With digital transformation now vital for organizations to remain competitive, cloud technology is becoming increasingly important. Indeed, Gartner predicts global public cloud revenue to increase by 17% in 2020. Hybrid multi-cloud environments are becoming increasingly popular. A recent Forrester Consulting survey of IT enterprise decision-makers found that enterprises are expanding their public cloud footprints, continuing to invest in private cloud, and growing existing on-premises infrastructure. 

IBM is preparing organizations to develop and maintain their multi-cloud capabilities with Cloud Paks, containerized software solutions for delivering greenfield, cloud-native applications and updating existing applications. Of the six Cloud Paks available, the IBM Multi Cloud Manager (MCM) Cloud Pak — running on Red Hat OpenShift — allows clients to streamline their business operations, workloads, and clusters across multiple cloud environments. 

In this article, we’ll look at three of the benefits of using IBM’s MCM Cloud Pak. But first, here’s some background on the IBM MCM Cloud Pak and how it is structured.

What Is the IBM MCM Cloud Pak?

The IBM MCM Cloud Pak is an open, hybrid cloud management platform that helps organizations break down IT silos. A central application and governance model allows disconnected teams to come together around a shared understanding of the application and its behavior, enhancing communication.

Enterprises can leverage the IBM MCM Cloud Pak to ensure consistent delivery of event management, application and infrastructure management, and multi-cluster management.

IBM MCM Cloud Pak: The Four Pillars

The underlying infrastructure of the application has four pillars:

1. Application Lifecycle Management

2. Infrastructure Lifecycle Management

3. Performance Monitoring

4. Governance Risk and Compliance Management

Let's explore what each of these means for users:

Application Lifecycle Management offers unified, streamlined approaches for constructing and deploying applications and application updates. These allow developers and DevOps teams to build and manage applications across environments via channel and subscription-based automation.

Infrastructure Lifecycle Management allows organizations to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters across different cloud providers. It also enhances the range of virtual machine (VM) management tools available to increase transparency and control and helps those new to hybrid cloud VM management. Inclusion of the self-service management tool Terraform and Service Automation for multi-cloud helps developers and administrators to meet business demands. 

Performance Monitoring enhances application resiliency for applications based on microservices, and it also monitors traditional resources across organizations. 

Governance Risk and Compliance gives peace of mind that applications fulfill the organization’s security and compliance requirements. This is vital when managing a hybrid application. System dashboards help organizations to interpret security and compliance findings, whether applications are deployed to Kubernetes and or traditional VMware/VM environments. 

The Benefits of Using IBM MCM Cloud Paks

IBM MCM Cloud Paks enable users to avail of increased transparency, consistent governance, and application automation across all of their cloud infrastructures.

1.     Increased transparency

IBM MCM Cloud Pak gives a comprehensive view of resources across Kubernetes environments in both public and private clouds. For development teams, it means they can view resources including deployments, pods, and Helm releases. Operation teams have complete visibility of clusters and nodes.

2.     Consistent governance

With Kubernetes environments proliferating across the organization, it can be difficult to ensure that they are being managed in accordance with set governance and security policies. The IBM MCM Cloud Pak enables such environments to be managed by a consistent set of configuration and security policies, so even if the number of clusters grows, the cost of managing them does not. These policies function even if connectivity to the management system has been interrupted. 

3.     Application automation

IBM MCM Cloud Pak offers a consistent approach to deploying enterprise applications across clusters, irrespective of the kind of application. Deployments are controlled via a placement policy based on multiple factors.

Conclusion

Organizations seeking to modernize their applications and business operations for the cloud face a multitude of options when it comes to cloud tools, environments, and platforms. Disparate solutions can mean wasted time and money. IBM MCM Cloud Pak provides an integrated environment where enterprises can manage all of their cloud applications. Stone Door Group helps existing IBM customers to migrate legacy applications and develop greenfield ones using Cloud Paks via our IBM Cloud Accelerator. 

About the Author

Eric Archer is a Red Hat Senior Consultant and a Docker Certified Instructor at Stone Door Group, a Cloud and DevOps consulting company that delivers successful digital transformation projects in the private and public sectors. Eric is part of a team of leading experts in Red Hat and DevOps technologies. To speak with Eric and our team, send us an email at letsdothis@stonedoorgroup.com.