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10 Actions IT Can Take to Curb Climate Impact

Digital technology is responsible for 3.7% of total CO emissions, according to estimates from The Shift Project. This could increase, as cryptocurrency mining is leaving a massive carbon footprint. With the world’s climate at stake, every percentage point matters.

Thankfully, many tech companies have announced significant climate pledges to reduce emissions or offset their carbon footprint. For example, Microsoft states they will be carbon neutral by 2030. Amazon has committed to a deadline of 2040, and other companies such as Infosys have co-signed. Netflix’s climate commitment states they will reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by the end of 2022.

Sustainability goals are vital long-term benchmarks, but on-the-ground technologists must make immediate optimizations to realize them. So, what exact steps can enterprise IT take to reduce their energy consumption and thereby reduce greenhouse gas emissions?

I recently met with Anant Adya, Infosys, to explore the overall energy footprint of enterprise technology. Below, I’ll cover 10 ways IT can reduce its impact on the environment, including actions like auditing legacy infrastructure, optimizing cloud operations and moving toward renewable energy sources. Many of these energy optimizations bring the added benefits of cost savings and code consolidation.

1. Reduce Resource-Heavy Legacy Infrastructure

One potential cause of unnecessary energy consumption is legacy infrastructure. To reduce power consumption, Adya recommends going straight to a network compute storage setup. You may find energy consumption savings by porting resource-heavy legacy systems to the cloud. This will be especially effective if you’re running older end-of-life machines with less efficient processing.

2. Reduce the Number of Clouds

Next, look at the number of clouds your organization has adopted, Adya recommended. In recent years, companies have moved to multi-cloud setups for reasons like performance, cost or features. However, these movements could cause unnecessary duplication. For a large enterprise, refactoring your multi-cloud usage could mean reducing from five or six clouds to two or three, said Adya. With the right combination, you could very likely reach equivalent benefits with less reliance on multiple clouds.

3. Reduce the Number of Core Data Centers

Look at the number of sites in your core data centers and reduce the footprint, if possible. In his digital transformation work, Adya described working with a client to consolidate six large data centers into three essential locations — one for disaster recovery and two others to support American and European zones.

4. Move Edge Locations to the Cloud

Large organizations may be supporting a lot of edge infrastructure. Yet some locations, such as offices, don’t require that kind of infrastructure, Adya suggested. He recommended reducing local servers and embracing more cloud-based computing solutions, overall. He described one case in which an organization consolidated 600 edge sites to 350, thus reducing power consumption by 40%. Adya credited the cloud for delivering lower costs and greater scalability and resiliency.

5. Embrace Cloud-Native Administrative Operations

Cloud computing is arguably more energy efficient than traditional on-premises arrangements with its pay-per-use model and multi-tenant approach. To get the most out of the cloud, Adya recommended moving to the cloud, along with adopting cloud-native software. Most operational and administrative work can be processed in the cloud, he noted.

6. Consolidate and Rationalize Resource Utilization

Another way to stem energy consumption is to check for underused or forgotten assets. While the cloud can help optimize software, there is a good deal of unnecessary cloud spending on underused resources. In 2020, companies wasted $17.6 billion paying for idle resources and overprovisioned computing instances, reported ParkMyCloud. Adya thus recommended looking at the entire server and storage estate to calculate the server utilization and slimming down wherever possible.

7. Increase Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE)

Hardware is much more efficient these days — sometimes by as much as 10X more powerful with 10X less energy consumed. As storage technologies also are always improving, it could make sense to upgrade to new hardware to reduce overall power usage. It’s important to monitor power usage effectiveness (PUE) and check power ratings before and after migrations. Adapting your information life cycle management tiering practices for storage could also help optimize to reduce wasted power, Adya added.

8. Meet Sustainability Goals on Campus

Have you ever driven by an office park at night and seen thousands of empty rooms with all the lights on? This has got to change. Another way to reduce power is to limit a campus’s energy consumption, described Adya. Smart automation and remote monitoring could be used to manage power efficiency by turning off lights and heating and cooling to meeting rooms when empty, for example.

9. Power the Business With Renewable Energy

Run your campus with solar power. Adya described how Infosys is doing this by mounting 40MW solar panels at their corporate centers, in effect sourcing 43% of its energy from renewable sources. Another more passive way to invest in renewables is to choose a data center provider that commits, under contract, to using a high percentage of renewable energy.

10. Purchase Carbon Offsets

The previous goals are all active steps to reduce energy requirements. However, once an organization has attempted these optimizations, another option is carbon offsetting. This indirect method effectively cancels out a company’s emissions by funding green activities, such as tree planting.

However, there is debate over the effectiveness of carbon offsetting, as trees take decades to become effective carbon consumers, and the practice doesn’t advocate for immediate change to harmful practices. “To be serious about tackling climate change, [organizations] need to stop carbon emissions from getting into the atmosphere in the first place,” wrote Alia al Ghussan for Greenpeace.

IT’s Role In Curbing Climate Change

Dire climate circumstances require quick action from all business units. In the process, organizations will likely consider many initiatives simultaneously to address their climate impact. However, as more companies become digital-first businesses, the onus falls on IT to support these changes.

In addition to the above actions, there are undoubtedly other ways enterprise software architects can stimulate sustainability initiatives within their organization. This could include refactoring code into more lean iterations or eliminating unnecessary records storage. Tech leaders could also vocalize their support for global pledges, such as the Paris Climate Agreement, RE100 or Global Optimism.

It would take a solar power plant covering 115,625 square miles, roughly the size of New Mexico, to power the world with solar energy! As you can see, it will take a lot of work to reverse our reliance on fossil fuels. But with scalable cloud computing and more intelligent infrastructure optimizations, IT can do its part to contribute to curbing climate change.

June 1, 2021
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.
January 4, 2021
Cisco CEO: Developers Need More Infrastructure Control

Cisco Systems CEO Chuck Robbins said this week that the company’s No. 1 priority going forward is to enable IT organizations to better manage application experience via abstraction layers that make to possible for developers to programmatically manage infrastructure.

Speaking at its annual Cisco Partner Summit, which occurred online, Robbins said Cisco is working toward making it possible for developers to not only programmatically provision IT infrastructure but also impact how services are delivered using application networking services the company is currently developing.

Over time, the entire Cisco portfolio will either be cloud-delivered or cloud-managed as Cisco increasingly delivers its technology as a service, he said. As part of that effort, Cisco is now exposing application programming interfaces (APIs) across its portfolio.

At the core of the initiative are investments Cisco is making in AppDynamics, ThousandEyes and its Intersight IT operations management platform. Those tools will be employed to provide insights and observability across a diverse application environment that increasingly includes cloud-native applications running on Kubernetes clusters, Robbins said.

In effect, Cisco is signaling a more aggressive transition toward managing infrastructure as code inside and out of the cloud. This week Cisco announced it has added an Intersight Workload Optimizer to optimize infrastructure consumption along with adding support for dynamic provisioning of Kubernetes clusters via Cisco Intersight. The company also added a Cisco Nexus dashboard to provide visibility into networks spanning multiple clouds, on-premises IT environments and edge computing platforms, and expanded the Cisco Identity Services Engine to now secure a wider variety of internet of things (IoT) endpoints.

Cisco, like every other provider of IT infrastructure, is shifting toward a cloud operating model that promises to enable IT teams to manage on-premises IT infrastructure in the same way IT teams consume public cloud resources. As part of that effort, Robbins noted Cisco has been disaggregating all the software functionality it provides from hardware whenever possible, which will provide IT teams with more flexibility and control over highly distributed IT environments.

The COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated a transition to managing IT as service, as organizations rely more on applications to engage their end customers, he added.

Of course, Cisco is not the only provider of IT infrastructure with similar ambitions. Not only is networking software is becoming accessible via APIs, but it’s also now possible to deploy a software-defined network on commodity processors almost anywhere. That transition is also the primary reason that network operations are increasingly being folded into DevOps teams seeking to manage compute, storage and networking as code across an extended enterprise.

It may be a while yet before network and storage operations are fully assimilated into DevOps processes. However, it’s now no longer a question of if as much as how long before most IT organizations achieve that goal.

October 30, 2020
Cisco Expands Effort to Meld DevOps, NetOps

Cisco Systems has accelerated its efforts to converge network operations (NetOps) by adding support for Terraform tools for managing infrastructure-as-code as well as expanding its support for the Ansible IT automation framework.

In addition, Cisco has improved and standardized the application programming interfaces (APIs) it makes available for its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) framework for virtualizing network services and is expanding the free code samples, boot camps and certifications its makes available via its DevNet Express training program.

Yousuf Khan, vice president of technical marketing and solutions engineering, said Cisco is moving toward embracing open source automation tools that are being widely employed to automate the management of IT infrastructure. That transition is being driven by DevOps teams, many of which have assumed control over IT infrastructure budgets as network operations are more integrated within DevOps processes, he said.

To increase its appeal, Cisco is making available Terraform Providers for Cisco ACI alongside Ansible and Cisco ACI Multi-Site Orchestration (MSO) to enable IT teams to automate network management using declarative tools, Khan added. Ansible can now be applied to invoke Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) alongside the other network services Cisco has already made accessible via Ansible.

Terraform is widely employed to programmatically configure cloud infrastructure, which Cisco is now embracing to enable IT teams to apply to network and server infrastructure. Ansible, meanwhile, is being embraced by multiple providers of IT infrastructure as IT teams look to standardize on a single automation framework. That approach eliminates the need to master multiple proprietary IT automation frameworks for each platform employed.

Cisco has spent the last few years encouraging network administrators to abandon command-line interfaces (CLIs) employed to program individual routers and switches in favor of a software-defined network architecture based on graphical tools that enables NetOps teams to more flexibly manage network infrastructure using virtual overlays enable by its ACI framework. Now ACI is being made accessible to Terraform and Ansible as more IT organizations adopt both tools as de facto open source tools for managing heterogeneous IT infrastructure environments. That effort will make it easier for DevOps teams to employ GitOps processes to deploy applications on Cisco infrastructure from whichever continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform they employ, Khan said.

Ultimately, he noted, the goal is to make the networks more agile. IT teams in on-premises environments today can provision a virtual machine in minutes but are still required to wait weeks for network services to be provisioned. The goal is to apply a more cloud-like operating model to a hybrid IT environment.

Each IT organization will need to decide to what degree they will want to meld their network operations and DevOps teams. While the tools to manage network services are becoming available, the cultural divide between most network operations and DevOps teams is still wide. The rate at which that divide is narrowing, however, is finally starting to accelerate as business leaders continue to demand higher levels of agility.

October 9, 2020
Preparing for Digital Life After COVID-19
The shift to a digitally dependent remote workforce across numerous industries was instantaneous for organizations after the COVID-19 pandemic spread, and after months of adapting, this way of life has become “a new normal.” IT professionals are facing unprecedented pressure to meet the increased demands they are experiencing now and preparing for the changes that will continue after the pandemic, such as enabling remote employees and driving the business. This presents an immense opportunity for these professionals to make a change.

In recent months, limits to digital transformation and what organizations are capable of have been tested and surpassed. IT professionals have searched for tools, visibility and insights to help them manage the new challenges so the technology being used by organizations continues to perform well. This means expectations moving forward have been set even higher for the level of performance these professionals provide. If limits can be exceeded and issues solved as they arise, what does this mean post-COVID-19?

Agents of Transformation

We call the professionals who are navigating these digital changes and inspiring innovation Agents of Transformation. As the leaders of the IT industry, these technologists are identifying what tools are needed not only for their efforts, but also for the organizations they support to provide a tighter interlock between IT and business leaders. Our recent special COVID-19 research report showed how the pandemic has changed the industry long-term.

According to the report, 79% of the 1,000 IT professionals we surveyed believe the pandemic will separate the strong from the weak in tech teams worldwide. Even if organizations find themselves surviving the digital transformation changes they’re making during the pandemic, it is crucial they also plan for the future so they do not fall behind with any additional new curveballs. As documented in the chart below, the key areas these Agents of Transformation think will change in business practices are risk and disaster planning, the continued use of remote working tools and flexible resourcing.

Planning for Changes in Business Practices

COVID-19 brought a lot of unexpected challenges that forced organization leaders to adapt. It is crucial organizations determine what their plans are moving forward and how they will be implemented. Once organizations know what their ideal digital journey looks like, they can begin to fill in the missing pieces such as how it could be impacted by outside forces like COVID-19 and how they can navigate these changes. Digital transformation will continue to play a key role in a post-COVID world with potential challenges including:
- Delivering positive experiences at an increased capacity.
- Lack of visibility into the performance of technologies.
- Managing mean time to repair (MTTR).
Continued Use of Remote Working Tools and Technologies

Even as health risks decrease and more employees are allowed to return to work, survey respondents expect tools and technologies for remote working are here to stay. To be successful moving forward in a world now dependent on digital transformation, organizations should figure out what their digital needs are, whether to efficiently manage increased traffic on their applications or support space for storing the influx of data. It is also important that an organization’s plans for a digital journey focus on things such as collaboration, clear goals and objectives and autonomy.

Keeping the above in mind, one way to prepare for shifting digital goals is by embracing risk and experimentation. Applying scalable cloud instances alongside microservices allows IT teams to quickly test agile new features with a small group of users, then scale out as needed. The future is uncertain, but with digital transformation continuing to grow, organizations should use this time to push new features for their applications that can address current and potential future bottlenecks. For example, if an organization noticed COVID-19 led to larger issues in their applications, they could use this time to research and try new tools that can address the smaller challenges, allowing for more time to focus on tackling the prominent challenges.

Jump-starting Your Digital Today

Organizations can jumpstart their digital transformation by adopting tools such as cloud monitoring, microservices and application performance management (APM). By identifying and preventing issues before the end user experience is diminished, organizations can reduce customer support issues and ensure continued brand loyalty.

Tools such as APM can accurately monitor and manage application technology stacks, from the user experience to network performance. These tools can help address surges in demand or shifts in resource allocations, especially as user behaviors change throughout the pandemic. While IT professionals often struggle to manage and scale services, it is possible to do this without sacrificing the user experience.

Cloud monitoring can help organizations prepare for traffic surges during and after the pandemic, through scalable cloud instances that offer additional capacity for IT resources. Many on-premises resources that are bound to offices or other physical locations are currently underutilized due to remote work. As a result, 74% of technologists surveyed said that digital transformation projects which would normally take more than a year to be approved are now moving forward within a matter of weeks. To keep up with this growing adoption, cloud monitoring provides IT professionals with real-time visibility and insights. Implementing microservices can also support organizations to develop, test and deploy new features at an extraordinary rate, resulting in improvements in security, speed and productivity.

Now that these changes are more familiar to end users, expectations will remain high moving forward. The organizations that successfully tackle challenges during the pandemic will be far more resilient. Internal processes have been a longtime barrier for companies to transform. Our current situation has broken down some old barriers and allowed for rapid changes in styles of work, which is likely to continue in some fashion post-pandemic. Businesses will see the value and become less risk-averse, empowering their IT teams to push the envelope for their ongoing transformations.

Whether it is through utilizing tools such as APM, cloud monitoring and microservices, disaster planning or managing the complexity of cloud and on-premises assets, technologists have never had a bigger opportunity to lead their businesses through change or bring closer alignment of IT to the business.
September 28, 2020
Surveys Show COVID-19 Changes to Enterprises Likely Long-Term

The global response by organizations to the novel coronavirus pandemic has been transformational. A recent survey of more than 500 senior decision-makers in the UK revealed just how much the virus forced enterprises to innovate.

The independent survey, funded by London-based tech developer Studio Graphene, questioned about more than 500 decision-makers within UK enterprises. Since March, 50% of those surveyed said they adopted technologies that they were previously hesitant to deploy.

Further, 64% said the pandemic proved to be a catalyst for the digitization of their business much more quickly than they would otherwise have. While 47% report to have migrated their offering from face-to-face to online and 39% have invested in a new area of technology that they had never used before. Finally, 22% have launched a new app.

The pandemic proved to be an eye-opener, too. The survey found that 48% of decision-makers attribute COVID-19 to their enterprise organization’s greater awareness of how technologically outdated their business is. Forty-five percent believe that it was risk-aversion that made it previously difficult to innovate. Not surprisingly, half of those surveyed said that the pandemic incentivized their company to improve their digital infrastructure.

While 45% of enterprises said that the pandemic was a catalyst for their enterprise organization’s most radical digital transformation and 47% said that the migrated their offering online, only 39% have invested in a new technological area and 22% launched a new app.

These findings echo the conclusions from another recent report released from Lux Research. According to Lux’s report, “The Impact of COVID-19 on Tech Innovation,” the changes brought on by the pandemic will be felt for years to come.

Lux identified five key areas that will continue to shape technology investments beyond the pandemic. These include human “infection prevention,” remote commerce, improved resiliency, increased agility and ongoing macroeconomic impacts.

Lux says the transformation underway will be felt differently across vertical markets. For instance, increased agility and resilience will bring long-term positive change for materials innovation. “Materials informatics will also see a medium-term positive impact thanks to increased efficiency and agility in R&D. We expect a positive effect on plastic waste recycling and synthetic biology, as more people are gravitating to single-use plastics to stay safe, and synbio can allow more agile and flexible production,” said Michael Holman, vice president of research at Lux Research.

While the energy industry will undergo essential changes, Lux predicts that increased resilience and agility will drive further investments in clean energy that will further spur on the energy transition. “Digital transformation will [also] rapidly accelerate adoption of emerging technologies like telemedicine, thanks to a dramatic increase in remote commerce and the need for infection prevention,” said Dr. Kevin See, vice president of research at Lux Research.

Expect increased adoption of wearables, robotics, agrifood and health systems, and long-term adoption of autonomous vehicles, the researchers conclude.

September 14, 2020
HashiCorp Adds Business Tier to Managed Terraform Service

HashiCorp today announced it has added a Business tier to the HashiCorp Terraform Cloud that expands the managed service in a way that provides advanced security, compliance and governance capabilities along with the ability to execute multiple runs concurrently and take advantage of more flexible service level agreement (SLA) options.

Meghan Liese, director of product marketing for HashiCorp, said this new tier addresses the requirements for enterprise IT organizations that are looking for a way to enable teams of developers to more securely provision IT infrastructure using open source Terraform tools.

For example, the Business tier of the service provides integration with single sign-on tools provided by Okta, while auditing of logs is provided via integration with tools from Splunk. This tier also provides access to private networks with fixed IP addresses as well as self-hosted agents to interact with other management planes if required.

HashiCorp reported that since launching a managed service last year for IT organizations that don’t want to provision the servers, it is now adding more than 5,000 new users per month, with 500,000 runs to provisioning infrastructure executed monthly.

The other two existing levels of services provided by HashiCorp are free instances aimed at individual developers and a Team and Governance services that can be employed to create teams that manage and govern reusable instances of configurations.

Liese said HashiCorp launched the Business tier in part to respond to the needs of enterprise IT organizations looking to automate the provisioning of IT infrastructure at scale. While there is a lot of free-rein usage of open source Terraform tools, Liese said enterprise IT organizations need to ensure security and meet compliance requirements.

Those same enterprise IT teams also tend to provision IT infrastructure concurrently, which, Liese noted, means waiting for one configuration to be completed before another is launched isn’t practical.

Terraform has gained a lot of traction among individual developers who have shown a tendency to prefer open source tools to provision IT infrastructure. That momentum has enabled HashiCorp to provide IT organizations with both commercial support for instances of Terraform they deploy and manage as well as via a service through which instances of Terraform are managed and updated by HashiCorp.

Regardless of the path chosen, the number of IT teams provisioning IT infrastructure as code has increased substantially. Less clear is to what degree that provisioning is being done by developers versus IT operations staff who have mastered Terraform. At a time when many organizations are unable to add more IT personnel, the need to automate the provisioning of IT infrastructure has never been more acute.

Of course, there are still more than a few IT teams who prefer to rely on IT administrators to provision IT infrastructure using legacy tools. However, as the pressure to become more agile continues to steadily increase, it’s now only a matter of time before the manual workflows constructed using those tools are rendered obsolete.

August 12, 2020
Nutanix Brings HCI Platform to AWS

Nutanix today announced that Nutanix Clusters are now available on bare-metal instances of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Manoj Agarwal, senior vice president of engineering for Nutanix, said Nutanix Clusters on AWS will provide IT organizations with access to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) capabilities based on Nutanix virtual machine that AWS doesn’t provide today on a public cloud.

IT organizations that already have Nutanix clusters deployed in on-premises IT environment will not have to refactor them to lift and shift them into a public cloud, he said, noting IT teams will also be able to provision Nutanix Clusters on AWS using the same Nutanix Prism management tools they currently employ in on-premises IT environments.

IT teams will also be able to employ on AWS add-on tools from Nutanix such as Files to manage unstructured data, Calm to orchestrate applications and Era to manage databases.

Agarwal declined to reveal whether Nutanix plans to support other public clouds. However, deploying HCI software on multiple clouds will provide IT organizations with the opportunity to deploy workloads without having to be concerned about being locked into a specific cloud service, he said.

In the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, IT teams are under even greater pressure to reduce total costs. Many IT teams prior to the pandemic managed cloud and on-premises IT environments in isolation. As part of the effort to reduce the total cost of IT, more organizations are now looking to embrace a heterogeneous hybrid cloud strategy that would enable them to manage multiple platforms via a common management plane. IT teams may not dynamically move workloads between clouds, but they will eventually move toward a common management framework that enables workloads to be more easily managed independent of the underlying IT infrastructure.

Nutanix, of course, is not the only provider of an IT platform aiming to become the provider of that management plane. Rather than rely on separate compute and storage services, Nutanix is making the case for an HCI platform that converges the management of compute, storage and networking.

Of course, providers of cloud service are simultaneously making available on-premises instances of cloud platforms they will manage on behalf of customers. The Nutanix approach enables IT teams to automate the building and managing of their own hybrid cloud computing environments without having to cede control to a cloud service provider, noted Agarwal.

It’s still early days as far as hybrid cloud computing is concerned, but it’s clear that the pace at which IT teams are moving toward them will accelerate in the wake of the downturn. The issue now is determining how best to achieve that hybrid cloud goal given the relative maturity of the management frameworks that would be used to manage multiple platforms. Regardless of the path selected, however, there will eventually be one IT team to rule them all.

August 11, 2020
Report: SD-WAN Shift to the Cloud Accelerates

The rate at which software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs) are being consumed as a cloud service appears to be accelerating in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A global survey of 750 IT professionals conducted by the market research firm Vanson Bourne on behalf of Barracuda Networks finds over half of respondents (52%) are looking to acquire an SD-WAN solution via a cloud provider, with Microsoft Azure being cited as the most preferred option.

Only 16% said they prefer an SD-WAN from an independent vendor, while 15% would opt for a telecommunications provider. Another 12% said they would rely on a reseller.

Klaus Gheri, vice president of network security for Barracuda Networks, said the survey suggests that as application workloads move into the cloud, more IT organizations want to centralize acquisition of networking services alongside compute and storage. As such, he said, providers of SD-WAN appliances such as Barracuda Networks will need to evolve to extend the basic SD-WAN capabilities provided by cloud service providers.

At the same time, Gheri noted that way applications are being accessed is also evolving as more employees are working from home. Rather than directly accessing applications running in a local data center or office, many organizations are routing access requests to those applications through their cloud service provider. That approach reduces costs by using a public internet connection to access to cloud service, which then routes that request over a virtual private network (VPN) to a local data center.

Given the egress charges a cloud service provider requires, that approach may not reduce costs in the case of every workload. However, it may reduce costs by reducing the amount of network traffic moving across a leased MPLS line, he noted.

Gheri said the rise of the cloud as a networking conduit illustrates how varied SD-WAN implementations have become. Organizations increasingly need some capability at the client level to automatically determine which network path makes the most sense for any request based on cost and latency requirements.

In the meantime, frustrations with VPN clients continue to mount. Most VPN implementations were designed to support a small percentage of employees for occasional access. With more employees working from home more frequently, many organizations are reconsidering their SD-WAN strategies. In addition to being able to scale services more easily, Gheri noted SD-WANs also afford organizations the opportunity to implement zero-trust networking services to better isolate application environments in the event of a security breach.

Over the last few years, SD-WANs have been one of the fastest-growing categories in IT. The Barracuda survey found 23% of respondents have already deployed SD-WAN, with another 51% either in the process of deploying or expecting to deploy one within the next 12 months.

Clearly, competition between cloud service providers, telecommunication carriers and independent providers of SD-WAN services will intensify in the months ahead. The challenge facing IT teams now is determining to what degree they want to be directly involved in managing SD-WAN networks versus simply consuming SD-WAN services on an as-needed basis.

June 15, 2020
Aruba Injects AIOps Into Network Management

Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) company, this week launched a platform that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and remediate networking issues before they have an impact on end users.

Patrick LaPorte, senior director of cloud and software solutions marketing, said the Aruba Edge Services Platform (ESP) applies algorithms to data collected for customer networks and aggregated by Aruba in the cloud. That approach enables the company to apply AIOps to automate the management of both software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs) and Wi-Fi access points.

Aruba has been making a case for converging the management of SD-WANs and Wi-Fi access points in remote offices for a couple of years now. With the downturn in the economy brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, the need to reduce the total cost of networking is even more pressing, LaPorte said.

The Aruba ESP platform further reduces the total cost of networking by augmenting network administrators with AIOps capabilities that will enable a smaller team to centrally manage via the cloud a much larger number of network services being delivered to remote offices, he said.

At the same time, Aruba enables IT organizations to implement zero-trust network security by providing built-in support for role-based access, dynamic segmentation of network services and identity-based intrusion detection to authenticate, authorize and control every user and device connected to the network, said LaPorte.

The Aruba approach to AIOps revolves around Aruba Central, a cloud service based on Kubernetes the company relies on to manage networking equipment that runs ArubaOS services. Aruba claims to have more than 65,000 customers using Aruba Central to manage network services.

Aruba Central has been enhanced to include AI Search, a data discovery service based on a natural language processing (NLP) engine that enables IT teams to employ English-language queries to extract user and device information from the data lake created by Aruba ESP. The company has also added user-centric analytics to better identify client, application and network performance issues.

Aruba has also added a faster Aruba CX 6200 Switch Series that includes built-in analytics and automation capabilities.

Finally, Aruba has launched Developer Hub, which provides access to its application programming interfaces (APIs) and documentation to applications that leverage the Aruba ESP platform.

The way network services are being managed and delivered to remote offices is dramatically changing as applications become more distributed. At the same time, the entire definition of what constitutes a remote office in the age of COVID-19 is being transformed as more employees work from home. Aruba is addressing that challenge by making it easier to set up network tunnels between home offices and remote offices managed by Aruba Central, said LaPorte.

As networking continues to evolve there is no doubt IT organizations will be relying more on automation and AI to deliver network services as scale. Less clear is the degree to which IT organizations will be willing to standardize on networking equipment from a single vendor to achieve that goal. In theory, IT organizations can reduce their total cost by standardizing on a single vendor. In practice, however, many IT environments are comprised of a dizzying array of networking equipment from multiple vendors.

Regardless of what path forward is chosen, it’s already apparent the current networking status quo will not hold for much longer.

June 10, 2020