It’s been more than a decade since commercial cloud first transformed business, but even now, only about 20% of workloads have moved to the cloud (link resides outside ibm.com). Why? Factors such as data residency, skills gaps, integration issues, legacy application environments not supported in the cloud and vendor lock-in may be preventing most teams from fully modernizing their IT operations.
Business leaders have the difficult task of accelerating innovation, speeding time to market and meeting evolving customer expectations without sacrificing security, compliance or the value of existing investments. Organizations must move past the basic cloud model and open the next chapter of cloud transformation, cloud application and cloud management innovation to help successfully balance these needs.
Enterprise lines of business look towards digital transformation and business process automation to drive innovation and create value. To deliver results, IT organizations are improving operational efficiency and modernizing IT infrastructure through cloud computing models and modularized application architecture.
As a major catalyst driving this transformation, containers make application integration and modernization far easier by isolating pieces of software so they can run independently. Additionally, Kubernetes provides a powerful solution for container orchestration and management. That is why IBM has embraced containers and built its multicloud solutions around the Kubernetes open source project.
Renovating legacy applications to cloud-native and hybrid cloud architectures requires teams to integrate on-premises components with containerized solutions residing in multiple clouds from different vendors, service providers and cloud providers. The challenge this introduces is that each cloud vendor offers unique Kubernetes distributions, requiring teams to double — sometimes triple — the number of management resources needed.
In 2019, IBM acquired Red Hat Corporation and has standardized its Kubernetes offerings based on Red Hat® OpenShift®. By delivering enterprise software via containers on OpenShift Kubernetes, IBM customers can build applications on a common hybrid cloud architecture platform that can run anywhere.
While teams can successfully implement a hybrid cloud strategy with OpenShift, teams may need more than Kubernetes alone. As application ecosystems continue to grow in complexity, enterprises will need to transform at scale, which includes orchestrating their production topology, offering a ready-to-go development model based on open standards and providing management, enterprise-grade security and intrusion detection as well as efficient application and data governance.
Adapting to change quickly and being able to continuously optimize and predict future issues is essential for digital businesses to gain competitive advantage. Enterprises across all industries — from healthcare to finance to insurance — can benefit from the functionality of public clouds and private clouds combined with the agility that hybrid cloud provides.
Building containerized applications from scratch requires a significant investment in cloud resources, talent and management tools. With a known shortage of cloud-native skills and short project timelines (businesses want solutions delivered yesterday), IBM customers are seeking enterprise-grade and pre-integrated software to accelerate digital transformation and innovation. IBM Cloud® Paks are AI-powered software designed for the hybrid cloud landscape. Customers are automating, predicting and optimizing business processes and modernizing business models at a faster pace without compromising capabilities, security and resiliency.
For the most complex projects and initiatives, IBM Cloud Paks were designed with built-in collaboration and intelligent workflows across multiple stakeholders to streamline communications and project management. IBM Cloud Paks help enterprises overcome obstacles introduced with the new application and operational complexity of multicloud environments.
IBM Cloud Paks are:
All IBM Cloud Paks are built on Red Hat® OpenShift® and are designed as cloud providers to help you develop and consume cloud services anywhere and from any cloud, allowing you to modernize with ease and make your data work for you, wherever you are.
IBM Cloud Paks are packaged based on solution domains and harness the combined power of container technology and IBM enterprise expertise to help organizations solve their most pressing challenges:
No two journeys to the cloud are the same. As your DevOps and ITOps teams embrace the container and Kubernetes revolution, accelerate innovation with pre-integrated, pre-certified, enterprise-grade IBM Cloud Paks software delivered on Red Hat OpenShift to meet your company wherever you are on that journey.