2019 SailPoint Identity Insider Magazine - Magazine - Page 36
JACKIE BRINKERHOFF
Sr. Director of Product
Marketing, SailPoint
Embracing Both
the Old and the New
If you happen to have had the great
opportunity to live through the 70s
and 80s, you may remember when
cartoons, such as Looney Tunes™,
were only available early Saturday
mornings (at least in the US it was that
way). TV stations would shut down at
midnight as they played the National
Anthem and then it was just static until the
morning news. Now we live in a 24/7 world where
everything, including cartoons, news, and basically
anything you can imagine, is on-demand!
TAKE
ON THE
FUTURE
The same could almost be said for how business
has evolved over the decades. For so long, we’ve
lived in an on-premises-only world, where all we
had were data centers and physical peripherals on
which to process and store our data. Now, we have
the “magical cloud,” where things live... somewhere
else, but we can still utilize and access them at any
time – 24/7. The sense of mystery and wonder still
exists, but more and more it is becoming our new
normal, especially as physical hardware limits have
essentially been removed.
With just a few clicks of our mouse, we can buy
more tools to do more things and acquire more
space to store all our digital stuff. All without
having to ever install anything ourselves or
maintain servers and update software. The digital
transformation of enterprises – moving file storage,
apps, and even critical systems like security from
the traditional on-premises to the cloud – has
already been well underway for some time now.
The catalyst for all of this has come from the
software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, which has
grown in popularity so well because it attains
everything we need: cloud apps are usually faster
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to deploy, easier to maintain and cost
less to implement. Need more capacity?
Done. The elastic nature of the cloud
can magically make that happen.
Organizations are recognizing this, and
have adopted cloud-first directives to
take advantage of this new era.
With all the benefits that a cloud enterprise
can experience, it’s no wonder that the cloud is
moving from being a disruptor to the new norm.
But for many, the legacy systems with which they
started their business are still so ingrained in the
foundation of how they work, becoming 100%
cloud may never actually occur.
So, is that bad? Is the shadow of “the cloud” above
our collective heads becoming too much of an
obligation instead of an inspiration? Instead of
looking to the cloud as a savior from the “bad”
on-premises systems, we should instead be
welcoming it as a complementary companion to
them. Yes, some systems can – and should – be
replaced by cloud applications. There’s no need
for every company to maintain and run their own
ticketing system, for instance, when apps such as
ServiceNow exist.
The hybrid environment, at least for the
foreseeable future, is here to stay for many
enterprises. And that’s ok. It’s truly giving us the
best of both worlds – where both options exist
and organizations can benefit from choosing what
works best for them. So, as we continue to evolve
our on-demand and just-in-time worlds, we can
still ensure we get to enjoy both. And for you Bugs
Bunny fans, it’s available anytime too!