Monthly Archives: March 2018

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How the enterprise can embrace hybrid cloud


Cloud Pro

8 Mar, 2018

Cloud computing has come a long way since the early days of being the newest kid on the IT block. Since then, the market has evolved and organisations have improved their understanding of what the various cloud models are and what each can do for them.

Hybrid cloud in particular can be a tough nut to crack. The benefits are plentiful – although some are more obvious than others – but businesses often struggle to know where to start or what to do next.

40% of organisations are planning to deploy a hybrid cloud storage model within the next year. Read the full survey in ‘Hybrid cloud storage adoption trends’.

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The growth of hybrid cloud itself is an acknowledgement that a zero-cloud approach is increasingly untenable, according to Kevin Casey at The Enterprisers Project. It also indicates that CIOs and their team need to retain control over their data, and a hybrid cloud environment increasingly provides the flexibility needed for workloads.

Enterprises now need to be able to quickly, seamlessly and – importantly – securely move workloads, including those that are mission-critical, to and from the public cloud.

Modern enterprises are time-poor, yet information-rich with plenty of demands to fulfill. As such, they have limited resources and must continuously balance today’s business needs with tomorrow’s exacting demands and changing market landscape.

With true hybrid cloud, organisations are freed from the shackles of the mundane and complex so they can focus on their core business objectives and move from the daily grind to innovating for future success.

Organisations can extend their data centres’ reach and gain many benefits with hybrid cloud, including but not limited to:

  • The ability to build new enterprise applications and host them in Java-based architectures as well as being primed to benefit from next-generation rather than just traditional apps.
  • Develop and test more efficiently. This frees up precious on-premise resources, but also ensures businesses can move forward and react to changing industry demands.
  • Ensure disaster recovery is in place for third-party backups, test environments, seasonal activity and other locations.
  • Take advantage of next-gen capabilities from key vendors’ packaged apps and host in the hybrid cloud.

So how, then do you get from A to B when it comes to realising those benefits?

Given all the benefits available, it’s no surprise that hybrid cloud is predicted to be the dominant model used in the future. More than 90% of organisations will have deployed some form of hybrid cloud infrastructure by the end of 2020, according to analyst firm Gartner.

IDC concurs, estimating that the hybrid cloud market will grow by 20.5% by 2021, strengthened by growth in security and compliance data services.

However, there are still barriers to overcome, particularly when it comes to ensuring that the needs of the business and IT continue to be aligned. This has been a battleground in the historic tech landscape, with lines of business and technology personnel at odds and speaking different languages. For hybrid cloud deployments, in order to truly reap the benefits, there needs to be a meeting of minds.

“Hybrid cloud helps give each group what it wants: security and control for IT operations and speed and agility for line-of-business operations,” IDC said, suggesting the model is a way of bridging the gap between the tech side and line of business stakeholders.

The research house continued: “To the extent that IT can incorporate external public cloud services into formalised IT procurement, implementation, and governance processes, IT becomes a facilitator of rather than a roadblock to more dynamic business-ready IT.”

Milind Govekar, chief of research at Gartner, echoed these thoughts, saying: “Many lines of business buy external cloud services without the initial involvement of, or oversight from, IT leaders. To implement hybrid cloud services successfully, IT leaders need to introduce an internal cloud services brokerage (CSB) role responsible for the governance, demand management and delivery of cloud services.”

He added: “Those who do not think and act like an external service provider or evolve into a CSB role will gradually lose the trust of business managers, who will circumvent the IT organisation in order to access the IT services they need. This will result in more disaggregation of IT services and reduced value from the remaining shared IT services.”

Learn more about the concerns expressed around data storage and compliance, and the actions businesses are planning to take to combat it in Cloudian’s survey.

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With this in mind, enterprises should be asking a number of questions prior to making the move to hybrid cloud. These include:

  • Who needs to be involved in the decision making process?
  • Once stakeholders are established, what will our decision-making criterion include?
  • What are the limitations and opportunities with our current IT and business setup?
  • What costs are involved (both overheads and savings)? What is the ROI?
  • Will it free up resources (tech and people) to add value elsewhere in the business?
  • What workloads can and should I move and when?
  • Which service provider should I partner with and will they still be in business a year from now?
  • Where will my data be located?
  • What about security and unauthorised access? Am I protected?
  • What are the SLAs?
  • Will I be locked in or do I have long-term flexibility?
  • Will it make business life better than it is today?

Many organisations have already successfully navigated their way through the maze of questions and possible answers to enjoy the benefits of hybrid cloud and hybrid IT.

Overall, the move to hybrid cloud won’t be an overnight success story for everyone, but businesses can expect to see cost savings and increased operational efficiency when it is deployed properly.

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Gordon Haff to Present #AI, #DevSecOps, and #CloudNative at @CloudEXPO NY | #DevOps #Serverless

The standardization of container runtimes and images has sparked the creation of an almost overwhelming number of new open source projects that build on and otherwise work with these specifications. Of course, there’s Kubernetes, which orchestrates and manages collections of containers. It was one of the first and best-known examples of projects that make containers truly useful for production use. However, more recently, the container ecosystem has truly exploded. A service mesh like Istio addresses many of the challenges faced by developers and operators as monolithic applications transition towards a distributed microservice architecture. A tracing tool like Jaeger analyzes what’s happening as a transaction moves through a distributed system. Monitoring software like Prometheus captures time-series events for real-time alerting and other uses. Grafeas and Kritis provide security policy attestation and enforcement. And there are many more.

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Kubernetes takes step up as it ‘graduates’ from Cloud Native Computing Foundation

It’s official: Kubernetes has hit the big time. According to a missive from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the Google-designed, CNCF-maintained project is the first to ‘graduate’ from its foundation, throwing its mortarboard in the air in time-honoured tradition at the Open Source Leadership Summit in Sonoma Valley, California.

So what does this actually mean? Each technology adopted by the CNCF – of which there are 16 including Kubernetes – theoretically goes through three stages. In the inception stage, with only two projects at present, the technology simply needs to add value to cloud native computing, be it containerisation, orchestration, microservices or anything in between. The incubating stage, where projects such as Prometheus and OpenTracing are based, requires further accreditations in terms of documentation and usage, before eventually ‘graduating’.

Graduating technologies, according to the CNCF’s criteria, need to explicitly define a project governance and committer process, and have committers from at least two organisations. Three of the largest cloud providers offer their own managed Kubernetes services, while adoption of containers – with Kubernetes generally at the top of the tree – continues to soar. Companies such as Bloomberg, Uber, The New York Times and eBay are using Kubernetes, with almost three quarters (71%) of the Fortune 100 using containers, according to Redmonk.

“This designation benefits Kubernetes in many ways,” wrote Sarah Conway, CNCF senior director of PR services in a blog. “It signals that Kubernetes is mature and resilient enough to manage containers at scale across any industry in companies of all sizes.

“As a graduate, Kubernetes is in an even stronger position to grow faster and sustain a vibrant, healthy and diverse technical community,” Conway added.

CNCF also announced 24 new members at the Open Source Leadership Summit, including various companies well known to readers of this publication, including CloudBees and Couchbase. The foundation now stands at 178 members strong; as CloudTech reported throughout 2017, companies such as Microsoft, AWS and Oracle joining the CNCF last year showed both a rise in the technologies and the larger organisations using it.

The criteria for CNCF projects state that projects can remain in an incubating state indefinitely but are normally expected to graduate within two years – so expect further graduands in the near future.

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Lessons learned from DevOps deployments: Testing, business strategies, and more

The word DevOps is derived from merging development and operations, and this merger is exactly what DevOps practice is all about: a set of practices to support collaborative partnership and communication between software development teams and IT operations leveraging maximum automation through key phases of solutions delivery process. Technology organizations need to promote a ‘one-team, one goal’ mentality, meaning that all members must view themselves as “critical” to the success of the team. Gone are the days of an “it’s not my job” mindset. DevOps’ core value proposition is its one-team delivery approach that covers the entire technology organisation.

DevOps is to IT industry what Toyota’s Kanban lean manufacturing was to the manufacturing industry. In today’s business environment, solutions and service delivery processes must be optimised for innovation and speed-to-market. Methodologies including Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Lean Startup, and Design Thinking are well-suited to support these objectives, and cloud platforms are the platform of choice for software solutions delivery.

Continuous integration and delivery

Gone are the days of multi-year projects and product launch parties. Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) are essential components of DevOps practice. Cultivating this culture of continuous application release is a paradigm shift in technology organizations, a shift that took off by agile methodology’s implementation and now overseen by DevOps practice. This shift requires that enterprises move at a faster pace than before – a pace that enables shorter solutions lifecycles and speed-to-market. 

If DevOps is to succeed, then you have to end the practice of running a large number of test cases manually

For error-free CI and CD, greater collaboration, automation, and information transparency is needed between business, development, and IT operations. To achieve this seamless internal collaboration and sustained innovation across the enterprise, DevOps adoption is essential. In cases where different teams work collectively towards achieving common business goals, DevOps helps companies respond to the challenges of multi-paced IT in combination with methods such as the SAFe to facilitate collaboration.

Continuous testing

DevOps demands speed and agility, at this pace traditional quality assurance (QA) testing methods are incompatible with DevOps practices. Gone are the days of “months on end” manual QA testing. If DevOps is to succeed then you have to end the practice of running a large number of test cases manually. With daily or weekend regression runs, test volume has gone up considerably, making test automation imperative.

Continuous testing is not an easy skill to master. It requires a lot of hard work at the beginning building out test cases. Traditional QA testers will evolve and transition into test automation engineers, who must have a complete grasp of application functionality as well as the underpinning infrastructure, test automation tools, and scripting languages. 

DevOps success hinges on getting continuous testing right. It’s a key indicator that your DevOps/agile practice is mature, and your QA strategy must take into account that 100% test automation is not practical – nor it is possible.

Infrastructure as code

One of the key components of DevOps is Infrastructure as Code (IaC) which is used in conjunction with CD. It is based on code development methods in the developments and deployment of Infrastructure configurations. IaC should not be confused with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and should not be mistaken as part of configuration management tools provided by different vendors for infrastructure provisioning capabilities.

Teams should create IaC execution plans for building, versioning, and change automation of infrastructure services. Ops team should use same repository and versioning as Dev team uses for source code. Just as the same source code compiles the same binary, an IaC code should generate the same environment every time it is run. This allows DevOps teams to test solutions in production-like environments early in the development cycle. Gives them the ability to validate and test to prevent deployment issues. Teams are able to deliver stable environments rapidly and at scale.

Final thoughts

Combining DevOps culture with agile approaches such as SAFe and platform as a service provides resource elasticity and frees Ops from purchasing, shipping and receiving, so they can focus on optimising infrastructure and developers can focus on functionality rather than scalability. 

Continuous testing and Infrastructure as Code are the two most important components of DevOps

Continuous testing and Infrastructure as Code are the two most important components of DevOps. They both need most attention, training, tooling, re-skilling, and deployment of team members. Applying software development best practices to test automation and infrastructure configuration teams streamlines solutions delivery. DevOps teams should adopt a homogeneous set of tools and practices in order to deliver solutions and their supporting infrastructure rapidly, reliably, and at scale. Company-wide DevOps standardisation is paramount.

For business executives and technology executives (CIOs/CTOs), the main concern is the ability of DevOps to enable business transformation through faster innovative solutions development without disruptive blackouts, so to fulfill emerging business needs.

At the same time, for senior solutions development executives (SVP product development/SVP solutions delivery), their primary focus is on improving key metrics such as reducing risk and cost and improve quality, productivity, speed and agility in the SDLC. Adopters of DevOps focus on value-driven development and delivery, waste elimination, and automating repetitive tasks. Business transformation objectives and IT efficiency objectives need to be aligned.

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The UK’s cloud industry ranks in the world’s top five


Clare Hopping

7 Mar, 2018

The UK ranks fourth out of the 24 top-performing countries for cloud readiness, a report by BSA | The Software Alliance has revealed, rising five places compared to 2016.

The company’s annual Global Cloud Computing Scorecard study explained that the UK’s legal and regulatory environment meant it was one of the major players in the worldwide cloud marketplace, which means it’s a leader in cloud innovation alongside Germany, Japan and the US.

The Scorecard determines a country’s ranking according to a range of different factors, with privacy and cybersecurity and broadband infrastructure three of the major considerations.

“The Scorecard is a tool that can help countries constructively self-evaluate their policies and determine next steps to increase adoption of cloud computing,” Victoria Espinel, president and CEO of BSA | The Software Alliance said. “Cloud computing allows anyone to access technology previously available only to large organizations, paving the way for increased connectivity and innovation.”

The UK was able to rank so high up the chain compared to previous years not only because it’s updating its laws and regulations to comply with GDPR, but has also introduced other safeguards such as the National Cyber Security Strategy in 2016, making it the highest performing country for the security ranking. The UK is also a signatory of the Convention on Cybercrime and has up-to-date laws for protecting e-commerce and electronic signatures.

IT Readiness and Broadband Deployment accounted for 25% of the overall score, as it’s the basis of a solid IT strategy. The UK ranked highly thanks to its national broadband strategy to roll out superfast broadband to 95% of the population by 2018, although its scores for fibre-to-the-home were lower than the average, with just 1% of households (compared to the average of 18%) having a subscription.

“Countries that embrace the free flow of data, implement cutting-edge cybersecurity solutions, protect intellectual property, and establish IT infrastructure will continue to reap the benefits of cloud computing for businesses and citizens alike,” Espinel added.

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Microsoft tailors Azure Stack for US government


Clare Hopping

7 Mar, 2018

Microsoft has announced plans to integrate its Azure Stack with Azure Government later this year, allowing US agencies to run Microsoft’s cloud services on their own private infrastructure.

At present, Microsoft has a huge array of central government clients, including the Small Business Administration (SBA), US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the US Air Force and many of the USA’s city and state governments.

“Azure Stack is an extension of Azure, and government customers can leverage these powerful hybrid capabilities to bring core and advanced cloud services to the edge, whether it’s field office, tank or aircraft,” Natalia Mackevicius, director of Azure Stack, said.

“With Azure Stack, it becomes possible to process data in the field without worrying about latency or internet connectivity, and then run aggregated analytics in Azure Government to get the most precise predictions and anomaly detections. In each of the scenarios, a hybrid cloud extends from enterprise to the tactical edge, which can be connected or offline or disconnected environments.”

Adding the capability to run its entire stack on private servers means the public sector can benefit from all of Microsoft’s cloud-based services, with the peace of mind their data will remain on-site, in a government-secure datacentre.

Everything can be managed from one place, including identity, subscription, billing, backup and disaster recovery and the Azure Marketplace for access to even more apps and services. Enabling Azure Stack on Azure Government also means government IT departments can easily switch between public, government-only, and on-premise cloud environments depending on their specific needs at any time (for example, if there’s a specific cyber threat or geopolitical changes).

“Microsoft is already unique in providing consistent, comprehensive hybrid cloud capabilities to government, and we’re advancing those capabilities by bringing Microsoft Azure Stack to Azure Government,” Julia White, corporate vice president of Azure, said in a blog post, explaining Microsoft’s decision.

‘This is a game-changing hybrid solution that delivers consistency across public, government-only, and on-premises cloud environments to enable advanced services to power government’s tactical missions and make the intelligent edge a reality.”

Azure Stack’s integration with Azure Government will be completed by the middle of this year.

Main image credit: Bigstock

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Google Cloud announces healthcare APIs and updates – as Apple and Spotify revealed as customers

It has been an interesting week or so for Google Cloud, both directly and indirectly. The company has announced new APIs, updates and customers for its healthcare cloud initiative, while other high-profile customers have been disclosed.

At HiMSS, the healthcare information and management systems society conference, Google launched a new cloud healthcare API, which is better equipped to focus on data types such as HL7, FHIR and DICOM, and also allows customers to crunch the numbers using analytics and machine learning in the cloud.

On the security side, Google’s App Engine and Cloud Machine Learning Engine are now HIPAA-compliant, joining various other services, including Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, and BigQuery. As a company missive explains, these services are covered by a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement (BAA), so while there is no formal certification process, the company has undergone various independent audits to assess compliance, with the complete list of services covered by the BAA including ISO 27001, 27017 and 27018.

Alongside this, Google rolled out a list of customers who are actively involved in its healthcare cloud. Many are utilising Apigee, Google’s API management platform, including The Chilean Health Ministry, Cleveland Clinic, and Rush University Medical Center, with several exploring machine learning-based predictive models to give clinicians greater insights or to identify security threats.

“Ultimately, we hope that better flow of data will inspire new discoveries with artificial intelligence and machine learning, leading to insights that improve patient outcomes,” wrote Gregory J. Moore, Google Cloud vice president of healthcare.

Regular readers will be aware that Google likes to illustrate product announcements with a sampling of customers, whether it’s launching a private ‘on-ramp’ network connection to its cloud or preemptible GPUs. Yet you can add Spotify and Apple to Google’s increasingly-impressive list of flagship customers.

Spotify’s custom was revealed in its recent IPO filing – on page 30 to be precise, deep into the list of risks the company has to provide to investors. “Currently, we are in the process of transitioning all of our data storage (including personal data of users and music data licensed from rights holders) and computing from our own servers to [Google Cloud Platform],” the filing reads. “We cannot easily switch our GCP operations to another cloud provider… while the consumer side of Google competes with us, we do not believe that Google will use the GCP operation in such a manner as to gain competitive advantage against our service.”

Confirmation that Apple was a Google customer – as well as a customer of AWS – was buried even deeper, in a January update to its iOS Security Guide. First spotted by CNBC, page 16, focusing on iCloud, explains after files are broken into chunks and encrypted, they are stored ‘without any user-identifying information, using third-party storage services, such as S3 and Google Cloud Platform.’

One of the key themes this publication has explored over the past year is how Google has secured larger, blue riband cloud customers. At Next last year, three of the company’s announced customers, Verizon, Colgate-Palmolive and eBay, were ranked in the Fortune 500.

You can read the full healthcare announcements here.

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Microsoft expands government cloud offerings as company says IT shift ‘reaches tipping point’

Microsoft has beefed up its government cloud offerings, launching government-specific editions of Microsoft 365 and Azure Stack, as well as greater security and compliance in Dynamics 365.

Microsoft 365, which comprises Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS), and Azure Stack, which extends Azure to on-premises environments, are being upgraded as Microsoft acknowledges faster acceleration of government organisations moving to the cloud.

“This move is driven largely by the desire to bring the most up-to-date tools and capabilities to employees to meet demands for mobility and create a more modern workplace – and to ensure they are better equipped to face rising security challenges,” wrote Josh Rice, general manager for Microsoft’s worldwide modern workplace in a company blog post.

The Microsoft 365 government cloud will be made available in three flavours; Government Community Cloud (GCC), aimed at agencies at the state, local and federal level, GCC High, for government customers in more sensitive situations, and DoD Cloud, as the name suggests, specifically for the Department of Defense.

“What Microsoft 365 for US Government brings to the table for government agencies of all sizes is the value of cloud services with the unique compliance commitments for handling controlled unclassified information,” Rice added.

Azure Government will also see two new regions for data classified as secret, bringing the total to eight dedicated government regions. As Microsoft’s region map shows, there are currently four dedicated government regions – in Arizona, Iowa, Texas and Virginia – as well as central and eastern DoD-dedicated regions.

Microsoft’s government customers, totalling at more than 7,000 in the federal, state and local ranks, include the Commonwealth of Virginia, the US Air Force, and the City of Chicago. “Evidence that 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,” wrote Julia White, corporate vice president of Azure in a blog post.

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Hershey’s aims to streamline supply chain with S/4 HANA


Clare Hopping

6 Mar, 2018

Hershey’s has chosen Accenture to implement its SAP S/4 HANA software, enabling the confectionery company to build a more streamlined manufacturing and supply chain process.

Another major aspect of the collaboration is to help the candy company gain better insights into customer behaviour to power its wider business strategy, whether that’s boosting customer interaction, experience or engagement. Using SAP S/4 HANA,  Hershey’s hopes to boost innovation and drive revenue growth as it sets out to increase margins from its confectionery.

“Our collaboration with Accenture will enable us to increase competitive advantage and support our growth ambition through greater collaboration and innovation, as well as service delivery built around the needs of our customers,” said Terry O’Day, chief product supply and technology officer for The Hershey Company.

“We selected Accenture for its understanding of our industry, technology credentials and proven track record in delivering enterprise transformation at scale.”

Implementing S/4 HANA, SAP’s ERP successor to Business Suite that runs on the vendor’s fast data-processing platform, is a major part of Hershey’s digital transformation strategy, which it explained will help the business be more competitive by using S/4 to find key insights to inform its wider strategy.

“Accenture has always been at the forefront of helping consumer packaged goods companies accelerate their adoption of new ways of working and new operating models,” Keith Barringer, who leads Accenture’s Consumer Goods & Services practice in North America, said. “This opportunity enables us to bring our vast experience to Hershey’s as it navigates its journey to a more agile organisation.”

Picture: Shutterstock

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Salesforce makes it easier to query your data


Clare Hopping

6 Mar, 2018

Salesforce has announced Conversational Queries, part of its Einstein Analytics platform that is designed to make it easier to query data.

The new feature recognises what you’re typing as you tap your question out, making the process of firing off queries more automated. For example, a user can start typing a common phrase they may use to find the information they need – like “show me top accounts by annual revenue” – and the information they’re looking for will appear. As the user types, the suggested question will pop up, like Google’s automated search query suggestions.

Previously, finding such information would mean waiting for the results to appear after querying the database, but this way, it means Salesforce knows what you’re going to type and so has the content prepped, ready to appear in a graph.

“Traditionally, the process of creating charts has taken an average of 12 clicks and required a deeper understanding of chart building — how to create filters and what measures should go on each axis,” Amruta Moktali, VP of product for Einstein Analytics, wrote in a blog post. “Conversational Queries offers a new way to explore data and get answers to questions faster, eliminating clicks and the training required to create and drill down into charts.”

It also keeps a tab on all of the questions you’ve asked, meaning you can browse back through them without having to put a new query to the database.

“Conversational Queries is going to be a huge game-changer in the AI and BI space,” Rick Nania, director of CRM operations at Active International, said. “Having the ability to ask questions and gain key insights into our data just by typing or speaking a few words is amazing. I was impressed with the ability to get suggestions just by typing in a few letters and seeing other possible questions to ask- no data scientists required.”