With more than half of all organizations employing a hybrid cloud strategy, and 81 percent using multiple clouds, according to RightScale, IBM’s recently launched Cloud Private for Data platform aims to deliver a compelling solution. The platform, released at the beginning of June, provides a foundation for the implementation of hybrid cloud environments and offers a glimpse into the future of the intelligent enterprise.

Cloud Private for Data lets organizations extract and cleanse data from legacy systems for use in cloud-based applications while delivering advanced capabilities for data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. With it, IBM is helping enterprises take a solid step into the future by giving them the means to manage multi-cloud environments and start automating time-consuming management tasks.

The platform integrates with Amazon’s AWS and Google Cloud, which means customers can leverage a single architecture to manage data across multiple clouds. As such, the platform addresses a common issue with legacy environments that often rears its head in multi-cloud implementations: data sits in silos, access is difficult, and there is no full visibility into the distributed environment.

Direct Connectivity

IBM’s Cloud Private for Data strategy meshes with Comcast Business’ own efforts to support intelligent hybrid infrastructures. In 2017, we partnered with IBM to provide direct, dedicated links to IBM Cloud’s expanding global network. Comcast Business has similar partnerships with Amazon AWS and Microsoft Cloud.

The service delivers up to 10 Gigabits-per-second (Gbps) of direct, private network connectivity so organizations can store data and seamlessly run workloads – including mission-critical applications – on premises and in the cloud.

Direct, private connectivity provides businesses the advantages of housing their workloads in the cloud, while reducing and, in many cases, eliminating the issues that arise when accessing the cloud via public Internet, such as latency and security concerns.

Organizations that leverage Cloud Private for Data need plenty of bandwidth to support their hybrid cloud environments. And they’ll also want to protect their private and public cloud investments with reliable, secure connectivity that avoids the shortcomings of the public internet.

This is where direct connectivity is critical; it delivers the bandwidth, security and availability not otherwise possible.

Expanding Clouds

Cloud adoption has increased steadily, with 92 percent of respondents in a RightScale survey saying they are using public clouds and 75 percent, private clouds. On average, according to the 2018 State of the Cloud Report, organizations use 4.8 clouds. Increased reliance on multiple private and public clouds is what makes platforms such as Cloud Private for Data necessary.

Likewise, it underscores the need for private connectivity to meet bandwidth requirements securely and reliably. The combination of IBM’s new platform with Direct2Cloud from Comcast Business can be a powerful combination for enterprises to modernize their networks.