For IT professionals to succeed as the hybrid IT era continues to evolve, they must arm themselves with a new set of skills, tools, and resources. Consider the following recommendations:

Start with Cloud Computing and Hybrid IT: Evolving Norms - Part 1

1. Ensure central visibility across on-premises and cloud environments

In the face of enterprise technology’s exponential rate of change, a management and monitoring toolset that surfaces a single point of truth across those platforms is essential. The ability to consolidate and correlate data to deliver more breadth, depth, and visibility across the data center will allow IT professionals to proactively identify and remediate problem areas and reduce the mean time to resolution.

2. Consider more than just cost efficiency

The findings of this year’s report indicate that cloud’s ability to increase ROI is less important to today’s IT professionals, with security, compliance, and performance now top of mind. With end-user expectations for availability, durability, and an acceptable response time no matter where an application is hosted or from where it’s delivered, IT professionals need to factor in the security and performance requirements of each application prior to migration to cloud services to ensure that Quality of Service is still met throughout the distributed stack.

3. Cloud-proof your job

Over the past 12 months, IT professionals ranked hybrid monitoring/management tools and metrics, application migration, automation, and data analytics as the most important skills and knowledge needed to successfully manage hybrid IT environments. In addition to leveraging their peer communities to better understand technology adaptations and abstractions, IT professionals need to establish monitoring as a foundational IT skill, also known as monitoring as a discipline, to drive a more proactive, efficient, and effective IT management strategy.

4. Forecast future migration, but remain flexible

As illustrated by this year’s report findings, every organization's hybrid IT environment is unique and the velocity, variety, and volume of new technology services are giving ample opportunity to realize innovation. To that end, IT professionals must be open to and agile in adopting the best-of-breed elements of cloud computing and hybrid IT. The best thing for any IT department to do in the year ahead is to build a roadmap for future integration and delivery that will help illustrate ROI and business advantages, or the lack thereof, for business management.

5. Build trust with cloud service providers through IT competency

“Trust but verify” should be the IT professional’s mantra in the year ahead, as organizations work to identify how best to maintain an element of control and visibility into workloads and applications that are hosted in the cloud. It will be critical to leverage comprehensive hybrid IT monitoring, beyond what is typically offered by cloud service providers, to ensure they have enough data and visibility to truly understand how workloads are performing in the cloud and the reasons for that performance. Similar to traditional on-premises strategies, application availability and durability are key trust tenets in hybrid IT.

Cloud computing’s mounting importance and the shift to hybrid IT are evolving norms. With the report’s findings in mind, it’s crucial that IT professionals continue to learn new skills and adapt to the ever-changing hybrid IT environment.