IBM has announced a new hybrid cloud solution -- building on its acquisition of Cast Iron -- to help clients significantly reduce the time it takes to connect, manage and secure public and private clouds. With new integration and management capabilities, organizations of all sizes will be able to gain greater visibility, control and automation into their assets and computing environments, regardless of where they reside.

As a result, it should be significantly easier to integrate and manage all of an organization's on-and-off premise resources, and will allow a task that once took several months to be done in a few days.

"As a user of IBM WebSphere Cast Iron, we have been able to not only easily integrate our on-premise and cloud-based applications, but also provide live feeds of order data changes to our sales reps on any device, including mobile phones, tablets and laptops," said Randy Berger, IT manager, Process & Application Development, Siemens. "Expanding on the Cast Iron platform will help IBM provide even better access and management for hybrid clouds."