For over a decade, the march toward cloud computing has been a steady and measured one for many organizations across the globe. Tempted by the promise of more flexible commercial models and the lure of greatly simplified operations, chief information officers (CIOs) have systematically addressed and mitigated many of the early concerns and risks around performance and security as their own companies have become hybrid cloud consumers.
Today, with the benefit of hindsight and practical experience, I see hybrid cloud as the default scenario for most organizations, one that they will likely be in for the foreseeable future as their own digital transformation journeys demand the adoption of more and more cloud-delivered as-a-service elements, whether they are infrastructure, platform or software.
These elements can be building blocks of infrastructure that are fundamental, such as storage, compute and network or they can be software or platform services that require different types of security, authentication and interconnectivity to support different business needs. Each of these elements that businesses can now pick and choose makes up the hybrid cloud model of their choice.
In many of these modern, emergent multicloud enterprise environments, architectures based in the hybrid cloud should support logical or physical extensions of existing corporate networks, which will allow seamless access between devices and back-end systems. These flexible architectures also need to facilitate higher-level, data-centric integrations between unconnected systems using application programming interfaces (APIs) that can securely exchange data through private or public network connections.
It may sound complex, and indeed the reality may be as it sounds.
A trip back through the annals of time will reveal that centralization -- typified by the era of mainframe and mini-computing -- helped organizations to become much more effective and efficient by replacing paper-based processes. That same historical lens will uncover that as we entered the PC era, the trend moved toward decentralization where applications and data were installed on desktop computers and laptops. This approach also helped organizations to further improve upon, and in many cases entirely rethink, existing business processes.
Fast forward to the current day -- the undeniably mobile and cloud era -- and there’s certainly some very obvious strands of DNA from the bygone days. Centralized and decentralized approaches still exist (remember the definition of hybrid cloud?), albeit in many cases for different strategic reasons. The explosive adoption of as-a-service models, especially software as a service (SaaS), is enabling organizations to adopt simpler, more configurable business applications at breakneck speed. This, in turn, drives more simplicity and more individual productivity and delivers tangible business outcomes.
The challenge facing information technology (IT) today is one of moving from being a necessary evil to one of being a business enabler. How does IT balance their own needs from a security and compliance perspective with those of the relentless set of demands from a more technology-savvy employee, partner or customer base, all while reconfiguring existing and new infrastructures to create an environment for employees that enables productivity, simplicity, choice and security?
The answer, I believe, lies in the concept of a digital workspace.
One may think of digital workspaces as a collection of digital assets -- any type of application, virtual desktop, files or data that organizations and their people use on a daily basis to get their work done. Where those digital assets reside and who provides them is changing almost daily, as is the context of access -- the kinds of devices and the number of locations used to access them.
Typically, organizations have delivered these kinds of traditional applications from their own data centers inside the four walls of their own buildings, but increasingly, as every business looks to adopt more and more technology to help drive new business models and reach new customers, this fuels the ongoing growth of “cloud” based applications, delivered from multiple providers and from different clouds.
The evolution of this new multicloud world demands that IT departments are equipped with the right tools to allow the freedom for their users to work from anywhere, however they choose, wherever they choose -- while providing the right security at the right time -- and doing that seamlessly from the user perspective.
Security cannot be in the way or it will simply be circumvented. Users are smart and options are plenty. A digital workspace approach offers the flexibility for organizations to choose how they deliver a contextual experience for individual users.
We no longer live in castles, where moats and drawbridges are employed to keep the bad guys out. Those castles were the corporate firewalls of old -- protecting company data that was always in one place. Focusing purely on securing devices no longer works. Concentrating on the user behavior (the context) is the fundamental change in the fight against cyber threats and being in the chain of every user transaction is critical for the 360-degree visibility that is required to add the extra layers of defense.
If strategies require certain types of applications to be delivered in a centralized way, via virtual desktops or in a decentralized way from multiple SaaS vendors, via native mobile applications or (most likely from combinations of all of these approaches), the digital workspace must support this -- and, above all, it must do this by understanding who the user is, where they are, what device they are using and what tasks they need to complete. This is achieved by building up a picture of how each person operates and using advanced analytics and machine learning techniques to constantly adapt the experience.
Security will continue to be the number one concern of CIOs for years to come, but this should not need to be at the expense of productivity. Cloud providers invest incredible amounts of money to ensure they deliver high levels of security and quality digital workspaces, as that is their business. CIOs have a fantastic opportunity to become business enablers and take their organizations forward in their own digital transformation journeys.
