Monthly Archives: May 2018

Uncategorized

How to pick a cloud your CIO will love: Three questions to ask

It will come as no surprise to those of you already leveraging cloud services that Forrester Research predicted that in 2018, cloud computing will become a must-have business technology. The scalability, agility and cost model allow IT teams to redirect their energy toward accelerating business initiatives without worrying about costly infrastructure investments.

As many have learned, however, it’s important when evaluating cloud providers to look closely at various elements of their services. Comparing quotes and services from different providers isn’t comparing apples to apples. Make sure you take into account the compatibility, accessibility, visibility, resiliency, security and support that is associated with the services from any provider – along with any indirect or intangible costs that may result from making the switch.

So, where do you begin? What questions do you ask as you evaluate cloud providers? After more than a decade spent helping customers migrate to the cloud for hosting, backup and disaster recovery use cases, here are some key questions we’ve identified:

What are the migration options to the cloud?

It is important to evaluate how you will migrate into a new environment with the least amount of reconfiguration and change possible. Account for details like the technologies you already have in place, your networking specifications and if you have any physical workloads to consider. To help make the migration as smooth as possible, ask yourself:

  • What do you move?
  • How will you get it there?
  • What technologies and tools does the provider use while assisting their customers during the transition?
  • Do they provide a managed migration service?
  • How can I identify and prioritise workloads for migration and will the provider help me with that process?

Does the cloud provider have options to support third-party networking capabilities?

As more and more organisations embrace the hybrid cloud, they look to leverage the networking options they utilise on-premises with their cloud services. This lessens the overhead of mixed technologies and skill sets and simplifies communication between systems. Ask the cloud provider what networking technologies are supported and who manages those systems. Are devices provisioned for you, or is self-service deployment the only option? Is it virtual or physical? Who manages the device once it’s installed, and will support help with connection issues? Connectivity is paramount to continuous business operations from your site to the cloud, and cloud networking can be complex. Choose a provider who can work with your existing environment to lessen the overall impact.

What about compliance and security in the cloud?

It is increasingly important to think about security and compliance when running both on-premises and cloud workloads. When implementing a hybrid cloud environment, make sure that you evaluate whether the cloud providers you are considering include built-in security and compliance tools that are available on the cloud platform itself. These tools need to be at least robust as, or even more robust, than what you currently have in your data centre. Be sure to ask about the visibility and alerting available within security and compliance settings and if the provider will assist with remediation actions as well as compliance requirements for any regulatory audits your cloud workloads will need to be governed by.

As data protection laws and regulations come into place, especially with the onset of Brexit and the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it’s important to verify that the cloud provider handles your data in accordance with data sovereignty and local data laws. You may be in a situation in which data cannot leave a certain country or geographic region. Make sure you understand how your cloud provider leverages their load balancing technology. You’ll want to know if this is regulated for you, and if the provider can guarantee data sovereignty and that it is not sent somewhere it shouldn’t be.

The journey to the cloud is all about removing the overhead of infrastructure and focusing IT resources on delivering value to the business. Choosing a cloud provider is one of the biggest IT challenges out there. The cloud provider needs to be able to meet your existing needs across capacity, services, support, security and compliance and be able to scale and grow for your future goals. Moving to the cloud is a major investment and choosing wisely the first time will avoid the pain of moving providers and the challenges that can bring.

Uncategorized

Ryanair goes all-in on AWS – with machine learning capability cited as key

The AWS Summit, in London, has seen a few pieces of news emerge – including a new customer and new functionality – with machine learning at the heart of it.

The cloud infrastructure behemoth announced Ryanair will be going all-in, with the Irish-headquartered airline set to close 'the vast majority' of its data centres in the coming three years. This includes moving from Microsoft's SQL Server to Aurora, Amazon's MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database engine.

Ryanair said machine learning, from gleaning greater data insights to improving the customer experience, was 'hugely important' to its growth. Amazon Lex, the technology underpinning Alexa announced as a general service at re:Invent in 2016, is being used by the airline on a trial basis.

"Because we have the most comprehensive set of cloud services, including our leading machine learning and deep learning services, Ryanair will be able to employ those services to drive greater customer and employee satisfaction," said Mike Clayville, AWS VP worldwide commercial sales in a statement. "We're excited to help them create first-class experiences on AWS as they continue to use our capabilities and services at an acclerated pace."

On the product side, AWS announced a new machine learning competency for consulting partners in the AWS Partner Network (APN). The move is an extension of the competency for APN technology partners announced at last year's re:Invent, and aims to match customers with the most qualified partners who have to have shown 'technical proficiency and proven customer success' with AWS machine learning tools. Launch partners include Accenture, Deloitte, and ECS.

Going back to Aurora, another release which may provide blessed relief to database admins is Backtrack, essentially a system restore – up to 72 hours, at least – for production databases if a fat finger incident occurs. The feature can be enabled at launch time for all newly-launched Aurora database clusters, with AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr proclaiming it to be 'as close as we can come, given present-day technology, to an 'undo' option for reality.'

Users can pause their application, select the appropriate cluster, click the backtrack option, choose the appropriate point in time, and go from there. "You then wait for the rewind to take place, unpause your application and proceed as if nothing has happened," wrote Barr. "When you initiate a backtrack, Aurora will pause the database, close any open connections, drop uncommitted writes, and wait for the backtrack to complete. Then it will resume normal operation and be able to accept requests."

AWS also added that Marketplace, its software supermarket, is being used by 1,400 ISVs and more than 170,000 enterprises respectively.

Uncategorized

Ryanair flies away from Microsoft and into AWS cloud


Rene Millman

11 May, 2018

Ryanair is to move almost all its infrastructure to AWS following a successful migration of some of its IT systems.

The budget airline plans to close the vast majority of its data centres over the next three years. It already runs several core production workloads on AWS, such as Ryanair Rooms and Ryanair.com, and is building a company-wide data lake on Amazon S3, using Amazon Kinesis to gain insights from customer and business data.

The airline is also ditching Microsoft SQL Server in favour of Amazon Aurora to run an email marketing campaigns in Europe in a bid to cut down costs in communicating with its 22 million European subscribers.

“We’ve chosen to work with the world’s leading cloud to develop and deliver services that will transform our customers’ travel experiences. By rebuilding core applications, converting data into actionable insights, and creating intelligent applications, we are putting the solutions in place to continue our leadership in the travel industry,” said Ryanair’s CTO, John Hurley.

It is also working with the AWS ML Solutions Lab to create an application that enables the company to automatically detect surges in demand for flight segments and anticipate schedule changes.

“Machine learning is hugely important to our growth, and we’re pursuing a variety of AWS machine learning services, including Amazon SageMaker, to enhance customer UI experience and personalise the myRyanair portal for every unique traveller,” said Hurley.

“We’re currently trialling Amazon Lex to enhance our customer support experience, by intelligently routing customer support requests to the right type of assistance – whether that be a customer support representative or an artificial intelligence-driven interaction.”

Mike Clayville, vice-president of worldwide commercial sales at AWS, said the airline’s plans to move to AWS are much like a lot of other enterprise looking to migrate as many of their existing applications as they can as quickly as possible.

“Because we have the most comprehensive set of cloud services, including our leading machine learning and deep learning services, Ryanair will be able to employ those services to drive greater customer and employee satisfaction. We’re excited to help them create first-class experiences on AWS as they continue to use our capabilities and services at an accelerated pace,” he said.

Uncategorized

Yegor Bugayenko Joins @CloudEXPO Faculty | @Yegor256 #Java #Cloud #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #DigitalTransformation

A traditional way of software development efforts reimbursing is pay by the hour, which in case of remote programmers means $20-50 per hour, depening on the territory and the complexity of tech stack. However, what is the real amount of work programmers are delivering for that money? How many features and bug fixes they are usually capable of closing in a single working hour? Those metrics are rarely being calculated. In the presentation I will demonstrate the numbers obtained from over 30 projects completely in the last four years, all remotely. The numbers will show that the real amount of money we spend on coding is much higher than we expect.

read more

Uncategorized

UK insurer Beazley adopts a digital transformation doctrine


Keumars Afifi-Sabet

11 May, 2018

Specialist insurers Beazley have been using Citrix products for a number of years, celebrating the culmination of a journey that has led them to be among the finalists at Citrix’s Innovation Awards this year.

The winner, WAGA, was crowned by CEO David Henshall during the keynote address in the Anaheim Convention Centre, California, this week – but simply featuring represents another big step in Beazley’s journey to streamline its business.

“At the moment we’re undertaking a huge activity-based working programme change,” said Dale Steggles, Beazley’s architect and leader of end-user technologies. “That’s changing the physical location, people, soft skills, as well as technology – trying to provide a huge mobility to the workforce globally.”

Citrix has underpinned a lot of that activity, according to Steggles, with the use of its products XenDesktop and XenApp, for instance, but also the likes of ShareFile and SecureMail.

Founded in 1986, Beazley grew out of its London offices to expand in the United States in 2005 – and has subsequently opened offices in Paris, Munich, and a host of other locations including the Middle East.

Speaking with Cloud Pro, Steggles was joined by Mark Moerdyk, Beazley’s head of IT infrastructure and engineering, who outlined how his team made several strong strategic decisions in the way they expanded.

“One of them was saying actually that we didn’t want to decentralise our infrastructure, and so we opted for Citrix to actually build out our US offices and enable our business across the US, while managing to consolidate our infrastructure into two data centres,” he explained.

On the day-to-day benefits the business has accrued, particularly in the recent history, Moerdyk added: “It’s the enablement of the business that’s been the most important element.

“We were actually reimagining and redesigning our physical office spaces to actually support the way people want to work, we take feedback from our users, and they’re consistently saying they don’t have the right environments to do their jobs, so we’ve actually embarked on a programme where we’re changing all of that.”

He noted an increased sense of mobility, driving gains in productive, includes hot-desking and remote working, leading to a “10 to 20% productivity gain just by enabling a different way of working”.

Steggles continued to outline how, technically-speaking, Beazley has managed to transform its infrastructure outlay that has laid the foundations for the firm’s greater mobility.

“We’ve been able to centralise 1,800 endpoints – that used to be 1,800 physical devices inside the perimeter – these are laptop and desktop devices, so we’ve changed that into where 80% of our users are hosting a shared desktop; managing one image, one workflow, one deployment mechanism – across four data centres globally.

“Previously, whether it’s product updates, whether it’s patching it’s patching, all that environment we had to touch on in end-points, now we just touch it once.

“Update a master image, and its done for 80% of your organisation. It’s then really helped us focus on business drive – around innovation rather than just keeping the lights on.”

The challenges, meanwhile, for Beazley, have historically risen in maintaining collaboration between different productivity apps and services, and reducing layers of complexity that have been created over years of developing IT infrastructure.

“Today we have four or five applications you’d need to deploy to a mobile device to be productive – reducing that down to one – that is a huge leap forward,” said Steggles, pinning his hopes on Citrix’s Workspace App materialising.

“One space, one environment; I’d go there to get any activities – the share, collaborate, connect with content, I think it’s a really good place to be.”

But the linchpin of Citrix’s role in Beazley’s outlay has been the way in which it gives smaller organisations access to an equivalence of the sort of expensive infrastructure that has only conventionally been available to larger enterprises.

“For us it’s about taking that challenge and working with our partners to drive efficiencies where we can and try push the business – whether for example it’s standing up an office in Barcelona over a VPN – over an internet connection – because the business wants to try to incubate it, wants to see whether its viable to put an office together in Barcelona with minimal investment.

“Previously, we’ve been unable to do that without the use of massive infrastructure outlay, now we just ship a device, give an access key to the user, and they login from anywhere in Barcelona.”

This is a point echoed by Citrix’s Sridhar Mullapudi, vice president of product management for Workspace services. Speaking to Cloud Pro, Mallapudi said one of the key benefits for businesses of its technology, for SMBs in particular, was on the infrastructure side.

“For SMBs what cloud usually does is it brings the economics and time to value enterprises used to have. So before, enterprises used to have a lot of budget, so they could actually implement these large IT projects and infrastructure investments which SMBs can’t do,” said Mallapudi. 

“With cloud-based solutions, like what you’ve seen today, Workspace, and things like that, it just makes it easier for SMBs to consume and get the same power that was probably historically reserved for enterprises but now is available through cloud.”

Uncategorized

Moneyball author Michael Lewis calls for better use of big data at Citrix Synergy 2018


Keumars Afifi-Sabet

11 May, 2018

Bestselling author and former Wall Street trader Michael Lewis called for data analytics to be much-better harnessed by large organisations and governments in a Q&A session at Citrix Synergy.

In an event marking the final day of Citrix’s annual Synergy conference, this year hosted in Anaheim, California, the author of Moneyball, and The Big Short, discussed how technology has affected the financial sector, how data has changed sport, and the role AI plays in human decision-making.

He cited data belonging to the US government, “the biggest company on the planet”, on how data analytics can be better-harnessed to not only gain insights, but develop smarter public policy.

“The federal government is a trove of enormous databases that people have only scratched the surface of,” he said, adding we are only starting to see this being better harnessed.

“The only reason we know about the opioid crisis is the national institute for health data on distribution of prescription drugs – which was made available to the public under the Obama administration in a way it was accessible.”

He told the audience “we wouldn’t even know” about the burgeoning opioid crisis affecting parts of the United States if not for analysts at Propublica, a nonprofit newsroom based in New York, taking and analysing this data.

Lewis also spoke about how technology had fundamentally changed the financial sector and how incentives to make short-term profits led to the financial crisis – issues at the heart of The Big Short and Flash Boys.

He explained how traders began to learn that their physical distance and location had an effect on how fast they were getting information about markets, and how high-frequency traders at BATS Global Market built faster networks to the other 12 exchanges scattered around New Jersey so they could detect big sell alerts and sell in front of rivals.

“What happened is, the stock market, instead of being about fundamental investment decisions, starts to become just about speed; how fast can you get from one exchange to the other, or how fast you can assemble a picture of the markets that is more accurate.

“If you can see prices before everybody else – it’s the ultimate form of insider trading.”

Lewis explained how traders began building faster networks to connect markets together, by trying to lay the straightest fibre-optic lines possible – a process that involved blowing up mountains, and hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, to gain only a few milliseconds of advantage, adding “there’s a kind of madness to it”.

“There’s a point where the speed – it’s not actually adding anything to the economic efficiency – it’s all about gaming the market; all about finding out what people are doing and and getting ahead, or assembling a picture of the market that’s a millisecond faster than the market itself,” he said. 

The other side of the equation, he noted, was about slowing down the New York Stock Exchange, or Nasdaq, as another way of widening the gap: “The incentives are to widen the gap of time between when an ordinary investor gets a piece of information, and when a high-frequency trader gets a piece of information.”

“This is a malign use of technology; I don’t think this adds anything to the wealth of the society. It does make a high percentage of high-frequency traders very rich.”

Uncategorized

HudsonAlpha’s Hybrid Cloud and DevOps | @CloudEXPO @Dana_Gardner #AI #HCI #DevOps #DigitalTransformation

The next BriefingsDirect hybrid IT management success story examines how the nonprofit research institute HudsonAlpha improves how it harnesses and leverages a spectrum of IT deployment environments. We’ll now learn how HudsonAlpha has been testing a new Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) solution, OneSphere, to gain a common and simplified management interface to rule them all. Here to help explore the benefits of improved levels of multi-cloud visibility and process automation is Katreena Mullican, Senior Architect and Cloud Whisperer at HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville, Alabama. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

read more

Uncategorized

Apple abandons Irish data centre amid planning delays


Clare Hopping

11 May, 2018

Apple has decided not to go ahead with the Irish data centre it wanted to start building in the western town of Athenry because it’s taking too long to obtain planning consent. 

The tech giant wanted to build its latest European data centre in the country because of its proximity to green energy sources – a responsibility it’s taking seriously. However, these plans have been hindered by the slow pace of planning authorities.

“Despite our best efforts, delays in the approval process have forced us to make other plans and we will not be able to move forward with the data centre,” Apple said in a statement. “While disappointing, this setback will not dampen our enthusiasm for future projects in Ireland as our business continues to grow.”

Ireland’s High Court approved the plans to build the data centre, but local residents raised strenuous objections which took the case to the Supreme Court. These repeated appeals have been the primary factor delaying the company’s plans to build a facility in the area.

“There is no disputing that Apple’s decision is very disappointing, particularly for Athenry and the West of Ireland,” Ireland’s Minister for Business and Enterprise Heather Humphreys said. “The Government did everything it could to support this investment… These delays have, if nothing else, underlined our need to make the State’s planning and legal processes more efficient.” 

Ireland’s government wants to make it easier for big businesses like Apple to build new data centres and tech infrastructure in the country as such deals bring in big bucks for the economy. Ireland now wants these structures to be viewed as “strategic infrastructure”, which means they should sail through the planning approvals process.

Apple will now put all of its energy into building a second data centre in Denmark after opening its first facility in the country late last year. The second data centre was announced in July and is due to begin operations in the second half of next year.

Uncategorized

Cloud migration best practices: Preparing for change

When the moment comes that you decide it’s time to move your business to the cloud: rejoice! As my favorite Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi once said, “You’ve just taken your first step into a larger world.”

Your deciding factor to make the move might have been any number of things:

  • Cost
  • Need for growth
  • Flexibility
  • Keeping up the competition
  • Security
  • Productivity

But adapting your business for success in the cloud isn’t the easiest nut to crack. Some might think of it the way they would about moving from an old house to a new one: cram everything into a box, make the move, unload in your new digs, and enjoy.

While that last part will likely come true once you’ve made a successful transition to hosting your business in the cloud computing environment, the pre-move decisions are the ones that can really make it a pleasant transition or an unmitigated disaster. Here are five strategies to employ to get your business ready for the big day when you go digital for good.

Do your homework

My father researches automobiles for a minimum of one year before buying a new one. He’ll read every safety report and review out there, start compiling a shortlist, compare prices throughout the year at various dealerships and ones in other cities and pick the brain of 50 different people before he even sets foot on a showroom floor. By the time he’s in the sales office, he’s the one telling them exactly how much money he’s willing to pay and what features he wants for that price.

You need that same level of commitment when you’re seeking out a new home for your business infrastructure, data and website. The really sobering thought here is that picking the wrong vendor here isn’t like making a bad choice on who to have supply your bottled water. If you mess up, it’ll take a whole lot of extra work to undo your mistakes and move on to the next provider.

Have a strategy

Yes, your plan is to move your business into a cloud computing environment, but this is no less complex a procedure than physically moving your office from one brick-and-mortar location to another. What is the most important thing you want to get out of moving to the cloud? You have to define that singularity to know how to go forward.

If you’re getting ready for an expansion, get your staff up and running on your new infrastructure as a service (IaaS) seems like the priority so the transition is seamless when your company grows. If you’ve run out of room to store data, get the next servers set up in the cloud first so you can automatically load new data there, then begin the migration process for everything else. Realize that this is not just a lateral move, but a chance to rapidly improve on your existing business model. That doesn’t just mean finally deleting your family vacation photos off the server, but giving you a real chance to enhance your company’s workflow by organizing everything to maximize productivity.

Changing IT providers

Breaking up is hard to do, and that is doubly true when the relationship you’re going to be ending is with your IT provider – assuming it’s not an in-house position. Unless you’re a tech junkie yourself, there’s something a little unnerving about telling the only men and women who know your company’s servers and networks inside and out that their services are no longer required. This is a particularly prickly subject if you have questions or need guidance about how to access certain parts of your network or are struggling to make the transition.

More likely than not, your new IT team in the cloud is going to only be available remotely to assist you, and while they are usually terrific professionals, you will be without your trusty IT sidekick for a while. A smart way around this dilemma is to be open and honest with your IT provider about what is transpiring. You’re paying them anyway, so consider making that final invoice include the IT provider giving you a complete map of everything on your server as well as remaining “on call” during your transition to help with any bottlenecks you may encounter along the way.

Legacy systems to cloud applications

How many of us have had a love/hate relationship with a particular software application? I once worked at a chemical news website that had a system for reporters to file their stories that must have dated back to the Stone Age. One French reporter had misspelled her own name about 20 times in the ‘Author’ listing, but every single instance came up when you tried to attach her byline to the web version of the article. This might be the most bitter pill for a lot of older companies and employees to accept: some of your comfortable long-term programs are not going to be able to make the move with you; particularly those that are systems of record, as the older ones rely greatly on physical documents. The government is to blame (aren’t they always?) for a lot of this. Legacy systems installed by the government never even had a web environment in mind, to say nothing of the cloud. The solution for a lot of companies is a hybrid cloud environment that combines the traditional aspects of a public cloud – IaaS, software as a service (SaaS) and desktop as a service (DaaS) – with aspects of a private cloud built specifically for your company.

Say you have oodles of data that can’t be converted to a new software but can be stored as image files. This could lead to a private cloud setup where the images files are stored until such time as they can be converted to the new cloud application. There are often lots of man-hours involved in a conversion like this, but the end result is the data secured and saved in perpetuity in a format that is easily accessible from anywhere on any device.

Have a little faith

Even those of us who have known the Internet our entire professional lives can get a bit antsy at the idea of pulling the plug on our databases, server rooms and so on in favor of trusting the all-encompassing cloud to be the new backbone of our organization. I think the primal fear exists for many of us that we’ll turn on the computer, log onto our spot in the cloud and be faced with a white screen; all of our information vanished forever.  

Thankfully, cloud computing doesn’t work that way. Apprehension is always a factor to overcome when dealing with new technology in the workplace, but when you’ve crossed that barrier, you’ll absolutely love the result. Being able to do your work faster with unlimited collaboration and the ability to log on to your company server from anywhere in the world is a remarkable benefit for your small leap of faith.

Uncategorized

Google announces agreement to acquire Velostrata


Bobby Hellard

10 May, 2018

Google revealed it has reached an agreement to acquire Israeli cloud migration startup Velostrata for an undisclosed fee.

Formed in 2014, Velostrata is a company that provides software solutions for businesses that want speedy cloud migration and workload mobility. It has 25 employees who will work alongside Google at its office in Tel Aviv.

Google Cloud’s vice president of engineering, Eyal Manor, expressed excitement at reaching an agreement with the startup, that is still subject to closing conditions, and adding further migration tools to its cloud services.

“This acquisition will add to our broad portfolio of migration tools to support enterprises in their journey to the cloud. That way, businesses can simplify their onboarding process to Google Cloud Platform, and easily migrate workloads to Google Compute Engine,” he said.

“We’re excited about the talented team that will be joining us in our Tel Aviv office, and the technical strength they bring to Google Cloud.”

Velostrata has a hybrid cloud solution that decouples storage from compute resources, leaving the storage in place on-premises while running a virtual machine in the cloud, allowing customers to easily and quickly migrate virtual machine-based workloads like databases and DevOps, to and from the cloud.

Velostrata founder Issy Ben-Shaul said the team were proud to join Google Cloud.

“Over the years, Google Cloud has made significant investments in building a robust cloud infrastructure that delivers industry-leading availability, reliability and security,” he said.

“Google Cloud continues to innovate with advanced compute and service platforms. We are proud to join forces and help pave the way for enterprise customers to transform their most demanding enterprise workloads on Google Cloud Platform.

“We are truly excited about the future ahead of us and looking forward to continuing the journey together as part of Google Cloud when the deal closes.”