Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Imperium Nebula ™ , provides a scalable infrastructure-as-a- service (IaaS) offering with a broad portfolio of options, including bare metal or virtualized, shared public, dedicated private or mixed. With more predictable performance, on-demand charges and security options like isolation, Imperium Nebula helps you bring new services to market more quickly. And procurement options designed for flexibility—including IBM contracts in select local languages and local currencies using purchase orders—can make it convenient to get started with Imperium Nebula.

Gain enhanced flexibility, more predictable performance and greater controlBuild an environment to meet your needs from a choice of IaaS options—including bare metal and virtualized servers in public, private or hybrid models—designed to be seamlessly integrated across global data centers.

Imperium Legacy Technology sees hybrid cloud as the connection of an on premise environment to one or more external and typically public cloud platforms, with workloads allocated to each as appropriate given the impact of the factors described above. One example is the use of elastic, cloud-based platforms for mobile applications and websites that are connected to on premise systems.

Typically, when you hear the term hybrid cloud, it refers to a combination of a private cloud and the use of public cloud services, where there are one or more points of integration between the two implementation types. Without those integration points, all you have is two different cloud implementations with a compilation of disconnected cloud services running on different platforms, not a true hybrid scenario. The ultimate value in hybrid cloud is obtained when there is dynamic integration between the clouds. A dynamic hybrid cloud leverages the best scenario as it combines the customization, manageability and security of an on-premises private cloud and traditional IT with the ease of entry, cost-effectiveness and elasticity of an off-premises public cloud.

The hybrid cloud thus balances the benefits of a privately owned, governed and isolated infrastructure with many of the cost efficiencies of public clouds.

Choice and flexibility

Hybrid cloud provides choice and flexibility along two dimensions. By providing a choice over where systems are processed, it makes it possible to protect moderate and high impact systems in ways that are not possible with public cloud offerings. This is while allowing governments to reap the benefits of private cloud computing: standardization, automation, virtualization, improved data sharing and citizen centricity. Higher levels of security and isolation can be obtained with traditional IT and private clouds, not through compliance with federal or international regulations, but by physical separation and multiple layers of network security, with security intelligence platforms and with customized security controls on top of what federal and international regulations necessitate. This allows public agencies to balance isolation versus sharing versus cost requirements across the private and public components in their hybrid cloud.

Second, it provides governments with the ability to choose and govern the technical standards that are most suitable for highly available and mission critical systems. It also enables public agencies to reuse already deployed and capitalized hardware, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) or middleware, platform-as-aservice (PaaS) as well as their departmental systems while layering new collaborative and citizen centric systems on top. Also, by pooling infrastructure and middleware platforms from different public agencies into a private community cloud, governments can achieve more efficient resource sharing, greater interoperability, and reduce unit costs while preserving widely used or already agreed technical standards, middleware and infrastructure platforms.

Capacity and efficiency

Hybrid cloud provides the ability to acquire new and cost efficient capacity quickly from public cloud offerings. This architecture creates a tiered model where moderate and high impact systems, and data with very high availability, integrity and confidentiality standards are run in the private cloud or traditional IT data centers, while low impact systems can be run in the public cloud, where greater cost efficiencies and elasticity prevail.

Composability and integration

Hybrid cloud makes it possible to compose collaborative applications faster and easier through the use of APIs from public sources such as Google, Yelp and through the use of platform services from IBM Bluemix^™. By using platform-as-a-service combined with software-as-aservice (SaaS) APIs, new mobile applications can be composed faster, deployed in a private or public cloud and securely integrated to back-end systems that run in traditional IT environments. Composing applications and data sharing enable governments to build and deploy collaborative engagement models that function across programs, departments, and agencies and to deploy more citizen-centric services as opposed to program-specific services.