Car sees rising cloud costs needing to be attributed to the utilisation of platforms, as opposed to it just getting more expensive.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cCloud is not getting more expensive,\u201d he said. \u201cHow much is consumed of the cloud will drive that price up, and then it should dovetail into a discussion around efficiency of using the cloud.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Organisations have spent 10 to 20 years on premises defining the tools and how efficiently they can run that hardware, explained Car. That maturity operationally hasn\u2019t really migrated into the cloud operational space and is where bimodal operations can really hinder organisations that run a cloud team.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThey run an on-premises or legacy infrastructure team, so they don\u2019t bring the learnings across into the cloud and the efficiency isn\u2019t there,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s what we need to look at.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve seen security get breached because of it, because the policies that were created didn\u2019t adapt.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Five or six years ago, the industry used the term \u2018shadow IT\u2019, where development teams would go and spin up solutions in the cloud, Car said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve definitely seen that neither the two shall meet and it\u2019s starting to get a little bit better as the lines are blurred,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cHowever, I still see a lot of organisations want to treat cloud as cloud and want to treat on-premises as on-premises and that\u2019s not going to deliver the efficiency in the cloud that is possible.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Car pointed out that tool sets that are sort of native in the cloud providers today aren\u2019t at the maturity compared to those used on-premises.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIn terms of density efficiency, that\u2019s going to allow you to really get the absolute maximum out of the cloud infrastructure,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Defining hybrid cloud strategies and drivers\u00a0<\/p>\n
This is why it is important for an organisation to define the drivers for their hybrid cloud strategy, said IBM partner for hybrid cloud, data and applications operations for Australia and New Zealand Iskra Nikolova.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Depending on the driver, the thinking behind the strategy will be different, she pointed out.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have a concept which we call hybrid by design, but many companies out there developed what I would describe as a hybrid by default strategy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThey do some applications on-premises, may invest in some kind of private cloud and some other applications \u2014 perhaps the majority \u2014 would be destined for public cloud.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
As an example, Nikolova, who previously worked at Telstra, said the telecommunications provider as part of its T25 strategy aimed to have 90 per cent of relevant applications on public cloud by 2025 as part of its key performance metric.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a process that happens almost organically and is what we call hybrid by default,\u201d she said. \u201cHybrid by design is where companies design upfront what will be most relevant to put on public cloud and what will be best suited for private cloud \u2014 in order to transform the business.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThis more intentional approach to designing workloads and where they\u2019re placed helps unlock better productivity in the short term but also enables automation.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Hybrid for AI<\/p>\n
This is where artificial intelligence (AI) comes into the picture in the long term. Without the right workloads in the right place, this can be a barrier to substantive end-to-end automation, explained Nikolova.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is where AI, especially generative AI, enables dramatic productivity gains which were perhaps not possible before, with less mature levels of automation,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This is a driver to really have the most appropriate cloud strategy \u2014 hybrid by design, ideally \u2014 in order to transform the business at every level, Nikolova said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t just at the infrastructure level, but also at the operating system, the applications and the data, with automation on top.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Another driver is automation and AI, because these tools require more intentional and thoughtful planning for how companies run workloads in multiple locations \u2014 on-premises, private or public.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnother observation now is that lots of new tools and methods for analysis are emerging that basically help with hybrid strategies,\u201d Nikolova said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The focus on end-to-end transformation was also shifting how organisations think about AI more broadly.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Hope said when digital transformation was at its peak, it was about driving customer value and cohesion, with that same mindset carried into the early stages of AI.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cNow the economics are shifting,\u201d he pointed out. \u201cCustomers aren\u2019t just saying \u2018Go experiment\u2019, they\u2019re asking how to get real value from what they\u2019ve already invested in and how to avoid overlapping suppliers or duplicate spending.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Technologists are pushing back, saying costs are going up, and the business needs to be more disciplined, noted Hope.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There was a lot of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) coming in and IT was being told to just \u2018deal with it,\u2019 even though they already have viable, cost-effective solutions in place.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cGenerative AI came in with a strong product-led push, but now with more agentic workloads and AI engineering, it\u2019s becoming a big platform play,\u201d he said. \u201cThat brings in serious cost considerations \u2014 we\u2019re already seeing cost blowouts.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cNow the conversation is moving from cloud cost to AI cost. That\u2019s why you\u2019re hearing companies say, \u2018Let\u2019s bring AI on-premises so we can control cost better.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
According to Hope, the really big enterprises have invested in understanding where they should place workloads and are having conversations around service management and observability.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cMany don\u2019t fully understand what\u2019s happening in this evolving ecosystem, consuming SaaS and PaaS platforms layered on top of hyperscalers like Microsoft and AWS,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019re asking for observability, resilience and clarity on data location, which leads into IT service management and risk conversations.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cCustomers are stretching traditional ITIL (information technology infrastructure library) processes while trying to maintain a DevOps mindset with a service management overlay.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThis complexity adds pressure on cost and operational management, and AI will only stretch this further as it moves from product to platform scale.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Car sees rising cloud costs needing to be attributed to the utilisation of platforms, as opposed to it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19878,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[64,63,257,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-19877","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-computing","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-computing","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19877\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}