What is IT optimization?

Organizations continue to increase their investment in cloud and evolve their environments to drive business forward. An optimized IT solution is unique to each enterprise, and most often involves a hybrid multicloud platform, which is a combination of public cloud, private cloud and traditional IT services. In a cloud computing survey, 73 percent of key IT decision-makers reported having already adopted this combination of cloud technology, and another 17 percent intended to do so in the next 12 months.²

The number of use cases grows as organizations turn to cloud adoption to optimize their IT infrastructures, improve efficiencies and offer a better customer experience. The need to optimize for flexibility, stability and agility has never been stronger.

---

² IDG. 2018 IDG Cloud Computing Survey. 2018

How to optimize IT:
Take the hybrid approach

Adopting cloud doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing proposition. You can start capitalizing on cloud capabilities while continuing to maximize the assets that currently reside within your on-premises environments. To facilitate flexibility and portability, you can incorporate your existing systems and applications into a hybrid-cloud model.

Most companies with private clouds will evolve to use their private cloud as a foundation that they’ll strategically integrate with public cloud services, ultimately managing workloads across data centers, private clouds and public clouds. The main advantage? With hybrid cloud your workloads can be deployed and managed where they make the most sense.

More key aspects of hybrid cloud include:

• Retains your critical applications and sensitive data within a traditional data center environment or private cloud

• Enables usage of public cloud resources like SaaS for the latest applications and IaaS for elastic virtual resources

• Facilitates the portability of data, apps and services and more choices for deployment models

A hybrid-cloud approach affords you the freedom to have your apps, data and services where they are most effective and deliver the most value, faster.

A field guide to multicloud management

Increase IT flexibility with virtualization and containers

IT optimization involves maximizing the performance of your technology within your existing infrastructure or environment. One approach that allows a more efficient use of computer hardware and boosts your ROI is virtualization.

Virtualization uses software to extend the utility of your physical hardware, allowing you to purchase the computing resources you need, when you need them. You can then scale those resources cost effectively as your workloads grow.

Containerization, as an alternative to or companion to virtualization, has become another major trend in software development. A container is an independent miniature platform that holds a single application, which makes it simple to deploy—often requiring a single click, making them ideal for cloud-to-cloud migrations. In fact, more than 59 percent of enterprises implementing a container strategy have seen an improvement in app quality, as well as a reduction in their applications’ defects.³

Containers provide a level of flexibility that is ideal for what’s become a multicloud world. When a dev team creates an application, they may not know where they’ll need to deploy it later. Today, an organization might be running the application on its private cloud, but tomorrow it might need to deploy it on a public cloud from a different provider.

Containerizing applications provides teams the flexibility they need to handle the many software environments of modern IT.

---

³ IBM Cloud Education. Containerization. May 2019.

Moving workloads to cloud:
How IBM can help

Sixty percent of companies are migrating applications to the cloud, but 66 percent of those companies see cloud migration as a challenge. When migrating applications and data to the cloud, one size doesn’t fit all. You’ll need to consider how much of your back-end infrastructure you want to support, and which application workloads can and should be moved.

Migrating to a cloud environment can help improve operational performance and agility, workload scalability, and security. From virtually any source, you can migrate workloads and quickly begin capitalizing on the following hybrid-cloud benefits:

• Greater agility with IT resources on demand, which enables you to scale unexpected surges or seasonal usage patterns

• Reduced capital expenditure by shifting to an operating expenses model to pay-as-you-go

• Enhanced security with various options throughout the stack—from physical hardware and networking to software and people

Before you embark on the cloud migration process, it helps to have a clear understanding of what’s involved. Here are five key elements for a successful cloud migration:

1. Develop a strategy. This should be done early and in a way that prioritizes business objectives over technology.

2. Identify the right applications. Not all apps are cloud friendly. Some perform better on private or hybrid clouds than on a public cloud. Some may need minor tweaking while others need in-depth code changes. A full analysis of architecture, complexity, and implementation is easier to do before the migration than after.

3. Secure the right cloud provider. A key aspect of your optimization will involve selecting a cloud provider that can work with you throughout and after the migration process. What tools, including third-party, does it have available to help make the process easier? Can it support public, private and multicloud environments at any scale? How can it help you deal with complex interdependencies, inflexible architectures, or redundant and out-of-date technology?

4. Maintain data integrity and operational continuity. Managing risk is critical, and sensitive data can be exposed during a migration. Post-migration validation of business processes is crucial to ensure that automated controls are producing the same outcomes without disrupting normal operations.

5. Adopt an end-to-end approach. Service providers should have a robust and proven methodology to address every aspect of the migration process. This should include the framework to manage complex transactions on a consistent basis and on a global scale. Make sure to spell all of this out in the service level agreement with agreed-upon milestones for progress and results.

It’s clear that IT optimization requires specific capabilities and know-how. IBM® Cloud Migration Services advises on the best approach for your enterprise—from any environment to any cloud—showing you how to plan, test different options, prepare budgets, and calculate the ROI for your overall migration initiative.

8 best practices to optimize your IT (PDF, 10.1 MB)

---

⁴ IBM Services. Soar to the cloud without turbulence. 2018

Expect more:
IBM solutions

Your enterprise needs a tailored IT optimization strategy. IBM has the technology and services to modernize and extend your IT infrastructure to cloud.

VMWare
IBM Cloud™ supports a wide variety of VMware products and services in its cloud environment. You can migrate all your VMware workloads from on-premises infrastructure to IBM Cloud, or you can mix and match, creating a hybrid-cloud environment that you manage from a single place. IBM has the experience in managing, designing, and deploying VMware infrastructure, with some of the largest deployments under management.

VMware clients often have difficulties with migration, implementing automation solutions, and vendor lock-ins. This IDC report examines how the IBM Cloud partnership combats these issues by offering a security-rich, flexible, non-disruptive path to a public cloud.

IDC Whitepaper: IBM Cloud for VMWare Solutions

Private cloud
IBM Cloud Pak™ offerings provide a faster, more secure way to move your core business applications to any cloud through enterprise-ready containerized software solutions. Built on a common operating environment that runs anywhere—from any data center to multiple clouds—you can select the best architecture and approach to address the most critical application, data and workload requirements for your business.

Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® and Red Hat OpenShift® enterprise Kubernetes, an open source platform for container orchestration, is trusted and certified by thousands of organizations around the world and is available anywhere they operate. Open architectures enable inclusion and choice for all companies, applications, developers and users.

Learn more about IBM + Red Hat

Public cloud
Open architectures, based on Kubernetes and containers, are driving the next wave of cloud-based business innovation. IBM’s public cloud offers trusted and secure solutions, improving innovation, user experience, account management, networking, core infrastructure and more, including:

• Support your existing enterprise workloads with IBM’s open cloud architecture so you can easily and quickly migrate, scale-up and scale-out your applications.

• Choose from multiple cloud-native architectures for your innovative new applications—Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, Serverless, VMs, bare metal—all under one management umbrella.

• Access advanced cloud services, such as AI, IoT and blockchain, to build next-generation applications.

IBM Cloud Pak offerings give you a faster, more secure way to move your core business applications to any cloud through enterprise-ready, containerized software solutions.

Build now

Cloud expertise
Cloud services from IBM can help your organization realize business objectives by building, deploying and managing workloads on a multicloud environment that’s integrated with your traditional infrastructure. As tightly integrated infrastructures are replaced by modular, managed services in a hybrid environment of private and public clouds, workloads must be migrated, optimized, and enabled for cloud applications to stay competitive.

Cloud managed services comparison guide

Conclusion
IT optimization helps your enterprise drive velocity, scale easily and increase security. IBM supports mission-critical workloads and optimization efforts across various industries including healthcare, finance, transportation, media, and more.

With a blend of trusted technology, tools, and expertise, you can successfully optimize your IT to meet the changing needs of your enterprise, and most importantly, you’ll exceed the ever-increasing demands of your customers.