Book Image

IBM SmartCloud Essentials

By : Edwin Schouten
Book Image

IBM SmartCloud Essentials

By: Edwin Schouten

Overview of this book

IBM, the oldest technology company in the world, has a wide variety of powerful cloud services to offer from its IBM SmartCloud portfolio. Being able to differentiate them, and knowing how to use them efficiently gives you a competitive advantage over others. Starting with the basics of cloud computing, this guide covers the wide range of cloud components, services, and solutions in the IBM SmartCloud portfolio. Following on from this, you'll be introduced to the public , Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud service - IBM SmartCloud Enterprise; before peeking into the future of IBM cloud services. Using this book, you will discover the advantage of both traditional enterprise computing and public cloud computing. You will explore IBM's portfolio of cloud computing solutions ranging from infrastructure services (IaaS), to business services (BPaaS), and private to public cloud. You will be taken through a number of in-depth use-cases, examples, and hand-on exercises that will help you to take advantage of infrastructure as a service solution IBM SmartCloud Enterprise quickly and easily. You will learn everything you need to know about the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, including how to take advantage of cloud computing within your organization.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

The value of cloud services


Now that we have covered what cloud computing, is let's briefly cover what the value of utilizing cloud services can be. We specifically mention "can be", as the true value can be different per application. There's no one-size-fits-all cloud solution available, as many different applications exist in the world and many organizations utilize applications differently.

However as a general rule, one of the benefits of cloud computing is increased efficiency; services are rapidly deployed and ready for use in a matter of minutes versus the weeks or months it traditionally takes. But, there is more to cloud computing than just getting your computed resources, storage capacity, or application as a service within minutes. Some examples are:

  • Business agility: Getting the compute resources you need when you need them. This will drastically shorten the time for new projects to get started, resulting in a quicker and ultimately more predictive time-to-market. Being able to deliver results faster, cheaper, and with more quality might just give a business the competitive edge it needs.

  • New business models: Using or combining readily available cloud services into a service allows us to define new and innovative business models with ease. This can result in new value propositions and revenue streams.

  • Less operational issues: Reduce issues and defects significantly by utilizing standardized services. This will increase business continuity and reduce time spent on operational issues. Secondly, cloud computing can also allow us to deploy the same service or topology of services repetitively, with the same predictable result every time.

  • Less capital expense: There is some debate about the value of shifting from a capital expense (CapEx) model to an operational expense (OpEx) model. The overall feeling is that, specifically for short and midterm projects, the OpEx model is more attractive because there are no long term financial commitments.

As we see, there can be quite some value in using cloud services. But, let us remember that the exact value we perceive and achieve will be different for each application and the application's entire life cycle.