«Outscale was founded in 2010, is based in France, is a strategic partner to Dassault Systémes and has done quite a bit of work with divisions of Dassault,» explained Jackie Funk, Digital Marketing exec at Outscale, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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«We want to show that our solution is far less expensive with a much better total cost of ownership so we announced several key features. One is called geo-distributed erasure coding, another is support for KVM and we introduced a new capability called Multi-Part,» explained Tim Desai, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Hitachi Data Systems, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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«The Striim platform is a full end-to-end streaming integration and analytics platform that is middleware that covers a lot of different use cases,» explained Steve Wilkes, Founder and CTO at Striim, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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As cloud deployments have become more complex—with hybrid cloud environments growing in number and importance—networking technologies have not kept pace with advancements in cloud computing and storage. In fact, hybrid cloud networking has become a serious pain for enterprises across industries.

Fortunately, new approaches are emerging that will help IT teams better anticipate these issues, and to ultimately overcome the complexity and related project delays that currently plague them.

At a technical level, one problem is that on-premises, datacenter-based private cloud networks are built on complex, hardware-centric datacenter networking devices such as virtual local-area networks (VLANs), routing protocols, and private circuits. In contrast, public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure provide virtual private cloud (VPC) and Internet-based connectivity that is dynamic, scalable, and elastic. But enterprises running multiple workloads on public clouds typically deploy each workload as an island in a separate VPC, generating a series of disjointed silos without any interconnection.

Networking alternatives offered so far—virtual routers, circuit-based approaches, home-grown legacy methodologies, or SD-WAN—fail to solve the fundamental challenge of enabling hybrid cloud networking to be as agile and elastic as cloud computing or cloud storage. These networking alternatives result in enterprises adding more expensive hardware, at times with reduced security, which impedes business agility and increases risk.

Clearly, enterprises need a modern approach to networking that is purpose-built for the cloud era.

Hybrid cloud ignores networking

Enterprises are turning to hybrid clouds, which integrate public and private cloud infrastructures, for reasons including application mobility between private and public clouds; on-demand access by DevOps to on-premises applications and data; and backup, disaster recovery, and high availability. As enterprises move more workloads to hybrid cloud infrastructures, they must be able to operate and manage their business applications regardless of the underlying network environment.

While the compute and storage aspects of the cloud have been made available as on-demand services, networking has not. This leaves many organisations struggling to extend traditional networking approaches to hybrid cloud. And it leaves DevOps teams, which are accustomed to moving at cloud speeds, unable to operate in hybrid cloud environments with the agility they require.

Managing traditional networking in the hybrid cloud today entails painstakingly slow, error-prone manual efforts. Connecting private clouds and public clouds involves multiple point-to-point networking and encryption technologies, including IPSEC VPN, SSL VPN, DirectConnect, ExpressRoute, and others. Coordinating these technologies adds complexity to the hybrid cloud network architecture and slows networking performance.

As a result, it can take several weeks to establish hybrid cloud connectivity. And even when the hybrid cloud is up and running, performing routine modify-add-delete change requests involves significant time and effort by highly skilled IT personnel.

For example, one Fortune 500 financial services enterprise ran into trouble when its strict change control processes collided with attempts to establish a hybrid cloud network. To get a connection to the cloud, it needed to open a ticket for the configuration change, review the ticket, test the change by networking experts, receive recommendations for the change, undergo review by the internal change review board, and schedule time to make the change. This process took months.

Traditional networking doesn’t scale in the hybrid cloud

Applying traditional networking technologies to hybrid cloud also requires deep networking technical skills, at a level that many companies lack, as well as coordination among multiple teams: networking, virtualization, cloud ops, security, compliance, etc.

Enterprise IT departments lacking the ability to seamlessly extend private cloud IP address spaces to the public cloud, or to securely connect the various clouds, can create hybrid cloud environments with gaps in end-to-end security. In addition, enterprises often find overlapping ranges between their assigned VPC and existing IP addresses. Sorting it out required one large enterprise to spend weeks performing IP management manually, using spreadsheets.

Not only is it impossible for IT to offer users the unified experience that hybrid cloud promises, current technologies prevent IT from operating with the speed or agility that developers demand from cloud environments, creating tension between IT and DevOps teams.

Because hybrid clouds currently consist of cobbled-together point tools and do it yourself scripts, scaling the hybrid cloud becomes very expensive. Operating costs rise exponentially as the hybrid cloud scales because there is no end-to-end network connectivity or performance visibility; no central location for logs and events; and no single console for controlling all the networking functions.

In the end, hybrid cloud implementations cannot deliver on the unified and agile experience that enterprises—or their DevOps teams, customers, or end users—expect from the cloud.

Overcoming cloud networking friction

Enterprises deploying a single application to a public cloud, or using an on-premises private cloud for all critical applications, might not notice networking issues. But as soon as an enterprise tries to run important applications in hybrid cloud environments, the challenges of networking across both public and private clouds become painfully obvious.

What’s needed is a new approach to networking developed specifically for the cloud: one that enables enterprises to set up and operate hybrid cloud networks that are secure, fast, and easy to implement; simple to operate; and far lower in cost and risk than existing technologies.

Such a purpose-built hybrid cloud network must:

• Be fully automated, so that even personnel without networking technical skills can deploy and manage hybrid cloud applications
• Connect clouds in minutes, not weeks, ideally using a browser-based interface and a few simple clicks
• Offer end-to-end security across private and public clouds
• Have centralised visibility across an enterprise’s entire hybrid cloud environment
• Use standard developer tools and work with all major cloud platforms
• Provide a software-only solution, so that enterprises need not invest in new networking equipment or reconfigure existing edge routers

Only a cloud networking approach built specifically for and from within the cloud can deliver hybrid cloud networking solutions able to overcome the friction of current hybrid cloud networking—so that enterprises can fully leverage the best of private and public cloud infrastructures while achieving the application flexibility and agility they need.

The concept of ‘everything as a service’ has been around the industry for a few years – yet according to the latest note from 451 Research, the increased demand for managed security, disaster recovery and networking is forcing its rise to the mainstream.

The analyst firm argues that the ability to ‘connect the dots’ with managed services will provide a key differentiator to both channel partners and service providers, as new kinds of managed services emerge. According to the company’s Voice of the Enterprise: Hosting and Cloud Managed Services study, from earlier this year, managed services and security services are aligned to approximately half of the total hosting and cloud opportunity, with that number increasing year by year.

“This spending trend, alongside feedback from providers, indicates there is an appetite for a wider range of bundled offerings from the managed service sector including systems integrators, VARs, and others with service deliver experience,” said Rory Duncan, 451 research director for managed services and hosting in a statement.

“We see a significant opportunity for technology vendors to partner with service providers to offer higher value, niche and vertical offerings as these services rapidly emerge,” he added.

This publication first examined everything, or anything as a service (XaaS) back in 2014. The rather modest example given at the time was around desktop as a service, which would have included from a service provider an office suite, or the SaaS side, servers (IaaS), as well as maintenance and a physical endpoint, offering the customer one fee and one ‘throat to choke’ for the product’s delivery.

In other words, this example offers up a managed service. But as a blog post from Chargify, a subscription billing software provider, put it back in February, XaaS is ‘extending beyond cloud computing’, pervading multiple industry models, and could kickstart the smart home revolution.

“[We] expect to see a myriad of more traditional industries and non-subscription products pivot to include ‘as a service’ in their offerings,” the company wrote. “Consumers are businesses are embracing the many benefits of the subscription model, and businesses should be looking at how to incorporate XaaS into their own roadmaps for future success.”

More CIOs and CTOs are choosing to architect and deploy hybrid multi-cloud computing environments in 2017. The trend is being driven by growing demand to support digital transformation projects that are led by the C-suite.

Newly released results from the CloudView Survey 2017 reveal the top drivers of cloud adoption – include improving agility and security, as well as standardising IT infrastructure.

Cloud computing market development

As multi-cloud environments and hybrid cloud become more prevalent, the survey revealed that 87 percent of cloud users have adopted some capabilities for a hybrid cloud strategy – that’s an increase of 17 percent compared to 2016, according to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC).

«Beyond adoption and maturity, a series of questions on ‘why are’ or ‘why aren’t’ respondents moving more workloads to the cloud makes up a key part of the study,» said Benjamin McGrath, senior research analyst at IDC.

Additional findings from the study include:

• 56 percent of users run more than one type of cloud deployment
• 40 percent of cloud users are «cloud First» organisations

«When we look at the shift in IT spend over the next 12-24 months to more of a mix of multiple types of cloud deployments, we see each type of organisation take a different journey,» added McGrath.

The study gathers data on the journey to cloud and how it differs by vertical – and micro-vertical – by country, by company size, company age, and by job title.

What industry-specific projects are moving to the cloud? What are end-users looking for from their vendors in each country? How will all that change over time?

CloudView 2017 encompasses thousands of surveys from line-of-business cloud buyers and IT operations staff on cloud adoption rates, trends, and attitudes.

Survey respondents are from more than 6,000 organisations worldwide, all of whom are current users of cloud services.

To gain a complete picture of potential cloud customers along the journey, data is also collected from respondents at organisations who are not currently utilising cloud.

If you are thinking about moving applications off a mainframe and over to open systems and the cloud, consider these guidelines to prioritize what to move and what to eliminate.
On the surface, mainframe architecture seems relatively simple: A centrally located computer processes data through an input/output subsystem and stores its computations in memory. At the other end of the mainframe are printers and terminals that communicate with the mainframe through protocols.

For all of its apparent simplicity, mainframe architecture can be extraordinarily complex. Mainframes process thousands of transactions per second and require an extensive infrastructure to house and maintain them. The hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of terminals (think of a bank’s ATM network) require a message routing scheme that can quickly prioritize and route transaction requests.

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As enterprise cloud becomes the norm, businesses and government programs must address compounded regulatory compliance related to data privacy and information protection. The most recent, Controlled Unclassified Information and the EU’s GDPR have board level implications and companies still struggle with demonstrating due diligence. Developers and DevOps leaders, as part of the pre-planning process and the associated supply chain, could benefit from updating their code libraries and design by incorporating changes.

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Unlike legacy ERP systems that can cost several hundred thousand dollars in capital expenditure, cloud ERP is relatively a lot more affordable. They are also viewed as a lot more stable given that the data is stored on decentralized servers. But besides these, moving your ERP to the cloud can bring in a number of other lesser understood benefits.

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