Asia-Pacific organizations moving to the cloud to drive their digital transformation should do so with open hybrid architectures, so they can choose the right operating environment and services that best meet their business needs.
The ability to pick and move freely between service providers is essential, as enterprises look increasingly to the cloud to innovate and roll out new online offerings quickly. It ensures they can maintain a competitive edge even as market demands evolve amid the pandemic.
Businesses realize the need for agility and are accelerating their move to the cloud to achieve this.
In Asia-Pacific, spending on public cloud services in 2020 climbed 38% to US$36.4 billion, according to IDC. The research firm further projects that cloud infrastructure-as-a- service will grow 32.7% this year to account for 46% of overall spending across the region, while software-as-a-service will claim the second-largest share at 41%.
As organizations embrace cloud technologies, though, they will need the flexibility to decide the right platforms and services on which to do so. Some may still want to run certain applications on-premises, in their own data centers, while others will opt to do so in a private cloud environment or across different public cloud platforms.
Whichever they decide, enterprises must be able to do so without the complexity of managing these mixed environments.
This is where an open hybrid cloud architecture plays a pivotal role. It affords organizations not only the flexibility to choose, but also the ability to seamlessly deploy on-premises infrastructures as well as services from different cloud platforms, both private and public.
More importantly, it assures there is no vendor lock-in. Unfettered, businesses will be better able to benefit from the wide array of cloud services available in the market today. It also means they can scale more easily and introduce new applications across their IT infrastructure whenever they need to.
Astute companies know this and more are opting for choice. Financial services providers for instance, are expected to head the hybrid way with their cloud deployments.
According to IDC, by 2023, 85% of tier-1 and tier-2 banks in Asia-Pacific will adopt an infrastructure strategy that melds on-premises private clouds, multiple public clouds, and legacy systems. Furthermore, the region's financial sector is expected to spend US$18.1 billion on public cloud in 2024, up from US$4.9 billion in 2019, IDC predicts.
A Forrester Consulting study commissioned by IBM also reveals that 89% of global IT decision-makers believe that open source facilitates a more flexible hybrid cloud strategy. Another 83% say it will lead to hybrid cloud environments that have higher efficiency and scalability.
Gaining the ability to predict, automate, and modernize, securely
IBM's open hybrid cloud solutions, in particular, are designed to help businesses establish key support pillars. These will enable organizations to innovate and boost their competitive edge.
First, they will be able to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to gain deeper insights and better predict market demands. The ability to extract relevant data insights that can power smarter decision-making is crucial, especially in a highly volatile business climate triggered by the global pandemic. Data is the new fuel and AI the accelerator.
Companies need to make sense of the voluminous data they generate each day and AI plays an integral role here. As it is, 60% to 73% of data within an organization is left untapped for analytics, according to Forrester.
Also essential is an open hybrid architecture that enables businesses to pull datasets from across different platforms and cloud environments. IBM's Cloud Pak for Data does exactly this. It is a unified platform that delivers a data fabric to connect and access siloed data, across multiple clouds and on-premises. It does this without moving the data and with enterprise-grade security as well as compliance.
It has enabled Dutch financial services group, ING, to establish governing and data quality rules including user access rights, across the company's data assets--regardless of the platform on which the data resides.
IBM's open hybrid cloud technologies also help organizations quickly and easily modernize their IT infrastructures, enabling them to run enterprise-grade cloud-native applications anywhere, and on any cloud.
In particular, modern microservices architectures will allow applications to be implemented as smaller, reusable components that support specific business functions. These applications are deployed in containers, holding only the software code and virtualized operating system dependencies needed to run the application.
Mexican bank Banco Sabadell, for example, is leveraging IBM's public cloud and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to transform its applications and IT infrastructure. The transformation will pave the bank's journey toward cloud-native development and application modernization. It will provide Banco Sabadell's APIs (application programming interfaces) to partners, so new innovative digital services can be built and delivered to enrich customer experiences.
In addition, IBM's open hybrid cloud solutions can intelligently automate workflows and key processes to enhance operational efficiencies and service quality. Automation significantly improves employee productivity as well as augments customer experience, since response and query time can be reduced and service delivery accelerated.
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Download NowRemoving the need to carry out repetitive menial tasks also frees up employees to focus on higher value functions. Further armed with AI-powered data insights, employees can make smarter decisions that impact their organization's performance, such as the ability to predict--and more quickly resolve--a service or system downtime.
Chinese energy company ENN Group realized these benefits when it deployed a virtual assistant that melded AI and automation capabilities from IBM Watson Assistant and IBM Watson Discovery, as well as IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with Automation Anywhere. The IBM solution was used to interpret and respond to IT service desk requests from employees.
Powered by IBM RPA, the automated financial assistant carried out basic back-office tasks, including pulling reports and processing monthly ledger bookings. It helped ENN handle between 2,000 and 3,000 tasks daily, running more than 70 business scenarios that drove millions of dollars in value and slashing processing time by 60%.
With data and workloads flowing across different cloud platforms and systems, companies running open hybrid environments will need to ensure all activities are carried out securely.
German retailer OTTO, for one, recognizes this. It implemented IBM's Security QRadar on Cloud to establish a consolidated and AI-driven security data framework across its IT infrastructure. It provides OTTO with a centralized view of potential threats and activities, and enables its security administrators to run analysis and take action where needed.
IBM offers a generation of hybrid cloud and AI solutions that empower businesses to seamlessly build and manage across all cloud environments, via a common platform, "Core to this is RedHat OpenShift, the hybrid cloud container architecture that underpins an organization's ability to develop and consume cloud services anywhere, and from any cloud."
Learn how IBM’s open, hybrid cloud strategy can make your business more agile.
