This article discusses motivations for moving to a distributed cloud and a new way to get started with it: IBM Cloud Satellite.
The phrase distributed cloud refers to public cloud services dispersed across various geographic locations that are chosen to meet application requirements, but the operations and governance of those services are still centrally controlled by a single public cloud provider.
With the launch of the Cloud Satellite beta program, you can use IBM Cloud anywhere, on the IBM public cloud platform, on premises, or at the edge, delivered as-a-service from a single point of control. With Cloud Satellite, you can focus on app development, not platform differences.
Public clouds matured considerably over the last decade. They are now seen as reliable, secure, and cost-effective for a variety of scenarios. They are usually the first option for developers to deploy a new application and favored by startup organizations that do not have the capital to purchase racks of servers. Enterprises use public clouds too. According to IDG, 81% of enterprises use the cloud in some way and 55% of organizations currently use multiple public clouds. However, several research surveys over the years noted that many enterprise applications did not move to a public cloud and remain on premises. Why is this?
Notably, non-tech industries such as health, retail, and banking lag behind when it comes to cloud adoption. Several reasons prevent organizations in those industries from moving their workloads to a public cloud. Quite often the barriers are data locality requirements (particularly for healthcare and banking) and low latency requirements (particularly for media and telecommunications). As a result, most enterprises are running hybrid environments of on-premises and cloud. Now, that architecture is changing to a more distributed environment with multiple public clouds, data centers, and edge components.
However, this move brings in some problems of its own:
Cloud Satellite can help solve all of these problems, while allowing you to keep a cloud-agnostic mind set and stay on-premises when necessary.
