Why Hybrid Cloud is the Path to Innovation & Collaboration

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The platform of choice and necessity for the digital age is the cloud — the future of information technology. In the era of cognitive computing, a world being rewritten in code, coders are becoming the architects of the future and cloud is the platform on which they are building.

More important than providing a faster and cheaper way to access IT, the cloud has become a platform for innovation.

And today, IBM introduced a new object storage service that redefines the security, availability and economics of storing, managing and accessing massive amounts of digital information across hybrid clouds. The company’s new IBM Cloud Object Storage offering includes more than 400 patents designed to deliver clients better value in the industry’s most secure environment.

Though organizations are flocking to the cloud for improved efficiencies and IT agility, clients see a gap for storing increasingly larger volumes of data — on premises and off premises. Currently, companies have to choose between storing data on internal servers and storage systems, or in the cloud. It’s a dilemma that has hindered business flexibility and raised infrastructure costs. As data volumes continue to grow across industries, the need to create flexible hybrid cloud storage solutions has intensified.

Bitly, for example, has adopted the new IBM Cloud Object Storage service to more quickly and easily analyze historical data that is being produced by the more than 10 billion clicks it processes each month across the world. IBM Cloud is now the exclusive cloud platform for Bitly.

Cloud platforms provide an open environment for rapid scaling and collaboration, two other key imperatives for success in the digital age. They also expose growing libraries of application programming interfaces, or APIs, which are application-programming interfaces from which partners and third parties across a broad ecosystem can create new, innovative solutions and apps. Using one retailer’s API, for example, another company’s website can post direct links to the retailer’s products with an invitation to “buy now.”

These kinds of connections and capabilities are rapidly becoming consumer-driven imperatives throughout the marketplace. But the cloud is not one thing. There are public clouds where data is stored and accessed by multiple clients or users, and private clouds where data is dedicated to a single client.

And there is a third way — hybrid cloud, which is a combination of public and private cloud that has become the fastest-growing segment of the cloud market. According to a recent UBS Evidence Lab study, 60 percent of IT administrators and CIOs surveyed agreed that hybrid solutions make the most sense.

Most companies today don’t want to move everything to the public cloud or keep everything in the private cloud. Rather, the decision about which way to go — public or private — is based on factors such as security, flexibility, resiliency, scalability and cost.

Success in the hybrid cloud will require the connecting of systems in new ways. Technology leaders must change their way of thinking so businesses can reap the full benefits of investments in on-premises systems and new opportunities in the public cloud — a powerful combination that creates even greater value for clients. This includes taking steps to:

• Deepen their understanding of business and financial implications of cloud as a guide to steering future cloud initiatives.
• Strengthen the ability to manage the complexity of multiple cloud ecosystem partners, and
• Extend the limits of complying with security and regulation through new internal capabilities and external solutions.

It is clear; in an industry that thrives on constant innovation, cognitive is the only way to ingest and extract value from the tidal wave of data that is engulfing our world — and hybrid cloud is the ideal platform on which these solutions must be designed, built, tested and deployed. To learn more about the new era of business, join us at the IBM Insight at the World of Watson or visit ibm.com/cognitive.

This story also appears on Forbes.com.
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Related Stories:

• Why Business Shouldn’t Settle for Just Any Storage – Thoughts on Cloud
• Beyond Four Walls: Rocketing Into Hybrid Cloud – In the Making

Partner Perspectives:

• Hybrid Matters – Panzura
• A Platform for Hybrid Cloud Enterprise Services – CTERA
• IBM Cloud Object Storage – Nasuni
• IBM COS: The Foundation of the Digital & Cognitive Eras – Mark III Systems