IBM announces a new hybrid cloud offering that features the company's Tivoli software and technology gained in IBM's acquisition of Cast Iron Systems.
IBM has announced a new
hybrid cloud solution based in part on technology the company got from its 2010 acquisition
of Cast Iron.
IBM's new hybrid cloud helps
clients reduce the time it takes to connect, manage and secure public and
private clouds. With new integration and management capabilities, organizations
of all sizes will be able to gain greater visibility, control and the ability
to automate their assets and computing environments, regardless of where they
reside, IBM officials said
The new offering makes it
easier for users to integrate and manage all of their on- and off-premise
resources, and will allow a task that once took several months to be done in a
few days.
"As a user of IBM
WebSphere Cast Iron, we have been able to not only easily integrate our
on-premise and cloud-based applications, but also provide live feeds of order
data changes to our sales reps on any device, including mobile phones, tablets
and laptops," Randy Berger, IT manager for process and application
development at Siemens, said in a statement. "Expanding on the Cast Iron
platform will help IBM provide even better access and management for hybrid
clouds."
IBM officials said more and
more organizations are looking to leverage the scale and flexibility of public
cloud, but are concerned about losing control of resources outside their walls.
This is causing organizations to embrace a hybrid cloud model, where they can
more easily manage some resources in-house, while also using other applications
externally as a service, IBM said.
According to industry
analysts such as the 451 Group, 39 percent of cloud users report that the
hybrid cloud is currently part of their strategy, with this number expected to
grow to 61 percent in the near future. This is the result of both private and
public cloud users evolving toward the use of a hybrid strategy.
Yet, as businesses adopt a
cloud computing model, they are faced with integrating existing on-premise
software such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource
Planning (ERP) and homegrown applications, while managing their usage and
security, IBM said. Managing the complexities within and between such hybrid
environments is key to effective enterprise business use of software as a service
(SaaS), according to Saugatuck Technology.
To address this challenge,
IBM is expanding its SmartCloud
portfolio with new hybrid cloud technology. The solution will build upon IBM's
Tivoli cloud management software and extend those capabilities to the
application and data integration technology from its Cast Iron acquisition to
provide control and management resources, security, application integration and
dynamic provisioning.
The new capabilities will
define policies, quotas, limits, monitoring and performance rules for the
public cloud in the same way as on-premise resources, IBM said. This allows
users to access public cloud resources through a single-service catalog-enabling
IT staff to govern the access and the usage of this information in a simplified
and secure way.
Moreover, IBM enables better
control of users' access by syncing the user directories of on-premise and
cloud applications. The automated synchronization means users will be able to
gain entry to the information they are authorized to access. IBM's monitoring,
provisioning and integration capabilities allow its hybrid cloud to support
"cloud bursting," which is the dynamic relocation of workloads from
private environments to public clouds during peak times. IBM's technical and
business policies control this method of data integration.
"As the hybrid cloud
model is emerging as a strategic means to quickly unlock business value from
data sources, IBM is making it enterprise-ready with the best monitoring,
governance and security tools available," Robert LeBlanc, senior vice
president of middleware software at IBM, said in a statement. "IBM's new
solution will expedite and secure this process to help clients of all sizes
access key business applications securely, no matter where they reside."
For more information about
IBM WebSphere Cast Iron, visit: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/integration/cast-iron-cloud-integration/.
Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.
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