New chances in the cloud: System integrators link on- and off-site

Cloud computing is quickly moving from dream to reality. Large companies are already gradually transferring their IT to the cloud. In a first step, a company’s own IT is condensed and converted from services offered by virtualised systems to a private cloud. Thus, entire departments are made independent and begin ordering IT services from the cloud—with support coming from the very top in a manner of speaking – all while the IT staff continues to work on the conversion process. What results are hybrid forms: The earliest pioneers were Google Docs and the customer service application Salesforce, which were used primarily on their own, as well as services offered by Dropbox or Amazon's server capacities. A variety of cloud offerings have come about in the meantime while a corresponding demand for such services has continued to grow. Oftentimes, these hybrid forms are referred to as “hybrid clouds”. One can only actually speak of a “hybrid cloud”, however, when both private and public clouds are integrated with one another as opposed to instances where old storage facilities are simply reproduced in slightly altered form.

This, however, leads to a problem: How does data from an on-site program enter a cloud application and vice-versa? IT veterans can remember a time when mainframe programs ran alongside DOS programs on PCs. These two were so rigorously separated from each other that a number of records had to be entered in two times or more. Copy-and-paste functionalities have simplified this process since then, yet they still require a great deal of work that ends up eating away at any cost advantages offered by the cloud. Because the “cloud” actually offers complete automatisation from the backend up to and including the provision of applications—all maintenance-free, simple and browser-based—this cannot be the answer. When it comes to the blending of on- and off-site applications, considerations such as compliance and transparency must be unequivocally taken into account. Who booked which server? Who is storing which data where? How do things look with regard to authorisations, cost controls and—last but not least—transparency? In short: The interdependencies considered noteworthy with well-integrated, on-site IT only increase once again with cloud computing.

As a result of all of this, a new working area for some part of the IT industry that offers a number of positions can now be found: the system integrators. From this point onward, their field of work is no longer defined by the limits of a company but take on a whole new dimension instead. System integration of the future translates to the combination of internal and external IT. Using their first-hand knowledge, experts migrate your customers into private, public or hybrid clouds as desired and, in the process, help to integrate existing hardware and software infrastructure in such a manner that minimal friction loss occurs. In other words, system integrators are those that are able to think deeply about a company’s IT infrastructure and know which wheel to turn when, as well as how a solution can best be integrated into an existing ecosystem. Finally, customers want to save on costs with the help of cloud computing while increasing their efficiency—something that does not require the deletion of all existing systems. Demand is high at present: A paradigm shift is well under way, then, because what users want to continue to use various cloud for various activities in the long-term? The goal is a combined cloud, integrated using clever IT solutions and the expertise of the system integrators.  

Hilarius Dreßen, Senior Vice President Global Channels, visionapp AG