Not just hybrid workers –hybrid systems
It is not just your staff that are getting used to the new normal, either working remotely or working in the office (or a combination), but it’s also your IT systems that have either undergone or are undergoing the same treatment.
From 2022 onwards, your IT systems are likely to be completely hybrid or heading in that direction. You may have your legacy applications that you need to keep running on-premises, but other more modern applications are in the cloud to take advantage of modern development practices.
This decentralised approach to IT systems proves problematic to business processes, due to additional layers of access and security and, where the cloud is concerned, differing locations. This is especially true where an overall business process may encompass various different applications or data sources that require to be accessed.
The trend for hybrid compute is growing in popularity for a number of reasons, such as:
Energy prices
Energy price increases and volatility in this area are proving a point of concern for customers running their own on-premises data centre, and not just electricity to power your IT hardware, but other costs such as air conditioning and the related maintenance. In the cloud these costs are included in your compute prices and all the major cloud providers are working hard on minimising their energy requirements. Therefore, customers are looking to minimise their energy needs and on-premises usage by taking advantage of cloud computing.
Modern computing practices
With cloud computing, areas around hardware maintenance, patching, security, and scalability are all built in and provided for customers, a decisive advantage over the on-premises equivalent. Cloud computing also lends itself to rapid development and deployment practices.
Legacy applications on-premises
Nearly every business will always have business critical applications that are considered legacy but are a necessity to keep running. These often are also not compatible to be migrated to another datacentre, the cloud, or to be modernised into serverless architectures. It is these applications that are driving the adoption of modernising your IT services where possible while keeping your necessary established systems in play.
Remote single access applications
For some customers, it can simply come down to various and often basic, but still absolutely business critical, applications that are limited to a remote machine and locked to the hardware they are running on, with only Citrix or remote desktop capability available. These absolutely require staying on-premises.
From a business automation perspective, it is important to imagine your business processes end-to-end, and therefore the fact that one single process might actually interact with not only various departments or members of staff, but also many applications or systems in various locations, such as the cloud as well as a remote or local datacentre(s).
In this case, businesses need to adapt their processes to match this hybrid world and manage access and relevant users’ permissions that make up their business processes, as remoting onto systems becomes more common.
For example, this could be part of a starter process where HR access one system to set up a new user then within the same process they must access a legacy system for payroll, and in turn have to put a request in for a new laptop to IT by logging a ticket request via the helpdesk SaaS application that resides in the cloud.
In this case, IT is as much a part of this process as HR, as well as all the various application access requirements which differ wildly, even within the same department.
Did you know?
With remote systems becoming more common with your business processes, business process automation has traditionally struggled with accessing remote systems, and usually has to rely on screen grabs or video of the remote session, sometimes referred to as surface automation or image recognition, and is normally very unreliable. IA-Connect from LABS with its patented technology means it can interact with a remote session, even a remote session inside another remote session, without increasing the automation complexity or difficulty, making it as simple as automating a local application.