by Don Jones

Hybrid IT is one of the new terms floating around the IT industry, and it’s more important than you might think. It’s actually a very carefully-crafted term that carries a good deal of meaning and import.

In the past, IT departments had pretty much their entire world under their control. Sure, you relied on certain external services such as utility providers, but by and large, most of your problems related to IT service delivery were inside your data center and completely within your power to influence, monitor, and change.

That’s changing. Businesses today are looking at outsourcing elements of their IT portfolio by using hosted service providers, Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings, or by transitioning applications to cloud computing providers. Regardless of which IT elements you’re outsourcing, you’re never outsourcing an entire IT service. Let’s say you move to an SaaS customer relationship management (CRM) solution: Although the application itself may be out of your direct control, you still control the elements that provide access to it, such as a network connection, Internet firewall, client computer Web browsers, and so on. You’re truly in a hybrid environment-an amalgamation between in-house IT resources and outsourced IT resources.

Such an environment can be pretty challenging. If the application is running slowly, who’s at fault? It could be your network connection. It could be your firewall. It could be your client computers. It could also be the service provider’s Internet connection, their front-end servers, or even their back-end database. Things might only be slow from certain parts of the world, if the service provider is globally distributed and is having problems in a certain data center. You can’t just universally pass “slow” complaints to the provider because the problem may, sometimes, be entirely on your end, or it may be “in between” you and the provider, somewhere in one of your connections to the Internet.

Regardless of the service level agreements (SLAs) in place between you and the provider, even a confirmed problem on the provider’s end won’t cover the potential business losses you sustain for an unavailable or slow application. At most, an SLA will usually credit you for fees paid to the provider when the SLA isn’t met. That won’t pay for the business losses you sustain, however, when a critical application isn’t responding quickly enough for your users to get their jobs done, or for your customers to access your products and services. So what do you need to do? You need to get your head into the cloud. You need to somehow gain the same kind of insight into your cloud-based IT elements as you have within your own data center. You need to know performance metrics, resource consumption, all the way up the chain.

You also need to carefully monitor the end user experience (EUE) so that you can better gauge the real-world, practical performance of a service-including all its many elements both in your control and in someone else’s. As the IT industry begins to consume more and more outsourced IT services, we’re also evolving new monitoring and management needs, and a new generation of monitoring and management products are being developed to meet those needs.

About the Author

Don Jones has more than a decade of professional experience in the IT industry. He's the author of more than 30 IT books, including Windows PowerShell: TFM; VBScript, WMI, and ADSI Unleashed; Managing Windows with VBScript and WMI; and many more. He's a top-rated and in-demand speaker at conferences such as Microsoft TechEd and TechMentor, and writes the monthly Windows PowerShell column for Microsoft TechNet Magazine. Don is a multiple-year recipient of Microsoft's "Most Valuable Professional" (MVP) Award with a specialization in Windows PowerShell. Don's broad IT experience includes work in the financial, telecommunications, software, manufacturing, consulting, training, and retail industries and he's one of the rare IT professionals who can not only "cross the line" between administration and software development, but also between IT workers and IT management. Don is a co-founder of Concentrated Technologies, and serves as author and series editor for Realtime Publishers.