In IT, we sometimes coin terms for things before we know exactly what they are and how they’ll be used. The resulting terms may capture a common set of aspirations and goals – as “cloud” did broadly for on-demand, self-service, and flexible computing. But such a term can also lump together diverse and even competing practices, technologies, and priorities to the point where important distinctions are glossed over and lost.

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Connecting to major cloud service providers is becoming central to doing business. But your cloud provider’s performance is only as good as your connectivity solution.
Massive Networks will place you in the driver’s seat by exposing how you can extend your LAN from any location to include any cloud platform through an advanced high-performance connection that is secure and dedicated to your business-critical data.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Paul Mako, CEO & CIO of Massive Networks, will discuss the intricacies of network and cloud management optimization.”

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Connecting to major cloud service providers is becoming central to doing business. But your cloud provider’s performance is only as good as your connectivity solution.
Massive Networks will place you in the driver’s seat by exposing how you can extend your LAN from any location to include any cloud platform through an advanced high-performance connection that is secure and dedicated to your business-critical data.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Paul Mako, CEO & CIO of Massive Networks, will discuss the intricacies of network and cloud management optimization.”

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Vulnerability management is vital for large companies that need to secure containers across thousands of hosts, but many struggle to understand how exposed they are when they discover a new high security vulnerability. In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, John Morello, CTO of Twistlock, will address this pressing concern by introducing the concept of the “Vulnerability Risk Tree API,” which brings all the data together in a simple REST endpoint, allowing companies to easily grasp the severity of the vulnerability. He will provide attendees with actionable advice related to understanding and acting on exposure due to new high severity vulnerabilities.

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Intelligent Automation is now one of the key business imperatives for CIOs and CISOs impacting all areas of business today.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Brian Boeggeman, VP Alliances & Partnerships at Ayehu, will talk about how business value is created and delivered through intelligent automation to today’s enterprises. The open ecosystem platform approach toward Intelligent Automation that Ayehu delivers to the market is core to enabling the creation of the self-driving enterprise.

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Intelligent Automation is now one of the key business imperatives for CIOs and CISOs impacting all areas of business today.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Brian Boeggeman, VP Alliances & Partnerships at Ayehu, will talk about how business value is created and delivered through intelligent automation to today’s enterprises. The open ecosystem platform approach toward Intelligent Automation that Ayehu delivers to the market is core to enabling the creation of the self-driving enterprise.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced it has joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) strengthening its open source hand – and two weeks after Microsoft signed up.

The company joins, as Microsoft did, as a platinum member, to help speed up the deployment of cloud-native technologies in its public cloud portfolio.

“As the largest cloud provider, AWS brings years of experience in enabling enterprises to successfully adopt cloud computing and enormous expertise in cloud native technologies,” said Dan Kohn, CNCF executive director in a statement. “We are honoured to have AWS join CNCF as a platinum member, and believe that their participation will help shape the future of enterprise computing.”

Among the other platinum members, of which there are now 16, are Google and IBM, meaning AWS was the last of the ‘hypervisor’ cloud providers to hold out. The Seattle giant continues to be absent from the Cloud Foundry Foundation’s list of members, however – Microsoft confirmed membership in June at the gold level – although the foundation has issued documentation about how to deploy Cloud Foundry on AWS.

AWS has also been part of several open source initiatives over the years, including being part of the Linux Foundation since 2013, contributing to such projects as the Open Container Initiative and the TODO Group, as well as being a founding member of the Core Infrastructure Initiative. Current members of the CNCF, including Ticketmaster and Vevo, are already running Kubernetes in production on AWS.

In a post on Medium, Adrian Cockcroft, VP of cloud architecture strategy at AWS, outlined the rationale behind the move. “Over time, components of cloud native architectures move from being experimental, through competing implementations, to being well-defined external services,” he wrote. “We’ve seen this evolution with databases, data science pipelines, container schedulers, and monitoring tools. This is one place where the CNCF acts as a filter and aggregator.

“For customers who are trying to track a fast-moving and confusing world, it’s helpful to regard CNCF as a brand endorsement, for a loose collection of interesting projects,” Cockcroft added. “It’s a loose collection, rather than a single, integrated cloud native architecture, so there’s no particular endorsement of any one project over another, for members of CNCF, or for users of projects.”

The company announced revenues of $4.1 billion (£3.13bn) for its most recent quarter, with analysts at Synergy Research noting it had managed to gain 1% in market share over the last four quarters in spite of its dominant position. 

SYS-CON Events announced today that Secure Channels, a cybersecurity firm, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Secure Channels, Inc. offers several products and solutions to its many clients, helping them protect critical data from being compromised and access to computer networks from the unauthorized. The company develops comprehensive data encryption security strategies that are tailored for the unique needs of each client; the team builds in an intuitive user experience to boost efficiency and effectiveness of its cyber security solutions.

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Only a fool believes that moving enterprise applications to the cloud is a panacea for the majority of the challenges facing today’s CIOs. Even cloud migration itself, like any IT project, presents a number of complex challenges. My favourite piece of advice is to think the same as you would if buying a house: don’t be impulsive. By taking the time to develop a clear focus at the outset, cloud buyers can eliminate unwanted costs and complications down the road. First and foremost, be clear around what you are looking for and why.

Updating the procurement function

The procurement department had a firm grip on IT purchasing until the advent of cloud. Now there is the risk that buying cloud services slips through the procurement net. Self-service applications mean that business line executives can whip out a credit card and pay for a small service themselves without involving procurement. But, just like a kid when in-app game purchases get out of control, at some point the bill might be too big to hide or the security too lax.

As with any IT change, the biggest challenges to a successful transition are generally cultural.  It’s not just the IT department and users that need to think differently when moving to the cloud. The procurement department also has to change well-engrained mindsets as it adjusts from dealing with products to services.

To transition from a Capex to a granular Opex model, the processes involved in purchasing and evaluating IT have to become more nimble. Without this, the procurement department becomes a bottleneck and the backlash will be a significant increase in shadow IT and shadow cloud.

Instead of negotiating with product providers every couple of years, the procurement team will have to adopt a new model that supports buying Opex services from more than one provider at a time. This means embracing a new level of agility, because cloud features and capacity change overnight.

Drivers for cloud

The first question to ask when someone requests a cloud service is: why? Only by understanding the key drivers at the outset – particularly when those factors are agility or cost – is it possible to choose the right model. This approach undoubtedly helps with negotiations and also makes it easy to switch providers if needed at a later date.

Defining cloud

Having a clear definition of what is meant by cloud within your organisation – and communicating this clearly to everyone inside the company and to your cloud provider(s) – is an important step. Then when your internal business customers talk about ‘cloud’ there are no misunderstandings.

Everyone within your firm should understand that it is an architectural and commercial model rather than simply a location – and that it does not mean any managed services or service delivered over the Internet.

Cloud repatriation and exit strategies

Cloud repatriation – moving workloads from the public cloud to a private cloud – is a growing trend. Even Dropbox, a company that started in the cloud, has now moved from the public cloud to its own data centres for faster performance and lower costs. Although security is one of the main drivers for repatriation, high profile cloud outages, greater control, cost, compliance and latency are all contributing factors.

Exit strategies are often neglected at the outset. But cloud buyers who don’t consider exit costs at the start of a relationship are missing a trick. Moving to a different provider – or repatriation – will require budget and time for recoding and retraining to get your staff up to speed.

Avoiding lock-in

One topic that is generating a lot of discussion right now is how to avoid cloud lock-in. A key reason for moving to the cloud is to gain greater flexibility. But this is stymied if your organisation takes advantage of a cloud provider’s set of compelling, but proprietary, add-on features and APIs without considering how you will manage without those features should you wish to change cloud provider down the line, or add a second cloud provider to the mix.

Balancing the need to avoid becoming too reliant on a provider’s proprietary features while at the same time making the most of what your chosen provider has to offer needs careful thought.

Cross-department collaboration

While DevOps and agile processes have transformed software development, buying cloud services require the business line, IT and procurement teams to work together in new ways. There is a need to collaborate on decisions and to ensure the work force has the right skills to benefit fully from the cloud.

Engaging early

As with any IT change, it is important to remember the users’ perspectives. This requires engaging with users early in the process to fully understand their needs; then at a later time educating them about the new service, particularly if it is self-service, and ensuring it continues to meet their needs over the long term. To do this effectively, many organisations engage third-party cloud expertise early on to transfer essential knowledge and innovation through lessons learned elsewhere.

You can’t manage what you can’t measure

We stressed the importance of being clear about what you are looking for and why at the start. The next step is to set up clear measurements and baselines to measure benefits. Only then is it possible to track improvements and evaluate the return-on-investment.

Despite all these notes of caution, don’t be disheartened. When it is well planned and executed, moving to the cloud is a beautiful thing to behold.  Be as prepared as a boy scout and you will reap the rewards.