IBM Consulting clears up hybrid cloud woes with Cloud Accelerator

The cloud acceleration platform aims to answer issues with a single cloud approach.

Over the pandemic, many businesses have moved to digital. Different ways to centralize data became an important topic, with cloud storage being one of the most turned-to services in recent years.

As businesses transitioned to having operations instantaneously tied with having data and processes in various cloud providers, a new problem came to light: how to manage multiple cloud platforms efficiently.

A recent IBM study, “Mastering Hybrid Cloud”, identified that the hybrid cloud opportunity is currently pegged at $1t and continues to be a powerful strategy for business transformation and innovation for clients.

It also showed that 97% of organizations are operating on more than a single cloud, as companies operate with a mix of multiple public clouds and private clouds. The average enterprise had around 8 clouds in 2020 and it’s expected to rise to 10 by 2023.

This led to businesses having multiple clouds to navigate through varying workloads, coining the term “frankencloud” approach to explaining this multi-channel use of cloud-based networks. Eventually, this showed that building clouds on top of clouds and creating environments riddled with complexity and lack of interoperability cannot be beneficial for businesses in the long term.

Whilst this issue slowly comes to light today, companies continue to be plagued with security and compliance challenges such as cyber threats and cloud outages as they modernize. Turning to hybrid and multi-cloud strategies became crucial to continuously support its customers.

To figure out how to navigate through these issues, Singapore Business Review, spoke with several experts from IBM to discuss ways to combat the growing need for a more centralised system of navigating through the cloud.

“Mastering hybrid cloud is an answer that most companies must adapt to. To put it simply, this is the integration of cloud assets according to a clear and compelling hybrid cloud vision, starting with a hybrid cloud platform architecture that defines a “fabric” of cloud services across multiple environments,” Koh Wan Taow, Partner of Hybrid Cloud Services in IBM Consulting said.

He added that whilst some businesses question the financial challenge of switching to a hybrid cloud, more benefits may be acquired from making the switch. Mastering hybrid cloud manages all cloud costs through a single view and captures opportunities to optimize costs and reallocate resources.

Centering this is the cloud financial operations practice which can help companies manage and optimize cloud service consumption and spending.

Suresh Eswaran, CTO of Hybrid Cloud Services in IBM Consulting, said that the IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator is the company’s answer to these pain points.

Suresh describes the IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator as a revolutionary cloud acceleration platform designed to orchestrate a collection of expert rules, tools, technical assets, and industry solution starter kits.

“The Cloud Accelerator identified several tasks that must be reviewed by organizations. These include addressing the breadth and complexity of their application landscape, enabling consistency in the operating model across hybrid multiclouds, developing solutions rapidly with predictable outcomes, driving DevOps transformation at scale, leveraging best practices and content harvested from cloud programs worldwide, and mitigating the shortage of skilled cloud expertise with tools and built-in intelligence,” Suresh said.

The technology provides a solution to move complex workloads to the cloud with speed and consistency regardless of cloud platform or modernization strategy. It also automates the work to be done, requiring highly skilled resources only for a fraction of time.

Amongst the tools and services that comes with the IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator include addressing complexity associated with regulated, mission-critical workloads based on IBM’s journey framework and prescriptive guidance to arrive with a predictable outcome.

For those looking for flexibility, it also supports a wide range of applications and landing zones including AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud and Red Hat. This enabled both hybrid cloud and platform-native modernizations.

There is also the function to codify expertise within the platform based on IBM’s proven expertise using cloud transformation and by harvesting best practices from IBM’s cloud programs executed globally.

Identifying appropriate accelerators from a vast repository of assets and tools across home-grown catalogues and IBM products, open-source and third-party vendors is also possible, through orchestrating a guided “GPS-like experience” to deliver highly optimised execution outcomes.