Welcome to the era of the digital enterprise, where digital is
your journey and cognitive is your destination. As business
leaders, you are under growing pressure to use information
to its fullest potential, delivering new customer experiences
as fuel for business growth. The digital economy is changing
the way we gather information, gain insights, reinvent our
businesses and innovate both quickly and iteratively.

In this environment, it’s not enough to just manage data
volume. Organizations need to become cognitive businesses,
combining information and experience to unlock deeper
understanding of customers, processes and strategies. Hybrid
cloud is the new normal, accelerating your transformation
to a digital enterprise through business innovation and
enhanced cloud-enabled solutions designed to maximize
customer engagement, as shown in Figure 1. In fact,
70 percent of IT decision-makers say they expect to always
have a hybrid blend of traditional IT and cloud, according
to a 2016 IBM Center for Applied Insights survey.

A hybrid cloud environment, combining traditional IT systems
and public cloud, enables you to extend business processes
beyond the walls of your organization. For example, many
organizations use public cloud as a collaborative development
environment to create innovative applications that can then be
ported to an on-premises or hybrid production environment.