Microsoft said earlier this week that government IT had reached a tipping point towards moving to the cloud – and now another large US contract is up for grabs.

During an Industry Day yesterday, plans were revealed by the Pentagon for the Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure Cloud (JEDI) opened up for tender to any single cloud provider.

The key is in the word ‘single’: as reported by Bloomberg, using multiple clouds would ‘exponentially increase the complexity’ of the issue, according to defence staff, therefore the plan is to go with one cloud vendor only.

As a draft statement of objectives explains: “The Department of Defence’s lack of a coordinated enterprise-level approach to cloud infrastructure makes it virtually impossible for our warfighters and leaders to make critical data-driven decisions at ‘mission speed’, negatively affecting outcomes.

“A fragmented and largely on-premise computing and storage solution forces the warfighter into tedious data and application management processes, compromising their ability to rapidly access, manipulate, and analyse data at the home front and tactical edge,” the document adds. “Most important, current environments are not optimised to support large, cross domain analysis using advanced capabilities such as machine learning and artificial intelligence to meet current and future warfighting needs and requirements.”

This comes amidst something of an issue with a recent tender. In February, the Pentagon awarded a contract for up to $950 million to REAN Cloud, a Virginia-based managed services provider, for automated pricing and procurement. Earlier this week, it was revealed that this contract had been cut to as low as $65m. Oracle had protested against the original decision according to a filing on February 20. In a statement, REAN said it was honoured to be performing work for the US military, and that it was unaware of the reasons as to why the contract was trimmed.

“Based on the threat of legal action and protest by the old guard, the only winners in this delay are those large companies that stand to lose money if DoD proceeds with innovation,” said Sekhar Puli, REAN Cloud managing partner. “In the meantime, the cost of maintaining antiquated government infrastructure has not subsided.”

Microsoft recently expanded its government cloud offerings to include government-specific editions of Microsoft 365 and Azure Stack. At the time Julia White, corporate vice president of Azure, wrote that “evidence we are at a tipping point for government to modernise IT with the cloud is coming from agencies across every level and branch of government.”

Long-time readers of this publication will remember the imbroglio between Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM in 2013 for a $600 million CIA cloud computing contract eventually won, after legal rulings, by AWS. If this, and the most recent contract, are anything to go by, expect a battle to be fought to the very end by the main cloud players.

Joe Curtis

Today, containers use some of the same terminology, but are introducing new ones. That’s an opportunity for me to extemporaneously expound* on my favorite of all topics: the proxy. One of the primary drivers of cloud (once we all got past the pipedream of cost containment) has been scalability. Scale has challenged agility (and sometimes won) in various surveys over the past five years as the number one benefit organizations seek by deploying apps in cloud computing environments.

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Bobby Hellard

Virtual network functions (VNFs) are software implementations of network function equipment packaged in virtual machines, on top of commercial off the shelf hardware NFV infrastructure. VNFs are a core part of NFV – as we know the base of NFV was to virtualise the network functions and software based to reduce cost and gain full control over network operations with added agility and flexibility benefits. We can say that the majority of NFV operations are focused towards how VNFs can be served in NFV infrastructure to introduce new services for consumers. In future, we can expect major developments will be related to VNFs only.

VNFs and NFV are separated by the fact that VNF are provided by external vendors or open source communities to service providers who are transitioning their infrastructure to NFV. There may be several VNFs which combine to form a single service for NFV. This adds complexity to the overall NFV purpose of agility, where VNFs from different vendors need to deploy in NFV infrastructure having a different operational model.

VNFs developed by different vendors have different methodologies for complete deployment in existing NFV environments. Onboarding VNFs remains a challenge due to a lack of standard processes for complete management from development to deployment and monitoring.

At a basic level, traditional VNFs come with limitations such as:

• VNFs consume huge amounts of hardware in order to be highly available
• VNFs are developed, configured and tested to run for specified NFV hardware infrastructure
• Needs manual installation, configuration and deployment on NFVi
• API not provided for VNF to enable automated scaling, configuration to serve the sudden spike in demand for utilisation
• Not supporting multi-tenancy, VNFs cannot be easily shared in infrastructure for reuse

Building cloud-native VNFs is a solution for vendors and this is a revolution in software development to have all cloud-native characteristics to VNFs. Features we can expect as cloud-native VNFs are containerised functions, microservices-based, dynamically managed and specifically designed for orchestration. The major differentiator of cloud-native VNFs from traditional VNFs can be self-management capability and scalability.

Building cloud-native VNFs overcomes the limitations of traditional VNFs and gives the following benefits. Cloud-native VNFs have APIs which enables:

• Automated installation and configuration
• Automated scaling when dynamic requirement from network
• Self-healing or fault tolerant
• Automated monitoring and analysis of VNFs for errors, capacity management and performance
• Automated upgrading and updating VNFs for applying new releases and patches
• Standard and simplified management enables less power consumption; reduction of unnecessary allocated resources
• Reusability and sharing of processes within VNFs can be achieved. VNFs can be easily shared within an NFV environment

NFV is a key technology used in the development of 5G networks. But NFV is going through a maturation stage where NFV solution providers are resolving many challenges like automated deployment, and VNF onboarding. Developing VNF and deploying into NFV infrastructure sounds simple, but it raises various questions when it comes to scale, configuring or updating VNFs. Any task related to VNFs need manual intervention, leads to more time consumption for launching or updating new services for service providers.

To deliver the promise of agility by NFV in 5G needs exceptional automation at every level of NFV deployment. Building cloud-native VNFs seems to be the solution – but it is at a very early stage.

The post Importance of Cloud-Native VNFs for NFV Success appeared first on Sagar Nangare.

Clare Hopping

In B2B situations, customer outcomes are far more likely to correspond to quantifiable key performance indicators (KPIs) like customer profitability, productivity, cost savings, etc. Customer delight might very well be on this list, but it is far more difficult to measure. We can thus come to the reasonable conclusion that customer success initiatives will only be successful if the people responsible for it take their focus off of inward-facing metrics like churn, upsells, and cross-sells, and instead give their full attention to such customer outcomes.

Just one problem: in the B2B scenario, simply focusing on business KPIs as business outcomes still falls short as a true metric for customer success.

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Cloud-enabled transformation has evolved from cost saving measure to business innovation strategy — one that combines the cloud with cognitive capabilities to drive market disruption. Learn how you can achieve the insight and agility you need to gain a competitive advantage. Industry-acclaimed CTO and cloud expert, Shankar Kalyana presents. Only the most exceptional IBMers are appointed with the rare distinction of IBM Fellow, the highest technical honor in the company. Shankar has also received the prestigious Outstanding Technical Achievement Award three times – an accomplishment befitting only the most innovative thinkers. Shankar Kalyana is among the most respected strategists in the global technology industry. As CTO, with over 32 years of IT experience, Mr. Kalyana has architected, designed, developed, and implemented custom and packaged software solutions across a vast spectrum of environments and platforms. His current area of expertise includes hybrid, multi-cloud as-a-service strategies that drive digital and cognitive enterprises to operational excellence.

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In 2018, the shifting emphasis to IoT, Artificial Intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR) and automation seem to overshadow cloud; yet, I believe it is just the opposite. A recently published industry survey shows that by 2020, the use of public cloud will grow dramatically. Business goals related to actively adopting AI, IoT and machine learning strategies are prompting IT teams to consider outsourced cloud and cloud experts to move faster than competitors. The formats and pilots incorporating these technologies can be seen across multiple markets and segments including government, retail, and industrial bases. The use of AI, VR, and IoT is also driving the technology, compliance and cybersecurity markets necessary to support these innnovations. For example, nowadays there are a number of automotive, entertainment and digital marketing companies with dedicated cyber teams.

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The joint cloud offering from VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS) is now available in Europe, the former has announced, with London first on the list and Frankfurt to join in due course.

VMware Cloud on AWS, which offers benefits to joint customers including workload portability between private and public clouds, had previously been available in AWS’ US West and US East regions.

The service was only made initially available in August, with AWS chief executive Andy Jassy joining VMware compatriot Pat Gelsinger on stage at VMworld. Among the list of earliest customers using the joint offering were Moody’s, Symantec, and Western Digital. Joining them, according to the VMware press materials, are Brink’s, a secure logistics provider, who said the flexibility of the new product is a ‘key driver in Brink’s technology and business transformation.’

“Bringing together the best of VMware and AWS, VMware Cloud on AWS provides customers an operationally consistent and familiar way to run, manage and secure applications in a hybrid cloud with access to a broad range of innovative and comprehensive AWS services and robust disaster protection,” wrote Sai Gopalan, VMware senior product marketing manager in a blog post confirming the news.

“This release initiates the global expansion of the service by making it available to our European and multi-national customers.”

Gopalan added there were future plans to move to additional European and Asia Pacific regions.