IBM Cloud VPC hybrid solution helps bring cost optimization, agility, and security for IBM’s internal IT
IBM is a global technology leader with more than 250,000 employees and annual revenues exceeding USD 50 billion. The company relies on thousands of internal applications to support a diverse portfolio; from chip design and quantum computing to sales, finance, and customer engagement. These applications are critical to IBM’s operations and innovation.
As the organization continued to grow and adapt to evolving business and regulatory requirements, the CIO team identified opportunities to improve efficiency and resilience. Managing security updates, disaster recovery, and compliance across a wide range of hosting environments required significant coordination. Application teams needed a way to accelerate delivery cycles while maintaining security and availability standards. To support IBM’s long-term strategy, the CIO organization sought a modern, scalable platform that could help simplify operations, optimize costs, and empower continuous innovation.
with IBM Cloud VPC’s automated compute and networking capabilities1
optimizing infrastructure observability2
IBM’s CIO organization began its modernization journey in 2019 by creating a hybrid cloud platform with Red Hat® OpenShift® on IBM Cloud®. This unified environment helped to enable containerized workloads and improved agility, but as adoption grew, managing workloads across IBM Cloud infrastructure environments and newer environments introduced complexity. Scaling OpenShift clusters, maintaining observability, and meeting evolving compliance requirements required a more advanced approach.
In 2023, the team moved from IBM Cloud classic infrastructure to IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC and IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers for VPC as the foundation for the next phase of transformation. Compute infrastructure on IBM Cloud VPC is designed for software-defined networking, built‑in security groups, and direct integration with OpenShift—aiming to eliminate reliance on specialized hardware and reduce licensing overhead. Using Terraform® for modular provisioning and Argo CD for automated deployments, the CIO team migrated workloads without lift‑and‑shift, helping to ensure stability and scalability.
Beyond infrastructure, the transformation introduced intelligent automation and data-driven decision-making. The IBM® watsonx.data® platform is the core of the CIO Organization’s data architecture, providing a unified foundation for lakehouse analytics and vectorized storage to power AI-driven applications. It enables key enterprise use cases including W3 (the company intranet), the Application Library and Access Hub, security log analytics, device telemetry pipelines, and conversational experiences such as AskIBM and AskIT. The platform also supports identity-related data workloads, for consistent, governed access across these services.
Observability was strengthened through IBM Cloud Logs, IBM Cloud Monitoring, and partner tools, designed to provide proactive insights for troubleshooting and optimization.
To optimize resource utilization, the platform integrated IBM Turbonomic®, applying AI-driven analysis for vertical scaling and intelligent workload placement. This allowed applications to migrate dynamically to support cost and performance efficiency. Combined with IBM Cloud VPC’s GPU-supported architecture and private endpoints for secure access to IBM Cloud services, the CIO organization achieved a platform designed to support evolving AI workloads, global expansion, and future growth .
The IBM CIO organization reduced OpenShift infrastructure provisioning time by 50% with IBM Cloud VPC’s automated compute and networking capabilities1. Application teams now have the capability to deploy updates daily instead of monthly, helping to accelerate innovation while focusing on security and compliance standards.
Disaster recovery and high availability support are built into the platform, helping to address risk and simplify continuity planning. IBM Cloud VPC optimizes infrastructure observability for the IBM CIO organization with 100% out-of-the-box monitoring2. Observability was enhanced through IBM Cloud integrated monitoring and network tools designed for proactive performance management. With GPU-supported infrastructure and a uniform architecture for global expansion, IBM is positioned to support AI-driven workloads and future growth.
The transformation didn’t just modernize technology; it changed the operating model. Combined with hybrid cloud flexibility and intelligent workload placement built with IBM Turbonomic®, the CIO organization now operates with agility and confidence, ready to meet evolving business demands.
The Chief Information Officer (CIO) organization leads IBM’s internal IT strategy and is responsible for delivering, securing, modernizing and supporting the IT solutions that IBMers use to do their jobs every day. The CIO strategy encompasses creating an AI-first, adaptive IT platform that makes IT easier to access across the enterprise, accelerates problem-solving and serves as an innovation engine for IBM, catalyzing business growth.
Footnotes
1 Based on internal IBM CIO measurements comparing provisioning of virtual server instances in IBM Cloud Classic (~10 minutes including configuration and networking steps) versus IBM Cloud VPC (~5 minutes). Actual provisioning times may vary depending on configuration and environment.
2 Refers to the availability of built-in monitoring capabilities in IBM Cloud VPC environments, eliminating the need for additional NetScaler and gateway appliances required in prior IBM Cloud Classic environments. Coverage may vary depending on workload and configuration.
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© Copyright IBM Corporation, March 2026.
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Examples presented as illustrative only. Actual results will vary based on client configurations and conditions and, therefore, generally expected results cannot be provided.