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Cloud computing has been cited by CIOs as one of the biggest contributors to IT complexity, according to a report released this week by Trustmarque.

Two thirds (66%) of survey respondents claim cloud is a primary reason for IT complexity, ahead of legacy technology (51%) and software licensing (51%). Almost three quarters (71%) said it was increasingly difficult to understand the right technology to use, while 61% agreed that finding the right solution to their business need was becoming more complicated.

Not surprisingly, 79% of those polled said that simplifying IT was a priority for their organisation. Breaking those numbers down, 36% said the biggest priority was ‘simplifying the management of shadow IT and business-led IT spend’, while 34% argued it was ‘simplifying the user experience through deploying new digital technologies’. Equally unsurprisingly, 87% of CIOs noted keeping ahead of security threats was a challenge.

An even higher number of CIOs (89%) argued that simplifying legacy IT whilst driving innovation remains a challenge. The topic of keeping on top of the competition while transforming enterprise IT was covered in depth at the IP EXPO event earlier this week. Antonio Piraino, CTO at ScienceLogic, put part of the blame at the CIO for hybrid IT issues; problems included the CIO being hesitant, a shift in complexity, and not identifying cloud appropriate workloads.

One of the key tenets of Piraino’s talk – that transforming to cloud is as significant a change as moving from the mainframe to client/server – was emphasised by James Butler, Trustmarque CTO. “The challenge of transforming traditional IT estates and organisations to this new platform is as significant as from mainframes to PCs, or the adoption of the Internet,” he said.

“This transition from the internet-enabled business to the digital one is a huge increase in complexity for IT departments designed for business as usual technical operations, while traditional models of integration, licensing and management that were not designed for cloud are exacerbating the problem,” Butler added.

The issue of software licensing and restrictive models is being taken up by the Campaign for Clear Licensing (CCL), which has examined the practices of Oracle, SAP, and IBM thus far.

“All our customers are looking at the cloud ecosystem as an important part of their overall product strategy. Some see it evolve as a multi-cloud / hybrid cloud strategy, while others are embracing all forms of cloud offerings like PaaS, IaaS and SaaS in their solutions,” noted Suhas Joshi, Vice President – Technology, at Harbinger Group, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff.

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Clearly the way forward is to move to cloud be it bare metal, VMs or containers. One aspect of the current public clouds that is slowing this cloud migration is cloud lock-in. Every cloud vendor is trying to make it very difficult to move out once a customer has chosen their cloud.
In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Naveen Nimmu, CEO of Clouber, Inc., will advocate that making the inter-cloud migration as simple as changing airlines would help the entire industry to quickly adopt the cloud without worrying about any lock-in fears. In fact by having standard APIs for IaaS would help PaaS explode much faster as there is no need to support plethora of clouds by every PaaS vendor.

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The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing rapidly by extending current technologies, products and networks. By 2020, Cisco estimates there will be 50 billion connected devices. Gartner has forecast revenues of over $300 billion, just to IoT suppliers. Now is the time to figure out how you’ll make money – not just create innovative products.
With hundreds of new products and companies jumping into the IoT fray every month, there’s no shortage of innovation. Despite this, McKinsey/VisionMobile data shows “less than 10 percent of IoT developers are making enough to support a reasonably sized team.”

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Containers are revolutionizing the way we deploy and maintain our infrastructures, but monitoring and troubleshooting in a containerized environment can still be painful and impractical. Understanding even basic resource usage is difficult – let alone tracking network connections or malicious activity.

In his session at DevOps Summit, Gianluca Borello, Sr. Software Engineer at Sysdig, will cover the current state of the art for container monitoring and visibility, including pros / cons and live demonstrations of each method. Special emphasis will be put on sysdig, an open source troubleshooting tool. Sysdig offers unprecedented container visibility without the need to break the “sanctity” of the container.

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“Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management.”
While this definition is broadly accepted and has, in fact, been my adopted standard for years, it only describes technical aspects of cloud computing.
The amalgamation of technologies used to deliver cloud services is not even half the story. Above all else, the successful employment requires a tight linkage to the economic and business models of the enterprise.

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With containerization using Docker, the orchestration of containers using Kubernetes, the self-service model for provisioning your projects and applications and the workflows we built in OpenShift is the best in class Platform as a Service that enables introducing DevOps into your organization with ease.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Veer Muchandi, PaaS evangelist with RedHat, will provide a deep dive overview of OpenShift v3 and demonstrate how it helps with DevOps.

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