In this dynamic data-driven world, organizations across industries adopt multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies to attune to evolving customer expectations and new working models. These strategies prove useful for maintaining backups, managing critical workloads, running applications, and storing vast amounts of data generated by in-house and customer-facing applications every day.
A recent surveyOpens a new window by IBM found that 74% of CEOs will turn to the cloud in the next 2-3 years to deliver operational agility and flexibility as they adapt to market shifts and change consumer expectations. This signals a whole-of-industry shift from purely on-prem infrastructure to one that leverages the benefits offered by cloud platforms to meet the evolving needs of businesses and end-users.Â
In this video interview by Toolbox, Harish GramaOpens a new window , the general manager of IBM CloudOpens a new window , explains why a hybrid cloud model is enjoying growing adoption across industries and how IBM’s hybrid cloud offerings address concerns like high egress fees and high latency, and complex data management.
He also talks about Big Blue’s new Cloud Satellite, how it competes with Microsoft Azure Stack and Azure Arc, AWS Outposts and Google Anthos, and how the market has responded to this new technology. He also addresses questions on the future of the public cloud, IBM’s role in upskilling developers and data engineers, and the road ahead for cloud computing.
Learn More: IBM Announces the Worldwide General Availability of IBM Cloud Enterprises
Key Takeaways From This Interview:
- Why hybrid cloud computing is gaining popularity
- Differences between a hybrid cloud and a multi-cloud approach
- How to address data management issues associated with hybrid cloud
- Why a Kubernetes-based cloud model outclasses proprietary offerings
Watch our face-to-face interview with Harish Grama:
Here are some of the highlights from this interview:
Companies Moving To the Cloud
HG: Because of existing regulatory requirements and data security concerns, some companies still prefer using on-premise infrastructure to store and process their data. IBM Cloud helps such businesses retain complete control over their data while moving it to the cloud, enabling them to run their applications on the cloud with the same level of security. At the same time, businesses retain the keys to such data, meaning that IBM cannot access their data or decrypt their data. Factors like these are enabling organizations to move their data to the cloud.
Hybrid Cloud Meeting the Needs of Most Organizations
HG: An enterprise shifting all of its data, applications, and infrastructure to a public cloud platform is a very complex matter. Many legacy applications don’t lend themselves easily to be migrated to the public cloud. Running these legacy applications may give rise to latency as well as security and compliance issues. That’s why on average, only around 20% of applications are run on the public cloud.  Â
A hybrid cloud platform based on Kubernetes (such as IBM Cloud) transforms middleware on-prem to become truly cloud-native, and this modernized middleware can then be run on the public cloud. This ensures that running legacy applications on the cloud doesn’t impact their performance as their application building blocks are the same. Hybrid cloud also gives organizations a consistent security model and a consistent management model where everything can be managed from a single panel.
Learn More: Open Source Skills Are the Most Sought After for Cloud Tech: IBMÂ
Latency and High Egress Fees Associated With Hybrid Cloud Computing
HG: IBM’s hybrid cloud enables organizations to access their cloud data and applications in 11 milliseconds or less, which satisfies most applications’ needs. This is facilitated by its huge public cloud footprint around the world. To help tackle latency issues, a hybrid cloud model lets companies perform workloads either on the public cloud or on-prem- depending upon which platform handles latency the best.
High egress fee associated with data stored in the public cloud is also a major worry for organizations, which is why organizations don’t transfer all of their data to the cloud. A Hybrid cloud model, based on open-source platforms like Kubernetes or OpenShift, provides organizations with application building blocks for both public cloud and on-prem, enabling the latter to deploy applications wherever their data resides. Uniquely, IBM’s hybrid cloud offerings do not charge egress fees for the movement of data between data centers or regions, giving customers the flexibility to move their data from public cloud to on-prem data centers or vice versa.
From the Editor
In the interview, Harish mentioned Booking.com as one of IBM Cloud’s Hybrid Cloud clients. This was incorrect, as he was talking about IBM Cloud’s recent association with Booking Group, a global online car rental service, and not Booking.com, the digital travel company. Harish clarified the company’s name at a later stage in the interview.
About Harish GramaOpens a new window :Â
Harish Grama is the General Manager of IBM Public Cloud. He is responsible for leading IBM’s multibillion-dollar public cloud business in providing a full-stack cloud platform to support enterprise and hyperscale workloads across public, private and hybrid environments. Prior to leading IBM’s Public Cloud, Harish was the CIO of Cloud Services for JPMorgan Chase.  There he led the company’s transformation to hybrid cloud, leveraging both their Cloud Foundry based private cloud, and Public Cloud Service Providers.Â
Before his CIO role at JPMorgan Chase, Harish has held executive roles as IBM’s Vice President and General Manager of Product Management, Development and Customer Support in Software. He brings over 28 years of enterprise technology leadership, and over the past six years he has been responsible for leading a multibillion-dollar P&L.
About IBM CloudOpens a new window :Â
IBM Cloud is a set of cloud computing services for business offered by IBM. It combines platform as a service (PaaS) with infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and scales and supports both small development teams and organizations, and large enterprise businesses. Headquartered in the Greater New York Area, it lists over 190 Cloud services in its stack, data centers located across the globe, and its services are used by 47 of the Fortune 50 organizations, ten of the largest banks, and 8 of the ten largest airlines in the world.
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