The results were stunning:
- Over 2,000 application components onboarded to CIO Hybrid Cloud platform, mostly custom-built applications, application integrations and data components.
- 55% fewer DevOps hours spent on operations, allowing applications teams to focus on business value.
- 90% cost savings for CIO Hybrid Cloud platform hosting containerized workloads versus legacy hosting.
Application teams are meeting corporate objectives:
- Application changes were taking months, but now changes can be delivered daily. Security patches are delivered rapidly.
- Security and availability were application afterthoughts, but now highly available secure applications are the default.
- Critical application teams struggled with disaster recovery implementation, testing and associated costs. Now disaster recovery support is built into the platform’s implementation patterns.
Increasing scale and capabilities of the previous private cloud solution required capital expenditures and operational overhead that were challenging to predict. The agility of the IBM hybrid cloud allowed the platform to scale elastically based on demand. The IBM Cloud Catalog of services are used by the platform and by the applications. The cloud provides security-rich resources with low operational overhead and consumption-based pricing. Data and applications are located on premises or in the cloud based on business requirements. Cloud data residency can be regional to meet regulatory requirements.
Continuous platform improvement is based on data-driven decisions with measurable results. Real-time data generated by the applications are stored in a data warehouse and are available for platform and application analysis. Over time some applications will require updates and platform metrics will inform the required changes. Other applications will reach end of life and the impact of retiring an application can be assessed. Application owners have visibility to metrics through a common interface to reason about performance and troubleshoot problems. The IBM Cloud Pak® for Data is a central component of the data warehouse.
The platform can also analyze underlying performance and measure the impact of changes. The data is also used to report derived information to the application teams, including compliance posture, criticality and software currency. The IBM Cloud® Security and Compliance Center, IBM Cloud® Log Analysis and IBM Cloud® Activity Tracker are used as part of the observability strategy along with IBM partners.
The platform can apply AI-based analysis on the data warehouse. Vertical scaling of application hosting resources using the IBM® Turbonomic® solution is available to the applications. Intelligent workload placement is also possible, allowing applications to migrate for optimal cost and performance.