Overcome the Challenges of Hybrid IT With Managed Services

There’s no doubt your data center is a mix of technologies. Hybrid IT is the way the world works today. It’s not about hybrid cloud, though that might be a part of it—it’s about choosing the right environment for each application, whether that means public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, or purely in your data center. It means having multiple cloud providers as you match each workload to the most appropriate service. It means complexity that allows you to deliver tremendous business benefits but can leave your IT team struggling to keep the environments under control.

Challenges of Hybrid IT

Some of the challenges of hybrid IT come simply because the complexity means there are more choices and more decisions to be made. When you use a single technology, when the business comes to you with a request, you know the tools you’ll be using. When you support a hybrid environment, you need to spend additional time understanding the business requirements in depth so you can deploy it most effectively. This means spending more time talking with the business before you start implementing their technology.

Hybrid IT means you’ve got to develop a multitude of data migration strategies, one for each environment. Although the environments may be isolated, it’s likely they’ll need to share data, so migration, or at least synchronization, isn’t a one-time effort either.

Keeping the data secure and in compliance is also challenging, because each of your different environments has its own controls. Bringing them all into alignment with your own policies can be time-consuming. Assuring consistency across the environments requires ongoing monitoring and the assistance of automation to promote policies.

With multiple types of technology in use, it’s harder to keep an eye on costs. Usage statistics and spending details come from multiple providers and offer differing levels of granularity. Hybrid IT can result in silos that hide the overall spending picture. Consider using tools that bring multiple bills into a single dashboard and make it easier to monitor spending. Analytics can identify opportunities to reduce spending through consolidating and shutting down instances.

Monitoring multiple systems is difficult, too, again because it’s hard to get an overall picture of how your infrastructure is functioning. You also have to manage multiple vendors, track multiple contracts, and interface with multiple contacts to resolve issues. It’s difficult for your team to have the expertise needed across all platforms to keep your entire infrastructure operating at a high level of performance.

Managed Services Address Hybrid IT’s Challenges

Hybrid IT is unavoidable; there are too many benefits from having the ability to tailor each workload’s infrastructure to match its requirements exactly. Managed services can help you get control back over this complex infrastructure, bringing in a team that’s experienced with all the technologies you use and overseeing daily operations. Contact CCS Technology Group to learn how our managed services can help you take better advantage of your hybrid IT infrastructure.

Interested in learning more about the benefits of partnering with a managed services provider? Check out our guide How Managed Services Make the Difference.