As more organizations move to a multicloud environment, data management providers continue to fight for market share. Does that mean a company is out of the game if a competitor gets the business? Not necessarily.

IBM Corp., one of the largest enterprise cloud providers, launched a multicloud manager in the second half of last year to capture revenue even when consumers are using a competitor’s cloud.

“While we want people to focus on the IBM cloud, we are being realistic that they are going to have multiple cloud vendors,” said Eric Herzog (pictured), chief marketing officer and vice president of worldwide storage channels for IBM’s Storage Division. “We want to make sure we support other clouds besides ours.”

In two separate interviews, Herzog spoke with Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Live conference in Barcelona. They discussed how IBM is operating in the hybrid cloud landscape, its partnership with Cisco Systems Inc. in storage and security, and how this partnership can provide a holistic approach to cyber resilience for end users. (* Disclosure below.)

The reasons to go multicloud

The reasons for enterprises to become multicloud are many. Some prefer this for security reasons, as the data will not be stored in just one location, while others want to get a better price by negotiating with more than one supplier. There is also a belief that some workloads work better on one type of structure than on others. The fact is that few companies just use the public cloud today, according to Herzog.

“Some people think multicloud is basically private cloud talking to public cloud,” Herzog said. “And I see multicloud as not just that, but literally … ‘I’m going to use eight or nine cloud providers to keep everyone honest.’”

Here’s part 1 of Herzog’s video interview:

IBM’s multicloud manager respects the customer choice. It has the IBM Cloud as the leading option but is ready to manage all other options.

“So if [customers] use our storage and go to a competing IBM cloud, I do not like that as a shareholder, but it is still good for IBM. Because we are still getting money from the cloud from the storage division,” Herzog stated.

As the storage service is not complete without cybersecurity solutions, IBM has been expanding its security activities. Its objective is to offer a comprehensive security approach, acting on several fronts to avoid problems arising from cyberattacks. For example, IBM uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect anomalous activity and backup datasets, snaps and replicants.

Another tool is to encrypt data to enhance its protection. “In fact, with our object storage, because of the way we do our hashing and the way we do our erasure coding and the way we hide the keys, we basically can make it almost non-crackable,” Herzog said.

As part of its security toolkit, IBM does incidence recovery. “Customers can go back to as many copies or replicas they have, whether it be the file side, block or object,” he explained. “So that would help an incident recovery after they know they’ve had an attack there, they’ve cleaned it up.”

IBM’s strategy works in partnership with the approach of networking companies such as Cisco Systems Inc. that also have security tools, according to Herzog. While Cisco looks at doing all the network security, IBM looks at the storage security.

“None of these things step on each other; it allows the end user to have a truly holistic strategy,” he stated. “We are looking at primary storage and secondary storage and actually hybrid storage as ways for them protect the data, so it is a complementary play.”

Here’s part 2 of Herzog’s video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Cisco Live. (* Disclosure: IBM sponsored these segments of theCUBE. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE