We’re seeing an emerging trend in the cloud computing world. I’ve been referring to it as cloud fatigue, but it’s more commonly known as repatriation, or moving workloads from the cloud back to on-prem locations. According to a recent 451 Research report, over 21 percent of organizations have plans to pull back from the cloud and return to an on-prem infrastructure in 2017. Considering the vast growth of cloud adoption over the last several years, what’s behind this trend?

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Mobile device usage has increased exponentially during the past several years, as consumers rely on handhelds for everything from news and weather to banking and purchases. What can we expect in the next few years? The way in which we interact with our devices will fundamentally change, as businesses leverage Artificial Intelligence. We already see this taking shape as businesses leverage AI for cost savings and customer responsiveness. This trend will continue, as AI is used for more sophisticated patterns, and chatbots replace the traditional mobile apps.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Michael Meiner, an Engineering Director at Oracle, looked at this evolution of mobile computing, along with the underlying enterprise technologies that enable this shift. Demos using Amazon Alexa and Oracle Mobile Suite were shown.

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In his Opening Keynote at 21st Cloud Expo, John Considine, General Manager of IBM Cloud Infrastructure, led attendees through the exciting evolution of the cloud. He looked at this major disruption from the perspective of technology, business models, and what this means for enterprises of all sizes. John Considine is General Manager of Cloud Infrastructure Services at IBM. In that role he is responsible for leading IBM’s public cloud infrastructure including strategy, development, and offering management. To date, IBM has launched more than 50 cloud data centers that span the globe. He has been building advanced technology, delivering “as a service” solutions, and managing infrastructure services for the past 20 years.

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When it comes to meeting the new requirements of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), cloud users could well have the advantage. That may sound counter-intuitive; as one of the biggest hurdles facing companies that have migrated to the cloud is exposure of data, since the perimeter is no longer a firewall at the company edge.

GDPR is set to take effect on May 25, 2018. The end goal of this legislation is to strengthen and enforce the security of personal data.  This new legal framework dictates that any company doing business in the EU, with EU citizens or that is EU-based will be held liable for any breach of data. GDPR regulation impacts virtually any company across the globe that does business in Europe, and it will likely become the new de facto standard for the care and management of customer data moving forward.

Fines for not adhering to the requirements can cost up to 20m EUR (around $24m) or 2-4% of annual global revenues, whichever is larger. The mitigating circumstance is that a company will not be held liable if they have encrypted their data in motion and it is then hacked. Let me repeat: securing data that goes into the cloud through encryption will be a critical piece of GDPR compliance.

Ultimately, the clear majority of businesses worldwide will now need to make sure their networks are encrypted. In recent weeks, major players such as Amazon and Microsoft have all indicated they will endeavor to comply with the new directive.

So, what can cloud providers do to tackle GDPR compliance?  The answer is network virtualised services.

Traditionally service providers would deploy appliances specifically built for each function such as firewalls and routers. For encryption, appliances often provide basic encryption capability for slow speed links. For higher speed or better performance, specialised hardware is necessary, but this approach adds significant cost to the equipment and requires an end-point that is vendor specific to match the proprietary hardware encryption.

Low-cost universal customer premises equipment (uCPE) allows service providers to remotely setup software services such as encryption, firewalls, and routers with zero touch provisioning. These virtualised network functions (VNF) can be downloaded and configured remotely. The uCPE is an off-the-shelf server provided by the service provider or customer. Using off-the-shelf devices over specific built appliances will drastically reduce the cost of premises equipment as will the use of software functions instead of appliances because one server can operate many different functions.

Relying on apps to handle encryption is not enough; as recently as 2016, a study by Blue Coat Systems, Inc. showed the 98% of the 15,000 apps surveyed would not meet GDPR requirements. Even if the vendors or developers claim that their products do, how does an IT department test this premise? Instead of relying on appliance manufacturers to protect data in motion, it is now possible for specialised security companies to create virtualised encryption VNFs to add to the service chain of functions. Service providers can remotely deploy virtualised encryptors to protect data-in-motion from the client's site right to the server in a data centre. Encrypting the stream to the cloud was a recommendation given at the RSA conference in San Francisco earlier this year.

Virtualisation speaks to the issue of scaling, be it a small company with limited IT resources that would have to outsource the project or a large corporation with many branch sites to address. Scaling the project based on cost is covered by the step-and-repeat process of virtualisation. Time to deploy is also a scaling issue. With zero-touch provisioning, it’s possible to automate the process so that downloading the software to commissioning can take as little as 30 minutes.

Most cloud deployments are not limited to a single cloud application. A recent RightScale State of the Cloud Report suggests that 85% of enterprises prefer this approach. With virtualised encryption, it’s possible to now encrypt in a hybrid cloud with different flows going to various cloud providers. All of the encryption can be managed by a unified key system, which can be controlled by either the service provider and/or the customer.

And the quality of the protection? While IPSec has been the past standard for data transport, it provides poor performance in a software form. IPSec is a framework of open standards that has traditionally offered security to tunnel between VPN endpoints at the IP layer. Standardised in 1995, it is noted for its complexity, intensive CPU requirements and latency. Many companies have tried to compensate for this with specialised IPSec proprietary hardware. While hardware improves performance, it does force vendor dependency. Now, however, we no longer have to rely on this standard and instead can use 21st Century government-grade software solutions. The best part is that the cost is a fraction of hardware encryption.

Agility, scaling, and flexibility are the three tenants of network functions virtualisation. Virtualised encryption covers all these points. Maybe this is the NFV killer app that service providers have been looking for to create new revenue-bearing services. In the ever-changing threat environment for data-in-motion, virtualised encryptors, through the nature of software templates, offer modern techniques for upgrading technology and scaling to meet new and changing customer requirements, thus offering the best means of ensuring GDPR compliance.

NetApp has disclosed its most recent financial figures – revenues of $1.42 billion (£1.07bn) for Q218, up 6% year over year with CEO and president George Kurian telling analysts the company ‘continues to substantially outpace the growth of the all-flash array market and competitors’.

Alongside the total quarterly revenues, NetApp posted a GAAP net income of $175 million, up from $109m this time last year, with predicted net revenues to be in the range of $1.425bn and $1.575bn in the third quarter of fiscal 2018.

Wall Street appeared more than pleased with the results, with NetApp’s stock rising to its highest in almost six years following the announcement. Writing for The Motley Foo, Anders Bylund said NetApp’s stock jump was a ‘surprise’, adding that strong sales of flash-based storage arrays and cloud-based data analytics tools were key to its success.

“Unlike competitors’ approaches, which are siloed and do not embrace the cloud, we help organisations unify their data across the widest range of cloud and on-premises environments to realise its full value for competitive advantage,” Kurian told analysts. “Data is at the heart of companies’ digital transformation, and we are winning because we are enabling customers’ success through data.

“No one matches our expertise in data management, our leadership in growing market segments and our open ecosystem approach,” added Kurian. “Our advantage is the result of decades of software-based innovation, strategic focus and the ability to partner effectively.”

Among the company’s highlights in the most recent quarter included a partnership with Microsoft, powering Microsoft Azure’s enterprise network file system (NFS) service, updating Data Fabric, its solution to move and integrate data management across cloud and on-premises, and a customer win in the form of US public health information exchange Healthix.

You can read the full results here.

Digital transformation is about embracing digital technologies into a company’s culture to better connect with its customers, automate processes, create better tools, enter new markets, etc. Such a transformation requires continuous orchestration across teams and an environment based on open collaboration and daily experiments.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Alex Casalboni, Technical (Cloud) Evangelist at Cloud Academy, explored and discussed the most urgent unsolved challenges to achieve full cloud literacy in the enterprise world.

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Our work, both with clients and with tools, has lead us to wonder how it is that organizations are handling compliance issues in the cloud. The big cloud vendors offer compliance for their infrastructure, but the shared responsibility model requires that you take certain steps to meet compliance requirements.
Which lead us to start poking around a little more. We wanted to get a picture of what was available, and how it was being used. There is a lot of fluidity in this space, as in all things cloud. The fact that DevOps Security plays into the cloud compliance model – particularly in dynamic cloud environments – makes it even more fluid.

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Cloud Governance means many things to many people. Heck, just the word cloud means different things depending on who you are talking to. While definitions can vary, controlling access to cloud resources is invariably a central piece of any governance program.

Enterprise cloud computing has transformed IT. Cloud computing decreases time-to-market, improves agility by allowing businesses to adapt quickly to changing market demands, and, ultimately, drives down costs.

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The notion of improving operational efficiency is conspicuously absent from the healthcare debate – neither Obamacare nor the newly proposed GOP plan discusses the impact that a step-function improvement in efficiency could have on access to healthcare (through more capacity), quality of healthcare services (through reduced wait times for patients) or cost (through better utilization of scarce, expensive assets).

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