Cloud-native meets hybrid cloud: A strategy guide

Information technology (IT) systems are the glue that holds modern enterprises together. They power internal systems, are often critical market differentiators, and need to deliver ever-improving functionality for customers, employees, and partners. At the same time, system complexity and speed of change have escalated: deployments routinely span multiple on-premise and cloud locations, an array of software technologies are used, and the teams behind these systems can vary greatly in their skills. The increased focus on digital transformation highlights the business advantages of change, but often does not address how to deliver real value with the new technologies.

These pressures lead to a fundamental tension between the reliability and productivity of the environment. On one hand, systems need to be kept functioning, secure, and predictable in their operation. Developers and operations teams need to be able to evolve the systems rapidly to deliver new functional benefits to users so the whole organization benefits from progress.

This core tension between reliability and productivity impacts many choices, but it becomes particularly problematic given today’s pressure for rapid change and improvement. IT teams find themselves continually having to balance short and long-term change in application delivery and development. For example, trading the use of existing systems and infrastructure to develop new functionality versus redesigning development and delivery capabilities. The long-term aim is to keep adding value with the company-wide application environment, while improving agile development and delivery.

Managing these pressures is relevant since IT systems have become highly distributed across datacenter locations and public clouds — hybrid cloud IT is a reality for most organizations. In addition, a myriad of new development technologies in cloud-native and other areas open up huge new opportunities to make development teams more productive.

This guide is designed as a strategy primer for enterprise architects and IT leaders to map out how to tackle modern IT strategy. It is focused on the convergence of three trends:

1. The importance of IT systems to modern organizational success.

2. Hybrid cloud and the shift to multiple datacenters, platforms, and cloud locations.

3. Cloud-native application development technologies and how they can be combined with existing approaches to create a robust, productive IT system.

The content covers context considerations, strategy challenges, and high-level architectural considerations with case study examples.