IDC TECHNOLOGY SPOTLIGHT Sponsored by: IBM

The need for consistent distributed management and control will increase as enterprises ramp up data-intensive digital business solutions across public cloud, on-premises datacenters, and edge locations.

Digital Business Depends on Distributed Clouds April 2021 Written by: Mary Johnston Turner, Research Vice President, Future of Digital Infrastructure

Enterprise Digital Strategies Are Built on Cloud AT A GLANCE Regardless of industry or geography, business is becoming more digital and data centric. The global pandemic and pivot to remote and virtual workplaces KEY STATS accelerated this transformation. As a result, IDC predicts that by 2022, 46% of » IDC predicts that 46% of enterprise enterprise products and services will be digital or digitally delivered worldwide. products and services will be digital or digitally delivered by 2022. Much of the growth in digital business is underpinned by public cloud, » IDC expects that cloud will account for software-defined on-premises datacenters, and edge computing platforms. 63% of IT infrastructure spend by 2024. DevOps and agile development efforts using cloud-native container platforms and services have allowed many enterprises to rapidly build and deploy KEY TAKEAWAYS The most successful digital enterprises are modern online business offerings that harness the power of highly advanced those that can optimize cloud and workload data, analytics, and developer services in the cloud. DevOps and digital deployments to meet the needs of specific line-of-business (LOB) teams have benefited from having access to highly applications and business processes while scalable cloud resources, without needing to worry about configuring or simultaneously managing risk, maintaining maintaining the underlying infrastructure, monitoring, and security. Whether compliance, optimizing costs, and ensuring consistent end-user experiences. supporting bare metal, virtual machines (VMs), or container workloads, cloud is expected to represent 63% of IT infrastructure spend by 2024. IDC estimates that 97% of enterprises currently rely on a mix of on-premises and public cloud resources. About 92% use at least two clouds, including both private clouds and public cloud services. The primary drivers for using multiple clouds focus on enabling workload-specific requirements and satisfying industry- and country-specific compliance and data privacy requirements. Complex, advanced data analytics, data streaming, and developer tooling are often easier to deploy as cloud services rather than being maintained as software on premises. As a result, enterprise buyers are looking closely at how different cloud service providers can support different workload profiles, policies, and service-level objectives (SLOs). Different workloads and use cases have unique security, access, data privacy, cost, performance, latency, and compliance requirements. Distributed cloud architectures spread across on-premises environments, public cloud platforms, hosted datacenters, and edge locations are here to stay. In this environment, the most successful digital enterprises are those that can optimize cloud consumption and workload deployments to meet the needs of specific applications and business processes while simultaneously managing risk, maintaining compliance, optimizing costs, facilitating innovation, and ensuring consistent end-user experiences.

IDC TECHNOLOGY SPOTLIGHT Digital Business Depends on Distributed Clouds

Considering the Value of Consistent Services on Cloud to Edge to On Premises Over the past decade, many enterprise organizations have taken advantage of one or more cloud resources depending on the need of their developers and workloads. Enterprises have deployed applications to on-premises private clouds using automated VM-based operations. They have simultaneously built on-premises container clusters for cloud-native DevOps teams and deployed many types of applications onto public cloud platforms to take advantage of scaling, advanced analytics services, and automated disaster recovery. Managed cloud services and industry-specific cloud software offerings are also part of the mix. In many cases, deployment decisions are based on specific developer or LOB preferences, with minimal consideration for how the data, workflows, and transactions will scale, interact, and grow over time. Many organizations have developed ad hoc multicloud and hybrid cloud environments that reinforce, rather than break down, data, computing, storage, and analytics silos. Each cloud platform, whether in a public cloud or on premises, requires administrators who have expertise in that specific set of cloud management and security tools. Each cloud provider generates its own bills and relies on its own native configuration management tooling. The rapid adoption of cloud-native container platforms and orchestration technologies such as Kubernetes has allowed developers to move faster than ever, but it has further accelerated this proliferation of loosely coupled cloud infrastructure and data silos. Edge computing, which takes advantage of powerful new hardware combined with software-defined controls, is pushing increasingly sophisticated data collection and analysis away from central datacenters, creating even more complex operational and integration challenges. IDC's research shows that these evolving distributed multicloud and hybrid cloud architectures need to be connected and consistently managed. This strategy results in a number of challenges in delivering reliable, consistent, and secure application services on an end-to-end basis. The need for consistency becomes paramount to standardize operational configurations, increase use of automation, improve security postures and compliance reporting, increase IT staff productivity, and enhance end-to-end business performance. Cross-cloud control planes that allow enterprises to deploy workloads and manage cloud services consistently across on-premises, public cloud, and edge locations are emerging to enable a more efficient, standardized, and automated approach to managing and securing multiple clouds. Consistent visibility and control allow businesses to consume innovative cloud services from multiple providers and partners without creating barriers to scale and data integration. Consistent control also facilitates the ability to deploy workloads and process data at the edge, in a public cloud, or in the datacenter, freeing developers from having to become experts on cloud-specific configuration and security.

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IDC TECHNOLOGY SPOTLIGHT Digital Business Depends on Distributed Clouds

The Business Case for Cross-Cloud Control Planes Facing the operational challenges created by hybrid and multicloud strategies, the majority of enterprises (71%) have identified consistent cross-cloud control planes as important to the long-term success of their cloud and cloud-native application initiatives, including edge. As shown in Figure 1, these organizations recognize that consistent cloud management, automation, observability, and security are critical to ensuring stable, scalable operational environments as well as for increasing time to value and improving both IT agility and end-user experiences. FIGURE 1: Top Business Case Metrics for Investing in Hybrid and Multicloud Management Tools

Infrastructure and application stability improvement

Speed/time to value

IT operational agility

Customer experience improvement

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 (% of respondents) n = 409 Source: IDC Cloud Pulse: Worldwide Enterprise Cloud Management Survey Insights (IDC #US46773120, August 2020)

The business case for these extended cloud solutions recognizes that LOB, developer, ITOps, and CloudOps site reliability engineering (SRE) teams all benefit from consistent end-to-end management and security. Specifically: » Business stakeholders get greater assurance of reliable end-to-end application performance, security, and compliance thanks to consistent, comprehensive infrastructure stability and integrations. As new applications are deployed and made available to users and customers across diverse geographies, the ability to maintain service- level agreements (SLAs) at scale is vital to sustaining customer loyalty and goodwill. » Developers benefit in that their applications can get to market faster when configuration, security, and compliance controls can be defined once and consistently applied across clouds. Developers spend less time focusing on making sure they are working on the correctly configured platforms and get more time to develop code and collaborate with business leaders. They also gain tighter coordination and end-to-end automation to support continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) life-cycle automation efforts. » ITOps and CloudOps SRE teams are able to provision and scale infrastructure services with greater reliability and operational stability across edge, on-premises, and public cloud platforms. Less staff time needs to be devoted to configuring and monitoring each individual resource, and consistent instrumentation and observability analytics help detect end-to-end anomalies and remediate cross-cloud dependency problems sooner. IT staff is able to define and curate templates, policies, and access controls once and then reuse them at scale across their IT estate.

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IDC TECHNOLOGY SPOTLIGHT Digital Business Depends on Distributed Clouds

Unlike traditional cloud management platforms that were deployed as appliances or traditional packaged enterprise software, distributed cloud control planes are effectively extensions of existing public cloud services that can monitor and control resources at the edge, in on-premises datacenters, or in multiple public clouds simultaneously. These extended cloud services are architected using software-as-a-service deployment models that package together all required cloud management templates, analytics, , and connectors to make them widely available as an extended cloud service that treats all infrastructure resource targets equally. Considering IBM Cloud Satellite IBM Cloud Satellite, an API-enabled distributed cloud service, extends a wide range of public IBM Cloud configuration, security, compliance, and data management functionality consistently across on-premises, edge, and third-party public cloud platforms. IBM Cloud Satellite allows customers to treat any on-premises, edge, or public cloud bare metal or VM host as a private region in the IBM Cloud. Customers simply run a lightweight host configuration script on target bare metal or VM hosts, and IBM Cloud takes over responsibility for running the cloud services including such activities as workload configuration, security, and other day-to-day operations management tasks. IBM Cloud Satellite is accessed as a cloud service via the IBM Cloud console. Customers incur small usage charges for IBM Cloud vCPUs used to support the IBM Cloud Satellite application, based on actual usage, but there is no up-front or termination fee. Launched for general availability in March 2021, IBM Cloud Satellite extends the Red Hat OpenShift for IBM Cloud service, the IBM Cloud Continuous Delivery service, and the IBM Cloud Pak for Data , which enables Watson AI and data integration capabilities, to be run on locations outside of the IBM Cloud. IBM Cloud Satellite includes fully automated deployment and configuration integrations with AWS ECS, S3, and related core AWS infrastructure services. Support for Azure and Cloud infrastructure is also available. A wizard-driven GUI provides a simplified process for designating on-premises resources as IBM Cloud Satellite hosts. Alternatively, customers can customize the solution using manual configuration to meet needs on each platform. IBM plans a steady drumbeat of additional service rollouts. Full-stack hardware appliance form factors for edge locations are also planned in collaboration with several hardware partners. IBM Cloud Satellite is currently supported by over 65 partners, including hardware vendors such as Intel, Cisco, and Dell; edge system partners such as ; communications service providers such as AT&T; and infrastructure software partners such as Portworx (recently acquired by Pure Storage) and Robin.io, both of which provide hyperconverged data persistence and management platforms for container deployments. IBM Spectrum Storage is also available for storage solutions. All software sold via the Red Hat Marketplace or available in the IBM Cloud catalog can be deployed via IBM Cloud Satellite. IBM Cloud Satellite will help IBM address a number of immediate enterprise hybrid and multicloud operational pain points and challenges, including the following:

» The lack of sufficient SRE and related hybrid and multicloud operational expertise that enterprises need to rapidly scale and continually optimize increasingly distributed cloud architectures, including growing numbers of edge locations » The amount of manual effort and human error associated with managing audit, compliance, and change control for infrastructure configuration, security, and data across on-premises, edge, and cloud resources

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IDC TECHNOLOGY SPOTLIGHT Digital Business Depends on Distributed Clouds

» The requirement to maintain consistent data and infrastructure configuration and security at edge locations regardless of the number of locations (Lumen Technologies will provide its customers with access to IBM Cloud Satellite services from any of its 180,000 edge computing sites.) » The need to allow enterprises to shift latency-sensitive workloads and analytic processing closer to where the data is collected while maintaining required security, data sovereignty, and configuration policies at scale » The necessity of having a consistent storage and data management layer across all connected hybrid and multicloud cloud deployments » The demand to standardize development tools so that enterprises can adapt and iterate quickly and enter new markets rapidly and consistently IBM Cloud Satellite relies on a standardized set of AI, data, Kubernetes, and security services to enable consistent operations and control across computing resources located in the edge, in dedicated on premises and hosted locations, and in multiple public cloud infrastructure platforms (see Figure 2). FIGURE 2: IBM Cloud Satellite Software catalog Custom applications including IBM Cloud Paks

IBM Public Cloud services

IBM Cloud Satellite

Satellite managed hosts

At the Edge On Premises Other Public Clouds IBM Cloud

Bare Metal or Virtual Integrated Bare Metal or Integrated Servers Appliances Virtual Servers Appliances

Regional Optimized IBM Cloud Satellite Datacenters Edge Devices Infrastructure Service Source: IBM, 2021

With IBM Cloud Satellite, IBM allows enterprises increased flexibility in how they choose to combine infrastructure, cloud services, and workloads. For example, it is possible to deploy Watson AI on premises and connect it to a local NetApp storage environment. The same can be done in AWS ECS with data stored in the S3 service. In both cases, limiting the movement of data can help reduce costs and processing time. For those that prefer a fully managed experience, IBM Cloud Satellite Infrastructure Service will provide a full-stack managed service solution.

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IDC TECHNOLOGY SPOTLIGHT Digital Business Depends on Distributed Clouds

Challenges Many enterprises are still evolving their cloud strategies. The move from traditional bare metal and VM-based application architectures is occurring slowly, and many organizations are still evolving the way they make the business case for cloud-native development, DevOps automation, and consistent cross-cloud management and security. The ability to take full advantage of solutions such as IBM Cloud Satellite depends on the organization's ability to develop mature cross-cloud governance, configurations, metrics, and workflows. To the extent that IBM can assist customers with the evolution of operational models and best practices, while also simplifying the move to containers and cloud-native apps and smoothing integrations between on-premises and cloud environments, IBM Cloud Satellite will enable customers to speed modernization and deliver value more quickly to end users and applications. Conclusion The need for consistent cross-cloud management and control will continue to increase As business as enterprises ramp up cloud-native digital business solutions and adopt multicluster becomes more Kubernetes and robust edge computing solutions. The ability to extend processing and analytics closer to the edge while maintaining consistent security, access control, digital, the need and configuration compliance will be particularly important for mission-critical, for consistent data-intensive workloads in regulated industries. distributed cloud These types of solutions provide enterprises with more flexibility in choosing cloud management and platforms and services while ensuring standardized operations, security, and cost security will control across all computing, storage, and network footprints. Effective selection and increase enablement of these types of solutions will be built on collaborative decision making dramatically. across LOB, DevOps, and ITOps teams. As business becomes more digital, the need for consistent distributed cloud management and security will increase dramatically.

About the Analyst

Mary Johnston Turner, Research Vice President, Future of Digital Infrastructure Mary Johnston Turner is Research Vice President Future of Digital Infrastructure, part of IDC's Future Enterprise research team. She analyzes how enterprise IT and business strategies are taking advantage of ubiquitous, autonomous cloud infrastructure solutions deployed across dedicated datacenter and shared public service environments. Her practice emphasizes the voice of the enterprise customer, based on surveys and in-depth analysis of best practices related to how enterprises are changing the ways they source, secure, and optimize digital infrastructure solutions.

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IDC TECHNOLOGY SPOTLIGHT Digital Business Depends on Distributed Clouds

MESSAGE FROM THE SPONSOR As companies use cloud platforms and services to fulfill accelerated digital transformation plans, distributed cloud provides what hybrid and multicloud solutions have previously lacked. In particular, as a distributed cloud service, IBM Cloud Satellite provides:

» Versatility in using cloud services consistently in any location—on premises, on cloud platforms, in edge environments » The same developer and operations experience in all Satellite locations, based on Red Hat Openshift as a service » A centralized, comprehensive capacity to monitor and manage applications, software, and services » Unified identity and access security across environments, including the option to link locations without going through the » Access to the IBM Cloud catalog, including the tools and services that enable machine learning and other analytics operations where data is generated and resides Tell me more

The content in this paper was adapted from existing IDC research published on www.idc.com.

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