World is witnessing another armed conflict. This time it’s in Ukraine being invaded by Russia. A conflict of this nature rings many bells for IT Services perspective as well.

From a information availability and security perspective, A conflict of this scale brings out the need for Hybrid infrastructure. Imagine of a customer who has all their key services either on Cloud or On premise; if his infrastructure gets affected by the conflict, it would be impact their business.

Similarly putting all the workload on a cloud could even be a challenge. For instance from a Russian perspective, none of the major cloud vendors would be able to transact and go ahead with the cloud services due to sanctions. They will soon be impacted by USD billing as they are at the risk of not being able to trade in USD.

What’s important is the global nature of these challenges. Even an event occurring on via a remote location on the world may affect your business.

Therefore CIOs will have to think of more aspects when they are planning the infrastructure for their IT services. Specially if they are adopting a cloud strategy they will have to think of many non technical aspects which might impact the business uptime.

Unfortunately the technology is being developed in a way where we are unable to totally move out of these challenges. For instance many organizations who are adopting SaaS or PaaS solutions will be unable to move out their infrastructure and switch to a different provider due to the tight integrated solutions provided by them. Therefore when evaluating SaaS moves, organizations will also have to rethink the freedom of downloading data and moving towards a different provider. In terms of IaaS there would be ways of moving the workloads across but in terms of PaaS or SaaS it becomes even more difficult.

One of the favorite questions asked by people was whether an enterprise should take a Cloud first approach. Global events such as war and pandemics and the impact on IT infrastructure and services makes us favor a hybrid approach. With a hybrid approach we would be able to move critical workload to the most suitable infrastructure and avoid downtime.

Post by Sadeepa Palliyaguru, Director | CIO

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