Why Cloud Delivery Matters in Hybrid IT

In meeting with customers and partners over the past several months, I hear one question on a regular basis: "We like the flexibility of your Hybrid IT portfolio, but why are you building a public cloud?"

I’d like to explain some of the reasons why dwelling on “cloud,” as if it’s a separate product or technology, somewhat misses the point.

To understand this way of thinking, it’s helpful to think about the writings of Nick Carr. His 2003 Harvard Business Review article "IT Doesn’t Matter," touched off a firestorm of debate throughout our industry, especially within the vendor community. 

It’s easy to see what Mr. Carr got right. He correctly observed that the client-server era led to companies over-estimating the discrete value of IT device technology. He stressed the importance of strategic alignment between information technology and business stakeholders. He predicted the rise of cloud computing and utility-like pricing based on consumption.

And while there are valid criticisms afforded by a decade of hindsight, Carr’s fundamental truth holds up today. IT isn’t valuable unto itself; its value is derived from what it allows the larger organization to achieve.

The Value of Offering a Cloud Lies In How It Supports Your Strategy

Launching a cloud service provider (CSP) offering is no more valuable than deploying IT equipment unless it enables a larger strategic endeavor. An Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering unto itself becomes easily commoditized. Building a globally scalable cloud platform is already hard enough. Unless complementary revenue streams and business benefits are derived from the platform, it struggles to be cost-competitive over time. There are numerous examples of cloud strategies from giants of the tech sector that illustrate how hard this is to get right.

The winners in the cloud infrastructure market are those who build a globally scalable platform that:

1. Supports the primary business service objectives of the provider, and
2. Is architected such that outside parties can adopt it independently for their own business objectives

We see numerous examples of this throughout the industry:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) was famously created to add scale and flexibility to the primary business of retail e-commerce.
• Microsoft Azure has gained tremendous prominence in the market over the past few years, but did not start gaining real traction until it was consistently leveraged by the primary business of enterprise software.
• Google’s cloud innovations include open source contributions and developer-relevant service offerings that drive Internet use and the primary business of search-engine advertising.
• At CenturyLink, the primary business is Hybrid IT: a transformational approach to IT infrastructure that spans physical and virtual models hosted on premises, in third-party data centers, and provided as a service, all connected by secure private networks.

A Hybrid IT solution provider offers full-service solutions from network to enterprise applications, complemented by IT consulting and intellectual property, that allow customers to exploit the latest advancements in IT infrastructure services while optimizing legacy investments. 

Not only do customers expect a Hybrid IT solution provider to deliver high-quality service, but also to model the behavior they seek to emulate. CenturyLink’s agile transformation to a cloud platform mirrors that of enterprise customers. It’s easier to believe a company can help you transform when you see how they are doing it themselves.

Aligning Strategy With Delivery

The CenturyLink "public cloud" is really a Hybrid IT service delivery platform, which supports the primary business in many important ways:

• Interconnect automation and software-defined networking enables programmable networking dynamics into hosting solutions.
• Resource isolation provides optionality and control over the hardware pool –  provisioning virtual, physical and isolated environments.
• Composable architectures help faster innovation and bringing new services to market - the re-use of component services on a single platform helps build higher-level services for other customer segments.
• Agile infrastructure helps design managed services that can be delivered anywhere – including customer premises and alternate clouds like AWS, Azure or GCE.

It’s also important to offer public access to any platform so that emerging use cases, from un-managed customers, can suggest new features and enhance scalability:

• Partners using a wide range of integration options available to reach customers across diverse network locations and deployment models.
• Customers leveraging data gravity that exists in colocation centers and  network-connected locations to enable cloud-powered analytics and insight.
• Developers choosing the right platform for communications-based workloads where proximity and latency matter.

The purpose of CenturyLink’s DevOps transformation is to deliver a next-generation cloud user experience that supports our primary business. Ours is a Hybrid IT service delivery platform, and we believe this is different from basic "public cloud". It is clear that the cloud user experience is the model that all Hybrid IT customers will seek, and the mission of our platform development organization is to continue scaling, automating and metering our services while enabling broad platform access for motivated users, developers and partners with innovation objectives of their own.

Increasingly, "cloud" matters more as a delivery characteristic than as a product or technology category.  How does your own "cloud strategy" mirror that of your larger organization?

This article originally appeared on the CenturyLink Cloud Blog.