As more and more companies embrace the Cloud, many are restricted by pre-cloud policies and requirements; especially when dealing with sensitive data such as PCI, PHI, SPI/PII etc. This makes it hard or not cost effective to enable the migration to the Cloud. With the challenges of a dynamic competition, many are forced to adapt to the Cloud and end up spending excessive operational dollars or compromising on critical components and limiting their effectiveness in leveraging native Cloud services. In this talk we will walk through some of the patterns to consider when moving to the Cloud specifically from a compliance and regulatory requirements perspective.

read more

Every organization is facing their own Digital Transformation as they attempt to stay ahead of the competition, or worse, just keep up. Each new opportunity, whether embracing machine learning, IoT, or a cloud migration, seems to bring new development, deployment, and management models. The results are more diverse and federated computing models than any time in our history.

read more

Today’s workforce is trading their cubicles and corporate desktops in favor of an any-location, any-device work style. And as digital natives make up more and more of the modern workforce, the appetite for user-friendly, cloud-based services grows. The center of work is shifting to the user and to the cloud. But managing a proliferation of SaaS, web, and mobile apps running on any number of clouds and devices is unwieldy and increases security risks. PJ Hough, Citrix Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer, discusses improving personal productivity with an evolved approach supporting modern workstyles and simplifying IT complexities to deliver the right experience to the right user at the right time, on any device.

read more

ShieldX’s CEO and Founder, Ratinder Ahuja, believes that traditional security solutions are not designed to be effective in the cloud. The role of Data Loss Prevention must evolve in order to combat the challenges of changing infrastructure associated with modernized cloud environments. Ratinder will call out the notion that security processes and controls must be equally dynamic and able to adapt for the cloud. Utilizing four key factors of automation, enterprises can remediate issues and improve their security posture by maximizing their investments in legacy DLP solutions. The factors include new infrastructures opening up, public cloud, fast services and appliance models to fit in the new world of cloud security.

read more

Is your enterprise growing the right skills to fight the digital transformation (DX) battles? With 69% of enterprises describing the DX skill drought as being soft skills, rather than technology skills, are you ready to survive against disrupters?

The next wave of business disruption is already crashing on your enterprise as AI, Blockchain and IoT change the nature and location of business. Now is the time to prepare. Drawing on experiences with large and midsize enterprises, Marco Coulter tabulates the skills needed to survive DX while innovating at scale. He will start with a focus on the ‘lingua franca’ or common language between business and technology needed for today’s digitally savvy or agile enterprise.

read more

Transitioning to the cloud is not so much taking a fresh plot of land and building up from there, but more trying to renovate an existing property. For larger organisations with sprawling IT outfits, it can be particularly complicated even once the bulk of the work has been done, with on-premise systems here, public cloud workloads there, and private cloud in between.

What’s more, organisations are realising that one size may not fit all just for cloud, but for public cloud. Take Netflix as a key example. Industry media tried to storm up a brouhaha last year when it was reported the streaming company, famously an Amazon Web Services (AWS) house, was using Google Cloud for certain workloads. Yet Netflix told this publication at the time there was ‘no change’ in its relationship with AWS and that it had been using Google for ‘a while’.

Rather than any great revelation, the Netflix story simply emphasised the IT needs of fast-paced organisations today. But as cloud complexity gets more important, so does the need to secure and monitor it.

Cloud management platforms (CMPs) are therefore becoming a very hot property in the industry. Like any technology subset, it can take time before industry validation. Gartner, which defines a CMP simply as ‘integrated products that provide for the management of public, private and hybrid cloud environments’, recently released its first Magic Quadrant in the area.

“What it’s telling IT organisations is that cloud management platforms have come of age, and here are the key players in that space,” explains Dan Murphy, CMO of Embotics, which is placed as a leader in the Quadrant. “For Embotics, and in particular our vCommander solution and cloud management in general, it means we are now essential technology, something that every large IT organisation needs – especially those that are adopting hybrid IT.”

It may be prudent here to explore just what an entangled enterprise IT stack looks like. Their infrastructure is likely to be a mix of on-premise and cloud. They may have had the vision of a connected Internet of Things (IoT) setup a decade ago – but back then it was all managed in the data centre, before moving to virtualised environments until the toes were dipped into the cloud.

Cloud management platforms are now essential technology, something that every large IT organisation needs – especially those that are adopting hybrid IT

In other words, it’s a mess – and a good CMP is able to manage everything along simultaneously while still providing value added services to end users. “Enterprises have set objectives to embrace public cloud services and lower costs. The IT department’s role is changing in this model to provide governance and enablement across hybrid IT,” said Murphy. “Many organisations believe public cloud is strategic, but they’ve also got a legacy infrastructure of on-premise applications to manage.”

As a result, CMPs have to be equipped with a variety of features, from provisioning and orchestration, to cost management, to cloud migration and backup. Murphy says many IT organisations end up serving as a ‘broker’. “Using an analogy of leasing a company car, instead of saying an employee can select any car, we’re saying ‘go to this dealer, and you can choose any car under this budget and with this safety rating,’” he explains. “That’s what we see an evolving role to be – ‘these are resources that have been curated by IT, and the organisation in general and here’s what you can choose from’, versus giving people the keys to the castle or in this case unrestricted and ungoverned access to the public cloud.”

This mentality has ensured that the conversation is changing not just between lines of business and IT, but within IT itself. From having dedicated security, networking and VMware experts, IT has become more of an enabling group which aims to give as frictionless access as possible to the technology – bearing in mind employees simply want the tools to do their job properly – but to also provide governance. This is again where CMPs can come into play; being tools which can help IT in this new, fleshed-out role.

Ultimately, the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Management Platforms gives an optimistic view of the landscape and where these companies sit. Yet there is naturally also a word of caution. Increasingly, it feels as though that AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google hold all the aces, and wherever they go, others follow. Murphy argues that in these areas – keeping up with R&D, and exploring concepts such as serverless computing – some vendors will fall away. “Embotics has always been at the forefront of innovation and we are committed to providing a management platform that enhances hybrid IT operations now and as new technologies emerge,” he adds.

Editor’s note: This article is in association with Embotics.

The collaboration software market continues to go up, with cloud-based collaboration growing more quickly and ‘strong’ growth expected for at least the next five years.

That’s the verdict of analyst firm Synergy Research in its latest note which argues cloud collaboration continues to ‘drive and disrupt’ the $45 billion-rated overall collaboration market.

Total worldwide third quarter revenues from collaboration, including on-premise, hosted and cloud-based solutions, hit almost $11 billion, with Synergy expecting Q4’s total to be ‘substantially higher.’

The research focused on the unified comms (UC) market – an area which only accounts for one tenth of the overall collaboration space but one with continued clear potential for growth. Of the different buckets which comprise UC, teamwork applications are considered by far the quickest growing. Synergy noted Slack as a ‘particularly noteworthy’ company as it more than doubled in size year on year.

This can be compared with Synergy’s figures released at the start of the year which priced the total cloud market at $250 billion, with 32% annual growth. Unified comms as a service (UCaaS) saw a 20% uptick, with RingCentral, Mitel, and 8×8 cited as key vendors. Perhaps surprisingly given its saturation, IaaS and PaaS continued to be the strongest growing area at 50%. Previous years saw its growth at more than 100%, but given the size of the market and the ‘law of large numbers’, as Synergy put it, this was not seen as a major surprise.

“Collaboration continues to be a somewhat fragmented market with many disruptive and high-growth companies targeting specific technology areas. That being said, the overall trend is quite clear in that traditional on-premise sales are shrinking and being replaced by cloud-based communication services,” said Jeremy Duke, founder and chief analyst at Synergy.

“There is now wide adoption of these new emerging cloud services and our forecasts show that they will continue to grow strongly over the next five years,” added Duke.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Clare Hopping

Clare Hopping

Clare Hopping