German software giant SAP has announced the launch of its Digital Manufacturing Cloud, which will enable manufacturing providers to deploy Industry 4.0 technologies in the cloud.

The announcement was made at the 2018 Hannover Messe, the yearly technological jamboree for all things industrial. The product includes business system integration, meaning greater visibility for the shop floor, as well as predictive analytics and a cloud-based collaboration system connecting customers with manufacturing service providers.

The cloud offering ‘extends and complements the digital manufacturing portfolio of on-premise solutions from SAP’, in the company’s own words, and is aimed at manufacturers of all sizes.

“Manufacturers in the era of Industry 4.0 require solutions that are intelligent, networked and predictive,” said Bernd Leukert, SAP board member for products and innovation in a statement. “Our manufacturing cloud solutions help customers take advantage of the Industrial Internet of Things by connecting equipment, people and operations across the extended digital supply chain and tightly integrating manufacturing with business operations.”

As far back as 2012, scientific papers were published on the role cloud computing could play in the manufacturing industry. One, published in the February 2012 edition of Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing, asserted cloud could ‘transform the traditional manufacturing business model, help it to align product innovation with business strategy, and create intelligent factory networks that encourage effective collaboration.’

Writing for this publication in 2013, Louis Columbus explored software as a service (SaaS) adoption in the manufacturing sector. According to Cindy Jutras, founder of analyst firm MintJutras, manufacturing organisations showed confusion around the technology, with half not understanding the difference between single and multi-tenant SaaS architectures. By 2023, almost half (45%) of all manufacturing software was expected to become SaaS-based, up from 22% in 2013.

Last year, Columbus again wrote around how integrating ERP and CRM systems is set to change the shape of manufacturing, bringing it in line with many other industries. “Bringing contextual intelligence into manufacturing that centres on customers’ unique, fast-changing requirements is a must-have to keep growing sales profitably,” wrote Columbus. “By integrating ERP, CRM, SCM, pricing and legacy systems together, manufacturers can provide customers what they want most – accurate, fast responses to their questions and perfect orders delivered.”

Going back to the production line, SAP also announced SAP Connected Worker Safety, a product which offers project managers, as well as health and safety personnel, access to data collected by IoT devices in real time. The sensors will collect worker data, such as heart rate and body temperature, and can raise alarms based on incidents such as dehydration or fatigue.

You can find out more about the Digital Manufacturing Cloud here.

Picture credit: SAP

Clare Hopping

Amazon Web Services is the juggernaut in the cloud provider space, and with any piece of technology comes the need for proper security. In this regard, AWS is no exception. In this piece, we will shortly discuss the latest breaches of public S3 buckets, provide an overview of the two ways to protect data in these storage spaces, and discuss how the new Amazon Secrets Manager utility can assist in securing AWS cloud applications.

Recent breaches

There have been a couple of recent instances in which company S3 buckets have been read by nefarious actors. Verizon and Accenture both presumably accidentally left their S3 storage areas readable to the public. All of the breaches resulted in personal data getting into the hands of bad actors, and all of the breaches were a result of a simple misconfiguration that allowed access to things that should have been walled off.

One might argue that this sort of attack is because of the nature of the S3 service: a storage repository where any connected device can put and retrieve information, whether that is logs, files, reports, databases, or any other object. By virtue of having a service readable and writeable from anywhere in the world, this sort of thing is bound to happen, one might say. But that is not true: even the lowest functionality devices, such as sensors, can be configured to authenticate via a put request to an S3 bucket.

Put simply: this shouldn’t happen. There is no reason to have a world-readable and world-writeable S3 bucket. Preventing this type of lift of private data requires making sure one simple setting is configured as is the default when setting up a new Amazon S3 instance: on step 3 of the Create Bucket wizard, make sure that under the Manage public permissions setting, the “Do not grant public read access to this bucket (recommended)” section is checked. To be honest, it is beyond me why projects make it into production with this setting at anything but its secure default, but too many breaches—and it’s a stretch to call the breaches because accessing the data is essentially as simple as browsing to a public website—have shown that for whatever reason, companies are not being careful enough in their S3 configurations.

Two ways of protecting simple storage service (S3) buckets

Of course, you will likely want a finer grained access controls than just “don’t let the public in.” There are a couple of options for protecting S3 buckets that go beyond that one selection:

• You can set up IAM policy and roles, which means you set up multiple users within your Amazon account and assign them permissions. This means that no one without the specified credentials can enter the bucket. Amazon has more information on bucket policies here
• Server-side encryption allows you to securely store data at rest, as Amazon encrypts and decrypts data based on the type of encryption key that you select: you can provide your own key, allow Amazon S3 to generate your key, or allow the sophisticated AWS key management service to provide you with enterprise class key management and audit trails

Ultimately, the best practice here is to use both IAM with well-defined policy roles and SSE encryption with a user generated key.

Looking at the Amazon Secrets Manager

Diving a little further into AWS cloud security, the Amazon Secrets Manager is a tool that allows you to enhance the security of your AWS applications. By handling secure key rotation automatically, allowing simpler access to AWS identity and access management (IAM) policies, and storing and distributing keys securely, the Secrets Manager product offers an AWS-integrated way to follow industry best practices in securing cloud applications. Inside Secrets Manager, you can store API keys, passwords, database or other credentials, and other secrets, and then track how they are used and oversee their entire lifecycle within one utility.

The real benefit of Secrets Manager is that developers can call the Secrets Manager API for credential use instead of hard coding secrets inside of their application or scripts; many breaches have occurred when sensitive credentials have been discovered in plain text within the source code of applications, configuration files, or scripts.

Currently, Secrets Manager is available in the following AWS regions and is a pay-for service that is charged per secret and per 10,000 API calls: US East (N. Virginia); US East (Ohio); US West (N. California); US West (Oregon); Asia Pacific (Mumbai); Asia Pacific (Seoul); Asia Pacific (Singapore); Asia Pacific (Sydney); Asia Pacific (Tokyo); Canada (Central); EU (Frankfurt); EU (Ireland); EU (London); South America (São Paulo).

Netflix has always been considered the poster child of Amazon Web Services (AWS) deployment – but the streaming and entertainment giant is moving to Google Cloud for certain workloads, according to reports.

It is yet another sign of the multi-cloud world organisations work in today. According to a report from The Information (paywall), citing sources close to the company, Netflix is using Google’s cloud for several functions, from disaster recovery to artificial intelligence.

The report adds that ‘by working with other cloud providers, Netflix risks causing friction to its decade-long relationship with AWS… but it is a move Netflix eventually will have to make to meet the needs of its growing global subscriber base.’

In a statement, Netflix said: “There is no change in our comprehensive relationship with AWS. We’ve had a few disaster recovery workloads with Google for a while and we always experiment with new technologies. There’s nothing bigger here.”

Part of the reason why Netflix is so frequently cited as AWS’ most well-known customer is because the company itself is usually so open about its architecture. Just last week, the company announced it was open sourcing Titus, its container management platform, with another nod to Amazon. “Given that Netflix infrastructure leverages AWS so broadly, we decided to seamlessly integrate, and take advantage of as much functionality AWS had to offer,” the company wrote in an official blog post.

One aspect to consider, as the Information report does, is around Spinnaker, Netflix’s open source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform. Plenty of articles have hit the press this year around how Spinnaker is Netflix’s secret weapon – with Mirantis recently launching a continuous delivery service based on it. Yet Netflix worked with Google on Spinnaker – and the two companies came together earlier this month to launch Kayenta, an offering which provides automated canary analysis.

From Google’s perspective, the news represents another high-quality client win in a year which has been full of them. Last March, the wider industry was made aware of how three major companies, Colgate-Palmolive, eBay and Verizon, were on board, while last month saw disclosures that Spotify and Apple were customers. The former, in its initial IPO filing, said it was in the process of transitioning all data storage from its own servers to Google Cloud Platform. In an updated filing, Spotify confirmed it would be paying €365 million to Google over three years.

So should we expect more of the same? As deployments become more complex and it gradually becomes easier to move workloads between cloud providers, then the simple answer is yes. According to 451 Research, in its Cloud Transformation Vendor Window study last year, around half of organisations polled who were confirmed AWS or Azure houses used the other vendor in some capacity. Speaking to this publication at the time Melanie Posey, 451 research vice president, said organisations were not actively using both providers to support the same workload, but leveraging two, or more, providers to host and support efforts in different regions.

CloudTech has reached out to Netflix for comment and will update the story as it gets it.

Keumars Afifi-Sabet
Joe Curtis

• Cloud BI adoption is soaring in 2018, nearly doubling 2016 adoption levels.
• Over 90% of sales and marketing teams say that cloud BI is essential for getting their work done in 2018, leading all categories in the survey.
• 66% of organizations that consider themselves completely successful with business intelligence (BI) initiatives currently use the cloud.
• Financial Services (62%), technology (54%), and education (54%) have the highest Cloud BI adoption rates in 2018.
• 86% of Cloud BI adopters name Amazon AWS as their first choice, 82% name Microsoft Azure, 66% name Google Cloud, and 36% identify IBM Bluemix as their preferred provider of cloud BI services.

These and other many other fascinating insights are from Dresner Advisory Services 2018 Cloud Computing and Business Intelligence Market Study (client access reqd.) of the Wisdom of Crowds® series of research. The goal of the 7th annual edition of the study seeks to quantify end-user deployment trends and attitudes toward cloud computing and business intelligence (BI), defined as the technologies, tools, and solutions that employ one or more cloud deployment models. Dresner Advisory Services defines the scope of business intelligence (BI) tools and technologies to include query and reporting, OLAP (online analytical processing), data mining and advanced analytics, end-user tools for ad hoc query and analysis, and dashboards for performance monitoring. Please see page 10 of the study for the methodology. The study found the primary barriers to greater cloud BI adoption are enterprises’ concerns regarding data privacy and security.

Key takeaways from the study include the following:

Cloud BI’s importance continues to accelerate in 2018, with the majority of respondents considering it an important element of their broader analytics strategies

The study found that mean level of sentiment rose from 2.68 to 3.22 (above the level of “important”) between 2017 and 2018, indicating the increased importance of cloud BI over the last year. By region, Asia-Pacific respondents continue to be the strongest proponents of cloud computing regarding both adjusted mean (4.2 or “very important”) and levels of criticality. The following graphic illustrates cloud BI’s growing importance between 2012 and 2018.

Over 90% of sales and marketing teams say cloud BI apps are important to getting their work done in 2018, leading all respondent categories in the survey

The study found that cloud BI importance in 2018 is highest among sales/marketing and executive management respondents. One of the key factors driving this is the fact that both sales & marketing and executive management are increasingly relying on cloud-based front office applications and services that are integrated with and generate cloud-based data to track progress towards goals.

Cloud BI is most critical to financial services and insurance, technology, and retail and wholesale trade industries

The study recorded its highest-ever levels of cloud BI importance in 2018. Financial services has the highest weighted mean interest in cloud BI (3.8, which approaches “very important” status shown in the figure below). Technology organizations, where half of the respondents say cloud BI is “critical” or “very important,” are the next most interested. Close to 90% of retail/wholesale respondents say SaaS/cloud BI is at least “important” to them. As it has been over time, healthcare remains the industry least open to managed services for data and business intelligence.

Cloud BI adoption is soaring in 2018, nearly doubling 2016 adoption levels

The study finds that the percentage of respondents using cloud BI in 2018 nearly doubled from 25% of enterprise users in 2016. Year over year, current use rose from 31% to 49%. In the same time frame, the percentage of respondents with no plans to use cloud BI dropped by half, from 38% to 19%. This study has been completed for the last seven years, showing a steady progression of cloud BI awareness and adoption, with 2018 being the first one showing the most significant rise in adoption levels ever.

Sales and marketing leads all departments in current use and planning for cloud BI applications

Business Intelligence Competency Centers (BICC) are a close second, each with over 60% adoption rates for cloud BI today. Operations including manufacturing and supply chains and services are the next most likely to use cloud BI currently. Marketing and BICC lead current adoption and are contributing catalysts of cloud BI’s soaring growth between 2016 and 2018. Both of these departments often have time-constrained and revenue-driven goals where quantifying contributions to company growth and achievement are critical.

Financial services (62%), technology (54%), and education (54%) industries have the highest cloud BI adoption rates in 2018

The retail/wholesale industry has the fourth-highest level of Cloud BI adoption and the greatest number of companies who are currently evaluating Cloud BI today. The least likely current or future users are found in manufacturing and security-sensitive healthcare organizations, where 45% respondents report no plans for cloud-based BI/analytics.

Dashboards, advanced visualization, ad-hoc query, data integration, and self-service are the most-required cloud BI features in 2018

Sales and marketing need real-time feedback on key initiatives, programs, strategies, and progress towards goals. Dashboards and advanced visualization features’ dominance of feature requirements reflect this department’s ongoing need for real-time feedback on the progress of their teams towards goals. Reporting, data discovery, and end-user data blending (data preparation) make up the next tier of importance.

Manufacturers have the greatest interest in dashboards, ad-hoc query, production reporting, search interface, location intelligence, and ability to write to transactional applications

Education respondents report the greatest interest in advanced visualization along with data integration, data mining, end-user data blending, data catalog, and collaborative support for group-based analysis. Financial services respondents are highly interested in advanced visualization and lead all industries in self-service. Healthcare industry respondents lead interest only in in-memory support. Retail/wholesale and healthcare industry respondents are the least feature interested overall.

Interest in cloud application connections to Salesforce, NetSuite, and other cloud-based platforms has increased 12% this year

Getting end-to-end visibility across supply chains, manufacturing centers, and distribution channels requires cloud BI apps be integrated with cloud-based platforms and on-premises applications and data. Expect to see this accelerate in 2019 as cloud BI apps become more pervasive across marketing and sales and executive management, in addition to operations including supply chain management and manufacturing where real-time shop floor monitoring is growing rapidly.

Retail/wholesale, business services, education and financial services and insurance industries are most interested in Google Analytics connectors to obtain data for their cloud BI apps

Respondents from technology industries prioritize Salesforce integration and connectors above all others. Education respondents are most interested in MySQL and Google Drive integration and connectors. Manufacturers are most interested in connectors to Google AdWords, SurveyMonkey, and The healthcare industry respondents prioritize SAP cloud BI services and also interested in ServiceNow connectors.

Clare Hopping

“Akvelon is a software development company and we also provide consultancy services to folks who are looking to scale or accelerate their engineering roadmaps,” explained Jeremiah Mothersell, Marketing Manager at Akvelon, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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Without lifecycle traceability and visibility across the tool chain, stakeholders from Planning-to-Ops have limited insight and answers to who, what, when, why and how across the DevOps lifecycle. This impacts the ability to deliver high quality software at the needed velocity to drive positive business outcomes.
In his general session at @DevOpsSummit at 19th Cloud Expo, Eric Robertson, General Manager at CollabNet, will discuss how customers are able to achieve a level of transparency that enables everyone from Planning-to-Ops to make informed decisions based on business priority and leverage automation to accelerate identifying issues and fast fix to drive continuous feedback and KPI insight.

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DXWorldEXPO LLC announced today that ICC-USA, a computer systems integrator and server manufacturing company focused on developing products and product appliances, will exhibit at the 22nd International CloudEXPO | DXWorldEXPO.

DXWordEXPO New York 2018, colocated with CloudEXPO New York 2018 will be held November 11-13, 2018, in New York City.

ICC is a computer systems integrator and server manufacturing company focused on developing products and product appliances to meet a wide range of computational needs for many industries. Their solutions provide benefits across many environments, such as datacenter deployment, HPC, workstations, storage networks and standalone server installations. ICC has been in business for over 23 years and their phenomenal range of clients include multinational corporations, universities, and small businesses.

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