By Laura Noonan 4 min read
February 26, 2021

Enjoy cloud consumption and an as-a-service model on-premises with IBM Cloud Satellite.

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Run your workloads wherever you need

Many of today’s enterprises realize advantages from moving applications into the public cloud. They’re building cloud native applications, scaling them on-demand and improving the speed of their development through as-a-service API-based consumption on the public cloud. But the reality is that many workloads have not moved to the cloud yet. Many enterprises, especially those in regulated industries, have security and compliance requirements or performance and latency requirements that make it challenging to physically move those applications into a public cloud data center.

In a recent survey, 73% of enterprises list movement between clouds as a priority concern. So, what if you could have the flexibility to run your workloads wherever you need them: on-premises in existing data centers, in multiple public cloud providers around the world or at the edge of the network — closer to the applications and data sources they need to process.

What if you could consume cloud services on-demand, anywhere, and all of these services were fully managed, as-a-service by the public cloud provider?

IBM Cloud Satellite: Build Faster. Securely. Anywhere

IBM Cloud Satellite helps organizations build applications faster on cloud, on-premises environments and at the edge. It extends the IBM Cloud catalog of cloud services to locations outside of IBM Cloud regions, while the heavy lifting of ongoing management of those service remains with IBM. Development and IT teams can deliver software faster by creating a fast, scalable software delivery pipeline with cloud native tooling, deploy them to any location, scale them on demand and improve the speed of their development through as a service API based consumption.

Use case: Financial services accelerating personalized mortgage experiences

Let’s look at a use case. A multinational bank is providing online access to home mortgages. Behind this proprietary app called MoveNow! — through which all customer transactions are conducted — the bank runs hundreds of critical operational applications. The bank has a strategic imperative to grow mortgage signups and revenue through personalized user experiences, allowing customers to tailor the right type of mortgage to fit their needs. Additionally, the bank needs to customize offers based on geography and fluctuating interest rates.

In a highly regulated, security-conscious industry with a long IT history, not everything can be deployed to the public cloud. The CTO of the bank wants her developers to invent new ways to meet clients’ needs by quickly building new applications and deploying them consistently in all their data centers. What she really needs is to be able to have the benefits and agility of cloud services available consistently in their data centers. That way, the developers can move fast.

Concerns from the CTO include the following:

  • Demand for new products and features requires agility and speed.
  • Regulations, policies and latency concerns keep backend systems on-premises.
  • Fragmentation of infrastructure resources isolates workloads, locking up the value of underused resources.

Securely consume cloud services in the bank’s on-premises data center

With IBM Cloud Satellite, the bank’s development and operations teams can break free from the constraints of disparate and immobile proprietary tools and bring cloud native technologies and practices on-premises. Developers can build containerized apps with the tools of their choice to modernize their mortgage applications, and the bank’s IT teams can use consistent configuration to ensure applications are deployed, configured and governed uniformly across all locations. Because backend systems remain on-premises, the bank can continue to meet latency, privacy, security and compliance requirements.  

The solution: IBM Cloud Satellite

  • Satellite location: The bank creates a Satellite location in each of their existing data centers where they want to deploy the MoveNow! app, giving the IT team choices for compute size, network connectivity and resource allocation.
  • Access a large catalog of IBM Cloud services: The bank can consume cloud services on-demand, such as the Kubernetes-based OpenShift Container Platform, DevOps tools and frameworks for AI machine learning. Because these services are API-based, the developers and IT teams can consume the APIs to build and deploy the bank’s applications.
  • Consistent operations experience: A single dashboard centralizes observability and management across all locations. The bank’s mortgage team can deploy, monitor and update the application themselves from a common dashboard on IBM Cloud. IBM handles the deployment and operational lifecycle of the services from the cloud, reducing the need for in-country skilled resources. Satellite configuration management enables the bank to keep the applications up to date and properly configured across hundreds of instances easily. And Satellite’s connection to IBM Cloud security makes sure that the data is safe and completely controlled by the bank’s team.
  • As-a-service model: With Satellite, the CTO’s team offloads running the PaaS services to IBM so they can focus on their core business logic. Now, the engineering team doesn’t need as much skilled staff at each data center.

With these capabilities and more, IBM Cloud Satellite allows the CTO and her team to consume cloud native services in their on-premises sites around the world. The bank will be able to meet its strategic goal to grow mortgage signups and revenue by quickly giving customers new products and enhanced personalized experiences.

Location, location, location

Many companies want the flexibility and agility that comes with the public cloud, but the constraints of latency, security and compliance requirements often make it challenging. With IBM Cloud Satellite, you can do the following:

  • Run apps wherever it makes the most sense
  • Extend security controls to any location
  • Build new apps in as few as three weeks
  • Ensure apps are always up to date

Get started

Categories

Cloud  |  management  |  Open source  | 
Laura Noonan
Portfolio Marketing Manager

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