Cloud computing is increasingly becoming a business-critical platform, as opposed to just a resource-supporting one. The pandemic since 2020 has accelerated the pace of digital transformation for enterprises, with more and more workloads being migrated to the cloud. The cloud is also becoming increasingly rich in terms of the services it offers. Many businesses require the ability to schedule workloads across both private and public clouds – an open hybrid cloud has become the inevitable choice for the new generation of IT infrastructure for enterprises. The hybrid cloud platform provides a way to build a new ecosystem that is centered around IT automation, agile workflows, departmental autonomy, and security & governance – all while achieving streamlined operations. In this way, enterprises can fully reap the benefits of cloud computing and digital transformation.
Currently, many enterprises are facing the challenge of how to properly manage a hybrid cloud and extract the maximum value out of it. From existing experience, it appears that enterprise IT needs to undergo a complete, continuous, and large-scale transformation in order to truly realize the value of next-generation hybrid cloud infrastructure. This will be a key determinant of whether an enterprise’s digital transformation will be successful and sustainable.
Challenges facing businesses
As enterprises undergo IT transformation, they face five major challenges in optimizing their IT architecture to improve business speed and agility:
Challenge 1: How can we create an open platform that is secure and consistent across multi-cloud and legacy IT environments while still enabling agility for the business?
In the face of the pandemic, enterprises urgently need a platform that is secure and open, and that can maintain consistency across multi-cloud and legacy IT environments while still enabling agility for the business. This open platform would simplify the complexity of developing for different environments, tools, and methods, and improve developer productivity. Most importantly, it would allow the IT department to focus on creating a new culture and way of working for the enterprise, with the speed of cloud-native to meet the needs of business users.
Challenge 2 How to reduce IT costs and accelerate IT modernization through automation technology and management simplification?
Affected by the epidemic, many companies have experienced a surge in financial pressure and tight IT budgets. They hope to reduce costs and improve cash flow. Most enterprises have an average of multiple cloud platforms, each with hundreds or thousands of applications. All of these greatly increase the complexity of daily operations and increase indirect costs such as personnel recruitment and training, IT maintenance, etc. Therefore, enterprises need to accelerate platform-based containerization and modernization and apply automation technology to simplify architecture management and further improve the efficiency of application development and implementation.
Challenge 3: How to reduce unplanned downtime, or even achieve zero downtime?
The pandemic has brought about changes in the way work is done. While some work items still need to be done in close proximity to the workplace to be most effective, most work will require new models of remote execution and the new normal to ensure business continuity. Therefore, enterprises need to have the flexibility to respond quickly, adopt new IT delivery models, and achieve the best combination of face-to-face delivery and virtual delivery. In addition, when a problem occurs in the system, new IT operation and maintenance technology is adopted to speed up the identification and repair of problem categories and foresee future problems in advance, reduce the risk of unplanned downtime, and improve customer satisfaction.
Challenge 4 How to ensure enterprise IT system security and data security?
Accompanied by digital transformation are security threat situations with a higher degree of automation, more complexity and longer latency, such as ransomware, zero-day attacks, targeted attacks, APTs (Advanced Persistent Threats) and other malicious attack methods. This has led to the “stumbling blocks” of enterprises on the road of digital transformation, and all of them have resulted in the leakage of enterprise data to varying degrees, which has brought long-term hidden dangers to the enterprise’s finance, brand equity, customer and employee productivity, etc. In the current environment, an enterprise’s business continuity plan has become an important strategic asset. Enterprises need to formulate future crisis response plans to ensure the security of their IT systems and data.
Challenge 5 How to maximize the value of scarce IT talents and keep the supply chain of IT talents to ensure business sustainability and innovation?
Within many companies, a significant amount of IT talent remains mired in day-to-day IT operations and cannot be freed to focus on activities that deliver higher value and expand business advantage. The lack of a sufficient number of people with digital skills greatly limits the sustainability and innovation of businesses. All of these require companies to transform their existing IT work models, adopt automation technologies and outsourcing services, and release valuable IT talents to invest in high-value activities; at the same time, adopt new digital training methods inside and outside the enterprise to accelerate talent supply and skill reshaping.
How to Enhance Next-Generation Hybrid Cloud Management Capabilities
Enterprises need to build a new type of hybrid cloud management from multiple dimensions, such as open platform construction, unified platform governance, full-stack consistent management, intelligent operation and maintenance technology, powerful crisis management, flexible delivery model, and innovative talent supply. ability.
1. Build an open hybrid cloud platform
To meet the above challenges, enterprises first need to build an open hybrid cloud platform as a solid foundation for digital transformation. The application of new technologies plays a crucial role, with 89% of IT leaders planning to use artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics, 83% planning to use the Internet of Things (IoT), and 59% planning to use the Internet of Things (IoT) for IT infrastructure development planning Use blockchain. Effectively implementing these technologies in a multi-cloud infrastructure will enable you to use data intelligently to fundamentally change day-to-day operations and deepen competitive advantage. On top of this, enterprises need to perform end-to-end management of different types of cloud environments and the entire IT infrastructure to achieve seamless integration of multi-vendor and multi-platform in a hybrid cloud environment.
2. Full-stack management of multi-cloud environments
Enterprises need to apply a hybrid cloud management platform to perform full-stack and consistent management of multi-cloud environments to help enterprises manage, monitor, automate and coordinate the environments of various cloud providers. To better balance the new system and the full-stack consistency management model, intelligent IT system operation and maintenance technology (AIOps) can realize the transformation from “man-based” to “intelligent” for enterprises, ensuring high business agility and predictability sex. These platforms and technologies need to be built on a strong crisis system to ensure business security and sustainability.
3. Innovative talent supply methods
The epidemic has changed how employees work, and the flexible delivery model can ensure safe and reliable delivery in a virtual environment, ensuring high business resilience. All of these, enterprises need to be strongly supported by innovative talent supply methods. Only after these capabilities are fully integrated can the value of the hybrid cloud architecture be fully leveraged, the business continues to accelerate digital transformation, and the strategic goals of the smart enterprise can be achieved.
Enterprise application case
To realize the large-scale transformation of hybrid cloud management models and capabilities, enterprises must implement the transformation of organization, culture, process, and thinking mode, and adopt fast, agile, and innovative transformation methods. A life insurance company uses IBM cloud-native software to build a microservice architecture and build an insurance core system. While reducing costs, the company also introduced DevOps and agile development to allow internal IT personnel to develop applications faster in insurance, optimize the operation and maintenance process, and reduce the cost of development and operation and maintenance labor. IBM also helped FAW Group to plan a platform-based system construction idea, which aims to realize online sharing and rapid iteration of front-end business, support comprehensive data integration, and ensure the consistency of touchpoint experience. FAW Group has established a driving model of a dual middle platform, realizing the continuous optimization of the business middle platform and the continuous iteration of the data middle platform.
A hybrid cloud strategy is the way of the future for organizations looking for flexibility, affordability, enhanced security, improved access and communications, and customizable solutions to their IT needs.
