Your Cloud Data Is Protected, But Is It Portable?

Imagine having the greatest suitcase in the world. It’s strong, lightweight and constructed well—but you can’t take it with you anywhere. It may have the perfect design, but, practically speaking, it’s not very useful. The same idea holds true for cloud environments. The big question is not, “Where does your cloud data reside?” or “How strong is the platform?” but rather, “How portable is your data?” and “Can you migrate it when needed?”

Why Portability Is Key
Unfortunately, many cloud customers and partners are learning this the hard way—they’re feeling the pinch of vendor lock-in. They’re happy to have AWS, Azure or Google host their applications, but moving workloads in and out of these cloud environments often proves to be challenging, time-consuming and costly.

First, you need to rewrite code in the native application. Only then can you move it from the cloud to on-prem, then up to another cloud or multi-cloud environment. That all takes time and money. Meanwhile, the workload applications aren’t available to users, who want access to their data anytime, anywhere.

For optimal effectiveness, people need a cloud solution that can lift and shift workloads easily—no questions asked.

For this reason, many people are moving away from hosting full cloud environments and moving critical applications and cloud data back to on-prem data centers. They’re concerned about not having access to data during an outage or because it’s too costly to do upgrades, run it in multiple environments or migrate it from one environment to another. They want the security of knowing their cloud environments are safe, but also that their data is accessible at any moment. They want the ability to port their data from a private or public cloud to an on-prem data center quickly and easily, and don’t want to encounter instances where it’s too costly or restrictive.

Flexibility without Restrictions: OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift is an enterprise-ready Kubernetes container platform with full-stack automated operations to manage hybrid cloud, multi-cloud and edge deployments.

By adding OpenShift, a leading Kubernetes platform, users can create a new layer of portability and eliminate the drawbacks of single vendor lock-in. OpenShift enables users to easily port applications across multiple environments, providing the freedom to shop different cloud solutions, move applications to more cost-effective environments, as needed, or optimize their environment based on the criticality of the application.

Having more agility is also a competitive advantage. Flexibility and workload portability can mean cost-savings, which impacts the bottom line and sharpens one’s competitive edge.

With the addition of OpenShift, cloud users have the three critical things they need: scalability for growth, trusted reliability and the one thing that’s missing from most single-vendor solutions—control. This is the ability to determine where an application should run (e.g., on prem, public cloud, private cloud) based on individual workloads and the flexibility to move things around, as needed.

How IBM and Red Hat Have the Cloud Covered
IBM plus Red Hat OpenShift makes the ideal cloud combination—offering portability through containerization. And with no lock-in.

IBM brings the enterprise-level, next-gen software for data analytics, data management and security. And Red Hat OpenShift, built on Linux, adds the open source architecture, providing the container-level portability that makes it easy to deploy and manage applications and workloads wherever they’re needed, without losing all the benefits of data management and security software.

Essentially, Red Hat’s “container” consolidates your software into a single instance, which makes it easy to deploy and manage across various environments, and change workloads based on the criticality of that software application.

But what if you’re already locked in with AWS, Azure or Google? All is not lost. In fact, it’s your applications that are poised to gain the most. By adding Red Hat to your current application environment, you gain all the benefits of software containerization, which enables you to move your applications between multiple clouds to make them more agile, scalable, cost-effective and easier to manage.

The bottom line is that flexibility is the open source advantage, and the flexibility of Red Hat OpenShift starts with where you deploy it. Red Hat OpenShift is ready to deploy in any environment, wherever your workloads live.

Learn More: Red Hat Center of Excellence
If you’re ready to harness the power of workload portability—and overcome the restrictions of cloud vendor lock-in—Ingram Micro can help. Our new Red Hat Center of Excellence is composed of highly technical engineers certified in all Red Hat products. They can help you develop the skills and comfort with Red Hat technology, enabling you to accelerate adoption of Red Hat solutions and time to market.

Learn more today at https://partner.ingrammicrocloud.com/ibm/redhat/.

Cheryl Rang is Director of Advanced Solutions, Ingram Micro.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.