No, I’m not talking about part-time electric vehicles, but I struggled to use the Cloud word in the title…. I find it’s often overused and seen as the answer to world peace in IT these days.

However, it has to be said that I saw first hand the value of a hybrid cloud environment as the world was hit by this years COVID crisis.

One of our clients had already started building a hybrid environment. I should probably explain that what we mean by hybrid is where clients are still having on premise data-centers with their critical production workloads under their control and on their own systems. This is combined with the ability to move workloads that make sense back and forwards into IBM Cloud as needed. For example, quickly evolving workloads, dev test environments, temporary projects, or just some larger scale testing of new applications. In addition, scale out workloads like client interfaces and support portals where demand is dynamic.

This client already had the network connections and security aspects in place back in March when it became clear that around 30,000 employees across Asia Pacific would need to work from home for some time. Normally they would come in, login to systems locally and work in an office with direct access to systems on site.

At the time, they had 4 physical servers and some storage in IBM Cloud, running some DR VM’s and containers for specific workloads. Within a single day, they had expanded this up to over 30 physical machines, running remote applications and virtual desktops that their home bound workers could remotely login to and have access to the workloads and tools they normally used on site.

This is a great example of the flexibility that a hybrid cloud environment can provide you. The same client has now started to execute a proof of concept using our Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud offering. This enables them to connect their cloud based systems to their on premise SVC and FlashSystem hardware, providing primarily a Disaster Recovery solution in the Cloud.

While Cloud may not be for everyone, its definitely here to stay and IBM can provide you solutions to move or migrate, permanently or temporarily – the right workload to the right infrastructure.

As things continue to evolve in 2020 with the COVID pandemic, it is clearly going to take some time for everyone to get back to any kind of normal modus operandi, whatever that may be post-COVID. For this reason IBM has made the second half regional Technical University events a single large virtual conference. Normally I’d be at some of these, catching up with lots of you and passing on the latest updates and technical deep dives into the Virtualize system, but this time it will be a virtual Virtualize 🙂

Registration, and further information is available on the IBM events pages, be sure to register early, although its virtual, there are a finite number of spaces, so don’t miss out on this key event in October. Click the image to access the registration site.