IBM Inc. (IBM) further simplifies cloud management and security with the availability of IBM Cloud Satellite after its introduction a year ago. The promise of IBM Cloud Satellite is that it can deliver cloud securely in any environment — hybrid or multicloud deployment, on-premise, or at the edge.

With IBM Cloud Satellite, organizations can control or run any applications in a single pane in IBM Hybrid Cloud while reducing latency and increasing data security.

“I would generalize this as a hybrid solution,” explained Jed Cruz, Technical Community leader and director of Presales Team, IBM Philippines. “Our offering is available as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). It’s also available to customers to have inside any data center where they have infrastructure resources. They can have the IBM Cloud Satellite ported in and access the catalog of services from our IBM Cloud marketplace.”

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The partnership with Lumen Technologies, an American enterprise solultions firm, will enable organizations to monitor and control cloud solutions in near real-time while also building solutions at the edge.

Citing an IBM study, Christine Ravelo, country leader for Cloud, Data & AI, and Security, IBM Philippines, said “74% of the 3,000 CEOs surveyed worldwide think that cloud computing will help their organization deliver results over the next two to three years.” With cloud adoption, organizations are faced with regulatory requirements and restrictions creating a more complex environment.

Ravelo also underscores the shift to edge computing, which is expected to generate a significant amount of data. With data stored in different locations, management and security, as well as visibility, may become difficult. This is also one of the factors the launch of IBM Cloud Satellite hopes to address, according to Ravelo.

IBM Cloud Pak

By offering IBM Cloud Pak for Data as a Service (DaaS) with IBM Cloud Satellite, the company is also extending Watson Anywhere, IBM’s AI (artificial intelligence) for Business. This offloads certain management tasks that would otherwise be performed manually.

The collaboration with Lumen Technologies will enable customers to deploy applications across more than 180,000 connected enterprise locations on the Lumen network to provide a low latency experience and create cloud-enabled solutions at the edge that leverage application management and orchestration via IBM Cloud Satellite. It will also build open, interoperable platforms that give customers greater deployment flexibility and more seamless access to cloud native services like AI, the Internet of Things and edge computing.

While IBM Cloud Satellite is seen as something that could benefit across almost all industries, Mike Dionisio, president of Questronix Corp. believes “the industries that I see would be benefiting from this are those that are heavily involved in or are already in the thick of things when it comes to their digital transformation. Industries like financial services, retail, and healthcare, because this will really help them or increase the velocity of their transformation.”

Partners

IBM is investing $1 billion in the next three years on its hybrid cloud ecosystem.

“Because this is very important to the growth of our partners and we want to help in the digital transformation of different types of companies in the Philippines and abroad,” said Tristan Ylagan, country leader for IBM Partner Ecosystem in the Philippines.

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 centers 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.