IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation on Linux on Z and LinuxONE

We all witnessed the world change right before our very eyes. As a result, companies had to change the way they do business with a greater dependency on automation. As we learn to live with the new normal, we go into 2022 well equipped to support your continuous journey through automation.

When you take app modernization, co-location, and sustainability it creates the perfect recipe to support the evolution of your business model. Both the Covid-19 pandemic and the great resignation have made the IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation on Linux on Z and LinuxONE critical to weathering the day-to-day business challenges. Business automation aids in achieving and retaining faster and more reliable business results.

IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation allows the acceleration of application modernization by offering a set of services and capabilities intended to determine best practices, find blockers or ineffective processes.  These business challenges are resolved by automating and streamlining processes to improve your business productivity and decrease errors.

IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation runs on Red Hat OpenShift, including Red Hat OpenShift on the IBM Linux on Z and LinuxONE platform. By leveraging Red Hat OpenShift, you have the option of easily moving or co-locating the application closer to the data by deploying on Z Linux. The IBM Z platform is renowned for bringing its best-in-class data privacy, security, availability, scalability, resiliency, and sustainability to our client’s hybrid multi-cloud approach.  IBM Z has a twenty-four-year history of improved energy efficiency. The IBM Z’s ability to continue to pivot and enhance the energy-efficiency, power conversion and cooling efficiency is critical to your business model. IBM Z and LinuxONE provide an economical and sustainable path for our clients to run on a cloud native platform with flexible computing to run on IBM Cloud Paks for Business Automation.

The following capabilities for IBM Cloud Paks for Business Automation are delivered as containers that run on Red Hat OpenShift on the IBM Z platform:

Content supports unstructured or semi-structured data comprising documents, text, images, audio, and video. Content services securely manages the full lifecycle of content.

◉ FileNet Content Manager

◉ Business Automation Navigator

◉ IBM Enterprise Records

Decisions provides repeatable rules and policies for day-to-day business operations, allowing you to gather, manage, execute, and monitor decisions.

◉ Operational Decision Manager

◉ Automation Decision Services

Workflow defines how work gets done through a sequence of steps performed by humans and systems. Workflow management is the design, execution and monitoring of workflows.

◉ Business Automation Workflow

◉ Automation Workstream Services

Operational Intelligence business automation insights provides deep understanding of business operations by capturing and analyzing data generated by operational systems. The data is presented in dashboards and made available to data scientists for analysis using AI and machine learning.

◉ Business Automation Insights

◉ Business Performance Center

Low-code Automation is a visual approach to building applications using drag-and-drop components. Low-code tools enable business users and developers to create applications without having to write code.

◉ Business Automation Studio

◉ Business Automation Application Designer

◉ Business Automation Application runtime

The plethora of capabilities offered for Cloud Paks for Business Automation means it’s important to have a reliable platform that provides scalability, resiliency, and sustainability. Running Cloud Paks for Business Automation on Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z and LinuxONE helps you automate with ease.

Source: ibm.com

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Driving innovation for SAP HANA workloads through IBM Power Systems Virtual Server

For enterprises and businesses running mission-critical SAP workloads, it’s time to make some important decisions. The 2027 deadline to migrate to SAP HANA and SAP S/4 HANA is looming. This date is when SAP will discontinue support for all earlier ERP applications and databases.

Meanwhile, across all industries, organizations are facing an increasing need to modernize and adapt to a hybrid cloud infrastructure, allowing enterprises to achieve new levels of speed, reliability and innovation. Strategizing and moving toward the future is a significant endeavor for a team of any size. The answer to this need? The only on-premises and off-premises certified IBM® Power® solution for SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver — IBM Power Systems Virtual Server.

Let’s dive in to see how it all comes together to empower SAP HANA applications.

A history of driving benefits 

SAP and IBM have been working together to advance innovation for over 50 years. Our strong relationship has allowed us to collaborate on early development stages and upward, adapting each of our technologies to work together. In fact, harnessing the power of both IBM and SAP has never been easier or more effective thanks to IBM Consulting™ solutions. This offering allows businesses and organizations looking for an end-to-end solution from a managed service provider (MSP) to harness the power of SAP technology while working toward their individual goals.

We created IBM Power Systems Virtual Server as a seamless extension of on-premises Power Systems technology, where SAP HANA has been available since 2015. Yet this new hybrid cloud solution has been designed for our clients to take advantage of cloud-based efficiencies, industry-renowned security, reliable performance and the ease of having infrastructure managed by the experts at IBM. Plus, IBM Power Systems Virtual Server delivers low-latency capacities thanks to 15 data centers in 7 countries with even more on the way, augmenting high-availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) capacities.

When clients use the hybrid cloud solution of IBM Power Systems Virtual Server, they have access to over 50 SAP-certified production instances. Plus, they can also access customizable instances that can be specifically sized for their environment—encouraging an agile, flexible approach to today’s toughest problems.

IBM Power Systems Virtual Server is purpose-built to handle data-intensive workloads. Our SAP-certified solution follows the success achieved by IBM Power Systems for thousands of clients deploying Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 8.1 and 8.2 as well as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 12 and 15 Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) boot images.

Innovation with the power of Linux

For years, Red Hat and SAP have helped push innovation for clients with various needs in different stages of their transformation. Clients can get the most from their SAP workloads with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 and 8.2, thanks to a proven solution designed to bring flexibility and a solid foundation.

As multicloud platforms, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 and 8.2 are built to enable SAP clients to accelerate their hybrid cloud journeys without vendor lock-in. Features such as live kernel patching and Red Hat Enterprise Linux HA solutions for SAP HANA and SAP S/4 HANA help clients’ workloads stay running smoothly during migration.

Clients can also take full advantage of SLES 12 and 15 OVA boot images, specially optimized for IBM Power Systems Virtual Server. These solutions create even more possibilities for those clients looking to run SAP HANA workloads on SLES.

Adaptable and agile: IBM Power Systems Virtual Server in action

We’ve worked with BRF, a global leader in exporting pork and poultry headquartered in Brazil, to achieve a higher level of hybrid cloud capabilities for greater efficiency and flexibility. Harnessing the power of a hybrid cloud environment, 80% of BRF’s logistical routing, control and scheduling of products are now running on IBM Power Systems — something very much needed as the company distributes to more than 117 countries worldwide.

BRF decided to migrate to IBM Power Systems Virtual Server to become more agile and resilient. First and foremost, our HA and DR capacities helped bring stability by decentralizing the company’s operations through the multizone region within Brazil. We also helped support its migration efforts toward a virtualized environment while achieving the flexibility it needed. The company can now spin up various-sized SAP HANA instances as needed for logistics while handling the increasing demand for meat on a global scale. Moreover, while IBM Power Systems Virtual Server helped BRF reach new efficiencies, it also helped save costs.

Source: ibm.com

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IBM Business Partners, MSPs, and ISVs amplify growth with IBM Power Systems Virtual Server

To achieve our mission of helping enterprises across the globe succeed through innovation, our team works alongside IBM® Business Partners within our valued, growing ecosystem.

Our network consists of IBM Business Partner companies, independent software vendors (ISVs), managed service providers (MSPs), global system integrators (GSIs) and other integral organizations that share our goals. Together, our Business Partners have achieved new levels of growth themselves through innovative products, including our latest IBM Power® offering, IBM Power Systems Virtual Server.

In this third installment of our blog series about IBM Power Systems Virtual Server, we’re looking at real-world examples of how growth is possible through scalable and transformative software hosting and management solutions.

IBM Power Systems Virtual Servers at a glance

Our team is thrilled about the impact our new hybrid cloud solution is already making for our Business Partners. We’ve combined the reliability and sheer processing power of on-premises Power servers with the scalability and flexibility that comes with a hybrid cloud environment. The result enables end-users to appreciate true hybrid cloud solutions that are strategically designed to be a seamless extension of their on-premises Power servers and IBM Power Systems Virtual Server data centers. IBM Power Systems Virtual Server is designed to deliver low-latency capacities thanks to 14 data centers in 7 countries with more on the way. They can run IBM AIX®, IBM i and Linux® workloads, including SAP SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 12 and 15 Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) boot images and Red Hat® Enterprise Linux 8.1 and 8.2.

ISVs and IBM Power Systems Virtual Server

Let’s look at some examples of how ISVs are currently using IBM Power Systems Virtual Servers to promote innovation, transformation and peace of mind.

Created as a global solution

While Iptor has over 1,000 clients across the globe, its data centers were only in Denmark. Its goal was not only to globalize its operations, but also to automate and streamline its process. The worldwide data centers of IBM Power Systems Virtual Servers helped Iptor maximize uptime, while its image capture feature helped them better meet the needs of clients quickly and in a more efficient way. Finally, our DevOps pipeline helped make installation and upgrades universally accessible so customers on its supply chain could stay up to date.

A security-rich environment for sensitive data

Silverlake, a provider of a software-as-a-service (SaaS) digital banking cloud platform, joined our ecosystem to support IBM Cloud® for Financial Services™. Our collaboration allowed Silverlake to create scalable and security-rich virtual digital banking solutions in the highly regulated financial industry. Silverlake uses IBM Power Systems Virtual Server as an efficient and effective way to virtualize its solutions while meeting compliances and lowering risk.

Sandbox capabilities

Many of our ISVs that are already part of the IBM Power Systems ecosystem have found success by conducting proof of concepts (PoCs) in IBM Power Systems Virtual Server data centers. These vendors have containerized their applications, while also running demo versions of their application in a client-accessible sandbox. With this structure in place, prospects can try out applications in an isolated environment. This offering is designed to help improve security and uptime while helping environments meet spikes in traffic.

MSPs, Business Partners and IBM Power Systems Virtual Server

It’s always vital for MSPs, resellers and business partners to grow and discover new opportunities and revenue paths. IBM Power Systems Virtual Server is an excellent way to extend Power Systems offerings in a hybrid cloud environment for current and new customers while being supported and covered by the IBM brand. Moreover, we take infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) management responsibilities from our MSPs and take care of it ourselves, including maintenance, data center floor space, updates and the costs of running a data center. Handling the maintenance of infrastructure helps not only cut costs by taking away data center expenses, but it also helps increase revenue margins and maximize uptime and availability.

As an IBM partner, you now have the opportunity to build partner-driven solutions on top of IBM Power Systems Virtual Server. We work alongside MSPs looking to grow in the enterprise space and shift their focus on services, such as disaster recovery (DR), migration, end-to-end management or reselling the offering. IBM Power Systems Virtual Server helps the clients of our Business Partners reach new geographies — regardless of their location — to further achieve globalization. Clients also have quicker access to new Power Systems features and functions.

At the end of the day, it’s all about making a better experience for the end-user. Plus, being the only on-premises and off-premises certified Power solution for SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver platform workloads, IBM can help enterprises meet the deadline to migrate to SAP S/4 HANA by 2027.

◉ Success through collaboration

A leader in hosting and managed services, Connectria has years of demonstrated and recognized experience serving IBM i customers. Connectria is now offering IBM Power Systems Virtual Server solutions to both its install base and new prospects after seeing strong demand for such a virtualized Power solution.

The Connectria team was excited to work with us, embracing opportunities to access a new market of high-end P30-tier licensing clients, as well as several other IBM i software tiers. We provided a variety of managed services and licensing specifically tailored to Connectria’s goals, growth objectives and current offerings. Now, Connectria is proud to offer our hybrid cloud infrastructure portfolio solutions bundled together alongside its management solutions. Connectria is also extending and shifting current clients’ infrastructure, including older on-premises Power Systems, to IBM Power Systems Virtual Server. As a result, Connectria clients can stay modernized by staying virtual.

Driven by the benefits of this latest offering combined with competitive pricing, Connectria’s sales team is proposing Power System Virtual Server solutions worldwide. Clients can now experience a new level of performance, experience and peace of mind.

A look at our roadmap

We are always pushing to add new capacities and capabilities to IBM Power Systems Virtual Server. In addition to upgrading our storage to IBM FlashSystem® 9200, here’s a high-level look at what end-users are finding beneficial. We’ve recently implemented virtual private network as a service (VPNaaS) solutions into this offering, as well as new network automation features. Coming soon is a whole new way to manage your IBM Power Systems Virtual Server, with IBM Cloud credit management. This credit system creates a simplified and efficient way for you to get the most out of your virtualized solution.

Source: ibm.com

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Increase business agility with IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Center

It’s no secret that digital transformation requires modernization. But the path to modernization can be less clear-cut. Many businesses struggle to identify who they can trust to bring the right approach for their business that is grounded in experience and proven business outcomes.

As digital transformation speeds up and modernization requirements become more urgent, it’s more important than ever to turn to a trusted partner like IBM. Sixty-seven of the Fortune 100 companies rely on IBM Z technology today and in a recent study of 261 decision makers, 74%1 say they “believe the mainframe has long-term viability as a strategic platform for their organizations.” With industry-first investments in AI and data analytics, IBM Z innovates with the clients and industries it supports.

The rise of hyperscalers has led many organizations to consider an application migration approach to public cloud alone, but in many cases it can be a one-way street and lock-in to one public cloud which may have implications on cost, governance and security.

IBM Z takes a more balanced approach to application modernization that brings the best of cloud and IBM Z together.

To help clients choose the best approach for their unique business, IBM today announced the IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Center. The center is a digital front door to tools, resources, training, ecosystem partners and real client examples. It is designed to help clients on their modernization journey and provide support for creating an effective modernization roadmap. The center is the result of collaboration with IBM Consulting and broad ecosystem participation, including global services and technology partners. The ecosystem brings deep expertise in modernization, whether clients are modernizing existing apps and data or integrating cloud native apps and data.

The IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Center helps clients leverage existing investments, rather than committing to a costly one-size-fits all migration strategy. A study done by the IBM IT Economics team shows a 3.2x2 lower annual TCO with IBM Z application modernization vs. application migration to the cloud only. With the expertise and guidance of partners clients can accelerate transformation in their Z environment.

IBM Z clients across industries have begun their modernization journeys, including Garanti BBVA, a Turkish bank that was one of the first to launch mobile banking in Turkey. By taking advantage of tools from IBM to modernize applications, Garanti BBVA estimates increased developer productivity up to 25 percent. This transformation has enabled Garanti BBVA to continue hiring top talent and maintain a competitive edge

To accelerate your modernization journey today, visit the IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Center for access to top industry resources.  Schedule a briefing, connect with a partner, join a workshop, earn digital badges, speak with a domain expert or dive deep with additional in-depth technical resources.

Source: ibm.com

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DevOps for IBM Z Firmware – with Red Hat OpenShift

Red Hat OpenShift is perhaps best known for providing a platform for developing and deploying cloud-native, microservices-based applications.

But when the IBM Z Firmware development team in Germany were looking to modernize their DevOps process, they found the ideal environment in Red Hat OpenShift running on IBM Z.

Scalability and Security

IBM Z systems sit at the heart of many of the world’s biggest companies and most critical workloads. Optimized for performance, security and reliability, IBM Z is designed to handle billions of transactions without missing a heartbeat.

The IBM Z firmware layer sits between the physical hardware and the operating system, and executes many of the low-level operations of the IBM Z system. Creating and maintaining this layer is the responsibility of the IBM Z Firmware development organization, which includes hundreds of developers.

The challenges the team faced were similar to those faced by many large development organizations – flexibility, security, and availability, especially combined with the need to scale. How could existing Jenkins setups be easily extended to add new workers? How could the existing login server be updated to support new security requirements? And how could runtime environments be designed with high availability in mind?

“The DevOps process is based around a large code pipeline, moving from source code management to binary repositories to automated testing, all managed by Jenkins scripts and workers”, commented Ralf Schaufler, IBM Z Firmware Integration Architect. “Supporting this are tools for bug tracking, access control, and backup.”

Technical Solution

The team looked at various options and decided to go with Red Hat OpenShift as this provided a secure enterprise DevOps capability, as well as a CI/CD pipeline. Although most of the IBM Z Firmware artifacts run on the IBM Z architecture (s390x), some run on x86 – and so OpenShift’s support for heterogeneous environments could offer additional benefits in the future.

The next question the team faced was whether to run OpenShift in the cloud or on-premises on Z. They determined that the cloud would be a more expensive option, especially as they have a fairly static environment of hundreds of users. In addition, running OpenShift on-prem on IBM Z enabled them to co-locate the development environment next to the test environments. This dramatically reduced the time taken to transfer IBM Z firmware images between development, simulation, and new hardware – and increased security by locating all these environments in the same protected zone with local access only.

“The first use case we implemented was to migrate their multi-user development server to ‘interactive containers’ running on Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z”, said Edmund Breit, Senior IT Specialist, IBM Z Firmware Delivery & Suppprt. “This enabled us to use the access control features of OpenShift and meet the IBM security requirements for developers.”

The next use case they deployed was to use Jenkins for the Continuous Integration and Development (CID) pipeline within Red Hat OpenShift, supporting greater scalability and enabling updates to be packaged and then included in the next driver update. This simplified the pipeline automation, and can also potentially enable future multi-arch support for both s390x and x86 firmware production in the future.

“We’re now looking at further use cases, including supporting virtual machines as well as containers, wider options for persistent storage, and additional CID services”, added Edmund.

“The migration of the DevOps process to OpenShift on Z has proved very successful and delivered a more secure and scalable approach,” continued Ralf. “This has also been helped by the Red Hat OpenShift for Z development team being close by in the IBM Boeblingen lab.”

Source: ibm.com

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Accelerating Modernization on IBM Power with Open Source Software and CI/CD Tooling

Much as Linux and open source transformed how operating systems were developed, open source software (OSS) is transforming the way applications are developed. Clients and ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) are increasingly embracing OSS. According to the 2021 Red Hat State of Enterprise Open Source report, 90% of IT leaders are using enterprise open source. At IBM, OSS forms the foundation for our Red Hat synergy, Cloud Paks, and the ISV enablement that Power customers can rely on as they accelerate the modernization of their mission critical workloads.

To stay competitive, customers are embarking on workload and infrastructure modernization which is designed to help their enterprise systems keep pace with today’s speed of business. We see that many of these customers are shifting to an open hybrid cloud and are adopting flexible tools for a modern DevOps environment. Architecture-independent developer tools can simplify developer workflows while increasing collaboration, productivity, and visibility by unifying enterprise-wide DevOps regardless of the underlying platform.

With the GitLab Ultimate 14.3 release, IBM Power customers can gain a modern DevOps platform, delivering an end-to-end solution for collaboration, visibility, and development. The GitLab Runner, and its operator, available via the OpenShift Operator Hub with support for Power expected at the end of October, extends GitLab’s multi-architecture CI/CD capabilities and native build and validation of high value workloads to IBM Power.

Nima Badiey, VP of Alliances at GitLab shared that “GitLab, the DevOps platform, is designed to accelerate deployment of critical workloads on IBM Power and Red Hat OpenShift. As businesses look to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives with hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, our customers can leverage the latest GitLab 14.3 release including the GitLab Runner for IBM Power and the new Power10 processor, to develop, secure, and operate software in a single application which can lead to faster pipeline performance and increased collaboration between developers and security teams.”

To further integrate Git repositories into Kubernetes deployment paradigms, OpenShift offers fully supported CI/CD with OpenShift Pipelines, based on OSS Tekton. OpenShift Pipelines is fully integrated with GitLab to deliver a seamless experience for both ISVs and end customers. Other tooling ISVs focused on CI/CD include Travis-CI and Jenkins. Jenkins is used by developers mostly as a continuous integration engine but also facilitates continuous build and deployment and infrastructure deployment. In keeping with the open source spirit, OpenShift Pipelines can be used as an alternative to or alongside Jenkins deployments. Jenkins and Tekton are both Continuous Delivery Foundation Projects.

Travis-CI, who announced support for Power9 in 2019, is a continuous integration platform for building, testing, and deploying open source software, and it supports open source projects that are hosted on GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket. Travis CI is designed to make it simple to run a build against multiple CPU architectures with the addition of one additional line in the configuration file.

Choosing the right tooling solution influences DevOps flexibility, maturity, automation and transformation to help customers develop and deploy applications to the cloud environment of their choosing. Along with our ISVs like GitLab, IBM Power and Red Hat OpenShift can help customers and ISVs accelerate their modernization journeys by adopting tooling designed to support important missions, likean accelerated time to market through the continuous delivery of an automated and efficient CI/CD pipeline.

Source: ibm.com

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Develop your skillset: hands-on training for IBM PowerVC 2.0 and Red Hat Ansible

IBM PowerVC 2.0 hit the market in fourth quarter of 2020. Since then, IBM has produced incremental updates to the software. The IBM PowerVC product development team worked hard to bring modern design and open-source JavaScript frameworks to cloud management on IBM Power. After having tried it for several months, I can’t recommend it more. If you’re using IBM Power servers, you should be running IBM PowerVC to manage them.

I’ve spoken with several new IBM Power administrators who are looking to test drive the product without having to worry about obtaining and managing licenses. There’s a button on the official product page that lets you download a trial version of the software, which you can then use to install in your own environment. But what if you wanted more? For example, everything from understanding the basics of IBM Power virtualization to the latest advanced VM management capabilities of IBM Power.

PowerVC 2.0 Workshop

IBM and our Global Training Partners now have an official IBM PowerVC 2.0 workshop! This gives you several days of access to systems in our IBM data center. You can touch and feel the product from the comfort of your home or office – everything from installation to advanced private cloud management. You can also get an official IBM-approved instructor to deliver the content to your organization.

That’s easily said. But, behind the scenes, IBM has dedicated pools of IBM Power servers in an IBM managed data center. They had to be specifically configured to automate everything from giving you access to a virtual machine that connects you to our network, to setting up a bunch of virtual partitions, virtual Hardware Management Consoles (HMC) and IBM PowerVC NovaLink related configurations. All that happens automatically when you book our workshop.

The PowerVC 2.0 workshop shows you how to set up IBM PowerVC 2.0.1 in both HMC and IBM PowerVM Novalink managed environments. It covers every single major administrative task. That includes a lot of information on OpenStack. We’ll manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux and IBM AIX partitions. Automation with Cloud-init and the implications of running your own Infrastructure as a Service cloud are discussed in detail.

Virtual TechU

At the virtual IBM TechU 2021, I will present on something similar. I have sessions on IBM PowerVC and Red Hat Ansible. The idea is to leverage the systems and automation software we’ve created in our data center to showcase our latest capabilities. I have a hands-on session on how to get started with IBM PowerVC to manage your operating systems and perform virtual machine lifecycle tasks. My second hands-on session is on how to get started with Ansible on Linux and run Playbooks to perform configuration management on IBM Power. I will showcase how to implement Ansible on AIX in a third hands-on session. I will also present a demo, on running Ansible on a Linux partition on IBM Power. These Red Hat Ansible sessions are now part of an official IBM training course too, which you can enroll in here. I will also present a general interest hands-on session on using Git and GitHub efficiently to perform source code management tasks.

I’m excited about the new training opportunities that will help you, our clients, to better utilize the IBM solutions critical to running your business. I hope to see you at TechU or a workshop soon.

Source: ibm.com

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Flexible, agile, and secure: modernizing applications with IBM Z

Priorities have changed over the last two years for IT executives. From business as usual to a rapid shift toward digital transformation, the impact of the pandemic cannot be overstated. With this shift to digital in mind, the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) surveyed 200 IT executives and discussed changing marketplaces and the role of IT in transformation in “Application Modernization on the Mainframe.”

Read More: C2090-312: IBM DB2 11 DBA for z/OS

Much of this change is attributed to the rise of cloud-based applications. But where does this leave mission-critical mainframe applications? A knee-jerk reaction may be to say the only way forward is to rearchitect IT environments exclusively on the cloud. However, 71 percent of IT executives surveyed say that mainframe-based applications are central to their business strategy. These workloads power essential business processes; with 93 percent of companies using the mainframe for financial management and 73 percent for customer transaction systems.

Digital transformation will require workloads to run where they make the most sense, necessitating a hybrid cloud approach. In three years, close to 70 percent of leading organizations expect their operations will include unique configurations of data and computing environments, including on-premise data center, mainframe, private cloud, public cloud, and edge computing.

By embracing a hybrid cloud approach, IT leaders benefit from the stability and security of the mainframe and extract maximum value from cloud investments. To ensure that applications are connected across platforms, it’s important to modernize mainframe applications. Modernizing mission-critical mainframe applications can help transform development culture, enabling adoption of DevOps and other agile practices that promote flexibility and innovation.

Enterprises in the financial services industry, like BNP Paribas, are re-thinking the way that they approach product development by modernizing their mainframe development environment. BNP Paribas deployed an integrated development environment backed by open-source tools. Driving both cost savings and quality development, the modern environment enables more efficient development and testing, which also helps attract new developers. It boosts developer engagement and code quality by offering greater autonomy and tool standardization.

BNP Paribas is just one of many enterprises taking advantage of modern mainframe tools and technology that deliver lower total cost of ownership and increased agility. The IBM Z ecosystem offers innovative solutions that drive enterprise transformation across the globe. The release of IBM z/OS V2.5, the next generation operating system on IBM Z, introduces high performance AI capabilities and new capabilities that support rapid product development on the platform.

Recognizing the need for continual innovation, 86 percent of IT executives say that their organizations need to accelerate digital transformation to stay ahead of changing customer expectations. By modernizing mainframe applications and integrating them with new applications in a hybrid cloud environment, enterprises can develop or maintain a competitive advantage and avoid costly re-architecture plans.

The first step of any modernization journey is to build an iterative plan. To learn more about application modernization on IBM Z, click here

Source: ibm.com

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Data breaches: the threat is still real

News headlines regularly feature the latest data breach and ransomware attack. It’s happening all over the world, nearly every day.

I first wrote about this risk in 2018. Sadly, despite efforts to combat cyberattacks, the threat is still all too real. Even in my hometown of Poughkeepsie, NY, a healthcare provider was hacked recently.

According to some analysts, hackers are not just looking for tons of raw data. Today, they’re especially focused on very valuable records such as user passwords, card and account numbers and social security numbers. As a result, today’s breaches can have especially far-reaching consequences.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created additional security risks with so many employees working remotely. In this climate, pervasive encryption is critical. It enables a customer to protect data even in the event of a breach. As I explained in my previous blog entry, pervasive encryption helps our clients to make the protection of data as easy and affordable as possible. It provides compliance quickly. And it works!

My team has helped many organizations improve their security posture by running IBM z/OS security health checks, to identify weak points in their security defense, or to implement pervasive encryption to better protect their client’s data.

One of our major clients from the payment industry implemented z/OS dataset encryption, the “star” feature of pervasive encryption, in a first phase with Db2 to maintain their compliance with PCI-DSS. And, as promised, the overhead was unnoticeable.

This is hardly the only success story. From the insurance industry to the healthcare industry, I’ve supported other implementations with high client satisfaction feedback. From a mainframe perspective, and from an IBM Lab Services point of view, I can say that I am relieved I haven’t been back to a hacked client crime scene lately.

We continue to improve pervasive, delivering enhancements such as the capability to encrypt non-extended format datasets and new functionalities like JES2 spool encryption (and compression). We also made key management easy with EKMF Web Edition. It is a graphical user interface running on Z to manage pervasive encryption keys easily and securely.

But Lab Services is always ready to help. A pervasive encryption readiness assessment (PERA) can be a game changer. It is a one-day, on-site, in-person workshop (or two remote sessions while COVID restrictions persist), which provides in-depth education about pervasive encryption, readiness state assessment and an implementation roadmap. It is even easier for z15 clients to get help with the zForward program available at no additional charge.

Later on, Lab Services is also here to help you in your implementation journey, from what I call the fundamental bricks (such as ICSF and TKE), to the actual pervasive encryption implementation.

While cybercriminals become more and more sophisticated, our goal is to always be there, one step ahead. The threat may remain real, but the battle is far from over. So, if you are ready to fight, contact IBM Technology Lab Services now. We can help.

Source: ibm.com

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Get a health check for your SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems

We all know that seeing a doctor for regular checkups is important. Even if you aren’t having any problems, it’s always a good idea for your physical health. In some ways, a “health check” for your SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems is similar. You may be getting optimal availability and performance, but a regular review is very important.

Read More: C2070-981: IBM FileNet Content Manager V5.2

IBM Power Systems technology for HANA has numerous advantages such as flexibility, efficient resource utilization, server consolidation, performance and reduction in cost. An SAP-certified person is required to install and configure HANA using the tailored data center integration (TDI) model. During deployment, a certified HANA engineer sets up the system following IBM Power server and SAP HANA best practices as per SAP notes and runs the SAP HANA Hardware and Cloud Measurement Tool (HCMT). This ensures the environment has been configured for HANA prerequisites and for hardware performance to meet HANA key performance indicators (KPIs).

After deployment, however, organizations will eventually need to make changes to their workloads and infrastructure. The monitoring tools you use might not capture deviations from best practices. Some components of your system might require periodic checks like firmware updates, patches, backups, cluster operations and so on.

The need thus arises for a periodic health check for SAP HANA on Power Systems. Without periodic health checks, you might not be getting the best availability and performance from your systems, and you could be at greater risk for an unplanned outage.

What is an SAP HANA on Power Systems health check?

A health check involves inspecting your system in several key areas. These include:

◉ Ensuring up-to-date software levels

◉ Examining the adequacy of hardware resources

◉ Looking at system tuning based on your current workload pattern

◉ Doing checks for best practices in virtualization

◉ Checking for security hardening implementation as per your company security policy

◉ Checking the feasibility of adopting newly released features in the Power server/OS/HANA

Your HANA configuration, error logs, high availability and backup policies are also validated.

Minimum checks that need to be carried out as a part of SAP HANA on Power Systems health check

Here is a list of the minimum checks that must be covered as a part of SAP HANA on Power Systems health check. This is only a high-level list. You might need additional checks based on your results.

1. Physical hardware installation checks

◉ PCI adapter placement and memory dual inline memory module (DIMM) placement

◉ Active/inactive core/memory distributions

◉ Check for working links (link up status) for network and host bus adapters (HBAs)

2. Software-level checks

◉ Check to see the support of all installed software levels and their compatibility

3. Availability and redundancy checks

◉ “Working” redundancy at all levels such as I/O adapters, switches, storage, LPARs, frames and so on

◉ Business expectation of recovery point objective (RPO), recovery time objective (RTO) and infrastructure readiness to meet these numbers

4. Operating system configuration checks

◉ Checks to confirm OS installation as per best practices and as per SAP notes for SAP HANA on Power systems

◉ Checks to see security hardening implementation

5. LPAR/Frame-level resource utilization checks and performance

◉ Processor, memory, disk and network utilization and comparison with available capacity

◉ Check to see the tunable values associated with processor, memory, disk I/O and network I/O are optimal for the current load

6. HANA checks

◉ HANA file system checks

◉ Review of HCMT results

◉ HANA configuration verification

◉ HANA backup checks

◉ HANA resource utilization checks

Benefits of a HANA system health check

An SAP HANA on Power Systems health check offers numerous benefits:

◉ Identify any single point of failure and fix it

◉ Prepare you for handling unexpected downtime, if any

◉ Demonstrate current hardware utilization and growth trends, thus helping you plan for future growth or release a portion of your hardware for other workloads, saving on budget for any additional workloads

◉ Get better support by staying up to date with software versions

◉ Better manage your IT budget by knowing growth trends

◉ Identify new technologies that could be applied to your environment

◉ Improve productivity, security and confidence. May reduce the cost of acquiring additional hardware for new workloads

Who can perform an SAP HANA on Power Systems health check?

Anyone who has good knowledge of IBM Power Systems, Linux and HANA can do an SAP HANA on Power Systems health check. You could do it yourself or engage a team of experienced consultants such as IBM Systems Lab Services. Lab Services helps organizations build and optimize SAP HANA solutions with Linux on Power Systems with a tailored data center infrastructure strategy. Health checks are among the many services we offer to help clients optimize their SAP HANA environments.

Source: ibm.com

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How to get the most value from SAP HANA

3 ways running SAP HANA on Power Systems can benefit your business

Increasing disruption creates increased complexity and a need to solve problems quickly—as in yesterday. The last year forced businesses to take a quantum leap in the acceleration of, and focus on, digital transformation. We all saw entire industries go completely online overnight, and companies that had started modernizing their businesses were in a better position to adapt quickly, while many struggled to maintain business continuity. What’s clear is today’s customer preferences and appetite for exceptional digital experiences is demanding, and the success of every business relies on the ability to adapt as the needs of customers continue to evolve.

More Info: C2090-543: IBM DB2 9.7 Application Development

Core business applications, such as SAP HANA, are key to ensuring your organization can keep up with the speed of change; the time to embrace migration and modernization is now. By using SAP business applications, IT teams can simplify workflows, speed processes, and reduce business risk, thus freeing up time and resources to focus on their move to SAP S/4HANA.

Why should running SAP HANA on Power Systems matter to you?

In the simplest terms, SAP HANA is a platform that can efficiently and cost-effectively process data faster than any traditional database. It can help your organization process information that is coming from, including but not limited to, the business, mobile, UX/UI, and the Internet of Things (IoT), efficiently and cost effectively. Notably, SAP HANA facilitates analytics and data processes as well as application development and deployment.

Furthermore, SAP HANA’s in-memory database can be run on-premises, on an IBM Power® Systems server, in the cloud, or both, and can be an integral part of your hybrid cloud strategy. It’s worth mentioning Power Systems is built precisely for memory-intensive applications, such as SAP HANA, offering the resilience, scale, and performance you’ll need to ease the process and still quickly deploy your applications.

Three scenarios where the benefits of SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems are undeniable

So, how can SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems benefit your business? Here are three questions and answers to help you get the most value out of SAP HANA and achieve your broader business goals.

Scenario 1: My SAP HANA application is due for a refresh. What do I stand to gain by updating my SAP HANA application?

If you’re running SAP HANA appliances on architecture that needs a refresh or are in the process of a strategic hybrid cloud transformation, upgrading to SAP HANA on Power Systems can help you reduce data sprawl, increase flexibility, improve reliability, boost performance and consolidate fewer workloads in a smaller footprint.

In fact, even if you’ve never had IBM Power Systems in your data center, establishing the platform will provide you with a powerful Linux system offering significant processor benefits and positions you to develop a customized solution for your business needs.

Scenario 2: I’m running a traditional database or other non-SAP HANA processing solution. Why should I make the costly and challenging move to SAP HANA from a traditional database?

SAP is discontinuing support for the SAP Business Suite with traditional databases in 2027, creating a mandatory move to SAP HANA. By maintaining traditional SAP deployments, you’re consuming IT resources that could be better diverted to more strategic initiatives. Migrating to SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems will significantly boost your performance, ease data administration and processing and increase user response time for transactional in-memory processing.

IBM Power Systems is an important part of this process because, as an in-memory database, SAP HANA performs best with high-quality memory and large memory spaces. With Power Systems you can easily shift resources from your traditional environment to a growing SAP HANA portfolio.

Scenario 3: I have on-premises SAP applications. Can I expand to off premises?

Absolutely! In fact, as customers develop their hybrid cloud strategies—and, simultaneously, SAP discontinues support for SAP Business Suite—there’s even more urgency to develop and execute on a migration plan toward SAP S/4HANA. Fortunately, you can easily extend your SAP environment to our IBM Power Virtual Servers. Power Virtual Servers provide a wide variety of SAP-certified options for running SAP workloads. One use case we see is customers utilizing Power Virtual Servers for non-production/test environments, freeing up on-premises infrastructure to optimize their production SAP workloads.

How to get the most out of SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems

SAP HANA can be complex, but the benefits of running SAP HANA on Power Systems are compelling—you can reliably process and analyze your data-intensive workloads with minimal delays, improved performance, faster load times and a lower overall cost.

If you’re curious and want more information, the IDC white paper, Who Can Benefit from SAP HANA Database and S/4HANA on IBM Power Systems? outlines the benefits of SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems, including deployment options, performance and cloud capabilities. Click below to learn more about how your organization can realize the benefits of SAP HANA on Power.

Source: ibm.com

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IBM CIO Office integrates IBM Z into the hybrid cloud

In a multi-technology landscape, it is increasingly difficult for companies to choose the path that eases management across the IT landscape. However, it’s a decision worth investing in, as making the right choice can enable a better user experience.

Many organizations today face challenges with their core IT infrastructure:

◉ Complexity and stability: An environment might have years of history and might be evaluated as too complex to maintain or update. Problems with system stability can impact operations and be considered a high risk for the business.

◉ Workforce challenges: Many data center teams are anticipating a skills shortage for some platforms within the next few years due to a retiring and declining workforce.

◉ Total cost of ownership: Some infrastructure solutions are evaluated as too expensive, and it’s not always easy to balance up-front costs with the lifecycle cost and benefits.

Trying to solve these challenges, IT organizations of all sizes have been investing heavily in a move to the cloud over the last few years. Many of them had been finding out that the usage of open and industry-standard APIs is very helpful.

Embracing a hybrid cloud approach that is based on open industry standards is better than opting for a platform-specific strategy. The IBM CIO Office determined the best approach for their needs and realized significant benefits, such as improving efficiency, agility and overall economics.

IBM Z is providing constant business value

“Our IBM Z® systems are still the high-performance, ultra-stable platform that our organization has relied on to support huge numbers of transactions for years and the assets running on these systems provide valuable content. That’s why it’s important for our organization that we include the IBM Z systems into our user portal,” says Eric Everson Mendes Marins, PCS_ZVM squad at IBM CIO Office. “We had been using a traditional IT operations model with individual management pillars for the infrastructure components. With that model it was hard and complex to manage the infrastructure assets across the multiple platforms. We had to develop scripts, and some administrator tasks had to be done manually. But what many people might not know is that IBM Z can be integrated seamlessly into an open hybrid cloud IT infrastructure.”

Creating a cloud provisioning portal for improved user experience

The CIO Office is helping its users to realize the potential of IBM Z, as well as the potential of IBM Power and x86 technology, demonstrating its power as part of an open hybrid cloud IT strategy.

“We aim to offer easy access and handling for our users—which means creating a portal for our cloud services that provide the access to our hybrid cloud IT environment,” explains Marins.

As part of the consolidation of the IT environment, the transition from the traditional IT operations model to a cloud operations model was implemented. For the integration of the multiple platforms into one cloud provisioning portal, the CIO Office wanted to use open standards and decided to use OpenStack APIs.

IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center provides an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) layer for IBM Z, enabling virtual machines to be provisioned and managed and the automation of services, and providing a platform for building higher-level cloud services.

Cloud Infrastructure Center helps to meet the demands of hybrid cloud strategy. It provides a ready-to-use solution for a consistent user experience with its integration capabilities to cloud management tools and with built-in OpenStack-compatible APIs to provision and orchestrate cloud workloads.

Its integration capability increased flexibility and improved efficiency at the CIO Office with a common skillset, simplifying the IBM z/VM-based virtual machine lifecycle management on IBM Z and providing unified cloud provisioning.

The entire setup of Cloud Infrastructure Center was done very quickly, in a few steps, and supports the CIO Office to reduce the costs and complexity in managing a hybrid cloud environment.

“IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center allows us to substantially improve our infrastructure management and reduce cost and complexity to manage from simple to complex environments,” says Marins.

The main values of integrating IBM Z into the hybrid cloud approach are increased business acceleration, higher developer productivity, increased infrastructure efficiency, improved risk and compliance management and long-term strategic flexibility.

Source: ibm.com

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The hidden danger of outdated infrastructure: security risk

With all the talk about cloud solution adoption, it’d be easy to assume that on-premises IT infrastructure is fading in popularity. However, the recent IBM and Forrester Consulting study “The Key to Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Strategy,” found that on-premises infrastructure still has a strong presence for many enterprises. The study found that “firms are planning to increase investments toward on-premises infrastructure, and 85% of IT decision-makers (ITDMs) in our survey agree that on-premises infrastructure is critical to their hybrid cloud strategies.” In fact, 75% of IT decision makers plan to increase their infrastructure investment in the next two years.

Unfortunately, plans aren’t always followed through. On-premises infrastructure updates are often one of the first things to get pushed based on budget needs, project priority or unexpected disruptive events (such as COVID-19). The Forrester study found that 70% of responding organizations have delayed infrastructure refreshes at least a few times in the last five years or more (up from 61% in 2019).

When looking at IT projects and priorities, refreshing on-premises infrastructure is an easy candidate for delay. It’s not a flashy new project and it may be difficult to justify the cost to the C-suite. When juggling multiple projects or the need to slash the budget, IT teams may look at risk/reward equation for not refreshing existing on-premises infrastructure. A decision is arrived that everything is working well enough for now. What is often not taken into account is that there are security risks associated with this gear. In fact, the Forrester study found that half of IT decision-makers found infrastructure-based security issues and vulnerabilities following a delayed refresh.

Changing nature of cyber risk

Security isn’t getting any easier. While the overall number of reported data breaches decreased in 2020, RiskBased Security’s 2020 Year End Report found that more than 37 million records were breached last year, up 141% over 2019 and reportedly the highest number of breached records since RiskBased Security began its annual report.

While security risk is increasing, organizational commitment to updated hardware is diminishing. The Uptime Institute found that the average timeframe for a hardware refresh is now every five years (compared to an average of every three years in 2015). Think about how much has changed in the cyber security landscape over the past five years. In many cases, five-year-old infrastructure was never designed to handle the high-risk workloads and security challenges we now task it with.

With the increasing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in business and technology applications, the need to support data-sensitive workloads is far greater than it was five years ago and will only increase. Forrester Consulting found that 84% of ITDMs anticipate greater data-sensitive workloads going forward. Couple all that with rigorous compliance standards that are closely tied to infrastructure security and it’s easy to see how not regularly refreshing infrastructure can create a dire security risk and impact an organization’s overall security posture.

Adopting a holistic security posture

Security isn’t a single headed monster, and the enterprise approach to strong, holistic security needs to remain equally multi-faceted. That includes not forgetting or dismissing the importance of regularly refreshing on-premises infrastructure, even as enterprises build out increasingly complex hybrid cloud solutions.

Source: ibm.com

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8 reasons why IBM Power Systems is your app modernization foundation

Application modernization comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s not always easy to know where to start. So, over the next few minutes, we’ll showcase the strengths and benefits that IBM Power Systems™ brings to your modernization efforts. Sure, there are many more benefits than we’ll cover here. For more in-depth analysis tips and recommendations to help you determine the complexity of your applications and a modernization path forward, you can check out our Field Guide to Application Modernization on IBM Power Systems.

Read More: C2150-606: IBM Security Guardium V10.0 Administration

Power Systems is built for core enterprise applications and for the next wave of digital transformation fueled by application modernization. Here are the major benefits of modernizing with IBM Power Systems:

1: Flexible, efficient utilization

You can manage spikes in demand and support more cloud workloads per server with IBM PowerVM® hypervisor on-demand CPU capacity. It manages demand by sharing pools of CPU cores across Red Hat® OpenShift® CoreOS nodes. These differentiating hypervisor constructs such as uncapped processors and shared processor pools provide the ability to guarantee performance SLAs while donating unused processor cycles to worker nodes in need of additional capacity. All this flexibility guarantees an 80 percent utilization on an IBM Power Systems E980 server.

2: More performance from software with fewer servers

You can buy fewer Power Systems servers to run an equivalent set of applications at comparable throughput levels than on competing platforms. That’s because it enables you to use 3.2X more containers per core with more CPU threads, achieve 2.6X better price performance (based on the number of containers), and collocate cloud-native apps with AIX, IBM i and Linux® virtual machine-based apps and enterprise data to exploit low-latency API connections to business-critical data. Plus, you can leverage sub-capacity licensing to greatly reduce containerized software license costs (IBM Cloud Pak Solutions, for example) using PowerVM shared processor pools, allowing CPU cores to be autonomously shared across Red Hat OpenShift worker nodes without sacrificing app performance.

3: Superior performance for your enterprise data

Running Red Hat OpenShift in a virtual machine adjacent to your AIX, IBM i or Linux virtual machines provides low-latency secure communication to your enterprise data with PowerVM Virtual I/O Server. This provides superior performance due to fewer network hops. It also allows for highly secure communication between your new cloud-native apps and your enterprise data stores as network traffic never has to leave the physical server.

4: Proven security and resiliency

To meet today’s security challenges, it’s essential that every layer of your company’s IT hardware and software stack remains secured. IBM Power Systems customers utilize the most reliable mainstream server platform to innovate and get to market faster without compromising security. Power Systems’ multi-layered approach to security gives you full visibility of your hardware and software. It protects the stack with comprehensive end-to-end security at every layer — including functionality that allows containers to remain secure, during and after deployment — all with a simple web-based UI.

5: Trusted and proven foundation

Kubernetes provides the core foundation for modernizing your enterprise applications. As the premier open-source container orchestration platform, it benefits both developers and IT administrators. Your developers have access to the latest software innovations to build software faster while your IT administrators can easily observe, operate and manage the platform and infrastructure. This helps you deliver high-value, high-quality software faster to end users. All of this is enabled through Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

6: Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Red Hat OpenShift is an enterprise-ready Kubernetes container platform with full-stack automated operations to manage hybrid multicloud deployments. Red Hat OpenShift is optimized to improve developer productivity and promote innovation; it is fully supported on all IBM Power Systems servers (IBM POWER8® processors or later).

7: IBM Cloud Pak solutions

Power Systems provides superior performance and economics for containerized workloads like IBM Cloud Pak enterprise-ready containerized software solutions for modernizing existing applications and developing new cloud-native apps that run on Red Hat OpenShift.

There are three main benefits: They are comprehensive and easy to use, they are supported by Red Hat and IBM, and they run anywhere Red Hat OpenShift runs. IBM Cloud Pak Solutions take a bundled approach that allows you to accelerate your modernization journey by packaging everything you need to get started — including Red Hat OpenShift and the apps that run on top of it. The IBM Cloud Pak solutions available on IBM Power Systems include IBM Cloud Pak for Applications, IBM Cloud Pak for Data and IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management.

8: Innovate with an extensive container software ecosystem

At the heart of any application modernization effort is a strong software ecosystem that allows teams to innovate using the latest technologies. Now more than ever, open-source communities are playing a significant role in organizations’ modernization journeys. IBM Power Systems not only runs your core business applications, but also a wide range of popular open-source and commercial container software.

When you choose Power Systems to modernize, you choose industry-leading reliability, performance and security, as well as superior compute performance for data-intense and mission-critical applications. It is a foundation for modern container-based applications.

Source: ibm.com

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Forrester study: hybrid cloud strategy and the importance of on-premises infrastructure

In continuing times of uncertainty, market change and evolving business needs, ensuring the stability, agility and resilience of your technology environment is an imperative. Organizations that are best able to leverage a future-ready hybrid cloud infrastructure strategy are better positioned to do exactly that – which makes understanding exactly how IT infrastructure strategies are prioritized, developed and implemented key.

In a newly commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of IBM this topic is explored in depth. Below you’ll find a snapshot of key insights, directly from the surveyed 384 IT decision-makers responsible for the strategy and execution of IT infrastructure environments at enterprises worldwide. One of the key findings is the continued importance of on-premises infrastructure, with 85% of IT decision-makers agreeing it is a critical part of their hybrid cloud strategy.

Future-readying your infrastructure 

Organizational needs can vary greatly, but the research helps identify some common considerations and implications. How are enterprises making strategic decisions about what types of IT infrastructure to use, and for what purposes? A hybrid cloud environment is found to be clearly delivering on openness and flexibility: 89% of IT decision-makers agree open source allows for a more open and flexible hybrid cloud strategy, and 83% agree a hybrid cloud environment leverages open source for greater efficiency and scalability. Nine in 10 (89%) also believe a hybrid cloud environment is able to both easily and securely store and move data and workloads, providing a secure and flexible strategy for today and tomorrow.

The push to public cloud has not stopped investments in on-premises infrastructure. Organizations are leveraging both hybrid cloud strategy and on-premises infrastructure to meet their unique needs during uncertain times. The benefits include greater performance, productivity and resiliency across data-intensive and mission critical workload types, alongside solutions for data residency and addressing continuing security challenges.

◉ Data residency (56%) is the top ranked reason why organizations maintain infrastructure outside of the public cloud, far outpacing 2019 (39%).

Your infrastructure refresh matters 

As may be anticipated in line with a widespread acceleration in digital transformation, over half of the organizations surveyed (54%) plan to expand or upgrade existing infrastructure in the next 12 months, and three in four (75%) plans to increase infrastructure investment in the next two years. But while infrastructure investment is increasing, conversely in terms of infrastructure refresh, these have been significantly delayed and reflect a 15% increase in delay from 2019 findings. This lack of reinvestment leaves organizations vulnerable.

◉ Nearly 9 in 10 (89%) are accelerating digital investments – primarily to support faster delivery of IT projects (60%).

◉ 70% have delayed infrastructure refreshes at least a few times in the last five years or more (61% in 2019).

While postponements are understandable given resource and budget constraints, it creates areas of vulnerability across security (50%), cost (44%), compatibility (39%) and performance (39%) and beyond the scope of the study, additional risks for reputation, trust, loyalty and customer experience too. Neglecting infrastructure refreshes risks becoming a significant pain point for organization’s modernization efforts, reducing the impact of the increased investment in infrastructure. The extent of the infrastructure refresh delays is both concerning and juxtaposed with the strategic focus placed on security by IT decision makers.

◉ 85% anticipate a greater focus on security and compliance and 84% will expect to see an increase in data-sensitive workloads and applications (for example: AI and machine learning).

Key recommendations from the Forrester study

1 – Make yours a hybrid cloud infrastructure strategy.

2 – Keep on premises as part of your hybrid strategy for the foreseeable future.

3 – Manage the mix of public cloud, private cloud and on premises as a holistic whole.

4 – Keep up with on-premises infrastructure refreshes.

Source: ibm.com

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