In this series, we’ve looked at what it takes to create a hybrid cloud: developing a strategy for IT and business; defining business outcomes and a service portfolio; and choosing a delivery model. And yet sometimes the task remains daunting, especially for companies that have sufficient internal expertise or experience. In these cases, they should consider launching their project with a trusted partner.

For example, when developing an overarching strategy for hybrid cloud, you can lean on an outside partner to ensure you’re adding value and not just throwing together disparate products.

The right collaborator can help your organization define and meet business outcomes with hybrid cloud that are tied to service-level agreements (SLAs) and achieve return on investment. As we noted in the first two posts of this series, there’s a strong likelihood that if a project starts without any consideration for business goals or specific problems to be solved, it will not end well.

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In covering what is needed to build a hybrid cloud, so far we’ve looked at the importance of building an overall strategy before choosing products; defining business outcomes and goals; and defining capabilities and service portfolios. Now it’s time to choose delivery models.

After you have clearly identified what service capabilities you need, you can start thinking which delivery model would be best for each of those services. That’s true whether you want to build them yourself or have a provider build them for you.

The key is to find the optimal mix of hybrid service delivery model that matches meets the organization’s needs and service requirements and adheres to any financial constraints you might have.

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In previous posts, we described the importance of developing an overarching strategy for building a hybrid cloud environment and defining the desired business outcomes.

Based on this, organizations should next develop a portfolio of services or applications with capabilities that can deliver those outcomes. This is sometimes called a service catalog, or a menu of services that companies offer to users.

For example, if your organization needs to support its online business, you must be able to quickly scale up and down compute resources to meet changing volumes of electronic transactions. Speed and performance are important. Or if you are building a cloud-based medical records system, security and compliance become critical capabilities.

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The corporate landscape is littered with the unfortunate results of failed IT projects. Any number of factors can account for tech initiatives that don’t work out. But it’s a good bet that if a project is launched without any real consideration for business goals or specific problems to be solved, it will not end well or at the very least will not be as successful as it might have been.

While there’s nothing wrong with experimentation for the right reasons and in the proper context, investments in technology for technology’s sake can be huge and costly mistakes. There should be a business reason for deploying a new service or technology, if none other than to evaluate whether it’s delivering on objectives.

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Is your organization looking to launch a hybrid cloud deployment? If so, you’re not alone. Many enterprises are discovering the potential benefits of the hybrid environment, such as increased flexibility, scalability and lower costs.

Cloud is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Hybrid clouds combine both private and public cloud services within a single environment. With a hybrid cloud environment, companies can deliver some IT resources in-house while others are provided externally. The hybrid model delivers an added level of flexibility, enabling organizations to leverage public clouds for applications and workloads that don’t require the highest levels of security, and private clouds for those applications and workloads that are especially critical to the business and need higher levels of security.

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