Issue link: https://cp.revolio.com/i/549869
16 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL www.datacenterjournal.com hyBrid cloud equals opportunity a hybrid IT model is created when an organization uses cloud-based applications, such as Salesforce.com or NetSuite, in combination with their existing on-premises applica- tions. Common reasons for taking this approach include reducing costs and limit- ing or even shrinking the IT footprint. But the opportunities go far beyond these advantages. Best-of-Breed capaBilities Perhaps the greatest benefit of adding cloud applications to the IT environment is the freedom it provides to rely on best-of- breed applications for important market- ing, sales, operations and HR functions to gain a competitive advantage. ink about typical on-premises customer-relation- ship-management (CRM) or enterprise- resource-planning (ERP) deployments. ey require effort to deploy and maintain, and they aren't updated very oen. When a new version finally appears, the long devel- opment cycle means that the new features are oen already dated. Nevertheless, the update requires another major deployment effort, and once this effort is done, the solution again remains static for a lengthy period even as the organization continues to evolve. By contrast, most cloud applications are updated monthly or quarterly, so they are state of the art all the time—typically without any headache at all for users or IT. Marketo and Zuora, for example, continu- ally interact with and learn from their users, then use a rapid development cycle to code, test and deploy the new features that users need the most. In early April 2015, Marketo announced integration with Google AdWords and Google Analytics to deliver more personal digital advertising; later in the same month, it announced the ability to engage customers across all major digital channels from a single marketing- soware platform. data aggregation and analysis at scale In addition to enabling always state- of-the art applications, the cloud allows organization to aggregate data across multiple solutions—including on-premises applications and social-media channels— and analyze this information in real time to give organizations a unique and up-to- the-minute perspective on their customers, employees, partners and supply chains. Why have sales suddenly dipped? Are customers reacting to something about the product, something in the news or a social meme? What is the cause of a sudden disruption in the supply chain? Has some- thing happened somewhere in the world to shut down a supplier factory or disrupt shipping lanes? Is it a local, regional or global problem? With the addition of social-media streams, this type of real-time analysis can occur only if the environment can expand with the speed and scale far beyond the capabilities of most businesses. Only the cloud offers the elasticity and quick con- nectivity to make it possible, and this capa- bility offers value even for companies that don't need to analyze social-media streams. Let's say a bank customer withdraws $10,000 from an ATM and then immedi- ately tries to take out a loan from different bank. Without real-time risk and credit scoring, the lending organization may not realize that the customer's credit risk has suddenly gone from a nine to a six. Only via the cloud can most financial-services organizations develop the capacity and the applications to pull off such a capability. agility and creativity Cloud technologies, whether as in- frastructure, a platform or an application, deliver extraordinary agility for developers, including rapid development and testing as well as low project costs. is capabil- ity enables organizations to, for example, rapidly develop a sales-assistance tool accessible on mobile phones, use it for six months, track usage and success rates in various regions, then update the applica- tion or even throw it away and start over, all with very little downside risk. Without a hybrid IT environment, organizations are stuck doing it the old way: making a huge investment in hardware, soware, human resources and time. All too frequently, this approach means the project delivery is too late to provide the maximum benefit, and even if it fails to offer any real benefit at all, managers are loath to throw it away, merely extending the wasted effort indefinitely. rapidly expand geographic reach e ability to aggregate partner and supply-chain information enables even midsize companies to develop a global reach. For example, Daylight Transport, a non-asset-based national trucking compa- ny, operates a virtual network of indepen- dent contractors, agents and carriers. e company struggled to tightly integrate a number of systems, including IBM Sterling Gentran, TruckMate from TMW Systems, and a patchwork of FTP applications and home-grown scripts, in order to manage customer orders, coordinate freight move- ment, monitor shipments, notify partners, invoice clients and more. Using cloud- based integration platform as a service (iPaaS), Daylight Transport was able to rapidly create highly reliable processes, including building an end-to-end cash flow process in a single day. Because iPaaS is geographically independent, Daylight Transport has the potential to expand its operations anywhere in the world. if hyBrid cloud is so wonderful, why isn't everyone doing it? As the fear of relying on the public cloud eases, the main resistance to launch- ing a hybrid cloud strategy would seem to come from the plethora of articles claiming that hybrid cloud is extremely difficult to implement. But although challenges will certainly arise, they can be overcome, oen in a very straightforward manner. Let's say a company subscribes to Marketo, Salesforce.com and several other