IBM, IISc Bengaluru to work on hybrid cloud solutions

IBM has teamed up with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) to launch an innovation lab for advanced research in hybrid cloud technologies. The lab, dubbed the IBM-IISc Hybrid Cloud Lab, will be located on-campus at IISc in Bengaluru.

The lab will have students and faculty from multiple departments work alongside IBM research scientists in order to increase hybrid cloud adoption, the Armonk headquartered technology firm said in a statement on Wednesday.

The lab will begin with an initial set of projects involving IBMs Research Lab’s scientists and the departments of computational and data sciences, computer science and automation, and supercomputing education and research center from IISc. The engagement will also include the broader open-source community to foster wider adoption of solutions.

“Our Hybrid Cloud platform is open, and we will jointly develop open-source software that provides interoperability, portability, and security that can be easily accessible,” said Gargi Dasgupta, director, IBM Research India.  

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One of the objectives of the partnership will be to build an autonomous system that can self-heal by diagnosing and healing faults and misconfigurations. The collaboration will adopt microservices to utilise cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes and serverless to bring in agility into processes.  

The two entities will also look to create an artificial intelligence (AI) information management system that can enable enterprises to gather insights from edge, cloud and on-premise data sources. Additionally, AI systems that can analyse languages will be built and used to model and optimise computing systems.

IBM said that the lab will present its research findings in premier conferences, hosting workshops and will continue to release open-source tools/materials to the community.  

“We are particularly excited about making the joint research findings open source which will significantly accelerate innovation in AI and Hybrid Cloud,” said Navakanta Bhat, dean, division of interdisciplinary sciences at IISc Bengaluru.  

A 2020 study by the IBM Institute for Business Value on hybrid cloud said that the value derived from a hybrid or multi-cloud including on-premise cloud is 2.5 times more valuable compared to a single cloud, single platform approach.