IBM recently announced the general availability of the IBM Cloud Satellite, which will allow its enterprise clients to launch consistent cloud services anywhere and in any environment – across any cloud, on-premises or at the edge. This will give clients across industries, including telecommunications, financial services, government, healthcare, retail and more, access to a consistent and secure set of cloud services – wherever their workload resides.

DSA was invited to attend a media briefing, where Raymond Wong, Cloud Platform Leader for IBM ASEAN, shared more details of the announcement, its importance for IBM’s hybrid cloud strategy and how it will improve the experience of customers and partners in the ASEAN region.

According to Raymond, enterprises around the world have been accelerating their digital journeys. Two of the major driving factors behind this rapid pace of transformation are hybrid cloud, 5G and edge capabilities – expected to be a USD $667 billion business opportunity by 2026.

He shared that a recent IBM study found that around 74% of CEOs around the world believe that hybrid cloud and cloud technologies will help spur the change and growth in their businesses. This is especially true for businesses in regulated industries looking to digitally transform with the cloud but also needing to ensure that they can protect customers’ data, while also meeting regulations around data sovereignty requirements.

He added that the value that businesses can derive from a full hybrid, multi-cloud platform technology and operating model at scale is 2.5 times the value derived from a single platform or single cloud strategy. Thus, Raymond believes that a platform approach accelerates value with scale.

Indeed, many organisations today operate multiple environments, including on-prem, edge and public cloud. Raymond commented that in ASEAN, the industry is expecting around 52% growth in the hybrid cloud by 2023. However, the complexity of building, deploying and managing applications in multiple cloud environments can bring challenges that impact performance and experiences, such as:

• Application performance degradation: Due to a lack of consistency in application development.

• Latency issues: Degrades response times.

• Data residency laws: Requires data to remain “in-country”.

• Lack of agility: Applications sprawl across many locations, decreasing development velocity.

• Lack of visibility: IT teams may operate as many as 5 to 8 cloud environments and require visibility into their digital platform and applications for each site.

IBM set out to solve these problems and address some of the biggest challenges facing their clients. Raymond named four requirements that today’s hybrid cloud customers require:

• The same consumption or consistent experience in the cloud, on-prem or in any cloud.

• A single management and operations experience across all their workloads.

• For all their workloads to be available to them, as a service, wherever it matters and makes the most sense.

• The ability to run workloads and deploy them quickly to achieve faster time to market wherever they want.

With IBM Cloud Satellite, IBM will make it easier for clients to access its cloud services and deliver low latency, while still enabling them to have the same levels of security, data privacy, interoperability and open standards found in hybrid cloud environments.

Raymond mentioned that this falls in line with IBM’s mission to “create a standardised, open platform that reduces lock-in for our clients when they make cloud architecture decisions”, especially with the acquisition of Red Hat in 2019. He added, “So, clients will have the choice of deployment in different platforms and cloud providers, on-prem or off-prem. Hybrid cloud is about giving clients the flexibility to modernise and create innovative applications in a way that meets their business needs”.

According to him, IBM is enabling the next frontier of cloud computing with the launch of IBM Cloud Satellite. “IBM Cloud Satellite acts as a unifying layer of connectivity across any location where the client data resides. On-prem, clients can enjoy a cloud consumption as a service model in their on-prem data centre. Satellite at the edge allows such deployments and applications to be deployed at the most remote and far-fetched areas of the network”, explained Raymond.

IBM Cloud Satellite can also run on workloads across other clouds (and not just IBM Cloud), so it provides a consistent way to run, manage and observe those workloads.

For more info, the full press release of IBM’s announcement is as follows:

IBM Cloud Satellite Enables Clients to Deliver Cloud Securely in Any Environment Including at the Edge
IBM today announced that its hybrid cloud services are now generally available in any environment -- on any cloud, on premises or at the edge -- via IBM Cloud Satellite. Lumen Technologies and IBM have integrated IBM Cloud Satellite with the Lumen edge platform to enable clients to harness hybrid cloud services in near real-time and build innovative solutions at the edge.

IBM Cloud Satellite brings a secured, unifying layer of cloud services for clients across environments, regardless of where their data resides. This is essential to help address critical data privacy and data sovereignty requirements. Industries including telecommunications, financial services, healthcare and government can now benefit from reduced latency that comes with analysing data securely at the edge. Workloads related to online learning, remote work, telehealth services and more can now be delivered with increased efficiency and security with IBM Cloud Satellite. As workloads shift to the edge, IBM Cloud Satellite will help clients deliver low latency, while still enabling them to have the same levels of security, data privacy, interoperability and open standards found in hybrid cloud environments.

IBM is also extending Watson Anywhere with the availability of IBM Cloud Pak for Data as a Service with IBM Cloud Satellite. This gives clients a flexible, secure way to run their AI and analytics workloads as services across any environment – without having to manage them on their own. EquBot, a fintech firm helping global investment professionals, is already seeing early benefits. The work has shown reduced latency from ten seconds to under one second on some of the time critical models. This allows investors to make better-informed decisions across financial markets.

Lumen platform delivers IBM Cloud Satellite to speed innovation at the edge
Lumen, an enterprise technology company enabling the 4th Industrial Revolution, is using its global Edge Compute platform to deliver IBM Cloud Satellite to customers. By combining the deployment flexibility of IBM Cloud Satellite with the Lumen edge platform's broad availability, adaptive networking and connected security capabilities, Lumen customers gain choice and speed in how they securely tap into the benefits of edge computing services.
Customers using the Lumen platform and IBM Cloud Satellite can deploy data-intensive applications like video analytics across highly distributed environments such as offices and retail spaces, and take advantage of infrastructure designed for single digit millisecond latency. Because the application can be hosted on Red Hat OpenShift via IBM Cloud Satellite from the close proximity of a Lumen edge location, cameras and sensors can function in near real-time to help improve quality and safety. For example, cameras can detect the last time surfaces were cleaned or flag potential worker safety concerns. Additionally, customers across geographies can better address data sovereignty by deploying this processing power closer to where the data is created.

"With the Lumen platform's broad reach, we are giving our enterprise customers access to IBM Cloud Satellite to help them drive innovation more rapidly at the edge," said Paul Savill, SVP Enterprise Product Management and Services at Lumen. "Our enterprise customers can now extend IBM Cloud services across Lumen's robust global network, enabling them to deploy data-heavy edge applications that demand high security and ultra-low latency. By bringing secure and open hybrid cloud capabilities to the edge, our customers can propel their businesses forward and take advantage of the emerging applications of the 4th Industrial Revolution."

As part of this collaboration, customers will be able to:

• Deploy applications across more than 180,000 connected enterprise locations on the Lumen network to provide a low latency experience.

• Create cloud-enabled solutions at the edge that leverage application management and orchestration via IBM Cloud Satellite.

• Build open, interoperable platforms that give customers greater deployment flexibility and more seamless access to cloud native services like AI, IoT and edge computing.

"IBM is working with clients to leverage advanced technologies like edge computing and AI, enabling them to digitally transform with hybrid cloud while keeping data security at the forefront," said Howard Boville, Head of IBM Hybrid Cloud Platform. "With IBM Cloud Satellite, clients can securely gain the benefits of cloud services anywhere, from the core of the data centre to the farthest reaches of the network."

IBM's partner ecosystem to co-create new cloud services with IBM Cloud Satellite
IBM is collaborating with more than 65 ecosystem partners, including Cisco, Dell Technologies and Intel to build secure cloud services helping clients run workloads in any environment via IBM Cloud Satellite. Infrastructure partners offer a choice of storage, networking and server solutions to help clients leverage their existing infrastructures to deploy IBM Cloud Satellite locations at data centres or the edge. Service partners plan to offer migration and deployment services to help clients manage solutions as-a-service anywhere. IBM Cloud Satellite clients can also access Red Hat OpenShift-certified software offerings on Red Hat Marketplace, which can be deployed to run on Red Hat OpenShift via IBM Cloud Satellite, offering flexibility to install and manage with greater simplicity.