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It’s that time of year again: Cisco has released its latest cloud index survey, and the numbers keep getting bigger. This time, global cloud traffic is predicted to rise from 3.9 zettabytes (ZB) per year in 2015, to 14.1 ZB per year by 2020, assisted by greater data centre virtualisation and increased migration to cloud architectures.

The figures from this time last year put the current prediction into context; back in October 2015 the networking giant put the overall figure for the end of 2019 at 8.6 ZB, although adding that the Internet of Everything (IoE) would generate an eye-watering 42.3 ZB per month by 2019.

Among the updated figures include global data centre traffic, which is forecast to hit 15.3 ZB per year by the end of 2020, while global data centre IP traffic will grow three-fold in the coming five years. 68% of cloud workloads in four years’ time will be in public cloud data centres, up from 49% in 2015, providing an interesting comparison with VMware’s analysis back in August, which argued 2021 will be the year where 50% of all enterprise IT workloads will be in the cloud, and 2030 the year when public cloud will be the dominant share.

The types of cloud service delivery models will also change, according to Cisco.

By 2020, almost three quarters (74%) of total cloud workloads will be software as a service (SaaS), up from 65% in 2015, compared with 17% for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) – down from 26% last year – and 8% for platform as a service (PaaS).

One evident trend Cisco aims to emphasise is around larger scale ‘hyperscale’ data centres, and how they will have a ‘significant’ impact on the global data centre landscape. By 2020, the report argues, hyperscale will host almost half (47%) of all data centre servers, as well as more than two thirds (68%) of data centre processing power.

Collaborating with Synergy Research, whose reports on cloud infrastructure have long been covered in this publication, Cisco argues there are 24 hyperscale operators globally that either hit $1bn in IaaS or PaaS, $2bn in SaaS, $4bn in search or social networking, or $8bn in eCommerce. From 259 at the end of last year, Cisco estimates there will be 485 hyperscale data centres by 2020. “As with servers, hyperscale data centres represent a large portion of overall data, traffic, and processing power in data centres,” the report notes. “Traffic within hyperscale data centres will quintuple by 2020.”

The report’s conclusion makes for particularly interesting reading, again noting that an ‘extraordinary’ amount of data will be generated by IoE applications – somewhere to the tune of 600 ZB – by 2020, as well as other emerging technologies. “Not only is the data centre traffic growing, but it is also getting streamlined with architectural innovations such as SDN and NFV, which offer new levels of optimisation for data centres,” the report notes.

With regard to cloud readiness – the work of the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA) is an excellent reference point in this regard – Cisco adds countries around the globe have made ‘significant strides’ in supporting cloud services. “The focus now turns to continuing to improve network capabilities to support the advanced cloud applications that organisations and end users expect and rely upon,” the report adds.

You can read the full paper here (PDF).

Body picture credit: Cisco

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• 2 million developers are working on IoT applications, increasing 34% since the last year.
• Over 50% of the developers working on IoT applications are writing software that utilizes sensors in some capacity.
• 4m enterprise developers play decision-making roles when it comes to selecting organizational IT development resources. Another 5.2 million hold decision-making authority for selecting IT deployment resources.
• 4m developers (26% of all developers globally) are using the cloud as a development environment today
• The APAC region leads the world with approximately 7.4m developers today, followed by EMEA with 7.2m, North America with 4.4m and Latin America with 1.9m.

These and many other fascinating insights are from the Evans Data Corporation Global Developer Population and Demographic Study 2016 (PDF, client access) published earlier this week. The methodology Evans Data has created to produce this report is the most comprehensive developed for aggregating, analysing and predicting developer populations globally. The study combines Evans Data’s proprietary global developer population modeling with the current results of their semi-annual global developer survey.

Key takeaways from the study include the following:

• 6m developers (29% of all developers globally) are involved in a big data and advanced analytics project today. An additional 25% of developers, or 5.3m, are going to begin big data and advanced analytics projects within the next six 13% or 2.6m of all developers globally are going to start big data and advanced analytics projects within the next 7 to 12 months.  The following graphic provides an overview of the involvement of 21m developers in big data and advanced analytics projects today. Please click on the image to expand for easier viewing.

• 4m developers (26% of all developers globally) are using the cloud as a development environment today. Developers creating new apps in the cloud had increased 375% since Evans began measuring developer participation in mobile development in 2009 when just slightly more than 1.2m developers were using the cloud as their development platform. 4.5m developers (21% of all global developers) plan on beginning app development on cloud platforms in the next six months, and 3.9m (18% of all global developers) plan on starting development on the cloud in 7 – 12 months. Please click on the image to expand for easier viewing.

• 8m developers in APAC (24% of all developers in the region) are currently developing on cloud platforms. 29% of APAC developers are planning to start cloud-based development in six months, and 20% in 7 – 12 months. The following graphic compares the number of developers currently using the cloud as a development environment today and the number who plan to in the future. Please click on the image to expand for easier viewing.

• 34% of all Commercial Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) globally today (1.8m developers) are using the cloud as a development environment. An additional 1.4m are planning to begin cloud development in the next six months.  28% of developers globally creating apps in the cloud are from custom system integrators (SI) and value-added resellers (VARs).  23% or approximately 1.2m are from enterprises.  The following graphic compares the percent of developers by developer segment who are currently creating new apps in cloud environments. Please click on the image to expand for easier viewing.

• 30% of developers (6.2m developers globally) are currently developing software for connected devices or the Internet of Things today, with an additional 26% planning to begin projects in 6 months. Evans Data found that this increased 34% over the last year. Also, 2.1m developers plan to begin development in this area within the next 7 to 12 months. The following graphic compares the number of developers globally by stage of development for creating software for connected devices or the Internet of Things. Please click on the image to expand for easier viewing.

• 41% of global developers creating connected device and IoT software today are from 27% are from North America, 24% are from EMEA and 7% from Latin America.  There are 6,072,048 developers currently working on connected device and IoT software today globally.  The following graphic provides an overview of the distribution of developers creating connected device and IoT software by region today. Please click on the image to expand for easier viewing.

• 34% of developers actively creating software for connected devices or the Internet of Things work for custom System Integrators (SI) and VARs today. ISVs are the next largest segment of developers working on IoT projects (30%) followed by enterprises (21%). The following graphic provides an overview of the global base of developers creating software for connected devices and IoT. Evans Data found there are 6.1m developers currently creating apps and solutions in this area alone. Please click on the image to expand for easier viewing.

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Have you ever driven on a high road or mountain pass that’s shrouded by low cloud? You’re at the familiar controls of your vehicle, but you can’t easily see road-signs, oncoming vehicles, which way the road goes, or other dangers. 

Progress can be hazardous unless you take extra precautions. 

The feeling will be familiar to many organisations’ IT teams as they transition some of their business applications and data to the cloud.   

The majority of organsations don’t have a large, centralised cloud deployment that has completely replaced their physical networks simply because this type of wholesale migration is costly and involves a great deal of planning, resources and risk. 

Instead, most enterprises have a hybrid model that includes a mix of physical data centers and private or public clouds. 

A recent forecast from 451 Research predicted that 60% of enterprise workloads will run in the cloud by mid-2018, up from 41% today. Securing these hybrid environments is much more complex, demanding a change in mindset and approach.

IT teams usually have good visibility into and control over their on-premise networks. But when it comes to cloud environments, it’s not as easy to see and react to emerging hazards – just like driving over that high mountain road.

Clouds move closer

These security challenges are made more complex as public and private cloud services evolve.  Ever-growing numbers of enterprise devices and services are connecting to and relying on the cloud, increasing the pressure on cloud architectures.

At the same time, organisations in sectors, such as healthcare, insurance, retail and entertainment, are under pressure to deliver differentiated services across geographies and regions according to local preferences or legislation. 

Organisations can achieve greater agility and flexibility using hybrid clouds helping them respond faster to market and customer needs

Collecting and analysing real-time information provides the ability to quickly adjust to trends and customer demands but information can quickly become stale if not acted upon appropriately. Thus, bringing the processing power of the cloud closer to that “big data” allows organisations to rapidly personalise their offerings and maintain a competitive edge.

This trend demands a more advanced, decentralised and distributed hybrid cloud model, reflecting the right mix of private and public clouds that work as an extension of existing corporate systems and processes.

The end result can deliver a more efficient and agile compute model, sometimes called ‘fog computing’ since it reduces the amount of data that needs to go to the cloud for processing. But whatever name the model is given, the problem remains how IT teams get complete visibility and control over it to ensure consistent protection and enforcement of policies across all their assets and data, both on-premise and in the cloud.

Meeting the security challenges

Perhaps the biggest issue that IT teams face is that using hybrid clouds can put data and business applications beyond their traditional IT security controls, which don’t typically touch the cloud – especially public cloud environments. 

At the same time, the number of cyber threats and breaches are increasing. Once an environment is breached, attacks are able to spread laterally within the cloud infrastructure and even extend externally outwards from the cloud to on-premise networks. 

A 2016 Ponemon Institute study of cloud malware and data breaches of nearly 650 IT pros found that 31% of firms had a cloud breach and 25% did not know how the breach occurred.

It all adds up to an enlarged, complex and blurred attack surface for organisations, so they need a comprehensive solution to bridge security gaps and extend protections, visibility and control from data centers to the cloud in a way that works with the cloud’s elasticity and automation. 

The solution needs to protect the north-south traffic entering and leaving the data center to and from cloud estates giving perimeter gateway protections. 

It also needs to give robust security to mitigate east-west traffic threats within cloud environments deployable as a security VM within the environment to inspect, make visible and protect traffic and assets within the cloud. 

East-west protection should be enforced by micro-segmentation which groups resources within the cloud environment and divides them into small, protected segments with logical boundaries. 

This increases the ability to discover and contain intrusions with communication between groups and segments controlled by specific dynamic security policies.

Traffic within the data center can then be directed to virtual security gateways for deeper inspection with advanced threat prevention techniques (such as firewalling, IPS, antivirus, anti-bot and sandboxing) to stop attackers and threats attempting to move laterally from one segment or application to another.  

Management matters

The solution should also integrate agnostically with the cloud service’s management and orchestration tools to enable the right security policies to be enforced for applications and automate security management processes so that they don’t become a brake on agility in the cloud environment. 

These features delivered via an integrated, virtualised security platform, allow advanced security and threat prevention services to be dynamically deployed wherever they are needed in the hybrid environment – from the on-prem data center to public and private clouds.

In conclusion, organisations can achieve greater agility and flexibility using hybrid clouds helping them respond faster to market and customer needs. 

With the right security approach that integrates advanced protections, policy management and visibility across both on-premise networks and private and public clouds (or fogs), they can drive their IT and business processes with complete visibility and control.

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More than half of CIOs polled by Verizon and Harvard Business Review say their use of cloud computing has improved their organisation’s competitiveness; but hybrid IT is the primary method of coping with digital transformation struggles.

The study, which polled more than 300 business and IT executives worldwide, found that 63% of organisations are pursuing a hybrid IT approach, yet a third (32%) are struggling to integrate cloud with other systems.

The top barriers preventing organisations from going deeper into cloud are, naturally, security (35%), integration with other systems (32%), and integrating multiple clouds (25%). What’s more, the report affirms the view that many organisations still use on-premises, as well as in-house, delivery for certain systems.

“It’s all about digital transformation in the enterprise: improving the customer experience and adopting new business models to respond to disruption from established rivals and new entrants, and hybrid IT is how you do that,” said Carl Lehmann, research manager in charge of enterprise architecture, integration, and business process management for the 451 Group.

Yet while this approach has its benefits – for instance, creating new business processes and customer-facing applications involving multiple cloud and non-cloud systems working together – there are drawbacks. “Few IT departments are experienced at managing this hybrid delivery model, or the network technologies required to make it work,” the report notes. “As a result, companies are beginning to partner with experienced hybrid IT providers that have the expertise and products to deliver these newer technologies and capabilities.”

The report agrees many companies are struggling with hybrid IT – “a repeatable, reliable, and consistent hybrid IT approach remains the exception rather than the rule” – but reiterates the importance of getting an orchestrated mix of systems right. Yet help is at hand. The report also notes companies are recognising the importance of outsourcing infrastructure management, in order to help them stay on top of technology change – as cited by 72% of respondents – as well as better respond to business demands (67%) and more quickly resolve problems (57%).

You can read the full report here (pdf).