Kategorie: technology

Singapore Exchange improves development process with IBM Cloud Private

Digital experience expectations in the financial services are now higher than ever before. Many organizations are improving the digital experience not only for their customers, but also for their employees and business partners. The key to exceptional digital experience is by driving innovation.
Singapore Exchange (SGX) has very robust trading and clearing engines that are at the heart of its business. While we use a traditional software development lifecycle methodology in implementing and enhancing our core engines, we adopt an agile strategy for applications and interfaces in order to enhance the digital experience for our customers.
This agile methodology gives our developers more control and accelerates time to market.
Selecting IBM for our on-premises cloud with microservices
After evaluating solutions from several vendors, we chose to work with IBM to help us create an on-premises cloud environment in conjunction with local business partner, Dimension Data.
Our assessment was that IBM Cloud Private offered better features, such as scanning security, auto-scaling and quick recovery. IBM is also a longtime partner of SGX, which provided assurance that we could embark on this digital transformation journey together.
IBM installed an IBM Cloud Private environment on site at SGX in just two days and then spent two weeks running an IBM Garage proof-of-concept (POC) microservices workshop for us. Our developers got first-hand experience in building, testing, deploying and managing applications in Kubernetes using a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery pipeline approach.
The POC also illustrated how IBM and Dimension Data would team up to provide augmented service for the solution, post implementation.
Enhancing agility and digital experience
IBM Cloud Private allows people to work quickly, and the infrastructure can scale up much faster than traditional infrastructure. Previously, we needed more people to set up the environment, servers and virtual machines. Now developers can spin up an environment by themselves to work with containerized applications and microservices. This new-found agility also meets our stringent security requirements.
IBM Cloud Private is the foundation that allows our developers, and the organization as a whole, to accelerate our development operations around our core trading engine.
Read the case study for more details.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Healthcare services company simplifies architecture, lowers costs with IBM Cloud

Patients, insurance organizations and regulatory bodies hold high expectations from healthcare organizations. Processes are complex, exposed to numerous risks and must comply with a growing number of healthcare laws.
A good and reliable recording of information, assurance of processes and simple communication about these are essential, but often fall short.
The Patient Safety Company (TPSC) breaks down barriers with its quality and risk management platform. The software platform hosts custom cloud solutions for data gathering, workflow management and process automation. Each solution identifies and analyzes risks, discovers trends and facilitates continuous quality improvement.
Seeking a way to support long-term business growth
Used by more than 500 healthcare clients and available in eight languages, our cloud-based software monitors, collects and stores data about quality and safety and makes the information available through customized dashboards that suit users’ specific needs in real-time.
To adhere to location-specific healthcare legislation, such as mandates regarding data being stored in-country, we were working with several local cloud providers to support our clients throughout Europe, North America and Australia. However, maintaining the different architectures in different clouds was costly. To align with our global growth plan, we began looking for a partner who could support regional healthcare regulations with a global standard for hosting centers.
IBM was the only vendor we considered that could provide data centers all over the world. Of course, our data centers were certified and compliant previously, but we now have increased visibility. With IBM, there’s now one global standard for our hosting centers. Plus, our customers feel more confident in The Patient Safety Company thanks to the security and governance assurances that accompany the IBM Cloud.
Another very important reason we chose IBM is that we are now headed towards a containerized, modern architecture from a traditional LAMP-stack environment. We’ll be able to take advantage of the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service to further improve stability, speed deployment and add functionality as required.
Expanding into new markets
We migrated our software platform to IBM cloud by cloud. In some cases, we migrated the established architecture. And, in other cases, we started with a new architecture. Regardless of the starting point, though, the end result we’re working toward is that all instances of The Patient Safety Company cloud will be on the IBM Cloud with the same architecture. We expect the move to decrease our hosting costs by 40 percent and improve our uptime from 95 to 99 percent or more.
Using the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service adds the needed flexibility for healthcare organizations to respond quickly to changes. Adjustments can be made as necessary to serve their changing needs for information.
The Patient Safety Company is now poised for growth in our target regions where both economic developments and developments in healthcare necessitate quality and risk management.
Additionally, we are aiming for other markets besides healthcare, such as oil and gas. Our solution for these other markets, built on the same foundation, is called RiskSync.
Read the case study for more details.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

An intelligent approach to multicloud management

Here’s a staggering fact: According to an IBM Institute for Business Value study, 94 percent of enterprise customers surveyed stated they are using multicloud, multicluster environments (public, private and at the edge) to optimize cloud workloads and take advantage of innovation and avoid cloud vendor lock in. Yet, less than 40 percent have the procedures and tools to operate a multicloud environment.

If you’re an operations manager or site reliability engineer (SRE), you know the importance of meeting key service level agreements (SLAs) and service level objectives (SLOs). In order to achieve them, however, you need management solutions that can unify increasingly complex hybrid, multicloud and multicluster environments, drive business value with app-centric cloud solutions and enable localized and intelligent application processing.
Barriers to hybrid, multicloud management
Today’s disparate monitoring tools limit visibility across evolving environments, while slow delivery and management processes are often the results of non-automated, manual methods. And then there’s the issue of consistent security and quality assurance, which are sometimes addressed just before a release.
Take an example of an enterprise in the auto manufacturing industry challenged with managing their applications that run across multiple data centers, network zones and scattered environments. Having a single dashboard can help to seamlessly and consistently deploy applications running across multiple clouds and manage it all through that single channel.
Smarter visibility, governance and automation for DevOps and SRE
IBM recognizes these challenges, so in 2018 we introduced the world’s first multicloud management technology – IBM Multicloud Manager – an award-winning management solution that provides consistent visibility, governance and automation wherever your applications reside – on-premises, in the cloud, at the edge or anywhere in between.
IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management extends this strategy by nurturing DevSecOps and SRE, embracing an open management architecture (containers and Kubernetes) and automating operations and security with consistency across your VM and container platforms. Enterprises can increase operational efficiency that’s driven by intelligent data analysis and predictive golden signals and gain built-in support for compliance management.
It’s your cloud journey. Let us help.
IBM has helped thousands of enterprises across 20 industries realize a faster, more secure journey to cloud. If you’re ready to take the next steps in your multicloud management and DevOps strategy, access the following resources and discover the path to smarter visibility, governance and automation.

Video: IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management in two minutes
Video: Under the Hood: IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management
Web: IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management

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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Three ways to drive customer value and remove infrastructure burdens

Building cloud-native applications can become a huge challenge with the vast and growing array of choices. As organizations wrestle with becoming more agile and adopting DevOps practices, how can they maintain their existing investment and start on a path towards a cloud-native future?
Take a quick look at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation interactive map and it’s easy to see that these choices aren’t easy to make. Many of the categories listed offer multiple solutions, making selection a time-consuming process. The challenge for any organization is how to choose the right infrastructure option for their business.
Once a particular set of technologies is chosen, the first task is to integrate them into a coherent solution for delivering new business value. This is a time cost that is not directly contributing to customer value. Though necessary, customers aren’t paying for  infrastructure choices.
While architects are debating fundamental infrastructure choices, developers have their own set of decisions to worry about. Finding the right tools and frameworks that help during development and are integrated into the development process, can be a significant undertaking.
Three focus areas can fundamentally change the productivity of a team and drive customer value.
1. Accelerate development teams
Development teams need to focus on building customer value into products instead of spending weeks or months deciding on how to configure the build process or integrating the components of a continuous integration and delivery pipeline.
Efficient organizations depend upon strong collaboration between different disciplines. For example, architects and developers need to be able to define their preferred runtime and framework choices and have a mechanism for capturing these decisions so they are easily shared through the wider development team.
Similarly, architects and operations teams need to be confident that the application updates reaching production comply with company policy and standards as well as possible industry regulations. By providing a consistent integration and delivery process for all languages and runtimes, teams can be confident that the same level of rigor, which could include testing, audit, security and other processes, has been applied to every update, right from the start.
2. Move beyond technology decisions to focus on solutions
To remain competitively relevant, enterprises must consistently update their software applications to meet the demands of their customers and users. While making these technology decision, it is important to have the end in mind. Infrastructure decisions cannot be limited to technology upgrades.
Decisions like these drive up the cognitive load on development teams and architects, slowing their progress of developing the real customer value of the new app. They also have to consider that a wrong decision could make it difficult to manage and monitor the app in production. All of this decision-making takes time and effort.
The goal should be to deliver new business applications with speed and security, so that the customers derive value from it.
To meet this demand, enterprises need a comprehensive solution that allows the flexibility to modernize some of the existing application while maintaining existing applications and systems. And, this must all be done without having to renegotiate contract terms and conditions or make new investments.
3. Simplify the cloud-native experience
Architects and operations teams get overloaded with choices, standards and compliance. Using standardized application stacks and tightly integrated tooling that works in harmony with open source, organizations can make the task of architecting, developing, deploying and managing cloud-native apps effortless, without overloading teams with too many decisions.
The best strategy is to adopt an end-to-end environment to speed development of applications and access cloud services to enhance innovation, reduce costs and simplify operations — all while meeting defined company technology standards and policies.
How IBM is helping companies focus on customer value
IBM Cloud Pak for Applications helps increase the rate at which new business applications can be delivered. The solution makes it easy for teams to quickly gain the benefits of building cloud-native applications without having to first go through a steep learning curve.
In addition, IBM Cloud Pak for Applications helps organizations focus on their business problems by removing uncertainty over technology choices. It brings together existing investments, such as WebSphere, with the capabilities necessary for multi-channel (web and mobile) and back-end application development supported by the premier Kubernetes platform of Red Hat OpenShift.
Crucially, we have focused on simplifying the collaboration between architects, developers and operational roles through the introduction of the Kabanero open source project. Through Kabanero, organizations will find a simplified path for developing cloud-native applications that are automatically built in containers and easily deployed onto the Red Hat OpenShift container platform built on Kubernetes.
The Kabanero project is a central component of IBM Cloud Pak for Applications that raises the bar on ease of development while preserving the critical enterprise needs of maintaining a strong security, governance and compliance posture.
With IBM Cloud Pak for Applications, we are focused on reducing the burden of infrastructure choice, improving the consistency of the development process, and ultimately helping teams to become more agile as they innovate and deliver value to customers, faster.
Learn more about IBM Cloud Pak for Applications.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

How IBM and Red Hat support your journey to cloud

What makes the recent news of IBM and Red Hat coming together so exciting? It’s the fact that we are delivering a complete, open hybrid cloud platform that enables enterprises to build, run, and manage apps and workloads in a consistent way, across any cloud; providing our customers with an incredible opportunity to accelerate digital transformation.
However, we know that with transformation, there are challenges. You not only want to build new applications to engage users in creative ways, you want to modernize the core part of your business — the engine of how your business operates.
IBM Cloud Paks, supported by Red Hat’s open container and Kubernetes technology, Red Hat OpenShift, are enterprise-ready, containerized software solutions that provide a faster, more secure way to move core business applications to any cloud.

IBM Cloud Paks are certified by both IBM and Red Hat to implement the best patterns for scalability, reliability and management. Businesses can gain portability, choice and access to any cloud infrastructure with a consistent set of common services and full visibility across all of their clouds and clusters.
IBM offers five Cloud Paks that are pre-integrated for cloud use cases:

IBM Cloud Pak for Applications to build, deploy and run applications
IBM Cloud Pak for Data to collect, organize, and analyze data
IBM Cloud Pak for Integration to integrate applications, data, cloud services and APIs
IBM Cloud Pak for Automation to transform business processes, decisions
and content
IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management to gain multicloud visibility, governance and automation

Businesses can also blend both open source middleware and trusted proven enterprise-grade middleware together for the best of both worlds. This allows companies to have a trusted full stack from hypervisor, to operating system, to runtimes and applications to deliver the best experience.
Ready to take an idea to create a happy user in a faster and more repeatable way?
Access these resources to learn how:

Blog: What are IBM Cloud Paks?
Video: IBM Cloud Paks in 2 minutes
Web: com/cloud/paks

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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud