Impacts and Improvements: Optimized Sourcing in Hybrid IT Environments

Where, how, why and from whom enterprises source IT capabilities has changed forever. Unfortunately, too many businesses still manage their IT infrastructure, providers, services and sources as they did in previous generations. Smart companies are rethinking how they source and manage IT to reduce complexity, mitigate risk and manage costs of increasingly hybrid-cloud-plus-traditional IT environments.

“We’re starting at the beginning,” the CIO of a Fortune 1000 investment bank told ISG. “First, we had to realize that most of what we know and believe about cloud and the changing nature of IT and business is probably at least 12 months old, and therefore outdated and likely wrong,” he stated. “We work very hard to catch up and stay abreast [of these changes], but the scale and pace today are beyond almost everyone’s ability, except the providers. So, we’re turning more and more to our services providers to help us manage and optimize our business. They already know how to deal with the scope and pace of change.”

This research paper draws on ISG’s work with hundreds of organizations to explore the following:

• How and why this multiple-sourced, hybrid IT and business reality is developing and accelerating,
• How to recognize critical, often unanticipated IT needs that increase costs and compromise operations, and
• How to harness managed services that optimize these hybrid environments for peak infrastructure demands and business effectiveness.