IBM's David Metcalfe explains how IBM Cloud Private can help organisations meet tough IT challenges


The multicloud era has arrived. Today, 8 out of 10 businesses rely on multiple clouds to meet their IT needs, with 71 percent using more than three.

IBM Cloud Private is designed to help organizations thrive in this new multicloud world. Your team can now enjoy the benefits of public cloud with an on-premise, private cloud installed behind your firewall. This solution can provide your organization with more security and the control to integrate private and public clouds.

IBM Cloud Private provides organizations consistent management and high levels of automation using platform capabilities based on Kubernetes and other open source solutions, which can run on existing infrastructure. This helps maximize investment, performance and security. The diagram below gives a high-level overview of the architecture:

There are good reasons to adopt a multi-cloud strategy:

- Not all workloads can operate in public cloud due to issues like latency and security, as well as regulatory and compliance requirements.
- Public cloud enables organizations to get new value from 3rd parties, innovation, weather insights, social media analysis, AI, cognitive and blockchain solutions.
- Private cloud leverages existing investments and extends the scale, performance, security and control of internal data and systems to provide IT as a service to the business and customers

Organizations face challenges like privacy and security of data in a public cloud setting, running mission-critical applications on public cloud, cost of networking bandwidth and data movement for data-intensive workloads (scaling up) and application performance issues. Many organizations today are encumbered with transforming existing application and infrastructure.

IBM Cloud Private can help your team meet some of these tough IT challenges by providing the four following benefits:

1) Rapid Innovation: IBM Cloud Private drives enterprise transformation by providing developers with choice of languages, frameworks, runtimes and services to build cloud-native applications and microservices. It also drives innovation based on existing and new services such as blockchain, machine learning, data and cognitive capabilities.

2) Differentiated Integration: IBM Cloud Private provides the API consistency with public clouds, enabling the enterprise to open up their data centers to integrate with data and services across clouds.

3) Investment Leverage: With IBM Cloud Private, enterprises can leverage their existing investments across both middleware and infrastructure. With new containerized versions of industry-leading IBM middleware (WAS, Db2, MQ), enterprises can modernize those investments by utilizing them within the ICP Kubernetes environment. IBM Cloud Private can also run on top of your organization’s existing infrastructure – so no additional investment is required. A bring your own license (BYOL) option is also available

4) Management and Compliance: IBM Cloud Private offers lower adoption friction for more critical applications and data in terms of security, compliance and operational risk. It provides integrated tools for security and managing your environment, and it also provides the flexibility to integrate with your organizations existing management/security tools and processes. This keeps your applications and data secure and under your control

IBM estimates that companies will spend more than $50 billion globally starting in 2017 to create and evolve private clouds with growth rates of 15 to 20 percent a year through 2020. How will your team invest to improve its private cloud capabilities in the multicloud world? Get started with IBM Cloud Private for free today.

Click here to view a recording of IBM's webinar: Government Digital Reinvention: Transforming citizen-facing services
Click here to download IBM's latest report: Approaching Cloud Computing in Government

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