Google has announced plans to buy cloud migration company Alooma in a bid to boost its cloud migration capacities.

In a blog post, Amit Ganesh, vice president  of engineering at Google, said that the addition of Alooma, subject to closing conditions, “is a natural fit that allows us to offer customers a streamlined, automated migration experience to Google Cloud, and give them access to our full range of database services, from managed open source database offerings to solutions like Cloud Spanner and Cloud Bigtable”.

“This simplified migration path also opens the door for customers to take advantage of all the technologies we have to offer, including analytics, security, AI and machine learning,” he said.

Alooma was founded in 2013 and specialises in Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) applications. This enables users to pull in data from many sources, including Oracle, Azure, and SaaS providers such as SalesForce and mapping this data to data warehouses such as Redshift and BigQuery.

The deal would bring ETL services to Google Cloud. Amazon and Microsoft have ETL services in the form of Azure Data Factory and AWS Glue.

In a blog post, Yoni Broyde and Yair Weinberger, co-founders of Alooma, said the acquisition is the evolution of their company’s long-standing partnership with Google Cloud.

“It follows several native integrations, over the years, from Google Ads and Analytics to Cloud Spanner and BigQuery,” they said.

“We believe that as part of Google Cloud — bringing together the best-in-class data migration and integration services — we can make our customers and partners even more data-driven and successful.”

The co-founders added that the move would bring the company closer to delivering a full self-service database migration experience bolstered by the power of their cloud technology, including analytics, security, AI, and machine learning.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed nor was a date for when the acquisition will be finalised.

If you’ve spent any time at all in the IT world, you’ll likely have heard about DevOps and how it’s the future of enterprise software development. Companies both large and small have adopted DevOps processes and methodologies as part of their organisation, chasing faster development cycles and greater application stability.

For the uninitiated, DevOps is a software development method that involves merging development and operations teams together. The goal is to shorten the time it takes to build, patch, and update software by monitoring and testing it as it’s being built. This allows problems to be caught earlier, leading to a shorter time-to-market.

Multiple advantages

DevOps has a number of advantages over traditional software development approaches like the waterfall method. The first and most obvious is speed; DevOps can radically accelerate development cycles, which means software can be delivered to users faster.

“Reducing the time between inception and value when delivering services is the key benefit,” says Guy Smith, CDW’s head of technology solutions. “In addition, bringing application developers closer to the operational challenges of running a live system can provide a useful feedback loop that results in applications that are designed to be operated, with consideration for proper abstraction, state handling, failure tolerance, and simple scaling.”

Because it’s also based around smaller and more frequent releases, users can also get used to new changes gradually, rather than having to acclimatise to lots of new things at the same time. It’s also easy to roll back to a previous version in the event of an unexpected bug and ensures that fixes for said bug can be issued faster. This shouldn’t be required that often, though, as DevOps generally has a lesser failure rate than waterfall development.

In many ways, DevOps is the cornerstone of digital transformation. Among the most common goals of a digital transformation project is for the company to become software-driven, with an agile approach to both its strategy and its IT, and DevOps is essential for all of those goals. Without being able to rapidly iterate on the software and apps that a business creates, it can’t be truly agile or software-driven, as it will constantly be behind the curve and slowed down by clunky, outdated methodologies.

Many major organisations have already embraced DevOps as a way to speed up their software pipelines; Companies like Hertz, American Airlines, Accenture and more have all implemented DevOps methodologies, using them to drive greater efficiencies, faster workloads and more frequent releases.

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An agile world

DevOps isn’t just applicable to IT, however. It’s closely tied to the agile movement, and many of its principles are effective across the business as a whole. Take the Scrum method, for example; this framework involves taking a project-based approach to solving business challenges.

A cross-functional team is created, made up of members from every relevant area of the business. The team establishes the end goal of the project, then works towards accomplishing this goal in a short series of ‘sprints’ lasting from two to four weeks, in which a small series of tasks are devised, planned, completed and tested.

The idea is to break a project up into more manageable chunks, with regular testing and monitoring throughout the process. Although this is generally applied to software development, it can be equally suited to projects like marketing campaigns, IT refreshes or quarterly reporting efforts.

Implementing DevOps can be extremely beneficial for a business, but it can be a rather daunting undertaking too, especially for a mature, established organisation that already has a more traditional development structure in place. As with any major organisational change, it’s crucial to ensure that the implementation is meticulously planned out beforehand and carefully managed during the roll-out itself.

“Be really clear about what problem you’re trying to solve and exactly how the new model will improve service delivery to users,” Smith says. “It’s very easy to get sucked into the dogma and fashion of DevOps/Agile but it isn’t always the appropriate approach or done with the end-user in mind. In addition, clear expectations need to be set about where responsibility lies, not just with ‘make stuff live faster’ but how real world problems such as bugs, operational issues and security incidents will be dealt with at 3am.”

Are you ready for DevOps?

One of the most important elements of moving to a DevOps approach is making sure the culture and management style of the organisation is ready to support it by obtaining buy-in from all the necessary stakeholders within the business and establishing a set of guiding principles that everyone is on board with. Beyond that, however, there are a number of technical tools which comprise the foundation of a successful DevOps organisation.

Version control systems, for example, are the bedrock of DevOps. One of the most essential principles of DevOps is rapidly deploying code, testing it to see if it works and then rolling it back and trying again if it doesn’t. By using a version control system like Git, CVS or Team Foundation Version Control, this process is made infinitely easier, allowing you to easily track iterations of code and work collaboratively on them without having to manually shuffle between multiple near-identical files.

Similarly, code-sharing platforms like Github or the aforementioned TFVC are a must-have for any DevOps team. Close collaboration is essential for speedy software releases, and the ability to have an entire DevOps team collaborating simultaneously on one piece of code will make the process much, much faster. Modern code-sharing platforms will also integrate with a swathe of other tools to help speed up and automate your workflows.

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools, for example, are another essential part of the DevOps toolchain that work in concert with code-sharing platforms and version control systems. Tools, such as Jenkins, are designed to automatically assemble and test a new build of a piece of software every time a developer commits a change to the version control system. This ensures that developers working on different features don’t accidentally break each others’ work when they commit changes to the main branch, resulting in fewer bugs and faster working releases.

Another key pillar of DevOps is Infrastructure as Code. This principle involves treating the various components of infrastructure – such as VMs, networks, and so on – in the same way as the code that’s running on it. New environments are spun up according to a pre-set template using the same version control model as the code itself, which means all your environments will be identical unless expressly designed to be different.

DevOps teams will need to spin up new test environments quickly and often, and spinning them up and administering them manually can mean that, over time, you’re left with a large number of environments which are all subtly different to each other. This can often lead to deployment issues, but using Infrastructure as Code platforms like Puppet prevents this by ensuring consistency across your environment.

Every organisation is different, and building the right DevOps toolchain can be a tricky business. Working with a skilled partner, however, can dramatically reduce the complexity and hassle of implementing a DevOps structure. CDW can offer not just the toolsets you need to get your DevOps pipeline moving, but also the expert strategic guidance to help make your DevOps journey a success from the word go.

“CDW can help you navigate the challenges of delivering services quickly, cost-effectively and securely whilst focusing on user-need,” explains Smith. “We have a significant breadth and depth of products, in-house expertise and partner relationships that allow us to think ‘outcome first, approach/tool second’ and provide solutions that offer true business benefit.”

To learn more about CDW Cloud Services, download your free guide or contact CloudEnquires@uk.cdw.com

Hackers are increasingly aiming cyber attacks at cloud infrastructure, using it as an entry point to drive other attacks and relying on employees and businesses to misconfigure their infrastructure, leaving it open to attack.

That’s according to cyber security firm Symantec’s latest Internet Threat Security Report, which noted misconfigured servers and cloud infrastructure are providing tempting targets for cyber  criminals. 

«The same security mistakes that were made on PCs during their initial adoption by the enterprise are now happening in the cloud<» Symantec’s report explained. 

«A single misconfigured cloud workload or storage instance could cost a company millions of dollars or land it in a compliance nightmare. In the past year alone, more than 70 million records were stolen or leaked from poorly configured S3 buckets. There are also numerous, easily-accessible tools that allow attackers to identify misconfigured cloud resources on the internet.» 

The security company explained that hardware chip vulnerabilities, which can be found in the systems that underpin cloud infrastructure, such as Meltdown, Spectre, and Foreshadow are also exposing data to criminals.

The reason for cloud infrastructure to increasingly draw the eye of cyber criminals is that they are looking for alternative ways to generate income. as returns from ransomware and cryptojacking attacks are reducing. 

The report noted that cyber criminals are also increasingly targeting online retailers to steal customer details using methods such as formjacking.

Formjacking allows criminals to steal user card data while they’re shopping online. It involves injecting code into badly-secured checkouts on retailer websites used to steal card details.

Symantec reported that more than 4,800 unique websites are injected with malicious code used in such attacks every month and it had blocked 3.7 million attempts to use such methods to steal card details in 2018.

“Formjacking represents a serious threat for both businesses and consumers,” said Greg Clark, CEO at Symantec.

“Consumers have no way to know if they are visiting an infected online retailer without using a comprehensive security solution, leaving their valuable personal and financial information vulnerable to potentially devastating identity theft. For enterprises, the skyrocketing increase in formjacking reflects the growing risk of supply chain attacks, not to mention the reputational and liability risks businesses face when compromised.”

During 2018, Symantec revealed that the number of hackers using more traditional methods of disrupting a company’s infrastructure, such as ransomware and cryptojacking had decreased significantly in 2018.

The reasons for this, Symantec cited, was that the value of cryptocurrency has reduced significantly and more businesses are adopting mobile and cloud computing, which makes attacks “less effective”.

After just five years on the market, Slack has become one of the most popular workplace communication apps, garnering over 10 million daily active users in 150 countries around the world. However, executives tell us that the platform plans to expand its business footprint even further in the years to come.

Slack has experienced rapid growth in terms of its users and as a company. About 500,000 organizations use Slack today, as well as 85,000 premium business subscribers – which includes 65 of the Fortune 100. That’s an increase of over 50% in the past year alone.

That hasn’t happened by accident. Slack has been somewhat aggressively asserting its dominance in a market that’s relatively saturated, and it’s clear it has no plans of slowing down. The company sees itself as an all-encompassing workplace communication platform, one that will act as a portal for all the various other services you might use. You won’t need any other application, because Slack will have them all.

That’s the message, and it’s one Slack is acting upon. The company unexpectedly announced the takeover of Astro, a startup developing an email platform with a built-in smart assistant, only to then announce it would be swiftly killing off its email component. Somewhat ironically, it’s clear Slack is gearing up to introduce its own email features despite years of railing against the seemingly outdated form of communication. What’s unclear is whether that’s a separate platform integrated with the Slack app, or features built right into Slack itself.

Freemium Foundation

The company will achieve this omnipotent status, it says, by taking advantage of its «freemium» model and the «virality» it ensures.

Slack can be used for free, with more features available for a monthly per-user fee. With the free version, you search up to 10,000 messages, make one-to-one video calls and install up to 10 apps and integrations – meaning you can get a pretty productive workday out of Slack without paying anything.

Perhaps more importantly, though, the free package also introduces many people to the platform and increases the odds that someone hears about it through word of mouth. Because the freemium model introduces so many people to the platform, there’s not a lot of barriers to entry.

Stuart Templeton, Slack’s Head of UK, explains to Cloud Pro that it’s this accessibility that’s proving to be a critical first step in introducing new users to the platform.

«As a company that goes to market in a ‘freemium’ way, I don’t think you can underestimate the power of virality,» says Templeton. «Our job is to ensure people have heard about [Slack] and are getting success, because that success drives monetisation, but it also drives viral adoption as well.»

Of the 8 million daily active users that Slack now boasts, 3 million of these are paid. These stats are reflected in the UK Slack market, which Templeton heads, with 45% of UK users now paying a monthly subscription, making it the country with the highest monetisation rate in Europe.

Virality

That’s one success Slack can shout about, but it’s not one that can inherently translate to growth. For that, it hopes to rely on the ‘viral nature of positive experiences’ – in other words, happy customers will tell their friends.

«We believe we’ve got an addressable market of around 600 million knowledge workers,» says Templeton. «So, we’ve got an enormous opportunity ahead of us.»

He explains that when successful paying customers share their positive experiences with other Slack users, they encourage others to become paying customers as well. Thus, the interconnectedness of Slack inherently boosts its business footprint.

It’s this idea of positive experiences that has led the company to become heavily invested in frequent software updates, including features like allowing Slack users to manipulate how often and where they receive notifications.

Templeton explains that because ‘Slacking’ is messaging-based, some users might initially feel overwhelmed with notifications. In a nod to Slack’s yet-to-be-confirmed email ambition, he believes that messaging on the platform should be thought of as similar to sending emails – the idea that users shouldn’t feel obligated to instantly reply to messages.

«It’s very important that people know we’ve got focus mode, that you could turn off your notifications by channel, that you can turn them off completely,» explains Templeton. «But, if you want to get a notification, it’s really important that you get it and that you get it on any device.»

Avoiding downtime

Another way Slack strives to improve customer satisfaction is through integrations. According to Templeton, there have been 8.8 million app installations from the Slack directory to date. It currently has about 1,500 apps available for download, and 95% of paid teams are using integrations.

«It can be from website visitors hitting the marketing channel to take friction away from marketing work, or leads to salespeople being rooted to the right place so they can respond to customers faster, or bug notifications coming from ServiceNow or Jira into Slack to make people work faster.»

This makes it easier for people to communicate and ultimately get their work done, Templeton argues, and while this is inherently what Slack, as a collaboration tool, is supposed to do, it is also serving as an important marketing strategy for the company.

Yet, in order for this business model to work, Slack users have to be having a positive experience. The company has been fortunate in that downtime has become a fairly rare occurrence – there has only been one major outage in the past year, although connectivity was restored in a matter of hours.

It’s also managed to avoid any major data breaches, aside from the discovery of a vulnerability in 2017 through its bug bounty programme, and the platform was one of the first to introduce sweeping data protection changes as part of the introduction of GDPR in May 2018.

Melting the Iceberg

Templeton compared Slack’s future to an iceberg. As the company’s customers continue to grow, its integrations and features – its strongest marketing assets – will do the same.

«If there’s a water level on that iceberg, of course below that water line, you’re going to have to go into those business applications to get your jobs done,» he said. «Over time, you’re going to see that water line drop, so that you can surface more and more sophistication into Slack, which will further take the friction out of people’s work.»

Slack prides itself on its ability to offer an unrivalled suite of integrations for its users, yet it’s clear that it has some way to go before the platform becomes ubiquitous in business collaboration. In order to address that hurdle, Slack will need to branch out, starting first with better support for email platforms.

Slack as the ‘email killer’ never quite materialised, but, as the old saying goes, if you can’t beat them, join them.