Stressful. Frustrating. Unpleasant.
That’s the trio of adjectives that surface when I think about relocation. Having recently moved from one house to another, those sentiments remain fresh in my memory.
The litany of unpacked boxes still lining my garage are constant reminders. And until the final coffee mug, picture and trinket are placed in their designated home, an unsettled feeling will reign as my shadow.
When you think about it, information technology (IT) and the professionals who support it are no different. Any change that introduces a major overhaul to how IT applications and the supporting infrastructure are implemented, managed and monitored is far from desired.
It’s especially true when proposing a total “lift and shift” of critical IT workloads from on-premises to the public cloud. The mere mention of it to IT executives is often a conversation stopper.
That’s not to say that enterprises aren’t moving toward the public cloud. They clearly are. Most understand that, in order to accelerate digital transformation, leveraging the power and flexibility of capabilities delivered in the public cloud is necessary for progressing at the required business pace.
But with the cloud, we’ve long discovered this is not either-or. In other words, hybrid cloud, which enables organizations to unlock new value with speed and flexibility while improving the ROI of existing infrastructure, is the preferred approach.
So, for those who’ve yet to dip their toes into the hybrid pool, where do you start? When, where, and how do you start taking advantage of the innovative, self-service capabilities public cloud venders are bringing to market at a rapid pace?
For existing IBM software clients, assistance with that journey is provided by IBM Cloud Product Insights. A new service recently released on IBM Bluemix, Product Insights provides IBM clients an entry point to the cloud with new capabilities that optimize an organization’s existing on-premises environments. New capabilities include:
Registration and usage
Multi-product, cloud-based dashboards provide visibility into what software products and versions are deployed. Quick and easy-to-use registration simplifies the task of getting a view of the supported products into the hybrid cloud.
Recommendations for optimization
Intelligent recommendations provide guidance on which cloud services enhance the registered software products used in your hybrid cloud environments. These recommended services can then be deployed, allowing organizations to discover, try and adopt services tailored to improve their existing environments.
Log management service
In addition to the capabilities made available through the initial release of Product Insights, a new experimental release of a Product Insights log management service is available, which provides users with deeper insight into their backend operations through log correlation, management, and SME dashboards.
Today, Product Insights and the experimental log management service supports six IBM products:
IBM WebSphere Application Server
IBM WebSphere Liberty
IBM MQ
IBM Integration Bus
IBM Operational Decision Manager
IBM Operational Decision Manager on Cloud
Throughout 2017, support for more IBM software products will be included with Product Insights. Advanced cognitive capabilities powered by IBM Watson will also be introduced, enabling users to proactively address potential problems with their backend operations before they become service impacting.
The cognitive insights that accompany IBM Watson and Product Insights are part of what differentiates the IBM Cloud from other vendors. The support of hybrid environments is another.
Because let’s face it: picking up and moving everything you own from one place to another isn’t easy. Whether it’s shifting your IT workloads to the cloud or the family to a new neighborhood, challenges surely await.
For me, the physical move was well worth it. Much of that can be attributed to a consumable process that did not include a complete lift and shift at an undesirable pace.
The extra space to give my 7-year-old more room to play football, baseball and soccer was a pretty nice benefit, too.
For more information on Product Insights, click here.
The post Announcing IBM Cloud Product Insights for hybrid cloud appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud
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