IBM Hybrid Cloud Strategy!

IBM Hybrid Cloud Strategy Explained!

IBM Power Systems: Hybrid Multicloud Strategy

Hybrid Multicloud = Hybrid Cloud + Multicloud

A hybrid multicloud combines a private cloud, a public cloud and more than one cloud service, from more than one cloud vendor.

Hybrid Cloud

No large enterprise, no matter how well prepared, can simply leap to the cloud in one fell swoop, even if the goal is to migrate completely to a public cloud provider such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure. There is going to be a necessary transition period, during which the enterprise will have some resources, systems and workload capabilities that have been migrated to public cloud, while others remain in the enterprise data centers or colo hosting centers. This interoperability is a common example of a hybrid cloud.

Unless an organization is literally “born in the cloud” (built on the public cloud for essential infrastructure and product/service delivery, plus supporting SaaS services such as web-based email, Salesforce and Zendesk), every enterprise’s cloud journey must include preparation for simultaneously supporting a cloud infrastructure and a legacy infrastructure. This requires conscious decisions about the level of integration vs. isolation that will be achieved between the data center side and the cloud side.



For many organizations, it may be tempting to simply graft a separate cloud environment alongside their traditional data centers, so as to minimize disruption of the existing internal operations and the introductions of new tools into existing environments. However, this path leads to increasing complexity, as more and more functions have to be simultaneously performed in multiple environments. So while hybrid cloud architectures vary, it is a best practice to anticipate the need to develop and deploy integrated platforms and architectures wherever practical.

Here are some characteristics that are typical of successful hybrid cloud environments:

A Centralized identity infrastructure that applies across multiple environments
Persistent, secure high-speed connectivity between the enterprise and the cloud environment
Integrated networking that securely extends the corporate network, creating a segmented but single overall network infrastructure
Unified monitoring and resource management

What is hybrid cloud?

Hybrid cloud is a computing environment that connects a company’s on-premises private cloud services and third-party public cloud into a single, flexible infrastructure for running the organization’s applications and workloads.

Hybrid Cloud | IBM


The principle behind hybrid cloud is that its mix of public and private cloud resources—with a level of orchestration between them—gives an organization the flexibility to choose the optimal cloud for each application or workload (and to move workloads freely between the two clouds as circumstances change). This enables the organization to meet its technical and business objectives more effectively and cost-efficiently than it could with public or private cloud alone.

The benefits of hybrid cloud are easier to understand once you know more about the capabilities, limitations, and uses of private and public clouds.

Private cloud vs. public cloud vs. hybrid cloud

Private cloud

In the private cloud model, cloud infrastructure and resources are deployed on-premises and owned and managed by the organization.

Private cloud requires a large upfront capital expense for equipment and software, a lengthy deployment, and in-house IT expertise to manage and maintain the infrastructure. It’s also expensive and time-consuming to scale capacity (because you have to purchase, provision, and deploy new hardware) and add capabilities (because you have to purchase and install new software). But private cloud provides maximum control over the computing environment and data, which is especially important—or even mandatory—if your company deals with highly sensitive data or is subject to strict industry or governmental regulations.

Public cloud

In the public cloud model, a company consumes compute, network, storage, and application resources as services that are delivered by a cloud provider over the Internet.

The cloud provider owns, manages, provisions, and maintains the infrastructure and essentially rents it out to customers, either for a periodic subscription charge or fees based on usage.

Public cloud offers significant cost savings because the provider bears all the capital, operations, and maintenance expenses. It makes scalability as easy as requesting more capacity, and it lets your company’s IT staff focus more on revenue-driving activities and innovation and less on “keeping the lights on.”

In public cloud's multi-tenant environments, your workloads are subject to the performance, compliance, and security of the cloud provider’s infrastructure. With Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) capabilities, you gain full control over your public cloud environment, including security and controls. VPCs give you the scalability of a public cloud and the security of a private cloud.


IBM Cloud - The faster, more secure journey to cloud transformation

Hybrid cloud

The hybrid cloud model represents the best of both worlds. You can run sensitive, highly regulated, and mission-critical applications and workloads or workloads with reasonably constant performance and capacity requirements on private cloud infrastructure. You can run less-sensitive, more-dynamic, or even temporary workloads (such as development and test environments for a new application) on the public cloud.

With the proper integration and orchestration between the two, you can leverage BOTH (when needed) for the same workload. For example, you can leverage additional public cloud capacity to accommodate a spike in demand for a private cloud application (this is known as “cloud bursting”).

Benefits of hybrid cloud

If you’ve read this far, you’ve likely concluded that the flexibility and division of labor enabled by hybrid cloud can offer significant benefits to almost any organization in several areas, including the following

Security and compliance

Hybrid cloud lets your organization deploy highly regulated or otherwise sensitive workloads in private cloud, while still being able to deploy less-sensitive workloads to public cloud services.

Scalability and resilience

You can’t always predict when workload traffic will spike, and even when you can predict spikes, you can’t always afford to purchase additional private cloud capacity for those spikes only. Hybrid cloud lets you scale up quickly, inexpensively, and even automatically using public cloud infrastructure and then scale back down when the surge subsides—all without impacting the other workloads running on your private cloud.


IBM Cloud Innovation Day



Resource optimization and cost saving

Hybrid cloud gives your IT more options and flexibility for deploying workloads in a way that makes the best use of your on-premises investments and your overall infrastructure budget. It also allows you to change that deployment in response to changing workloads or new opportunities.

For example, hybrid cloud lets you do any of the following:

Establish a cost-optimal division of labor for workloads—say, maintain workloads with known capacity and performance requirements on private cloud and migrate more variable workloads and applications to public cloud resources.
Quickly ‘spin-up’ a development and test environment using pay-as-you-go in the public cloud resources, without impacting on-premises infrastructure.
Rapidly adopt or switch to emerging or state-of-the-art tools that can streamline your development, improve your products and services, or give you a competitive edge.

For a visual dive into hybrid cloud and the benefits it offers, watch “Hybrid Cloud Explained”:

Hybrid Cloud Explained

Common use cases of hybrid cloud

Unless your organization was born on the cloud, you have a range of applications and workloads spread across private cloud, public cloud, and traditional IT environments that represent a range of opportunities for optimization via a hybrid cloud approach. Some increasingly common hybrid cloud use cases that might be relevant to your business include the following:

SaaS integration: Through hybrid integration, organizations are connecting Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, available via public cloud, to their existing public cloud, private cloud, and traditional IT applications to deliver new solutions and innovate faster.
Data and AI integration: Organizations are creating richer and more personal experiences by combining new data sources on the public cloud—such as weather, social, IoT, CRM, and ERP—with existing data and analytics, machine learning and AI capabilities.
Enhancing legacy apps: 80% of applications are still on-premises, but many enterprises are using public cloud services to upgrade the user experience and deploy them globally to new devices, even as they incrementally modernize core business systems.
VMware migration: More and more organizations are “lifting and shifting” their on-premises virtualized workloads to public cloud without conversion or modification to dramatically reduce their on-premises data center footprint and position themselves to scale as needed without added capital expense.

Hybrid cloud architecture

Gartner defines two common types of hybrid cloud platforms: hybrid monocloud and hybrid multicloud.

Hybrid monocloud

Hybrid monocloud is hybrid cloud with one cloud provider—essentially an extension of a single public cloud provider’s software and hardware stack to the customer’s on-premises environment so that the exact same stack runs in both locations. The two environments are tethered together to form a single hybrid environment, managed from the public cloud with the same tools used to manage the public cloud provider’s infrastructure.

Hybrid multicloud

Hybrid multicloud is an open standards-based stack that can be deployed on any public cloud infrastructure. That means across multiple providers as well as on premises. As with hybrid monocloud, the environments are tethered together to form a single hybrid environment, but management can be done on- or off-premises and across multiple providers, using a common set of management tools chosen by the customer.

Hybrid multicloud architecture gives an organization the flexibility to move workloads from vendor to vendor and environment to environment as needed and to swap out cloud services and vendors for any reason.

A variant of hybrid multicloud called composite multicloud makes the flexibility even more granular—it uses a mix of microservices and cloud environments to distribute single applications across multiple providers and lets you move application components across cloud services and vendors as needed.

Monocloud vs. multicloud

Pros and cons exist for both approaches. Hybrid monocloud may be better if you’re confident that you can meet your application needs with a single vendor’s stack; you can’t justify the cost and management effort of working with multiple cloud vendors; or if you’re taking your first step from on-premises to hybrid.

But the flexibility of hybrid multicloud makes it almost inevitable for most organizations. In a recent Gartner survey, 81% of respondents reported working with two or more cloud vendors.

Hear more from Daryl Plummer, VP, Distinguished Analyst, Chief of Research and Chief Gartner Fellow on how enterprises are realizing an agile and responsive hybrid cloud architecture in this webcast featuring Gartner.

For a deeper dive on hybrid cloud architecture, see Sai Vennam's four-video series, starting with "Hybrid Cloud Architecture: Introduction":

Hybrid Cloud Architecture: Introduction

Hybrid cloud strategy

Important considerations for your hybrid cloud strategy include the following:

Use of open standards-based architectures
Secure integration across cloud apps and data on- and off-premises
Management of mixed clouds and providers across hybrid environments
Automation of DevOps across providers and hybrid environments
Movement of data and files between clouds, on- and off-premises, and across multicloud.
Understanding security responsibilities.
Let’s look at each in more detail.

Cloud open standards

Open standards, as the name implies, are documented standards open to the public for use by anyone. Typically, the purpose of open standards is to allow for consistency and repeatability in approach. They are most often developed in collaboration by people who are invested in achieving the same outcomes.

In the case of hybrid cloud, open standards can help support interoperability, integration, and management. Some examples of open standards that support hybrid cloud include Kubernetes, Istio, OpenStack, and Cloud Foundry.

Hybrid cloud integration

Integration across applications and data—in the cloud and on- and off- premises—is an important component of any hybrid cloud strategy. Whether connecting applications from multiple Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers, moving parts of applications to microservices, or integrating with legacy applications, integration is key to ensuring the components of the hybrid ecosystem work together quickly and reliably.

IBM Cloud Webinar - Accelerate your Innovation & Transformation with a Multicloud Architecture


To keep up with the pace of innovation, organizations need to be able to support a high volume of integration requests. While traditional integration styles and approaches are still important, more modern styles—such as API lifecycle management and event-driven architecture—are critical components of today’s integration ecosystem.

Modern integration requires speed, flexibility, security, and scale, and in recent years, businesses have started rethinking their approach to integration in order to drive speed and efficiency while lowering costs.

Decentralized teams using agile methods, microservices-aligned architectures, and the introduction of hybrid integration platforms are reshaping the way enterprises approach hybrid integration. Download the Agile Integration eBook to learn more about how business are thinking about integration modernization.

Hybrid cloud management

Management is another important component of a hybrid cloud strategy. Management includes, but is not limited to, provisioning, scaling, and monitoring across environments.

In a hybrid monocloud environment, management is relatively straightforward because with a single vendor, you can use the same tools to manage or provision across the infrastructure.

In a hybrid multicloud environment encompassing multiple cloud vendors, it is more of a challenge to manage consistently.

Kubernetes, the most popular container orchestration system, is an open source technology that works with many container engines. It can help with management tasks like scaling containerized apps, rolling out new versions of apps, and providing monitoring, logging, debugging, etc.

Differences in the specific Kubernetes implementations by cloud vendors can complicate management across environments but open source solutions like Red Hat OpenShift can simplify Kubernetes implementations by enabling orchestration and provisioning across different cloud environments, standardizing and treating the entire environment as a single stack.

DevOps and automation

At its core, DevOps is focused on automating development and delivery tasks and standardizing environments across the lifecycle of applications. One of the primary advantages of hybrid cloud is the flexibility to use the best fit environment to support individual workload requirements. DevOps methodology and tools like Red Hat OpenShift and Ansible help ensure a consistent approach and automation across hybrid environments and infrastructures, which is especially helpful in multicloud scenarios.

To learn more, check out the video “What is DevOps?”:

What is DevOps?

Hybrid cloud storage

Cloud storage allows you to save data and files to an off-site accessible via the public Internet or a dedicated private network connection. Data that you transfer off-site for storage becomes the responsibility of a third-party cloud provider. The provider hosts, secures, manages, and maintains the servers and associated infrastructure and ensures you have access to the data whenever you need it.

A hybrid cloud storage model combines elements of private and public clouds, giving organizations a choice of which data to store in which cloud. For instance, highly regulated data subject to strict archiving and replication requirements is usually more suited to a private cloud environment, whereas less-sensitive data (such as email that doesn’t contain business secrets) can be stored in the public cloud. Some organizations use hybrid clouds to supplement their internal storage networks with public cloud storage.

Hybrid cloud security

Enterprises worry that moving applications, services, and data beyond their firewalls to the cloud exposes them to greater risk. In fact, security vulnerability is often cited as a leading barrier to cloud adoption.

Hybrid cloud adds complexity to security management because it requires management across multiple platforms, often without transparency or visibility into what is being managed where. Businesses often misunderstand where the responsibility lies for ensuring security, believing the cloud provider bears sole responsibility.

The following provides a basis for a sound hybrid cloud security strategy:

• Insist on a “shared responsibility” approach: Although the business is ultimately responsible for securing its data, services, and applications, it's important for businesses to choose vendors that view security as a shared responsibility. Choose cloud providers that incorporate security into their platforms, offer tools and partners that make security management easier, and work with customers to implement best practices.
• Use tools and processes designed for the cloud: Automation and secure DevOps practices help security professionals automate system checks and tests into deployments. Removing human error from the workflow helps simplify development and deployment.
• Manage access: Identity and access management (IAM) frameworks help protect valuable assets from getting into the wrong hands. Policies should promote the concept of least-privileged access so that users only have access to the resources they absolutely require for their roles.
• Ensure visibility and define ownership: Management systems should help enterprises monitor and manage across multiple cloud platforms. Internal security teams should know who is responsible for specific assets and data and have robust communications plans in place so nothing is overlooked.

What is multicloud?

Multicloud is the use of two or more clouds from different cloud providers. This can be any mix of Infrastructure, Platform, or Software as a Service (IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS). For example, you may consume email as service from one vendor, customer relationship management (CRM) from another, and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) from yet another.



Currently, most organizations — 85 percent, according to one survey — use multicloud environments. You might choose multicloud to address specific business requirements; you might also choose it to avoid the limitations of a single-vendor cloud strategy. For example, if you standardize on a single cloud vendor or approach for all of your IT services, you might find it difficult later to switch to a different vendor t that offers a better platform for application development and more competitive prices. And, if the vendor you’re locked into has an outage, it will affect your whole environment.



With multicloud, you can decide which workload is best suited to which cloud based on your unique requirements. Different mission-critical workloads (such as an inventory application for a retailer or distributor, a medical records repository for a healthcare provider, or a CAD solution for an engineering firm) have their own requirements for performance, data location, scalability, and compliance, and certain vendors’ clouds will meet these requirements better than others.

Pathways to Multicloud Transformation

Learn more about multicloud.

Multicloud versus hybrid cloud

Multicloud and hybrid cloud are distinct but often complementary models. Hybrid cloud describes a variety of cloud types. In a hybrid cloud environment, an organization uses a blend of public and private clouds, on or off premises, to meet its IT needs. The goal of the hybrid cloud is to get everything working together, with varying degrees of communication and data sharing to best run a company’s daily operations.

Multicloud refers to a variety of cloud providers. Each cloud may reside in its own silo, but that doesn’t prevent it from interacting with other services in a hybrid environment. In fact, most organizations use multicloud as part of their hybrid strategies.

A common hybrid/multicloud use case: your website and its load balancing solution run on public cloud IaaS, while the website connects to a user database and an inventory system on a private cloud on premises to meet security and regulatory requirements.

Pros and cons of multicloud

Speaking generally, the chief advantage of multicloud is the flexibility to quickly adopt the best technologies for any task. The chief drawback is the complexity that comes with managing many different technologies from many different vendors.

Pros

• Multicloud’s inherent flexibility offers a number of benefits, including risk mitigation, optimization, and ready access to the services you need.
• Multicloud helps mitigate risk in two ways: by limiting exposure from a single vendor approach and by preventing vendor lock-in. In a multicloud environment, if a particular provider’s cloud experiences downtime, the outage will affect only one vendor’s service. If your hosted email is down for a few hours, services from other providers, such as your website or software development platform, can still run.
• Multicloud also lets you choose the service that best suits your needs. One service might offer extra functionality or employ a security protocol that makes it easier to meet your compliance requirements. Or, all things being equal in security and functionality, you might choose the provider with the best price.
• Another significant multicloud benefit is access to technology. For example, if you lack the budget to deploy an analytics solution on premises, you can access it as a cloud service without the up-front capital expense. This also means you can get the service up and running more quickly, accelerating your time to value.

Similarly, when you have the freedom to choose any provider for any solution, you can access new innovative technologies more quickly than you might be able too from a single vendor’s catalog, and you can combine services from multiple providers to create applications that offer unique competitive advantage.

Cons

• The more clouds you use — each with its own set of management tools, data transmission rates, and security protocols — the more difficult it can be to manage your environment.
• You may lack visibility into entire applications and their dependencies. Even if some cloud providers offer monitoring functions, you may have to switch between dashboards with different APIs (interface rules and procedures) and authentication protocols to view the information you need. Cloud providers each have their own procedures to migrate, access, and export data, potentially creating serious management headaches for administrators.
• Multicloud management platforms address these issues by providing visibility across multiple provider clouds and making it possible to manage your applications and services in a consistent, simplified way. Through a central dashboard, development teams can see their projects and deployments, operations teams can keep an eye on clusters and nodes, and the cybersecurity staff can monitor for threats. You might also consider the adoption of microservices architecture so that you can source cloud services from any mix of providers and combine them into a single application.

Multicloud use cases

The number of multicloud use cases is expanding quickly. Multicloud helps you meet a virtually infinite number of business goals.

For instance, you may choose to develop and test applications on multi-tenant public cloud infrastructure to speed access to compute and storage resources and optimize costs; but, you may choose to deploy your applications on a dedicated cloud environment from another vendor that offers more compelling security and compliance features, or on a bare metal environment that meets specific performance requirements.

For data storage, you may choose one vendor for data that is frequently in transit and a different vendor for data archiving because the costs may vary significantly with data in motion versus data at rest. Or, you may want the freedom to move your data off a given cloud vendor in response to new regulations or other unforeseen events.

Multicloud architecture

When you develop a multicloud strategy, architecture is a central consideration. Architecture decisions you make today will have repercussions far into the future. Careful planning and vision are required to avoid architecture that may eventually work against you by constraining your ability to scale, make changes and upgrades, and adopt new technologies.

When designing your multicloud architecture, consider factors such as where data resides, who has access to it, and from where. If certain applications are spread across different clouds, take into account the API formats and encodings for each cloud and how you can create a seamless experience for IT administrators and users alike.

You should also account for the geographic spread of your applications, databases, and web services to make it easy to access and manage your data regardless of location. You’ll also want to consider how far data travels and create a flow with the lowest possible latency.

Assembling your cloud orchestra: A field guide to multi-cloud management


Facing challenges

While multicloud environments help modernize IT environments, making them more agile and flexible, they also create challenges because of the differences between cloud providers. For instance, you have to address ownership boundaries — where do your management and security responsibilities end and where do those of the cloud providers begin?

Transform & Modernize your legacy, monolithic apps using IBM Cloud Pak for Application | Webinar


Integration: Some cloud services may operate seamlessly out of the box, but many are bound to require some level of integration, especially if you are linking them to other resources within your IT environment, such as a website or database. For the environment to operate optimally, you will have to address differences between each cloud in areas such as APIs, containerization, features, functions, and security protocols.
Portability and interoperability: Are you able to migrate components to more than one cloud without having to make major modifications in each system? Once components are moved to a cloud, you also may face challenges of interoperability with your on-premises systems.
Latency: Where data resides, its proximity to user, and the distances it has to travel all contribute to latency issues. If users experience delays in accessing applications and databases as a result of latency, productivity may suffer, and that would be counterproductive to using a multicloud approach that is supposed to deliver benefits like agility, flexibility, and efficiency.
Privacy regulations: Regulations sometimes require you to use security controls like encryption when transmitting and storing data. Regulations also may restrict where you can archive personal data (such as medical, financial, and human resources records), so you need to know where the cloud infrastructure is located and whether it complies with relevant data-handling laws.
Security challenges associated with multicloud

One of the biggest challenges you’re likely to face with a multicloud environment is security. Cloud providers have appropriate security controls and tools in place to protect their services, but it’s up to you to implement proper protocols and solutions to secure data when it sits in your on-premises environment and when it travels back and forth to the cloud.

Your multicloud security plan needs to include authentication policies to ensure users access only the cloud-based resources they need for their jobs. And since using cloud services gives user access from any device, you also have to secure the mobile devices your employees use to connect to the services.

Each multicloud environment is different, so some level of security customization is usually necessary. Whatever your customization requirements, visibility into the entire multicloud infrastructure is critical, enabling you to monitor the environment at all times to ensure data is being accessed properly, that security vulnerabilities are addressed, and cyberattacks are prevented.

Strategy for multicloud

As you build and expand your multicloud environment, it’s wise to set strategy to maximize benefits and prevent complexity. It’s easy to lose control of a multicloud environment without a proper management strategy. Currently, fewer than half of organizations with a multicloud environment (41 percent) have a management strategy and only 38 percent have the necessary procedures and tools in place.

Setting a strategy starts with deciding which workload belongs in which cloud so you can achieve optimal data resiliency. Resiliency refers to how you handle and back up data to ensure business continuity in case of data loss.

Part of your strategy should cover how to manage APIs to achieve interoperability between multiple clouds and on-premises systems. Typically, cloud services come with API lifecycle solutions that include centralized management and flexible deployment options for multiclouds and on-premises environments. But getting everything to work together will require some configuration expertise.

Your multicloud strategy should cover the migration of on-premises services to the cloud and any modifications you have to make so they can run in a cloud environment. It should specify rules and best practices for building, testing, and running applications that will interact with your cloud services. Lastly, the strategy should cover security controls, practices, and solutions that ensure a safe multicloud environment.

Welcome to the Multi-cloud world

Key technologies of multicloud

Multicloud containers

In a multicloud environment, the use of software containers solves portability issues and accelerates application deployment.

A container is a small file that packages together application code along with all the libraries and other dependencies that it needs to run. By packaging together applications, libraries, environment variables, other software binaries, and configuration files, a container guarantees that it has everything needed to run the application out of the box, regardless of the operating environment in which the container runs.

Provision and deploy to multiple cloud providers with IBM Multicloud Manager


The consistent application of open standards across clouds makes containerization ideal for moving applications within a multicloud infrastructure. Since the application can run in any environment, you can take its container from an on-premises environment and place it on any public cloud infrastructure for the purpose of cloud bursting, a process that allows you to scale up when you run out of capacity. In another scenario, if you need to run an application in different places across a multicloud environment, containerization enables you to do so with efficiency and consistency.

According to a recent study, 57 percent of surveyed organizations are using containers today. To deploy and run multicloud efficiently, enterprises will look to adopt management solutions that leverage open standards like Kubernetes to give them full visibility and control across environments in a consistent and repeatable way, regardless of the vendor or infrastructure they choose.

Multicloud storage

To get the most value out of your multicloud environment, you need a data storage strategy. You can run your storage infrastructure either on premises, in the cloud, or use a combination of both depending on your specific needs.

Cloud storage adds flexibility and scalability, but data privacy or archiving regulations may limit what types of data you can store in the cloud. Privacy laws differ between states, countries, and regions, and, in some cases, specify where data can be saved. For instance, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) places severe restrictions on how to handle and store data of EU subjects outside the region’s borders, so many companies simply opt to keep the data within member countries.

Distributed Transaction Processing Across Multiple Clouds with Kubernetes


Other considerations regarding multicloud storage revolve around management of stored data. You may have multiple storage locations to keep the data as close to users as possible but, of course, using multiple sites adds complexity. Thankfully, management solutions are available that bring consistency and order to cloud storage no matter how geographically dispersed your storage network is or how many clouds it uses.

Multicloud automation

As IT environments expand across geographic zones and multiple clouds, getting everything to work together efficiently is a priority. Automating management of a multicloud environment eliminates manual tasks and with them the chance of human error, improving efficiency and operational consistency while freeing up staff for strategic work.

Multicloud monitoring

While multicloud offers plentiful benefits, as already discussed, it can create silos and added complexity, making it difficult to monitor your entire IT environment. Even when a cloud provider offers monitoring, the capability is limited to that provider’s cloud, which means other parts of your cloud environment stay in the dark from an administrative standpoint.

Manage hybrid IT with IBM Services for Multicloud Management


To address the issue of visibility, vendors have started introducing monitoring tools that give you a comprehensive view of your multicloud environment. You should select a management tool as early as possible in the process of implementing a multicloud environment. Trying to manage a multicloud without full visibility is likely to result in performance issues that will only get more severe the longer they are allowed to exist— and poor performance can discourage customers from doing business with your organization.

To help you choose a tool that best suits your needs, Gartner has assembled a set of criteria to evaluate monitoring solutions.

Multicloud and VMware

One way that organizations can gain visibility into their multicloud environments is by leveraging VMware’s multicloud solutions. From a central console, you get a unified view of the health, performance, and security of all your applications and services wherever they are located within the multicloud infrastructure.

When leveraging VMware solutions, you can accelerate software development through the use of containers that make it possible to run applications seamlessly in different environments. Within the VMware environment, you also can leverage microservices that enable quick changes to applications and Kubernetes, which automate application deployment and management.

Some organizations are using VMware multicloud solutions in conjunction with a cloud provider to develop and manage containerized applications in a customized multicloud infrastructure. This approach makes it possible to scale the environment on demand and manage it from the centralized VMware console.

Multicloud and IBM

To help prepare companies for a multicloud future, IBM offers a host of multicloud solutions and services, including the IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management. Enterprises can use IBM Multicloud Manager to deploy, run and monitor their Kubernetes container clusters in multicloud environments.

How To Get Ahead Of The Growing Multi-Cloud Security Threat


IBM supports multicloud strategies for application development, migration, modernization, and management with a range of cloud migration and integration technologies, services, and consulting offerings.

Learn more about IBM’s multicloud solutions, multicloud services, and hybrid and multicloud strategy.

Get started with an IBM Cloud™ account today.

More Information:

https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/cloud

https://www.ibm.com/blogs/systems/topics/cloud-computing/hybrid-cloud/

https://www.cloudtp.com/doppler/hybrid-cloud-vs-multi-cloud-whats-difference-matter/

https://www.ibm.com/blogs/cloud-computing/2019/08/22/simplify-digital-enterprise-journey-hybrid-multicloud/

https://www.ibm.com/blogs/cloud-computing/tag/hybrid-multicloud/

https://www.ibm.com/blogs/cloud-computing/2019/12/12/cloud-2020-trends/

https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/storage/hybrid-cloud-storage

https://ibmsystemsmag.com/IT-Strategy/05/2020/new-levels-computing-flexibility

https://ibmsystemsmag.com/Cloud

https://www.ibm.com/blogs/systems/how-red-hat-openshift-can-support-your-hybrid-multicloud-environment/