Looking back over the last several years, we’ve seen we’ve seen considerable hype surrounding companies going “all-in” on the public cloud. Large companies such as Capital One and Netflix are industry leaders in this respect and deservingly so. The effort involved is monumental and its effect on IT consumption within those organizations is transformational. For the majority of the enterprises, I believe that a “cloud-first where possible” strategy is the right move for the business. For the next five ten to years, I expect that most enterprises will maintain on-premise infrastructure that requires seamless and secure connectivity to workloads running in one or more public clouds. In this post, I’ll be discussing how public cloud providers have shifted their strategy to accommodate the reality of hybrid IT.

The major public cloud providers have released products aimed at extending their presence into the enterprise data center.

Azure Stacks was the first product in this category followed by AWS Outposts. The former is available now while Outposts is expected to be available in 2H 2019. On a related note, the press is reporting that Microsoft and VMware might be forging a partnership that may resemble the deal AWS stuck with VMware several years ago. While a dominant player in the data center, VMware scuttled its public cloud offering and sees its future in cooperating with public cloud providers to easily shift workloads between the data center and the cloud.

In other developments, IBM–not exactly a leader in the public cloud sector–sees its future in hybrid IT. Matt Asay of TechRepublic makes a compelling case in his Why IBM had no choice but bet $34 billion on hybrid cloud article that IBM’s acquisition of RedHat represents a $34B bet on the future of hybrid IT. RedHat’s OpenShift offering is in a strong position to accelerate the movement of workloads between private and public cloud.

At Konekti, we know from talking to enterprises that hybrid IT is not only real but is often very difficult to design and operationalize the dual infrastructure (or more if multiple public clouds are involved). Finding and retaining the talent with experience in hybrid IT is challenging. How can you tackle these challenges in a way that doesn’t force enterprise IT architects and developers to become experts in the minutia of securely connecting workloads at potentially hundreds of diverse locations? Steering the design and management of networking and VPC infrastructural components are what we do best.

If the challenges of hybrid IT are pain points for your organization, let’s strike up a conversation to see if our services will help you meet your IT objectives.