Getting all mature with hybrid infrastructure

By Charles Wilson

Let’s talk maturity. IT maturity, that is.

I’ve blogged about IT maturity before, but let’s define it for this discussion using the IT Maturity Model:

1. Initial – Processes are undocumented, low communication, reinventing each time
2. Repeatable - Repeatable documented functional processes are currently being used in some areas.
3. Defined – Defined processes are documented, process integration started
4. Managed – Managed Services, processes measured with metrics and an established Portfolio Office
5. Optimizing – Optimizing of all processes is implemented, documented, measured and managed, and a formal Continual Improvement process is in place

The IT Maturity Model is obviously intended to give you an idea of how to rate your organization’s maturity, from an initial stage to fully optimized. So how does your organization rate?

Believe it or not, IT Maturity is often overlooked within IT organizations. When that happens, the adoption of new services is likely to fail. And in most cases it does.

This leads to money lost and resources wasted. I could give you many examples of this, but I don’t want to waste your time dwelling on failures. Instead, I want to give you an example that shows how you can look at your organization and decide if your organization is a good fit to become a hybrid enterprise and adopt a hybrid infrastructure.

So our example is a company that needs a new CRM system because its current CRM system is old and is running on old outdated hardware and, most of all, doesn’t meet the organization’s current business needs. In this situation, the IT staff has to ask a bunch of questions to evaluate its IT maturity.

Those questions include: Does my organization have the ability to migrate to a new CRM system that will meet the business’ need? Do we have processes in place that can meet business requirements like 24 by 7 uptime, disaster recovery, backup, scalability, security, monitoring, and ongoing modernization?

Cloud service providers all offer these types of capabilities. In order to adopt these types of capabilities and deliver your businesses CRM needs your organization needs to have an IT Maturity level high enough to be able to adopt a hybrid enterprise architecture.

And a hybrid infrastructure can provide some huge benefits to your organization and your business, especially helping your organization attain IT maturity.

Let’s take the 24 by 7 uptime requirement as an example. Your organization probably needs help to meet this requirement or is already using a service that provide this. But not only that, your organization needs to have processes in place to be able to manage a 24 by 7 help desk so it can achieve 24 by 7 uptime. That is only part of it; it isn’t just about a 24 by 7 help desk. It is also having monitoring, the ability to manage and deploy patching, and automating the deployment of new instances to scale out based on user demand.

And there are probably a half dozen other things that need to be in place. But there is no need for me to explain all of them. I think you get the picture. Hybrid Enterprise and adoption of a modern hybrid infrastructure can benefit your company and can bring new business capabilities to your company. You have to do some planning and you have to evaluate whether or not your organization can stand up the challenge of adopting a modern hybrid infrastructure. When you do that, you’re assessing your maturity level.

As a Cloud Architect I have helped organization assess their capabilities and adopt modern hybrid capabilities within their organization to bring new business capabilities to their company. Stepping back and taking the time to assess accurately your IT organizations capability is a capability that you can either develop within house or their organization you can leverage that can provide this service.

Our Cloud team has a process called ARM, which stands for Assessment, Roadmap and Migration. This modern mature process helps organization assess the adoption of a new technology such as adopting a hybrid infrastructure. This process uses work products to gather information on the current state of your IT infrastructure, assess your organizations IT maturity level and determine how and what your organization can do to adopt a hybrid infrastructure.

As part of the assessment, we develop a roadmap to help your organization stand up projects and organize task for adoption. ARM also builds out a complete migration plan as part of developing the Roadmap.

When you put these three pieces together, the Assessment, the Roadmap, and the Migration itself, your organization will have a solid plan for delivering on a modern hybrid infrastructure that will meet and exceed your businesses needs and requirements. This should and can lead to business success.

About the author

Charles Wilson is our Cloud Solutions Advisor. He has extensive experience in designing and implementing cloud solutions for companies in such industries as financial services, real estate, manufacturing, and retail. He holds certifications as an IBM Certified Enterprise Architect, AWS Technical Professional, and AWS TCO and Cloud Economics.