The challenges facing businesses today are enormous. Not only must you get your core business practice right, you must also be able to reach buyers everywhere, instantly, with 100 percent availability, in a way that’s compelling, easy-to-understand, and highly flexible.

IT is expected to link to everything, make every interaction instant, keep it all rock-solid secure, and do it on a budget.

Responding to changes this seismic will require rethinking not only your physical infrastructure but your entire way of managing developers, IT architects and engineers, and line-of-business management teams.

In this handbook, we’ll explore how you can build a hybrid, highly flexible infrastructure.

• You’ll learn why cloud isn’t the ideal solution for all business challenges and why cloud-only providers are sometimes too limited in what they offer.
• You’ll discover how hybrid solutions enable you to use public and private clouds to extend your on-premises infrastructure and handle workload surges.
• You’ll explore how architectural elements like the Enterprise Service Bus and microservices can help you manage across all your systems, while making sure that business operations stay flexible and agile.
• You’ll examine how decision-support and analytics can give you more control and insight into your workloads.
• You’ll find out how to integrate security into your entire infrastructure, including the Application Programming Interfaces that connect your services.

This guide is a helpful go-to resource that will help you understand how to approach hybrid integration and showcase some of the powerful IBM products and services that can make your digital transformation effective and successful.