Why IBM Cloud Private (ICP) could be the perfect option
In today’s ever-connected business environment the cloud has come to represent the cornerstone of differentiation and competitive advantage. For most companies, it represents the environment where the majority of their business processes and applications reside. However, for many companies the public aspect of cloud computing is something that’s not a possibility: from regulatory challenges and more, the option is simply not available.
That said, there are ways to experience all the benefits of the cloud without moving to a strictly public option—leveraging a possible private or a hybrid option. For instance, IBM’s private cloud offering (known as ICP) delivers all the benefits of public cloud while remaining compliant with a multitude of industry-specific regulations—enabling users to effectively manage enterprise workloads with the benefit of extra controls for security.
So, why is the cloud so important? Trust me when I say I’m quite aware of that question being somewhat odd in this day and age. Most understand why the move to the cloud up until now has been so important. But that’s not where cloud ends; in fact, that’s actually where it begins. The need for companies to embrace the next phase of cloud—known to most as digital transformation—will come to represent the next evolutionary stage in computing as we know it.
The cloud will now be the epicenter for all modernized business process to leverage everything from Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning, to the Internet-of-Things (IoT), Digital Assistants and, of course, the new gold standard of business: ubiquitous data. In fact, it’s data that is the single greatest driving force of the new millennium—leveraged to achieve everything from better and more personalized end-user experience, all the way through to supreme business intelligence.
It’s for these reasons alone that organizations burdened with industry-related regulatory challenges must still embrace the cloud, albeit on their own terms. In the case of ICP, IBM has created a Kubernetes-based container platform that can help organizations to quickly adopt cloud-based infrastructure, enabling them to modernize and automate workloads. More importantly, it enables users of the platform to build new and highly innovative cloud-native applications to remain relevant and competitive in a world driven by cloud infrastructure. In this instance, the only difference is that the development and deployment of new applications takes place in a highly secure, private infrastructure within one’s own data center or hybrid model, mitigating risk of potential security concerns associated with other public cloud options.
For example, one of the most prevalent business challenges today is the need to modernize traditional applications. And, as our digital world continues to evolve, the demand on companies to enable better and more efficient scalability and resilience is paramount. Of course, like any modern IT challenge, that’s always easier said than done—but there can be light at the end of the tunnel.
ICP’s catalog includes containerized IBM middleware that is actually ready to deploy into the cloud—a benefit for those that dread the perceived long and arduous path to cloud readiness. In the case of ICP, containerization dispels those concerns, enabling users to avoid the trappings of application-specific breakage points when modernizing monolithic and legacy applications. By doing so, it can also reduce downtime by enabling users to simply address and isolate application interdependency issues on a singular basis without having to schedule downtime for an entire system.
So what does this truly mean for highly regulated business models? Simply put, cloud on its own terms. It’s clear that public cloud offerings enable far more options in planning one’s own data center environment. The elasticity afforded by the big players such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and more, is obviously of great value. In fact, it is the single biggest reason that many organizations—private and public sectors alike—are choosing to move more infrastructure to public options.
This choice makes IBM’s private cloud offering shine. Whether an organization chooses a fully private, a hybrid, or a fully public model for its cloud deployment, managing High Availability (HA) workloads becomes far easier in any case. And with the ability to provide a single deployment method and DevOps process at any time—in case the organization decides to deploy to the public cloud and on-premises data center simultaneously—it makes it an easy choice.
In the end, the cloud is here to stay; consequently, a business of any nature requires modernity to exist. Knowing that fully public cloud options are not for everyone, it’s nice to know there is still a cloud option available that can deliver the same benefits—but on one’s own terms.