Many governments have started taking steps to embrace the advantages cloud computing for their core business applications.  It offers opportunities to modernise infrastructure and automate IT management to allow business customers to provision and adjust capacity at will.  Service quality and security benefit from consistent application of policy and management, and there is greater flexibility and control over costs.  IBM recently delivered these benefits for a large social benefits department of a European Government.

However, Governments want more.  The current pandemic has accelerated their pursuit of digitisation.  Use of the latest hosting and cloud services offered by public cloud providers is helping governments deliver using current technologies and adapt at speed to meet citizens’ expectations.  The UK Government recently signed an agreement with IBM for public cloud services, the latest in a series of similar arrangements with leading public cloud providers.  Government departments can more easily access IBM’s technology advances for innovation.  This includes artificial intelligence (AI) for which IBM patented over 1,800 inventions last year in areas such as natural language processing to go with over 2,500 inventions in cloud.

Modernising on-premises infrastructure brings coherency and consistency to the IT environment.  However, it is important that these advantages are not lost when extending it to public cloud providers.  Avoiding lock-in and workload portability are two goals, but departments also benefit from having a single approach to accessing, managing and understanding the cost of cloud services.  IBM’s platform spans on premises infrastructure, private and public cloud services to integrate:

• Enterprise management for developers to consume services
• DevSecOps management
• AI-enabled operations
• Governance (cost and assets)

It spans cloud-native workloads built as microservices in containers as well as more traditional virtualised workloads.

IBM implemented a multi-cloud management platform for consumer products organisation’s IT department that was struggling with manual asset cost-tracking processes – they were time consuming and inefficient.  The assets were in public clouds with IBM and another provider, in the private cloud with VMware and on IBM-managed traditional IT.

IBM’s multi-cloud management portal captures and tracks all IT provisioning requests and fulfilments for the organisation.  It is now able to identify monthly cloud asset costs according to its organisational hierarchy.  It can view all its public cloud and private cloud spend in the consolidated Cost and Asset Management dashboard.  Ultimately, the organisation reduced the lead time to consolidate, distribute and verify departmental asset costs across the IT organization by 85%.

Find out more about managing IT operations across multiple clouds.