With almost 75% of enterprise workloads yet to shift to the cloud, IBM is betting on hybrid cloud, which represents a US$ 1 trillion market opportunity globally, to drive digital transformation for clients. Subram Natarajan, Chief Technology Officer and Director, Technical Sales, IBM Technology Sales, India/South Asia shares how IBM is driving the hybrid cloud approach with its customers
Are enterprises getting the true value of cloud as a technology? What are the current challenges in the industry with regards to cloud adoption?
Indeed, cloud has the power to fundamentally shift competitive landscapes by providing a new platform for creating and delivering business value. To take advantage of cloud’s potential to transform internal operations, customer relationships and industry value chains, organisations need to determine how best to employ cloud-enabled business models that promote sustainable competitive advantage. Cloud has already changed both business and everyday life –from consumers who perhaps unknowingly use it to access their favourite music to companies that purposely harness its powerful resources. While much activity and buzz relating to cloud involves its technological capabilities, the benefits of cloud adoption extend into the business realm.
For example: Parle by migrating its mission-critical SAP workloads, ERP, supply chain, and analytics applications to IBM Cloud, can boost productivity across business functions such as finance, HR, and procurement. This can also help the company meet the evolving needs of its growing ecosystem of wholesalers and retailers.
Today, hybrid cloud has become one of the common architectural patterns, in the cloud world, primarily driven by the need to flexibly scale while not compromising on the resiliency characteristic. However, there is a vast majority of organisations navigating their approaches and re-analysing their existing technology stack in favour of the cloud due to the local security needs or even in some cases regulatory requirements. In addition, the proprietary technical requirements of cloud platforms, unimpressive TCO when you consider a wider time horizon and end-to-end costs, reliability of a skilled and experienced partner to help undertake the journey are the challenges that face organisations today, as they get ready to move to the cloud. Vendors like IBM are helping clients to overcome all these challenges to leverage cloud to create new business models that promote long-term growth and profit.
With cloud getting inroads into various industries, from small companies to large enterprises, what are the best practices for using the cloud? Why is IBM betting big on hybrid cloud?
For many organisations, a move to the cloud is inevitable. In fact, clients find that choosing a hybrid cloud approach is 2.5 times more valuable than relying on the public cloud alone. Benefits are across many areas – business value acceleration, developer productivity, infrastructure cost efficiency, cost of regulatory, compliance, and security.
At IBM, we prescribe a methodical way of undertaking the cloud journey. We call this the Journey to Hybrid cloud. It comprises four distinct functions, often executed in sequence.
- The first step is to develop a cloud strategy based on the stated goals and arrive at a blueprint of how the actual movement to the cloud can happen.
- This is followed by moving the applications from the status quo to the target architecture.
- One of the best practices also demands that we continue to rationalise the applications and ensure the consolidation of applications. This includes building new applications –either as a measure of replacing an aged application or for standing up a new set of products and services, we advise customers to follow cloud-native principles.
- Last but not least, while building a cloud is a significant first step, the Day 2 operations are equally critical. The ability to manage multiple cloud, automatically provision and move resources, plan for agile development and frequent releases are all part of cloud management.
With companies moving to the cloud and work from home, security breaches are at an all-time high. How IBM is addressing this big challenge of CIOs?
Security continues to be a significant focus area for IBM and we have traversed quite a bit on this journey. In the Covid era, where hybrid cloud is prevalent, we see companies having increased control of the unique privacy demands of different datasets. Every workload has different demands, and for the most sensitive data, companies need to ensure the right controls are in place.
At IBM, we believe that the future of security is an open, connected platform approach – leveraging open standards, AI, and automation to connect security tools and data across the hybrid cloud. In fact, organisations are also looking at zero trust framework for modernising their overall security programs that helps them adapt to the risks emerging from their changing business environment.
We designed Cloud Pak for Security to provide a single, unified platform to connect all of a company’s security tools and data from IBM and others –built on an open architecture of Red Hat OpenShift, to scale across hybrid cloud environments. IBM is also developing next-generation innovations for protecting the privacy of data as it moves through distributed, hybrid cloud environments. While traditional encryption technologies can protect data while it is being stored or transferred, IBM is working on technologies that keep data private even while being computed upon. This is what Confidential Computing is all about. For example, we are spearheading the development of Fully Homomorphic Encryption, a next-generation technology that allows data to remain encrypted during computation –regardless of the cloud or infrastructure being used to process it.
Can you tell us about the IBM Cloud Satellite and how it is uniquely different in the market? Also, which are the industries that will benefit from Cloud Satellite?
With IBM Cloud Satellite, we are bringing the strength of public cloud services to the private environment and extending the capabilities that we have on public cloud while allowing organisations to run on environments of their choice –could be on-prem, edge or any public cloud setup. Essentially, you can use Satellite to build a consistent, on-demand, fully managed set of core application services that run across any of the setups mentioned earlier. The overall theme with Satellite cloud is consistency. From the IBM Cloud dashboard, we can spin up a new OpenShift Cluster on the Satellite Datacentre, deploy apps into the cluster, create integrations and services like logging and monitoring. Essentially, organisations are extending the services available on IBM Public Cloud to their data centre.
The key differentiation here is that the apps are self-contained, so they can run without ever needing to communicate back to the public cloud data centre. For the operations team, on the other hand, they can benefit from consistent operations for these core applications services within the IBM Public Cloud. Simply put, a Satellite location is like a mini IBM Cloud region where organisations can choose to run IBM Cloud services like Red Hat OpenShift. But it doesn’t end there. The uniqueness of the technology is that many companies across all industries can benefit from adopting distributed cloud technology. If you consider age-old companies they stand to benefit from deriving cost advantage, speed to market, data security while using cloud, and adherence to governance principles. If you take startups, they will gain the advantage of faster time to market with minimal CapEx investment for IT development. The impacted business area may differ, but everyone stands to benefit.
How do you see the adoption of emerging technologies gaining ground during the pandemic?
The confluence of various NextGen technologies is presenting unique opportunities for all of us to build efficiency at scale that we have not seen earlier. Hybrid cloud in a combination with automation and AI can deliver a range of important benefits, from increased flexibility, speed, agility, and scalability to a shift in the cost model from capital expenditures to operating expenses. The phenomenon of data, the value of the cloud and the scaling of artificial intelligence is now core to a company’s strategy as they embrace digital transformation.
The adoption of cloud services has been on the rise. Dozens of business-oriented applications today are connecting homebound workers to collaborative tools that enable business continuity. The cloud-based support of video conferencing, file-sharing services, communications platforms, chatbots, and a host of data analytics, graphic design, accounting, HR, and sales management programs continue to support remote employees to work collaboratively. Similarly, remote developers continue writing code and building applications in cloud-supported containerised environments, while AI-backed internal and customer-facing applications keep humming along because they are built and managed in the cloud.