Listen to my interview with Philippe Jarre, general manager of IBM Global Business Continuity and Resiliency Services, about IBM's newly announced program to validate the resilience of cloud providers. Discover how important IBM believes cloud computing will become over the next few years in the enterprise computing landscape.
Listen to or download the 6:59 minute podcast below:
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PW: Philippe, IBM has just launched a new set of consulting services to help businesses take advantage of cloud computing. And along with that, there's a new program to validate third party cloud providers. I believe they go through a battery of tests, and if they're successful, IBM declares them 'Resilient Cloud Proven'. And there's a new IBM logo they'll be able to show off. So Philippe, does IBM believe cloud computing is a good thing for the enterprise? What are the advantages?
PJ: Actually, cloud computing is just the next generation of e-business. The big advantage is the flexibility and the way that actually the consumer and the company will be able actually to build. And therefore, if you are going to have a lot of transactions which are going to be through this kind of service, it's very difficult to predict the volume. And by design then, you need to ensure that this company will be able to offer a service which is very resilient, which means very flexible, and that's why we have announced this certification and this process today.
Okay. So from IBM's point of view, it's really the ability to scale out when web demand is there rather than paying for the infrastructure all the time that's able to cope with the peak load?
Yeah, absolutely. And all these clouds are going to be interconnected in the future. You need to ensure that overall for the economy that you — actually these clouds are resilient, the public or the private clouds first, of course.
And yeah, so you're seeing enterprises actually having their own clouds internally as well as external cloud providers?
Absolutely.
And you think enterprises are probably going to be accessing both at the same time quite often?
Yes, it depends — at the end this is a business decision and you will see, for example, procurement activities may use public clouds to find a cheap ticket on the web, where they are going to use their own business applications which are delivered as a cloud service internally in the company to fulfill the internal procurement activities. It's just an example.
So when enterprises turn to outside providers, why does IBM feel that validation is such an important thing for IBM to offer these cloud providers?
So we have been in the risk management [business] for IT for — in my organization — for 40 years, so this is not new for us. And all the time, actually, when you are a business provider using IT, what my organization is doing is risk assessment and offering some solution to mitigate the risk. As we are moving to an economy which is going to be very cloud centric, we need to ensure that these companies will be able to be resilient.
And to be resilient, you need to have a critical mass and you need to be flexible to handle the volumes. And what I have done actually in the recent activities in the last two years is to invest dramatically across the world to build resilient infrastructure to provide recovery services or resiliency services for companies who are willing to use my technologies.
Yes, okay. So really, this kind of validation is based on IBM's experience in the past of providing resilience and guaranteed services. I mean if a cloud provider gets this IBM badge, are there going to be strings attached? If you're validated by IBM as a cloud provider, does that mean you have to use IBM's software and servers?
Not at all. Of course, we are — we're going — it may be that we always assess IBM and non-IBM platforms. So because most customers today are using multi-supplier capabilities. We always assess these from a business perspective first, then from a process perspective, and then we look at the technology. So we need to be multi-platform.
We do the assessment according to the best — the best-of-breed in the industry where they are — for example, for airline, for example, for public sector, for financial services. And we know according to the regulation, or according to the best practices, what they should be in terms of resilience. Then we give them some advice, what they should do in order to be resilient.
They can then choose to do this by themselves, to invest in infrastructure, or they can choose an outsider that will be able to provide the services and IBM is well positioned to do this. Then we can review the assessment they have done according to our recommendation and say, yes, absolutely we think you are absolutely validated according to our standard on the business continuity.
And do you think this kind of validation is important to build up enterprise confidence in the concept of using external cloud providers?
I think in this market, where you're going to have a lot of players coming in, as a company you need to ensure that actually you have the right level of security, the right level of resilience, for the data you are using, for the information you are transmitting and for — to be sure that actually when you are planning on using the service, the service will be available. Because the economy in the future — in two, three, four, five years — will be fully dependent actually [on] the availability of these clouds.
I mean we're talking, I suppose, about kind of establishing some best practice, some standards for what one should expect from a cloud provider. I mean do you think in the future we'll move towards perhaps more interoperability between different clouds so that it — to make it easier for enterprises to mix and match different cloud providers and of course their own cloud infrastructure as well?
Absolutely. Absolutely. And this is not something that we have in our — we actually have right now. But I can really see some agents to be deploying the cloud throughout, and to simplify the communication between these services in order to build a bundle of services around the cloud. And therefore, it will be more and more important actually to be sure that these clouds are resilient.
Yes, and I think it probably gives confidence that IBM is setting out to kind of help establish some of the de facto standards at least and perhaps will be working with others to look at more formal interoperability standards in the future.
Absolutely. And actually, what we want to do is to be sure that we are, you know, showing a direction in where we want to go and work with as many players as possible actually in these activities.
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