IBM Offers Support For Challenges In The Shift To Enterprise Clouds

IBM also announced a new IBM Endpoint Manager for Mobile Devices that helps firms better manage and secure their mobile environments, including iPhone, iPad, Android-based phones and tablets, Windows Phone, and Nokia Symbian devices. With the ability to install in minutes, organisations will quickly be able to remotely set policies, monitor employees’ devices to identify potential data compromise and wipe data off the devices if they are lost or stolen.

In addition, by employing key innovations in cloud environment capacity analytics, storage use and optimisation, operations teams can shift their focus from managing environment bottlenecks to delivering new services. For instance, IBM’s new IBM SmartCloud Monitoring enables cloud administrators to maximise cloud availability and usage by monitoring virtual infrastructures and applying analytics to optimise workload placement.

A smarter cloud

IBM’s SmartCloud Virtual Storage Centre improves the flexibility, cost, usage and performance of storage with automated administration, management and provisioning controls.

Moreover, IBM’s new SmartCloud Foundation offerings allow organisations to install, manage, configure and automate the creation of cloud services in private, public or hybrid environments with a higher level of control. Collectively, the new offerings will help clients speed delivery, lower risk and better control the move to deploy cloud alongside their existing production environments, IBM said.

Big Blue says it is offering clients greater value and flexibility by delivering best-practice cloud services. Since deploying IBM SmartCloud Provisioning, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider Dutch Cloud has seen its client base expand significantly, according to company officials. Yet the high degree of automation built into the IBM service has greatly reduced Dutch Cloud’s administrative workload.

Now the IT team spends 80 percent of its time on client migrations and only 20 percent of its time on administration – a more than 70 percent decrease in administrative time. Dutch Cloud’s monthly recurring revenue has tripled twice in the last six months, but its operational costs have remained flat, the company said.

“With our original tool, it could take almost an hour to provision an extra 200 virtual machines for a client,” says Martijn Van Zoeren, CEO of Dutch Cloud, in a statement. “With IBM SmartCloud Provisioning, we can do it within five minutes. Previously, we had to keep changing our tool to support all new versions of VMware, KVM and Microsoft software coming out, and all the new storage versions. It was easy to do that when we first started, but we couldn’t maintain it as we grew. We were spending 80 percent of our time maintaining the tool and 20 percent on supporting client requirements.”

With IBM SmartCloud Provisioning, new services also can be deployed in minutes rather than hours, Van Zoeren said. “This places Dutch Cloud in an ideal position to respond rapidly to fluctuating client needs. The IaaS market is going to continue to mature, and we’ll see more competition in the coming years. Our technology choices have given us the ability to thrive in this competitive market.”

Delivery and agility

As enterprises look to accelerate delivery and realise agility, many are starting their cloud implementation journey around their development, test and deployment operations.

For example, SunTrust bank is working with IBM’s DevOps application to increase its business agility while increasing operational discipline, quality, customer satisfaction and governance. Using a cloud environment, SunTrust developers have been able to achieve application build times up to five times faster.

Building on that and other experiences with clients, IBM will be releasing new capabilities with IBM SmartCloud Continuous Delivery, Hebner said. The new software is a suite of best practice patterns for enabling integrated lifecycle management of cloud services, combining Rational Collaborative Lifecycle Management applications with IBM SmartCloud Provisioning. IBM’s recent Green Hat acquisition will further extend these capabilities, reducing development lifecycle times by streamlining test cycles as applications are transitioned to cloud deployments, the company said.

IBM said customers using the software have seen dramatic results, including shortened delivery time from months to days through end-to-end automation, standardisation and repeatability; 20 percent reduction in resource costs while increasing predictability of deployments through low touch and self-service; 40 percent more agility by streamlining operation and development collaboration with in-context communication; and 20 percent increases in application service availability and performance by improving stakeholder alignment of development, test and operations.

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