Our guests on the podcast this week are Lynda Stadtmueller, Vice President, Cloud Services at Frost & Sullivan and Kelly Ireland, Founder and CEO at CB Technologies.

We discuss why hybrid cloud and change management are still important for companies in the second decade of modern cloud. With the exception of some startups born in the cloud, many enterprises never accepted the fact that the cloud would replace the data center. Organizations feel this is not an “or” discussion, it’s an “and” discussion. They know things need to be on the public cloud, and they need their own on-premises data center as well. Therefore, enterprises sift through their workloads and data to determine what makes sense to migrate to public cloud and what makes sense to keep on private cloud. CTP has found that 30-40% of workloads are not economically viable to move to the public cloud. Organizations can build net new applications on the cloud, but they shouldn’t move everything. For this reason, hybrid cloud will continue to be a strong focus for enterprises in the future.

How will the cloud change IT within companies? 

Businesses are now technology dependent. Every aspect of how a business operates is becoming technology-based. The technology allows a new way for enterprises to innovate and with that, a need for IT organizations to transform. Separate from the need to understand what the cloud is and how to optimize it, these IT teams must also draw on new skill sets professionally. IT organizations are struggling with how to become a customer service-oriented organization to internal line of business clients. 53% of companies are concerned about the changing roles of IT employees. There is a lot of change management that is required that has nothing to do with the technology, but more to do with how it’s delivered to the business.