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Tag: cloud migration

  • Challenging Cloud Migration Myths in the Wake of COVID-19

    Challenging Cloud Migration Myths in the Wake of COVID-19

    The COVID-19 push to cloud migration, unfortunately, is riddled with myths. Here are some worth busting

    With a substantial increase in the number of businesses now operating from their employees’ homes, and organization leaders realizing that their office buildings are now somewhat unnecessary until a vaccination against the coronavirus is widely distributed, the cloud has played an increasingly important role in IT operations.

    For many, migrating to the cloud has had to happen quickly and at a large scale to cope with the increased pressure on IT infrastructure during the pandemic. At such a turbulent and challenging time, it’s never been more important for businesses to ensure they have the correct IT infrastructure in place.

    As more businesses of different shapes and sizes begin to use cloud computing technology, the realization that greater flexibility, efficiency and scalability can be achieved is being understood by the majority. However, there are still a significant number of enterprises that have misconceptions about how cloud technology can enhance or replace their current IT environment. The outsourcing of IT infrastructure to a dedicated provider can make it difficult for organizations to understand where and how their operations are running and can become a breeding ground for misunderstanding and myths.

    To help clear up some of these myths, I’ve put together a guide to support organizations in the decision-making process and help them understand whether moving to the cloud is the right option for their business.

    Myth 1: Companies should hold tight and do nothing in the wake of COVID-19 as moving IT operations to the cloud is too risky

    This is absolutely not true. While it might seem scary to overhaul IT operations at such an uncertain time and invest in cloud computing technology, there is no doubt that it will be worth it in the long run. Business leaders and IT directors are understandably apprehensive about buying into a cloud migration platform when their budgets are already strapped and the future of their business is uncertain, however, our own research has proven migrating to the cloud can have significant financial benefits.

    Our recent Forrester Consulting TEI (Total Economic Impact) study examined the potential return on investment enterprises may realize by deploying hybrid infrastructure optimization solutions for both the public and private cloud platforms, and found those that have already deployed a cloud migration service have seen a 145% return on investment across a three-year period. Businesses shouldn’t fear that moving into the cloud will have a negative impact to their company economics even though things are difficult in a post-COVID environment, as in fact, deploying a cloud migration strategy will have the opposite result.

    Our Current State of Hybrid Cloud and IT report found that companies that decided to halt their cloud migration altogether as a result of the pandemic are 2.5 times more likely to experience detrimental outages that can hurt company KPIs, as opposed to those that have continued their journey to the cloud over the last four months.

    Myth 2: Cloud migration has to be a quick, ‘one and done’ process if organizations are to cope with the infrastructure demands that remote working practices create

    The term “one and done” cannot be applied when migrating to the cloud. The fact is that cloud migration is a process, and being able to scale up accordingly first requires the right technologies in place. While the pandemic has exacerbated some significant IT challenges across businesses, it has placed a greater focus on ensuring employees can effectively work from home instead of a faster migration to the cloud, which has, understandably, been put on the backburner. For some organizations, remote working has never been part of their practices, but with government guidelines and lockdown restrictions, working side by side has not been an effective way to continue to keep employees safe.

    The immediacy of the shift to remote working has meant ensuring operations could continue as a priority focus for businesses. But as we begin to settle into the “new normal” and most employees are now accustomed to working from their home, vision can be turned to a digital transformation process and ensuring the correct technologies are in place for companies to thrive.

    Myth 3: Halting your cloud migration during COVID-19 will save you time and money and won’t impact your IT systems’ performance

    This is in fact an untrue statement, as businesses that have halted their cloud migration journey because of the pandemic have already experienced significant issues in their IT systems. Our report, which was conducted to better understand how businesses were coping with their migration strategies during the pandemic, has revealed that more than three-quarters (77%) of respondents have reported a lack of access to the correct tools. In addition, 81% of those surveyed have said they have spent more time working across multiple systems to create a single report on IT bandwidth and resources, increasing the amount of time spent on a singular task.

    There is no doubt that deciding to halt a cloud migration strategy because of the pandemic will have impacted organizations’ information technology systems. But that’s not to say it’s too late. Businesses can get back on track and ensure the move to the cloud is just as effective in post-COVID operations.

    Myth 4: COVID-19 has made system transparency and measuring performance more complicated than ever before, especially when factoring in cloud migration

    Measuring performance and system transparency post-COVID can only seem complicated if the appropriate resources aren’t put in place. If businesses and IT decision-makers ensure the correct technologies are readily available and accessible, measuring the performance of a cloud migration strategy should be relatively simple.

    Our survey reveals that access to the correct tools and support services has a direct correlation to business cloud performance. More than three-quarters of those who experienced performance issues during the beginning of the pandemic also say they lack sufficient access to tools. However, companies that had already begun (or actually completed) their migration process at the onset of global lockdowns experienced fewer IT outages. In fact, for more than half of businesses, having impacted access to the correct support services has created a significant hurdle to overcome at a time when they’re already trying to cope with a number of challenges. Comparing this to those that maintained good performance, just under half said access to either type was not an issue.

    As with most things at the moment, apprehension in investment is unsurprising. For businesses, attempting to get sales, productivity and efficiency back on track is the most critical post-COVID action. But, beginning to understand how a digital transformation and cloud migration strategy should be adopted or continue at this time is crucial for survival.

  • 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.

  • Should I Stay or Should I Go? A Cloudy Decision

    Should I Stay or Should I Go? A Cloudy Decision

    If you’ve been operating in the cloud for some time now, chances are your business has changed since you first made that move and particularly during the current climate. Has your cloud usage grown considerably — and your OpEx costs? Is that just the cost of doing business in the cloud?

    It doesn’t have to be. Here’s how you can rationalize your infrastructure and determine if there are cloud expenses you can reclaim and even if it makes sense to move some of your cloud deployments into colocation.

    The rush to the public cloud has now slowed as organizations realized that it is not a one-size-fits-all solution. The main issue is the lack of deep visibility into the performance of applications provided by the host. Our own research has recently revealed that 32% of public cloud resources are currently under-utilized, and without proper direction and guidance, this will remain the case. What is needed is real-time data and intelligent recommendations to lower costs and assure performance.

    In order to optimize cloud resources, a third-party AIOps based resource is needed. This will provide an independent and granular view of how applications are using capacity and if it is right-sized. In addition, it will monitor the performance of the applications in real-time and provide metrics and analytics to eliminate bottlenecks. The allocated capacity can also be monitored to ensure an accurate match to workload requirements via real-time performance data.

    Although the major hosts provide cost optimization tools, these are not very accurate. Analysis of billing and how it matches capacity over time — as well as in real-time — is what is needed for the cloud to remain a vital part in IT infrastructure. Armed with this information you can plan capacity purchases and discover wasted spend. By using a single platform for cloud management, you can monitor your infrastructure, plan capacity and eliminate performance risks. Performance bottlenecks can be predicted before they affect clients and SLAs with multi-conditional alerting powered by advanced anomaly detection.

    Cloud solutions are not only publicly provided by the likes of AWS and Azure. Colocation is also a strong option where your applications are managed on your behalf by a system integrator. This is increasingly becoming a stronger option for more business-critical applications. But to determine which is best for you, you need to start with the facts. 

    The cloud promises IT organizations unprecedented value in the form of business agility, faster innovation, superior scalability and, most importantly, cost savings. For many organizations, it is at the core of their IT digital transformation strategy. It is a disruptive force that requires application workload behavior knowledge, careful planning and collaboration from well-informed, trusted advisors.

    As a first step, enterprises frequently target a subset of their less critical on-premises applications for migration to the public cloud. Typically, organizations will take one of two paths to the cloud:

    1. Going Cloud Native. Rewrite your application to use resources offered by a cloud provider.
    2. Lift and Shift. Very minimal or zero code changes to the application. Largely, just replicate the application in the cloud.

    The faster time-to-production choice is to lift and shift the targeted applications to a cloud service provider’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). In the lift and shift option, the advantage is a reduction in the cost incurred in the physical infrastructure such as hardware, floor space, cooling, security, etc., and the management of that infrastructure. Savings will differ depending on your unique computing resource needs, workload refactoring and business models.

    Even in its simplest form, IaaS migrations must be carefully planned requiring answers to some fundamental questions:

    1. Will my application perform as expected in a public cloud? (Application Fitness)
    2. How much will it cost to run my applications in a public cloud? (OpEx)
    3. Which cloud service provider is the best choice for my applications? (Cost and Fit)

    IT managers need answers to these questions before the actual migration is performed. As most internal IT organizations don’t have deep cloud expertise, the question is: Who can you trust to provide you with the answers and help you make better business decisions?

    As technology and the cloud stands to play an ever-increasing role throughout organizations, ensuring that you’re adopting the right type of infrastructure specifically for your business has never been more vital for continued success. Choosing a service that provides the answers to your key questions, before the actual migration takes place and prepares you with vital insights into your applications and workloads targeted for cloud migration, has to be an important part of the decision-making process.

    As organizations continue to battle the COVID-19 storm, understanding the product that will overhaul your IT infrastructure, before you fully buy into it, is going to provide the confidence and assurance you need to make that decision a little less cloudy.

  • DevOps as a Service: Migrating Your Entire DevOps Stack to the Cloud

    DevOps as a Service: Migrating Your Entire DevOps Stack to the Cloud

    DevOps as a Service (DaaS) enables teams to centralize their tooling and workflow into one unified solution. This solution typically contains all necessary DevOps pipeline features, which replace legacy tooling. This article explains how DaaS works, including pros and cons, and an example showing how to migrate from Azure DevOps Server to Azure DevOps in the cloud.

    What Is DaaS?

    DaaS is a managed, cloud-based service that provides a unified DevOps toolchain. All or most of the tools necessary for a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline are collected in a single platform. This platform is then provided to teams with the support of dedicated DevOps professionals.

    The goal of DaaS is to enable organizations to focus on developing and delivering software without having to worry about managing or maintaining tools. It is designed to abstract away the intricacies of tool integration, deployment and maintenance. This enables teams to focus on higher-level tasks, and outsources significant manual effort.

    DaaS can provide small to medium businesses with enterprise-level infrastructure and tooling without needing to hire more staff or build extensive expertise. Instead, these businesses can rely on the experience of DaaS providers to create, deploy and optimize a pipeline for them. These pipelines are created to be intuitive and to facilitate the smooth collaboration of all team members. 

    DaaS Pros and Cons

    If you are looking to migrate your development processes to the cloud, there are several migration strategies you can use. One involves moving existing tools to cloud resources as microservices, which you must then integrate. The other may involve scraping existing tools and adopting a DaaS. Whichever the case, you need to understand the pros and cons of DaaS before you can make the right choice for your organization.

    Pros of DaaS:

    • Managed services provide access to dedicated DevOps engineers for support, expertise and optimization.
    • Provider teams have experience across a range of organizations and industries, and can customize solutions for you based on that experience.
    • DaaS teams can provide mentorship and guidance which helps your team improve their own skills. This enables teams to learn from the mistakes of others and prevents repeating mistakes.

    Cons of DaaS:

    • The importance of pipeline management and availability requires you to partner with a service provider that is reliable and can ensure zero to minimal interruptions.
    • Outsourcing infrastructure demands and providing access to source code and other sensitive data and systems. This can create a security risk that you are not in control of.
    • DevOps teams still need to understand the tools being implemented and the basics of how to manage and use those tools. 
    • Managed services often cost more than self-implemented pipelines and the costs may not be offset by an in-house reduction in IT responsibilities.

    DevOps Cloud Migration Example: Migrating from Azure DevOps Server to Azure DevOps in the Cloud

    Azure DevOps Server, formerly called Team Foundation Server (TFS), is a server hosted on-premises that enables you to build DevOps pipelines. While based on similar services to those offered in the Azure cloud, it requires you to manage and maintain your infrastructure and provides limited support for your configurations.

    By migrating to the cloud, you can outsource many of your infrastructure responsibilities, focusing instead on producing quality software. Azure DevOps Services are an example of partially managed DaaS that you can use.

    Below is a brief guide for how to transfer your data and projects from DevOps Server. This guide is adapted from the full DaaS guide provided by Microsoft.

    1. Preparation: Planning your migration requires taking an inventory of how you are currently using your tools, what data you need to migrate and how migration will impact your productivity. You also need to determine if you need additional licenses. For this step and those to follow, there is a tool you can use to assist you in the process.
    2. Configure Your Prerequisites: Before you can migrate your pipeline data you need to set-up a few prerequisites. You should synchronize your local Active Directory (AD) with Azure AD for authentication. You also need to set up security and compliance measures to ensure that your infrastructure remains secure.
    3. Update and Validate Your Server: Check to make sure that your server is up-to-date with the latest version of Azure DevOps Server. If you are still using TFS, this may mean a series of updates. Once you’re fully updated, you can use the migrator tool to validate the collection databases of each of your projects. If any errors are found, you need to fix those issues during this phase.
    4. Ready Your Cloud Resources: After all errors are eliminated, you can begin preparing your cloud resources for import. This requires assigning, activating and mapping your DevOps Services subscriptions. You also need to generate a template for your import settings through the migrator tool. These settings should be saved in your Import Specification file. Finally, you need to create a container instance in the data center you want to use your DevOps Services in.
    5. Migrate Your Pipelines: After all of your preparatory and planning stages are done, you are ready to migrate your workloads. During this phase, you should first run a test import to ensure that all configurations are correct and that the import process goes smoothly with no data corruption. This helps ensure that you don’t create unnecessary downtime.

    Provided your test run goes smoothly, you can then proceed to import your data. Once uploaded, you need to assign your organization name, set up billing and redirect your on-premises build servers to the new cloud resources. After you are done, you can resume operations and begin operating your pipelines directly from the cloud.

    Conclusion

    DaaS is typically not just a centralized platform, but also a managed service that comes with certain levels of support and optimization. If you are short on DevOps talent and tooling, DaaS can fill this gap or even help you and your team learn DevOps skills.

    However, since you are giving the DaaS of your choice control over your pipeline, you need to investigate and research. You will be giving your DaaS access to source code and security. Before signing a contract, make sure this service is trustworthy and meets your standards.

  • How to Implement a Data Self-Service Program

    How to Implement a Data Self-Service Program

    Data self-service is a hot topic these days. By giving different people across an organization–marketers, technologists, business leaders, etc.–access to available data and analytics tools, you empower business users and decision makers to do their jobs effectively. But data self-service is still a work in progress at most organizations.

    According to a recent survey by IDG Research, more than half of the respondents’ lines of business rely on IT or data teams to build and set up BI and analytics dashboards, versus handling these tasks themselves. The point being, at most companies, employees do not have direct access to data or to the tools that help them analyze their data. For many businesses, data self-service is the next milestone in achieving rapid time-to-insight and real-time business agility.

    Whether giving increased data access to new users or helping traditional data users achieve more advanced analytics tasks, the goal is the same: more people with the ability to quickly get the information they need, without submitting a ticket or waiting in a backlog. However, moving to a more democratized data and analytics system takes strategy and planning.

    Here are six steps that can help you organize your data self-service initiatives.

    Move Data to the Cloud 

    Any data self-service initiative should start with seriously considering moving your data from an on-prem data warehouse to the cloud, or expanding your cloud presence if you’re already there. Many obstacles to achieving data self-service are related to infrastructure and the inability to use data quickly and in a cost-effective way. On-prem data architectures often come up short when trying to handle the sheer volume and complexity of data we see today, especially within a practical budget. 

    Build a Data and Analytics Strategy

    Before your organization moves forward with a data self-service initiative, there are several important questions you should ask to help develop a comprehensive plan that is more likely to succeed and benefit your end user:

    • Where is your organization now, and where is it going?
    • What does data self-service really mean to your organization?
    • What about security and data governance?
    • What are the blockers you might face?

    Choose Where You Will Put Your Data

    In order to facilitate data self-service, you need to break down silos between data sources and bring data into a centralized location. If that location is the cloud, there are a few choices of how that will look. In moving data to the cloud, you will need to focus on storage, data acquisition, preparation and transformation. 

    In determining where and how your data will reside in the cloud, there are many factors that come into play:

    • Will a cloud data warehouse or a data lake best suit your needs? Sometimes compliance or regulatory requirements will guide or dictate your choice.
    • How important is familiarity? For example, Amazon Redshift is based on PostgreSQL 8.0.2. A company operating an on-premises PostgreSQL data warehouse may be more comfortable moving to Amazon Redshift, since they share many aspects due to common ancestry.
    • What cloud platform/vendor services do you already use? Choosing a cloud platform related to your existing services may make it easier to trust, land and expand. Sometimes a vendor offers a clear differentiator, which in itself could be a winner. For example, if your company needs to share data with multiple third parties in a safe and secure manner, Snowflake’s data sharing feature may appeal to you.  

    When bringing data into the cloud, you have three main choices of cloud architectures to choose from: 

    • Platform as a service (PaaS) is a managed service that sits inside a cloud infrastructure that gives you scalability and also lets you retain some control. Examples include certain cloud data warehouses or an Amazon S3 bucket. 
    • Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a bare-bones cloud infrastructure from a cloud provider–for example, AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure. It allows you to set up your own data infrastructure in the cloud to suit your needs. It offers the most control, but it can also be a complex choice.
    • Software as a Service (SaaS) is an end-to-end managed service with little or no maintenance or overhead that lets you focus on business needs and not worry about maintaining a tech stack. But, you have the least amount of control over factors such as security and how data is stored.

    Choose Your BI and Analytics Tools

    After choosing the platform that will hold your data, consider your BI and analytics tools. As with the data platform, analytics infrastructures and tools are structured in different ways, depending on IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.

    Depending on the choices you make, you may be able to continue to use some or all of your existing ETL/reporting/analytics tools. But moving to the cloud allows you to explore newer technologies and products that align better with your data analytics needs and your future strategies.

    PaaS: Sometimes, on-prem services can be replaced with equivalent or similar PaaS cloud offerings. For example, if you move to a CDW such as Amazon Redshift, Snowflake or Google BigQuery, you may be able to load a CDW database driver into your reporting platform and continue to use your existing investments. Or, you could have an ELT process that loads your file directly into a table in your CDW.

    IaaS: Within an IaaS, you could move your existing analytics infrastructure into the cloud. End-users may see improved performance due to changes in topology as well as any infrastructure-related upgrades that were carried out as part of this move.

    SaaS: Some SaaS offerings come with their own visualization tools. Like PaaS, depending on your choice, you may be able to use existing tools or explore alternatives.

    Implement and Train

    Once you select your cloud data and analytics platforms, comes the equally important step of implementing your solution and getting your team up to speed.

    Before wide-scale implementation, you should embark on a POC to try the tools and determine whether they meet your requirements. Many companies with in-house technical teams tend to carry out the POC themselves. This involves researching the technologies, learning to use them and building a minimum viable product

    Many users in your organization will have limited or no experience with running their own analytics and creating their own data visualizations. Even if you think users have experience and will quickly get up to speed, training on new tools and processes benefits everyone.

    Build a Support Structure

    Every self-service initiative needs a well defined support structure and every user needs a clear path to get help if needed. These are the two types of support:

    • Support for products and tools. Most vendors have robust support offerings available for a subscription. Most noteworthy and popular open source products tend to have active user-forums or paid support. If you have a technical partner, they may also step in to fill any gaps.
    • Business process support. It’s nearly impossible to train an end-user for every eventuality or requirement they may encounter. For example, a user may need information that is not available in their daily dashboard. To create an ad-hoc report, they need to understand the underlying data model to be able to make effective use of it. 

    Establishing a self-service data analytics platform is a multi-step process, especially if you need to modernize your data architecture to do it. Remember to take the process step by step: use the right tools to get data into the cloud and ready for analytics; lean on the expertise of your IT and data teams and your partners; and choose ELT, analytics and visualization tools that are graphical and intuitive for end users. If you follow the steps and keep these things in mind, you will be on your way to making data accessible to every person in your organization who needs it.

  • Embracing the Journey to Public Cloud

    Embracing the Journey to Public Cloud

    One of the fascinating competitions in today’s business world is the one between the digital disruptors—companies whose business vision is rooted in technology and driven by the cloud—and the so-called incumbents.

    One sector where this competition is particularly intense is financial services. In this sector, the digital-first companies typically don’t compete with banks and other financial institutions directly. Instead, they target specific functions based on a clear—and often data-driven—understanding of what customers want. This strategy has proven particularly successful with millennials. For example, until recently the norm for giving money to a friend or family member was to write a check. Now, almost two-thirds of 20- and 30-year-olds use payment apps, such as Venmo.

    In healthcare, a different pattern is emerging, one where digital-first giants either buy or innovate their way into the sector. Examples include Amazon’s billion-dollar acquisition of the online pharmacy PillPack and the new Apple Watch, which is capable of taking electrocardiograms.

    Whatever the sector, digital disruptors have one characteristic in common. They leverage the capabilities of the cloud to the maximum extent possible. A shift in power toward digital-first companies is underway, and the cloud plays a major role in helping these companies establish themselves.

    Many incumbents are just now taking their first steps on the journey to the cloud, and still working on the challenges involved in migrating their existing legacy applications to more scalable and agile public cloud environments. While they’re engaged in this process, digital insurgents are already exploiting the full potential of the cloud to deliver solutions that meet emerging customer needs associated with today’s evolving lifestyles.

    In highly regulated industries, such as financial services and healthcare, major brands will not necessarily see an immediate decline in their customer base, nor profits. Nonetheless, digital-first companies are capturing millions of customers annually, and this growth poses a considerable challenge over time. Embracing the journey to public cloud is crucial for legacy enterprises.

    The most successful cloud-based disruptors use experimental sandboxes as a critical component of development. The public cloud can drive progress toward almost any business goal involving IT—operational transformation, new market penetration, new product launches, automation.

    Digital transformation to the public cloud is also the only way companies can leverage storage scalability and the essential innovations of the open-source community. There are still lingering concerns among executives in highly regulated, data-sensitive industries concerning privacy and regulatory compliance, and these can lead to hesitation. The face is, public clouds have been in place for over two decades now, and their security is often superior to older on-premise security. Incumbents can, therefore, tap into the public cloud to ensure safety for mission critical workloads.

    To accelerate the transition to the public cloud, consider the following best practices.

    Learning to Fail Fast and Learn from Experience More Quickly

    The Silicon Valley maxim to fail fast may run counter to incumbent corporate culture, but it is the best path to success in the new digital reality. The key is being able to learn from failures quickly and adjust accordingly.

    Partnering for Progress

    A digital native approach to business is often lacking in the corporate culture of incumbents. Cloud partners that have a digital disruption in their DNA can play an important role in driving cultural renewal at every level of the organization. A reliable cloud service partnership can accelerate concepts, pilots, staffing and other mechanisms designed to deliver value quickly and securely.

    Re-Examining Compliance Processes

    Operations should be streamlined to transform enterprise IT to be well-suited for the cloud. Companies can apply artificial intelligence to supplement human intervention, and encourage cloud adoption among employees. First, building a solid foundation, then working your way up, enables businesses to make important changes that transform the enterprise into an environment that is compliant by design.

    Successfully competing with digital natives means using the cloud to find new opportunities to streamline and better comprehend customer needs and behaviors. It also means being unafraid to change time-honored business practices. At the same time, in highly regulated and data-sensitive industries, compliance and security must be prioritized. Cloud transformation has quickly become vital for companies in all sectors and represents an essential foundation for future business success.

  • 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

  • Ten Questions Data Professionals Should Be Asking When Moving to the Cloud

    Ten Questions Data Professionals Should Be Asking When Moving to the Cloud

    You have finally decided to move your data into the cloud. Whether it was the ability to leverage the power of cloud compute, the promise of cost-savings or the scalability and flexibility that a cloud data warehouse can bring, it’s important to have a strategy in place. In order to set yourself up for success, here is a list of questions that will help you organize your data and ensure your data migration efforts provide business value.

    What Is the Outcome I Need to Achieve?

    When you are creating a data migration strategy, you need to have an end goal in mind in order to make the best decisions on technology and approach. Simply getting your data into the cloud won’t be enough to take action on that data. 

    How Many Data Sources Do We Currently Have? 

    Once you have your outcome in mind, take a comprehensive inventory of all your data sources before you begin the migration process. It reduces your risk of discovering halfway through the process that you have no access to a data source–or that you forgot to include it in your migration plan. 

    Who Is the Administrator of Each Data Source? 

    It is likely that you may not have access to every single data source that you are looking to migrate. Make sure to find out who can provide you with access to that data, and fully understand your requests. This person will be able to explain the necessary requirements for that data source and will be your contact to help integrate that source into your migration efforts. 

    What Data Is Most Important to My Key Stakeholders, and What Do They Consider Important in Getting that Data? 

    This question might also be: What are the KPIs that drive the business from the data sources? You’ll need to have a good grasp on the metrics that are used for business-critical KPIs so that you have the right data in the cloud to ultimately be transformed for analysis. For example, a retailer might value click-through-rate on emails as a key indicator of attribution for sales data. In order for them to get that information, they would need to provide data from their email marketing system and their eCommerce platform. Keep stakeholders involved in the success and failure criteria of your project so they can help set you up for success. Identify the system of record for the metrics that each KPI is calculated from. Quite often, more than one system in your organization can have a representation for that key metric, but with different values. Align with the related stakeholders as to which is the system of record in those cases. 

    How Can I Show Business Impact Quickly?

    A proof of concept (PoC) in the cloud is always associated with the desire to show results quickly, as the speed and performance that the cloud brings means that you should be able to move faster, right? Asking yourself what you can do to help the business recognize the value of your project can help you assuage any productivity concerns. To create a quick PoC, start by first identifying a small number of typical use cases to test out. Picking a high-value KPI that is calculated from metrics from well known source systems could be a good candidate for that first iteration.

    What Are My Security Concerns?

    Considering that the cloud can house petabytes of data that enterprise companies collect every day, it is safe to assume that some of that information will be sensitive and confidential. Ask yourself if the data you migrate contains personally identifiable information (PII) and if that information is necessary for the project you are working on. In most cases, PII is not needed for analytics work and therefore, you wouldn’t need to migrate that. You might need to know the brand of a credit card to make a data-driven business decision but perhaps not the actual credit card numbers. 

    Who Has Access to My Data Now that It Is in the Cloud?

    If you are migrating sensitive data into the cloud, these are the security and compliance requirements that come into play. How much data security management you entrust to a cloud provider entirely depends on the needs and requirements of your business. There are several different security models, some of which give you more control, some that hand-off that control to cloud providers—it is important to choose the model that works best for your business. Ensure the vendors you use are SOC II compliant and have all the necessary certifications in place to keep your data safe. Work with your organization’s security group on this. They may have defined an overarching Enterprise Cloud Strategy which can help to provide guidance around the acceptable use of cloud resources for your analytics workloads.

    What Do I Do with My Data Once It’s in My Cloud Data Warehouse? 

    Once your data is in the cloud, what do you plan to do with it? Create a strategy to structure your data in the correct way for your business outcome. Different cloud-built technologies can help structure your data for analytics, prepare your data for machine learning or artificial intelligence projects, or perform data cleansing so you have the most accurate data available. It is important to remember that different cloud data warehouses, data integration tools and data visualization products need to complement one another. Make sure you build your stack for your project to ensure success. 

    How Do I Save Costs in the Cloud? 

    In addition to faster time to value, one of the main reasons companies migrate data to the cloud is to save costs. But, how can you ensure you are saving costs while migrating data? You can take advantage of free trials offered by many purpose-built cloud data tools that allow you to allocate, compute and storage as needed. The beauty of a cloud data warehouse is that you don’t need to provision for future workloads. As your needs grow, you can scale up easily and manage costs effectively. Try to avoid using multiple products that do similar things. This will reduce cost, increase adoption of the products and keep your architecture simple.

    Is My Team Equipped to Handle Cloud Migration?

    Cloud data migration is different than on-prem migration and in such, you and your team will be using technology that you haven’t used in the past. To set your team up for success, inquire about their comfortability using the tools you’ve selected and ensure they have the level of access needed to do their jobs efficiently. If there are gaps in knowledge, you can look to provide the training to help them get up to speed and make onboarding as painless as possible.

    If you answer these ten questions, you will be on the right track to begin your cloud data migration project. Keep your business goals in mind and start small—the flexibility of the cloud allows you to scale your project later if needed.

    — Arawan Gajajiva

  • An Overview of Cloud Migration and Open Source

    An Overview of Cloud Migration and Open Source

    Most businesses are moving toward making their business processes more user-friendly, through digitization. This shift of business modernization comes with a heavy price for them in terms of money and in terms of time. It is going to take time and a great amount of investment in new innovative technologies.

    Cloud computing is the biggest trend in digital transformation due to its ability to make business applications and infrastructure easily accessible. In the roadmap toward cloud migration, businesses are looking to save capital investment or expenses (CAPEX) and operational expenses (OPEX). 

    Open source technologies come to rescue for such businesses. Be those who are present at public cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, or private data centers. The role and emergence of open source technologies simplified the equation of overall expenditure for all enterprises and organizations of any industry domains. Year by year, more open source projects are coming up and solve major challenges which businesses are facing. Companies such as Red Hat and communities like Linux Foundation have a major role in promoting open source projects at the heart of digital transformation.

    Why Open Source at Cloud?

    • The main reason to adopt open source technologies in the process of cloud migration can be avoiding vendor lock-in in the future. Most public cloud vendors have a similar portfolio of open source supports in their offerings. As open-source projects are not owned by one company and its overall framework is common to all of its consumers, any updates to its core files have an impact on all projects. And businesses can simply move their application environment from one cloud to another without worrying about backend environment that is powered by open-source projects. There can be a seamless integration of applications and services developed or deployed by different businesses and vendors.
    • Open source adoption for cloud will help in interoperability with other enterprise solutions that can be located in different data centers. Though, other data centers should be equipped with the same open source projects. This interoperability enables the reuse of software stacks, libraries and components. Such interoperability can help deploy multi-cloud environment for businesses.

    The Cloud-Native Approach in Cloud

    Application containerization has been adopted by many solutions providers and vendors in the last few years and has become significantly popular. This containerization surge has triggered the use of cloud-native applications. Most of the popular cloud-native projects are hosted in Linux Foundation’s CNCF (Cloud Native Foundation) community which nurtures the development of various open source projects. Some of the popular projects are Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, Helm, rkt, Linkerd, Etcd, Jaeger, etc.

    The cloud-native approach involves the utilization of tools for handling containers, micro-services, service mesh, DevOps and continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD). Cloud-native tools for CI/CD can be Check, Ansible, puppet, etc., and service mesh can be Istio, Linkerd, etc.

    Most of the enterprises tend to involve open source projects from various umbrella’s to build the Cloud migration strategy. Moving to cloud-native management of application can be a prominent requirement for many enterprises.   

    Open Source Cloud Migration Tools

    There are open source tools and frameworks that help with cloud data migration. These tools require modification in terms of coding to make the migration process that suits your infrastructure. To make coding customizations in these tools you might need investment for skilled resources.

    The above projects help enterprises to move data. Bluethroat is an open source project which can be used for migration of overall infrastructure from data center to data center, data center to the cloud, cloud to data center and cloud to cloud. Currently it is powered with limited features and used specifically for AWS. It offers the following features:

    • Migration of infrastructure to AWS.
    • Agentless.
    • Environment discovery.
    • Automatic network creation and server deployment.
    • Linux server migration.

    Conclusion

    Cloud migration has its own challenges in terms of uptime, security and data loss. Most public clouds are evolved to handle data as well as application workload migrations. There are many benefits to open source projects, as discussed in this article. The main advantages of migrating open source frameworks to the cloud are cutting back on expenses and avoiding bottlenecks.

    — Sagar Nangare

  • 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