Top 10 practices to accelerate technology transformation

Drive innovation in your enterprise.

70% of enterprises are pursuing hybrid cloud ¹

Hybrid and multicloud environments are a growing reality as businesses seek to reduce costs, optimize workloads and deliver new applications and services to customers, employees and partners. In fact, 70% of enterprises are pursuing hybrid cloud,¹ yet 65% of companies lack a management plan for hybrid today.² Moving data, workloads and business critical applications from legacy environments to hybrid cloud can be risky. With careful planning and a robust resiliency strategy, you can mitigate service interruptions, security breaches—and the accompanying loss of trust in your enterprise.

To stay competitive organizations must build new digital services while driving innovative business processes on secure, resilient, scalable and open platforms across public and private clouds. They need the right tools and skills to design, deploy and manage complex multicloud environments across vendors and platforms.

This guide provides resources to help you identify practices that accelerate transformation with hybrid cloud.

Reach the cloud state that achieves your business objectives

Most IT and business leaders understand the benefits of hybrid cloud environments, yet two-thirds of these executives are skeptical about the ability of their enterprises to successfully make the move.³

To overcome these hesitations, senior IT leaders are turning to cloud architecture design to reach a cloud state that achieves their business objectives. With the right plan, teams can stay focused and improve security, maximize availability and integrate workloads across hybrid IT estates.

Learn how a cloud architecture design can provide better business value, flexibility, revenue growth and cost control that increases the confidence of senior leaders in cloud migrations.

Proactively protect your critical workloads

35% of enterprises experienced a cloud outage last year ⁵

When an organization’s applications, data sources and data reside across private cloud, public clouds and traditional on-premises environments, it’s challenging to manage business continuity and disaster recovery. The high levels of complexity and interdependence may create risks and vulnerabilities that, unless identified and managed appropriately, can reduce the benefits of cloud migration. Most enterprises have limited proactive plans to effectively protect their critical workloads in the event of a disaster, with 68% acting only after a disaster had occurred.⁵ When outages occur, determining their cause can be complicated, recovery times can be lengthy and the business impact can be very high.

Download this report from 451 Research which examines IT leaders’ views on resiliency and provides analysis, insights and recommendations for organizations considering migration to hybrid multicloud.

Transform your network for future cloud deployments

Network modernization is essential to enterprise success in the digital era. Your network is the backbone of your IT infrastructure, and it needs to evolve as your enterprise adapts to shifting market and workplace priorities. It also has to reduce costs, provide rapid application deployment and help enable the journey of your applications to cloud environments. In fact, 82% of IT leaders say that connectivity is a primary concern for moving to a hybrid cloud model.⁶

Fuji Television needed a more secure, flexible network infrastructure to support changing employee work styles and help pave the way for cloud transformation. Their existing network wasn’t keeping pace with their business needs.

Read about how they worked with IBM Network Services to transform their network for future cloud deployments.

Make private cloud IaaS a strategic asset

Using the private cloud as a foundation, enterprises can create a true hybrid cloud environment which seamlessly ties the private and public cloud resources with unified management and automation. ⁸

For many enterprises, their private cloud infrastructures are key for expansion into hybrid multicloud environments. In fact, private cloud can serve as a foundation to seamlessly link private and public cloud resources. Dedicated private infrastructures can reside on- or off- premises and, when consumed in as-a-service managed models, provide virtually unlimited infrastructure resources. All this without ever having to procure, maintain and manage the technology. Managed private clouds can also help enterprises benefit from greater security and uptime by lowering their total cost of ownership (TCO), preserving capital expenses and freeing up internal resources for other strategic needs.

Learn how enterprises can use IT infrastructure and private cloud models as strategic assets to support their application development and growth plans. Download the IDC Whitepaper. (PDF, 274 KB)

Take back control

More than 60% of IT executives state they don’t have the tools and procedures to manage and operate in a complex multicloud environment. ⁹

An effective cloud strategy must consider methods for effectively managing multiple clouds with a single cloud management platform. Without it, digital transformation is much harder to achieve. Without common operations, compliance and governance cadence for cloud, the digital enterprise cannot scale. The hybrid IT operations model should be a partnership between DevOps and IT operations teams offering choice and consistency while avoiding provider lock-in.

Learn how IBM Multicloud Management Platform can help simplify hybrid IT management.

Free up your in-house IT resources

Cloud environments provide stable and secure platforms for enterprises, and often typically improve application speed, agility and performance. However, only 20% of business-critical applications such as SAP and Oracle have migrated to the cloud¹⁰. What’s driving this hesitancy? To start, ERP applications are complex and deeply integrated into multiple processes and non-ERP applications. Additionally, many organizations lack SAP and Oracle application skills, which are especially crucial in global implementations requiring country-specific expertise and consistent delivery. Finally, downtime due to migration is never an option.

Many leading enterprises have turned to cloud managed services providers to fill this gap and help with migration planning and deployment and management of SAP and Oracle applications on the cloud. Finding the right managed services provider is key.

Download this comparison guide and learn the right questions to ask a potential cloud services provider to help you choose the right one for your business.

Orchestrate and automate your hybrid cloud

Whether it’s scalability, cost savings, or the ability to match the right workloads to the right providers, leading enterprises are realizing the benefits of moving to hybrid cloud models. Hybrid cloud environments can also speed application development and deployment times, while bringing new services to customers, suppliers and employees. Many enterprises are also using multicloud deployment services to boost hybrid cloud operational efficiencies.

However, orchestration and automation across multiple technologies, cloud environments and service providers can be complex and time consuming.

Watch this demo to see how a multicloud orchestration and automation platform can help you simplify the development and deployment of infrastructure, apps and data across multiple clouds.

Speed application releases and existing app modifications

67% of enterprises cite security and resiliency as challenges that prevent them from moving workloads to the cloud. ¹²

Hybrid cloud architecture is rapidly becoming the preferred deployment platform for both cloud-enabled and cloud-native applications. Enterprises can find they lack the in-house skills and processes to manage the complexity of these environments. There are many advantages to integrating DevOps into your hybrid, multicloud application management strategy. Empower your team to quickly adapt to market trends.

• Develop solutions sooner and go to market faster.
• Improve your deployment frequency.
• Move faster and increase agility with DevOps.

Watch this video to explore options for continuous delivery of software-driven innovation with DevOps.

Get help managing complex hybrid cloud environments

Many businesses have deployed hybrid IT environments and have found that ongoing management remains complex. Why? Integrating data center and cloud environments can be particularly difficult given the sophisticated coordination required across private and public cloud platforms, technologies and vendors. Additionally, in-house IT teams frequently don’t have all of the skills needed to effectively deploy and maintain workloads in these multicloud environments.

“67% of IT leaders cite lack of in-house cloud expertise as a barrier to cloud transformation.” ¹³

Download this Frost & Sullivan report that outlines key challenges and solutions to business transformation with hybrid cloud and recommendations on how to find the right IT support partner.

¹³ 2019, How the Right IT Support Partner can Accelerate your Cloud Transformation, Frost & Sullivan.

Move your transformation forward

The move to hybrid cloud is driven by many factors—including the need to create new revenue sources, reduce operational costs and speed up time to market.

However, internal budget challenges can limit progress. In a recent report, 56% of IT leaders state that managing and optimizing cloud costs holds enterprises back from putting core applications on the cloud¹⁴.

As a result, enterprises are taking advantage of payment solutions to help fund their cloud transformation, improve cash flow, and enhance their return on investment (ROI). IBM Global Financing can help structure a payment plan that’s right for your enterprise.

Download this IDC Technical Spotlight to see how flexible payment solutions can accelerate digital transformation. (PDF, 855 KB)