Like 90,000 others, I attended Think2020 virtually this year. There were over 250 virtual labs covering everything from #AI to #Cloud to #5G. Some of the themes of the conference that resonated for me were Hybrid IT and the OpenShift messaging of “Run on Anything, Anywhere”

Agility and resilience have always been important terms for organizations to embrace but these terms resonate now more than ever in the wake of COVID-19.

The Cloud made it possible for all of us to work, communicate, and collaborate during this time. As we move forward, organizations are taking a fresh look at what worked well and what might need some fine tuning as it relates to their cloud footprint.

During Jim Whitehurst’s IBM Think 2020 keynote, “Scale Innovation at Speed with Hybrid Cloud”[RB1] , he spoke about open architecture being key to business readiness. Multicloud provides the concept of safety as it relates to the ability to move workloads from one cloud to another in theory. But ultimately is that ability to move workloads around the start of a bigger conversation as to what’s next with corporate cloud environments?

Foundationally do we need to architect these cloud environments with more of a strategic intent in the design and architecture which helps to future proofs the organization moving forward?

Whitehurst spoke of “a single, open IT architecture that extends from the heart of your data center to the farthest edges of your network, an architecture that allows you to build applications once and run them anywhere, and a source innovation from any part of your ecosystem.”

Organizations choose multicloud for a variety of reasons. These include a need to avoid vendor lock in, performance, compliance and resilience to name a few. Recently, I wrote a blog, “The Right IT Infrastructure is Hybrid”, where I highlight a recent Forrester study and why enterprises are adopting hybrid multicloud infrastructure.

To Whitehurst’s point, multicloud is becoming more of an intentional strategy. This is in part because cloud is maturing. Part of that maturation is the evolution of a true hybrid cloud fabric that weaves together an organization’s data center, private cloud and public cloud footprints. Another driver for this focused, intentional strategy is a move of certain workloads to the edge.

Network World notes that by 2022, more than 50 percent of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside the data center or cloud. One of the creation points of that data is the edge.

Industries such as manufacturing, transportation, finance and healthcare are utilizing edge computing. Organizations are electing to create these environments in order to process time data that is either time sensitive or to handle data in a remote location where there is limited connectivity.

To support edge computing, IBM announced few new tools at Think 2020. One of those tools is IBM Edge Application Manager.

This solution enables AI, analytics and IoT enterprise workloads to be deployed and remotely managed, delivering real-time analysis and insight at scale for up to 10,000 edge nodes simultaneously by a single administrator.

Additionally, IBM introduced Cloud Satellite. This tool extends IBM Cloud services anywhere a client needs them, on-premises or at the edge. IBM Cloud Satellite enables access to a catalog of cloud services and brings together the ability to use a single dashboard with common identity and access management across IBM Cloud satellite locations.

IBM’s new Edge Application Manager runs on Red Hat OpenShift, a Kubernetes platform that runs across multiple environments.

Organizations need platforms and tools that continue to evolve with them. Those platforms and tools need to enable a variety of footprints. These modern infrastructures and application practices call for agility to be built-in, to more quickly meet changing business needs.

#IBMPartner