Changing the Status Quo Through Hybrid Cloud Strategies
Mark Clayman, President and CEO, TriCore Solutions
Accelerating Time to Market
CIOs, CXOs and CEOs are faced with significant challenges in today’s environment, including:
• Achieving year over year revenue growth while expanding operating margins at the same time.
• Enabling the business to innovate, but doing so within the same budget constraints that currently exist.
• Finding, hiring and retaining individuals that can leverage new technologies, are open to changing the status quo of how the business is managed and operated and that can bridge the gap between the business users and an organization’s technology investment.
• Accelerating the time to bring product and services to market
Managing Environment in AWS
In the end, security and compliance for an organization is not significantly different when managing an internal data center versus managing an environment in AWS. Organizations will still need to:
• Implement a governance model.
• Maintain the appropriate controls and policies.
• Implement a structured change management program.
• Establish roles and responsibilities and the associated access that mitigates security risks.
• Segreate application tiers, where necessary, to control and mitigate access from end users and the public internet where required.
• Leverage security, compliance, audit, logging and alert tools to identify and react to threats.
According to the Rightscale 2015 State of the Cloud Report, 82 percent of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy, up from 74 percent in 2014 
AWS has established that it can support audit and compliance requirements from FedRAMP to HIPAA to PCI and has a tool set that some organizations may not have implemented internally that provide an increased level of oversight and monitoring. There is no reason an environment in AWS should be less secure. It will come down to the way that it is managed.
IoT: A Game Changer
As many companies are aware, the Internet of Things (IoT) promises to be a game changer for the industry. Though this may seem like a new concept for some, it has been around for a significant amount of time–in different forms. For industries with complex supply chains like retail and manufacturing, however, tapping into the IoT is already underway–but more can be done with the technology available today to make operations smarter, more flexible and more cost-effective. Other industries are beginning to understand what IoT promises: to unlock value, create new products and services and rapidly transform how organizations manage, operationalize and monetize their assets. With IoT, physical assets become liquid, easily indexed, reported on and tracked, enabling businesses to significantly improve their understanding of everything from the operations of their business to the user of their products and services.
It is clear that organizations understand the value of IoT data, but it is unclear how to actually go from collecting the data to deriving value from the data. We expect the IoT will continue its accelerated implementation in 2016 and the associated adoption of cloud solutions as the platform to enable it’s effectiveness.
Major Trends in Cloud Services
There has been a significant increase in cloud adoption and outsourced cloud services within the past year. According to the Rightscale 2015 State of the Cloud Report, 82 percent of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy, up from 74 percent in 2014. Additionally, 88 percent of enterprises are using public cloud while 63 percent are using private cloud. As more companies choose to move more enterprise appliations and production work loads to the cloud, what becomes important is architecting the environment to meet the requirements and needs of the application envrionments and the business.
In particular, the decision to move production enterprise workloads to the cloud requires significant and skilled planning. Without this planning, organizations will miss out on the value that cloud platforms provide.
