Speaking at an IBM roadshow presented in partnership with ITWeb in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town, IBM infrastructure experts said cloud adoption, driven by the need to modernise, is gaining momentum around the world.
Clive Sagadevan, cloud technical professional at IBM Cloud, said cloud adoption had evolved beyond its early stages, in which it was driven mainly by cost savings, and then by the need for speed and modern applications.
"In the third phase of cloud adoption, drivers include reimagined processes, blockchain, cognitive computing and application modernisation. We are not at the stage where cloud native applications are being leveraged, making the cloud a must."
Research by Forrester and IBM found a 400% increase in public cloud use in the past five years in this new environment, he said, with 49% of enterprises using public cloud IaaS/PaaS platforms and leveraging their security and economies of scale.
"But many applications are not natively built for the public cloud, so now we are also seeing private cloud growth.
"Private cloud brings with it the benefits of public cloud, but behind traditional firewalls. 70% of private cloud adoption is driven by the need to modernise."
However, enterprises are not choosing one cloud over another; most are scaling out to multiple clouds, depending on their needs and workloads.
"Eight out of 10 organisations are committing to multi-cloud environments, and 71% say they already use three or more clouds," said Sagadevan.
Charbel Antonios, IBM software-defined storage solutions sales leader, said IBM had moved to help enterprises innovate within this multi-cloud environment.
"IT has to architect for disruption, with AI [artificial intelligence] as a goal and multi-cloud as the platform. Organisations need to modernise traditional workloads, transform their business with next-generation applications and containerise or refactor applications.
"This new environment could be on-prem, off-prem, cloud-based or containerised, anywhere on the globe. Organisations can use follow the sun methodologies to optimise processes," noted Antonios.
"IBM solutions harness software-defined architecture and the largest storage portfolio any company can offer today, along with innovations like POWER9, IBM Cloud Private and FlashSystem 9100, to give you the choice to deploy whatever you want, wherever you want, and differentiate in a digitised market."
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