The old titans of technology have given way to the new, and it’s all about clouds. I’m sure many of us remember not too long ago when all IT stuff was on-premises for both small and large enterprises. The Titans back then were local IT staff who usually sat in a room without windows on less traversed floors. They administered IT for the whole organization, and their location might have been next to the server room or in the server room itself. They were the ones who turned it off and on again.
These IT pros were usually a little nerdy and a bit shy. Otherwise, they probably would not have chosen this line of work. One thing for sure, though, was that they were the heroes of IT by keeping things running for the company and for each of us specifically. They came around and loaded programs on our computers with sets of disks. Sometimes our desktop servers would be kept overnight to run updates. When we had a good relationship with them, we got more things, like a test server underneath our desks that was decommissioned by the organization but still useful “under the radar”. I can still recall hearing that noisy fan on my old Sun Microsystem server with Solaris running as a Unix-based operating system.
Fast forward to today.
It’s not as clear who’s running what or where stuff is coming from. Most of us run around with skinny little laptops and smartphones that have access to petabytes of data and massive compute resources at the touch of a button. The concept of a server has given way to virtual machines and containers that live in a cloud somewhere. Instead of having two or three servers that we had control over, some of us have access to hundreds and thousands of computing instances that could be running anywhere with ten or a hundred times more power than these old physical servers.
At one time, we used cloud icons to symbolize the Internet, and also for showing wide area network (WAN) connections to a local area network (LAN), as shown in this image.
The Titans of Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Management
Now “The Cloud” is ubiquitous. We have private clouds, public clouds, and hybrid clouds. We have cloud-first approaches and cloud-native application architectures. The term “cloud” is an abstraction that just symbolizes network connectivity for a defined set of resources that are either on premises in your local data center, in rented space from a public cloud provider, or a combination of the two in the case of hybrid cloud.
To say that this new digital era has gotten massively complex is an understatement. Many new technologies have emerged making it incredibly complex as virtualization, infrastructure as code (IaC), and software-defined networks (SDN) have become the norm. Data is now stored anywhere including massive “data lakes” within the cloud. Consider also that everything is backed up and there’s a failover of mirrored resources sitting somewhere that can be turned on or off almost instantly.
New Clouds, New Titans
Our new titans are the ones who deliver this complexity in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. They can be sitting anywhere—at home, in an office, or some secure location for high-security computing. Many of them have kept up with technology and are still “Jacks of all trades” as the IT pros of the past were in many cases, but now there are more specialized roles that span a continuum of capabilities. Roles have been defined more specifically to run all this complexity across a digital ecosystem that includes compute, network, and storage power in clouds, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines of code, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices that add yet another layer of connectivity.
Let’s consider some of the key users and potential titans in this new era of enterprise hybrid and multi-cloud complexity.
End Users
- DevOps Engineer
- Software Engineer
- QA Engineer
End-users in the hybrid multi-cloud ecosystem build and deliver solutions. They are responsible for the software code that gets delivered to the mission-critical applications. They can develop software for external facing applications for eCommerce, finance, hospitality, healthcare, and more as well as all the internal business applications and the DevOps orchestration tools to deliver end-to-end solutions from the raw infrastructure to the actual code that runs the apps. The more they can automate any step of the way, the better.
Directors and Managers
- IT Manager
- Engineering Manager
- IT Director and CIO
Directors and managers are charged with implementing disruptive change in the way business is done within an organization. They must deliver more and new value faster and at an efficient cost. They must take into account legacy and future processes and balance security, risk, control, and spending with innovation and the ability to get solutions to market that will improve revenue for the company or achieve an outcome desired by the organization.
Administrators
- IT Admin
- Sys Admin
- Network Administrator
Administrators are the day-to-day IT pros that must do the installation and configuration of the backbone of any digital initiative including the hardware, networking, and server configurations. They have most likely been hit the hardest with requirements for digital change by having to move from legacy systems to more software-defined solutions that span the hybrid cloud landscape. They’re the ones who need to know what is required to have virtualized environments that run instances now instead of servers and the requirements to host the re-architecting of solutions in the cloud.
IT Architects
- Cloud Architect
- Solutions Architect
- Applications Architect
The architects of any hybrid multi-cloud ecosystem are the decision makers for the best fit of the technology for the solutions they deliver. They determine the placement of infrastructure resources—analogous to a building architect who designs what materials go into the construction of a specific structure that meets a specific need. They want to make sure that the resources consumed by the end users are easy to get and that they know how to use them. They must know how to respond to the very competitive enterprise offerings from public cloud providers.
CloudBolt Makes You a Titan
CloudBolt provides one place for all of these potential Titans of the hybrid multi-cloud era to be strategic, govern and control costs, and connect to all the technology for end-users to consume and deliver business value to the organization.
