2021 IBM Hybrid Cloud Predictions

 

IBM has been singing the advantages of hybrid clouds for several years. For 2021, it is now going so far as to venture some hybrid cloud predictions.  

Courtesy: IBM Newsroom

At the start of 2020 nobody would have anticipated the year we just concluded. Does anyone need to be reminded that  by the end of March, the COVID-19 pandemic had disrupted operations worldwide, forcing businesses to quickly adapt their technology infrastructures to accommodate all or most of their workforces remotely and cope with unprecedented levels of long-term uncertainty. Who would have guessed that for many revamping their IT infrastructure fast would be needed for so long or be a key to their survival.

IBM and other enterprise hybrid cloud providers lucked out for sure. Haven’t seen anyone jumping up and saying I predicted it. I’m sure some will but they will probably wait until it gets closer to bonus and review time.

Not just hybrid clouds but some related technologies will also rise to the forefront. For instance. IBM notes: 

• Wider adoption and experimentation with new security technologies, including Confidential Computing, quantum safe encryption and fully homomorphic encryption, which makes it easier to read and use encrypted data on the fly.
• AI automation is making the shift to hybrid cloud faster and easier.
• The integration of multiple clouds and on-premise systems into a single hybrid platform
• The ability to leverage hybrid clouds to push more workloads onto intelligent edge devices.

These trends will continue in 2021 and beyond, especially security technologies such as Confidential Computing, quantum-safe, and fully homomorphic encryption, which allows you to  perform calculations on encrypted data without decrypting it first. This should allow even the most regulated industries to move to the hybrid cloud.

It’s already apparent, IBM continues,  that companies will continue to decentralize IT operations around hybrid cloud environments in 2021 and probably beyond. But to do that successfully, organizations will want to take further security measures that improve isolation, ensure system and data integrity, and implement zero trust strategies all while remaining compliant with tougher data privacy regulations worldwide, which aren’t going away, especially as even more complex security threats evolve.   

Not to be left out, IBM continues, is the Z. In particular, hardware systems that provide these security capabilities the company hopes, will be widely adopted to protect on premise and public cloud workloads. These hardware systems, especially LinuxONE and IBM Z, already provide a higher levels of security for both open source and traditional workloads. And the capacity, performance, security, scalability and non-fail availability are ideal for the task.

Now add to that IBM’s Industry-specific clouds, such as the IBM Cloud for Financial Services and IBM Cloud for Telecommunications. These were designed from the start to address unique challenges and security requirements of these regulated industries. IBM has already attracted Bank of America to its financial services cloud and claims more than 35 partners for its telecommunications cloud.

And it is not just hybrid clouds that have drawn IBM’s attention.  The company continues to pioneer quantum computers, which it expects will solve some of industry’s most challenging problems, problems that today’s  best performng supercomputers cannot solve. Those same quantum computers can also address risks such as the ability to fashion unbreakable encryption algorithms for when companies are ready to deploy quantum-safe cryptography. This could not only  secure data today but help protect against future threats.

This all sounds wonderful, like your most optimistic New Year’s Resolutions. You know, the ones you made a couple of nights ago after three or four drinks. But quantum computing continues to suffer from all the problems that plagued it last month and last year: noise interference, instability, faults,  loss of quantum coherence, and more. And we haven’t even mentioned the lack of applications to solve meaningful business problems. Can anyone even describe what those business problems are and what a quantum computing solution might look like?

DancingDinosaur is happy to cheer IBM and any other technology player and tout every quantum or hybrid cloud or technical achievement they make. The IT industry needs advancements this new year and every year going forward. Best wishes and go for it!

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his work at technologywriter.com.