devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Category: IT as Code

  • LF Edge Moves Open Networking Push Forward

    LF Edge Moves Open Networking Push Forward

    A vendor-neutral initiative dubbed the State of the Edge was acquired this week by LF Edge, an arm of The Linux Foundation focused on defining an open source stack of software for edge computing applications.

    The State of the Edge project will be merged with the existing Open Glossary of Edge Computing initiative that LF Edge already had in place. That combined initiative will now be known as the State of the Edge project within the larger umbrella of LF Edge projects.

    State of the Edge was launched by Vapor IO, Arm, Rafay Systems, Packet by Equinix and Edge Gravity by Ericsson to provide free research reports. Arpit Joshipura, general manager for networking, edge and Internet of Things (IoT) for The Linux Foundation, said that mission will continue as part of a larger effort to advance open software-defined networking software.

    The goal is to define stacks of software and implementation blueprints that will make it simpler for both telecommunications carriers and enterprise IT organizations to implement open source networking software both at the edge and in the cloud, said Joshipura.

    That’s critical because as IoT continues to evolve it’s apparent that IT and operations technology (OT) teams will converge, he added, noting the challenge is enabling organizations to achieve that goal around using a suite of programmable open source platforms that are truly interoperable with one another.

    Existing LF Edge projects include Akraino Edge Stack, an edge computing platform; Baetyl, a cloud-based management platform; EdgeX Foundry; a framework for sharing data between devices; Fledge, a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) for common administrative tasks; Home Edge, a platform for deploying consumer applications; and Project EVE, a virtualization engine.

    Interest in building and deploying applications at the network edge is on the rise in anticipation of 5G wireless networking services becoming widely available. Most of the organizations building those applications will be relying on best DevOps practices to achieve that goal. Less clear for now is the degree to which traditional network operations will be rolled up into those DevOps practices. The more programmable the networking environment becomes the more control each developer theoretically can have over the network services being accessed by their applications. However, network bandwidth is often a finite resource; there most likely will need to be some governing mechanism that determines how much network bandwidth any one application would be allowed to access at any given time.

    Of course, the open source community is not the only entity eyeing the rise of edge computing. Providers of commercial networking platforms ranging from Cisco Systems to VMware are all focused on enabling edge computing applications. Historically, open source platforms such as OpenStack have been embraced by carriers. However, within enterprise IT environments open source networking platforms have not gained much traction. The open source community will need to galvanize around a set of platforms and blueprints for edge computing platforms quickly. Otherwise, many organizations will most likely turn once again to commercial networking platforms to provide services to edge computing applications.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Three Priorities for IT Operations Continuity During the COVID-19 Pandemic

    Three Priorities for IT Operations Continuity During the COVID-19 Pandemic

    The world has been turned upside down amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, and organizations that are trying to maintain best IT and security practices are faced with new challenges such as sudden remote workforces, increased COVID-19-related phishing and business e-mail compromise scams, and quarantine-imposed travel restrictions. 

    Are you facing disruptions in your workforce, limitations in the supply chain and up-ended disaster plans? You’re not alone. A recent survey, Critical Gaps in Business Continuity Plans: Exclusive Survey Results, reported that 62% of businesses surveyed have business continuity plans, but 48% said their plans only cover emergency operations for two to three weeks.

    With increased limitations affecting enterprises, what are the top three things organizations must prioritize for optimal security and minimal outages to aim for business as usual?

    Consider the Cloud

    If you have been considering the cloud for your IT and information security infrastructure, now might be the right time to explore all your options and make strategic moves. Eighty-three percent of enterprise workloads will be in the cloud this year, according to a recent LogicMonitor cloud study, and security hardware and applications will be no exception to that trend. The cloud can increase your capacity and facilitate remote access to vital business functions, especially now when redundancy and scalability are more important than ever. 

    For example, the cloud could be a temporary solution for a retailer whose existing payment processing infrastructure is overloaded and declining transactions as a result. It doesn’t replace their existing on-premises environment, but it augments it by adding on-demand scalability. This could cover a temporary surge in demand or stand in during a full-blown outage. Do you know whether your existing applications have cloud-based extensibility?

    Quite often, organizations aren’t aware of the cloud capabilities they can already utilize. During times of uncertainty, the cloud can be a good temporary approach and does not have to be a big expenditure. Organizations can pursue the cloud with a low commitment, month-to-month contract, and consider it more permanently at a later date.

    When moving workloads to the cloud, considering security is of paramount importance. Many public cloud providers such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform offer functions to help secure these workloads and applications, and one gaining a great deal of attention is encryption key management. All major public cloud providers offer methods for their users to self-manage the keys used to encrypt, decrypt, digitally sign,and validate data. This technology is known as Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) and is a high assurance method for letting organizations retain control of their own cryptographic keys even after moving to the cloud.

    Ensure Redundancy

    System failures are not an option in mission-critical environments, and redundancy will offer up backup to increase the reliability of your systems. Given the current COVID-19 situation, do you have backup resources that can continue to process data without interruption? What if your data center is out of service altogether? Do you have another that can keep your infrastructure operational? 

    As an example, let’s look at cryptographic key management. Numerous business applications offload private key storage to purpose-built devices known as hardware security modules (HSM). HSMs are tamper-evident, tamper-responsive servers typically certified to rigorous requirements such as FIPS 140-2 Level 3. A typical information security infrastructure may only have throughput requirements to justify a single encryption HSM that is partitioned to provide services to multiple business applications. But if this single HSM fails or must be taken offline, any application relying on it for cryptographic key management may also become unavailable. 

    In this scenario, the ideal data security infrastructure would comprise multiple HSMs along with at least one centralized management server, split between multiple geographically separated data centers. This example can be extended out to virtually any other type of IT hardware, but it is particularly important for resources representing a single point of failure, where their outage would have cascading impacts throughout your enterprise ecosystem.

    To mitigate these risks, talk to your vendors about data security and redundancy options; you might be surprised at their offerings. And consider more than just individual device outages, too. What if you can’t get into your data center? Taking a hybrid approach to infrastructure design, where you rely on a diverse set of tools to prepare you for a wide range of potential problems, will let you maintain the redundancy and high availability that your users and customers expect.

    Monitor Your Data Centers

    Now is the time to monitor your IT operations even more closely than usual to spot extremes and help with scalability and capacity planning. Can your infrastructure handle the increase of users and transactions? Are you accounting for handling higher volumes that come with an increasingly remote workforce? How would your organization handle a service disruption if you experienced an outage? Closely monitoring your IT and security resources to look for spikes and surges can guard against oversaturation and could help justify offloading workloads to cloud data centers.

    Malicious actors often ramp up their activities in times of crisis, specifically because they know that companies’ focus is otherwise occupied. Automated monitoring can greatly assist in preventing these types of attacks, but only if proper baselines and profiles are established. For example, looking at an enterprise cryptographic ecosystem, if a bank knows its HSMs are validating 10,000 PINs per second on average, and suddenly that number spikes to 100,000 per second, they should immediately investigate. Intelligent monitoring and health-checking technology is designed for these exact types of scenarios, as well as to identify infrastructure health issues so administrators can respond proactively rather than reactively.

    Your organization’s IT infrastructure and data security are depended on to be reliable, and your IT operations continuity effort needs to be prioritized now more than ever. Here’s to keeping your employees, and your IT infrastructure, in good health.

    — Ryan Smith

  • HPE Expects Increased Reliance on Virtual Desktops

    HPE Expects Increased Reliance on Virtual Desktops

    Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) is making it easier for organizations to migrate to virtual desktops that can be deployed on servers in an on-premises IT environment.

    Peter Mansell, global practice director for digital workplace at HPE, said that in the wake of COVID-19 pandemic more organizations will be moving to centralize the management of desktops to make their IT environments more resilient. To facilitate that transition, HPE is making available servers that come pre-integrated with virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) software from Citrix or VMware. Those servers can be acquired under standard acquisitions with 90-day payment deferrals if required or as short-term rentals, he said.

    Alternatively, organizations can deploy VDI software on HPE Greenlake, a set of servers that HPE manages on behalf of customers.

    Historically, the adoption of virtual desktops has been limited for reasons that range from total cost to simple inertia. However, one of the downstream impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic will be the greater centralization of desktop applications. In most cases, that will mean relying on either cloud services or VDI platforms that make it easier to access desktops remotely, Mansell said. The cloud, however, is not an option for many highly regulated industries that are required to maintain control over their IT infrastructure, he noted.

    Of course, end users would still need to find a secure way to remotely access those servers assuming there is enough available bandwidth. However, from a management perspective, it would be much easier for IT administrators, who are now trying to push updates to a wide variety of devices as the bulk of the workforce continues to work from home indefinitely.

    Up until now at least, resistance to centralizing desktops has been high among both end users and Microsoft. However, with the rise of the Azure cloud, Microsoft has been encouraging organizations to centralize management of desktops. Mansell said in addition to making VDI servers available, HPE is working with Microsoft to make virtual desktops running on the Azure cloud available to HPE customers as well. End users, meanwhile, increasingly rely on cloud applications, so the dependency they once had on applications that run locally has decreased considerably.

    Each organization will need to determine whether it makes sense to centralize the management of desktops. Beyond ensuring business continuity, most organizations will be experiencing a significant amount of financial pressure in the months ahead. One way to reduce costs would be to reduce the number of IT administrators required to manage operating system and application updates across fleets of devices. In fact, some organizations may not even have to acquire fleets of devices if end users are employing their own machines to access virtual desktops.

    Whatever the path forward, the COVID-19 pandemic has made more organizations aware of how easily their operations can be disrupted by events beyond their control. The issue now is coming up with a business continuity plan that minimizes the impact those disruptions can have on IT as much as possible.

    — Mike Vizard

  • VMware Extends Network Virtualization Reach

    VMware Extends Network Virtualization Reach

    VMware today announced the general availability of an update to its NSX-T network virtualization software that adds support for NSX Federation, which enables IT teams to apply global policies and isolate domains to contain problems to a single zone. Other capabilities being added via NSX-T 3.0 include support for Level 3 Ethernet virtual private networks (L3 EVPN), multicast routing and improved data plane performance.

    In addition, VMware revealed that next month it will make available an update to VMware vRealize Network Insight that employs machine learning algorithms and statistics to discover application flows across a virtual network.

    VMware is also making generally available intrusion detection and prevention (IDS/IPS) capabilities to a previously announced software-defined firewall, along with support for AWS Direct Connect, VMware SD-WAN application and business policy statistics; enhanced Kubernetes visibility, integrations with the VMware Tanzu cloud service for managing containers; the latest release of VMware Cloud Foundation; and VMware NSX-T 3.0.

    Finally, VMware announced that VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud software has now been integrated with the Microsoft Azure Zones portal to simplify provisioning on that public cloud.

    Tom Gillis, senior vice president and general manager for the Networking and Security Business Unit at VMware, said as part of the overall effort to reduce costs in the wake of the sudden downturn in the economy as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, VMware expects many organizations will accelerate the rate at which they are transitioning to network virtualization to replace many of the hardware appliances they currently rely on. For the amount many organizations are paying for software and support for those appliances, they could be transitioning to a much more flexible approach to networking that provides a cloud experience spanning on-premises and public cloud computing platforms, he said.

    Gillis also noted it is now only a matter of time before VMware extends the control plane of its network virtualization software to the physical network underlay on which NSX-T is deployed. That capability will enable IT organizations to further reduce costs by eliminating the need to deploy multiple control planes, he said.

    According to VMware, the number of customers that are consuming some element of its Virtual Cloud Network portfolio now exceeds 15,000, which represents on average a 50% growth rate each fiscal year since May 2018.

    Gillis made it clear that in the months ahead a much larger swath of networking will become automated to drive down costs. Most organizations have adopted some level of network automation. However, Gillis said partial automation is an “oxymoron”—once most organizations start down the automation path the network becomes just as programmable as other IT infrastructure that is now managed as code.

    It may take a while for networks to come fully automated at a time when many network engineers still prefer to use command-line interfaces (CLIs) to manage network infrastructure. However, as networking continues to become more complex in the age of the cloud, it’s not so much a question of whether organizations will automate networking as it is to what degree and using which platform.

    — Mike Vizard

  • The Linux Foundation Throws Weight Behind Secure Microkernel

    The Linux Foundation Throws Weight Behind Secure Microkernel

    The Linux Foundation announced today it will host the seL4 Foundation, the nonprofit organization established by Data61, an arm of Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Australia that has been developing the seL4 microkernel operating system.

    Gernot Heiser, who will serve as chair of the new foundation, said the seL4 is unique in that it is mathematically proven to be secure, which provides a robust foundation on which a new generation of embedded systems can be built to drive, for example, internet of things (IoT) applications.

    Founding members of the seL4 Foundation include Data61, University of New South Wales in Sydney, HENSOLDT Cyber GmbH, Ghost Locomotion Inc., Cog Systems Inc. and DornerWorks Ltd.

    The hosting of the seL4 Foundation is sure to add more fuel to an increasingly fierce debate over the future of operating systems. Advocates of microkernels contend operating systems in terms of functions and size should be kept to an absolute minimum to both ensure security and maximize flexibility.

    Rather than loading functions into the operating system, most functions should be accessed in user space above the operating system. That approach allows organizations to take advantage of a modular architecture to swap capabilities out as they best see fit.

    However, supporters of traditional operating systems such as Linux and Windows contend organizations are better served by operating systems that run the same functions consistently. Linus Torvalds, who oversees the development of the core Linux operating system, has been especially critical of microkernel-based approaches to building operating systems.

    Between those two extremes have emerged containers, which package many of the functions once handled by the operating system into a container alongside application code to make it easier to run containers on multiple variants of operating systems. That shift has subsequently led to increased reliance on lighter-weight operating systems that only provide the basic functions required to run a container.

    Microkernel-based operating systems in time most will likely lend themselves better to many emerging use cases, especially on various emerging edge computing platforms where security is a paramount concern. The smaller the operating system, the less attack surface there is to defend. One of the issues that organizations of all sizes contend with today is the stack of software that needs to be defended is a lot larger than they may absolutely require.

    Of course, it remains to be seen how much momentum The Linux Foundation can generate for the seL4 project, which currently is supported only by a relatively small number of organizations. The degree to which organizations may back seL4 or some other similar initiative may come down to the degree to which they have grown tired of ceding control over what goes into an operating system to either Microsoft or the oligarchy that currently dominates the development of Linux. Regardless of where any organization falls on that spectrum, the one thing that is clear is given the scope of all the other open source projects supported by The Linux Foundation, it’s probable a lot more organizations are about to become a lot more involved in that debate whether they want to or not.

    — Mike Vizard

  • GigaSpaces to Provide Free Go-Live Services

    GigaSpaces to Provide Free Go-Live Services

    GigaSpaces, a provider of a platform for processing analytics data in real-time, will be making available professional services for free during the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic as part of a Go Live initiative to reduce the total cost of acquiring and implementing its platform.

    Yoav Einav, vice president of product for GigaSpaces, said the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic shows it’s apparent organizations of all sizes will need to reduce their IT costs. At the same time, many organizations will need to keep IT projects moving forward as nascent digital business strategies now become business continuity strategies, he said. Most of those business continuity plans will be contingent on providing a better digital customer experience based on real-time analytics.

    GigaSpaces has been building up its professional services capability for the past several months and plans to tap into the expertise of third-party IT services providers to make sure there is enough available expertise in the right place to meet anticipated Go Live demand.

    GigaSpacesIt’s still unclear to what degree IT projects will be impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Undoubtedly, many IT projects are being paused or outright canceled, especially in vertical industry segments that have been among the hardest hit. Organizations that are moving IT projects forward, however, should expect to IT vendors to help reduce the total cost of implementing those projects by providing free additional services, as in the case of GigaSpaces, or at the very least much more flexible payment terms.

    There are, of course, some vertical industry segments where organizations are building new applications that are highly relevant. One GigaSpaces customer, for example, is racing to build an application that will make it easier to find critical healthcare supplies that are frequently out of stock when needed most, noted Einav. Other organizations are simply moving to reduce costs by offloading queries from traditional databases.

    In many cases, organizations will be evaluating which platforms to employ to build these applications not just on the raw performance attributes of the platform but also how quickly those platforms can be implemented. As such, the robustness of the IT services ecosystem, including its overall DevOps acumen, will become a more critical evaluation criterion.

    In the meantime, a major transition away from legacy batch-oriented applications toward applications that process data in near real-time that has been gaining momentum now for several years should continue. Most organizations are now going to require the sub-second performance of a financial services application. However, visibility into supply chains in near real-time is becoming a bigger requirement, especially when many of the organizations that make up the supply chain are potentially not as economically resilient as they once were.

    Less clear is the rate at which the transition to near real-time applications will now occur. However, at a time when competition between organizations is about to become more fierce than at any time in recent memory, many organizations are about to discover how big a difference modern applications can really make.

    — Mike Vizard

  • COVID-19 Response: Espressive Makes AI Help Desk Free for 90 Days

    COVID-19 Response: Espressive Makes AI Help Desk Free for 90 Days

    Espressive, a provider of a help desk software that makes extensive use of artificial intelligence (AI), announced this week it will provide free access to its software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for the next 90 days.

    Company CEO Pat Calhoun said the COVID-19 Rapid Assistance Program is intended to provide a way to augment existing help desks that are now being overwhelmed by requests from end users working from home.

    With a massive spike in IT incidents being seen since the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic, many help desks are now simply overwhelmed. In some cases, Calhoun said some end users are finding themselves on hold for 2.5 hours or more.

    Espressive, via its Barista virtual agents, provides a means to automatically address most routine requests using chatbots and a natural language processing (NLP) engine that the company developed specifically to address help desk use cases.
    The Espressive platform has already been trained to recognize 750 million phrases, Calhoun said, noting each time a new phrase is added to the NLP engine, the entire customer base benefits from the addition.

    Organizations that are finding it difficult to handle the volume of support calls being made by often geographically distributed remote workers can employ chatbots via a SaaS platform in a few hours, Calhoun said. In many cases, IT staff are trying to respond to help desk requests using on-premises applications that they need to access remotely, often using cumbersome virtual private network (VPN) software. A SaaS platform provides an alternative approach that is designed from the ground up to be accessed remotely, he said.

    Chatbots are already being widely employed online by customer service organizations with mixed success. Most end users, however, are at the very least familiar with interacting with them. In the case of IT support calls, the volume of requests is within a narrow range of tasks that could be handled via a chatbot, such as requesting a new password.

    Many organizations have already been gradually infusing AI into their help desk operations. The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to accelerate that transition. AI isn’t likely to completely eliminate the need for help desk staff anytime soon. However, it does provide a way to scale help desk services at a time when IT staff are trying to manage a massive transition in how and when applications are accessed by the entire organization.

    Naturally, it remains to be seen how much organizations will rely on AI to resolve support issues once the current pandemic crisis has passed. Short of being replaced altogether, there are many rote tasks that many IT professionals would just as soon not have to manually perform multiple times a day. The challenge now is defining the line between where an interface between man and machine makes the most sense for the benefit of all. In the meantime, to one form or another, chatbots are now here to stay.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Taming the Shadow IT Beast and Runaway Spend

    Taming the Shadow IT Beast and Runaway Spend

    Do you know how much IT resources your employees are consuming?

    According to research conducted by the Everest Group, shadow IT spending accounts for a whopping 50% or more of the IT budget. Beyond these costs, shadow IT could end up costing you big in terms of a security breach: Gartner estimates that 33% of security attacks will be on shadow IT resources by 2020. Simply put, shadow IT isn’t just an expensive problem to have. It’s a threat to your business.

    You Can’t Blame Developers for Going Rogue

    DevOps and application teams are a key consumer of IT resources in your organization—they’re agile teams who need to get product releases out the door quickly. They need to get the job done, and will provision any resource that will get them there, even if it means going around IT.

    Still, you can’t blame these developers for going rogue: They need the right resources when they need them, and IT, busy responding to multiple tickets while juggling daily fires, can’t always meet those needs in a timely fashion. From a developer’s perspective, though, the fact that IT is firing on all cylinders to do their best doesn’t matter. For them, waiting days for resources may as well be an eternity.

    Giving Your DevOps Teams the Goods

    In a perfect world, DevOps and application teams would get access to the resources they need without the back and forth of ticketing systems, or the complexity of provisioning resources on systems that are totally unfamiliar systems. The latter is especially risky because it can introduce potential security holes that could be exploited by attackers.

    To this end, IT’s ultimate goal should be to enable self-service provisioning for DevOps and application teams. Creating a catalog that only serves up the resources relevant to the requesting team is one option here. Through blueprints, a repeatable way to orchestrate and automate provisioning of resources, this self-service nirvana becomes a reality: IT delivers resources in minutes, not days or weeks, and developers get what they need without putting the organization at financial and operational risk.

    Delivering Self-Service, but with a Safety Net

    Of course, IT wants to be as efficient and agile as possible, though not at the expense of control over cost and compliance. So, while enabling DevOps, IT also needs to monitor and contain cross-cloud spend.

    To accomplish this, IT can set automated quotas and limits, ensuring that user access to AWS resources, memory and more, is tightly controlled. They can also set up controls, such as power scheduling and expiration dates, to further control costs. As a result, VMs can’t be left on gobbling resources over the weekend, and demo environments shut down automatically when no longer used.

    From a security and compliance standpoint, IT can prevent teams from going rogue by determining who can do what. For instance, this could be who can orders servers, workloads and XaaS—along with quotas set for spend and resource usage—to who can approve fulfillment of those orders. This way, resources are never overprovisioned, and a real tally is kept as to exactly who is using which resources across the business.

    Taming the Shadow IT Beast

    With a better handle on cloud spend and resource usage, IT teams can put a dent in the 44% of IaaS compute spend stemming from non-production resources that are accidentally left running, according to ParkMyCloud. At the same time, they can stay on top of security and compliance, while still giving DevOps the tools they need, with orchestration blueprints that automate resource provisioning on a repeated basis. Taming the shadow IT beast, allowing developers to access resources in seconds with a self-service catalog, frees up IT teams to tame all the other beasts they face on a daily basis.

    — Brian J. Kelly

  • Comparing Three Approaches to Multi-Cloud Security Management

    Comparing Three Approaches to Multi-Cloud Security Management

    Moving to a multi-cloud environment can bring many advantages, but it also brings huge challenges in managing both the everyday operations and security of multi-cloud infrastructures.

    To meet these challenges, several approaches to multi-cloud management have arisen. The most common can be roughly grouped into three categories: Cloud Management Platforms (CMPs), Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and cloud-native abstraction. The differences between these approaches reflect the differences between top-down and bottom-up cloud management, as each management process suits a different set of companies.

    In this article, we’ll take a look at all three approaches, explain what the advantages and disadvantages of each are and then explore whether new approaches to multi-cloud management are required.

    CMPs

    CMPs are the highest level approach to cloud management—the approach that is furthest away from the native code that your clouds run on. The rise of CMPs has come as the result of a simple observation: public cloud services are redundant and overlapping, and can therefore be managed through an abstraction layer that hides the complexities of what is happening at a cloud-native level.

    By using a CMP, admins do not need to understand the differences between AWS and Microsoft public clouds (for instance), but instead use a consistent interface to manage both.

    This has some huge advantages, primarily when it comes to improving cloud security. CMPs allow IT operations teams to implement a common security layer within multi-cloud environments, and apply the same identity and access management (IAM) processes across all the clouds they are working with. 

    This is particularly useful with cross-cutting applications that interfaces with multiple, critical portions of your cloud storage to help simplify, and which requires highly complex user access policies. This is ultimately one of many reasons why security breaches of cloud-based data are so rare, as 99% of businesses in the UK that rely on cloud-based software have never experienced a security breach. 

    IaC

    IaC is a second approach to multi-cloud management. This approach arose in response to utility computing and second-generation web frameworks, which gave rise to widespread scaling problems for small businesses.

    Administrators took a pragmatic approach: they modeled their multi-cloud infrastructures with code, and were therefore able to write management tools that operated in a similar way to standard software.

    IaC sits in between the other approaches on this list, and represents a compromise solution. It gives more fine-grained control over cloud management and security processes than a CMP, especially when used in conjunction with SaaS security vendors whose software can apply a consistent security layer to a software model of your cloud infrastructure. This is important because SaaS is growing rapidly in popularity, with 86% of organizations expected to have SaaS meeting the vast majority of their software needs within two years. 

    On the other hand, IaC requires a greater level of knowledge and vigilance than either CMP—or cloud-native approaches. If admins are knowledgeable enough to write code that can accurately (and reliably) model multi-cloud infrastructures, IaC can be a powerful way to improve DevOps security. These software models, however, will require constant monitoring to ensure that changes in the cloud-native layer do not introduce vulnerabilities into management tools.

    Finally, IaC can be significantly more efficient, when it comes to computing and network resources, than a CMP. Because IaC software runs closer to the cloud-native layer than (most) CMPs, it can execute common tasks much more quickly.

    Cloud-Native Abstraction

    The final approach to multi-cloud management is to manage your environment using only cloud-native tools. This approach has grown in popularity recently, as developers grew increasingly comfortable with working with containers and Kubernetes directly. Cloud storage providers have responded by offering increasingly complex tools designed to work directly on the cloud-native layer, and the storage provider you use should come with these tools.

    Cloud native application management has several advantages, and several disadvantages. The most obvious advantage is that cloud-native tools give admins a much greater level of control over their multi-cloud environments than the other approaches on this list. Because these tools run natively, they are also typically faster and more efficient than the other approaches we’ve mentioned above.

    On the other hand, saving computing time comes at the cost of increasing the workload for administrators. If you are working across a large number of clouds, managing each separately using each cloud’s native applications can quickly turn into a full-time job. In addition, managing multiple and complex access and usage policies at a cloud-native level can make it difficult for admins to keep on top of how their IAM processes are running, and increases the risk of mistakes. 

    Is It Time For a New Approach?

    All of the approaches above are a different solution to solve the same problem, namely the challenges caused by rapid adoption of multi-cloud technologies. Each, as we’ve seen, has a primary advantage when compared to the others. But in truth, none of the approaches above represents a completely adequate solution to managing security in multi-cloud environments.

    The choice of which approach to take must therefore be a pragmatic one. For companies who are blessed with the knowledge, talent and time to manage multi-cloud infrastructures at a cloud-native level, this is likely to be the best solution, especially at a time when cloud waste is booming. If you take this approach, however, you should also be aware that implementing it will require putting in place thorough and rigorous code auditing processes in order to ensure that any small IaC elements that run on top of cloud-native tools do not introduce common security vulnerabilities into your network.

    For small to medium size businesses, or those running hugely complex multi-cloud systems, CMPs will be a safer bet. The reduced efficiency of these services–both in terms of computing resources and capital investment–is likely to be more than made up for by the reduced load on the admins who spend their days working with them, and the reduction in the number of mistakes that are made.

    Ultimately, it’s apparent that a new approach to multi-cloud management is required. One that combines the flexibility and speed of cloud-native with the ease of CMPs. But at the moment, it’s difficult to ascertain what that will look like.

    — Gary Stevens

  • Laying the Foundation for a Successful Digital Future

    Laying the Foundation for a Successful Digital Future

    Digital infrastructure is under mounting pressure from a variety of powerful technology trends. Whether that pressure stems from DevOps, the cloud, AI, mobile or big data, almost every organization is looking to the future with an eye on modernizing their mission-critical IT systems.

    Unfortunately, the challenge of future-proofing IT infrastructure is often exacerbated by the widespread reliance on legacy technology. Add to that the growing data connectivity complexities across the entire technology landscape, and you face the difficult task of balancing your networking strategy with your other—sometimes competing—technology priorities.

    In particular, legacy networks often lack the performance, control and flexibility today’s digital business models rely on. And they’re increasingly vulnerable to security risks. If that wasn’t enough to give you pause about your network, older technologies often consume a disproportionate amount of your IT budget that you could otherwise invest in modernizing your underlying IT infrastructure.

    That fundamental disconnect leaves little room for maneuvering when current thinking shows that agility is so closely linked to success—and where having a purpose-built network infrastructure is key to successful digital transformation. Just as a new house needs a solid foundation, your digital future requires the right digital infrastructure to meet your long-term challenges. 

    The Issues of Network Modernization Raise Some Big Questions

    Think for a moment about the key issues you face. Can you afford to be at the mercy of an outdated or inflexible network? Can you ignore the enormous potential of transformative technologies? Are you prepared to risk falling behind more agile competitors? Or, alternatively, can digital transformation give you a significant competitive advantage?

    Whatever your priorities are, the bottom line is digital transformation almost always requires advanced on-demand connectivity that can be deployed quickly and cost-effectively. To meet this need, many businesses are turning to software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs) and network functions virtualization (NFV) to build agile networks designed to solve your data connectivity needs today and well into the future.

    Meeting the Challenge 1: SD-WANs

    SD-WANs are purpose-built solutions that deliver agile, secure and scalable connectivity by leveraging intelligent software. One of their main advantages is the centralized network orchestration, control and zero-touch provisioning that provides high-performance networking within a borderless infrastructure across highly distributed enterprises. 

    This high level of flexibility facilitates digital transformation, because SD-WANs can leverage all types of connectivity options (such as MPLS, broadband, 4G and 5G) while automating network functions. One big advantage is the ability to simplify the connection of people, devices and locations to the cloud, providing seamless access to the virtual functions and business services they need.

    SD-WANs also help abstract the complexity of the underlying network to create a virtual layer that simplifies a wide range of network operations. The major benefit here is that there’s no need to manage multiple layers of hardware (such as routers, firewalls and load balancers) that have historically complicated network management.

    This is particularly important for geographically distributed organizations that want to simplify branch or remote office networks, given that SD-WANs can connect new offices or branch locations to the corporate network in hours, rather than weeks or months. This provides a proven way to quickly deploy new apps and services while controlling, or even reducing, networking costs.

    Meeting the Challenge 2: NFV

    Combining SD-WANs with NFV can deliver even greater business benefits since NFV utilizes key network functions on an “as-a-service” basis, improving both network agility and efficiency. It achieves this by replacing legacy network hardware with software that runs in the cloud.

    This approach offers a cost-effective way to modernize diverse network functions ranging from intrusion detection to traffic prioritization and network performance optimization. In this way, you can easily reconfigure your networks to meet the data connectivity needs that lie at the heart of digital transformation. Best of all, you can do so without introducing unnecessary risk, complexity or cost.

    Modernizing Your Network for Digital Transformation

    Modernizing your network infrastructure can deliver the appropriate scale, security and performance needed for modern business. In particular, SD-WANs can help ensure your digital transformation goes hand-in-hand with an equivalent modernization of your network infrastructure. As a result, you can simplify your operations, improve security, respond more quickly to business demands and deliver a much more compelling customer experience.

    — Michael Cabra