Modern software design has fundamentally changed how we manage applications, causing many to turn to containers as the new virtual machine for resource management. As container adoption grows beyond stateless applications to stateful workloads, the need for persistent storage is foundational – something customers routinely cite as a top pain point. In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 21st Cloud Expo, Bill Borsari, Head of Systems Engineering at Datera, explored how organizations can reap the benefits of the cloud without losing performance as containers become the new paradigm.

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Cloud computing has come a long way over the last several years. It has gone from an emerging technology used in tech startups, to a catalyst for driving enterprise business transformations. According to IDC’s CloudView 2017 report, 70 percent of CIOs say they embrace a “cloud-first IT strategy.” This shows that cloud has moved way beyond the early-adopted phase, where born in the cloud startups were the only ones putting data and applications in the public cloud. Today, global enterprises have embraced the cloud as a means to achieve agility and innovation, and are rapidly driving cloud adoption to new heights.

Still, looking at it another way, just how far has cloud come? Have cloud users configured their organisations to truly get the most out of the technology? The same IDC report suggests the answer is no. According to CloudView 2017, only 16 percent of worldwide organisations have in place the skills and processes they need to manage the evolving cloud environment efficiently.

Here at CloudHealth Technologies, we work with customers who are grappling with these same challenges every day. Many customers expanded into the cloud quickly, and they’re struggling not only to get visibility into the systems and teams using it, but to develop a holistic strategy to fully harness the power.

The good news is, the enterprise has been making strong progress in transitioning from early adoption to mature usage of the cloud. They’re beginning to develop the organisational skills they need to gain productivity and efficiency in the cloud. And they’re developing new roles that take advantage of the new skillsets required to compete in cloud-first environments.

Here are a few ways we're seeing innovative organisations getting it done:

Adopting a disruptive attitude

The cloud can be a threatening technology within the enterprise. For all the promised benefits of innovation and agility, it requires a fundamental shift in the skills, people, processes and technologies within an organisation. All enterprises will inevitably encounter some level of resistance to adopting the cloud, and thus it's critical to approach it as a disruptive innovation.

The first step is to make the commitment. Companies need to have change agents, and employees need to buy into the change. Tech companies embrace this counter-revolution mentality when it comes to cloud. Enterprises need to as well.

Aligning their business

Once companies have committed to a cloud-first approach, they need to ensure that everyone is aligned on how the move to cloud will help the organisation accomplish its goals. The chief goal must be driving business transformation that enhances value to customers, increase top-line revenue, and improves competitiveness of your business. At the end of the day, cloud is the vehicle that’s fueling their transformation. It's critical to develop and communicate a clear vision, and to get buy in from your key stakeholders.

Hiring and locating great cloud talent

To succeed in the cloud, companies need to create a culture that will attract the people with cloud skills that are going to make a difference. The culture needs to be open, collaborative, and fast moving. People who have great skills in the cloud want to work with other people who are great at cloud. As Steve Jobs used to say: “A players” want to work with “A players.” It's critical to cultivate this culture in a small team before rolling it out more broadly. Often an organisational tipping point must be achieved to drive cultural change.

Creating a ‘learning organisation’

It’s not enough to create a solid organisational plan for the cloud; the organisation has to learn and keep learning. The Japanese call it a “Kaizen” mentality – a system that continuously improves. When it comes to cloud, you need to always be analysing, measuring, and figuring out how to change things to make them better. Everything should be subject to continuous improvement.

Creating new leadership roles

One of the most important moves a modern cloud-first organisation can make is to create a function for cloud governance. A typical enterprise may have hundreds of teams using the cloud, each of which has great ownership over the applications and infrastructure they manage. It is critical to empower these teams with the ability to harness the innovation and agility enabled by the cloud, but it is also equally important to ensure your teams are adopting best practices, driving standards, gaining efficiencies, and complying with critical policies and frameworks. Increasingly we are seeing enterprises create governance teams that help drive the impedance mismatch between agility and control, increasing the cloud IQ across the organisation, and enabling business success.

Building technical knowledge

At the end of the day, while building out the team is critical, companies still need deep technical knowledge in areas where cloud matters. It’s essential to have people with a deep understanding of cloud architectures, programming, cloud services, DevOps, and key technologies (e.g. containers, microservices) that are required in the cloud. But the list of new areas of knowledge to learn is constantly growing and changing, and it is imperative to build a learning organisation that can continue to grow and learn together. In addition to enabling greater cloud success, it is also a critical tool for retaining organisational talent.

While the technology may be more than 10 years old, we're still very early in harnessing the true power of the cloud. We have come so far, but still have so many opportunities to grow and learn. The cloud has great potential to fundamentally transform our businesses, but achieving success requires that we adopt new roles, processes and technologies to support this change. Your cloud transformation won’t happen overnight. But if you dedicate yourself to the task and learn from others’ successes and mistakes, you be able to compete in a cloud-first environment – and win.

In his general session at 21st Cloud Expo, Greg Dumas, Calligo’s Vice President and G.M. of US operations, discussed the new Global Data Protection Regulation and how Calligo can help business stay compliant in digitally globalized world.
Greg Dumas is Calligo’s Vice President and G.M. of US operations. Calligo is an established service provider that provides an innovative platform for trusted cloud solutions. Calligo’s customers are typically most concerned about GDPR compliance, application performance guarantees & data privacy.

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Say hello to the Cloud Analytics Academy. The program, launched today by Snowflake Computing alongside Amazon Web Services (AWS), Looker, Talend and WhereScape, aims to help executives lead their organisations in data warehousing, BI, and more.

The curriculum is designed by Kent Graziano, Snowflake chief technical evangelist, with the partnering companies chipping in with their expertise.

There are three courses; the ‘executive fast track’ is the one-size-fits-all course with five sessions on key technologies and key techniques; the ‘cloud foundation track’, being aimed more as a beginner’s course, and the ‘modern data analytics track’, which is focused more at advanced users and strays into topics such as agile data warehousing and Python.

Prospective students are encouraged to take all three courses; completing one track earns a Cloud Analytics Academy certification, while completing all three means they achieve Academy Master certification.

“Organisations of all sizes now face enormous pressure to deliver analytics faster and at a lower cost than ever before, and many are looking to the cloud to address these challenges,” said Mark Budzinski, CEO of WhereScape. “We’re excited to partner with Snowflake to help data professionals gain the knowledge needed to maximise the benefits cloud data warehousing offers.

“We also want to help data professionals understand how automation can help IT be more agile in their development and operational efforts to deliver value to the business faster,” added Budzinski.

The press materials cite a Gartner report which puts growth of the worldwide software as a service (SaaS) market at more than 63% by 2020. According to a study from BARC Research and Eckerson Group, four in five firms said they were planning to increase the use of cloud for BI and data management in the coming year.

You can find out more about the Cloud Analytics Academy here.

Facebook’s newest data centre in Nebraska will be entirely wind-powered, as work on a $430 million wind farm in the region begins.

The Rattlesnake Creek wind farm, built by Enel Green Power North America, the renewable energy arm of the Enel Group, will have a total installed capacity of 320 MW, 62.5% of which will be sold to Facebook to power its data centre in Papillon, approximately 120 miles from the installation.

The Nebraska data centre constitutes Facebook’s sixth data centre in the US, and ninth globally. Facilities already exist in Oregon, Iowa, and North Carolina, with plans underway in Texas and New Mexico, while its portfolio outside of the US consists of sites in Lulea, Sweden, Clonee, in Ireland, and Odense, in Denmark. According to a report from the Omaha World-Herald in June, when Facebook awarded contracts to subcontractors from neighbouring states, the site was expected to ‘take shape’ by Thanksgiving.

“This project consolidates our growing presence in the US as our company enters into a new state and expands our business with new partners,” said Antonio Cammisecra, head of Enel Green Power in a statement. “We are thrilled to be able to support Facebook’s growing renewable energy needs in Nebraska and be part of driving economic development in the region.”

On the other side of the coin, Digital Realty has announced the launch of a second data centre in Frankfurt. The company, with more than 130 data centres across the globe, says it aims to capitalise on what it describes as the second largest market in Europe behind London. Companies with operations in Frankfurt include Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and Alibaba to name a few.

“Given its central location, excellent infrastructure, and concentration of leading international businesses, Frankfurt is widely regarded as the connectivity, commercial and financial capital of Germany,” said William Stein, Digital Realty CEO in a statement. “We are pleased to be able to support our customers’ global growth requirements on our state of the art Sossenheim campus.”

According to recent industry figures, Digital Reality continues to compete alongside Equinix for supremacy in the colocation market. The former confirmed its merger with Dupont Fabros Technology in September – with a total enterprise value of more than $35 billion as a result – while the latter completed the acquisition of 29 data centres from Verizon, beefing up their respective stakes.

Equinix’s most recent customer win came in the form of Singapore-based DBS Bank, who announced earlier this week that it would become the first bank in the country to launch a new cloud-based data centre. The move is alongside more general cloudy ambitions for the bank, with partnerships already in place with AWS and Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

In a recent survey, Sumo Logic surveyed 1,500 customers who employ cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). According to the survey, a quarter of the respondents have already deployed Docker containers and nearly as many (23 percent) are employing the AWS Lambda serverless computing framework.
It’s clear: serverless is here to stay. The adoption does come with some needed changes, within both application development and operations. That means serverless is also changing the way we leverage public clouds. Truth-be-told, many enterprise IT shops were so happy to get out of the management of physical servers within a data center that many limitations of the existing public IaaS clouds were forgiven. However, now that we’ve lived a few years with public IaaS clouds, developers and CloudOps pros are giving a huge thumbs down to the constant monitoring of servers, provisioned or not, that’s required to support the workloads.

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Machine learning-optimised stacks, container-first architectures and DevOps for both software and hardware are among the key trends redefining enterprise IT infrastructure, according to a new report from McKinsey.

The piece, authored by Arul Elumalai, Kara Sprague, Sid Tandon, and Lareina Yee, looks at what is changing and how companies need to fight back.  

Many of these have frequently been covered by this publication; some, like the public cloud going mainstream, are long overdue. Yet there is an interesting titbit here. Given the long-established leadership of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and Google in public cloud, McKinsey argues that their entrenched dominance will mean only organisations with ‘significant capital investment capabilities’ will be able to compete in future. The article offers Alibaba as a potential suitor; the Chinese firm said last month its cloud business “continued to defy gravity”, while in September Gartner placed the company in third place for public cloud IaaS.

Other predictions which readers will have heard before – but are still invaluable – revolve around cybersecurity and increased usage of open source offerings. Examples of how the latter is gaining traction in the enterprise involves TensorFlow, Google’s machine learning system first launched in 2015. The customer list today is impressive, McKinsey notes, from Airbnb, to eBay, and Qualcomm.

It is the emerging technologies, however, which take the honours. According to McKinsey, B2B applications will account for almost 70% of the value coming from the Internet of Things (IoT) in 10 years’ time; and IoT business applications are now ready for adoption. Elsewhere, the article notes how the new DevOps business model is moving beyond app development to integrate operations and IT infrastructure, while artificial intelligence is ‘delivering benefits to companies across industries.’

“The scale of disruption in the technology infrastructure landscape is unprecedented, creating huge opportunities and risks for industry players and their customers,” the report concludes. “Executives at technology infrastructure companies must drive growth by transforming their portfolios and rethinking their go-to-market strategies.

“They should also build the fundamental capabilities needed for long-term success, including those related to digitisation, analytics, and agile development.”

You can read the full piece here.

Agility is one of the key characteristics that distinguishes a successful managed service provider from the rest of the pack. Being agile means being able to respond quickly to onboard new customers, and fulfill new service requests. Unfortunately, this is often in direct conflict with another important MSP goal: minimizing the number of staff required to deliver those services.

One of the smartest ways to resolve that conflict is to implement your own cloud infrastructure, with customer self-service and automation. With the right approach to cloud, you can ease the burden on your technicians, accelerate onboarding, bring services to customers more quickly, and shrink your time to revenue.

What stops you being agile?

Most MSPs are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to onboarding new customers or provisioning new services.  Traditionally, your infrastructure exists in silos where compute, storage and networking are managed as separate functions. To provision a new customer, you first assess the customer’s needs, and then build the necessary infrastructure from scratch – racking specific servers, firewalls and other systems; buying various software licenses; and layering them to deliver the service.

The customer gets a bespoke solution – eventually – but this traditional siloed approach is not conducive to efficient, sustainable and most importantly repeatable growth for you as an MSP. There are three key reasons why:

Complexity delays revenue: Onboarding new customers or spinning up new resources, in this type of environment, involves careful coordination across infrastructure silos, teams, vendors and technologies. It's time-consuming to design, configure and test services that depend on multiple platforms, multiple UIs, and multiple networking and storage technologies.  Provisioning can take several weeks, delaying time-to-revenue.  

Worse still, it's a process you have to repeat for each customer – and it's difficult to manage when customer needs change. The servers provisioned at the beginning of the year may not be adequate at the end of the year.

People cost money: These problems are compounded by the need to adjust staff levels to minimize salary expenses. Most MSPs size their teams for service maintenance rather than service provisioning, and don’t typically have dedicated teams for bringing up new customers. Technicians must fit that into an already busy work schedule, adding even more time between a customer's order and service delivery.

You have too much or too little hardware: In many cases, IT resources are either under- or over-provisioned. No MSP wants to see equipment sitting idle, but when the alternative is waiting days for new kit to arrive – creating further delays for the client – having a stock of unused hardware may be the lesser of two evils.  

The benefits of a cloud management platform

Building your own cloud infrastructure lets you tackle these issues head on. As well as giving you a platform for private and public cloud service delivery, cloud infrastructure brings much greater agility and efficiency to your operations as an MSP.

Provisioning efficiency: Because cloud provisioning is software-driven, it requires minimal amounts of staff to perform the operation. Rather than racking new devices for new customers, an MSP can carve out a section from existing infrastructure and provision resources on the fly.  To offer public and/or private cloud services, you need a cloud platform with the ability to orchestrate across a range of hypervisors – and to achieve peak efficiency, you also need to be able to manage these services centrally.  By being able to see all physical servers, firewalls, storage and Virtual Servers in one place, it’s easier to react to customer needs and issues as they arise.

Administration efficiency:  A cloud management platform should minimize manual effort at every point in the customer lifecycle. With the right cloud management platform, properly-trained personnel, and some consulting from the cloud infrastructure vendor, one or two technicians should be able to provision a new private cloud in hours rather than weeks.

Vital to this is the need to be able to create permission-based user roles and user groups so that, once the cloud is in production, clients can self-serve resources within a secure framework, minimizing the need to interact with your teams. The cloud management platform should also leverage customer profile templates. Once a template is created for one customer, it can be easily modified to onboard a second customer, and so on. Having a central template repository makes provisioning easier and faster for IT administrators and also reduces provisioning errors.

Billing efficiency: Leveraging a solution that also intricately calculates resources for billing by customer is another element that will save hours of manual work, and improve margins quickly.

Resource efficiency: with the ability to treat the entire compute, network, and storage infrastructure as a flexible pool of resources, MSPs can easily assign specific resources to specific clients and bill for them accordingly. The process becomes a software-based provisioning activity that requires fewer technicians and eliminates custom racking and stacking for individual clients. What’s more, the MSP can replicate one customer’s setup for the next customer, and simply tweak the resource allocations or service mix to suit the new customer.

What the cloud translates to for the MSP is: more efficient use of resources, faster time to revenue for new customers, higher revenue from private cloud services and more fluid resource planning for future needs. Moving to a cloud-based infrastructure not only enables new services, it also simplifies and streamlines provisioning to improve service agility while reducing costs.

Most technology leaders, contemporary and from the hardware era, are reshaping their businesses to do software. They hope to capture value from emerging technologies such as IoT, SDN, and AI. Ultimately, irrespective of the vertical, it is about deriving value from independent software applications participating in an ecosystem as one comprehensive solution. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Kausik Sridhar, founder and CTO of Pulzze Systems, discussed how given the magnitude of today’s application ecosystem, tweaking existing software to stitch various components together leads to sub-optimal solutions. This definitely deserves a re-think, and paves the way for a new breed of lightweight application servers that are micro-services and DevOps ready!

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