Author: Louis Gervais, COO, FlexITy

When you think of hybrid cloud, you probably view it as a technical solution for your business — a fix for one or several challenges that your company may already have. So would you believe me if I told you that this way of thinking could actually be holding your organization back from reaching its full potential?

There’s a reason why 78% of enterprises are unable to meet their business objectives through technology.

To help position your organization for ongoing success, I would like to propose a different way to think about hybrid cloud.

Consider this statement: Hybrid cloud isn’t about technology at all. It’s about humans
People need to implement the right business processes to support and strengthen their organizations before adopting new technologies.

Hybrid cloud does not exist to improve technology across your organization because technology fails without the proper processes. Instead, it is a method that exists to enhance business processes and experiences for users.

I encourage you to take a few minutes to digest the following explanation of what hybrid cloud is to wrap your head around its true, human-centric nature.

An Approach to Satisfy Impatient Prosumers

Today, everyone has become a prosumer, consuming technology while helping to shape it on a daily basis. From the moment we wake up in the morning until we go to sleep, we are dependent on our phones, TVs, and computers for a wide variety of services.

These services, presented through applications like Netflix and Amazon, deliver user experiences that are quick, consistent, and seamless. The emergence of these exceptional applications has caused prosumers to become impatient toward interruptions around any kind of user experience.

In fact, a study from Microsoft found that the human attention span has dropped to only eight seconds when searching for a website.

“People expect all of the apps they use at work to function like the apps they use at home,” says John Lilek, a solution architect at FlexITy.

Businesses are no longer just competing with other enterprises in their industry. Now, they must create user experiences that are just as seamless as those provided by Big Tech companies for consumers sitting at home or on the road.

For IT teams, this means going beyond satisfying business leaders and, instead, becoming true service providers by striving to serve all end users, which include both employees and customers.

Hybrid cloud gives business leaders the power to satisfy employees and customers in a sustainable, consistent way.

A Method for Reducing Disruption

As we move away from a technology-centric mindset and toward a human-centric one, hybrid cloud helps business leaders redefine success around their services.

Ultimately, there are three critical measures of success when it comes to hybrid cloud.

First, we must keep track of the number of times users connect to your services without interruption. If they aren’t able to access them smoothly 100% of the time, you’re probably losing their attention.

It’s also important to measure the amount of time users can connect without being disrupted. The more time they spend connected, the more successful you are in keeping them focused on your organization.

Finally, ask yourself: Can users complete a transaction without being interrupted and without having to communicate in more than one way?

Just think of how streamlined it is for customers to purchase a product on Amazon: They can complete an order by pressing no more than two buttons.

“Success is whether or not users start complaining,” explains Allan Meace, VMware solution architect at FlexITy. “If your processes work for people, then they’re successful.”

Shifting Your Perception of  Hybrid Cloud

Until now, IT would have been focused mainly on technology first. However, this historical approach to technology in IT now prevents staff from coming up with effective business-focused solutions to their organization-related problems.

That shift is happening because businesses see that landscape change. It is changing at a pace that a traditional approach to technology deployment simply cannot keep up with.

According to Meace, “the difference between traditional IT and modern-day IT is that everything is application-centric, not infrastructure-centric.”

In other words, the world is now running on services rather than technology alone.

It is crucial for IT professionals to begin prioritizing end users over technology that is implemented for the sake of being implemented. After all, it’s the people, not the technology, that drives the demand for an application and a business’ success.

Business leaders need to invest the time to think and ask questions about how every decision made by IT will impact their existing services.

Through hybrid cloud, IT teams can take these necessary steps to provide richer user experiences and aim to resolve business problems in a well-informed manner that reduces risk to their business.

If you want to increase your understanding around hybrid cloud fully, this is only the start of your journey. Access our second article in this series, “Why Hybrid Cloud Exists Today,” to find out how your business can benefit from this journey to the cloud.