"Consciously Hybrid" one year on: "Clouded" lifts the lid on the culture of cloud

[RussellM]

Over the last twenty years, we've all seen cloud becoming the de facto strategy. Cloud is not just a technology that has been a catalyst for digital transformation, it has had a profound effect on the very culture of Information Technology and changed our perceptions, behaviour and decision-making.

The Consciously Hybrid journey first started for me several years ago while I was working for one of the major hyperscale cloud providers. Based on my real-life experience of working with the top global customers, I saw first-hand the challenges they faced in living up to expectations that Cloud First would be the key to unlocking their latent digital potential. While some customers saw quick wins from migrating the simplest and easiest applications, their optimism bias blinded them to the risks on the road ahead as more complex, tightly-coupled and large-scale workloads threw up unexpected challenges, delays and inevitably cost. The harsh reality is that the costs of migrating complex applications that were never architected for cloud native deployment far outweigh the assumed benefits.

Thus the customer unwittingly becomes unconsciously hybrid, a situation that was never planned for, leaving them both sustaining legacy systems while incurring increasing cloud spend. Indeed, in the UK public sector today, 50% of all government IT budgets are still spent keeping the lights on rather than investing in modernisation, so arguably a decade of cloud first policy has not realised its intended benefits.

When I joined Hewlett Packard Enterprise in 2019, the company's edge-to-cloud strategy was the perfect antidote to the unconsciously hybrid problem. HPE is bridging the gap between public cloud and the inevitability that customers need to continue running workloads and processing data at the edge and in private cloud, by bringing cloud innovation to the customers' environment. 

A year ago, we released our documentary film "Consciously Hybrid" to highlight the challenges that the UK public sector in particular is facing in the race to public cloud. The response was overwhelming: clearly these challenges resonated with customers and this led to some fascinating discussions. Some who did not appear in the original film asked to be interviewed and we toured the UK to collect their stories.  

Something else became clear: the Consciously Hybrid message resonated beyond the UK public sector audience. HPE colleagues and customers from public and private sectors across the world got in touch to relate their own stories and ask how they could be more Consciously Hybrid.

This year, we embarked on a new project to uncover the culture of cloud: an anthopological study of how this technology has influenced our attitudes, decision-making and behaviour. A new documentary film, "Clouded", documents this journey and looks into issues such as cloud economics, data governance, privacy and sovereignty, regulation, competition, skills and the future of technology.

"Clouded" is a collaboration between Dark Matter Media, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and VMWare and features a broad range of contributors including Dr. Luc Julia, Chief Scientific Officer at Groupe Renault; Corey Quinn, Chief Economist at Duckbill Group; Kirk Bresniker, Chief Architect and HPE Fellow at HP Labs; Joe Baguley, VP and CTO EMEA at VMWare and Thomas Maurer, Chief Evangelist Azure Hybrid at Microsoft.

Join me on the next step of the Consciously Hybrid journey and stream "Clouded" at consciouslyhybrid.com.

Russell Macdonald
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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