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Tag: public cloud

  • Hybrid Cloud in 2024: Trends and Predictions

    Hybrid Cloud in 2024: Trends and Predictions

    Hybrid cloud environments are becoming increasingly pivotal for DevOps teams, primarily due to their ability to bridge the gap between the rapid deployment of public cloud resources and the security and control of private cloud infrastructure. This blending of environments provides DevOps teams with flexibility and scalability, which is crucial for operating continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) in large enterprises.

    In a hybrid cloud setup, DevOps teams can swiftly deploy and test new applications in a cost-effective and scalable public cloud environment. Once the applications are ready for production, they can be seamlessly transitioned to a private cloud or on-premises environment, where they benefit from enhanced security and control. This allows DevOps teams to optimize their workflows, reduce time to market, and respond more effectively to business needs.

    The hybrid cloud also enables a more collaborative and agile working environment. DevOps teams can leverage various tools and platforms available in the public cloud while ensuring that sensitive data and critical applications are securely managed in the private cloud. This both enhances operational efficiency and improves compliance with data governance and regulatory requirements. These benefits will make hybrid cloud an indispensable asset for DevOps teams in 2024 and beyond.

    What is a Hybrid Cloud?

    Let’s start with a brief definition. A hybrid cloud is a computing environment that combines a public cloud and a private cloud by allowing data and applications to be shared between them. This combination allows businesses to enjoy the best of both worlds, leveraging the scalability and cost efficiencies of public cloud platforms while enjoying the security and control offered by private cloud infrastructure.

    This hybrid cloud model provides businesses with more deployment options and greater flexibility to scale computing resources. It also helps in reducing capital expenditure and improving security by allowing sensitive data to be stored on a private cloud. A hybrid cloud strategy enables businesses to allocate resources efficiently, keeping less critical applications on the public cloud, while mission-critical applications run on the private cloud.

    Current State of Hybrid Cloud Computing

    The hybrid cloud market is in a state of rapid growth and evolution. As businesses increasingly recognize the benefits of a hybrid approach, the adoption of hybrid cloud strategies is on the rise.

    In a world where digital transformation is the norm, hybrid cloud computing has emerged as a key enabler. It offers the flexibility needed to adapt quickly to changing business conditions, the scalability to handle sudden increases in workload, and the security to protect sensitive data. These benefits have made hybrid cloud a cornerstone of digital transformation strategies.

    However, the journey to hybrid cloud is not without its challenges. Businesses are grappling with issues related to data security, compliance, integration, and management. There are also complexities related to workload portability, interoperability, and the need for skilled resources. Despite these challenges, the adoption of hybrid cloud continues to grow as businesses seek to leverage its benefits to drive innovation and competitive advantage.

    Emerging Trends in Hybrid Cloud for 2024

    Increased Adoption Across Industries

    Many industries, including the banking and finance sector, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and even the government sector, are seeing increased adoption of hybrid cloud strategies. This trend is driven by the need for greater agility and flexibility, better cost management, and improved security and compliance.

    In the healthcare sector, for example, hybrid cloud is enabling the integration of disparate systems, facilitating the sharing of patient data, and supporting telehealth initiatives. In the banking sector, it is helping to manage risk, improve customer experiences, and drive innovation. In retail, hybrid cloud is supporting omnichannel strategies, personalizing customer experiences, and improving supply chain efficiency.

    Advancements in Cloud Technology

    The hybrid cloud landscape in 2024 will be shaped by advancements in cloud technologies. Technologies like containers and Kubernetes are simplifying the deployment and management of applications, making it easier for businesses to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy. The rise of serverless computing is also contributing to the growth of hybrid cloud by eliminating the need to manage servers and allowing developers to focus on writing code.

    Furthermore, advancements in networking technologies are making it easier to connect and integrate public and private clouds. The emergence of 5G is expected to further accelerate the adoption of hybrid cloud by providing the high-speed connectivity needed to support real-time applications.

    Integration of AI and Machine Learning

    The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) into hybrid cloud environments is a trend that is rapidly gaining momentum. One key aspect of this integration is the ability to use AI for better resource management within the hybrid cloud. AI algorithms can analyze patterns in data usage and application performance, allowing for more efficient allocation of resources across public and private cloud environments.

    Furthermore, AI and ML are also facilitating better data management and analytics. Cloud-based services are making AI/ML more accessible to businesses of all sizes. By integrating these technologies, businesses can unlock insights from vast amounts of data stored across different cloud environments.

    Predictions for Hybrid Cloud in 2024

    Growth in Edge Computing Integration

    By 2024, the integration of edge computing with hybrid cloud architectures is expected to grow significantly. Edge computing brings data processing closer to the location where it is needed, optimizing response times and saving bandwidth. 

    In a hybrid cloud context, this means that organizations can process critical data at the edge, in real-time, while still leveraging the cloud for less time-sensitive tasks. This integration is particularly beneficial for industries like manufacturing and autonomous vehicles, where real-time data processing is crucial. The combination of edge and hybrid cloud computing enables businesses to harness the power of cloud computing while maintaining the speed and efficiency of edge processing.

    Improved Security and Compliance Measures

    In 2024, we anticipate significant advancements in the security and compliance aspects of hybrid cloud environments. As these environments become more complex, the need for robust security measures that span both public and private clouds is crucial. Enhanced encryption techniques, more sophisticated identity and access management systems, and advanced threat detection tools will become standard. 

    Additionally, we expect to see the development of more streamlined compliance benchmarks and frameworks designed specifically for hybrid cloud architectures, simplifying the process of adhering to various regulatory standards and ensuring data privacy and protection across multiple platforms.

    Innovations in Cloud Management Platforms

    The year 2024 is likely to witness substantial innovations in cloud management platforms, driven by the need to manage complex hybrid cloud environments more efficiently. These platforms will offer enhanced capabilities in terms of automation, orchestration, and unified management across multiple cloud services. 

    The use of AI and machine learning for predictive analysis, resource optimization, and proactive problem resolution will become more prevalent. These platforms will also provide better tools for cost management and analytics, giving businesses a more granular understanding of their cloud usage and enabling more cost-effective decision-making.

    Customizable and Flexible Cloud Solutions

    As hybrid cloud environments continue to evolve, 2024 will likely see a rise in more customizable and flexible cloud solutions tailored to specific business needs. Providers will offer a range of options that allow businesses to mix and match services from both public and private clouds, creating highly personalized cloud environments. 

    This customization will extend to aspects like security, performance, and compliance, allowing businesses to fine-tune their cloud infrastructure to their specific requirements. Such flexibility will be particularly beneficial for businesses in niche markets or those with unique operational needs, enabling them to leverage the power of cloud computing without compromising on their specific requirements.

    Conclusion

    By 2024, hybrid cloud computing will have significantly evolved, becoming a critical component in the digital transformation strategies of various industries. This technology offers a blend of public and private cloud benefits, crucial for DevOps teams in terms of flexibility, scalability, and security. The integration of advanced technologies like AI, machine learning, and edge computing will enhance resource management, data analytics, and real-time data processing. Additionally, the hybrid cloud’s role in ensuring agility, better cost management, and compliance is expected to drive its wider adoption across sectors like healthcare, banking, retail, and government.

    The landscape will also see advancements in security and compliance, with sophisticated measures spanning both cloud types and cloud management platforms will evolve to include AI and machine learning for more efficient operations. Customizable and flexible cloud solutions will become prevalent, allowing businesses to tailor their cloud environments according to specific needs. Overall, hybrid cloud in 2024 will be a strategic enabler, equipping businesses with the necessary tools and capabilities to thrive in an increasingly digital world.

  • Report Affirms Continued AWS Cloud Dominance

    Report Affirms Continued AWS Cloud Dominance

    A report published this week by Wiz, a provider of a cloud security platform, found more than half of organizations (57%) are using multiple clouds, with 22% currently using three or more platforms.

    However, the report also noted that 72% of all workloads are running on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Among organizations that have more than one cloud platform, Microsoft Azure (41%) is the most common secondary platform (41%), while Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is the most used tertiary platform among organizations employing two or more clouds (44%).

    The report also noted 9% of AWS customers use managed database servers, compared to 87% in GCP and 82% in Azure. However, over 91% of companies also have non-managed database servers running in a cloud. In total, only 6% of companies use managed database servers exclusively, compared to 90% using a mix of managed and non-managed database servers, the report finds.

    The most widely deployed databases are PostgreSQL, Redis and MySQL, with 90% of organizations running at least one instance of a PostgreSQL server.

    Scott Piper, principal cloud security researcher for Wiz, said the report makes it clear that despite gains by Microsoft and Google, AWS remains the most dominant cloud service provider. Even after a decade, rival cloud service providers have not been able to overcome the first-mover advantage that AWS continues to enjoy. In many cases, a second or third cloud is being employed only because a single development team preferred it or an IT team assumed responsibility for it when their company acquired another organization using it, noted Piper.

    However, while most organizations have multiple accounts per cloud service provider, the report also found that the bulk of the application workloads are managed via only a handful of accounts, he added. That suggests more organizations are subject to higher levels of disruption in the event of an outage than many of them may realize, said Piper.

    One of the reasons so many organizations have a narrow range of accounts, of course, is they simply don’t have enough personnel. In fact, a general skills shortage also tends to limit the number of cloud platforms organizations might otherwise employ.

    Multiple cloud platforms also tend to exacerbate cybersecurity challenges. With the introduction of each additional cloud service, the overall size of the attack surface that needs to be defended expands. The Wiz report found 47% of organizations have at least one database or storage bucket publicly exposed to the internet. It can take less than 13 hours for cybercriminals to discover and access an exposed bucket with a guessable name, noted Piper.

    More challenging still are the number of application programming interfaces (APIs) that need to be secured as cloud service providers continue to add new services, he added.

    Ideally, organizations should be adopting a framework to harden privileges, encryption, authentication and connectivity and improve hygiene, otherwise known as PEACH, said Piper.

    Regardless of the approach to cloud computing, it’s apparent there’s still a long way to go before organizations are ready to embrace hybrid cloud computing spanning multiple clouds.

  • How 5G Will Change the Public Cloud as We Know It

    How 5G Will Change the Public Cloud as We Know It

    When it comes to realizing the promise of 5G, we’re still a few years away. Under the hood, though, the rollout of 5G infrastructure and the new applications 5G will enable—from AR and VR to new drone capabilities and beyond—will drive dramatic changes in infrastructure demands, starting with the public cloud.

    In the 5G era, many of the applications that will become possible and take advantage of this network infrastructure will require a tremendous amount of data to be moved and processed—whether for a connected car, video surveillance with real-time analytics, or AR/VR—so much so that the data needs can’t really be solved at the responsiveness that these applications will demand from the centralized public cloud as we know it. As 5G creates a new ecosystem, a lot of these applications are going to be built in new ways and rely on the attributes of edge clouds: Edge computing delivered as a cloud-like service. Underpinning it will be cloud-native architectures and other highly automatable and flexible infrastructure to help make it a reality. Let’s take a look at some of the key elements.

    What is an ‘Edge Cloud’?

    SaaS companies building applications in the public cloud today are used to self-service, elastic infrastructure. You don’t have to think about hardware, you pay per use, there are APIs to take advantage of, and most importantly everything is highly automatable and flexible. More than likely, you need only think in terms of a handful of centralized locations as you build—a site on the west coast, one on the east coast, one or two in Europe or Asia.

    In the 5G future, that will likely no longer be the case. Many new, revenue-generating services will depend on low-latency, high-bandwidth capabilities that enable applications and data processing to get closer to the user or device. Everything from industrial applications, IoT, to immersive infotainment (virtual and augmented reality) to telemedicine and more will be able to take advantage of the 5G network and edge-compute processing to deliver new capabilities and experiences.

    Services like these depend not only on connectivity but also on the ability to gather data, process it, and more importantly, move and act on it at very high speeds.

    In this new world, you still want the same things from your infrastructure—it needs to be elastic and capable of scaling up and scaling down. And reliability, automation, and agility (the ability to iterate and deploy quickly) become even more important. And it needs to be available and running in many, many more places in order to be close to the customers and devices you are serving. You’re not thinking about three locations across the globe or two or three across the U.S. Instead, you may be thinking about a couple of dozen in one metro area alone. A whole new kind of compute environment has to be built around that, as well as a cloud infrastructure environment.

    The Multi-Mode Present, and What’s Next

    5G environments will require very flexible infrastructure that can be highly automated, repurposable, and usable in very generic ways. If you are building metro, point-of-presence data centers all over the country, it is not cost-effective to use highly specific infrastructure for each application in each site; it is too limiting in flexibility and too onerous to manage at scale.

    One aspect of the infrastructure challenge is that service providers still rely in part on monolithic, traditional applications that tend to run in physical or virtualized environments to make them deployable, controllable and able to be automated. But newer applications are being designed with a different technology stack based on containers.
    With applications that live in both areas, flexibility across VMs and containers is a must. As a result, rollouts of 5G will employ a multimode infrastructure, combining both virtual machines and containers in order to support both legacy and modern applications. The goal: Easy automation everywhere.

    Virtualized and container environments will need to live and operate in concert with one another. They both require automation, but because each has its own needs it’s important to choose a technology stack and approach that will incorporate and work with both.

    While virtual machines and virtualized network functions (VNFs) are more prevalent today, that won’t remain true for long. As carriers move to microservice architectures that drive continuous improvement and speed time to value, adoption of CNFs is growing.

    The Road Ahead

    Since it is still early days for 5G use cases, architecture flexibility will allow carriers to pivot toward any killer apps that emerge. Data-centric infrastructure that can deliver both performance, agility and flexibility is essential.

    As we look out at the possibilities for 5G, it’s helpful to think back to the early 1990s. With AOL dial-up and a 2400 baud modem, you could email, surf the web (though it was painfully slow) and play a few games. The advent of broadband ushered in entirely new applications and use cases like e-commerce and media streaming and drove the infrastructure changes to support them. 5G presents the same type of potential for sea change that will open up a whole new world of innovations for the consumer and the enterprise.

  • IT Spending to Reach $4.4 Trillion in 2022

    IT Spending to Reach $4.4 Trillion in 2022

    For those who doubted the digital transformation trend, it’s become clear that it’s not a marketing fad or a buzzword but is now standard operating protocol for businesses. A forecast released this week from market research firm Gartner confirms this, as the projected increase in application software, infrastructure software and managed services spending highlights that digital transformation is a CIO marathon and not a sprint.

    According to Gartner, every major consumer-focused online offering and mobile application is underpinned by infrastructure-as-a-service and comprises a substantial portion of the near 10% growth in software spending that will occur this year.

    Gartner said it expects digital business initiatives, such as experiential customer experience and optimization of supply chains, to push spending on enterprise applications and infrastructure software into double-digit growth next year.

    Gartner’s prediction is that worldwide IT spending is projected to total $4.4 trillion in 2022, an increase of 4% from 2021.

    But the technology battleground isn’t just about hardware and software, it’s also about talent. The tight IT talent pool is driving up salaries and forcing technology service providers to increase their prices. This is pushing up spending growth in analytics, cloud computing, seamless customer experiences and security

    Gartner expects software spending to grow 9.8% to $674.9 billion in 2022; IT services are forecast to grow 6.8% to reach $1.3 trillion.

    Cloud’s gain is traditional IT’s loss, according to a Gartner market forecast released earlier this year. Enterprise spending on public cloud computing in addressable segments will be greater than spending on traditional IT by 2025. Gartner’s ‘cloud shift’ research includes only those enterprise IT categories that can transition to cloud, within the application software, infrastructure software, business process services and system infrastructure markets. “By 2025, 51% of IT spending in these four categories will have shifted from traditional solutions to the public cloud, compared to 41% in 2022. Almost two-thirds (65.9%) of spending on application software will be directed toward cloud technologies in 2025, up from 57.7% in 2022,” Gartner predicted.

    In 2022, traditional offerings will constitute 58.7% of the addressable revenue, but growth in traditional markets will be much lower than in the cloud. Demand for integration capabilities, agile work processes and composable architecture will drive a continued shift to the cloud, as long-term digital transformation and modernization initiatives are brought forward to 2022. Technology product managers should use the cloud shift as a measure of market opportunity.

  • Survey Surfaces Observability Challenges in the Cloud Era

    Survey Surfaces Observability Challenges in the Cloud Era

    A recent cloud observability survey found nearly two-thirds (64%) of respondents reported the adoption of public clouds has made it more difficult to achieve observability. Nearly half of respondents (48%) said they now consider providing real-time insights into application/infrastructure environments to be a top priority.

    The survey polled 357 IT professionals and was conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) on behalf of Yotascale, a provider of cost optimization tools for cloud computing environments.

    Yotascale CEO Asim Razzaq said that attaining and maintaining observability becomes more challenging with each new cloud platform adopted. The survey found that 71% of organizations now rely on more than three cloud infrastructure providers.

    A full 84% of survey respondents also noted that tracking costs and cloud cost allocation is burdensome and time-consuming, and 61% admitted they lacked sufficient visibility into which teams own what cloud resources. Nearly a quarter (24%) are considering making changes to their monitoring and observability practices as infrastructure costs rise.

    Observability has always been a core DevOps tenet, but achieving and maintaining it is challenging. Most DevOps teams today aspire to be able to maintain some level of continuous monitoring. However, as it becomes easier and less costly to instrument applications, interest is rising in observability platforms that simplify the investigation of anomalies indicative of an issue that could disrupt an application environment. As that shift occurs, more organizations will seek to correlate events with costs as part of an effort to rein in the costs of IT, said Razzaq.

    In the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of workloads being deployed on public clouds increased sharply. In theory, many organizations signed enterprise licenses that reduce cloud costs if they consistently consume a certain level of infrastructure resources. In practice, however, individual developer teams are showing a preference for one cloud platform over another based on the attributes of their workloads. As a result, however, it becomes more challenging to not only consistently observe diverse platforms but also to control costs.

    It’s still early days as far as the adoption of observability platforms is concerned, but it’s apparent that as application environments become more complex the plethora of monitoring tools that DevOps teams rely on will need to be streamlined. It’s not uncommon for DevOps teams to have multiple monitoring tools that surface a set of pre-defined but often conflicting metrics. Observability platforms unify logs, metrics and traces in a way that makes it simpler to launch queries to identify the root cause of an issue.

    The rate at which DevOps teams will embrace observability will naturally vary. In 2022, the biggest obstacle might not be the technology as much as it is simply understanding what queries can help DevOps teams better understand the root cause of an IT issue before there is a major disruption. In the long term, it’s expected that machine learning algorithms will leverage the data collected by observability platforms to automatically identify issues that might lead to a disruption long before it actually occurs. Regardless of approach, however, the ability to manage complex IT environments in the months and years ahead will continue to steadily improve.

  • Google DORA Report Shows Modest DevOps Gains

    Google DORA Report Shows Modest DevOps Gains

    Google today published the annual Accelerate State of DevOps Report created by its DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team that finds 26% of DevOps teams surveyed can now be classified as elite performers. That compares to 20% the last time the study was conducted in 2019.

    DevOps teams, made up of a total of 32,000 IT professionals from around the globe, were evaluated based on their ability to frequently deploy, code, lead time for changes, time to restore service, change failure rates and operational performance. An elite team is expected to be able to restore service in the event of an outage in less than an hour.

    Dr. Dustin Smith, a user experience researcher for Google, said the increased rate suggests steady gains in DevOps maturity continue to be made despite all the challenges the COVID-19 pandemic presented. A full 96% of respondents said that prior to the pandemic they had not worked from home on a regular basis.

    The DORA report finds high and elite performers make up two-thirds of respondents. Elite performers were able to collectively decrease their lead time for changes when compared to previous studies. It’s also worth noting only elite performers have minimized their change failure rate. In previous years, medium and high performers were able to do the same.

    Overall, more than half of respondents (52%) report they have adopted site reliability engineering (SRE) best practices to some degree.

    Elite performers deploy code 973 times more frequently than low performers, who reported deploying less than once every six months. The normalized annual deployment numbers range from 1,460 deploys per year for the highest performers to 1.5 deploys per year for low performers. Not surprisingly, for elite performers, the lead times from commit to deploy are 6,570 times faster than low performers.

    Security practices have also improved with 60% conducting security reviews, with 58% reporting that the reviews include testing. Nearly two-thirds (63%) said they work closely with information security teams. The report finds teams with high-quality documentation were 3.8 times more likely to integrate security throughout their development process.

    Reliance on cloud platforms has also increased, with 56% of respondents indicating they employ a public cloud, a 5% increase from 2019. Only 21% of respondents reported deploying to multiple public clouds. Over a quarter (26%) of respondents did so to leverage the unique benefits of each cloud provider, followed closely by 22% that cited availability.

    Just over a third (34%) report they are using a hybrid cloud, while 29% have a private cloud. A total of 21% still don’t use a public cloud.

    The report also finds elite performers were 3.5 times more likely to have met all essential cloud characteristics defined by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST). Those characteristics are defined as on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity or expansion and measured service. Only 32% of respondents who said they were using cloud infrastructure agreed or strongly agreed that they met all five of the essential characteristics of cloud computing defined by NIST, an increase of 3% from 2019. Overall, usage of those characteristics of cloud computing have increased by 14% to 19%, with rapid elasticity showing the largest gain.

    The DORA report makes it clear there is still a long way to go before DevOps nirvana is more widely achieved. On the plus side, however, the number of organizations that have embraced DevOps to some degree continues to steadily increase.

  • Cloud Security Requires Shared Responsibility

    Cloud Security Requires Shared Responsibility

    The Growth of Public Cloud and the Need for Cloud Security

    Since 2006 when Amazon first introduced EC2 — the first public cloud service — cloud has become a major staple of enterprise information technology strategy. Both Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and newer cloud services continue to grow robustly. Enter the need for cloud security.

    While providing undeniable benefits to users such as scalability, speed to market, and cost savings, public cloud offerings also created a new dilemma: Just who was responsible for security when the platform was no longer protected on the user’s  premises,  and was in some part controlled by a third-party vendor?

    Cloud security is an issue the industry has had to solve in order to achieve such impressive growth. Since 2014, security services have been a key focus area of cloud providers. This includes protection of the infrastructure itself and tenant boundaries, as well as advanced services protecting the data itself. Without security, no reasonable enterprise would use public cloud in production.

    AWS Approach To Shared Responsibility Model

    As a public cloud pioneer, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the first provider to introduce the term “shared responsibility model” and its components, starting to think about improving  cloud security to a level sufficient to protect enterprise production workloads.

    According to Amazon:

    ‍“Security and Compliance is a shared responsibility between AWS and the customer. This shared model can help relieve customer’s operational burden as AWS operates, manages and controls the components from the host operating system and virtualization layer down to the physical security of the facilities in which the service operates. The customer assumes responsibility and management of the guest operating system (including updates and security patches), other associated application software as well as the configuration of the AWS provided security group firewall.”

    In short, AWS secures the cloud’s physical infrastructure, compute, and network systems  from outside physical access and from digital access and insider threats.  The customer’s responsibility is to protect everything they run in the cloud.

    What Needs To Be Secured in a Cloud Deployment?

    The importance of security in the context of public cloud has led to formation of the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). CSA has their own interpretation of the shared responsibility model.

    From the CSA’s perspective, the following are the categories of cloud systems that need to be secured:

    Information and Data – Data are the crown jewels of any digital business. From the addresses of paying customers to sensitive financial records and employees’ information ,  protecting data is critical to the success of any online business. Further, many compliance regulations, especially the recent focus on GDPR and CCPA, exert additional pressure to protect personally identifiable information.

    ‍Application Logic, APIs, and Code – The data are interpreted and processed by the application logic and application programming interfaces, or APIs. The code that implements applications can represent a core competitive advantage for the enterprise, but the logic itself and protection of the APIs is extremely important for securing  both the business and its data.

    ‍Users, Authentication, and Access Control – Users — who are both owners of the data and the source of revenue for the online business — , also need protection. From account takeover to identity theft, malicious actors can harm the users. The owner of the service where such attacks take place  is ultimately responsible for providing security.

    ‍Platform and Resource Configuration – This is the only major component of the cloud that is protected by the cloud provider itself. Protection is typically extended to the physical premises, computing resources, including cooling and physical maintenance requirements, network resources, virtualization systems and hypervisors, resource management systems, storage systems and so on.

    As Platforms Evolve, Does Shared Responsibility Change as Well?

    Newer cloud services go beyond providing just infrastructure-as-a-service and may influence how we think about shared responsibility.

    For example, some of the more interesting platform offerings include serverless compute services, a cloud development model that allows developers to build and manage applications without having to worry about server management. These offerings include  AWS Lambda, AI-as-a-service, (such as Google Cloud AI), and hosted blogs like Medium.

    If the application uses one of these advanced services, it changes how the shared responsibility model is applied because the provider is not just responsible for the host, but also for the security of the platform itself.

    While this helps us sort out security responsibilities, we must still consider security of information and data (think hosted WordPress blog); security of intellectual property and code (such as the case with serverless);  and security of the API and application logic (as might be the case with a hosted Kubernetes infrastructure, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service or Azure Kubernetes Service). All these data, application logic and code elements should still be secured by the cloud user or enterprise according to the shared responsibility model.

    There are a couple of additional important security considerations for newer platforms. Watch out for cloud lock-in. While running a guest Linux OS makes it extremely easy to migrate  workloads back on premises or to a different cloud, running the logic on a hosted platform makes the migration more difficult: the logic becomes dependent on the provider APIs. Secondly, data flows and compliance becomes a touch more difficult because best practices are not as well established for newer platforms.

    How Traceable Can Help with Cloud Security

    Traceable Defense AI provides application protection that helps fill in the customer’s share of the shared responsibility, especially as data flows, application logic, and APIs are concerned.

    Data flows – Traceable observes the data flows throughout the application running on the platform and identifies sensitive data for compliance purposes.

    API security in pre-production and production – Traceable maps out the application flows, protects applications and APIs from run-time threats, assesses API risks and helps with threat analysis and compensating controls.

    User-centric view – Traceable identifies suspicious activities and anomalies. When suspicious activity is detected on a previously well-behaved account, it’s an indicator of an account compromise. Combined with a rate-limiting functionality, this helps protect legitimate users.

    Traceable is a born-in-the-cloud company that prides itself on helping enterprises adopt cloud-native architectures in production. Understanding the shared responsibility model, selecting the cloud provider that holds up their end of the bargain, and using the right cloud security tools to fulfill the enterprise share of security responsibility is what will make the cloud truly secure.

    To learn more about Traceable you can visit us at https://traceable.ai or view a recorded demo.

  • Too Many Organizations Get Public Cloud Wrong

    Too Many Organizations Get Public Cloud Wrong

    The cloud has been getting a lot of press in the past few years—and with good reason. The elasticity and flexibility of resources are transformational for businesses. However, there are also drawbacks. For most enterprises, it’s a significant undertaking to migrate on-premises applications into a public cloud environment.

    Modern applications today are rarely self-contained entities. Application dependencies occur when software components, applications and servers rely on one another to deliver a service. The typical enterprise manages hundreds, or even thousands, of interconnected components and services, forming a complex web of dependencies.

    If an application is migrated to the public cloud without understanding the dependent services, severe performance degradation can occur with applications that are still on-premises. For example, moving an e-commerce shopping application to the public cloud but leaving a key database on-premises will result in consumers experiencing a slower response.

    The Repatriation Problem

    IDC research shows that fewer than 20% of enterprise applications have been moved from onsite data centers to the public cloud, not because companies do not see value in the cloud, but because the process of getting those applications to the cloud is complicated.

    A survey of 350 cloud decision-makers in the United States and UK commissioned by Virtana and fielded by Arlington Research in November 2020 confirmed this. More than two-thirds (68%) of respondents have already migrated 25% or more of their applications to public clouds, supporting the IDC finding.

    Clearly, businesses recognize the value of the cloud. But another surprising result confirms that the migration process may be problematic. A whopping 72% of respondents said they have moved one or more applications from the public cloud back on-premises. Considering the time and effort cloud migrations require, this is a striking result. While there may be cases where repatriation is undertaken strategically to support evolving business needs, the reasons cited by respondents show most were rollbacks required because of unanticipated problems.

    There Is No Single Reason Why

    Almost half (41%) of respondents said they repatriated applications that should have stayed on-premises. The reality is that not all workloads are a good fit for the public cloud environment. You need a solid understanding of the various attributes of different workloads, such as data, back end, privacy and security requirements, to determine their inherent suitability for a public cloud environment.

    Technical provisioning issues challenged 36% of respondents. The sheer number of configuration options available—combined with the variety of computing dimensions that you have to take into account—means there are a lot of puzzle pieces that have to fit together, or you could run into problems.

    Almost one-third (29%) of respondents reported application performance degradation in the public cloud. The public cloud is a fundamentally different environment than an on-premises data center, and creating a hybrid environment further alters the nature of the infrastructure, so you cannot simply expect workloads to attain the same performance levels as you migrate them. And if performance slows to an unacceptable level, any benefits you gain by moving applications to the cloud are overshadowed.

    Around one-fifth (21%) admitted that they selected the wrong public cloud provider. Cloud providers are not all the same, and picking the wrong one, for any reason, can be an expensive and disruptive mistake.

    Finally, one-fifth (20%) of respondents repatriated applications because of unexpected costs in the public cloud. The public cloud’s pay-for-what-you-use model is appealing compared to the on-premises capex model, where you pay for capacity regardless of whether you use it. But there is a dark side; you have to pay for what you use in the cloud even when that usage is unexpected. Whether that is due to poor planning, an unanticipated surge or workload drifts over time, getting a nasty surprise in your end-of-month bill can put a big dent in your cloud budget.

    Eliminate Repatriation With Better Planning and Observability

    Any one of these reasons alone reflects a challenging setback to overcome. Unfortunately, many organizations run into more than one of these problems. In fact, one-third of respondents cited two or more of these reasons for repatriation, and 12% experienced three or more of these issues. This seems to indicate that organizations’ migration planning efforts are inadequate. It is not for lack of investment—78% of survey respondents said that even during the current challenging economic climate, they are continuing their migration to the public cloud at the same or an accelerated pace, signaling they believe public cloud deployments to be a strategic investment.

    The real problem is a lack of precision in observability—of workload characteristics in the data center pre-migration and of workload utilization and performance in the public cloud post-migration. The better you understand your applications, in minute detail, within the context of the environments they are moving from and to—a ‘know before you go’ approach—the less likely you will have to hit the “undo” button on your public cloud migration.

  • Reserved.ai Applies Machine Learning to Rein in Cloud Costs

    Reserved.ai Applies Machine Learning to Rein in Cloud Costs

    Reserved.ai has added a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool to more accurately predict cloud computing workloads and rein in cloud spending. The company says its Purchase Planner tool uses machine learning to optimize cloud computing workloads by automatically purchasing cloud reserve instances based on the forecasts it generates.

    Purchase Planner leverages the machine learning algorithms Reserved.ai created to monitor and forecast when organizations should optimally reserve instances on a public cloud. The forecasts are based on customers’ current application workload requirements, as well as what the AI platform estimates overall demand for reserved instances is likely to be in the months ahead.

    The Purchase Planner tool is currently available on Amazon Web Services (AWS), and there is also a public beta edition available for Microsoft Azure clouds with support for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) planned for this quarter.

    Reserved.ai CEO Aran Khanna said Purchase Planner enables Reserved.ai to automatically purchase reserved instances on the AWS cloud. If, for any reason, those reserved instances are not required, Khanna said Reserved.ai will buy them back from customers.

    Given thriving demand for reserved instances on public cloud, Khanna said reselling those instances minimizes any financial risk for the company.

    Historically, many IT organizations have over-provisioned their cloud resources to mitigate the cost of having to purchase cloud instances on demand. In the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, Khanna said more IT teams are attempting to optimize their cloud costs by reducing the number of reserved cloud instances they anticipate they’ll need based on their current cloud infrastructure consumption. Achieving that goal requires a massive amount of guesswork that can be more accurately calculated by machine learning algorithms, Khanna said.

    Khanna said the Reserved.ai platform provides the added benefit of requiring only 15 minutes to install, with a minimal infrastructure footprint required.

    Capacity optimization as an IT discipline has been around for decades. In the age of the cloud, however, IT organizations lost visibility into capacity utilization and cloud computing costs as developers spun up virtual machines. Now, finance teams require IT teams to, at the very least, maximize the number of workloads run while more accurately predicting cloud costs. Any actual reduction in cloud spending is a secondary benefit. The challenge today is that most cloud optimization efforts rely on the manual efforts of IT teams, and often, they’re unable to keep pace with the rapid rate of change in the cloud.

    Understanding the true cost of cloud computing will be more critical in the months ahead, as more organizations look to compare the cost of running one type of workload on the cloud versus another. Gaining visibility into those costs today will only be feasible when IT teams can rely on AI platforms capable of analyzing those costs in near real time. Otherwise, by the time an IT team becomes aware of an opportunity to reduce costs, the opportunity has already been seized by another organization.

    Regardless of how IT teams rein in cloud costs in the months ahead, the goal should be to maximize the number of workloads that can run without increasing the budget. After all, most organizations today are focused on maximizing their existing cloud investments to the fullest extent possible.

  • VMware Starts to Gain Some Momentum on AWS

    VMware Starts to Gain Some Momentum on AWS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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