New Strategies Emerge to Stem the Costly Downside of Today’s Unwieldly Cloud Adoption Choices

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New Strategies Emerge to Stem
the Costly Downside of Today’s
Unwieldly Cloud Adoption Choices
Transcript of a discussion on what causes haphazard cloud use, and how new tools,
processes, and methods are bringing actionable analysis to regain control over hybrid IT
sprawl.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the
transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of
the Analyst podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions,
your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on the latest insights into successful
digital transformation.
This hybrid IT management strategies interview explores how jerry-rigged approaches to
cloud adoption at many organizations have spawned complexity amid spiraling -- and
even unknown -- costs.
We’ll hear now from an IT industry analyst about what causes unwieldy cloud use, and
how new tools, processes, and methods are bringing insights and actionable analysis to
regain control over hybrid IT sprawl.
Here to help us explore new breeds of hybrid and multi-cloud
management solutions is Rhett Dillingham, Vice President
and Senior Analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy. Welcome,
Rhett.
Rhett Dillingham: Thank you. Glad to be with you.
Gardner: Rhett, what are some of the drivers making hybrid
and multi-cloud adoption so complex?
Footprints in the cloud
Dillingham: Regardless of how an enterprise has invested in public and private cloud
use for the last decade, a lot of them ended up in a similar situation. They have a
footprint on at least one or multiple public clouds. This is in addition to their private
infrastructure, in whatever degree that private infrastructure has been cloud-enabled and
turned into a cloud API-available infrastructure to their developers.
Dillingham

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They have this footprint then across the hybrid infrastructure and multiple public clouds.
Therefore, they need to decide how they are going to orchestrate on those various
infrastructures -- and how they are going to manage in terms of control costs, security,
and compliance. They are operating cloud-by-cloud, versus operating as a consolidated
group of infrastructures that use common tooling. This is the real wrestling point for a lot
of them, regardless of how they got here.
Gardner: Where are we in this as an evolution? Are things going to get worse before
they get better in terms of these levels of complexity and heterogeneity?
Dillingham: We’re now at the point where this is so commonly recognized that we are
well into the late majority of adopters of public cloud. The vast majority of the market is in
this situation. We’re going to get worse from an enterprise market perspective.
We are also at the inflection point of requiring orchestration tooling, particularly with the
advent of containers. Container orchestration is getting more mature in a way that is
ready for broad adoption and trust by enterprises, so they can make bets on that
technology and the platforms based on them.
Control issues
On the control side, we’re still in the process of sorting out the tooling. You have a
number of vendors innovating in the space, and there have been a number of startup
efforts. Now, we’re seeing more of the historical infrastructure providers invest in the
software capabilities and turning those into services -- whether it’s Hewlett Packard
Enterprise (HPE), VMware, or Cisco, they are all making serious investments into the
control aspect of hybrid IT. That’s because their value is private cloud but extends to
public cloud with the same need for control.
Gardner: You mentioned containers, and they provide a common denominator
approach so that you can apply them across different clouds, with less arduous and
specific work than deploying without containerization. The attractiveness of containers
comes because the private cloud people aren’t going to help you deal with your public
cloud deployment issues. And the public clouds aren’t necessarily going to help you deal
with other public clouds or private clouds. Is that why containers are so popular?
Dillingham: If you go back to the fundamental
basis of adoption of cloud and the value
proposition, it was first and foremost about
agility -- more so than cost efficiency.
Containers are a way of extending that value,
and getting much deeper into speed of
development, time to market, and for
innovation and experimentation.
Containers are a way of … getting
much deeper into speed of
development, time to market, and
for innovation and experimentation.

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Containerization is an improvement geared around that agility value that furthers cloud
adoption. It is not a stark difference from virtual machines (VMs), in the sense of how the
vendors support and view it.
So, I think a different angle on that would be that the use of VMs in public cloud was step
one, containers was a significant step two that comes with an improved path to the
agility and speed value. The value the vendor ecosystem is bringing with the platforms --
and how that works in a portable way across hybrid infrastructures and multi-cloud -- is
more easily delivered with containers.
There’s going to be an enterprise world where orchestration runs specific to cloud
infrastructure, public versus private, but different on various public clouds. And then
there is going to be more commonality with containers by virtue of the Kubernetes
project and Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) portfolio.
That’s going to deliver for new applications -- and those lifted and shifted into containers
-- much more seamless use across these hybrid infrastructures, at least from the control
perspective.
Gardner: We seem to be at a point where the number of cloud options has outstripped
the ability to manage them. In a sense, the cart is in front of the horse; the horse being
hybrid cloud management. But we are beginning to see more such management come
to the fore. What does this mean in terms of previous approaches to management?
In other words, a lot of organizations already have management for solving a variety of
systems heterogeneity issues. How should the new forms of management for cloud have
a relationship with these older management tools for legacy IT?
Get more information
On HPE OneSphere
Dillingham: That is a big question for enterprises. How much can they extend their
existing toolsets to public cloud?
A lot of the vendors from the private [infrastructure] sector invested in delivering new
management capabilities, but that isn’t where many started. I think the rush to adoption
of public cloud -- and the focus on agility over cost-efficiency -- has driven a
predominance of the culture of, “We are going to provide visibility and report and guide,
but we are not going to control because of the business value of that agility.”
And the tools have grown up as a delivery on that visibility, versus the control of the
typical enterprise private infrastructure approach, which is set up for a disruptive
orientation to the software and not continuity. That is an advantage to vendors in those
different spheres. I see that continuing.
Gardner: You mentioned both agility and cost as motivators for going to hybrid cloud,
but do we get to the point where the complexity and heterogeneity spawn a lack of

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insight and control? Do we get to the point where we are no longer increasing agility?
And that means we are probably not getting our best costs either.
Are we at a point where the complexity is subverting our agility and our ability to have
predictable total costs?
Growing up in the cloud
Dillingham: We are still a long away from maturity in effective use of cloud
infrastructure. We are still at a point where just understanding what is optimal is pretty
difficult across the various purchase and consumption options of public cloud by provider
and in comparing that to an accurate cost model for private infrastructure. So, the tooling
needs to be in place to support this.
There has been a lot of discussion recently about HPE OneSphere from Hewlett
Packard Enterprise, where they have invested in delivering some of this comparability
and the analytics to enable better decision-making. I see a lot of innovation in that space
-- and that’s just the tooling.
There is also the management of the
services, where the cloud managed service
provider market is continuing to develop
beyond just a brokering orientation. There is
more value now in optimizing an enterprise’s
footprint across various cloud infrastructures
on the basis of optimal agility. And also creating value from services that can
differentiate among different infrastructures – be it Amazon Web Services (AWS) versus
Azure, and Google, and so forth – and provide the cost comparisons.
Gardner: Given that it’s important to show automation and ongoing IT productivity, are
these new management tools including new levels of analytics, maybe even predictive
insights, into how workloads and data can best become fungible -- and moved across
different clouds -- based on the right performance and/or cost metrics?
Is that part of the attractiveness to a multi- and cross-cloud management capability?
Does hybrid cloud management become a slippery slope toward impressive analytics
and/or performance-oriented automation?
Dillingham: We’ve had investment in the tooling from the cloud providers, the software
providers, and the infrastructure providers. Yet the insights have come more from the
professional services’ realm than they have from the tooling realm. That’s provided a
feedback loop that can now be applied across hybrid- and multi-cloud in a way that
hasn’t come from the public cloud provider tools themselves.
So, where I see the most innovation is from the providers that are trying to address
multi-cloud environments and best feed innovation from their customer engagements
There is more value now in
optimizing an enterprise’s footprint
across various cloud infrastructures
on the basis of optimal agility.

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from professional services. I like the opportunity HPE has to benefit from their
acquisitions of Cloud Technology Partners and RedPixie, and then feeding those
insights back into [product development]. I’ve seen a lot of examples about the work
they’re doing in HPE OneSphere in moving those insights into action for customers
through analytics.
Gardner: I was also thinking about the Nimble acquisition, and with InfoSight, and the
opportunity for that intellectual property to come to bear on this, too.
On HPE OneSphere
Dillingham: Yes, which is really harvesting the value of the control and insights of the
private infrastructure and the software-defined orientation of private infrastructure in
comparison to the public cloud options.
Gardner: Tell us about Rhett Dillingham. You haven’t been an IT industry analyst
forever. Please tell us a bit about your background.
Dillingham: I’ve been a longtime product management leader. I started in hardware, at
AMD, and moved into software. Before the cloud days, I was at Microsoft. Next I was
building out the early capabilities at AWS, such as Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and
Elastic Block Store (EBS). Then I went into a portfolio of services at Rackspace, building
those out at the platform level and the overall Rackspace public cloud. As the value of
OpenStack matured into private use, I worked with a number of enterprises on private
OpenStack cloud deployments.
As an analyst, I support project management-oriented, consultative, and go-to-market
positioning of our clients.
Gardner: Let’s dwell on the product management side for a bit. Given that the market is
still immature, given what you know customers are seeking for a hybrid IT end-state,
what should vendors such as HPE be doing in order to put together the right set of
functions, processes, and simplicity -- and ultimately, analytics and automation -- to
solve the mess among cloud adoption patterns and sprawl?
Clean up the cloud mess
Dillingham: We talked about automation and orchestration, talked about control of
cost, security, and compliance. I think that there is a tooling and services spectrum to be
delivered on those. The third element that needs to be brought into the process is the
control structure of each enterprise, of what their strategy is across the different
infrastructures.

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Where are they optimizing on cost based on what they can do in private infrastructure?
Where are they setting up decision processes? What incremental services should be
adopted? What incremental clouds should be adopted, such as what an Oracle and an
IBM are positioning their cloud offerings to be for adoption beyond what’s already been
adopted by a client in AWS, Google, and Azure?
I think there’s a synergy to be had across those needs. This spans from the software
and services tooling, into the services and managed services, and in some cases when
the enterprise is looking for an operational partner.
Gardner: One of the things that I struggle with, Rhett, is not just the process, the
technology and the opportunity, but the people. Who in a typical enterprise IT
organization should be tasked with such hybrid IT oversight and management? It
involves more than just IT.
To me, it’s economics, it’s procurement, it’s contracts. It involves a bit more than red
light, green light … on speed. Tell me about who or how organizations need to change to
get the right people in charge of these new tools.
Who’s in charge?
Dillingham: More than the individuals, I
think this is about the recognition of the
need for partnerships between the
business units, the development
organizations, and the operational IT
organization’s arm of the enterprise.
The focus on agility for business value had a lot of the cloud adoption led by the
business units and the application development organizations. As the focus on maturity
mixes in the control across security and compliance, those are traditional realms of the
IT operational organization.
Now there’s the need for decision structure around sourcing -- where how they value
incremental capabilities from more clouds and cloud providers is a decision of tradeoffs
and complexity. As you were mentioning, of weighing between the incremental value of
an additional provider and an incremental service, and portability across those.
What I am seeing in the most mature setups are partnerships across the orientations of
those organizations. That includes the acknowledgment and reconciliation of those
tradeoffs in long-term portability of applications across infrastructures – against the value
of adoption of proprietary capabilities, such as deeper cognitive machine learning (ML)
automation and Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities, which are some of the drivers of the
more specific public cloud platform uses.
This is about the recognition of the need
for partnerships between the business
units, the development organizations,
and the operational IT organization’s
arm of the enterprise.

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Gardner: So with adopting cloud, you need to think about the organizational implications
and refactor how your business operates. This is not just bolting on a cloud capability.
You have to rethink how you are doing business across the board in order to take full
advantage.
Dillingham: There is wide recognition of that theme. It gets into the nuts and bolts as
you adopt a platform and you determine exactly how the operations function and roles
are going to be defined. It means determining who is going to handle what, such as how
much you are going to empower developers to do things themselves. With the
accountability that results, more tradeoffs are there for them in their roles. But it's almost
over-rotation and focus to that out of recognition of it and lack of valuation of that more
senior-level decision making in what their cloud strategy is.
I hear a lot of cloud strategies that are as
simple as, “Yes, we are allowing and
empowering adoption of cloud by our
development teams,” without the second-level
recognition of the need to have a strategy for
what the guidelines are for that adoption – not
in the sense of just controlling costs, but in the
sense of: How do you view the value of long-
term portability? How do you value strategic
sourcing and the ability to negotiate across these providers long-term with evidence and
demonstrable portability of your application portfolio?
Gardner: In order to make those proper calls on where you want to go with cloud and to
what degree, across which provider, organizations like HPE are coming up with new
tools.
So we have heard about HPE OneSphere. We are now seeing HPE’s GreenLake Hybrid
Cloud, which is a use of HPE OneSphere management as a service. Is that the way to
go? Should we think of cloud management oversight and optimization as a set of
services, rather than a product or a tool? It seems to me that a set of services, with an
ecosystem behind them, is pretty powerful.
A three-layer cloud
Dillingham: I think there are three layers to that. One is the tool, whether that is
consumed as software or as a service.
Second is the professional consultative services around that, to the degree that you as
an enterprise need help getting up to speed in how your organization needs to adjust to
benefit from the tools and the capabilities the tools are wrangling.
And then third is a decision on whether you need an operational partner from a managed
service provider perspective, and that's where HPE is stepping up and saying we will
A lot of cloud strategies are as
simple as “Yes, we are allowing and
empowering adoption of cloud by
our development teams,” without
the second-level recognition of the
need to have a strategy for what the
guidelines are for that adoption.

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handle all three of these. We will deliver your tools in various consumption models on
through to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model, for example, with HPE
OneSphere. And we will operate the services for you beyond that SaaS control portal
into your infrastructure management, across a hybrid footprint, with the HPE GreenLake
Hybrid Cloud offering. It is very compelling.
On HPE OneSphere
Gardner: With so many moving parts, it seems that we need certain things to
converge, which is always tricky. So to use the analogy of properly intercepting a hockey
puck, the skater is the vendor trying to provide these services, the hockey puck is the
end-user organization that has complexity problems, and the ice is a wide-open market.
We would like to have them all come together productively at some point in the future.
We have talked about the vendors; we understand the market pretty well. But what
should the end-user organizations be starting to do and think in order for them to be
prepared to take advantage of these tools? What should be happening inside your
development, your DevOps, and that larger overview of process and organization in
order to say, “Okay, we’re going to take advantage of that hockey player when they are
ready, so that we can really come together and be proficient as a cloud-first
organization?”
Commit to an action plan
Dillingham: You need to have a plan in place for each element we have talked about.
There needs to be a plan in place for how you are maturing your toolset in cloud-native
development… how you are supporting that on the development side from a continuous
integration (CI) and continuous development (CD) perspective; how you are reconciling
that with the operational toolset and the culture of operating in a DevOps model with
whatever degree of iterative development you want to enable.
Is the tooling in place from an orchestration and development capability and operations
perspective, which can be containers or not? And that gets into container orchestration
and the cloud management platforms. There is the control aspect. What tooling you are
going to apply there, how you are going to consume that, and how much you want to
provide it as a consultative offer? And then how much do you want those options
managed for you by an operational partner? And then how you are going to set up your
decision-making structure internally?
Every element of that is where you need to be maturing your capabilities. A lot of the
starting baseline for the consultative value of a professional services partner is walking
you through the decision-making that is common to every organization on each of those
fronts, and then enabling a deep discussion of where you want to be in 3, 5, or 10 years,
and deciding proactively.

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More importantly than anything, what is
the goal? There is a lot of
oversimplification of what the goal is –
such as adoption of cloud and picking of
best-of-breed tools -- without a vision
yet for where you want the organization
to be and how much it benefits from the
agility and speed value, and the cost
efficiency opportunity.
Gardner: It’s clear that those organizations that can take that holistic view, that have the
long-term picture in mind, and can actually execute on it, have a significant advantage in
whatever market they are in. Is that fair?
Dillingham: It is. And one thing that I think we tend to gloss over -- but does exist -- is a
dynamic where some of the decision-makers are not necessarily incentivized to think
and consider these options on a long-term basis.
The folks who are in role, often for one to three years before moving to a different role or
a different enterprise, are going to consider these options differently than someone who
has been in role for 5 or 10 years and intends to be there through this full cycle and
outcome. I see those decisions made differently, and I think sometimes the executives
watching this transpire are missing that dynamic and allowing some decisions to be
made that are more short-term oriented than long-term.
Gardner: Maybe people at the board of directors’ level should familiarize themselves
more with cloud management capabilities as we go forward.
I’m afraid we’re going to have to leave it there. We have been exploring how jerry-rigged
approaches to cloud adoption at many organizations has spawned complexity and
spiraling costs. And we have also learned about new breeds of hybrid and multi-cloud
management solutions that are bringing insights and even actionable analysis to help
regain control over hybrid IT sprawl.
So please join me in thanking our guest, Rhett Dillingham, Vice President and Senior
Analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy. Thank you so much, Rhett.
Dillingham: It’s been a pleasure, Dana.
Gardner: And a big thank you to our audience as well for joining this BriefingsDirect
Voice of the Analyst hybrid IT management strategies interview.
I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host on this ongoing
series of Hewlett Packard Enterprise-sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening.
Please pass this along to your IT community, and do come back next time.
There is a lot of oversimplification of what
the goal is – such as adoption of cloud
and picking best-of-breed tools – without
a vision yet for where you want the
organization to be and how it benefits
from the agility and speed value, and the
cost efficiency opportunity.

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Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the
transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Transcript of a discussion on what causes haphazard cloud use, and how new tools,
processes, and methods are bringing actionable analysis to regain control over hybrid IT
sprawl. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2018. All rights reserved.
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