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Tag: managed services

  • IBM to Provide Hybrid Cloud Service Based on VMware Cloud

    IBM to Provide Hybrid Cloud Service Based on VMware Cloud

    At the VMware Explore 2023 conference this week, IBM announced that it will soon provide a fully managed service based on a streamlined edition of VMware Cloud.

    Brendan Kinkade, vice president for independent software vendors, technology and hybrid cloud partnerships for IBM Global Sales, said VMware is now making available editions of VMware Cloud that are both easier to deploy and manage and, just as importantly, migrate between cloud platforms and on-premises environments as IT teams see fit.

    IBM is committed to using that platform to deliver a managed VMware Cloud service that will span hybrid cloud computing environments aligned to an NIST-validated framework, he added. That approach is critical because it will enable IT teams to apply VMware license credits to any instance of VMware Cloud no matter where it is deployed, noted Kinkade.

    In addition, the streamlined edition of VMware Cloud doesn’t use proprietary application programming interfaces (APIs) to make it simpler to port IT environments to another cloud service or back to an on-premises IT environment whenever necessary, he added.

    At the foundation of the hybrid cloud service will be an instance of a multi-tenant vCloud Director console residing on the IBM Cloud. Through the console, IT teams will be able to work with IBM to co-manage application environments.

    In addition, IBM is providing a managed IBM Cloud Cyber Recovery (ICCR) Service to better secure cloud computing environments.

    It’s not clear how much of IT is now being consumed as a managed service, but the COVID-19 pandemic has certainly increased that number. Many IT organizations are also finding it simpler to rely on a managed services provider (MSP) to manage infrastructure so they can focus more of their time and effort on application development, noted Kinkade.

    MSPs are also in a better position to aggregate all the telemetry data needed to train artificial intelligence (AI) models that will be used to automate workflows, he added.

    Exactly how DevOps workflows will evolve as organizations rely more on external service providers to manage IT infrastructure is, naturally, a work in progress within many organizations. The main challenge is aligning a unique set of continuous delivery (CD) practices for deploying and updating applications with a provider that has already defined its own workflows.

    Nevertheless, given the complexity of those environments, many organizations are not able to hire and retain the IT expertise required to manage it, so the only option may be to rely on an MSP.

    Each IT organization will need to decide whether to rely on an MSP, given the total cost of a service. Many organizations often wind up having a mix of workloads managed by internal IT teams and external service providers. The one thing that is certain is that as the pace at which workloads are being deployed in the cloud increases, many internal IT teams are overwhelmed by a level of complexity that will only increase.

  • Dell Looks to Expand Pool of Available DevOps Expertise

    Dell Looks to Expand Pool of Available DevOps Expertise

    Dell Technologies has quietly launched a training and education initiative to significantly expand the number of IT professionals that have DevOps skills.

    Brad Maltz, senior director for DevOps and developer relations ecosystems for Dell, said the next era of IT will require IT professionals that understand how to automate the management of application development and deployment. Given its long infrastructure history, Dell is especially interested in helping IT teams to use a mix of graphical tools and command line interfaces (CLIs) to programmatically deploy software at much faster rates and at scale, he added.

    Dell has already hired more than 200 specialists to provide that training as part of a DevOps Transformation Services consulting services engagement, said Maltz. The primary area of focus will be working with IT organizations that are embracing platform engineering to centralize the management of DevOps and GitOps workflows, he noted. Many of those teams are now relying on declarative automation tools that ultimately make DevOps more accessible to a wider range of IT professionals, added Maltz.

    The number of IT professionals that employ graphical tools based on IT management frameworks such as ITIL still far outnumber the number of IT professionals that have DevOps skills. The ongoing debate between these two camps essentially comes down to the need to be able to consistently manage IT at scale versus being able to adroitly keep pace with the needs of organizations that are increasingly dependent on software. In the digital transformation era, it’s become clear that more of the organizations that hire IT professionals are placing a higher value on agility, said Maltz.

    Bridging the divide between ITIL and DevOps to address that requirement is largely a psychological challenge that requires IT teams to address a range of cultural issues in addition to mastering different types of tooling, he added.

    Regardless of whether organizations continue to manage IT infrastructure internally or rely more heavily on managed services provided by Dell, the need to continuously deliver secure software faster has become a business issue. The trouble is the level of DevOps expertise within organizations tends to vary widely. A recent survey published by the Continuous Delivery (CD) Foundation found only 22% of respondents are using both continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) to automate all building, testing and deployment of code in a production environment. Most organizations that have adopted DevOps make extensive use of CI to build applications, but CD has proven to be more challenging to master. In fact, the CD Foundation survey found only 7% of respondents described themselves as DevOps engineers or specialists.

    The bulk of the managed services that Dell provides are focused on managing infrastructure rather than deploying software, but the company does have a managed DevOps offering based on the application development and deployment platform that an internal Dell DevOps team built to construct and deploy applications. Naturally, Dell has a vested interest in accelerating the rate at which software can be deployed on IT infrastructure it provides and manages.

    It may be a while before the overall size of the DevOps community expands, but the training initiatives such as the one launched by Dell will help. However, it may become a lot easier to find and retain that talent in the months and years ahead. In the meantime, organizations would be well-advised to invest in upskilling their own IT teams. After all, it’s less expensive to train someone that already works within an IT organization than it is to compete against thousands of other organizations willing to pay top dollar for the best DevOps expertise money can buy.

  • DevOps Deeper Dive: IBM to ‘Maniacally Focus’ on Hybrid Cloud, AI

    DevOps Deeper Dive: IBM to ‘Maniacally Focus’ on Hybrid Cloud, AI

    IBM this week announced its intention to spin out a new company next year focused primarily on managed infrastructure as part of a plan to focus more on hybrid cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives.

    IBM is combining the Red Hat assets it gained last year via a $34 billion acquisition with its investment in Watson AI technologies, while an as-yet-unnamed company will assume control over IBM outsourcing services currently provided by the Managed Infrastructure Services unit of IBM’s Global Technology Services division.

    IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, appointed last April, on a conference call with analysts said IBM will primarily focus on high-growth opportunities driven by Red Hat OpenShift, Linux, Kubernetes, containers and DevSecOps software technologies that will drive a trillion-dollar hybrid cloud computing opportunity, while the new company will become the world’s largest IT services provider with more than 90,000 employees serving a base of more than 4,600 clients generating more than $19 billion in revenue. Today IBM generates a little more than half of its revenue from those services and claims to have a services backlog of $60 billion.

    The new approach will enable IBM to “maniacally focus” on hybrid cloud computing and AI opportunities, Krishna said. That shift will also create a separate company capable of generating double-digit growth that should result in a higher stock valuation at a time when investors are pouring billions of dollars into software companies. IBM this week disclosed it has 2,400 hybrid cloud platform clients and that the number of larger deals driven by Red Hat software has increased by a factor of two.

    To achieve its financial engineering goal, IBM will incur multiple charges, including $2.5 billion to spin out the new company and another $2.3 billion to set it up.

    IBM has a long history of spinning out companies. In its new form, the company will grow both organically and inorganically as it makes additional acquisitions, noted Krishna.

    The “new” IBM will look and feel a lot more like Red Hat than it will IBM prior to its acquisition of Red Hat, said Mitch Ashley, CEO and managing analyst of Accelerated Strategies Group (ASG).

    “It’s starting to head toward looking more like Red Hat acquired IBM,” he said.

    The degree to which IBM will be able to dominate hybrid cloud computing is unclear. IBM is making case for unifying the management of IT by standardizing on the Red Hat OpenShift platform based on Kubernetes that can be deployed on any public cloud or on-premises IT environments, including those that also house mainframes and x86 servers. In the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, the rate at which IT organizations are expected to reduce costs by centralizing the management of cloud computing platforms is expected to increase.

    Adoption of multiple cloud computing platforms in the enterprise has tended to be reactive and any effort to centralize the management of those platforms is still in the planning stages, said Judith Hurwitz, president and CEO of Hurwitz and Associates, a research and consulting firm.

    “It’s not easy,” she said. “It’s not like you can go out and buy a control plane.”

    Ultimately, however, IT teams will have multiple options to choose from that don’t necessarily require them to adopt the Red Hat OpenShift platform.

    Similarly, IT organizations have access to a wide array of open source AI frameworks via cloud services that provide alternatives to Watson offerings.

    In the meantime, the rate at which organizations are transitioning to hybrid cloud and AI platforms is increasing. The issue IBM will need to contend with is making sure it doesn’t become distracted by its own internal issues over the course of the divestiture, which might take well over a year to ultimately complete.

  • HashiCorp Unfurls Cloud Platform for Managed Services

    HashiCorp today at its online HashiConf Digital event launched HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP), through which it intends to make all of its software available as a fully managed service.

    At the same time, HashiCorp announced a public beta of an update to HashiCorp Terraform, a curated instance of an open source tool for configuring IT infrastructure that adds additional workflow capabilities.

    Finally, an update to Nomad, a cluster manager and scheduler for containerized application environments, adds support for multiple clusters as well as the Container Network Interface (CNI) specification defined by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

    Rob Genova, director of product marketing for cloud services at HashiCorp, said although the company previously made some of its offering available as a managed service, HCP will serve as a foundation on which HashiCorp will manage updates to its software on behalf of end customers.

    The first managed service on HCP, now available in private beta, is an instance of the Consul service mesh deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which will be followed by an instance of Vault, secrets management software developed HashiCorp, that will also be deployed on AWS.

    At the core of HCP is a HashiCorp Virtual Network (HVN), which offers a common abstraction across cloud providers around an isolated single-tenant network. Each HVN can have multiple services deployed within it. In the future, HashiCorp is promising HVN will enable peering across cloud providers and cross-provider clustering of its software. Support for additional cloud services will be added based on customer demand, added Genova.

    HCP will be offered on a pay-as-you-go pricing model to minimize upfront costs, which Genova said should make Consul and other HCP services more accessible to smaller teams and organizations. Costs will increase only when workloads scale. Both development and production pricing options will be made available, he said.

    HashiCorp already provides access to hosted instances of Consul and Terraform, which it will continue to offer alongside HCP, Genova added.

    Genova said it’s become apparent more organizations would prefer to have HashiCorp manage Consul, Vault, Terraform and Nomad on their behalf. At a time when many organizations have limited IT resources, Genova said many organizations want to devote the bulk of their limited internal resources to building and deploying applications rather than the infrastructure required to maintain them.

    It’s not clear how many organizations will opt to rely more on managed services in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. At a time when many organizations are either reducing or freezing headcount, all options are being considered. Many internal IT teams may occasionally employ a managed service to extend their own capabilities. In other cases, developers may bypass an IT operations team altogether.

    In the wake of the pandemic, Genova noted more organizations simply want to deploy resources in the cloud to ensure availability while gaining increased flexibility.

    Regardless of the path chosen, the days when IT teams felt more compelled to do everything themselves are, for better or worse, changing utterly.

  • IT Modernization Yields Business Benefits Even in Early Stages

    IT Modernization Yields Business Benefits Even in Early Stages

    In recent years, with the emergence of newer technologies ranging from the cloud to machine learning, IT modernization has evolved from a replacement of end-of-life infrastructure to an enabler of innovation and business value. It is a complex process that can take months or even years, but a recent survey shows that the effort begins to deliver measurable results almost as soon as an organization executes the first steps on its roadmap.

    In The State of IT Modernization 2020, an IDG Research Services survey of 200 IT executives commissioned last December by Insight Enterprises’ Cloud + Data Center Transformation team, respondents that had completed 25% or less of their initial modernization objectives reported achieving business improvements in each of the eight categories measured. Sixty-five percent had already achieved better quality of service. Significant progress had also been made in improving customer experience/satisfaction (52%), cost savings (50%), uptime (44%) and the ability to create new revenue-generating products and services (42%). 

    Organizations that had completed their initial modernization objectives reported even better outcomes on all eight measures, notably including the ability to extract business value from data (56%) and faster time to market for new products and services (50%). 

    The findings clearly demonstrate that a modernized IT ecosystem is a core building block of business transformation. Whether it’s spinning up a new service or application quickly, doing a deep data dive to identify new market opportunities or using artificial intelligence to improve sales forecasts or warehouse operations, it’s essential to have the horsepower, agility and advanced data analysis capabilities to do the job.

    The survey of CIOs, CTOs, CSOs and IT directors working at organizations with an average of 29,294 employees also revealed a wide range of details about the status of IT modernization efforts. Let’s look at some examples.

    Progress Made

    Fifty-six percent of the enterprises surveyed have either achieved initial IT modernization objectives or have made significant progress toward doing so, while 19% have made moderate progress and 26% are in the beginning stages. Interestingly, even those in the earliest stages are pursuing emerging technologies such as AI, machine and/or deep learning (43%), automation to support scale-out and other cloud strategies (37%), cloud native application development (35%) and public cloud container services (35%). 

    Projects Derailed 

    Despite this progress, the road to IT modernization can be bumpy. Forty-one percent of survey respondents reported having delayed or abandoned some of their 2019 IT modernization initiatives. The top reasons cited were competing priorities (46%) and lack of a clear roadmap or strategy (45%). Other causes included data security concerns (39%), inadequate in-house expertise (38%), poor preparation (29%) and outdated processes or tools (27%). 

    Shifting Cloud Strategy

    Whether they have just embarked on their IT modernization journey or have made significant progress on their roadmap, organizations continue to grapple with optimizing their cloud strategy. The survey showed that:

    • Ninety-two percent of survey respondents increased workloads deployed in the public cloud and 91% in the private cloud in 2019, reflecting the ongoing increase in cloud adoption as well as migration from one platform to another.  
    • Eighty-nine percent switched or planned to switch from an all-private or all-public cloud strategy to a hybrid cloud approach – and 87% adopted a multicloud approach using more than one public cloud provider – as they attempted to find the right path for their cloud needs.
    • Eighty-four percent moved select workloads from a public cloud to an alternative cloud or non-cloud location, suggesting a failure to perform appropriate cost modeling, workload/platform alignment and other due diligence before the initial move.

    Poor Public Cloud Cost Controls

    More than two-thirds of survey respondents reported that public cloud costs exceeded their expectations, with cost overruns for roughly half that group ranging from 51% to 100%. Most of the causes can be traced to inadequate due diligence, governance or cloud optimization efforts, often due to a lack of in-house expertise in these areas. Examples include: unexpected data egress charges, subscribing to more cloud resources than required, failure to take advantage of vendor volume discounts, lack of knowledge to analyze monthly cloud costs and failure to optimize cloud workloads to extract maximum value from cloud platforms.

    Managed Services

    Adoption of managed services is widespread at every stage of the IT modernization journey, with an average of 95% of respondents outsourcing one or more IT operating environment functions to a managed services provider and 84% outsourcing cloud management. 

    Top Challenges Faced

    Governance is the number one modernization challenge in 2020, according to survey respondents, with new strategies and processes required to ensure control over areas ranging from cloud deployments to continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), automation and orchestration, and infrastructure as code. Optimizing and managing the centers of data that are replacing the traditional data center ranks as number two, with workloads located on-premises and in multiple clouds as well as on the edge.

    At the same time, most IT organizations have long-standing cultural and technological norms that need to change in order to move modernization initiatives forward. Hurdles cited elsewhere in the survey range from IT silos to outdated processes and tools, understaffed or underskilled DevOps teams and lack of enabling technology for containerization and automation.

    These challenges also need to be overcome in order to take full advantage of today’s technology to drive innovation, business transformation and the competitive edge that can help businesses both survive and thrive in today’s economy.

  • How to Leverage Elastic Services for Cost Optimization

    How to Leverage Elastic Services for Cost Optimization

    Due to the current pandemic, business continuity for many organizations has suffered a great deal. Organizations, primarily those in manufacturing, agriculture, transport, hospitality, energy and retail sectors, have been affected by the unanticipated change in the business landscape. Some companies in these sectors have been experiencing massive losses in revenue, which is why their primary requirement at this point is cost reduction.

    The other side of the crisis is that organizations in sectors such as medical, government and financial services, which are providing essential services, have experienced higher operational demands than usual–again leading to increased operational costs. Irrespective of the industry you belong to, and whether it is experiencing reduced or increased operations, cost optimization is a reality for you to ensure a sustained existence.

    One of the most reliable measures for cost optimization at this stage is to leverage elastic services designed to grow or shrink according to demand, such as cloud and managed services. For example, a well-positioned organization with a cloud native architecture can scale up or scale down cloud consumption to mitigate lost operational demand. Organizations that employ managed services providers can repurpose full-time staff members from impacted business units or product lines to more strategic initiatives.

    The Need for Cost Optimization: Now and Later 

    From observations of the economic impact of the crisis, many organizations have not been well positioned or in a state to leverage elastic services during the current crisis. In the absence of a flexible operational model, they are exposed to risks caused by:

    • A sudden disruption in business continuity.
    • Loss of business or revenues.

    To ensure that they are ready, should another disaster strike, companies need to start planning now. Partnering with a seasoned managed services provider to plan and leverage the consumption and subscription services is advisable, so that they can immediately adjust expenditures that are no longer relevant and can prepare for long-term cost reduction to conserve cash.

    Optimizing Costs with Elastic Services 

    One thing that the impact of the pandemic on businesses has made very clear is that investment toward IT strategy and planning services pays in good times, as well as bad times. Therefore, organizations, whether they are experiencing loss or profit at this stage, should consider long-term investment toward IT strategy and planning services, and thoroughly plan the “new normal” expenditures needed to scale demand/revenue.

    Elastic cloud and managed services can help these organizations strike a balance between the rapid changes in the demand and need for expenditure.

    • With consumption services, organizations can choose to pay only for the services and resources they use. 
    • With subscription services, organizations can choose flexible payment terms that often afford advantageous pricing the longer one commits. Choose the timeframe that balances the risk and reward.
    • Since most enterprises will freeze hiring and try to avoid long-term or substantial capital investments at this stage, they can meet their operational demands by contracting managed services and re-platforming their applications to use cloud services.

    The Three-Step Approach to Successfully Implementing Elastic Services 

    Given the requirements of each business are different, and the way they plan their expenditure varies as well, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy to ensure the successful implementation of elastic services for cost optimization. In order to ensure that elastic services help optimize costs in your organization in an efficient manner, you should follow the three-step approach described below:

    1. Discover: First, collect all your operational revenue and expenses over a three-year period. Understand seasonality lows and highs (these are elastic needs). Perform a business-impact-analysis (B-I-A) to understand the critical business processes and then map them to risk scenarios that can cause business disruption. Capture and arrange the risks and then determine how to build a risk mitigation plan with your strategic IT leadership and advisors.
    2. Analyze: Adapt your existing architecture to identify your business goals and how it has changed due to the new circumstances, and then perform a gap analysis and capabilities assessment. 
    3. Plan: Based on your business goals, revisit how and where it makes sense to use elastic services to fit seasonal fluctuation better, and risk scenarios where rapidly declining operational demand may occur.

    Given the pace and scale of how the business landscape is changing, a traditional wait-and-watch response is not going to work in the long run. Engaging with a strategic leadership partner that can help you analyze your current infrastructure and implement elastic services is a smart move to meet your business objectives.

  • Mission Makes AWS Expertise Available for Free

    Mission Makes AWS Expertise Available for Free

    Mission, a provider of managed services for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, this week announced it will make its cloud optimization expertise available free of charge for any IT organization that acquires AWS licenses through it.

    Alex Beal, director of product for Mission, said as cloud sprawl continues to be an issue, many internal IT teams simply don’t have the expertise required to rein in those costs. However, rather than charge extra for the expertise Mission will now make its tools and consultants available for free under the auspices of the Mission Cloud Foundation service to any organization that employs Mission to acquire AWS licenses, he said, noting every Cloud Foundation customer will get access to a designated Mission Cloud Analyst who will provide regular account reviews and guidance on implementing best practices.

    Mission can provide the free service because it acquires licenses from AWS at a lower cost. Effectively, AWS is paying for the services being provided by Mission, said Beal.

    As more workloads move into the public cloud, IT teams are struggling to navigate a complex mix of service levels from AWS that range from spot pricing options to reserved instances that can be licensed for specific periods of time at a deep discount. However, determining which workloads lend themselves best to various AWS pricing options can be challenging to determine, especially for developers who spin up virtual machines without consulting with internal IT teams. Collectively, organizations are wasting millions of dollars each year because of suboptimal usage of public cloud resources. Beal estimated that the average IT organization is wasting about $5,000 a year on cloud infrastructure resources that could be better allocated to other IT initiatives.

    Beal said Mission will work with those internal IT teams to identify unused resources and rightsizing candidates, set up budget alerts and recommend better options for specific types of workloads using a combination of monitoring tools from third parties such as CloudHealth and one developed by Mission. Those monitoring tools are also employed to enforce budget constraints and run security checks.

    Mission Cloud Foundation also includes tools to reallocate charges, reference purchase order numbers and set up automated custom reports.

    Most IT organizations could develop much of this expertise on their own. However, Beal said most IT teams also have better things to do with their time that add more value to their organization. Instead of acquiring licenses direct from AWS, Mission is making a case for an alternative approach that provides a level of service and support that AWS generally only provides to Global 2000 customers.

    Other managed services providers (MSPs) may or may not also provide tools and expertise free of charge. Savvy IT teams, however, may soon force the issue. After all, while public cloud represents the most widely employed form of IT infrastructure as code, from a cost perspective it’s also clear public clouds can also quite easily become too much of a good thing.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Cybersecurity Fears May Drive Shift to Managed DevOps

    Cybersecurity Fears May Drive Shift to Managed DevOps

    Should organizations consider using a managed service for DevOps to keep their platforms up to date and secure?

    The recent disclosure of a vulnerability that would allow open source Jenkins continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms to be employed to launch a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack highlights how challenging it is to secure the platforms on which many organizations now depend to build their most critical applications.

    The CVE-2020-2100 bug theoretically would have allowed cybercriminals to employ the Jenkins UDP discovery protocol to bounce traffic between servers until they could no longer respond. That same flaw also could be employed to launch DDoS amplification attacks against platforms connected to the internet. Those attacks can’t be stopped unless one of the servers is rebooted or its Jenkins service is restarted. The specific vulnerability discovered was fixed last month in Jenkins v2.219. IT organizations can either upgrade their Jenkins servers, disable the UDP discovery protocol or block the UDP port 33848.

    Tracy Miranda, director of open source community for CloudBees and member of the governing board for the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), which oversees the development of Jenkins, said the bug itself is at best of medium severity. However, now that it’s been disclosed, the race is on to patch Jenkins servers or block UDP port 33848 before cybercriminals exploit the vulnerability on any public-facing instance of a Jenkins server.

    Given the fact that most IT organizations may not have resources at hand to patch their Jenkins servers quickly, Miranda said these and other potential future cybersecurity issues are a testament to why more organizations should rely on instances of Jenkins that are managed by third-party providers on their behalf. Organizations are spinning up more Jenkins servers than ever as they move to accelerate application development, and by relying on a managed service provider (MSP) to manage Jenkins, IT teams can focus more of their efforts on building and deploying applications rather than on managing CI/CD platforms.

    These days, more organizations are looking at DevSecOps as a best practice. Much of that focus, however, is on securing the applications that DevOps teams create; not nearly as much attention is being paid to securing the underlying platforms on which those applications are being built and deployed.

    It’s too early to say to what degree cybersecurity concerns might push IT organizations toward managed DevOps platforms. However, the more that cybersecurity teams participate in the DevOps process, the more they will ask questions about the fundamental security of the underlying platform.

    Of course, many IT teams often view managed services provided by third-party vendors as a threat to their existence. Nevertheless, DevOps platforms are among the most complex and expensive platforms to manage. In fact, that complexity is one of the main reasons so many organizations have hired site reliability engineers rather than relied on traditional IT administrators to manage DevOps platforms such as Jenkins. The issue that often comes up is just how many SREs an organization needs to hire before the cost of a managed DevOps platform becomes economically more appealing.

    — Mike Vizard