With some analysts projecting that within the next two years almost 85 percent of companies are expected to adopt a hybrid cloud infrastructure, enterprise CIO’s have a big job in front of them. CIO’s need to find an approach that enables them to migrate workloads in real-time and integrate their existing infrastructures to the cloud. To accomplish this, organizations should start by considering the following questions:

• What kinds of data and applications do you plan to move to the cloud?
• What are the costs associated with making the move?
• How will you comply with governance and security concerns?
• And finally, which cloud provider will be your partner to support this move?

In the past, migration services used to be defined as moving existing infrastructure to a new platform every time you changed vendors. Today, migration has an entirely new meaning. Migration involves moving data and workloads from existing systems to private and public clouds in order to achieve significant savings. And delivering those migration services has become big business. In fact, Markets and Markets estimates that cloud migration services will eclipse $7 billion in the next four years. So choosing the right partner, that offers the right services, is often the difference between a smooth transition into a cloud infrastructure versus never-ending, costly delays.

The IBM Aspera High-Speed Transfer software helps customers securely and reliably migrate large amounts of data to, from, or between any major cloud. We also recently announced IBM Cloud Mass Data Migration, a new offering that is specifically designed to help companies accelerate the secure movement of data – from terabytes to petabytes – into the IBM Cloud.

And earlier this year we introduced Cloud Innovate to help clients discover new insights, transform, and deliver true business value by making cloud migrations predictable, secure and fast, and deliver these as a service. To complement Cloud Innovate and to align the IBM Services Platform with Watson, today we are introducing two additional services to help clients move their existing infrastructure and private cloud applications to the public cloud faster and at lower risk, while improving hybrid cloud deployment efficiency by as much as 60 percent.

The new IBM Cloud Migration Services and IBM Cloud Deployment Services will give companies a significantly less expensive and faster way to migrate existing workloads to the public cloud. The new cloud services also enable clients to more quickly deploy infrastructure automation such as orchestration, as well as apply analytics.

These services help clients migrate to the cloud seamlessly via the IBM Services Platform with Watson. Together, cloud migration, cloud native application development and microservices will help clients deliver business outcomes by transforming their information technology portfolios, and by creating compelling experiences for their ecosystems of customers, suppliers, and employees.

If you’re thinking about your cloud migration strategy and how you’re going to transform your IT infrastructure, look for a partner that brings you the right experience, the right tools for the right workloads, to run on the right cloud. Get your company ready for your cloud future.