Next Stop: the Cloud

Our world is governed by a social fabric.

It’s woven throughout the many devices we carry with us every day. It’s the thread that connects us to friends, family, and coworkers, no matter how far from them we are at any moment. And it’s how we keep up with the events happening in the world around us.

And thanks to this social fabric, the long-established rules of IT are being quickly – and decisively – rewritten.

Just consider how a socially connected world can influence the reaction to a noteworthy public event, like a sweeping breach of financial data. As news of the breach makes its way around the world, consumers – numbering in the thousands – respond by opening their mobile banking apps and checking their balances to make sure everything appears in order.

The social conversation about the breach, coupled with the flurry of account lookups that follow in its wake, will combine to have a massive impact on traditional IT infrastructures and processes. The sudden, sharp increase in transaction rates, the heavy burden placed on back-end systems, the time needed to keep everything running despite this immense stress – none of it can be monetized.

It’s today’s “cost of doing business,” certainly, but it’s also a cost that can quickly become crippling if steps aren’t taken to mitigate its effects.

And that’s where the hybrid cloud comes into play.

ClearPath Forward in the Cloud

We’re preparing the ClearPath Forward™ environment to participate in hybrid cloud infrastructures for one very simple reason: clients know the effect rapid, unexpected demand spikes can have on their infrastructures and need the flexibility, scalability, and cost efficiencies this model offers to help offset the associated costs.

Our push toward the hybrid cloud isn’t a new idea, nor is it simply a response to the changes reshaping the business and IT landscapes. Rather, it’s a place we’ve been moving toward for a while now. It’s a journey that has its roots in the steps we took to effectively decouple our hardware and software and emphasize the importance of the application layer above all else.

Building on this momentum – and truly embracing everything a cloud-readied ClearPath Forward program can deliver – means equipping you with more choice than you ever had before.

We want to offer you the freedom to buy hardware and virtualization technologies from your preferred vendors, to deploy operating environments and application stacks where you want, and to choose what’s kept in house, what becomes a web service, and what resides on public and private clouds.

That’s the promise of the hybrid cloud, and that’s what we’ll deliver.

Opening a World of Possibility

So, what does a world with ClearPath Forward in the cloud look like?

It’s one where we build on the inherent strengths of the ClearPath Forward environment – its ability to handle significant transaction volumes, meet massive performance demands, and maintain data integrity, among others – and use them to drive the flexibility and responsiveness you need to address tomorrow’s demands.

In this model, you’ll have the freedom to move your ClearPath Forward workloads to appropriately sized application environments across the cloud as you see fit, so you can control cost and better manage transaction volumes. Plus, the ClearPath Forward environment can help you match a sudden spike in transaction rates by giving you the freedom to tap into an instantaneous increase in processing power. And once demand normalizes, you can lower the system’s capacity accordingly.

As part of this vision, you’ll be able to purchase software images of varying sizes and bring them up and down as business needs dictate, without having to source, implement, and manage independent systems. This provides additional agility to absorb fluctuating demand, while helping to keep costs manageable.

These high levels of flexibility and responsiveness make it easier to streamline development – and adopt DevOps principles – as well. You can bring up a small development image, use it until the work is complete, and decommission it until the next project begins. Then, you can spin up a testing environment, put the application through its paces, confirm the viability of what your team built, and shut that down once everything is ready for production.

With the ability to move from development to testing to production at such a rapid pace, you’ll be able to build a continuous, iterative loop that makes it easier to deliver value to your customers at the speed they expect. And you can do so without locking yourself into multiple systems that may go underutilized for months at a time.

These are just a few examples of the wealth of opportunities a cloud-ready ClearPath Forward environment can deliver – and that’s the best part. The hybrid cloud should be about possibility, about having the freedom to take IT – and your business – in whichever direction you choose, when you choose to do it.

And when you decide where you want to go next, you’ll know your ClearPath Forward environment will be there to support you.

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