Over the years, IT environments have become more and more heterogeneous. The days when a single vendor, such as IBM, could dominate most aspects of an organization’s computing environment are long gone. Systems, databases, applications, storage solutions and other mission-critical aspects of an organization’s IT infrastructure are typically widely distributed and deployed on a range of different platforms.
There is some value to this approach in that applications can be run in the environments that deliver the best performance and agility, based on the particular requirements of users and workloads. There are also legacy infrastructures and applications to protect and extend.
The challenge with all of this heterogeneity, however, is that it can be expensive to maintain all of these separate and diverse infrastructures. Worse, heterogeneous IT environments can create silos and impede the integration of critical resources – applications, computing power, databases, management tools and even business processes – that could make the entire organization run more smoothly, efficiently and cost effectively if only they were more tightly integrated and centrally managed.
The value of hybrid cloud computing is almost immeasurable to IT environments. It gives the organization the opportunity to centrally manage and control critical IT resources, while continuing to support applications and workloads created and deployed on virtually any compute platform on premises, off premises, or a combination thereof.
Vicom Infinity customers experience significant cost savings with this approach, while deploying an overall IT environment that is much simpler to manage. More importantly, they are able to integrate applications across the organization without having to rip and replace existing infrastructures.
The key to IBM’s hybrid cloud computing approach is IBM Cloud private. With ICp, IT organizations bring a Cloud look-and-feel environment on their IBM Z behind their firewall that seamlessly integrates into any other cloud environment.
As hybrid Cloud computing becomes even more prevalent in the coming years, organizations will find that they will need more efficient integration, coordination, automation and workload management – not to mention bulletproof reliability and security. The question is how do they achieve all of these goals. The answer, in many cases, will be hybrid Cloud computing with ICp on the IBM Z.
