‘IT as a service’ (ITaaS) is on the rise as companies realise the benefits of contracting an IT service provider for all their business technology needs. While ITaaS is not a new concept, it has become a go-to operational model for medium-to-large sized companies that need 24/7 monitoring, managing, and sustaining of company technology.

Moving to ITaaS is an operational shift, where IT is run as a business and therefore can be optimised according to business needs. Companies that run hybrid IT environments, such as private cloud, public cloud, and in-house applications, can contract services for all or just part of their technological system. Here are some leading benefits of IT as a service and why more companies are shifting to this model.

Full-time security

Hiring a full-time staff to monitor servers 24/7/365 is expensive and can eat up a lot of the IT budget. Instead, by contracting an ITaaS provider, companies can save valuable time and resources. This provider will be on-call for any disruptions of services, applications, or any website or hardware. The ITaaS provider will fix the issue and alert the company if necessary.

Since IT security is a top concern for businesses, having an ITaaS provider can take away an element of fear, as they are skilled in handling breaches such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks or malware issues. And especially for companies with strict compliance regulations, and ITaaS provider can ensure all requirements are met.

Efficient support for employees

Most companies have employees distributed around the country or around the world, which often means limited deskside support resources. An ITaaS provider, however, can deploy a self-service support portal, which allows employees to open support tickets, search a robust FAQ, check the status of issues, request new devices, or find any information related to the IT aspect of their position.

This type of support system is seamless for employees who want fast answers and quick relief from IT issues. It can be integrated with help desk software applications, making internal IT support easy.

Monitoring and management

All companies must monitor and update hardware for items such as antivirus software, operating system updates, etc. This process takes time and resources that could be used elsewhere. By shifting this responsibility to an ITaaS provider, companies are relieved of managing each employee’s laptop, desktop, and mobile device. The ITaaS provider ensures all devices are regularly updated with the latest operating systems and applications.

Furthermore, the ITaaS provider can remotely access each device for configurations, patching, and ongoing maintenance. If for some reason an on-site fix is necessary, the system can alert a designated technician to fix the problem. ITaaS providers also monitor and maintain virtual servers, remotely fixing any issues, to ensure regular and consistent performance.

Enhanced reporting

Many companies are bound to a service level agreement (SLA), which makes performance monitoring an important part of IT services. The ITaaS provider can monitor performance and alert technicians to when action is necessary for any hardware or device. ITaaS providers can report against enhanced SLA metrics beyond standard OEM warranty terms. For small-and-medium sized businesses, attaining these services through the OEM can be costly, which is why an independent service organization is an affordable alternative.

Turbonomic, a Boston-based cloud and virtualisation software provider, has announced new support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure public cloud environments with general availability of its 5.9 iteration.

The company says the move will ‘enable customers to confidently accelerate their journey to hybrid cloud’, with support offerings include visibility of all workloads regardless of where they reside, and lowering of public cloud bills by 30% on average.

Other features include being able to migrate to AWS and Azure public clouds through migration planning, workload placement and workload scaling, controlling public cloud workloads, and enforcing compliance across hybrid environments.

Turbonomic cited a Gartner forecast which argues that by 2020 a quarter of large enterprises will run ‘dynamic optimisation’ solutions to manage the public cloud, compared to less than 1% in 2016.

Gartner defines dynamic optimisation as “a technology capability that uses telemetry, algorithms, service and resource analytics, and policies to drive automated actions that reduce waste, cost and risk exposure, while simultaneously improving service levels.” Naturally, Turbonomic – back in its previous life as VMTurbo – was named as a representative vendor in the analysis, in April last year.

“Transitioning to hybrid cloud presents a new challenge: deciding which workload should run where and when, and confidently managing the transition. It’s a cloud-scale challenge that can only be solved with self-managing software,” said Shmuel Kliger, Turbonomic founder and president in a statement.

“With today’s announcement, Turbonomic is uniquely positioned to help customers monitor and automate their workloads anywhere – on premises and/or in public cloud – in real-time, to unleash the full potential of the public cloud’s elasticity and scale.”

In August, Turbonomic – alongside Verizon – issued research which argued business continuity was the most important business driver of multi-cloud adoption, yet citing cost as the primary differentiator. The company told CloudTech at the time that focusing primarily on cost was “not a recipe for assuring customers are delighted with your service.”

You can find out more here.

New competitors, disruptive technologies, and growing expectations are pushing every business to both adopt and deliver new digital services. This ‘Digital Transformation’ demands rapid delivery and continuous iteration of new competitive services via multiple channels, which in turn demands new service delivery techniques – including DevOps. In this power panel at @DevOpsSummit 20th Cloud Expo, moderated by DevOps Conference Co-Chair Andi Mann, panelists will examine how DevOps helps to meet the demands of Digital Transformation – including accelerating application delivery, closing feedback loops, enabling multi-channel delivery, empowering collaborative decisions, improving user experience, and ultimately meeting (and exceeding) business goals.

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A new report from Puppet on the DevOps landscape has found a significant gap in productivity and results between the highest and lowest rating organisations.

The study, put together in conjunction with DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) and which polled 3,200 respondents across multiple industries and with organisations of all sizes, found the highest performing organisations have automated 72% of all configuration management processes, spending 28% of their time in manual configuration processes. In contrast, lower performers can spend almost half (46%) of their time on manual configuration.

When it came to lead time for changes – in other words, moving from code commit to code successfully running in production, the highest performers have it down to less than one hour, with the rest managing between one week and one month on average. A big discrepancy there – and it shows again with deployment frequency as well as mean time to recover.

Medium performers, however, were distinguished between the lowest rubric in terms of change failure rate. For high and medium IT performers, the percentage of changes made which subsequently requires remediation is both between 0% and 15% on average, while for low IT performers the number rises to 31%-45%.

The research also examined how leadership affects performance, with high performing outfits sharing leaders with ‘vision’, ‘inspirational communication’, ‘intellectual stimulation’, ‘supportive leadership’, and ‘personal recognition’.

No surprises on the surface there, but the report notes how leadership is not enough to differentiate at the highest level. Teams whose leaders were in the top 10% were not the highest performers as a group, instead displaying varying performance. “Leaders cannot achieve DevOps outcomes on their own,” the report notes. “DevOps success also depends on a suitable architecture, good technical practices, [and] use of lean management principles.”

“The results of the 2017 State of DevOps Report show that high-performing IT teams are deploying more frequently and recovering faster than ever before, yet the automation gap between high and low performing teams continues to grow,” said Nigel Kersten, Puppet chief technical strategist. “The report will help organisations understand how to identify their own inhibitors and embrace change on their DevOps journey.”

“This year’s results clearly demonstrate that DevOps teams are achieving tremendous success by moving towards a culture of shared accountability and trust,” said Cameron Deatsch, head of enterprise growth at Atlassian. “Shifting an organisation’s culture can be difficult and requires the right knowledge, guidance and tools that encourage collaboration and visibility across teams.

“Thousands of customers rely on Atlassian as the foundation of their DevOps practices, providing collaboration across teams, a dedicated marketplace of integrations with leading DevOps tools, and most importantly, accelerating the evolution of their team’s culture.”

Puppet has been busy of late. The company said in May that it had added more than 250 new enterprise customers over the past 12 months, as well as announcing new offices opened in Singapore and Seattle, as well as an updated facility in Sydney. A recent report from Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) found that more than 90% of organisations are using DevOps practices in some capacity, but support production applications only a third of the time.

You can read the full Puppet report here (free, email required).

In his session at @ThingsExpo, Arvind Radhakrishnen will discuss how IoT offers new business models in banking and financial services organizations with the capability to revolutionize products, payments, channels, business processes and asset management built on strong architectural foundation.
The following topics will be covered:
How IoT stands to impact various business parameters including customer experience, cost and risk management within BFS organizations.

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Cloud security provider Netskope has announced the close of a $100 million (£77.5m) series E funding round to press ahead with its go to market strategy as well as explore new ventures.

The round, which brings Netskope’s total funding to $231.4 million, was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and included contributions from existing investors Social Capital and Iconiq Capital, as well as new participation from Sapphire Ventures and Geodesic Capital.

Among the upcoming projects for the company, best known for its cloud assess security broker (CASB) software, includes the first public mention of what is being described as ‘Netskope for Web’, an advancement of the security platform beyond the cloud aimed at being pushed out later this year.

“This announcement really is just a reinforcement of the notion of building the definitive leading cloud security platform,” Sanjay Beri, Netskope CEO, told CloudTech. “The fact [the round] is led by existing investors is a great thing. It was oversubscribed, and for us, we haven’t gone out fundraising per se ever – we’ve had the luxury of a lot of external folks wanting to invest in the company.”

Netskope’s modus operandi is around offering a different solution to securing assets and data in the cloud. Beri describes it as delivering ‘the absolute best architecture and product that would allow enterprises to tackle the problem the way it should be’. To paraphrase the adage about lipstick and porcine creatures, if you put lipstick on legacy security tools, it’s still not going to understand the language of the cloud, or APIs.

Whether it’s the SaaS of Salesforce, Box, Office 365 et al, to the primary IaaS and PaaS of AWS, Google and Microsoft, Netskope aims to have organisations covered through data loss and threat protection, encryption, and more. The company’s next plan is to advance it from the cloud to the whole web. “[It’s] the ability and savviness to understand the way that people work now and the way that applications are built now bringing it to the entire web, not just the cloud,” said Beri, “so one of the things this funding continues to fuel us to do is advance that platform to continue to realise the vision of the definitive cloud security platform.”

Netskope says that it had seen an uptick in 2016 of ‘leading enterprise customers in the retail, financial services, manufacturing, energy, and healthcare verticals’. With customers including Toyota, Genomic Health, and the City of San Diego on the books, Beri mused on where different industries are in their cloud journeys.

“I think you should cut at it two ways – geography and then vertical,” he said. “As the market has moved, what you see now is the largest healthcare, life science companies in the world all using cloud.

“Healthcare is definitely a strong vertical,” Beri added. “When you look beyond retail, most every single retail company in the world is leveraging cloud. They want to focus on their core business and they don’t want to build infrastructure. The cloud lets them enable that remote working, large distributed workforce, and yet they’re worried about protecting customer data, protecting financial data and so on.

“[It’s] the same thing with financial and insurance – you think they’d be the laggards but some of the largest financial institutions in the world are Netskope customers, and they’re leveraging cloud, not only because their end users want, but because it’s a corporate strategy now. It’s a competitive advantage, if you can leverage these properly.”

The geographical discussion naturally beget a look at GDPR, of which the one year countdown for compliance passed last month. Netskope has previously warned companies to get their act together – fines of €10 million or 2% of annual turnover – while Beri calls the process a ‘seesaw’.

“For anybody who wasn’t taking it seriously, it’s going to hurt your business if you don’t now, and I think what a lot of enterprises are realising is that with GDPR coming, they need the next level of visibility and ability to control where their data goes, who uses it, and how it’s exposed,” he said. “One of the keys we focus on at Netskope is how you enable companies to move forward, be productive, leverage the applications that they want, yet at the same time, how you put guard rails around their usage so you’re not going to be able to for example leak EU customer data, or put yourself at risk of violating GDPR.”

It’s a good analogy for their whole ethos. 

Cloud applications are seeing a deluge of requests to support the exploding advanced analytics market. “Open analytics” is the emerging strategy to deliver that data through an open data access layer, in the cloud, to be directly consumed by external analytics tools and popular programming languages. An increasing number of data engineers and data scientists use a variety of platforms and advanced analytics languages such as SAS, R, Python and Java, as well as frameworks such as Hadoop and Spark. Cloud APIs are commonly designed to support application integration representing a disconnect with the analytics ecosystem. These combined trends create significant demand for a “bring-your-own-analytics” (BYOA) capability for cloud applications.

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