Managing Your Infrastructure in a Hybrid Environment

What Does HDIM Stand For?

HDIM is Hybrid Digital Infrastructure Management, and if you’ve just come across the term elsewhere, there are a few things you should know to begin your journey.

Large modern organizations tend to use a big mix of infrastructure technologies to power their business operations. Even recently created organisations may still have a mixture of on-premise technologies as well as a footprint in the cloud. 

In fact, many using public clouds don’t have just one provider. The organisation might have the right workloads in the right place for its needs, but managing them may be a challenge. 

Inevitably this mixture quickly creates complexity for the infrastructure technology teams that manage the competing demands of heterogeneous hardware and software. With this increasing complexity and maturity teams find that they need to develop hybrid digital infrastructure management skills in order to generate the best business value from their infrastructure and operations (I&O) platform.

Optimizing Workload Placement with New Management Tools

Gartner contends that by 2022, 20 percent of enterprises will use hybrid digital infrastructure management tools to optimize workload placement across on-premises, cloud and edge environments (Hybrid Digital Infrastructure Management: A View From the Top, September 2019). 

According to the analysts, there are no current solutions offering a complete visualization of a hybrid environment. When multiple cloud providers, data centers, and platforms are used, particularly remote services, the ability to manage strategically plummets.

As an I&O professional knows, hybrid environments offer greatly enhanced corporate agility because they provide greater options in workload deployment, and yet those in the know inevitably find that they increase complexity too. It seems certain that as the use of hybrid services continues to evolve gaps will increasingly show within I&O teams, their solutions and their ability to coordinate activities.

Gartner expects that HDIM tools will grow as a superset of today’s data center infrastructure management (DCIM) tools. The idea being that such solutions should monitor IT assets, workloads and costs across owned data centers, colocation and hosting providers, as well as cloud service providers. As such the technology promises to deliver one image of the compute services being delivered by IT to business users, wherever they reside.

So What Can the I&O Team Do?

Those I&O leaders that are looking to optimise their operations infrastructure and cloud management should look to tick off a few best practices.

Firstly, it pays dividends to ensure the organization develops workload analytical skills and the right solutions to enable visibility across technologies as well as to take action in order to manage complex hybrid environments.

Secondly, teams need a dependable view of the value IT solutions provide to the business, as well as each technology’s state and, importantly, its potential too. With metrics for usage, performance, and dependencies made visible irrespective of the infrastructure used to enable each one.

Thirdly, it’s sensible to create an HDIM toolset by combining insights from various management solutions from IT service management (ITSM), DCIM, cloud management platform (CMP) and wherever else information resides.

Taken together, you’ve got the outline of the way forward with your HDIM plan. Let’s see where it takes you.