The Role Of Mainframes In Cloud: To Meet The Full Range Of Reliability And Security Needs
January 2013. A Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Paper Commissioned By IBM
Executive Summary
Does your private cloud strategy aspire to merely accommodate lightweight, low-priority applications running on
commodity servers or to handle all kinds of workloads? In October 2012, IBM commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate enterprise demand for cloud environments for business and mission-critical enterprise workloads to determine whether flat commodity infrastructures suffice. Forrester’s hypothesis: Emerging requirements for cloud environments include specific infrastructure and heightened security, reliability, and resiliency characteristics. We crafted survey questions to test this hypothesis and fielded them to 200 IT decision-makers in organizations with at least 500 employees in North America, the UK, Germany, and Brazil.
The survey reveals that enterprises want private clouds to accommodate a wide set of applications that in many cases demand specialized hardware, high security, highly resilient infrastructure, and other capabilities that cannot be fully provided by commodity infrastructure alone. In response to these requirements, private clouds can (and must) employ hybrid infrastructure service types to satisfy the broad range of needs in the typical enterprise.
These “hybrid infrastructures” won’t simply relabel today’s complex, incompatible mess of infrastructure — private clouds abstract workload (like business applications) complexity from the underlying infrastructure. Clouds deliver infrastructure services — not just the raw infrastructure itself, meaning that you can deploy workloads anywhere within the infrastructure service. Hybrid cloud infrastructures aren’t mere theory; public IaaS clouds are doing exactly that today.