IBM today announced two new services that are meant to make it easier for businesses to move their data and applications to the cloud. The company says the IBM Cloud Migration Services and IBM Cloud Deployment Services will make it easier and more affordable to migrate their existing workloads to the public cloud.
Cloud Migration Services, as the name implies, helps businesses get ready to move to the cloud. This looks very much like a bespoke service where IBM helps you understand your existing IT infrastructure and then works with you to migrate services to the cloud.
Cloud Deployment Services is a fully managed orchestration and automation platform for building private and hybrid clouds across multiple platforms and service providers (and that includes non-IBM products). At the core of this is the ability to model (or “blueprint,” as Big Blue likes to call it) infrastructure and application solutions and make these patterns repeatable to automate the infrastructure, as well as middleware builds and operations.
“In addition to providing companies with a significantly less expensive and faster way to orchestrate workloads across various cloud delivery models, IBM Cloud Deployment Services also provides next gen automation with its niche patterns and workflows,” IBM’s CTO and VP of Global Technology Services Bridget Karlin tells us. “This helps reduce the service provisioning time and drastically reduces the design, build, deployment and testing efforts.”
IBM also notes that Cloud Deployment Services also helps companies take advantage of the “IBM Services Platform with Watson capabilities” (because everything IBM does these days has to at least use the name ‘Watson’ in some form). ” The platform along with these new services, provide companies with artificial intelligence tools that bring together human intelligence and technology-driven insights that create cognitive IT infrastructures,” said Karlin. “The IBM platform-powered cognitive IT infrastructure is designed to predict and identify potential problems, self-learn and self-heal, helping reduce business disruption and strengthen a highly secure IT environment.”
These two new services fit right into IBM’s existing product portfolio around cloud migration. With Cloud Mass Data Migration, the company already offers a service that helps companies securely move their data into its own cloud, for example, while the Aspera High-Speed Transfer tools help its clients move their data to any cloud. In addition, the Cloud Innovate team helps its clients speed up their cloud migrations with a focus on moving to microservices and modernizing their existing applications.