As you review your technology capabilities this summer and consider the hybrid cloud, you’ll no doubt be reviewing a suite of solutions. With so many technologies on the market, IT leaders like yourself can be overwhelmed by the choices laid out before them. Not only do you want a platform that serves your employees, but you also want something that will enable agile application development and deliver outcomes that move your organization forward at an accelerated pace.
We understand the importance of hybrid cloud solutions and how they play a part in organization development. In today’s blog post, we cover the top 5 characteristics that bookend strong and practical hybrid cloud solutions.
Let’s explore.
Characteristic #1: Speed
The market has very little time to wait and wants updates from you now. Furthermore, your competition is iterating at an accelerated speed as well, leaving your organization very little time to respond. Therefore, hybrid cloud platforms must be fast and portable, offering the maximum flexibility. This is possible on platforms like IBM Bluemix as well as newer innovations like Docker, which optimizes applications in a virtualized environment.
Characteristic #2: Cost Reduction
One of the benefits of moving into the cloud are the lower costs. In the past, purchasing IT assets meant paying for what you didn’t use, which ate into the bottom line. Hybrid cloud platforms offer the best of both worlds, reducing the cost of IT while allowing organizations to pay for what they have consumed. For IT leadership, choosing the platform that optimizes upon cost opens up greater budget towards innovation and taking a solution to market. We estimate that organizations can save up to 30% by switching to such solutions.
Characteristic #3: Intelligent Capabilities
Creating a digital experience means unifying disparate technologies, a challenge for DevOps organizations who have long used a cache of tools to get work done. For modern organizations, leveraging intelligent, unified, and centralized management capabilities offers teams the chance to be more efficient and scalable in their daily activities. Not only does this lower overall costs, but it also speeds up application development and deployment.
Characteristic #4: Leverage Ecosystems
The new world of technology means connectivity. As organizations lower costs on their development, they also increase their usage of application programming interfaces to tap into increased capabilities. It goes without saying that the more connections a hybrid cloud platform offers, the more feature-rich and business-use case heavy a technology can be.
Characteristic #5: Lightweight Applications
The final characteristic addresses the size of the application. It’s important for DevOps teams to deploy and manage agile applications, which load quickly, increase efficiency, and take up little space. Though storage is inexpensive, the emphasis on space should lie with storing, interpreting, and managing customer data.
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With WebSphere Application Server 9, cloud and mobile interoperability come standard in an industry-leading, highly available platform. Developers and IT leaders alike can enjoy the benefits of hybrid cloud while continuing to innovate for the future to connect applications, compete on the global market, and optimize their technology needs.
Check out our co-webinar with IBM where we ask if the cloud is the driving force behind digital disruption.
Learn more about our IBM practice here and get in touch today.
