As evidenced by its prevalence, hybrid IT proves to be a beneficial approach for most organizations that are either going entirely cloud-free or relying exclusively on a public or private cloud. It proffers many benefits including increased business agility (46 percent), improved customer service (41 percent)andfaster product development (34 percent). Nevertheless, managing hybrid IT environments is not easy. The biggest barriers to a seamless hybrid IT are interoperability concerns; disruptions and delays; compromised security and inadequate compliance and other threats. Let’s take a closer look at each.
Interoperability Concerns
When organizations adopt a hybrid IT approach, fostering interoperability between on-premise and off-premise environments is not easy. In other words, enabling application, system or technology hosted on-premise to work with that the systems and technology hosted in the cloud (to facilitate information exchange) takes a toll over users at large. This is because, with a hybrid IT in place, organizations have multiple different architectures to handle instead of managing a relatively confined architecture.
Interoperability issues put the data management task that involves acquiring, validating, storing, protecting, and processing at risk, corrupting decision-making. This makes a negative impact on organizations’ ability to embrace market changes and fulfill customer demands.
Disruptions and Delays
When a hybrid IT is put in place, enterprises are expected to deal with multiple IT infrastructures. Since integrating these disconnected systems takes a lot of effort and time, one can exhibit a direct impact on the business processes and workflow. Such ‘broken’ business processes trigger service disruptions and delays, which slows down the speed of operations drastically. This sudden slow down opens doors to mediocrity in the organization and accelerates overhead costs, making them difficult to do business with.
Poor Data Quality
Handling hybrid data is a challenging task. Multiple data sources where data (structured or unstructured) resides in different formats are difficult to track. So, making sense of it all together can quickly become a complex maneuver.Further, poor data redundancy puts quality at huge risk. This problem arises when business users do not have redundant copies of data properly distributed across the ecosystem. And enterprises are bound to suffer the damage that occurs when there is an outage in one data center.
Compromised Security and Poor Compliance
Security is challenging indeed, but hybrid IT ups the complexity – and the ante. Data is exposed to risk (both in transit and at rest) across the hybrid environments. Usersface problems with authentication, management, and authorization procedures happening in both private and public cloud to boot.
When organizations adopt a hybrid IT approach, they tend to face security, data sovereignty, service availability and latency concerns. Transmission of data over the network is vulnerable to eavesdropping and data breaches attacks that circumvent mutual authentication by impersonating endpoints. To prevent security incursions, organizations must encrypt communications and data.
Hybrid IT environments call for more due diligence when it comes to compliance. Both the in-house and cloud services must adhere to strict compliance parameters. And, since data moves back and forth in a hybrid model, maintaining compliance is difficult. Further, hybrid IT can give rise to unprotected APIs. This can expose sensitive data to breaches or attacks that exploit an authorization token to manipulate personal information and data. This vulnerability is a major cause of concern in enterprise mobility management and BYOD transmissions over unsecured connections.
Now, that you are aware of potential hybrid IT threats, the question that must be explored is, how can one take control of their hybrid data to make intelligent operational and strategic decisions while overcoming complexity and delivering value?
The simple answer to overcoming the key barriers is self-service integration.
Overcoming Hybrid IT Barriers with Self-Service Integration
Self-service integration solutions optimize companies’ technology stack. Its unique business user capability empowers users automate anything and everything they can, implementing not only infrastructure as code but security as code too. IT squads become free from the burden of building and maintaining connections and focus on maintaining control and governance instead.
Business users can rely on self-service integration to easily integrate in-house and cloud environments, allowing seamless operability within and beyond. They can easily combine the data from disparate sources into a unified set to use it for extracting high-quality, data-driven insights. The resulting integrated environment streamlines processes and workflows, eliminating delay or disruptions in toto.
Pre-built application connectors and shared templates hosted in a self-service integration platform allow users integrate hybrid data carefully into a unified set in minutes, streamlining business intelligence and decision-making. Its end-to-end encrypted environment feature allows only the authorized and authenticated users to access hybrid data (in motion and at rest) for analysis and usage. Encrypting the hybrid IT environment solves security problems, eliminating the risk of breaches altogether.
Further, its low-code, reusable, integrations and APIs speed up data movement across the organization’s hybrid IT landscape and allow users handle data outage without delay or any discrepancy.Users can gain end-to-end visibility into workflow and tasks with a monitoring dashboard, ensuring compliance and flexibly adapting processes to changing business requirements. As a result, users can drive value across business ecosystems and deliver seamless experiences for customers, partners, and employees. In short, they can achieve the right balance between data security and performance, accelerating ROI and making organizations easier to do business with.