It wasn’t long ago that organizations were scrambling to move to the cloud. Cloud adoption was a must and getting cloud services up and running was top priority. However, the biggest challenge today isn’t the adoption of the cloud, but the management of cloud expenses. Many teams and users of the cloud are often surprised when they see the size of their monthly spending. This is because the cost of cloud computing is so much different than on-premises data centers. On-premises data centers have a fixed capacity and costs, which leads to maximizing utilization. Cloud computing is charged per transaction and everyone involved needs to be vigilant in consuming as few resources as possible.

At the IBM Think Conference 2019, CEO Ginni Rometty discussed IBM's vision for digital transformation in 2019. "When I say chapter two, I think digital and AI becomes about scale and embedding it everywhere in your business,” said Rometty, as she presented IBM’s decision to make the Watson platform available in Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft Azure and other cloud providers. “This will be the most open, scalable AI for business in the world.” The overall feeling of the Think Conference was a defined openness towards other cloud providers and maximizing customization toward the specific requirements of an organization. With that in mind, the IBM Cloud Garage is focused on assisting companies in identifying their business needs and tailoring a solution to work towards.

StackRox, a leading container and Kubernetes security organization, announced on January 23, 2019 the 2.4 release of its Container Security Platform. The new release allows businesses to quickly manage risks based on context and leverage Kubernetes for scalable policy enforcement. The recent enhancements focus on deployment-centric visibility, multi-factor risk profiling and network policy management.