IBM Adds Sovereign Core Platform Based on Red Hat OpenShift
IBM announced today it will next month make available a technical preview of a sovereign IT platform based on the Red Hat OpenShift platform that enables IT teams to deploy isolated workloads in as little as a single day.
Sachin Prasad, program director for product management for artificial intelligence (AI) and data, said IBM Sovereign Core takes advantage of the Kubernetes foundation at the core of the Red Hat OpenShift platform and other IBM software components to enable IT teams to rapidly deploy an IT environment.
Those components include a management console developed by the HashiCorp arm of IBM and IBM Verify identity access management (IAM) tools. IT teams can also optionally deploy a range of other software components provided by IBM as they see fit, added Prasad.
Scheduled to be made generally available later this year, the IBM Sovereign One platform also provides those IT teams with access to a control plane that enables internal IT teams to manage their IT environments in much the same way cloud service providers do. All authentication, authorization, encryption keys, and access management remains under the control of an internal IT team or IBM service provider partner residing within a specific geographic boundary.
In effect, IBM Sovereign Core provides IT organizations with an architecture that enables them to build and deploy applications in a way that would not be subject to, for example, the U.S. Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act that dictates any organization using IT infrastructure made by a U.S. company could, at least in theory, have its IT platforms seized. At the very least, they would be open to being fined for violating compliance mandates, noted Prasad.
Exactly how enforceable the U.S. CLOUD Act is has yet to be tested, but given the current state of geopolitics many organizations in Europe especially are moving to reduce the amount of infrastructure they rely on from IT vendors headquartered in the U.S.
It’s not clear how pervasive the move to sovereign IT platforms will be but the trend is becoming more pronounced in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Many organizations are looking for ways to ensure that sensitive data doesn’t wind up being used to train an external AI model that then makes the data available to anyone able to craft a prompt to surface it.
More challenging still, the rise of sovereign IT platforms is likely to have a profound impact on providers of cloud computing services, many of which may need to ensure that the workloads they are managing not only reside in a specific region but are also managed by local IT teams.
Ultimately, the one thing that is certain is workloads are going to continue to become more distributed. The challenge, as always, is finding a way to efficiently manage them in a way that doesn’t increase the total cost of IT to the point where it far exceeds available budget resources.
