Having been focused in the cloud sector for more than 12 years now, I have experienced much fast paced change and continued assumptions, misunderstanding and over-promising of cloud as the saviour of all ills.

Cloud is used as a generic term and yet covers a wide plethora of sub form factors (SaaS – software as a service, PaaS – platform as a service and IaaS – infrastructure as a service) and delivery mechanisms (private, public and hybrid clouds). Within these you then have a growing breadth of vendors with offerings, either born in the cloud or developed from former traditional on network server led models; each being architected differently from physical infrastructure components through to functionality, hosting locations, pricing and security models.

For the dispersed needs of a business, there is not one cloud vendor that can or does provide a total end-to-end solution fit for all and nor should there be, with cloud being a highly innovative and agile market sector that is driving change and disruption. The right fit for each project needs to be assimilated from the business needs, the technical mix, the security requirements the businesses skill set and future predicted needs and the commonality sought by the business (meaning a possible focus on reducing the breadth of vendors, perhaps choosing one PaaS platform as the standard to be used whenever PaaS is applicable).

There are five key focal reasons for driving your business to a multi-cloud infrastructure:

Best of breed

Cloud has driven aggressive innovation and disruption; with new providers replacing both old and newer approaches, commoditisation reducing the cost of compute and varying cloud providers offering a range of different capabilities and functions.

Multi-cloud allows you to select the best of each on offer for your needs at that window of time, some being medium to long time commitments – such as an ERP or CRM re-platforming – and some being short term tactical options such as spinning up IaaS or PaaS for testing or project-based DevOps work. Multi-cloud allows you to pick and choose from a growing range of services on offer to create a customised portfolio that fits the needs of your organisation.

Ability to mix delivery mechanisms from SaaS, PaaS and IaaS

No one of these delivery mechanisms is best for all customers in every instance. For example, you may have a customer CRM application that has specific value to your business through a lot of prior investment done to align to your specific business processes. You have the choice to switch to a robust, industry common SaaS based CRM and invest in re-building the processes and specific aligned customisations (a quick switch on of the generic and longer investment in the configuration) or to re-platform your proprietary setup to a cloud based platform to increase the robustness of the underlying infrastructure, add flexibility and reduce ongoing costs. A multi-cloud strategy allows you the what if capability to weigh up a wider option base for each new and existing application and do the right thing for you and your business in each individual case.

Risk mitigation and reduction

There has always been a panacea target of 100% uptime and availability (excluding scheduled maintenance) and no matter what the guarantee offered by any cloud vendor and regardless how mission critical they are, there will always be risk for failure as has been demonstrated by some very global performance and outage issues from brand name vendors. The comparative however should be with traditional methods of delivery and the efficiency scaling of costs delivered through cloud.

We pay far less now per compute/storage for far greater resilience than we have had previously. In choosing packaged cloud applications the level of redundancy delivered by the cloud provider will outweigh that you could afford or choose to provide yourself. When spinning up your own apps into the cloud, you can now build greater hot standby resiliency at a price lower than older cold redundancies would have been. By spreading your workloads across multiple cloud providers, the possibility of simultaneous downtime reduces exponentially.

Autonomy

Historically vendor selection led to lock-in, which led to costlier, prolonged and risk averse proof of concepts, delayed decisions and in the case of a mistaken decision a situation where good was often thrown after bad as the cost to change was too extreme. With cloud, whilst the full panacea of switch on and switch off has not been achieved across all form factors and vendors, it is invariably easier to switch onto a cloud service and switch onto another if required than it has ever been with network server installed products.

With IaaS / PaaS workloads, if platformed more generically (not utilising vendor-specific APIs) then the workloads can be shifted quiet easily from one vendor offering to another, leaving the customer with the ability to run the app regardless of the chosen underlying infrastructure provider. As we progress the ability to move cloud vendor will become easier giving increased autonomy to the client for performance, security and cost reasons. This will lead to the advantage of reducing dependency further on any single cloud vendor and allow the negotiation of more favourable pricing and agreements.

Interoperability

Cloud platforms, regardless of form factor or delivery method, are not all interoperable with each other or with legacy systems. There is often an assumption that all will play and talk nicely together and push and pull data easily; this is not the case. Therefore, the ability to mix and choose between offerings in a multi-cloud environment is key in today’s world where data is king. For example, if a key business requirement is to link a legacy on network system to a new cloud offering and bi-directional data flow is a key aspect, then having the flexibility to choose a cloud solution that is strongest for that need and not be forced down a particular avenue is key.

Conclusion

One cloud may be better suited than another for a specific task; for example utilising a public cloud for services extendable to your ecosystem of workers and partners and a private cloud to host a more focused internally critical system. High security workloads may be determined to run in private clouds whilst regular generic business applications and data can leverage cost effective public cloud offerings. With a multi-cloud option on offer you can spin up resources and options more easily than in the old world where selecting a vendor led you into far longer tie ins and more costly and complex deployments. With mixed clouds, you can elect to choose a richer set of options to solve a wider set of business functional needs.

Today’s cloud services are resilient, secure and delivered using multiple regions and data centres to form a single cloud network. Multi-cloud takes cloud to the next level and allows businesses to build sophisticated inter cloud services encompassing an ecosystem of large and small, niche and broad, PaaS, SaaS and IaaS providers.

With increasing focus on security and data regulations evolving quickly, such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), the ability to choose a provider where needed, that has the most stringent alignment with your data security needs is also key.

Multi-cloud capabilities and options make the case for cloud stronger and the ability to adapt to changing business needs easier.

Cloud computing is fast becoming a mature technology with more growth expected. Gartner believes that by 2020, a ‘no-cloud’ policy will be as rare as a ‘no-internet’ policy is today. Over the last five years in particular, businesses have recognised that cloud computing reduces spending on data centres and on premise equipment, and enables them to be way more flexible and efficient, as employees are able to access company data however and wherever they want.

Though most large organisations have or are developing a cloud strategy, many aren’t turning the key overnight.  The move is more gradual so they need to contend with a hybrid approach – managing on premises and cloud environments – for the foreseeable future. If done right, this enables them to continue to keep the lights on while embracing cloud for ease of growth, such as mergers and acquisitions, better facilitating mobile workers and ensuring virtual teams can communicate and collaborate more freely. Many of the companies we speak with are trying to move more workloads to the cloud so they’re in both a hybrid and migration state.

Moving more workloads to the cloud means less investment in infrastructure management and maintenance – this allows IT to focus on innovation and staying competitive.  The quicker they move their communication and collaboration workloads to the cloud, the easier it is for them to adapt to change and centralise accounts, data and audit logs, thus making compliance mandates easier to comply with.

Managing cloud workloads via software as a service (SaaS) has distinct advantages. As companies move to more cloud-based services, they will want to extend this model to their management tools as well and for the same reasons: license flexibility, mobility, audit ready.

But what other benefits are there for companies born in the cloud, and how can businesses built upon legacy systems keep pace?

Leaving a legacy

Legacy businesses will be constantly catching up with companies born in the cloud, who will be faster to adapt to modern ways of working in a much safer way. For example, those born in the cloud can easily adopt policies across their unified communications platform to ensure better compliance with corporate and industry mandates as well as have a better handle on mobile device policies and have them dynamically enabled. They also have better visibility into where data is stored and how, so issues related to compliance and auditing can be avoided.

Cloud services often rely on restful APIs to enable quick and easy integration. As such, for organisations that have adopted cloud solutions, this opens a wealth of opportunities to better leverage their business data and build more intelligent systems. If proper security guidelines are established from the beginning, then organic growth can happen quickly and seamlessly – with no need for heavy infrastructure investment.

Getting security right

As the cloud footprint expands, the risk and complexity of securing, managing and ensuring compliance for multiple environments increases. Businesses today face significant security challenges, such as protecting against data loss, threats to data privacy and breaches of confidentiality. All such threats are made more serious by the imminent arrival of GDPR, with the associated risk of public backlash from breaches and substantial fines for those companies failing to secure their data and ensure quick restore.

Many security threats (about 70%) originate from an insider. This means that companies need to implement dynamic management of be vigilant in applying policies for employee access to ensure they are secure and compliant with data protection legislation. They also need to ensure they have extended their disaster recovery solutions to cover all cloud objects and they can be implemented quickly in response to a threat.

One notable advantage of cloud is also the speed of recovery if users or groups are deleted. Such an occurrence can be a heavy risk in today’s environment where hackers attempt to gain access to privileged users accounts and infiltrate the environment that way. It is difficult to roll back if you don’t have a way to compare changes made at definitive times.  Being able to view changes between known good backups and live Azure AD, then quickly being able to restore only the unwanted changes can save you hours of investigation and the cost of downtime. Businesses can easily achieve all this through simple SaaS solutions. Again, the design of the cloud environment should encompass smart storage and back up plans for recreating the business environment no matter what happens to physical devices.

A cloudy future for some

Cloud computing already has an important place in business and it will go on to dominate the discussion. Fundamentally, if there is no cloud plan, then companies face falling behind competition and hindering their own growth. 

To stay competitive, companies will navigate to cloud-hosted productivity platforms, due to their cost saving and practical advantages in handling fast, dynamic work-loads. In addition, businesses will be putting a larger emphasis on simplified SaaS based cloud backup, and recovery and policy management solutions that are able to dynamically keep abreast of the business as it grows – meaning less lost hours in managing and fixing. Collecting and processing data to achieve better business and financial intelligence is what makes cloud computing far superior to traditional systems, and why organisations yet to make the leap must do so now.

In his general session at 20th Cloud Expo, Don Demcsak, a DevOps and Cloud Native Modernization Principal for Dell EMC, showed how to create the continuous delivery culture and eight accelerators for leading the change. Don Demcsak is a DevOps and Cloud Native Modernization Principal for Dell EMC based out of New Jersey. He is a former, long time, Microsoft Most Valuable Professional, specializing in building and architecting Application Delivery Pipelines for hybrid legacy, and cloud native applications.

read more

Rodrigo Coutinho is part of OutSystems’ founders’ team and currently the Head of Product Design. He provides a cross-functional role where he supports Product Management in defining the positioning and direction of the Agile Platform, while at the same time promoting model-based development and new techniques to deliver applications in the cloud.

read more

Dhiraj Sehgal works in Delphix’s product and solution organization. His focus has been DevOps, DataOps, private cloud and datacenters customers, technologies and products. He has wealth of experience in cloud focused and virtualized technologies ranging from compute, networking to storage. He has spoken at Cloud Expo for last 3 years now in New York and Santa Clara.

read more

Headquartered in Plainsboro, NJ, Synametrics Technologies has provided IT professionals and computer systems developers since 1997. Based on the success of their initial product offerings (WinSQL and DeltaCopy), the company continues to create and hone innovative products that help its customers get more from their computer applications, databases and infrastructure. To date, over one million users around the world have chosen Synametrics solutions to help power their accelerated business or personal computing needs.

read more

Alibaba claimed at Mobile World Congress that it was the fastest growing cloud provider in the world – and another step has been taken with the official opening of its Indonesian data centre.

The facility, in Jakarta, was first announced in June last year and represents the first data centre opened by a major cloud provider in the area. The data centre’s launch can be seen alongside Alibaba’s ‘ongoing commitment’ to support the Indonesian government in creating 1,000 startups by 2020.

“As the only global cloud services provider originating from Asia, we are uniquely positioned with cultural and contextual advantages to provide innovative data intelligence solutions and computing capabilities to customers across this region,” said Alex Li, Alibaba Cloud Asia Pacific general manager.

Indonesia can be seen as one of the weaker countries in the Asia Pacific region for cloud readiness. The nation ranked in 11th position out of 14 in the most recent index – from 2016 – from the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA), having risen one place compared with the previous report. The report at the time argued: “A coordinated plan to tackle the needs of the digital economy would aid Indonesia’s cloud readiness plans.

“Responsibility for coordinating across organisations when drafting regulations that converge across ministry silos – such as the new eCommerce framework, which spans the trade and ICT ministries, and also involves the private sector – should be clearly delineated to reduce business uncertainty.”

Further research from two years ago, this time by Barracuda Networks, found small to medium businesses in ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, were intrigued by the cloud’s capabilities but weren’t fully confident in them. 71% of businesses surveyed, from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore, said they would not be likely to adopt a cloud-first strategy.

Whether this situation has changed in Indonesia will be unveiled in due course, with the next ACCA report due out later this quarter. Alibaba however is seeing customers in the country get on board with its cloud, including online marketplace Tokopedia and IT services provider GTech Digital Asia.

You can find out more about the Indonesia data centre here.

Rene Millman

Organisations are moving to the cloud without evaluating the impact of a cloud outage, according to the latest study from data management provider Veritas.

The report, titled The Truth in Cloud and put together alongside Vanson Bourne, found that an ‘alarming majority’ of firms shift full responsibility for data protection, compliance and uptime on cloud service providers.

Three in five (59%) of the 1,200 global business and IT decision makers polled said dealing with cloud service interruptions was the primary responsibility of the cloud service provider, while 83% added their provider was responsible for ensuring workloads and data in the cloud are protected against outages.

It feels as though the point has been reached where every respondent will respond affirmatively when asked about their cloud initiatives – and this study saw it almost take effect, with 99% of IT decision makers saying their organisations will move systems to the cloud in the next 12 to 24 months. More than a quarter (27%) added they also expect to outsource all on-premises infrastructure to the public cloud.

With more organisations taking increasingly advanced cloud initiatives, the benefits of embracing multi-cloud can be outweighed by the issues of downtime and who is responsible for it, Veritas adds.

“Organisations are clearly lacking in understanding the anatomy of a cloud outage and that recovery is a joint responsibility between the cloud service provider and the business,” said Mike Palmer, Veritas executive vice president and chief product officer. “Immediate recovery from a cloud outage is absolutely within an organisation’s control and responsibility to perform if they take a proactive stance to application uptime in the cloud.

“Getting this right means less downtime, financial impact, loss of customers’ trust, and damage to brand reputation,” Palmer added.

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

Read more: It’s not you, it’s me: Understanding the shared responsibility of cloud security

Jane McCallion