Enterprise IT has been in the era of Hybrid Cloud for some time now. But it seems most conversations about Hybrid are focused on integrating AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google ECM into existing on-premises systems. Where is all the Private Cloud? What do technology providers need to do to make their offerings more compelling? How should enterprise IT executives and buyers define their focus, needs, and roadmap, and communicate that clearly to the providers?

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Picture credit: British Medical Journal

During a recent VMworld keynote, Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of VMware, gave special praise to General Electric (GE). For a company which was founded when Queen Victoria was still on the British throne, its continued innovations through cloud, analytics, and more has helped it remain the only company still standing from the original 12 listed as part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

The British Medical Journal (BMJ), founded in 1840, a full 52 years before GE, is another case in point. The company’s expansion over its storied history now encompasses 60 specialist medical and science journals. Its infrastructure grew with it; but with time at a premium, and new products to launch, there was little to scope to examine and evaluate the architecture. An expiring hosting contract gave the journal time to breathe, however, with the BMJ selecting managed hosting provider Datapipe to help them through this digital change.

Sharon Cooper is chief digital officer at the BMJ. Having previously been CTO since 2012, the parallels between then and now are stark. “Like any company, we had a lot of legacy systems,” Cooper tells CloudTech. “One member of staff threw their laptop on my desk after a business trip referring to it as ‘as much use in a sales meeting as an etch-a-sketch’.” This meant that the whole company was running on Lotus Notes and Windows XP. Employees used third party cloud storage systems and forwarded email to home accounts to help get their job done.

Today, Cooper insists that the cloud storage provided by the company is just as good as anything else. But this is just the icing on the cake, the baubles on the Christmas tree, or whichever metaphor you prefer. Underpinning the journal’s transformation is a concerted move to DevOps and agile processes.

Back in 2012, there would be on average one release a month with “several people standing around whilst a manual process that took the best part of an afternoon played out”, as Cooper explains. Now, it’s up to four times a day. The working relationships between dev, ops, test and business needs is “unrecognisable” from before. “One of our product owners was disappointed he didn’t have a ‘big bang’ release [that] one of the devs built an Android app in an afternoon with a big red button on it – to bring back the sense of ‘ta-da’,” says Cooper.

As the team and collaboration aspects changed, the infrastructure was changing with it. In total, more than a dozen suppliers were long listed, which then became five, and eventually three. The shortlisted firms were given some code and asked to stand it up; and Datapipe came out on top. “Some vendors draw a line – you’re either fully managed or not at all, but Datapipe had the flexibility and the know-how to work BMJ’s way,” said Alex Hooper, BMJ’s head of operations.

This partly refers to the fact that the BMJ’s environment is not the easiest to work with; they operate on a separate managed service outsourced platform. But the results spoke for themselves; alongside the already-mentioned much improved release cycle, content and services are now built and delivered around APIs as opposed to weekly batch file transfers, while more than 200 virtual machines run applications 24×7 in a private cloud infrastructure.

Plans for the future, however, will aim to see workloads being moved to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud. Cooper explains that some workloads are not suited for public cloud, such as development environment, but moving over without any interruptions, and ensuring maximum cost reduction, is equally important.

“We have some experience in this, having moved between two private clouds recently,” says Cooper. “Generally, we’d move the application servers across first but leave the data stores in the old data centre – we had a VPN set up between the two cloud, and all the data traffic flowed across that. Then we’d replicate the databases between data centres and switch to the replica in the new data centre.

“This worked very well, easily taking the 200 request a second authentication traffic until we finally moved that system across,” Cooper adds. “Getting that hybrid architecture right between private and public cloud will be key.”

For organisations in a similar boat, Cooper advocates several points to consider. Think about the problem you are trying to solve before jumping in, work out where your talent is – “you can outsource the doing part, but don’t outsource all of the understanding” – manage expectations, and build in contingency plans. Above all, however, is the importance of getting employees onside.

“You need your team to buy into the change,” Cooper explains. “Infact, I can’t take much credit at all for our modernising programme in detail. I set out a very clear place I wanted to get to – it was very business-focused, it was really clear just how critical that back office ops team was in ensuring our customers got what they wanted – and why I wanted them to change to improve that customer experience.

“How we got to that future state was really determined by the team,” adds Cooper. “They worked out the detail, they changed significant parts of their jobs, built really strong working relationships across the team to deliver. I’m immensely proud of my team – it has been their dedication, hard work and preparedness to change that has made this work for us.”

(c)iStock.com/JasonDoiy

451 Research’s latest study of cloud computing adoption in the enterprise, The Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Transformation – Workloads and Key Projects provides insights into how enterprises are changing their adoption of public, private and hybrid cloud for specific workloads and applications. The research was conducted in May and June 2016 with more than 1,200 IT professionals worldwide.

• As of Q2, 2016 Microsoft Azure has achieved 100% year-over-year revenue growth and now has the 2nd largest market share of the Cloud Infrastructure Services market according to Synergy Research.
• Microsoft’s FY16 Q4 earnings show that Azure attained 102% revenue growth in the latest fiscal year and computing usage more than doubling year-over-year.
• 451 Research predicts critical enterprise workload categories including data, analytics, and business applications will more than double from 7% to 16% for data workloads and 4% to 9% for business applications.
• Cloud-first workload deployments in enterprises are becoming more common with 38% of respondents to a recent 451Research survey stating their enterprises are prioritizing cloud over on-premise.

The study illustrates how quickly enterprises are adopting cloud-first deployment strategies to accelerate time-to-market of new apps while reducing IT costs and launch new business models that are by nature cloud-intensive. Add to this the need all enterprises have to forecast and track cloud usage, costs and virtual machine (VM) usage and value, and it becomes clear why Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are now leaders in the enterprise. The following graphic from Synergy Research Group’s latest study of the Cloud Infrastructure Services provides a comparison of AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM, Google, and others.

Being able to innovate faster by building, deploying and managing applications globally on a single cloud platform is what many enterprises are after today. And with over 100 potential apps on their cloud roadmaps, development teams are evaluating cloud platforms based on their potential contributions to new app development and business models first.

AWS and Microsoft Azure haven proven their ability to support new app development and deployment and are the two most-evaluated cloud platforms with dev teams I’ve talked with today. Of the two, Microsoft Azure is gaining momentum in the enterprise.

Here are the seven ways Microsoft is making this happen:

Re-orienting Microsoft Azure Cloud Services strategies so enterprise accounts can be collaborators in new app creation

Only Microsoft is coming at selling Cloud Services in the enterprise from the standpoint of how they can help do what senior management teams at their customers want most, which is make their app roadmap a reality. AWS is excellent at ISV and developer support, setting a standard in this area.

Giving enterprises the option of using existing relational SQL databases, noSQL data stores, and analytics services when building new cloud apps

All four dominant cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, Google, and IBM) support architectures, frameworks, tools and programming languages that enable varying levels of compatibility with databases, data stores, and analytics. Enterprises that have a significant amount of their legacy app inventory in .NET are choosing Azure for cloud app development. Microsoft’s support for Node.js, PHP, Python and other development languages is at parity with other cloud platforms. Why Microsoft Azure is winning in this area is the designed-in support for legacy Microsoft architectures that enterprises standardized their IT infrastructure on years before.

Microsoft is selling a migration strategy here and is providing the APIs, web services, and programming tools to enable enterprises to deliver cloud app roadmaps faster as a result. Like AWS, Microsoft also has created a global development community that is developing and launching apps specifically aimed at enterprise cloud migration.  Due to all of these factors, both AWS and Microsoft are often considered more open cloud platforms by enterprises than others. In contrast, Salesforce platforms are becoming viewed as proprietary, charging premium prices at renewal time. An example of this strategy is the extra 20% Salesforce charges for Lightning experience at renewal time according to Gartner in their recent report, Salesforce Lightning Sales Cloud and Service Cloud Unilaterally Replaced Older Editions; Negotiate Now to Avoid Price Increases and Shelfware Published 31 May 2016, written by analysts Jo Liversidge, Adnan Zijadic.

Simplifying cloud usage monitoring, consolidated views of cloud fees and costs including cost predictions and working with enterprises to create greater cloud standardisation and automation

AWS’ extensive partner community has solutions that address each of these areas, and AWS’ roadmap reflects this is a core focus of current and future development. The AWS platform has standardization and automation as design objectives for the platform. Enterprises evaluating Azure are running pilots to test the Azure Usage API, which allows subscribing services to pull usage data. This API supports reporting to the hourly level, resource metadata information, and supports Showback and Chargeback models. Azure deployments in production and pilots I’ve seen are using the API to build web services and dashboards to measure and predict usage and costs.

Openly addressing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) concerns and providing APIs and Web services to avoid vendor lock-in

The question of data independence and TCO dominates sustainability and expansion of all cloud decisions. From the CIOs, CFOs and design teams I’ve spoken with, Microsoft and Amazon are providing enterprises assistance in defining long-term cost models and are willing to pass along the savings from economies of scale achieved on their platforms. Microsoft Azure is also accelerating in the enterprise due to the pervasive adoption of the many cloud-based subscriptions of Office365, which enables enterprises to begin moving their workloads to the cloud.

Having customer, channel, and services all on a single, unified global platform to gain greater insights into customers and deliver new apps faster

Without exception, every enterprise I’ve spoken with regarding their cloud platform strategy has multichannel and omnichannel apps on their roadmap. Streamlining and simplifying the customer experience and providing them with real-time responsiveness drive the use cases of the new apps under development today. Salesforce has been successful using their platform to replace legacy CRM systems and build the largest community of CRM and sell-side partners globally today.

Enabling enterprise cloud platforms and apps to globally scale

Nearly every enterprise looking at cloud initiatives today needs a global strategy and scale. From a leading telecom provider based in Russia looking to scale throughout Asia to financial services firms in London looking to address Brexit issues, each of these firms’ cloud apps roadmaps is based on global scalability and regional requirements. Microsoft has 108 data centres globally, and AWS operates 35 Availability Zones within 13 geographic Regions around the world, with 9 more Availability Zones and 4 more Regions coming online throughout the next year. To expand globally, Salesforce chose AWS as their preferred cloud infrastructure provider. Salesforce is not putting their IOT and earlier Heroku apps on Amazon. Salesforces’ decision to standardize on AWS for global expansion and Microsoft’s globally distributed data centers show that these two platforms have achieved global scale.

Enterprises are demanding more control over their security infrastructure, network, data protection, identity and access control strategies, and are looking for cloud platforms that provide that flexibility

Designing, deploying and maintaining enterprise cloud security models is one of the most challenging aspects of standardizing on a cloud platform. AWS, Azure, Google and IBM all are prioritizing research and development (R&D) spending in this area. Of the enterprises I’ve spoken with, there is an urgent need for being able to securely connect virtual machines (VMs) within a cloud instance to on-premise data centers. AWS, Azure, Google, and IBM can all protect VMs and their network traffic from on-premise to cloud locations. AWS and Azure are competitive to the other two cloud platforms in this area and have enterprises running millions of VMs concurrently in this configuration and often use that as a proof point to new customers evaluating their platforms.

Bottom line: Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure are the first cloud platforms proving they can scale globally to support enterprises’ vision of world-class cloud app portfolio development.

Keeping pace with advancements in software delivery processes and tooling is taxing even for the most proficient organizations. Point tools, platforms, open source and the increasing adoption of private and public cloud services requires strong engineering rigor – all in the face of developer demands to use the tools of choice. As Agile has settled in as a mainstream practice, now DevOps has emerged as the next wave to improve software delivery speed and output. To make DevOps work, organizations must focus on what is most relevant to deliver value, reduce IT complexity, create more repeatable agile-based processes and leverage increasingly secure and stable, cloud-based infrastructure platforms.
In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 19th Cloud Expo, Flint Brenton, CEO of CollabNet, will outline strategies for unifying a continuously changing, fragmented and disparate set of technologies and processes within common community architecture.

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Enabling patient-doctor trust goes a long way in a provider’s ability to provide care. Trust is also critical for enabling network connections that are safe, to help secure health networks.
The healthcare industry is scrambling to shore up defenses as cyberattacks and breaches increase. The rapid adoption of electronic health records/electronic medical records (EHR/EMR) has created an attractive opportunity for cyber criminals. Ponemon Research recently reported that breach costs are $363 for each stolen healthcare record, and that is the highest across all vertical markets.

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Oracle has announced total revenues of $8.6 billion (£6.6bn) in its first quarter 2017 financial results, up 3% in constant currency and with the cloud change at the heart of it.

Addressing analysts after the results were announced, Safra Catz, Oracle co-CEO, said in her first remarks, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha: “Clearly, we are pleased with our results, with the most obvious thing being that we overachieved again in the cloud especially in the United States. As you all know, we have pivoted the organisation to go after the cloud and we are outperforming even our most aggressive expectations.”

Cloud software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) revenues were $798m, up 79% in constant currency, while total cloud revenues – in other words, factoring in infrastructure as a service (IaaS) with it, were $969m, up 61% respectively. Oracle expects to sell more than $2bn of SaaS and PaaS in annually recurring revenue.

In the press material, Oracle again fired shots at its opponents – noting that the previous quarter has seen the sign up of ‘more ERP customers than Workday has sold in the history of their company’ – while in the analyst call Larry Ellison, Oracle CTO, had his sights set on Amazon Web Services with the rollout of new second generation IaaS data centres.

“For the first time, we have this big technology advantage in the infrastructure as a service,” said Ellison. “We expect this will enable Oracle to accelerate our infrastructure as a service business to the same high growth rates that we’re currently experiencing in both SaaS and PaaS.”

The key move from Oracle over the past quarter has been the company’s acquisition of cloud ERP rival NetSuite for $9.3bn in July. Only one mention was made of the deal on the analyst call – Catz confirmed that the antitrust reviews had all been cleared for the deal except in the US.

Other notes from the financial results showed short-term deferred revenue at $9.5bn, up 5% in constant currency compared with this time last year, while operating income was $2.6bn.

Since cloud computing has made big leaps in the past few years by emerging as a conventional business tool, several strategies have consequently surfaced. These myths aren’t necessarily as risky as they were initially presented to be, but they certainly affect our methods of approaching solutions in the cloud computing space.

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Cloud applications are awash within businesses today – whether the organisation knows it or not. There are more than 4.2 million apps available across the Android and Apple stores alone, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that employees are quick to download the latest app instead of going through the red tape of IT procurement, provisioning, testing and security. From Dropbox and Twitter to Facebook and Salesforce, apps have become the de facto method for sharing and storing data, allowing easy access and greater collaboration. In principle this is no bad thing, but in reality there’s risk involved and businesses are often innocent bystanders.

We’re all at the mercy of someone else’s security policies. I can have every single possible security tool, device and dashboard in place, but if a service I use is hacked? That’s out of my control. In the last couple of weeks Dropbox confirmed a hack in 2012 had resulted in 68 million user names and passwords appearing online. That’s around a third of Dropbox’s user base. A couple of days later OneLogin announced a bug had let a hacker view users’ secure notes, potentially exposing a Pandora’s box of information for anyone looking to move sideways in big businesses.

Most hackers are after a quick and easy payday. And any savvy hacker knows there’s loot to be had from cloud services. Given today’s consumer / corporate crossover world we live in, things like Dropbox are a prime target as they’re a vast cache of IP and corporate databases – and probably a fair amount of personal information that can exploited. At the same time, apps like OneLogin are designed to increase security and anyone looking to procure a few passwords would do well to try their luck here. 

The cloud industry has been hard at work dragging people over the line in the security debate for some time.  We have worked hard to tackle the issue head on and incidents like these don’t help assuage the doubts that many still have.

Enterprises are bombarded with advice about how to keep their data safe. We tell them about the importance of monitoring network activity, of knowing what their employees are doing, the need for layered solutions and access controls. But we need to practice what we preach.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a cloud app provider, a cloud security provider, an end user, or a service provider the same rules apply. If your password database is accessed and its contents downloaded or moved, big red, loud alarm bells should be ringing and, if they’re not, you’re not doing it right. Everyone needs an understanding of what normal looks like for their business, who is accessing what and from where, as well as the ability to control what can and can’t be done.  

The cloud shouldn’t be feared; it should be embraced with open arms. But, as an industry, we need to take care of our own backyard first; otherwise we’re falling at the first hurdle.