Now is the Time to Take Back Control

In the unprecedented complex reality in which most organizations are running their businesses today, they are compelled to figure out how to continue serving their clients, without putting their employees’ well-being at risk. At the same time, they are also required to tighten their budgets, while still trying to figure out how to adapt their applications to the changes and disruptions in their respective industries and markets.

Their development teams are rising to the challenge of building such applications, but on their runtimes of choice, without much concern about differences in platforms. Hence, their operation teams are forced to manage these applications across on-premise and cloud environments, but at the same time cannot afford to acquire siloed skills and competencies based on each technology provider they work with. Governance and compliance across this technology landscape adds further obstacles, compounded by the need to ensure stability of the entire end-to-end environment and additional demand on their infrastructure and networks.

Organizations are undoubtedly ramping up on their hybrid and multicloud operating models to meet some of these challenges by adopting a cloud native strategy. The reality, however, is more complex than what the cloud native approach can address as many business-critical services today still run on monolithic applications which will stay as they are for the foreseeable future, and will only gradually transition into cloud native, leveraging hybrid cloud technologies such as Red Hat OpenShift. These organizations have to deal with a multifaceted reality of monolithic and cloud native applications, all distributed across multiple clouds and on-premise.

This current setting clearly cries out for a unified, hybrid, multicloud management capability that addresses the burden of dealing with so many different environments. This unified management layer is expected to be consistent, simple, integrated and managed through a single pane of glass. In times like this, automation is also central to the promise to multicloud IT operations to lessen the impact of human intervention. This platform needs to be truly self-monitoring, self-managing and self-optimizing whilst converging the teams of development, operation and security towards the needed DevSecOps and AIOps paradigm shifts.

Even with the economies slowly opening up and people getting back to work, in the new normal that we live in today, these operational and development challenges are not going away. It is becoming even more essential for organizations to have the visibility, control and automation of their dispersed IT landscapes to mitigate future risks and secure business continuity.

In my career, I have been at the forefront of addressing such business and operational challenges with the fortune of being armed with leading edge software solutions. IBM has once again risen to the challenge by ramping up development efforts, leveraging its research assets and ensuring open standards with IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management powered by Red Hat OpenShift. In the latest release, IBM has extended the offering by bringing together market leading capabilities such as Watson AIOps and Red Hat CloudForms and Ansible into a single unified platform. It also has a pluggable integrated core which means our clients can leverage existing third party tools such as Sysdig, Humio and Turbonomics through partner OEM integrations.

This platform caters for all the IT operations and management requirements of typical DevSecOps, ITOps and AIOps use cases. IT operations are able to:

· spin off new environments on demand with consistent security, compliance and cost policies.

· visualize these environments irrespective of being virtual machine based, container based, traditional on-premise, private cloud or any public cloud.

· visualize, monitor and troubleshoot different components of the applications regardless of where they are deployed.

· monitor events, respond to them automatically and evolve from a reactive model to a predictable and proactive model using AI and machine learning technologies.

Do you want to take back control and manage your evolving hybrid cloud environment ? Visit the IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management website or message me with any questions.