes managing
a hybrid environment can be like having an office full of Macs and PCs or a mobile workforce full of Androids
and iPhones. You might put a lot of effort into a proprietary private cloud solution, and then find out how
hard it is to migrate it.
At Leisure Interactive, David McKnight found the biggest challenge was moving his core productthe
reservation systemfrom private to public. When it comes to platform-as-a-service, he advises coding from
scratch, and wishes hed had that luxury himself.
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It took about 18 months from the time we made the decision to the time we flipped the switch, he says.
That took a tremendous amount of planning, architecture modification, and coding. It was a massive project,
much larger than we anticipated.
Even then, features you wish you had can blow out to cost time and productivity. Metafuse Inc. is behind
cloud-based project management software Project Insight, and director of technology Wes Kliewer has found
missing functionality to be the main challenge when it comes to the cloud.
In Microsofts cloud-based Outlook Web App, for example, external partners cant attach emails to the
Microsoft CRM product. Kliewers internal sales team can, but partners have to copy and paste emails as an
independent record. It doesnt sound like a big deal, but scale that up to a company the size of a Fortune 500
blue chip with tens of thousands of employees and hundreds of thousands of suppliers and partners, and it
adds up to a lot of man-hours lost incrementally.
Its vital you know what functionality might be different when you look at locally installed versus cloud
software, Kliewer says.
Still, Chris Poelker says most potential pitfalls are avoidable if youre careful. His advice is to think about every
possible contingencyand dont sign off until your providers addressed them. The contract, he thinks, is
everything.
Make sure all the concerns you would have in running your own datacenter are taken care of by the cloud
providerservice levels, performance, security, out clauses, even compensation for loss of data all needs to be
specified in the contract, he says.
No matter what your organisations size, all the figures point to the same thingyoure going to be in the
hybrid cloud majority soon, if youre not already.
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CAN YOU REALLY DO IT ALL IN THE

CLOUD? NO WAY, SAY TECH CHIEFS
BY STEVE RANGER
Cloud computing is still too risky for CIOs to gamble on putting all enterprise
applications out there.Although more and more organisations are experimenting
with cloud-based applications, tech chiefs remain extremely cautious about putting
mission-critical applications into the cloud, citing security, cost and reliability
among their key considerations.
92 PERCENT SAY NO
When asked Is it now a realistic possibility to run all the applications a business
needs through the cloud? the ZDNet/TechRepublic CIO Jury of tech decision
makers responded with resounding no by a margin of 11 to one. Most CIOs are
using some elements of cloud computing in a hybrid combination of private and
public, but none would trust their entire IT infrastructure to the cloud.
Gavin Whatrup, group IT director at Creston, said: Aside from the discussion
around the in-cloud ecosystem, governance, control and management, there is the
much more basic fact that all those resources are only as resilient as the fibre that
connects you to them. Any on-premise versus cloud discussion has to consider the
weakest link, and this should be at the top of that list.
John F. Rogers, IT director at Nor-Cal Products, echoed this saying: There are
still many infrastructure issues (bandwidth, internet connection, etc.) and customer
security requirements that make cloud computing a hit-and-miss proposition.
Organisations considering the cloud have to address a range of issues such

as the long-term operating cost, security, the ability to integrate with other
enterprise applications and the implications for a companys long-term technical
and information architecture, said Abby Hosseini, CTO of Mercury General
Corporation.
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It is not only a matter of security or cost as a There are many

single dimension. As a result, each platform/
places on the planet
contract needs to be assessed on its own merits
with a long-term vision of cost and operational where internet
needs. Cloud is a matter of how, not where, and availability is just
as such, in our company we adopt the how and
not an option.
do not put much weight on where the compute
platforms need to run. It is a competency not a Paul Collins
destination.
Collins said security flaws such as Heartbleed
Aside from the discussion around the in-cloud and high-profile cases of password theft shows
ecosystem, governance, control and management, that there is no such thing as an entirely infallible
there is the much more basic fact that all those online cloud service... Lets not even start talking
resources are only as resilient as the fibre that about the NSA.
connects you to them.
Gavin Whatrup, group IT director, Creston Rob Neil, head of communications and
technology at Ashford Borough Council, said
According to Jerry Justice, IT director at SS&G
moving everything to the cloud was possible from
Financial Services, much depends on your
a technical maturity point of view if was archi-
definition of cloud. We can and do run most of
tected properly. But he added: Whether [it makes
our apps in a private cloud, he said, but added
sense] from a financial perspective when youre
while there has been good progress there are still
a mid-size organisation like a district council is
a lot of gaps among vendors for pure cloud
another question entirely
services.
Paul Collins, director of ICT at the Australian For John Gracyalny, VP of IT at SafeAmerica
International School Hong Kong, said cloud Credit Union, whether a company can move
services should only be used where the everything to the cloud depends on its size,
applications or services are not regarded as a complexity and the type of the business. He
core or critical function of the business. Security said his organisationin financial services
and trust are not the only issuesCIOs should would keep core account processing in-house
consider reliability and the ability to synchronise indefinitely, as its less expensive than cloud
data between the local device and the cloud, he providers. However, some ancillary services,
said. especially web-related like internet home banking,
online loan applications etc., make more sense in
There are many places on the planet where
the cloud. Im not sure I foresee a time when we
internet availability is just not an option.
would not be using a mix, he said.
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EASIER WITHOUT LEGACY IT

INFRASTRUCTURE
It may be easier for new businesses to make the leap to using cloud services much
quicker than long-standing organisations, because they lack the long-standing
investment in IT infrastructure that can make the benefits of such a migration less
clear cut.
Florentin Albu, CIO at the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United
Nations, said that only businesses that has been redesigned for the current digital
era will be able to take full advantage of the cloud. Companies are already able to
run most of their applications in the cloudfrom ERP to more common office
apps (email, document management). They cannot (yet) run all applications in
this way and the reasons are cost, attitude towards risk, operating model, physical
limitations.
Gavin Megnauth, group CIO at Impellam made a similar point: If we all had the
luxury to start all over again we probably wouldnt have the legacy of incrementally
added-to infrastructure split between on and off premise, he said, adding I
think cloud has come of age, but a mix of public and private cloud would be the
preferred choice for us.
Finally, Chuck Elliott, CTO at Concord University, said that when it comes to
cost versus benefit it appears were not there yet. Some services make sense,
but other cloud services remain cost prohibitive and hopefully its just a matter
of time before they become affordable for us medium-sized businesses, he
said, adding: Compliance issues may dictate controls that are not available when
someone else has your data.
THIS CIO JURY:

Rob Neil, head of communications and technology at Ashford Borough
Council
John F. Rogers IT director, Nor-Cal Products
Paul Collins, Director of ICT, Australian International School Hong Kong
23
Dale Huhtala, executive director for enterprise technology infrastructure services at Service Alberta
Abby Hosseini CTO of Mercury General Corporation
Jerry Justice, IT director, SS&G Financial Services
John Gracyalny, VP of IT, SafeAmerica Credit Union
Tim Stiles, CIO, Bremerton Housing Authority
Florentin Albu, CIO, Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations
Kevin Leypoldt, IS director, Structural Integrity Associates
Florentin Albu, CIO, Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations
Chuck Elliott, CTO, Concord University
Gavin Whatrup, group IT director at Creston
24
HYBRID CLOUD ADDS FIZZ FOR COKE
Warwick Hutton, CIO Australia at Coca-Cola Amatil
BY DREW TURNEY
With more customers and users than most entire industries, Coca Cola Amatil delivers mobile data to staff in
hugely varied local network conditions, and needs the power of the cloud to manage it.
Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA) is one of the largest non-alcoholic beverage bottlers in the Asia-Pacific region and
one of the worlds top five Coca-Cola bottlers. The company, which operates in six countries and has 14,900
employees, 700,000 active customers and 270 million end consumers, was using what CIO Australia, Warwick
Hutton, describes as an ageing Lotus Notes system. It was obvious that cloud computingparticularly a
hybrid environmentwas the answer.
25
Spearheaded by group CIO Barry Simpson in We didnt want to

2010, CCA was an early adopter of the Microsoft
Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) cloud-
be in the business of
based email platform. It was the companys first maintaining infrastructure
experience with shared public cloud applications ourselves. We centralised
on a broad scale, and Hutton and his team were
very happy with the results, which prompted
much of our processing
many other projects leveraging public, private, and and used virtualisation to
hybrid cloud platforms. get economies of scale in
The migration to cloud-based email in the early those environments.
days was handled extremely well by employees,
Warwick Hutton
he says. The most telling factor in the projects
success was the ability for people to communicate
from any device and at any time. It fundamentally traditional hosting models are too expensive and
changed how people worked and really opened cumbersome. The company strategy is now to
our eyes to the possibilities of cloud platforms leverage cloud platforms as much as possible to
and what it could offer, Hutton says. Weve now lower cost and provide flexibility.
migrated to the latest Office 365 service and are
While old world concerns like security and data
leveraging more of the cloud than ever before.
integrity are still important to operations, IT
staff recognise they cant keep everything locked
MOVING OUT behind corporate firewalls if they want to provide
Today CCA has a mobile-first approach in every-
innovative solutions.
thing it does, and cloud technology delivers new
capability faster and more cost-effectively to This is where we see hybrid cloud models
where it delivers the most business benefit. Its the working for us, Hutton says. Where workloads
endpoint in a longstanding program that began are very standardised, have widespread use, and
with the decision to outsource data centres. need to be mobilelike email, office productivity,
We didnt want to be in the business of and software as a service (SaaS) systemsit
maintaining infrastructure ourselves, Hutton makes sense to leverage the scale and economies
says. We centralised much of our processing and of public cloud. Where applications are niche,
used virtualisation to get economies of scale in need a lot of customisation or we need testing
those environments. He says the IT operations and development environments, we generally use
team is pretty lean at CCA, which means private cloud.
26
In most cases for widespread or mobile use, CCA systems use a combination of
both public and private cloud to deliver an end-to-end application, and Hutton says
the key to making it work is to hide the complexities of where the system lives from
the end user. Regardless of whether its public, private or hybrid, the access to the
system should be simple and available from any device. The security and authenti-
cation requirements needed to make them available are hidden as much as possible.
Whats more, the application determines the components of the IT infrastructure

stack and whether its more suited to a private or public environment, or both.
Components that are unique to our business and get no advantage running in a
shared environment would be kept in private cloud, Hutton says.
In a business as large as CCA there are a huge number of systems running, all of
them arising from and servicing different departments and carrying out different
tasks. Many of them have similar use cases or operational parameters, and when the
cost equation will be similar for hosting in either private or public clouds, its not
often clear which option is best from a cost perspective.
But Hutton says factors other than just cost can often influence the decision. In
general, if a large portion of the organisation accesses an application and it needs
to be available on a shared platform, wed prefer the option to simplify access from
outside the corporate network.
SHARED LANGUAGE
The very terms public and private can trick us into thinking each one is a fortified
cyber-world of iron walls, particularly when it comes to discussions about data
security and the performance issues that can arise form co-location.
But one of the lynchpins of cloud computing is for systems to connect across
networks to deliver value faster. CCA is just one company that realizes hybrid
cloud doesnt just mean having some workloads on-premise and some in public
environments.
Huttons team takes a more application-based rather than an infrastructure-based

view. In particular, bursting capability on demand should be available in all cloud
environments. The key to making that a reality is to get to the point where all your
27
infrastructure costs are subscription based and have capacity on demand, albeit at different rates dependent on
the level of services associated with them.
When it comes to the integration challenges across a hybrid cloud strategy, Hutton says a consistent and
federated single sign-on has been the biggest challenge, although hes seen improvements lately in standard
federated security offerings.
Latency can also be an issue, and it dictates the applications youd plan to deliver in each environment. Hybrid
cloud models have allowed CCA to bring functionality closer to the mobile user leveraging the internet and
public cloud, while maintaining a secure consistent back-end architecture in the private cloud.
In fact, authentication and standardised access across all cloud environments is CCAs idea of true security. And
for a company that operates across the region covering Australia, New Zealand and parts of Southeast Asia
all with very different telecommunications industriesconsistent access is tricky.
But Hutton says its getting easier. There are still fixed-line challenges in places like Papua New Guinea, Fiji
and Indonesia, but the rise of mobile data networks and the internet means the public network is often more
reliable and cheaper than the traditional corporate network. Using public cloud infrastructure for applications
like email and office productivity has actually freed staff up from often unreliable and overloaded corporate
networks, he says.
THE FUTURE
In late 2013, CCA decided to optimise the use of the Office 365 architecture to provide productivity tools via a
browser or native applications on any device. The first half of 2014 saw the company move personal and team
documents, the company intranet, social networking platform, and customized applications specific to CCA to
SharePoint Online and Azure. It also recently signed a five-year deal with IBM to move its mission-critical SAP
infrastructure into a cloud environment hosted in IBMs Sydney data centre.
CCA aims to have a large portion of the business using web browser and mobile applications by the end of
2014, and its something that a hybrid cloud approach is driving towards completion.
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BMCS FOUR-YEAR SLOG UNLEASHES

THE BENEFITS OF HYBRID CLOUD
BY KRISHAN SHARMA
The hybrid cloud that BMC had set out to build used a combination
of on-premise infrastructure, both physical as well as virtual, while
also leveraging public cloud capabilities from Amazon Web Services
(AWS).
The project was headed up by BMC s senior director of enterprise

cloud services, Sandeep Kulkarni, and he explained that his team was
able to maintain a flat budget by ensuring the architectural blueprint
of the cloud infrastructure consisted only of standardised compute,
storage, and network hardware.
This allowed us to get away from an expensive maintenance

agreement. Cloud provides a seamless fail-over, so honestly as long as
I have spare blade, chassis, and network equipment, I dont need any Sandeep Kulkarni
maintenance of any sort. I can keep the spare in each of my major
cloud providing sites and get away from the maintenance, which to me is just an insurance, said Kulkarni.
This is an important and seldom-mentioned attribute of cloud as the going rate for hardware maintenance
agreements as a proportion of the hardware capital cost is around 20 percent according to Forrester analyst
Boris Evelson, so its quite a saving on the annual operating budget.
Of course, overcoming budgetary constraints isnt the only challenge in a migration project of this scale, with
the team facing a number of technical and operational challenges throughout the course of the project.
The technical obstacles will be familiar to many IT departments that work in large organisationsdealing with
a vast library of legacy hardware and applications, more commonly referred to as brownfield. In BMCs case,
they had a lot of older HP, IBM, and Oracle physical hardware that needed to be virtualised and moved to the
cloud.
Kulkarni says coming up with the right brownfield conversion strategy required a near-perfect understanding
of all the complexities and nuances of the existing environment.
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Getting to know what you have and knowing The servers, once provisioned, would end up
what out of it is utilised is very important while remaining on the network forever causing huge
building an internal cloud. Taking a service view server sprawl. Our [storage] reclamation rate
of your IT is the first step towards a good cloud prior to our cloud was 4 percent and today after
implementation. Once you know your business deploying cloud we are above 85 percent. This
services, you can then map them into underlying makes our infrastructure highly efficient.
technology services which are then fulfilled by
Our internal cloud provision times moved from
infrastructure in the cloud.
days to minutes. And everything from CMDB
The skillsets needed to evolve as well. The internal to monitoring is all automated now. As a result,
team at the time consisted of traditional Windows it freed up our internal teams by significantly
and UNIX network teams, and while BMC had the reducing the time spent on managing the
requisite network, compute and storage resources, hardware. If we talk about software-as-a-service,
domain expertise was highlighted as an area of our tier 1 application availability went up multiple
deficiency. folds once we moved to the external cloud.
We identified the skills we had, identified the BMC today uses cloud in all of its capacity, almost
skills gap and trained the individuals to become 40 percent of its tier 1 apps are hosted on a SaaS
true cloud engineers. We also added datacentre cloud.
expertise to this group.
We also manage our private cloud for product
Operationally, processes based around the older development, build and testing. The internal cloud
physical infrastructure had to be redefined to the started as IaaS, however we have matured the
new automated cloud offering. offering to not just operating system provisioning
but also application stack provisioning, he said.
NO PAIN, NO GAIN We use external cloud in tandem with internal
So was the four-year long slog worth it and did the cloud for any scalability-type testing where the
hybrid cloud model deliver the gains the business demand is not constant but fluctuates heavily.
originally set out to achieve?
Kulkarni said that after the hybrid cloud was
Absolutely,Kulkarni said. Prior to our internal successfully deployed, there was a real shift in
cloud, we were provisioning everything manually. mindset amongst the team.
This took days for our customers, also everything
else in the system like configuration management With cloud services we moved away from asking
database (CMDB), monitoring, decommissioning our customer what server they want, to what
was also manual. services they want. That became the focus.
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5 PITFALLS TO AVOID IN YOUR HYBRID

CLOUD STRATEGY
BY ALISON DENISCO
Enterprise adoption of the hybrid cloud continues to gain momentum: Some 68% of tech professionals said
their companies are either using or considering the hybrid cloud, according to a 2016 Tech Pro Research survey.
And 99% predicted that some of their systems and applications would be cloud-based within the next five
years.
In a recent 451 Research survey, tech professionals were asked Much confusion
what best describes their hybrid strategy. Some 36% said
they dynamically move workloads to the most appropriate
remains within
IT environment based on cost, performance, security, data companies about the
sovereignty, and other requirements, while 31% said they use definition of hybrid
on-premises resources mainly for existing workloads, and use
IaaS, public, or hosted clouds for new workloads. Meanwhile,
cloud. A recent
27% said they run internal business systems and data on Stratoscale survey
premises, while customer or end-user facing systems run on found that C-level
IaaS, public, or hosted clouds.
executives define
Enterprises are looking at multiple execution venues both
hybrid cloud slightly
on premises and off premises, said 451 Research analyst Carl
Lehmann. They understand the various characteristics of differently than IT
each execution venuecost, performance, security, intellectual professionals.
property issues, control over infrastructureand then allocate
workloads to the best execution venue.
However, many organizations lack clarity on how to effectively create, implement, and manage a hybrid cloud
strategy, experts said. Here are five common pitfalls to avoid when developing a hybrid cloud strategy.
1. LACKING PURPOSE
Much confusion remains within companies about the definition of hybrid cloud: A recent Stratoscale survey
found that C-level executives define hybrid cloud slightly differently than IT professionals.
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Most of our clients have accepted that hybrid is their end state, said Gartner analyst Mindy Cancila. But
what I find is that very few of them have clarity around what that means that they need to do. And so, while
most organizations are recognizing that theyre going to adopt some type of public cloud services, their
data centers are not likely to go away overnight. Organizations will likely remain in a hybrid state for the
foreseeable future, Cancila said.
And rather than determining the true purpose of the cloud in their company, a lot of organizations look at
hybrid cloud and say Okay, this is what everyones doing, so this is what Im going to do, Nelson said.
For the best chance at hybrid cloud success, companies should have direction, have priorities, have the core
values of what youre trying to achieve with cloud very clearly articulated, Nelson said, and revisit those plans
over time.
2. GETTING STUCK IN A PUBLIC VS. PRIVATE CLOUD

DEBATE
Its key to avoid political debates within your company around public versus private cloud, Cancila said.
Rather, recognize that were going to do something in public cloud, lets build the right types of framework so
that we can assess what should move to the public cloud versus not, she added.
image: istock/ EtiAmmos
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These debates occur because the cloud is new for many organizations, Cancila said. The transition requires
companies to take data theyve historically had control of and visibility into, and to let go of some of that
control as they move it to the cloud. There tends to often be a debate as to whether or not the public cloud
providers can deliver that same level of availability and performance better or not, and with equal security,
Cancila said.
To make those decisions, Cancila recommends building a framework for assessing applications, choosing cloud
providers, and governing the public cloud deployment operationally.
This framework will help find the delicate balance between what you do on premises and what you do in
the cloud, and revise that over time as the cloud matures, data center business changes, and legacy hardware
starts to get older, Nelson said. Its a very lifecycle-based model of constantly needing to revisit some of the
decisions youve previously made, Nelson said.
3. FAILING TO RIGOROUSLY ANALYZE WORKLOADS AND

EXECUTION VENUES
Most companies dont perform a thorough enough analysis of the various hybrid options available to them
to properly understand price, performance, and operating characteristics, said Lehmann. It comes down to
understanding the value and risk of various workloads, and the performance characteristics of the operating
environment, and creating an evaluation matrix mapping the workload to the execution venue, Lehmann said.
Additionally, many lines of business and IT teams have subscribed to SaaS services on their own without
considering an overall strategy, Lehmann said. There was insufficient strategic forethought, he said.
Companies need to step back, reconsider workloads entirely, reconsider the execution venues available to
them, formulate a more thoughtful strategy based on business need and competitive dynamics in their market,
and then structure a set of key performance indicators that measure success from a business perspective.
4. IGNORING MULTI-CLOUD MANAGEMENT

Most companies use multiple clouds, according to the 451 Research survey. Some 64% of businesses use SaaS,
and 41% use IaaS. Just 10% said they dont use anything.
If enterprises build up their hybrid strategy, its important to plan for not just public cloud, but multiple public
clouds, Cancila said.
Regardless of what that architecture looks like, multi-cloud management becomes very important, Cancila
said. Thats where you govern the consumption and the cost of what your organization can do across
more than one cloud provider, Cancila said.
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5. FORGETTING INTEGRATION STRATEGIES

Hybrid is really all about integration, Cancila said. Companies look for a single tool to manage all of their
cloud deployments; however, this does not exist, she added.
Hybrid cloud is real, but its time to start breaking it down and investing in the integrations that you need,
Cancila said. And that starts with identifying the applications that move to public cloud, and the attributes that
need to integrate back into your data center.
Many companies are turning to integration platforms as a service to link their clouds to other clouds and to
on-premises infrastructure, Lehmann said. Now that we have so many execution venue options and so many
different tools, the integration tooling needs to be reconsidered, Lehmann said. Many of those tools are
beginning to coalesce into hybrid integration platforms.
Enterprises are not giving sufficient attention to integration strategy, or are not taking sufficient advantage of
emerging tools that enable more sophisticated multi-cloud integration, Lehmann said. We need a renewed
emphasis on integration strategy.
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HOW A HYBRID CLOUD

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION SAVED
A 96-YEAR-OLD COMPANY
BY TEENA MADDOX
In 1921, Overhead Door Corporation was founded and began manufacturing sectional garage doors. Nearly
100 years later, in 2012, it began a lengthy digital transformation effort using a combination of private and
public cloud services for a hybrid cloud solution.
The $1 billion company manufactures a range of products, including residential and commercial doors and
openers for everything from houses and airports to trains, hotels, hospitals, and more. The company has five
divisions that employ 4,000 people across 36 states and Canada, with manufacturing facilities in Mexico and
the UK. And while the company has made progress in modernizing its systems, its still four years away from
achieving its ultimate digital transformation goal, said Larry Freed, CIO of Overhead Door.
image: overhead door corporation`
35
Freed joined the company in 2011, soon after organizations dont invest a lot. Traditionally, once
a strategic business assessment was completed your HR system is in, its in. But with the shift to
allowing for the hiring of a CIO as part of a the cloud its evolving constantly. There could be
technology overhaul that was needed to accom- one to two major version upgrades a year. Theres
modate future growth. much more capability.
When I joined, there was a collective decision Customer service was upgraded, too. Customers
made with the board that we needed to transform can access the companys service portal online
from a technology perspective and a business to get answers about products or to chat with
process perspective, Freed said. One of his first a customer service rep online. The customer
tasks was to evaluate which software company to experience is frequently changing as new services
use to replace 20-year-old legacy systems that were are added to the existing platform.
constricting operational efficiencies and limiting
supply chain optimization. ON-PREMISES SOLUTIONS
AND HYBRID CLOUD
MOVING ON UP The core enterprise resource planning (ERP) is
After choosing Oracle, the company began handled on premises. Our financial, manufac-
moving some core processes to the cloud and turing, inventory, purchasing, scheduling, planning,
currently uses Oracles CRM cloud for many HR transportationall of that is on premise from
functions. Freed said this change is the single a core perspective, Freed said. It works in
biggest transformation that has taken place. conjunction with cloud applications, but the back
That has changed the way our employees engage office on site is still needed as a component of the
with the company through an HR perspective process.
and integrated the process from end to end More and more organizations are strategically
and allowed it to become a more self-service shifting their applications suites into the cloud and
interaction, Freed said, explaining that employees they may be using different cloud providers. In
can access any pertinent information online some cases, were leveraging Oracle for our service
without needing to send an email to HR and wait cloud and our HCM cloud, but we use Kronos
for a reply. This has allowed the HR department to time and attendance, which is in the Kronos cloud
be more strategic and less administrative. from a SAAS perspective, Freed said, adding that
Its really been a paradigm shift for the Amazon is also being used as a cloud provider at
organization, Freed said. What were leveraging Overhead Door.
in the cloud is a current and ever evolving When you have various cloud providers
modern platform. Particularly in the HR space, that are hosting applications, you still need
36
integration. One of the keys to a hybrid environment is a very robust integration platform
to allow those transactions to move back and forth in a seamless matter. In our case we
use the Oracle Fusion Middleware platform as a data highway. The acronym they use is
SOA [service-oriented architecture]. Its complicated, but it allows for a single homogenous
platform to promote or leverage or support how
you move data across systems, he explained.
The thing people need
COST AND STAFFING to consider is the net
As for the cost, managing Fusion Middleware
for our hybrid environment from an on-going
new project requirements
production support perspective (resources) equates associated with setting
to roughly 1.2% of our overall IT budget, Freed up a cloud application
said.
integrations are a critical
No new employees were needed to introduce cloud
and core component of any
applications. Although the number of integrations
have increased, our staffing has remained the same. implementation.
Our Oracle application landscape is very broad Larry Freed
and complicated. We have been able to manage the
integration requirements as-is. The thing people
need to consider is the net new project requirements associated with starting up a cloud
applicationintegrations are a critical and core component of any implementation. The
right implementation partner is key to the initial design and development of the SOA
integrations in a middleware platform. Those project costs must be accounted for upfront,
Freed said.
ADDRESSING SECURITY CONCERNS

Security was an initial concern, since so much employee data would be stored in the cloud.
We began having the conversation in 2013 and we were rightly concerned at the time.
But the more and more we spoke about it, and the more we understood how Oracle had
the infrastructure in place and the appropriate security, we felt very comfortable that it
was protected and Oracle could probably do a better job than we could on-premises with
security, he said.
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Nirav Mehta, vice president of product management for Oracle, said that privacy concerns are common among
companies considering moving to the cloud, and a hybrid cloud can alleviate some of those concerns.
While organizations are eager to move their enterprise workloads to the public cloud, many have been
constrained by data privacy concerns or regulations that have prevented them from being able to deploy their
applications and data in data centers not under their control. A hybrid cloud model allows organizations to
deploy some workloads in the cloud while others remain on-premises with seamless portability, Mehta said.
STAYING RELEVANT
Making the move to the hybrid cloud and undergoing a digital transformation was a key part of Overhead
Doors plan to stay in business another century or more.
Its a very competitive world and a very global world today, and these things are part of what you need to do
to continue to be relevant and attract the right talent and increase your market share, Freed said.
38
HOW BUILT CREATED A HYBRID CLOUD

FOR CONSTRUCTION
image: built
BY TAS BINDI
The Australian construction sector is not known for being innovative. Recent Australian Bureau of Statistics
data reveals that only a third of construction companies could be classed as innovation-active compared with
more than half of businesses in the warehousing, telecommunications, and retail sectors. But one construction
company is looking to change that and lead by example.
Founded in 1998, Built handles construction builds, refurbishments, and fitouts for customers such as Apple,
Cartier, Commonwealth Bank, Hewlett-Packard, Louis Vuitton, National Australia Bank, Ramsay Healthcare, St
George, Virgin Australia, and Westpac.
39
The company claims it has doubled in size over the last

five years by revenue and employee count, currently
generating AU$1 billion in annual revenue and employing
700 staff across six states. It manages projects greater
than AU$200 million in size and has established a 70
percent repeat client rate.
Builts head of IT, Wai-Lum Tang, who has been at

the company for 18 months, said one of the reasons
a business as big and mature as Built has been able to
grow quickly like a startup is because of its appetite for
innovation.
We are really challenging the status quo in the Wai-Lum Tang, head of IT at Built (Image: Supplied)
construction industry to find new and better ways of
doing things, Tang said.
Weve been investing in our own apps to manage aspects like safety, quality, and procurement.
There is a lot of exciting technology coming into our space, and for us, its about how we use this and
integrate it to achieve positive outcomes for our people, business, and customers.
The 19-year-old company now applies a cloud-first approachat infrastructure and application levelsto
everything it does. For Built, cloud-based technology provides new capability faster and more cost-effectively to
where it delivers the greatest business benefit.
The greatest upshot is improved margins in an industry where profits are thinin the 2014-15 financial year,
the industrys profit margin was 10.2 percent, according to a report [PDF] by Bankwestand operational costs
are variable due to volatile commodity prices.
Since implementing cloud-based technologies, many of which operate on subscription or consumption-based

models, Tang said Built has been able to better forecast its spend in line with its growth profile.
Built uses both public and private cloud platforms, relying on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to store its web
hosting assets, while its private cloud is managed by Superloop subsidiary BigAir.
Tang said the companys IT group currently runs its cloud platform strategy like an investment portfolio in
that it selects the right platformpublic or privatefor the application or tool it is deploying.
40
It uses public cloud infrastructure for applications At Built, our IT team doesnt
such as email, file storage, team communications,
construction management, project management, and spend time managing all the
other areas of productivity. Some of these applications technical points; instead,
are internally built, while others are externally-sourced. we rely on partners to host
We dont have our own email servers; we use and manage the entire
Microsoft 365. We also use Dropbox for file storage,
Slack for internal communications, and Trello for work
environmentleveraging
management. Our identity management system, mobile their team of experts
device management system, and ERP are also cloud- and allowing us to focus
based, SaaS-based. We dont own any infrastructure,
which means our IT team isnt locked down trying to
on hiring resources that
manage infrastructure, Tang said. can focus on addressing
Private cloud infrastructure is used for internal assets business challenges and not
such as files that would not be shared with anyone who servers and networks.
is not directly employed at Built. Wai-Lum Tang
TAKING INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT OUT OF THE

EQUATION
Builts hybrid cloud journey began about two years ago when the company decided to outsource its
infrastructure.
The companys primary datacentre is a managed hosted environment that is multi-tenanted, which Tang said
works significantly better for Built. Its IT group needs to remain nimble so that it can quickly respond to
the needs of the business, and so it does not make sense to have clunky infrastructure and a team to
manage it.
Tang identified smarter resource management as one of the greatest benefits of transitioning to a hybrid cloud
environment, explaining that Builts IT group can now spend more time finding or building solutions than
managing servers, networks, and operating systems.
In the past, we would have had to spend a lot of money on building our own private cloud and employ highly
specialised technical resources to build and manage the environment and manage detailed technical items such
41
as hypervisor, input/output operations, demand/ Previously, the company used network-attached

capacity management, and network issues. Then storage devices at every project site, but
possibly double that spend to build a capable transitioned to Dropbox in October last year. It
[disaster recovery] environment, Tang said. also had on-premises file servers at every regional
office and datacentre, whereas now the company
At Built, our IT team doesnt spend time
supplements its local servers with Dropbox, which
managing all these technical points; instead, we
Tang said allows the company to derive the best
rely on partners to host and manage the entire
of both worlds.
environmentleveraging their team of experts
and allowing us to focus on hiring resources that You got these big marketing documents that you
can focus on addressing business challenges and couldnt email, you couldnt easily transmit, and
not servers and networks. you couldnt easily use VPN technology to open it
... It was difficult to access files outside the office
The hybrid cloud approach, according to Tang,
or on mobile technology Tang said.
also enables Built to improve IT responsiveness
and prototype applications more easily. With Dropbox, we were able to easily share files
In the old world, when you wanted to deploy an with our peers or colleagues, with people in other
application, you would spin up a server, configure cities and offices, which meant we could bring in
it, patch, and commission it. Then when that box a team thats not just locally sitting together, but
was ready, you will need to install the app, figure nationally working on a project or a bid.
out how to enable access, and then deploy to your Using Dropbox in conjunction with other cloud-
users. Thats a lot of steps and work to deploy an based applications such as Trello, Tang said Built
application, Tang said. has been able to respond to four times more
When you consider many of our teams are based tenders than it was able to even a year ago.
on construction sites, this can take a lot of time, Our marketing team would prepare the documen-
which is time not spent getting on with the project tation, prepare the design, and draft it all up,
for our customers. and rather than getting all the [collaborators] to
comment online, we would print it out and put it
MAKING COLLABORATION on the table, or we would email it to them. When
MORE PRODUCTIVE everyone puts in their replies, notes, and markups,
Built realised last year that it needed centralised before you know it, the documentation is out of
file management and access that made it easy for date, Tang said.
project collaborators to edit and share files faster But what were able to do now is put the
and more securely from any workstation or device. documentation online ... and people are able to
42
comment on markups or any other variations in real-time. So the bid leader who logs into his PC or laptop or
iPad is always looking at the most up-to-date version and were able to turn around tenders quicker.
While Tang was not able to disclose Builts return on investment in Dropbox, he noted that completing four
times as many tenders means four times the opportunities of putting ourselves in front of prospective
clients.
Eventually, thats going to mean securing more jobs for Built, Tang added.
WHAT HAPPENS TO LEGACY DATA

Tang said one of the biggest challenges around hybrid cloud implementation is identifying where to draw the
line in the sand when it comes to legacy data.
Because we have a hybrid [environment], we dont have to take everything with us to the public cloud. For
example, we have approximately 70 project sites across the group and not every one of those projects sites that
is currently in-flight is going to be on Dropbox, Tang said.
However, for the new projects coming on board, we are slowly putting them into Dropbox ... that way, we
dont have to bring across legacy information. We dont have to change the way existing project teams are doing
their job. We just train them as they move on to the new project.
Tang also noted the importance of separating legacy and new datasets, especially if the company has
subscribed to a consumption-based model with a cloud vendor.
Where possible, Tang believes companies should adopt a hybrid solution because you get the best of both
worlds.
But before jumping into any hybrid cloud solution, ask yourself: What would a startup do? Tang advised.
The hybrid cloud model is a great enabler for companies to access applications and technologies without
deploying expensive datacentres. Its especially valuable for businesses with limited resources who need to be
smart with how they spend their IT budget.
43
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SPECIAL REPORT

The art of the hybrid cloud

COPYRIGHT 2017 CBS INTERACTIVE INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

14 Bring the clouds together with the hybrid approach

39 How Built created a hybrid cloud for construction

HYBRID CLOUD: WHAT IT IS, WHY

WHAT IS HYBRID CLOUD?

image: istock/ Assja

THE BENEFITS OF GOING HYBRID

Another benefit of this hybrid cloud model is the ability

WHERE HYBRID DOESNT WORK

image: istock/Alfredo Allais

WHO USES HYBRID CLOUD?

Assembling a private cloud to handle a standard workload, with burst compute

INFOGRAPHIC: COMPANIES ARE

When ZDNets sister site Tech Pro

A big reason behind moving to a hybrid

HYBRID CLOUD: WHICH WAY WILL

SOURCE: TECH PRO RESEARCH

BRING THE CLOUDS TOGETHER WITH

image: istock/ Matt Leung

image: istock/ luchschen

Such moves are often enough to encourage further cloud

CAN YOU REALLY DO IT ALL IN THE

Organisations considering the cloud have to address a range of issues such

It is not only a matter of security or cost as a There are many

EASIER WITHOUT LEGACY IT

THIS CIO JURY:

HYBRID CLOUD ADDS FIZZ FOR COKE

Warwick Hutton, CIO Australia at Coca-Cola Amatil

Spearheaded by group CIO Barry Simpson in We didnt want to

Whats more, the application determines the components of the IT infrastructure

Huttons team takes a more application-based rather than an infrastructure-based

BMCS FOUR-YEAR SLOG UNLEASHES

The project was headed up by BMC s senior director of enterprise

This allowed us to get away from an expensive maintenance

5 PITFALLS TO AVOID IN YOUR HYBRID

2. GETTING STUCK IN A PUBLIC VS. PRIVATE CLOUD

image: istock/ EtiAmmos

3. FAILING TO RIGOROUSLY ANALYZE WORKLOADS AND

4. IGNORING MULTI-CLOUD MANAGEMENT

5. FORGETTING INTEGRATION STRATEGIES

HOW A HYBRID CLOUD

image: overhead door corporation`

ADDRESSING SECURITY CONCERNS

HOW BUILT CREATED A HYBRID CLOUD

The company claims it has doubled in size over the last

Builts head of IT, Wai-Lum Tang, who has been at

Since implementing cloud-based technologies, many of which operate on subscription or consumption-based

TAKING INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT OUT OF THE

as hypervisor, input/output operations, demand/ Previously, the company used network-attached

WHAT HAPPENS TO LEGACY DATA

TechRepublic is a digital publication and online community

Associate Editor The opinions expressed herein are subject to change

Copyright 2017 by CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. TechRepublic

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