IBM Cloud
The platform for public, private and hybrid applications
IBM Cloud was designed to support a full range of applications: from modern, cloud-native apps and microservices to legacy, monolithic software and systems. It provides companies with the infrastructure needed to build new applications from scratch, modernize existing applications, or both. IBM Cloud is ready to support enterprises at any stage of their journey to cloud.
Video: Welcome to the IBM Cloud
Take a tour of the IBM Cloud console to learn how you can easily start building right away. Get your account set up, create resources from the IBM Cloud catalog, then manage them from your resource list. Visit the Support page to get help with any issues you might run into. The IBM Cloud documentation is also a helpful resource for walking you through common tasks.
What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing, sometimes referred to simply as “cloud,” is the use of computing resources — servers, database management, data storage, networking, software applications, and special capabilities such as blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) — over the internet, as opposed to owning and operating those resources yourself, on premises.
Click here to learn more about IBM’S cloud offerings.
Compared to traditional IT, cloud computing offers organizations a host of benefits:
- Greater cost efficiency. While traditional IT requires you to purchase computing capacity in anticipation of growth or surges in traffic — capacity that sits unused until you grow or traffic surges — cloud computing enables you to pay for only the capacity you need, when you need it. Cloud also eliminates the ongoing expense of purchasing, housing, maintaining and managing infrastructure on premises.
- Improved agility; faster time to market. On the cloud you can provision and deploy (“spin up”) a server in minutes; purchasing and deploying the same server on premises might take weeks or months.
- Greater scalability and elasticity. The cloud lets you scale workloads automatically — up or down — in response to business growth or surges in traffic. And working with a cloud provider that has data centers spread around the world enables you to scale up or down globally on demand, without sacrificing performance.
- Improved reliability and business continuity. Because most cloud providers have redundancy built into their global networks, data backup and disaster recovery are typically much easier and less expensive to implement effectively in the cloud than on premises. Providers who offer packaged disaster recovery solutions— referred to disaster recovery as a service, or DRaaS — make the process even easier, more affordable and less disruptive.
- Continually improving performance. The leading cloud service providers regularly update their infrastructure with the latest, highest-performing computing, storage and networking hardware.
- Better security, built in. Traditionally, security concerns have been the leading obstacle for organizations considering cloud adoption. But in response to demand, the security offered by cloud service providers is steadily outstripping on-premises solutions. According to security software provider McAfee, today 52% of companies experience better security in the cloud than on premises. Gartner has predicted that by this year (2020), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud workloads will experience 60% fewer security incidents than those in traditional data centers.
IBM Cloud Deployment Models
- Public cloud
- Private cloud
- Hybrid cloud
Public Cloud
In a public cloud, a cloud provider offers affordable access to cloud services, running on some portion of its privately-owned infrastructure, via the internet. Everything is owned and managed by the cloud provider, and the customer effectively “rents” a portion of it for a subscription or usage-based fee. There is no need for businesses to purchase any hardware, software or supporting infrastructure of their own. Thousands of customers share the resources of a public cloud.
IBM Public Cloud
For companies who need public cloud solutions that enable higher levels of compliance, security, and management, with proven architecture patterns and methods for rapid delivery, the IBM public cloud stands out as ready to run mission critical workloads. Trusted by 47 of the Fortune 50, 10 out of 10 of the world’s largest banks, and 8 out of the 10 largest airlines, IBM Cloud meets the requirements for running the world’s largest incumbent businesses across many industries.
IBM public cloud offers a broad range of compute choices, from bare metal and virtual servers, to serverless architectures, to Cloud Foundry apps, to Kubernetes containers.
Advantages
- Ease of Use. With on-demand deployment of a managed Red Hat OpenShift environment and our commitment to the Red Hat ecosystem, it’s easy to connect and migrate.
- Industry-leading compliance. Includes FIPS 140-2 Level 4 HSM cryptocards, for data encryption to meet even the most stringent requirements
- Threat monitoring. Manage threats across all clouds from a centralized security dashboard with IBM Security integration
- Hardened Kubernetes service. Continuous container security, built-in isolation, and network segmentation for application protection
For a closer look at IBM public cloud, see the following video:
Private Cloud
Private cloud (also known as an Internal Cloud or Corporate Cloud) is a cloud computing environment in which all hardware and software resources are dedicated exclusively to, and accessible only by, a single customer. Private cloud combines many of the benefits of cloud computing—including elasticity, scalability, and ease of service delivery—with the access control, security, and resource customization of on-premises infrastructure.
Many companies choose private cloud over Public Cloud (cloud computing services delivered over infrastructure shared by multiple customers) because private cloud is the only way to meet regulatory compliance requirements. Others choose private cloud because their workloads deal with confidential documents, intellectual property, personally identifiable information (PII), medical records, financial data, or other sensitive data.
Private Cloud and IBM Cloud
IBM Cloud Paks make it faster, simpler, and more secure to move existing applications to any cloud environment, whether it’s public or private. Each IBM Cloud Pak includes containerized middleware, common software development and management services, and a common integration layer, enabling development teams to orchestrate their production topology. This makes it easy to modernize existing applications for Kubernetes using agile DevOps methodologies. IBM Cloud Paks simplify the process of migrating your full software stack to any environment—on-premises, the public cloud, or private and hybrid cloud architectures.
Advantages
- Full control over hardware and software choices. Private cloud customers are free to purchase the hardware and software they prefer, versus the hardware and software the cloud provider offers.
- Freedom to customize hardware and software. Customers can customize servers in any way they want and software as needed with add-ons or through custom development.
- Greater visibility into security and access control. All workloads run behind the customers’ own firewall.
- Fully enforced compliance with regulatory standards. Companies are not forced to rely on the industry and regulatory compliance offered by the cloud service provider.
Disadvantages
- Higher cost. This can include the cost of purchasing and installing new hardware and software and the cost of managing it, which may involve hiring additional IT staff.
- Limited flexibility. Once an organization invests in hardware and software for its private cloud, adding capacity or new capabilities requires additional purchases.
Hybrid Cloud
Hybrid cloud is a computing environment that connects a company’s on-premises private cloud services and third-party public cloud into a single, flexible infrastructure for running the organization’s applications and workloads. It is a mix of public and private cloud resources with a level of orchestration between them that gives organizations the flexibility to choose the optimal cloud for each application or workload, and to move workloads freely between the two clouds as circumstances change.
IBM Hybrid Cloud
IBM Hybrid Cloud is an integrated environment including public and private cloud, with supporting technologies for integration and multicloud management. It improves on both public and private cloud by offering better flexibility and balance. With hybrid cloud, companies can more effectively manage speed and security, lower latency and drive higher performance. Companies can build, deploy, and operate apps and services wherever they run best. Organizations can meet their technical and business objectives more effectively and cost-efficiently than it could with public or private cloud alone.
Advantages
- Security and compliance. Hybrid cloud lets organizations deploy highly regulated or otherwise sensitive workloads in private cloud, while still being able to deploy less-sensitive workloads to public cloud services.
- Scalability and resilience. You can’t always predict when workload traffic will spike, and even when you can predict spikes, you can’t always afford to purchase additional private cloud capacity for those spikes only. Hybrid cloud lets you scale up quickly, inexpensively, and even automatically using public cloud infrastructure and then scale back down when the surge subsides—all without impacting the other workloads running on your private cloud.
- Resource optimization and cost savings. Hybrid cloud gives IT more options and flexibility for deploying workloads in a way that makes the best use of on-premises investments and overall infrastructure budget. Deployments can be changed in response to fluctuating workloads or new opportunities.
IBM Cloud Paks
Beyond containers and Kubernetes, enterprises need to orchestrate their production topology, and to provide management, security and governance for their applications. They need to do this while improving efficiency and resiliency, reducing costs and maximizing ROI.
IBM Cloud™ Paks are enterprise-ready, containerized software solutions that give clients an open, faster and more secure way to move core business applications to any cloud. Each IBM Cloud Pak™ includes containerized IBM middleware and common software services for development and management, on top of a common integration layer — designed to reduce development time by up to 84 percent and operational expenses by up to 75 percent.* IBM Cloud Paks run wherever Red Hat® OpenShift® runs and are optimized for productivity and performance on Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud.
To read more about the six IBM Cloud Paks and benifits of each, click here:
IBM Cloud Catalog
IBM Cloud supports access to other IBM tools and services including IBM Watson and IBM Cloud Functions for server-less computing, as well as those from third-party vendors.
The IBM Cloud Catalog lists over 170 services across categories, including:
- Compute – Offers various compute resources, including bare-metal servers, virtual servers, and serverless computing and containers on which enterprises can host their workloads.
- Network – Provides cloud networking services, such as a load balancer, a content delivery network (CDN), virtual private network (VPN) tunnels and firewalls.
- Storage – Offers object, block and file storage for cloud data.
- Management – Provides tools to manage and monitor cloud deployments, such as those for log analysis, automation and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
- Security – Includes services for activity tracking, identity and access management and authentication.
- Data management – Provides SQL and NoSQL databases, as well as data querying and migration tools.
- Analytics – Offers data science tools such as Apache Spark, Apache Hadoop and IBM Watson Machine Learning, as well as analytics services for streaming data.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Uses IBM Watson to deliver services such as machine learning, natural language processing and visual recognition.
- Internet of things (IoT) – Includes the IBM IoT Platform, which provides services that connect and manage IoT devices, and analyzes the data they produce.
- Mobile – Enables a development team to build and monitor mobile applications and their back-end components.
- Developer tools – Includes a command-line interface (CLI), as well as a set of tools for continuous delivery, continuous release and application pipelines.
- Blockchain – Provides IBM’s Blockchain Platform, a software-as-a-service offering to develop apps, enforce governance and monitor Blockchain networks.
- Integration – Offers services to integrate cloud and on-premises systems, or various applications, such as API Connect, App Connect and IBM Secure Gateway.
- Migration – Provides tools to migrate apps to the cloud, such as IBM Lift CLI and Cloud Mass Data Migration.
- VMware – Enables the migration of VMware workloads into the cloud.
The Future of Cloud
Within the next three years, 75 percent of existing non-cloud apps will move to the cloud. Today’s computing landscape shows companies not only adopting cloud but using more than one cloud environment. Even then, the cloud journey for many has only just begun, moving beyond low-end infrastructure as a service to establish higher business value.
To review the eBook, “Achieve Cloud without Compromise”, click here:
