Where are you on your Journey to Cloud?

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Author: Dev Mookerjee, CTO Red Hat Synergy, Asia Pacific, IBM Global Markets

Chances are last year you were working from home with a broadband connection being your work and social lifeblood. You have likely spent more hours meeting people on Zoom, Webex, Whatsapp, BlueJeans or other video conferencing applications than ever before. While we all appreciate the value of fast broadband and a digitally connected workforce at a very personal level now, the past year has also compressed timelines for digital transformation for most organisations into an infinitely smaller window than anticipated.

Digitisation of an organisation is not a single application; it is a systemic change to how an organisation approaches its entire value chain including its business continuity processes. If you are thinking that digitisation at this scale is for new, born-in-the-cloud companies, take heart with the fact that IBM was able to move 95% of our global workforce to working from home in just a few days – and maintain business continuity as we did it! This year IBM turned 109 years young. We weren’t born on the cloud, but we sure have been re-born on it!

Enterprise Agility

Enterprise agility has been a key characteristic that companies’ model to with 79% of executives prioritising it as a central business competency. A robust cloud strategy is key to achieving your organisation’s vision of agility. Now, just as you would never limit your organisation’s freedom to make the right choices for your clients and you, your approach to cloud needs to be guided by the same strategy. An organisation’s cloud strategy is about having the agility to be able to run the right workloads on the right cloud platform based on the workload’s business needs in a seamless, secure, and governed manner. 

The IBM approach to cloud along with industry-leading hybrid cloud technology from Red Hat is built to provide enterprises with that choice. This includes starting with your existing investments in technologies, skills and processes and then embarking on a journey to cloud. The IBM Cloud is built on our security leadership including data protection advancements, Open innovation to give enterprises true choice and enterprise-grade infrastructure.

Hybrid computing

Hybrid computing is the next chapter of the cloud and allows organisations to have private and public clouds to work together. It’s a foundation for enterprise cloud with existing workloads running on-premises. Coming back to connectivity, data transfer speeds is a key differentiation in the hybrid world, and this has not gone unnoticed in Australia with the rollout of 5G networks. 5G makes this possible by enabling a tenfold reduction in latency from 4G and a higher connection density. It’s no wonder there is a projected $500 billion in economic growth and potential for 3 million new jobs with the advent of 5G. In May last year, Telstra announced an expanded 5G footprint to now include 47 Australian cities.

Hybrid Cloud has been estimated to be a US$1.2 trillion market globally. The rollout of 5G across Australia, coupled with IBM’s Multi-Zone Region (MZR) Public Cloud located in Sydney, presents enormous potential for Australian businesses to start or expand their own Journey to Cloud in a locally present and managed Hybrid cloud. To help you along the journey, RMIT Online has partnered with IBM to deliver a course to help prepare business leaders for the wide-scale adoption of 5G technologies.

In my decade of working at IBM, I have seen massive changes in the technology landscape including cloud, AI, quantum, blockchain and so many more. And every time, IBM has responded to our clients’ requirements with speed, agility and mutual trust – often leading the industry conversation and founding the technology in the market.