Edge, shared cloud, Cloud Satellite – what’s it all about?

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The use of public cloud services has increased significantly over the past 10 years. Depending on the research applied, between 20 and 30 percent of all workloads have been transferred to a cloud environment. However, this excludes operationally critical and latency-sensitive workloads, as the latency between cloud servers and data sources has become too great. The issue of latency can be a deal-breaker, as data such as that generated in a manufacturing facility must be made available in real time, or otherwise it becomes unusable. Is it true, then, that cloud services cannot be universally applied, and that, as a result, parallel data silos are being built? Coffee table discussions indicate that shared cloud environments and edge storage could be the answer, and to that end, IBM has also presented its new solution Cloud Satellite.

IBM Cloud Satellite

On Monday, March 1st, IBM announced its IBM Cloud Satellite service, through which hybrid cloud services can be made available in any environment, either on-premises or as an edge solution. IBM Cloud Satellite offers customers a safe and harmonized cloud service layer across various environments, no matter where their data is located. This is crucial for ensuring that all data privacy and sovereignty requirements can be met. Industries such as telecommunications, financing, health care, and public administration can also benefit from the reduced latency achieved through IBM Cloud Satellite. Latency can be reduced by securely analyzing data right where it’s located or being generated.

In the future, IBM continues to deliver the IBM Cloud Pak for Data as a service that uses IBM Cloud Satellite. This provides customers with a secure and flexible way to run AI and analytics workloads in any cloud environment without having to manage the process themselves. For example, EquBot, a FinTech company serving global investment professionals, immediately saw how the reduced latency offered by IBM Cloud Satellite could support their business operations. Trials indicated that latency could be reduced by up to ten times, a significant improvement when making investment decisions. EquBot’s customers are now better able to make decisions based on data.

Other potential use cases for IBM Cloud Satellite include remote work and study, or health care services, where it can offer improved efficiency. Workloads can be run securely and more efficiently. As workloads are increasingly run with edge computing, IBM Cloud Satellite allows companies to benefit from reduced latency while maintaining a level of information security, privacy and compatibility similar to that in hybrid cloud environments.

What solutions are available now and in the future?

While IBM’s partner Lumen Technologies’ operations currently cover over 180,000 companies, Finland is unfortunately not yet covered by Lumenes pre-built Edge network. Operations are focused in the US and in the rest of Europe, which also gives a significant business opportunity to operators based in Finland. Let us hope that Finland, too, will soon have a pre-configured edge-computing infrastructure and a network allowing direct and fast access to edge storage.

IBM works together with over 65 companies within its partner ecosystem, including Cisco, Dell Technologies, and Intel. This partner ecosystem is currently developing new cloud services for IBM Cloud Satellite to enable the safe use of cloud services in any environment.

Infrastructure partnerships offer a wide range of options for data storage, networking and server operations, helping customers gain the full benefit of their existing infrastructures when using IBM Cloud Satellite. In the future, customers using IBM Cloud Satellite will also have access to Red Hat OpenShift certified software available at the Red Hat Marketplace. Software can be implemented and run over the administrated Red Hat OpenShift in the edge location.

I’m eager to see what challenges edge solutions can help us overcome. I’ve added a couple of links here, in case you are interested in reading more or would like to listen to a replay of the Cloud Satellite announcement event from March 9th, including a guest appearance of the famous futurist, Dr. Michio Kaku. You can also have a look at all the services available for Openshift in the Red Hat Marketplace, or at the services included in the Cloud Pak for Data.

Find more information beneath:

• Read more about the IBM Cloud Satellite service here.

• On demand Satellite announcement event replay.

• Browse the Red Hat Marketplace.

• How the IBM partner ecosystem works.

• IBM Cloud Pak for Data as a Service.