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Tag: cloud adoption

  • Enabling Cloud Adoption in the Government

    Enabling Cloud Adoption in the Government

    In 2022, federal agencies are estimated to spend $7.8 billion on cloud computing. While this spending on cloud computing is necessary, it’s imperative that the government uses its allotted funding appropriately to leverage the cloud’s full potential and avoid common pitfalls.

    Avoiding Common Cloud Adoption Pitfalls

    I’ve frequently witnessed government agencies get locked into a cloud reseller that doesn’t give them the full capabilities offered by AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure. Most people outside of the federal market don’t realize that the government does not buy cloud directly from the cloud providers—apart from some very large contracts like the upcoming JEDI replacement contract vehicle, JWCC. They buy through a network of reseller partners that offer volume discounts and try to bundle managed services to help with cloud management.

    This approach gives the reseller, not the customer, the power to hold the keys to their kingdom—and can make it difficult for the customer to easily switch between cloud providers in the event of poor performance, lack of access or billing transparency. The federal government would benefit from keeping a small, but purposeful, cloud project management office (PMO) in-house. Thus ensuring that root access is available to all the accounts, subscriptions and projects to provide freedom to the agency to more easily change partners as their cloud maturity evolves.

    I’ve also seen government customers unfocused on the holistic end-user experience of actually using the cloud. The result is fragmented collections of different systems, processes and steps that cause engineers to be frustrated and inefficient. Customers must transform the end-to-end cloud provisioning process so that self–service is paramount and existing technology investments are seamlessly and transparently integrated to the end-user. When done correctly, innovation will be the byproduct, because focus can go towards developing the next generation of mission systems and tools—rather than trying to determine how to get a cloud account to begin a project.

    Three Steps Government Agencies Can Take to Get Value from Cloud Infrastructure

    Challenges exist, but there are proven steps the government can take to get the most value from their cloud infrastructure.

    • Define purpose: First and foremost, understand the purpose the cloud infrastructure intends to serve. Are you looking to reengineer cloud architecture, become more cost-efficient, or transform the innovation potential within your organization by introducing new services that can take you farther, faster? Understanding this purpose and your goals will go a long way towards success.
    • Quantify ROI: To get the best return on your investment, understand what resources are already available and which are necessary for your operations. To fully take advantage of the cloud, it is important to make sure basic costs are under control, such as ensuring AWS EC2 or Azure VM instances are not overprovisioned or underutilized. It’s equally important to make sure you take advantage of reserved capacity reservations for your predictable workloads; these can save you 30% or more. Last but not least, keep a focus on fully leveraging technology solutions to help bring all the pieces together in an integrated user-friendly experience across cloud providers.
    • Consider the outsourcing approach: Bringing in cloud resellers and contractors can provide guidance to your organization and help you make better choices. Just like building or renovating a house, agencies need general contractor-type companies that can help to manage and orchestrate the process of migrating to the cloud and all of its moving pieces. These contractors can also help to locate the various specialists required to get the job done for each unique situation. Long term, having a small, efficient cloud PMO is something every agency should strive to have in-house; however, given the demand for cloud engineering talent, the near-term focus should be to ensure flexibility into engagements with partners, so that they don’t hold back the potential of the organization.

    As digital transformation and cloud migration continue, it’s important for the government to stay on pace with its adoption. As of now, most agencies are still relying on manual steps to validate controls and get Authorizations to Operate (ATOs) approved. Making the simple swaps to more automated processes, learning how to leverage cloud resources to their full ability, and outsourcing operations to contractors can make acceleration easy.  There has never been a greater need for cloud enablement. The time to scale up is now.

  • Legacy Systems: Should They Stay or Should They Go?

    Legacy Systems: Should They Stay or Should They Go?

    Digital transformation requires new technologies. But does that mean legacy systems should be replaced?

    Survey after survey has shown that IT and business leaders have had to drastically rethink priorities, strategies and spending in the wake of the global pandemic. A survey our company conducted last October showed that technology spending hasn’t taken a terrible hit—in fact, 60% of IT leaders reported they had either significantly or moderately increased their IT budgets in the last six months. Other research from 2020 mirrors those findings.

    Yet, there are significant challenges. Three top ones reported in the OpsRamp survey include business and IT alignment, available technology solutions and economic uncertainty. Executives want to move forward, yet they need to be cautious with budgets and develop strategies that can flex with the unpredictability of 2021.

    And this is how we arrive at the topic of legacy systems. As part of the reprioritization effort, IT leaders are wise to take a hard look at their technology portfolio and determine which systems should go and which should stay—factoring in economics, business needs, customer demands and change management requirements. Progressive IT leaders know that if they don’t adopt the right technology at the right time, continued business success (and even survival) is at risk.

    Defining Legacy Systems

    We tend to associate a legacy system with a technology that’s been around a long time, yet it could also be a three-year-old system. Legacy systems can be a burden when the UI and the UX look dated, are slow or difficult to upgrade and integrate with other applications, and costly to maintain. Many legacy systems were built for on-premises environments and don’t migrate easily to the cloud. Finally, because some systems are built on languages and technologies that are 10 to 20 years old, IT organizations struggle to find people with the requisite skills to maintain them. These are all red flags.

    On the other hand, there are valid reasons why enterprises maintain legacy systems:

    • The technology technically isn’t broken and satisfies a core business process, industry requirement or customer need.
    • The system integrates with many other applications and core processes, making it difficult to replace.
    • Longstanding vendor relationships make it politically or culturally challenging to abandon.
    • Influential stakeholders love it, despite any negative impact on customers and revenues.

    How to Evaluate a Change

    Even if a system still currently meets your business need, it’s important to understand what your competition is doing and what your customers are asking for to ensure you’ve got a future-proof strategy. Consider Slack, Amazon, Google and Netflix: These innovators have redefined what experiences software can provide and thereby have changed expectations for all users regardless of the sector.

    In IT operations, if a customer is receiving fewer IT alerts due to filtering and correlation capabilities, that’s a good thing. But does the software proactively manage those alerts, filtering out the high-priority items to the right person and suggesting the best next steps for a quick resolution before users are affected?  From the executive and business view, you need to demonstrate efficiencies and cost savings from moving to a new solution as well as revenue-generating impacts.

    Mitigating Snafus With Legacy System Replacements

    When you decide it’s time to make the big move and replace a major system, consider the top factors that can ruin these projects or needlessly delay the time to value:

    • Gaps in knowledge and mindset. Look at what happened when every CIO got a mandate from the CEO to move operations to the cloud. Understanding how the cloud works and how to manage cloud-based assets was a struggle, so most early cloud migrations were simply lift-and-shift. That led to a common scenario in which not only did companies not achieve the savings they expected, but also the environment became even more expensive to support than their on-premises infrastructure.
    • New skills. In lockstep with the gap in strategic understanding of new technologies is the fact that it’s difficult to acquire or build the associated new skills fast enough to keep pace with changes in the market. This is why still today, more than 10 years after the advent of public cloud, there are significant talent gaps in the areas of cloud architecture, cloud optimization and cloud-native development.
    • Cultural changes. People don’t like change, especially if they’re not unhappy with the status quo. IT leaders are improving here, but there’s still ample work in helping convey the reason for change and the benefits to designing a frictionless path to adoption.

    The 3-step Plan to Modernization

    There’s nothing especially new about how to avoid a marred enterprise software implementation, except for the fact that tolerance levels are at an all-time low. Executives don’t want to see one-year rollouts and two-year time-to-value cycles anymore. Here’s how to simplify and speed up the benefits when moving to new platforms:

    1. Start with a small, powerful punch. You can gain momentum with a small project that doesn’t commit the organization to a gargantuan, tangled overhaul. Pick a project that’s not going to stress out your team and has a specific, predictable ROI. Truth is, people love innovation and want to be part of the “next new thing” as long as it doesn’t require too much pain all at once. Make sure to socialize the outcomes across the organization and explain how you did it.
    2. Make the leaders your champions. If your executive team doesn’t feel motivated to promote a new system internally, you might want to investigate whether it’s the right solution. Be sure to get that buy-in before you sign any vendor contract. Communication style matters. Who on the executive team can really create excitement around the future and effectively demonstrate the need for change? You want a salesperson personality for this job.
    3. Foster an evangelist committee. In the trenches, you also need a team of people who understand how to use the new solution and are eager to share their tips. I’ve seen leaders take on a full internal campaign prior to a new system being launched, from rebranding and relabeling an enterprise software package, developing an internal PR strategy around it and creating really effective tools such as short videos to help users get up to speed.

    Balancing Continual Innovation and Lower Complexity

    A legacy system overhaul is not for the faint of heart. You must carefully consider whether your organization is ready to take on transformational change or if an incremental change, such as customization or a new integration to your existing platform, is enough for now. But if incremental change is just going to help you survive another day, it can make the necessary change you really need much more painful later on.

  • Cloud Growth and Other 2020 Trends

    Cloud Growth and Other 2020 Trends

    Growth continued this year as even the COVID pandemic could not slow down the cloud

    The rise of COVID-19 defined 2020 for nearly every industry. Cloud computing is no exception, though growth in the sector continued this year. Gartner estimates that $257.9 billion will be spent on public cloud services in 2020, up 6.3% from 2019. IDC reports that almost half of IT spending is cloud-based, “reaching 60% of all IT infrastructure and 60% to 70% of all software, services and technology spending in 2020.” These projections came in mid-2020, which proves that cloud adoption and spending were not greatly impacted by the pandemic.

    You can make the argument that cloud computing itself is the trend of 2020. Blockchain, quantum computing, machine learning and AI all deservedly earn a lot of headlines in the tech press. But at a more basic level, cloud computing is changing the way we do business. Whether it is the way they store their data, improvements to agility and go-to-market for faster release of new products and services, or how they develop and operate services remotely in today’s “locked-down world,” cloud computing is benefitting all businesses in every sector.

    In short, cloud computing had a strong year in 2020 despite COVID-19 and appears to have a very bright future. Several key trends, perhaps overshadowed by the pandemic, helped define a dynamic year for the sector. These include the following:

    • Continued Dominance of ‘The Big Four’ – All of the big four cloud providers—AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud—reported strong growth and collectively grew 40% in Q320. Together they still account for 63% of the entire cloud sector.
    • Rise of Managed Services – The global cloud managed services market, in particular, is growing rapidly and is expected to reach $116 billion by 2025, growing from $62.4 billion in 2020, according to a study conducted by Markets and Markets.
    • Serverless and Containers – There used to be some talk about serverless and containers replacing the use of traditional virtual machines (VM). But I mostly see customers realizing that VM infrastructure is not going to disappear anytime soon, though container use certainly rose over the last 12 months.
    • Automation – The push toward greater automation continued in 2020. I noticed users accepting greater automation in their infrastructure environments, and there was simply more demand for it across the board. This is great news as one of the major advantages of a DevOps approach is automating away the manual tasks that bog down critical projects.
    • Growth in home use – This may seem an obvious one, but with the COVID-19 pandemic leading companies across the globe to new “work from home” policies, virtual desk infrastructure (VDI) usage exploded.
    • Security – Especially with a remote workforce, cloud security faced new challenges this year. One example of this playing out is in Snowflake’s massive IPO.

    Other trends of note this year included the continued growth of hybrid and multi-cloud and desktop as a service (DaaS). So, while COVID-19 truly defined 2020 for most people, the cloud sector was busy with the trends discussed above. It will certainly be interesting to see how these trends play out in the year ahead. Whatever new trends arise, it seems likely that cloud computing will continue to transform the way we all do business.

  • How To Build Out a Successful Multi-Cloud Strategy

    How To Build Out a Successful Multi-Cloud Strategy

    Navigating even just a single cloud environment can be complicated enough for any startup. Between understanding the range of features on offer, planning for expenditure and ensuring you have the right expertise to leverage the tool to its full potential, the thought of managing multiple clouds can seem daunting.

    However, whether your company is just starting out or has been around for years, the rewards to be reaped from a multi-cloud approach make it a worthy investment. Adopting a multi-cloud strategy offers a whole host of benefits and can allow you to optimize costs when implemented correctly. In fact, a recent Gartner survey of public cloud users found that 81% of respondents are working with two or more providers. In addition, the amount of business applications, services and workloads is set to double over the next two years.

    Here’s what companies of all sizes can gain from going multi-cloud, and how they can do so.

    Why Opt for Multicloud?

    For startups, adopting a multi-cloud strategy can be rewarding from day one. If you’re building your proof-of-concept or are in the design stage of building your infrastructure, leveraging multiple environments at once can help you develop faster and with more advanced tools.

    With access to multiple clouds, you can play around with the strengths of each provider and combine them to get the “best of all worlds,” increasing agility and eliminating vendor lock-in. Having immediate access to more than one cloud also means being able to take advantage of these features as and when you need them, without having to fully migrate to another cloud, which can be a costly and lengthy process. In fact, Gartner analyst Michael Warrilow stated that “most organizations adopt a multi-cloud strategy out of a desire to avoid vendor lock-in or to take advantage of best-of-breed solutions.”

    Opting for a multi-cloud environment also boosts security and disaster recovery and ensures easier migration for some data and applications. Cybersecurity is heightened as spreading applications across different providers means an attack is less likely to bring your entire infrastructure down at once. Furthermore, sticking with one provider inevitably runs the risk of losing control of a mission-critical application during an outage. All of this adds to the overall resiliency of your system’s infrastructure.

    So, how exactly can you get started with your multi-cloud journey?

    Making the Right Cloud Choices

    While a multi-cloud approach can deliver serious value in terms of resiliency, flexibility and cost savings, making sure you’re choosing the right providers requires a comprehensive assessment.

    Luckily, all main cloud vendors offer free trial services so you can establish which ones best fit your needs and see how they work with each other. It will pay to conduct proofs-of-concept using the free trials and run your data and code on each provider. You also need to make sure that you’re able to move your data and code around easily during the trials.

    It’s also important to remember that each cloud provider has different strengths—one company’s best option is not necessarily the best choice for you. For example, if your startup is heavily reliant on running artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications, you might opt for Google Cloud’s AI open source platform.

    Or perhaps you require an international network of data centers, minimal latency and data privacy compliance for certain geographies for your globally used app. Here’s where AWS could step in. On the other hand, you might need your cloud applications to seamlessly integrate with the various Microsoft tools that you already use. This would make the case for Microsoft Azure.

    There are multiple factors at play that you have to carefully consider to ensure ROI of your multi-cloud investment. According to a 2019 Spiceworks study, AWS comes out top for maximum uptime, Azure wins on compatibility and Google Cloud proves to be the best for manageability.

    However, it’s also crucial to remember that there are far more cloud providers than the “big three.” For example, Aliyun is Chinese conglomerate Alibaba’s cloud computing offering, while Oracle and IBM also have their own services. Many startups turn to more niche vendors that can better suit their individual needs, so it could pay to explore alternative options, too.

    Ultimately, you need to understand not only what your current needs are but also how your business goals align with the capabilities of your cloud strategy. Consider what you might need in the future that your current cloud provider doesn’t provide.

    Avoiding vendor lock-in—being able to dip into different features as and when you please—is one of the key benefits of multi-cloud adoption. However, it requires careful planning and assessment of your short- and long-term business goals and how these relate to your cloud infrastructure needs.

    Managing Multiple Cloud Environments Requires Expertise

    There’s no doubt that leveraging a single cloud environment requires team members with experience and know-how of that particular cloud vendor. So, moving to a multi-cloud approach means there’s an even higher demand with regards to the expertise you need at your disposal.

    If your team only has engineers who are experienced with working with Azure, it wouldn’t be a wise move to immediately adopt AWS without recruiting more talent. This is especially true as AWS is the most complex and mature of all of the main cloud providers and requires the relevant knowledge to be able to take full advantage of the tools and applications available. Hence, you need to consult your team at every step of the way on what kind of cloud environment is within their capabilities when crafting your multi-cloud strategy.

    Another vital aspect of multi-cloud adoption is managing the integration of the databases from each cloud provider. This means aligning your data management strategy across each cloud environment, otherwise you risk creating data silos and databases that don’t communicate with each other. Fortunately, many cloud providers include features that let you create clusters and manage and deploy databases. A team that understands the need for this is essential.

    Finally, a DevOps culture is crucial for any successful multicloud strategy. The purpose of multicloud adoption is not only to build out your infrastructure, but also to power continuous delivery and integration when it comes to product development. To ensure you select the best features and determine the right capacity according to your needs and expertise, you need to get the input of your entire DevOps team, including cloud experts, software developers and QA engineers, too. In fact, going one step further, many companies are even building out Cloud Centers of Excellence (CCoE), aa team of cloud experts who drive cloud-based digital transformation across an organization.

    The Balance of Controlling Multi-Cloud Costs

    Controlling and managing your expenditure while adopting a multi-cloud environment is no easy task, especially as your personalized use of the tool, which scales up and down, will result in fluctuating costs. In fact, controlling these expenses can be so difficult that cloud cost management vendor ParkMyCloud predicted that companies spent more than $14 billion on unnecessary cloud infrastructure costs in 2019.

    From a cost-saving perspective, Google Cloud is the best option as it offers more flexible contracts, lower starting costs and clearer visibility into expenditures compared to the other big providers. However, the decision should be taken against the potential ROI of the multicloud strategy you adopt, so calculating the financial optimization that will come from accessing multiple cloud environments can help guide you.

    If possible, it’s a good idea to consult with an expert partner on the ways in which you can best manage costs and maximize ROI. If this isn’t an option, you can use different tools that allow you to create estimates around expenditures.

    As the growing numbers around multi-cloud adoption suggest, it’s a trend that’s delivering value and is here to stay. With a multi-cloud environment, startups and enterprises alike can have flexibility around the features they need, optimize costs, increase security and protect themselves against outages. However, embarking on a multi-cloud strategy is no straightforward task: It requires research, planning and consultation with your technical team. By aligning your business goals with your cloud requirements and democratizing your decision process, you can ensure you get the most out of your multi-cloud investment.

  • VMware Starts to Gain Some Momentum on AWS

    VMware Starts to Gain Some Momentum on AWS

    The number of IT organizations planning to move application workloads to the cloud that today run on VMware appears to be accelerating in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    A survey of 1,054 IT and business professionals conducted by Faction, a provider of IT services, conducted in June finds more than half (51%) of all respondents are either accelerating their cloud adoption timeline or moving forward as planned. Among respondents considering deploying workloads on VMware Cloud on AWS the percentage is 8 points higher (59%), with scalability cited as the primary driver by more than half of respondents (52%). A quarter of respondents (25%) planning to make that transition said they plan to add or increase workloads on VMware Cloud on AWS in the next 12 months.

    Top use cases among IT organizations currently running VMware Cloud on AWS are data center extension (26%), AWS integrated applications (22%) and cloud migration (18%). Among those considering VMware Cloud on AWS, the top use cases cited are data center extension (25%), disaster recovery (23%) and test & development (17%).

    VMware may also be starting to gain some traction with cloud-native applications based on Kubernetes. The survey finds that while the VMware Tanzu platform is currently being used by only 1% of all respondents, 18% said they plan to adopt Tanzu in the next two years.

    Duan van der Westhuizen, senior vice president for marketing and product at Faction said the survey shows VMware is making clear gains in the cloud. The biggest issue now is a lack of skills among internal IT departments looking to deploy workloads on VMware Cloud on AWS, said van der Westhuizen.

    Of course, there are multiple ways to migrate application workloads to the cloud. Some IT organizations may opt to refactor applications to run natively on the open source virtual machines provided by AWS. Others may decide to encapsulate applications in containers that can then be deployed on top of any virtual machine. Regardless of the approach, the need to make applications available at a time when local data centers are inaccessible has driven many organizations to reconsider their options. One of the options is to do not do anything at all. VMware makes a variety of tools available via software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms that IT teams can employ to remotely manage workloads running anywhere.

    It’s not clear to what degree workloads are moving to the cloud, given how unevenly vertical industries have been impacted by the economic downturn brought on by the downturn. The survey finds the top four industries considering VMware Cloud on AWS are technology services, financial services, health care and government. Among those organizations for which COVID-19 has paused or canceled cloud migrations, top factors are budget pressures (75%). Staffing shortages and macro-economic uncertainty each tied at 41%, the survey noted.

    Virtual machine platforms from VMware are not going to disappear from the IT landscape anytime soon. However, given the number of options, IT organizations now have at their disposal, it appears less likely VMware will be able to continue its historic dominance over application workloads in the enterprise.

  • Survey Shows Accelerated Shift to Cloud, With Caveats

    Survey Shows Accelerated Shift to Cloud, With Caveats

    A survey of 250 IT leaders published by Snow Software, a provider of software asset management software, finds 91% are changing their cloud strategy in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

    The survey also finds twice as many respondents report they are accelerating cloud migration (45%) and digital transformation (41%) projects versus those putting cloud migration (22%) or digital transformation (21%) initiatives on hold.

    At the same time, however, nearly a third of respondents (32%) said they are asking their cloud vendors for extended payment terms, while 31% are renegotiating their cloud contracts. Around 10% of respondents indicated that they would not be able to pay their cloud bills last month.

    More than three-quarters of respondents (76%) said they have increased their use of cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and even private clouds.

    In addition, more than half of respondents (55%) noted an increase in the use of collaboration tools such as Slack, Teams or Google Chat, while 52% said they have seen an increase in the use of cloud-based videoconferencing software such as Zoom, Cisco WebEx or GoToMeeting.

    Overall, 60% of IT leaders said they are continuing to increase cloud use.

    Jesse Stockall, chief architect for cloud management for Snow Software, said the results show the cloud has played a critical role in enabling employees to work from home. In many cases, the first thing to be shifted to the cloud was application testing environments. With development teams working from home the only way to effectively set up a testing environment is in the cloud.

    At the same time, Stockall said entire applications have been lifted and shifted to the cloud using containers. Rather than refactoring these applications, IT teams decided to encapsulate entire applications in a container that could be deployed on any virtual machine. IT teams then will spend the next few months converting those monolithic applications into a series of microservices that can run natively on cloud computing platforms, he noted.

    Stockall expects that approach to lifting and shifting applications first and modernizing them second to accelerate as more organizations conclude working remotely is now part of the new normal. Employees may soon head back into the office, but many more of them increasingly will access applications from home. Business and IT leaders are also unsure whether a second wave of the pandemic might make local offices and data center once again inaccessible, he added.

    Many IT organizations will also be replacing legacy virtual private networks (VPNs) with software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs) to make cloud applications more accessible, Stockall, noted.

    The COVID-19 pandemic may prove to be a seminal moment in the history of cloud computing; while cloud computing has been around more than a decade, the bulk of applications still run on-premises. However, once many local data centers became inaccessible overnight, strategies that called for either replacing or modernizing those applications are being accelerated.

    It’s not clear how many of those on-premises applications might be retired altogether. Whatever the outcome, there’s never been more focus on where application code is being built and deployed.

  • Why SDN’s Hot Streak Continues in 2020

    Why SDN’s Hot Streak Continues in 2020

    The software-defined networking (SDN) market is expected to grow by double-digits between now and 2023, driven by the increasing mainstream adoption of this technology. And for good reason: SDN gives IT the ability to make changes through software code instead of reconfiguring each device, and manage data traffic from a central console to move it in any direction.

    Communication gear still drives the physical movement of bits, but software drives the data plan and the control plan. This allows network managers—and even applications—to dynamically manage network resources based on complex system needs. SDN supports real-time integration across multiple servers, services and clouds, and it also processes huge volumes of data. IT departments can now overcome traditional networking issues such as performance bottlenecks and develop a more responsive network strategy.

    SDN Plays a Critical Role in Cloud Adoption and Improves Security for IT Departments

    SDN architecture integrates easily with cloud-based environments, both public and private ones. This gives network managers greater flexibility, speed and automation in managing their network clouds.

    On the security front, SDN allows an IT department to divide a network connection between an end user and the data center, and provide different security settings for the various types of network traffic. For example, a network could have one public-facing, low security network without any sensitive information. But another network segment could have a software-based firewall and encryption policies that allow for more sensitive data to travel over it. Having the ability to match security policies to specific workloads is a key advantage of SDN. 

    One of the hottest trends with SDN is microsegmentation, where IT professionals customize security settings to different types of traffic. With this security model, the goal is to apply segmentation rules down to the workload or application. This mitigates the likelihood of an attacker migrating between compromised workloads or applications to others. Basically, microsegmentation creates intelligent groupings of workloads based on their characteristics as communicated inside the data center. This approach does not depend on dynamically changing networks, specific business or technical requirements which means microsegmentation provides enhanced security.

    The software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) takes SDN even further by connecting enterprise networks over large geographical areas, such as branch offices and data centers. Traditional WAN connections typically needed technology that required special proprietary hardware. SD-WAN moves more of the network control into the cloud through software, allowing for greater scalability, flexibility and reduced hardware costs. SD-WAN is expected to grow even faster than SDN in the coming years for several reasons:

    • Greater reliability of application performance, a huge advantage for users in today’s digital workspaces.
    • High level of connection security for cloud applications without performance trade-offs.
    • Increased bandwidth which reduces congestion and slowdowns.
    • More business agility through faster deployments of new applications.
    • Simpler IT administration through a centralized console instead of in-field configurations.

    SDN and its offspring of SD-WANs continue to defy expectations in creating greater agility, flexibility, security and reliability. Leading-edge IT organizations are embracing the imperatives of digital transformation through SDN and SD-WAN to provide for agile deployment, provisioning and operational management.

    — Melinda Cross

  • Challenges with the Rapid Adoption of Cloud-Native Technologies

    Challenges with the Rapid Adoption of Cloud-Native Technologies

    To keep pace with the ever-changing digital landscape, today’s enterprises are trying to move to the cloud as fast as possible. As more and more companies move toward implementing cloud native and open source technologies to enable agility and increased time-to-value, the operational impacts to the business can be significant. While these challenges can cause serious setbacks and complexity, if an organization addresses them from the very beginning as part of its cloud strategy, it can overcome any trial.

    The following are top challenges enterprises may face when rapidly adopting cloud native technologies. 

    Intense Competition and Market Pressure

    As businesses fight to keep their competitive edge, they are feeling significant pressure to adopt new initiatives to achieve greater business velocity. New initiatives such as data analytics, data science and cloud computing are being leveraged by organizations to gain an advantage while disrupting how businesses have traditionally been performed. 

    Lack of Maturity and Interoperability of Many Open Source Technologies

    Understanding the cloud landscape is a critical component for kicking off any digital transformation project, but the state of each technology varies significantly. Because so many of these technologies are open source, getting a true understanding of maturity can be challenging. Some solutions are in very early stages with low commercial adoption and support, while other solutions are at a later stage and much more mature.

    Unfortunately, most of these technologies were not built to ensure interoperability from the beginning and the efforts of jamming together multiple disparate solutions from the cloud native landscape is complex and rife with challenges. This is why it is imperative that modern organizations ensure its solutions are enterprise-grade, ready to scale and nearly fool-proof to challenges. 

    No Clear Best Practices or Architectural Standards

    Because many of these new technologies lack maturity, the right information and proper documentation is scattered and difficult to distill. How can developers trust if an application is safe to include in their implementation if they are unsure whether documentation is correct and up-to-date? Since many of these open source technologies do not have well-defined best practices or architectural standards, implementing these solutions can be a huge business risk.

    Limited Choices for Leveraging External Domain Expertise and Support

    In order to ensure that organizations’  Day 2 operations go smoothly, they need the right expertise to provide guidance and support. Unfortunately, because so many of these technologies are new, there is a very limited pool of talent—both internally and externally—organizations can pull from. Organizations need the right technical support and services to operate and scale effectively, and with limited options available, the complexities of long term success can be a huge barrier.

    The Complexity of Managing Ongoing Operations

    Implementation is just the beginning, what really enables businesses to be successful with any digital transformation initiative is tackling ongoing Day 2 operations. This means ensuring that technologies work well together, the team understands how to leverage the technologies and organizations have an operational readiness plan for continued development and ongoing improvement. So many businesses focus their attention on what happens before production and as a result, success is not always achieved. 

    When beginning a cloud native journey, enterprises must be conscious of the inherent challenges rapid adoption poses. Competition, lack of maturity and best practices, limited choices and complexity can all complicate an enterprise’s journey to the cloud. Awareness of potential problems can help stop issues before they arise while easing the transition to the cloud.

    — Tobi Knaup

  • Castles in the Cloud: How to Take Your Business Kingdom Off-Prem with Confidence

    Castles in the Cloud: How to Take Your Business Kingdom Off-Prem with Confidence

    Cloud transformation requires migrating all or part of an organization’s virtual assets off-premises, typically to a public cloud.  This enables greater efficiency and cost savings, among other benefits, but it brings heightened risk as well. At the same time, many organizations moving to the cloud don’t fully understand the implications in terms of security. Consequently, successful cloud migration requires a shift in mindset.

    A Medieval Metaphor for Cloud Infrastructure

    Think of your organization as a kingdom surrounded and protected by a castle. Traditionally, this castle would be outfitted with defensive layers designed to protect the residents, the royal family and the possessions within. Protection of the castle is straightforward. A moat surrounds the castle with drop bridges in and out at strategic points (firewalls).

    In addition, guards are stationed at each entry point, conducting a thorough inspection of the people, carts and the content that they carry both in and out of the castle (IDS/IPS). The guards also check credentials at the gates and within the castle to ensure patrons are cleared for access and use of rooms and resources (IAM). The perimeter and interior walls are continuously checked for weaknesses that could introduce potential blind spots that are unguarded (vulnerability management).

    The castle has a variety of rooms, each with its own function, content and worth. Each door has a lock (AV). Within each room and the correlative hallways exist guards who check credentials, monitor the people who enter and the contents they carry, etc. (behavioral detection and endpoints). In addition, multiple other measures are in place that bolster prevention, detection and response capabilities (DLP, deception, etc.). Information from all of these sources is noted in a central location by a scribe. Guards analyze the information, looking for additional indicators of potential threats to the kingdom (SIEM) and respond accordingly.

    Comprehensively, protection of the kingdom requires an overall model and policies that accounts for new threats and tactics from rival kingdoms and thieves. Architecture of security measures are continuously updated and adaptable. In the event of an incident, the guards have designed and exercised a plan to respond. 

    Understanding the Three Different Models of Cloud 

    Clearly, this is a basic metaphor for the on-prem approach. Moving to the cloud introduces a new level of complexity to protection spread across three different models: Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS) or Software as a service (SaaS).

    In the context of our castle analogy, let’s assume the castle has reached productive capacity. Neighboring rivals are creating competitive pressures, offering residents (who pay taxes) the possibility of a better life if they relocate. To keep residents happy, productivity requires expansion beyond castle walls. As production expands, neighboring kingdoms offer different models to achieve productivity. However, each model presents different levels of shared responsibility in protection (referred to as the Shared Responsibility Model).

    • IaaS: In this model, the on-premises kingdom (kingdom A) decides to expand all operations to a neighboring castle (kingdom B). The castle itself and the moats are all controlled and provided by kingdom B. However, the infrastructure, moats, hallways, rooms, access lists, monitoring of activity and protection and usage of its contents are the responsibility of kingdom A.
    • SaaS: Kingdom A decides to have blacksmithing conducted in a neighboring castle (kingdom B). The castle itself, the moats, infrastructure, hallways and blacksmithing room are all protected by kingdom B for a charge. Kingdom B’s responsibility is to control access to the room, but maintaining who’s on the access list to the room and the protection of its contents and usage are the responsibility of kingdom A.
    • PaaS: Kingdom A decides to house and build military operations in a neighboring castle (kingdom B). Kingdom B is responsible for the basic controls, but the configuration and monitoring remain the responsibility of Kingdom A.

    With this transformation, Kingdom A faces a more complex security landscape. Innovation and efficiency are critical to meeting the growing and changing demands of their kingdom, but not without additional risks. New operating models bring new risks and potential vulnerabilities to their system(s). Methodologies and processes used to secure their own kingdom do not necessarily work or apply to protecting their new partner kingdoms. Additionally, people–and experience–that understand these new complexities are harder to come by while the thieves and rival kingdoms discover vulnerabilities and weaknesses and begin to exploit and steal valuables that put the entire kingdom and its residents at risk.

    Protecting Your Castle in the Cloud Takes a Deep Understanding

    Moving to the cloud is almost inevitable at this point, and it carries so much potential to accelerate business outcomes. It takes a different mindset to secure it than what we are used to as an industry–the landscape has been changed from a security perspective. By fully studying and understanding the differences, organizations can continue rapid and secure adoption of the cloud, while reaping the benefits that it promises to bring.

    — Sean Blenkhorn

  • Atlassian Looks to the Cloud

    Atlassian Looks to the Cloud

    As part of an effort to accelerate migrations to the cloud, Atlassian is making instances of Jira Software, Confluence, Jira Service Desk and Jira Core running in the cloud available for free, as well as premium options that provide access to the same software with access to additional features and support.

    Harsh Jawharkar, head of go-to-market for Cloud Platform at Atlassian, said it’s apparent most organizations want to shift from on-premises to cloud versions of Atlassian platforms. However, they need control and more transparency into how much that shift will cost, said Jawharkar.

    At the same time, Atlassian views the cloud as an opportunity to expose more end users to its offerings by making them available for free. These editions of Jira Software, Confluence, Jira Service Desk and Jira Core will be available in the coming months alongside existing free editions of Trello, Bitbucket and Opsgenie.

    In addition, Atlassian is now extending its Cloud Premium service to now include Jira Software and Confluence, with a premium edition of the Jira Service Desk coming soon. Atlassian is also making 50% to 75% discounts available to eligible academic organizations and non-profit organizations.

    Atlassian is also moving to provide organizations with more control over where data gets stored. Customers now can choose where data in the Atlassian cloud will be stored to address regulatory compliance concerns. Atlassian also recently added a data encryption at rest and in-transit capability to ensure no data stored in its cloud is compromised by unauthorized access.

    In addition, Atlassian is updating Atlassian Access, a console for managing access to its various platforms, to include support for Google Cloud Identity and Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). Atlassian also committed to providing support for multiple cloud access brokers (CASBs) starting with an early access program involving McAfee and Bitglass before the end of this year.

    Atlassian is also promising enhancements to its audit log and early access to tools, which will help organizations better understand how Atlassian software is being consumed and their associated billing costs. The whole process of onboarding and offboarding users is becoming critical as organizations become more concerned about controlling their cloud application costs, noted Jawharkar.

    Finally, Atlassian is enabling customers to customize the URLs associated with Atlassian cloud service to reflect their own brands.

    Atlassian today has more than 150,000 customers consuming its software, including Costco, Delta Airlines, Office Depot and Visa. The most widely employed Atlassian application in DevOps environments is Jira, a project management application optimized for tracking software development projects. Atlassian is now trying to extend that base of customers to increase usage of OpsGenie, a set of tools for managing alerts.

    Obviously, each IT organization is going to transition to the cloud at its own pace. The issue most of them are wrestling with now is determining whether it makes more economic sense to move to the cloud or stick with the on-premises IT environment they already have in place.

    — Mike Vizard