IBM launched a series of hybrid cloud services this week that range from streamlined integration and security to providing live consultation for companies that want to develop their cloud strategy. The company explained that a lot of the process of maintaining a hybrid-cloud infrastructure is manual, resulting in “major security implications and a lack of consistent management and integration tools.”
According to IBM, its new IBM Cloud Integration Platform can help companies cut the time it takes to “write, test and secure code once, store it in the platform and reuse it” by 33 percent, a process that the company explained often monopolizes developer time and productivity. The set of tools is vendor agnostic and can integrate on-premises, public and private cloud systems.
“Integration is critical as enterprises optimize business processes and create more personalized customer experiences,” IBM wrote in the announcement. “However, integration is becoming increasingly complex because many enterprises are already using between two to 15 different clouds and want to deploy new cloud services such as AI, analytics and blockchain to stay ahead of the competition.”
The IBM Services Multicloud Management is designed to simplify multicloud IT operations through a single system, and the IBM Services for Cloud Strategy and Design will connect businesses with the IBM Cloud Advisory, a set of newly-appointed cloud strategy specialists, to help them devise integration and operations strategies.
“Teams will use open and secure multicloud strategies, that draw on years of IBM experience in IT transformation and collaboration with an ecosystem of cloud partners, and IBM’s industry-leading Cloud Innovate method, automated accelerators and IBM Cloud garage approach to support clients with application development, migration, modernization and management,” the company wrote.
The last piece of IBM’s initiative is the Cloud Hyper Protect Crypto Service, which the company said provides the “highest level of commercially available security on a public cloud” with its use of IBM LinuxONE in its global cloud data centers. “This service provides encryption key management with a dedicated cloud hardware security module (HSM) built on the only FIPS 140-2 level 4-based technology offered by a public cloud provider,” the company wrote.
“Most large organizations have data and workloads spread across multiple public and private clouds, SaaS and on-premises environments – sometimes as a result of their business process infrastructure, but also for compliance, regulatory and data privacy reasons,” said Denis Kennelly, general manager of cloud integration at IBM. “The challenge in this environment is to overcome data and technology siloes to quickly deploy new business services and applications with security. Today, we are launching new capabilities designed to help unleash the full power of the hybrid cloud.”
