How ready are you to move to the cloud?
By using an analysis of your current IT estate, we can understand your goals and develop a plan to help you achieve success on your terms.
We help define a technology strategy that leverages your existing investments, cloud platforms and network setup. We then evaluate new ways of working to help develop an agile roadmap for moving to cloud. This roadmap becomes the basis for your cloud solution design.
In a recent IBM survey of Senior IT Leaders, 95% agreed that a cloud architecture design helps improve the success of an organization's journey to the cloud.*
How cloud architecture design accelerates cloud deployments, 2020Is your cloud solution design responsive?
We can help create a cloud solution that covers the required service layers, deployment platforms, provider choices, integrated tool chains and security solutions.
We make sure the resulting platforms, management framework, automation and operations toolsets are designed with agility in mind. This gives you a flexible architecture to accommodate the changing needs of your business.
Of IT leaders with a cloud architecture design completely agreed that it had positively impacted the success of their organization's journey to cloud.*
How cloud architecture design accelerates cloud deployments, 2020Is your network ready?
As we develop your multicloud framework, we help confirm that your network is ready to support it. We use a unique scorecard to assess the interoperability of your current network. This scorecard can reveal a variety of data points in terms of business, technology, process and skill alignment that may be used to enhance efficiency.
Based on the analysis and our experience with more than 100,000 successful cloud migrations, we recommend a future network strategy.
Of enterprises feel multicloud networking is most critical in supporting digital transformation and IT evolution.*
Enterprise Edge Cloud Networking Report (October 2020)How resilient is your cloud solution design?
To protect critical workloads in your multicloud environment, you need integrated resilience capabilities. That's why we assess the current standing of your capabilities and identify potential risks for your enterprise and help you effectively manage and mitigate them.
Based on the assessment, we can create a resiliency plan that's designed to support the migration and management of your new environment. The plan also helps guide routine testing of your capabilities. This way, you can better adapt to the changing business and IT landscape over time and confirm your ability to continue critical business operations in a major disruption situation.
Over 90% of organizations believe that they're prepared to recover from an outage. Yet 63% of them experienced frequent business outages in the last couple of years.*
The State of Hybrid Multicloud Resilience, 451 Research, 2020Taking inventory
With your company’s cloud strategy and design in place, we can now get into the details of your IT infrastructure and its critical applications.
To help visualize your IT inventory, we use our discovery tool, which creates a dashboard of your environment. This view can include your servers, virtual machines, workloads and applications — virtually anything that lives within your IT environment.
The dashboard helps provide us the information needed to begin an affinity mapping process for your applications. We start by grouping the data into categories, such as moveable applications or immoveable applications.
Begin planning
With the inventory, affinity and dependency map in place, we can begin planning for your migration.
Your plan may include:
- An outline of migration phases
- Key timelines
- A risk mitigation and resiliency strategy
- A customer support and escalation matrix
Security is a priority
To help ensure business continuity, we work with your team to develop a strategy that is designed to build security and resiliency into all phases of your migration.
We use our orchestration technologies to help automate workflows. This approach is designed to account for threat management, incident response, disaster recovery and compliance management by helping address these issues automatically.
Confidence is key
To help increase your team’s confidence, we can run a pilot test that is designed to make sure the advised migration plan is right. We can do this by creating infrastructure and application test cases, performing user acceptance testing scenarios and putting in place a migration rollback process.
We also perform post-migration infrastructure and application testing for your enterprise, which can include documentation and a handover plan for your team.
Keep in mind you will have priority support during the handover to help make sure things go according to the plan.
Add automation
Using a cross-team approach with Red Hat® products, we help automate parts of your workload deployments.
The Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform is a specialized, agile and prescriptive way to deliver virtually all the tools you need to implement enterprise-wide automation. As a result, you can decrease fulfillment time and boost operational efficiency.
Network as a programmable service
Many companies encounter challenges with multivendor network functions. To help manage this, we can provide a fully orchestrated and automated control point called the Cloud Network Intelligent Control Center.
This solution is designed to simplify network integration across traditional and cloud-based network services and execute tasks across 570* different types of network devices reliably.
As a result, you can manage your configuration and more easily ensure the network is functioning properly.
* Source: IBM Cloud Network Intelligent Control Center solution brief
Dashboard view
Managing traditional and cloud environments seamlessly across applications and data across data centers is a balancing act of agility and control.
Your users need to be able to quickly access the services and tools they depend on while maintaining the control required to minimize risk and ensure compliance.
Using our dashboard, you can consolidate the view of your assets, costs and availability across cloud providers. From here, we can help monitor and manage your entire hybrid cloud environment — servers, storage, networking, middleware, cloud, workloads and applications.
Identify the gaps
To align your business needs and IT capabilities, we develop a topology map that’s designed to help you more easily identify gaps between demand and technology services.
This approach can give you a basis for further analysis, what-if simulations and investment decisions.
After the analysis, we can help you select the right technology service for each of your business demands.
The model will reflect the priorities you set around service costs, delivery location, service capabilities, accessibility, service maturity and reliability.
Self-service management through cognitive capabilities
The final step is to transfer the topology and associated choice factors into an AI-based decision model. This model can enhance traditional IT operations by aggregating data from multiple sources and using automation, advanced analytics and AI to help identify and resolve problems faster.
The AI-based decision model also helps you consider the changing circumstances within your organization and the broader market ecosystem on an ongoing basis.
IBM has helped clients optimize their IT to achieve:
Scalability75% saw increased scalability.
Business agility72% saw improved business agility.
Faster migrationUp to 25% faster migration to cloud.
Cost reductionUp to 20% reduction in overall IT costs.