Cloud computing remains one of the major drivers of digital transformation. While enterprises all over the world have made significant investments in their on-premises IT deployments and mission-critical applications, the real question they are trying to answer is if cloud is ready to take center stage with these strategic applications onboard.

Many organizations grapple with the need to work faster, deliver sooner, and scale on business needs. They also have the need to build new applications in an agile fashion with modern resilient architectures to meet changing business demands. But, in many cases, cannot run their applications on the public cloud.

Most of the time they are held back by regulatory and legal requirements. Others do not want their strategic assets to be residing outside the organizational infrastructure. Does this mean that organizations with sensitive or strategic applications will lose out on the benefits of cloud architecture?

Not necessarily. A private cloud allows companies to customize their environments according to their own unique needs and based on their own security requirements. It leverages the benefits of public cloud, including rapid deployment, scalability, ease of use and elasticity — but can also offer additional capabilities such as greater control, increased performance, predictable cost, tighter security and flexible management options.

Key use cases of the Private Cloud

While the benefits of cloud computing are clear, businesses are increasingly finding the need to take different approaches to the cloud depending on the nature of each individual workload. For example, business leaders may want their workloads behind their firewall for security and compliance reasons. In addition, businesses want to leverage their data center investment in their line of business (LoB) applications. So how are enterprises using the private cloud to meet their dynamic business needs?

1. Modernize applications on Cloud: Every enterprise has its share of heritage applications that represents a great deal of investment, making it unrealistic to simply throw it all away. These applications are monolithic, not easily extended to develop new applications and become difficult to manage over time.

For these reasons, businesses want to modernize their heritage applications, making them cloud-enabled, componentized and consistently managed. Refactoring heritage applications, or parts thereof, into microservices often makes the most sense for organizations since it allows them to keep their existing systems running while they evolve to a more sustainable development model.

2. Create new cloud-native applications: Enterprises have a critical need to create cloud-native applications while adhering to the security and regulatory needs of their business. Cloud-native applications are built with a variety of runtimes with application portability as a key feature of any cloud platform, public or private. Therefore, businesses must be empowered to build cloud-native applications anywhere and move them anywhere without compromising on security and compliance measures.
3. Open data centers to work with cloud services: Today’s enterprise developers are looking to add more functionality to the applications they are building. They want to create cloud-native applications on a private cloud platform that can integrate data and application services from existing applications or new, public cloud services. They also want access to the immense processing capacity available on their mainframes for large analytics jobs.

What if they could pull mainframe data into an application built on a private cloud that can leverage an external push notification service hosted on a public cloud?

Introducing IBM Cloud Private

To be successful, organizations are increasingly discovering that they need a combination of public and private cloud services to meet the needs of their customers.

IBM Cloud Private software is designed to enable companies to create on-premises cloud capabilities similar to public clouds to accelerate app development. The new platform is built on the open source Kubernetes-based container architecture and supports both Docker containers and Cloud Foundry. This facilitates integration and portability of workloads as they evolve to any cloud environment, including the IBM public cloud.

It also enables the containerization and deployment of existing & new apps into any cloud-based topology, allowing the continuation of returns on past investment, without the need to rip up the original blueprints and build from scratch. Private cloud, in conjunction with IBM’s public cloud, enables developers to innovate faster, on modern architectures and leverage new cloud services, while optimizing costs through consistent enterprise management and security tools.

Get started with the IBM Cloud Private for developing and managing on-premises, containerized applications. Try the Community Edition at no charge.

To read more about IBM Cloud Private’s offering, click the link here.