IT Briefcase Exclusive Interview: Top Skills Needed to Manage Hybrid IT Environments

Featured Interview with Kong Yang, Head Geek, SolarWinds

 The market is rapidly evolving from traditional on-premises IT to a hybrid strategy driven by the cloud. Based on a 2015 survey of global IT professionals, the vast majority say they now work in hybrid IT environments, and nearly half (48 percent) identify with the term “hybrid IT professional.” In this interview, Kong Yang, Head Geek and technical product manager at SolarWinds, speaks with IT Briefcase on how hybrid environments are changing the role of the IT professional.

• Q. How do you define ‘hybrid IT?’

A. Well, despite the migration to the cloud, in almost all environments, there are workloads that have and will remain on-premises for the foreseeable future. This reality is hybrid IT: migrating some infrastructure to the cloud, while continuing to maintain some critical services on-premises.

• Q. How has the move to hybrid IT changed the role of IT professional?

A. An IT professional operating in a hybrid IT environment must transcend traditional roles and possess a deep understanding of enterprise networks, data centers and application delivery. Additionally, they also need the ability to manage infrastructures, integrate cloud services and ensure quality-of-service (QoS) that meets business performance needs for any given service delivered via a cloud provider. In short, today’s IT pros need to become polymaths in order to be successful in a hybrid IT world as they pivot across multiple domains and skillsets.

• Q. Are there any new skills IT professionals need to be successful in these environments?

A. Yes. In fact it’s a mix of honing and adapting existing skills as well as acquiring new ones. The survey provided insight into the top skills that are most needed to effectively manage hybrid IT environments. They are: service-oriented architectures, automation, vendor management, application migration, distributed architectures and hybrid IT monitoring and management tools and metrics.

• Q. Can you talk a bit more in-depth about each of these skills?

A. Of course. Starting from the top, IT professionals who work with service-oriented architectures (SOAs) today have many pillars and layers to consider, but at the core of are the service provider and the service consumer. So, as more companies move to a hybrid IT model, they will need to be more agile and cost-effective. To meet these needs and continue improving skills and expertise in SOAs, IT professionals should have a fundamental understanding of application architectures and how to scale them, distributed systems and APIs.

The evolution of automation should be expected as hybrid IT becomes more common. Automation enables the scale, agility and availability that businesses require, but today’s automation is done primarily with scripts. As more businesses move towards hybrid IT, where infrastructure resources are only one part of the equation, they will need more than scripts to enable automation as they reduce the friction to consumption for their end users.

Vendor management is two-fold, as IT professionals will be required to manage the technology aspect of cloud environments, as well as managing the business side of cloud service provider terms and conditions as well as different pricing models that change over time. Let’s just say that this will give them more opportunities to expand their careers and roles.

Application migration to the cloud can be difficult and time-consuming; in fact it’s not uncommon to spend weeks on a single application. However, IT pros should become familiar with the product suites of IBM, Microsoft and Amazon, who have begun making it much easier to migrate applications to the cloud.

Working with distributed architectures will require working across multiple cloud service providers across multiple geographic locations. For IT professionals seeking to adapt their skillsets to succeed in hybrid IT environments, they will need to become accustomed to cloud service providers doing the remediation in case of outages or other performance issues, and, as the ultimate failover, having multiple providers.

Finally, with many of today’s on-premises monitoring and management tools and metrics, IT professionals often have a disparate view of their environments—compute, storage, network, virtualization and application layers. The multitude of different tools and processes across multiple platforms are difficult to manage, let alone scale. For hybrid IT environments, a complete view of the on-premises data center and the cloud is even more critical.

Any closing remarks?

Managing applications and other IT infrastructures in this new hybrid world requires IT professionals to be armed with a new or adapted set of skills, and the tools and resources that match them. Adding and mastering the six skills I’ve outlined here—service-oriented architectures, automation, vendor management, application migration, distributed architectures and hybrid IT monitoring and management tools and metrics—will go a long way to ensuring not only business success, but IT career longevity.

Kong Yang is a Head Geek at SolarWinds with over 20 years of IT experience specializing in virtualization and cloud management. He is a VMware vExpert™, Cisco® Champion, and active contributing thought leader within the virtualization community.