Johannesburg, 18 Nov 2020
While all organisations are increasingly harnessing the cloud, investment in on-premises has not stopped. This will make the efficient deployment and management of hybrid cloud environments a top priority for organisations for some time to come.
This is according to Rishi Nirghin, Executive – IBM Systems at IBM South Africa, who was speaking ahead of an IBM webinar on hybrid multi-cloud.
“A Forrester paper commissioned by IBM this year found that, despite the push to public cloud, 90% of IT decision-makers still see on-premises infrastructure as a critical part of their broader cloud strategies,” says Nirghin. “In fact, on-premises and private cloud investments are growing in line with public cloud investments, pointing to hybrid cloud environments for years to come.”
However, because cloud gives organisations the ability to deploy and scale apps rapidly, quickly access compute resources and continuously innovate, cloud is also an integral part of strategy, and hybrid multi-cloud is the model of choice. IBM research finds that at least 71% of organisations already use services from three or more clouds in enterprise solutions.
"The reality is that nearly every business will have investments across on-premises and off-premises deployments, so hybrid multi-cloud is a practical and pragmatic way of looking at the way most businesses are approaching information technologies,” says Nirghin.
He says IBM is seeing three key use cases for hybrid cloud adoption:
- Modernisation and containerisation of applications to increase developer velocity and provide consistent hybrid cloud management;
- Establishing low-latency integration between applications and business-critical data by co-locating cloud-native and traditional applications; and
- Making cloud-native apps secure, scalable and resilient with co-optimised software and hardware infrastructure that deliver encryption everywhere and vertical scalability.
“The key challenge in today’s hybrid multi-cloud environments is friction between an enterprise's infrastructure, software and organisational structure. You need a hybrid multi-cloud approach that unifies these complex, distributed systems and groups into one integrated architecture.”
Enterprise organisations need to adopt open source technologies such as containers and orchestration in order to accommodate both their legacy applications and cloud-native applications. But open source technology is not always an easy or palatable fit for certain industries or enterprise-scale clients. For them, open source must be hardened and made ready for the enterprise.
“To meet these demands, we are launching a co-ordinated set of IBM Systems innovations around multi-architecture Red Hat OpenShift and IBM Cloud Paks,” he says. “Red Hat OpenShift combined with IBM Cloud Paks provides the complete platform layer for development, deployment and management of containerised applications at scale.”
IBM Power Systems, described as an unfair advantage for enterprises, has a thriving partner ecosystem to deliver a host of features, and offers secure, high performance private cloud on a platform that is stable, reliable and trusted.
On Wednesday, 2 December 2020, IBM will host an Executive Webinar on Hybrid Cloud for Power Systems, to outline IBM infrastructure for cloud. For more information, and to register for this event, click here.
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