Mastering Hybrid Cloud – Big Ideas

Hybrid cloud is a powerful strategy for business transformation and innovation across a modern enterprise. Unlocking transformational business performance improvement requires being able to securely employ software and data at scale and with speed across the enterprise IT landscape. That, of course, is cloud. For a big enterprise, especially one rapidly transforming into a virtual enterprise, the bar is higher. We set out the Virtual Enterprise as the target destination for next-gen business transformation in a related report.¹

Because of data gravity, security and regulatory requirements, and the complexity of mission-critical applications, a single public cloud is rarely adequate. Transforming enterprises demands open innovation and expanded business value. That’s hybrid cloud. A solution that spans conventional data centers, mainframes, multiple clouds (private and public), software as a service (SaaS) applications, and applications and data running at the edge. That pragmatic hybrid cloud approach yields 2.5x more value than the use of a single public cloud alone.²

A hybrid cloud platform can integrate applications that run across multiple clouds, moving data securely across the cloud estate, and improving business processes and workflows that span multiple clouds. A hybrid cloud platform simplifies and integrates diverse elements of a large cloud estate into a single, coherent fabric of capabilities.

So, simplification and integration of the IT landscape is what mastery of hybrid cloud is all about, and that mastery can confer 4 distinctive levers of value:
– Build applications once, deploy them anywhere.
– Manage applications once, host them anywhere.
– Skill once, deploy them anywhere.
– Innovate anywhere, with anyone’s technology.

Hybrid cloud simplification and integration also deliver broader access to a bigger range of value propositions. Let’s break that down.

By broader access, we mean that more people can build and deploy more software, and access and use the underlying data. So how does broader access intersect with hybrid cloud? Think of hybrid cloud like a city’s transportation network: as multiple routes expand a population’s access, so multiple forms of cloud make valuable cloud capabilities accessible to everyone across the enterprise.

By a bigger range of value propositions, we mean that hybrid cloud can take you to many more of the places you want to go in your search for business value. Currently, you can easily move only a small proportion of your application estate to public cloud. Consequently, we see this big movement toward hybrid cloud.

We’re very bullish on the journey to value with hybrid cloud.

There is value to be had from the early stages of cloud adoption, but we believe that hybrid cloud will drive your business’ most transformational, software- and data-driven roadmaps for improving product and service delivery to your customers.

Even further, by promoting openness and cohesion across the ecosystem, hybrid cloud opens the door to increased business value by expanding innovation.

Read this report to go deeper on how organizations can overcome the barriers to realizing benefits of hybrid cloud.

For any questions or requests contact your IBM Representative today.