IBM Hybrid Cloud: A Game-Changing Platform for Canadian Business

By ibmblogsApril 29, 2022

Cloud, cloud everywhere

Tumultuous changes in the past two years have disrupted organizations across every industry. COVID-19 has made digital experiences the norm for citizens and customers, and a remote workplace the new norm for employees. Sustainability has emerged as a top enterprise priority, accelerating the need for clean, governed, accessible data.

To embrace digital transformation, companies must fast-track their cloud modernization shift.

The problem is, while most organizations acknowledge that application modernization is inevitable and accelerating, most enterprise systems still reside on-prem. The “Lift and shift” of cloud-ready applications is complete, but security-dependent, mission-critical workloads are still waiting to be transformed into digital native, composable components that can be recombined according to changing business and IT needs.

Furthermore, Canada is lagging behind the world when it comes to the percentage of core systems migrated to cloud: 40% for Canada compared to 50% globally.¹ And Canadian organizations are still mostly focused on digital transformation for internal use rather than improving customer experience.

Ready to exploit real enterprise value from digital transformation? A hybrid cloud platform built on microservices architecture has emerged as the clear path forward.

Managing the move to hybrid multicloud

To develop IT environments that enable business transformation, tasks must be seamlessly integrated across different types of clouds and entire IT infrastructures. A platform approach plays a unifying role and acts as the technological glue that allows an organization to harness the full range of capabilities available to it for improved business and operational performance.

Unfortunately, many clients have entered the hybrid multicloud world without a real plan and without a single strategy to manage that world. Most clients have multiple public and private clouds along with their own on-prem data centres. Computing power may be available on demand, but if it’s inefficient, money is being wasted. Just 27% of Canadian businesses have a holistic multicloud management strategy in place.

An open hybrid cloud platform running on RedHat allows these different environments to interoperate seamlessly and efficiently – and the ability to monitor, secure, develop quickly across them. RedHat ensures that mission-critical workloads are running in the IT environment best suited to their specific security and governance requirements—allowing the business to respond quickly and cost-effectively to changing demand despite growing complexity.

Managing multiple clouds requires a sharp increase in platform engineering skills for new development, testing and design. Platform management skills are also a critical capability for managing consumption, application deployment, application availability, and troubleshooting. These skills are in short supply, and companies are looking for partners with the experienced people and the capacity needed.

An ecosystem approach to hybrid cloud and business transformation

Pairing hybrid cloud with enterprise transformation drives exponential business value. The “Virtual Enterprise” looks forward and outward. Decisions are no longer based on tradition and internal information, but rather, a combination of predictive and prospective analysis based on unprecedented access to data and intelligence — with compute power available on demand across the cloud environment.

To conquer their business transformation challenges, leaders are looking for the proven path to faster innovation, process reinvention, new technology deployment, and accelerated outcomes. They need a consulting services partner who understands these needs and will work collaboratively with them – and their ecosystem partners – for the benefit of clients throughout the complex journey ahead.

This is where IBM Hybrid Cloud Services (HCS) stands out. Not only do we understand hybrid cloud – and what you can achieve with it, we partner across the entire stack of cloud providers and the full breadth of business functionality. We know our products, and we know theirs too.

In an NBC interview with Jim Cramer, Arvind Krishna explained IBM’s collaborative, ecosystem approach to hybrid cloud.

“IBM has a long history of working with partners who are important to our clients,” he said. “We have always created an ecosystem of other providers – hardware, software, business consulting partners, and now cloud providers – to add value to the client environment. Everyone in the ecosystems benefits from the growth opportunities in automation, cybersecurity and more.

A collaborative path to modernization with IBM Hybrid Cloud Services (HCS)

IBM Consulting is a single consulting organization that drives innovation from end-to-end within the IBM hybrid cloud platform. Clients have access to IBM products, research, AI and automation technology, and software development tools – backed by IBM Security that ensures cyberthreats are correctly dealt with without hindering ease of use.

A critical differentiator for IBM HCS team is our Cloud Modernization Centre in Gatineau, Quebec. Part of our family of Client innovation Centres (CIC) the CMC is dedicated to modernization, particularly for federal government and clients in Quebec.

Besides these foundational capabilities, IBM’s certified experts use the IBM Garage methodology to co-create and co-execute with clients, transferring the skills needed to enable further development on the cloud – so clients can do the work needed to thrive in their unique marketplace.

We meet you where you are, then do what it takes to help you modernize and move forward. Whatever brings value to our clients is what drives us.

Whether your application modernization program is driven by business or IT, IBM delivers much more than a well-managed cloud platform – we offer a cohesive strategy aligned with hybrid cloud, AI and the power of the ecosystem. We work with you to deliver rapid business value while acting as a truly collaborative partner.

IBM brings industry expertise to work with clients facing operational slowdowns and issues with change management affecting time to market. Here are six hybrid cloud consulting use cases from Canadian clients.

Case 1: Operational urgency and cost optimization
- Data centre in Asia shut down due to government regulatory concerns led to a need to move quickly to the cloud
Case 2: Improve availability and enhance customer experience
- Channel enablement project supporting high demand during Black Friday/Boxing Day shopping
Case 3: “Inside-out” modernization (starting with a technology problem)
- Getting off the mainframe meant realizing technical strategy by decomposing a legacy monolith and building to an API microservices arch that leverages cloud. Identified the new opportunities that come from modernizing the application.
Case 4: “Outside-in” modernization (starting with the business problem)
- With the goal to provide new functionality, client modernized business process by migrating legacy processes from dated COTS application to modern tech stack on OCP.
Case 5: Implement a clear digital transformation vision
- Making transactions in real-time to provide an optimal customer experience, while also updating the core banking system
Case 6: Build and manage secured platform on cloud
- Implementing the most current versions of core business systems