Breaking Down the Barriers for Moving an Enterprise to Cloud

The IBM Research Integrated Solution (RIS) team has developed, and continues to evolve, a full-service cloud access environment for the entire IBM Research division. This implementation, which we will refer to as IRC (IBM Research Cloud) provides self-service provisioning, access to multiple IBM cloud datacenters, access to IBM Watson services, Kubernetes Clustering [1], DevOps [2] tools, and a host of other useful and emerging cloud services. In addition, the implementation provides automation and simplification of the tasks that users often find the most tedious to complete - registration of virtual machine instances, export compliance, compliance to IBM's security standards, etc. This paper will detail the journey - from primitive cloud access to streamlined, secure, automated cloud access where users have services at the 'tip of their fingers'