IBM has announced the launch of IBM Cloud Private, a new piece of software which aims to ‘extend cloud-native tools across public and private clouds.’
As a study from AlgoSec earlier this week posited, organisations are on the whole expecting their public cloud usage to ramp up in the next couple of years. Yet not everything is suitable for the public cloud.
IBM Cloud Private is compatible with a variety of systems manufacturers, such as Cisco, Dell EMC, Intel, Lenovo and NetApp, as well as offering various developer tools and data and analytics services.
Cloud Private is also built on Kubernetes architecture and supports both Docker containers and Cloud Foundry. This may not come as a huge surprise; in 2015 IBM became a founding member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which has a specific focus on sustaining containers and microservices architectures. Over the past year the largest cloud players have all joined the party; Microsoft in July, Amazon Web Services (AWS) in August, and Oracle in September, all at platinum level.
IBM gave a couple of examples as to how Cloud Private could be used. In the aviation space, an airline could use the software to bring a core application that tracks frequent flyer miles into a private cloud environment before connecting it to an app in the public cloud, while a financial services provider could use it to combine analytics and machine learning in the public cloud while maintaining security and regulatory concerns with customer data.
One example of this combined strategy comes from Hertz. “Private cloud is a must for many enterprises such as ours working to reduce or eliminate their dependence on internal data centres,” said Tyler Best, Hertz chief technology officer. “A strategy consisting of public, private and hybrid cloud are essential for large enterprises to effectively make the transition from legacy systems to cloud.
“Hertz is an early adopter of both public and private IBM cloud and we could not accomplish our technology goals without private cloud as part of our overall cloud portfolio,” added Best.
To look at another offering which aims to perform similar tasks, the launch of VMware Cloud on AWS – first announced last year but made fully available in August – is a good place to start. The service offers VMware’s software designed data centre (SDCC) on the AWS infrastructure, enabling users to run VMware apps across consistent public, private, or hybrid vSphere-based cloud environments, alongside having optimised access to AWS services.
You can find out more about IBM Cloud Private here.