IBM Unveils New Offerings for Faster and More Secured Path to Hybrid Cloud

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Feb 12, 2019, 11:30 ET

Tools and services designed to help businesses deploy new applications across hybrid cloud environments with security and efficiency

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 12, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM Think -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced new hybrid cloud offerings to help businesses migrate, integrate and manage applications and workloads seamlessly and with security across any public or private cloud and on-premises IT environment.

The IBM Institute for Business Value estimates that by 2021, 98 percent of organizations surveyed plan to adopt hybrid architectures, but just 38 percent will have the procedures and tools they need to operate that environment¹. The process today is challenging because it is largely manual with major security implications and a lack of consistent management and integration tools.

As part of today's news, IBM is launching new hybrid cloud tools and services designed to help enterprises navigate the complexities of this new landscape:

New IBM Cloud Integration Platform designed to reduce time and complexity to launch new services and applications across cloud environments in a consistent and secure manner.
New IBM Services designed to advise on holistic cloud strategies.
New IBM Services designed to simplify the management of resources across cloud environments.
New services designed to provide industry-leading security for data and applications in the public cloud.

"At Aetna, a CVS Health business, we see hybrid cloud as an integral part of our transformation journey," said Claus Torp Jensen, Chief Technology Officer, Aetna. "We want to use the best services from various cloud providers to create a seamless consumer experience and digitalize underlying business processes. For that, we are taking an API-centric approach to integration and making sure that all of our APIs are easily accessible across our hybrid cloud ecosystem."

New Cloud Integration Platform Designed to Dramatically Reduce Coding Time, Complexity

The IBM Cloud Integration Platform is designed to securely connect applications, software and services from any vendor regardless of whether those systems are on-premises, in a public cloud or a private cloud. The platform brings together a comprehensive set of integration tools in a single development environment. It can help improve productivity because integration specialists can write, test and secure code once, store it in the platform and reuse it – an arduous task that once monopolized their time. This can help companies cut the time and cost of integration by 1/3, while staying within their unique requirements for security and compliance².

Integration is critical as enterprises optimize business processes and create more personalized customer experiences. However, integration is becoming increasingly complex because many enterprises surveyed 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 competition³.

With the IBM Cloud Integration Platform, companies can quickly bring to market new capabilities while freeing up integration specialists to focus on the more complex, system-level integrations.

"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, cloud integration, 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."

Learn more about the new IBM Cloud Integration Platform by visiting: www.ibm.com/cloud/integration/platform

New End-To-End IBM Hybrid Cloud Services

IBM is launching new IBM Services for Cloud Strategy and Design, a comprehensive set of services designed to advise clients on how to architect the right holistic cloud strategy from design, migration, integration, road mapping and architectural services to navigating their journey to cloud. IBM Services is establishing dedicated teams of consultants who are certified experts in the latest services and technologies across multiple cloud platforms. Teams will use open and secure multicloud strategies, drawing upon IBM's experience in IT transformation and collaboration with an ecosystem of cloud partners. The new services leverage IBM's industry-leading Cloud Innovate method, automated decision accelerators and IBM Cloud Garage approach to support clients with co-creation and scaled innovation in application development, migration, modernization and management.

Building off of a recent partnership expansion announcement with ServiceNow, IBM is also introducing new IBM Services for Multicloud Management to provide a single system to help enterprises simplify the management of their IT resources across multiple cloud providers, on-premises environments and private clouds.

The delivery of IBM Services for Multicloud Management includes three layers designed to provide a single management and operations system:

Business management – applications that provide digital service ordering, modern service management, and cost governance to help manage spend;
Orchestration – an automation layer that helps enable services of different types, from different vendors to be integrated easily and made available to consumers;
Operations - a layer that helps enable infrastructure and operations administrators to monitor and maintain systems, including legacy infrastructure, private cloud, public cloud and container environments.

In addition, it includes a unified, self-service experience to users to facilitate faster and easier access to cloud services via an environment integrated with the ServiceNow Portal to configure and buy cloud services and solutions from multiple cloud providers. It also provides performance management services and offers the means to monitor and manage the health of the cloud.

"As we grow our digital business, moving our applications to the cloud is critical to help modernize our processes and deliver even better experiences for our customers. Adopting the right strategy and migration approach to cloud needs to be seamless and requires an understanding of our IT landscape," said Sarp Uzkan, vice president, IT, Tribune Publishing. "IBM cloud advisory services and tools provided a detailed assessment that determined not only which applications would be best to move to the cloud but a strong business case that would meet our needs and enabling us to explore the best approach for moving to the cloud."

Learn more about the new IBM Services by visiting: http://www.ibm.com/blogs/cloud-computing/2019/02/12/new-ibm-services-multicloud-world/

Industry-Leading Security for Data and Applications in the Public Cloud

Security remains a top concern across all industries and markets when deploying apps and data in hybrid cloud environments. In order to minimize threats, enterprises need to the ability to protect data at every stage of its journey, easily manage access and identity and gain visibility into the security posture for all of their applications.

IBM is launching the IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Crypto Service, which is designed to provide industry-leading security on the public cloud and is made possible by bringing IBM LinuxONE into IBM's global cloud data centers. This service will provide 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 provider⁴.

This is part of the IBM Cloud Hyper Protect family of services, which is already providing enterprises like DACS and Solitaire Interglobal with industry-leading security and resiliency for their applications. To provide high levels of security across both public and private clouds, IBM is also announcing significant enhancements to IBM Cloud Private on Z.

Learn more about IBM's new capabilities in cloud security by visiting: https://ibm.com/blogs/bluemix/2019/02/cloud-security-right/

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About IBM Think:
At Think 2019, IBM will outline new offerings, client engagements, partnerships, technology breakthroughs and developer tools that underscore how IBM and partners are changing the way the world works. For more information, visit the IBM Think 2019 Newsroom: https://newsroom.ibm.com/think. Follow the conference on Twitter at #think2019 and @ibmlive, and go to https://www.ibm.com/events/think/ for the full schedule and live streaming agenda.

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Footnotes
1. IBM Institute for Business Value: Assembling Your Cloud Orchestra, October 2018
2. Based on customer experience and Total Economic Impact methodology developed by Forrester Research, Inc. (The Total Economic Impact of an API Management Solution, February 2017)
3. IBM Institute for Business Value: Assembling Your Cloud Orchestra, October 2018
4. Currently available in beta, planned for general availability March 2019