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IBM's key principles for cloud

John Granger, IBM. (Brian Ngobese, ITWeb)

The story of digital transformation is a book being written one chapter at a time, says IBM's John Granger.

Speaking at IBM’s Think Summit 2019 in Johannesburg this week, John Granger, senior vice president cloud application innovation, IBM Global Business Services, says businesses were transformed by consumer driven innovation in which the web, social media and mobile enabled them to reach customers in new ways. Now, the most important technology is going to be the cloud, he says.

Businessoes need to consider five key principles when thinking about cloud; namely it will be hybrid, multi-cloud, open, secure, and managed.

Hybrid

“All clouds will be hybrid. By that I mean you will have traditional IT private clouds and public clouds. Our research shows that on average, if you put your traditional IT aside, 40% of clouds will be private and 60% public. If you regulate it, it'll probably be the other way around. By and large, that reflects your concerns about data. Data has gravity, and few of you can hold the candidates' totally critical data without holding it in a substantial private cloud. So there are going to be more hybrid cloud models, the private dedicated public and managed clouds as well as the need for extensive hybrid integration capabilities.”

Multi-cloud

“Your public cloud provision is going to be multi-cloud. Different applications and workloads work better on different cloud of course, but more importantly, clients are cautious about putting all of their eggs in one public cloud basket, they are cautious.”

Open standards

“In a hybrid cloud world with private and multiple public clouds, open standards are critical. You need to leverage the latest and greatest technology and be open by design. We need to be able to write something once and then deploy on any cloud from any vendor. And our Red Hat acquisition will further enable you to do just that. Red Hat is the leading open source enterprise company in the world and the reason it is so important to be using open source technologies is that the skills are scarce. You want people to be able to write something and then you choose where you want to deploy it. And all of this means greater agility for you, and lowers the cost of ownership by using a consistent set of repeatable skills and tools across vendors.”

Secure

“Your cloud has to be secure. You need to leverage a world class security net into your mix of cloud models, and in every layer of the security stack, applications data network and beyond in securing your entire enterprise cloud and IT real estate.”

Managed

“It all needs to be managed. In this environment companies require cloud services which support multiple vendors and technologies, and it must be aligned to the latest open and software defined standards and architectures.”