Enterprises must take an intelligent approach to multicloud management, to get visibility, governance and automation across their on-premise and cloud environments.
However, even though IBM research shows that 94% of enterprise customers surveyed say they are using multicloud and multicluster environments, less than 40% have the procedures and tools to operate a multi-cloud environment.
This is according to speakers at a multicloud management webinar hosted by Envisage, in partnership with ITWeb, this week.
Birgit Smythe, MD of IBM Gold Partner Envisage, said: “We’re all looking at moving to hybrid and multicloud environments, but it is important that you don’t go blindly into adopting cloud – you need visibility of the entire environment, from a central place, in order to manage it effectively.”
Andrew Hewitt-Coleman, Red Hat Synergy Leader, Hybrid Cloud Integration Software at IBM South Africa, echoed this view: “Historically, when everything was inside an enterprise’s own data centre, people were quite comfortable with managing their environments. However, now it’s becoming more tricky to evaluate multiple environments, and they are a lot more reliant on tools to tell them where the problems are. If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist, which is why visibility is key.”
Smythe and Hewitt-Coleman outlined IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management, which allows enterprises to achieve visibility across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, and supports IT operations' transformation, automation, application modernisation, governance and compliance management.
Too much time is spent jumping between tools, digging through data to find the needle in the haystack.
Andrew Hewitt-Coleman
Smythe says Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management manages all the big cloud and on-premise environments, providing a single screen overview of the domain and how it’s performing, with add-ons available to automate tasks such as patching, updates and new functionality across the full environment.
They highlighted a Cloud Pak add-on – Watson AIOps – which was released recently to enable AI-powered incident resolution. Watson AIOps ties signals across structured and unstructured data from multiple sources to provide a clear view of anomalies, with linkages to sources for faster investigation and resolution.
Hewitt-Coleman said: “Even with dozens of tools for monitoring and automating, less than half of those surveyed by IBM could monitor their whole environments. In this complex environment, problems could take hours or days to diagnose and remediate.
"Even minor IT incidents can cause major business impact, and we are seeing more and more logging and eventing, so enterprises now have to allocate valuable resources just to keep the lights on and manage easily preventable outages, rather than innovating. Too much time is spent jumping between tools, digging through data to find the needle in the haystack.”
Watson AIOps correlates disparate data across toolchains to derive hidden insights and help identify incident root causes faster, so enterprises can rapidly resolve IT incidents.
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