Compute in the cloud may be cheap but it isn't free. Most of today’s apps are delivered via secure HTTP. That means TLS or the increasingly frowned upon SSL. It means cryptography, which traditionally has been translated to mean performance problems.

Thanks to advances in technology, CPUs are now incredibly fast and many client (and server-side) hardware natively integrates what was once specialised cryptographic hardware. This means that, on a per-connection basis, speed is not as much of an issue on an individual basis for cryptography as it once was.

But that doesn't mean that cryptography still isn’t a source of performance and operational expense. 

Applications today are not comprised of a single endpoint. There are multiple intermediaries and proxies through which a message must travel before that "single endpoint" is ever encountered. They are security and access control, load balancing and routing endpoints. Each needs to inspect the message – in the clear – in order to execute its designated role in the complex dance that is the modern data path.

Here is where the argument that cryptographic isn't as expensive starts to fall apart. On its own, a single endpoint introduces very little delay. However, when repeated multiple times at every endpoint in the data path, those individual delays add up to something more noticeable and, particularly in the case of public cloud, operationally expensive.

Cryptography is naturally a computationally expensive process. That means it takes a lot more CPU cycles to encrypt or decrypt a message than it does to execute business logic. In the cloud, CPU cycles are analogous to money being spent. In general, it's an accepted cost because the point is to shift capital costs to operational expense.

But the costs start to add up if you are decrypting and encrypting a message several times. You are effectively paying for the same cryptographic process multiple times. What might be computed to cost only a penny when executed once suddenly costs five pennies when executed five times. Do the math for the hundreds of thousands of transactions over the course of a day (or an hour) and the resulting costs are staggering.

Also remember that each CPU cycle consumed by cryptographic processing is a CPU cycle not spent on business logic. This means scaling out sooner than you might want to, which incurs even more costs as each additional instance is launched to handle the load.

Suffice to say that "SSL everywhere" should not result in "decrypt everywhere" architectures in the cloud.

Decrypt once

To reduce the costs and maximise the efficacy of the CPUs you're paying for, it is worth the time to design your cloud-based architecture on a "decrypt once" principle. "Decrypt Once" means you should minimise the number of endpoints in the data path that must decrypt and re-encrypt messages in transit.

Naturally, this requires forethought and careful consideration of different application services you're using to secure and scale applications. If you aren't subject to regulations or requirements that demand end-to-end encryption, architect your data path such that messages are decrypted as early as possible to avoid additional cycles wasted on decryption later. If you are required to maintain end-to-end encryption, the combining of services whenever possible will net you the most efficient use of compute resources.

Combining the services – i.e. load balancing with web application firewall – on a single platform means reducing the number of times you need to decrypt messages in transit. It also has the added advantage of reducing the number of connections and time on the network, which translates into performance benefits for users and consumers. But the real savings are in CPU cycles that aren't spent on repeated decryption and re-encryption. 

It may seem a waste of time to consider the impact of encryption and decryption for an app that's lightly used today. The pennies certainly aren't covering the cost of the effort. But as apps grow and scale and live over time, those pennies are going to add up to amounts that are impactful. Like pennies, microseconds add up. By considering the impact of cryptography across the entire data path, you can net benefits in the long run for both users and the business.

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

The widespread success of cloud computing is driving the DevOps revolution in enterprise IT. Now as never before, development teams must communicate and collaborate in a dynamic, 24/7/365 environment. There is no time to wait for long development cycles that produce software that is obsolete at launch. DevOps may be disruptive, but it is essential.

DevOpsSUMMIT at CloudEXPO expands the DevOps community, enable a wide sharing of knowledge, and educate delegates and technology providers alike.

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has been focused on the long road of what it calls the ‘innovative enterprise’ and building up its cloud consultancy with the acquisitions of RedPixie and Cloud Technology Partners. Now, it is ready to put that knowledge to the test.

The company has announced the launch of HPE Right Mix Advisor, which is claimed to be an industry-first product recommending the ‘ideal hybrid cloud mix’ to organisations.

The product is based on more than one thousand hybrid cloud ‘engagements’, as well as automated discovery. One recent example saw nine million IP addresses across six data centres analysed, and alongside data from configuration management databases and external cloud vendor pricing models, to provide a roadmap for which workloads would fit private and public respectively.

Cloud Technology Partners, acquired in 2017 for its AWS expertise, and RedPixie a year later for Azure, both fall under HPE Pointnext, the company’s services and consultancy unit. Using this experience, HPE claims, an action plan for hybrid cloud can take only weeks as opposed to months. According to the company’s own work, migrating the right workloads can lead to up to a 40% reduction in cost of ownership.

“I like to tell customers there are a thousand things they could be doing – but they need to find the 10 most impactful things they should start on tomorrow morning,” said Erik Vogel, HPE Pointnext global vice president for hybrid cloud in a statement. “HPE Right Mix Advisor helps organisations get the insight and methodology that they need to drive innovation, deliver predictable optimised customer experiences and remain competitive.”

HPE’s interest in hybrid cloud has been well documented. The company’s Discover Madrid event in November was to unveil the next part of its ‘composable strategy’ – putting together on-premise hardware, software and cloud into a single server platform. In June, HPE announced that it was investing $4 billion into what it called the intelligent edge; technologies to deliver personalised user experiences and seamless interactions in real-time.

As Antonio Neri, HPE president and CEO explained at the time, it’s all about the data – and where you invest in it. “Companies that can distil intelligence from their data – whether in a smart hospital or an autonomous car – will be the ones to lead,” he said. “HPE has been at the forefront of developing technologies and services for the intelligent edge, and with this investment, we are accelerating our ability to drive this growing category for the future.”

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.

As you know, enterprise IT conversation over the past year have often centered upon the open-source Kubernetes container orchestration system. In fact, Kubernetes has emerged as the key technology — and even primary platform — of cloud migrations for a wide variety of organizations.

Kubernetes is critical to forward-looking enterprises that continue to push their IT infrastructures toward maximum functionality, scalability, and flexibility.

As they do so, IT professionals are also embracing the reality of Serverless architectures, which are critical to developing and operating real-time applications and services. Serverless is particularly important as enterprises of all sizes develop and deploy Internet of Things (IoT) initiatives.

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CloudEXPO has been the M&A capital for Cloud companies for more than a decade with memorable acquisition news stories which came out of CloudEXPO expo floor. DevOpsSUMMIT New York faculty member Greg Bledsoe shared his views on IBM’s Red Hat acquisition live from NASDAQ floor. Acquisition news was announced during CloudEXPO New York which took place November 12-13, 2019 in New York City.

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In today’s always-on world, customer expectations have changed. Competitive differentiation is delivered through rapid software innovations, the ability to respond to issues quickly and by releasing high-quality code with minimal interruptions. DevOps isn’t some far off goal; it’s methodologies and practices are a response to this demand. The demand to go faster. The demand for more uptime. The demand to innovate. In this keynote, we will cover the Nutanix Developer Stack. Built from the foundation of software-defined infrastructure, Nutanix has rapidly expanded into full application lifecycle management across any infrastructure or cloud .Join us as we delve into how the Nutanix Developer Stack makes it easy to build hybrid cloud applications by weaving DBaaS, micro segmentation, event driven lifecycle operations, and both financial and cloud governance together into a single unified stack.

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Clare Hopping

Hybrid cloud is becoming the go-to approach to cloud because it gives enterprises the best of both private and public cloud. They gain the security and reliability of private cloud for mission-critical data and applications, while also benefitting from the cost-efficiency and flexibility of public cloud. According to a 451 Research survey, 69% of enterprises will have multi-cloud/hybrid IT environments by 2019.

As enterprises reap the rewards of their migration, they are putting more of their operations into services like Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud and Amazon Web Services. In some organisations, the various business units might be using a different cloud for their service and managing multiple clouds may limit an enterprise’s agility, scalability and efficiency. Without a multi-cloud strategy, enterprises will find it harder to scale and deploy new services.

Having a multi-cloud strategy makes sense for both small and medium-sized enterprises and multinational enterprises across industry. The benefits come from building greater resilience, power of choice and flexibility when managing workloads.  However, the main challenge is to efficiently connect these environments on a global scale. Connecting directly to each cloud service provider (CSP) and data centre location globally is costly, making it increasingly difficult to manage as more data and services are moved into a multi-cloud environment.

Managing connectivity to multiple CSPs requires skills, human capital and time. Each vendor has different processes and platforms which can place more strain on an enterprise’s internal operations. Furthermore, the IT team will need to have the technical know-hows on each cloud to effectively run a multi-cloud Environment. Deploying and scaling new services quickly can be a challenge if each cloud is managed and connected by a different network provider.

The cost management of multi-cloud can also put additional stress on an enterprise with each CSP having its own billing system, pricing model and payment options. It can become difficult to navigate and monitor costs in the long term. Without an effective model to monitor each environment, cost can easily become out of control and unmanageable.

A wide multi-cloud environment may offer more choices in managing workloads, but it also opens enterprises up to wider range of security breaches, cyber-attacks and vulnerabilities. Implementing security protocols and procedures is another time-consuming task that may require the enterprises’ IT team to upskill.

For enterprises today, the benefit of having a multi-cloud strategy is obvious but a major change is needed across the business operations. These stumbling blocks not only limit the full potential of cloud, but also adds complexity to an enterprise’s network. Enterprises must find a way to integrate and connect the various clouds into a single environment. This will free the enterprise from complexities as they add and deploy new capabilities in the cloud.

Software-defined networking (SDN) can solve many connectivity challenges today including cloud connectivity. It gives them a way to simplify management of their cloud connectivity whilst optimising network costs and accelerating their cloud adoption. Through a single platform, they could easily connect multiple cloud environments and interconnect data centre locations globally as they grow their business and reach new customers.

Instead of putting spends towards upskilling workers or hiring new IT roles, enterprises can train existing staff to use an SDN platform to provision connectivity to the various cloud environments. It enables them to connect to multiple public CSPs as well as destinations globally using a simple interface. This will free up more time and resources to innovate new services and put more investments towards other aspects of the business.

While SDN may not be the answer to all problems, it gives enterprises the capabilities to bridge the gap in connecting the clouds with greater scalability, visibility and security. For enterprises, the success of a multi-cloud strategy can be defined by an automated process where private connectivity can be established on multiple clouds and scaled across regions at minimal cost and complexity. The programmability of SDN enables this possibility and is able to provide visibility in managing the clouds. Ultimately, the underlying infrastructure has to be a robust and truly global network to support the SDN platform.

It is possible for enterprises to gain full control over their multi-cloud environment and use a network infrastructure that best suit their business objectives. They do not have to worry about the costs and complexities associated with scaling the network for connectivity to the cloud. This simplifies their access to multiple CSPs and allows them to adjust and adapt their cloud environment to their needs as they change over time.

With the right SDN platform, enterprises can maximise the potential of multi-cloud and accelerate their growth with new applications and services.

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.

James Morris

If you can make the leap to a cloud-centric usage model, G Suite provides seamless real-time document collaboration.

Google has been a “disruptive” company on many levels since its inception. Gmail changed the way we used email by providing an inbox size that kept growing ahead of user needs. When the company began also offering competent office software via the browser, for free, it seemed like Microsoft Office had a real challenge on its hands.

Now, around a fifth of businesses use G Suite, which is less than a third of those that use Office 365. But this is still a significant figure, making G Suite the second most popular office suite, and the obvious one to consider instead of Microsoft’s. So to accompany our review of Microsoft Office 365, here we look at what G Suite has to offer in comparison.

Google G Suite review: Options

Everyone with a Google account can access Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive (including 15GB of free storage), and numerous other Web-based Google applications. But if you want more cloud storage and a professional email address that doesn’t end in gmail.com, then you will need one of the paid subscriptions, of which there are currently three. Unlike Microsoft’s subscriptions, these are true monthly prices that you don’t have to pay for annually upfront, and the number of users you can have on any of them is unlimited.

The Basic subscription costs £3.30 per user per month and increases the online storage to 30GB across mail and files. It also gives your company control over employee accounts, which you won’t have if they all use their own Gmail accounts. This means you can change their passwords when they leave, and take away access to their Google Drive storage at the same time. You can also restrict collaboration access to within your organisation, and create group email addresses, as well as have multiple email versions that end up in the same mailbox.

The Business edition of G Suite costs twice as much at £6.60 per user per month, but has significantly upgraded features. For fewer than five users, each one gets 1TB of cloud storage, but for five or more users the capacity is unlimited, which is a distinct advantage over Microsoft’s alternatives. There is also an easy environment for creating Web apps for your organisation, and much more sophisticated search, security and e-discovery features compared to the Basic version. Above this, there’s the Enterprise edition for £20 per user per month, which further enhances security management features and e-discovery.

However, it’s worth noting that in April 2019, Google plans to increase the prices of the Basic and Business accounts by $1 and $2 respectively, although the company hadn’t announced what this will translate to in the UK at the time of writing. There are also separate versions of G Suite for Education or Government clients.

Google G Suite review: Office Applications

One very clear distinction between G Suite and Microsoft Office 365 is that there are no installable desktop versions of the G Suite applications. However, a G Suite administrator can enable offline file and app access for their users within the Chrome browser. Similarly, Chromebooks already work in this way, so you can load locally stored documents into Docs, Sheets and Slides within the Web browser, whether or not you have a working Internet connection. Your edits will then synchronise back out to cloud storage when connectivity is available again.

For general document creation and editing, Google’s offering is very serviceable, and there are clear advantages from the native online nature of G Suite. The various applications also have the ability to import and save back to Office file formats, amongst others – although not always faultlessly, with the formatting compatibility of the Slides to PowerPoint translation being particularly suspect in some cases. In the last year or so, G Suite’s version control facilities were enhanced so that different versions can have different names. This also enabled the ability to suggest changes from the smartphone versions.

Gmail is the granddaddy of G Suite applications, and its biggest strength is its Google-powered search, which is as fast and capable as you would expect. A lot of extra features can be added with third-party augmentations. However, by default you can’t sort email or group it, which may lead users to turn to a standalone email client such as Thunderbird or (perish the thought) Microsoft Outlook, particularly if they need to access email offline.

The Google Docs word processor is perfectly capable at the core functions of document creation and formatting, but lacks special capabilities such as Word’s SmartArt insertion. Some people might prefer the cleaner, simpler interface compared to Word, although this is in large part thanks to having fewer features. There are also more subtle deficiencies that put it behind Microsoft Word. For example, whilst you can easily call up a word and character count, the rolling count in Word’s bottom left corner is more streamlined as it doesn’t require a menu click.

However, you can extend the capabilities of all the Google Apps via Add-ons, many of which are free. For example, Docs doesn’t come with a table of contents facility as standard, but you can add one via an Add-on. There are numerous free Add-ons for bibliographies and citations, which again aren’t included as standard. The sophisticated mail merge capabilities of Word don’t seem to be replicated, however, although there are Add-on options that will mail merge with an address database held in Sheets.

Whilst word processors reached the point years ago where few people cared which one they were using for basic writing, Google Sheets poses a viable challenge to Excel. It includes capable PivotTable features and lots of functions that parallel those in the Microsoft competitor, although not always with the same name, which will be a bit confusing if you’re already an Excel function whizz. The extremely useful VLOOKUP works in a very similar way, however. You can create a similar range of charts, including some of the recent Office additions like waterfall visualisations.

Sheets gains extra power thanks to being hosted online. You can connect other applications to a Google Sheet and draw data from it via an API to use elsewhere. Equally powerful is the ability to set up a Google Form that feeds straight into a Sheet, so you can get users to enter data and have it automatically appear in a handy spreadsheet format. This can allow Sheets to form the hub of a database-driven survey app that outputs dynamically to a web page, for example.

Google Slides is perhaps the weakest of the G Suite apps. It has all the basic needs and again has some benefits from its online nature with the ability to search YouTube directly and insert videos into your presentation. However, the theme and animation options are considerably more pedestrian than PowerPoint’s and Apple Keynote’s. However, it is now possible for third parties to add custom templates, which improve the design capabilities.

Google G Suite review: Cloud Services and Smartphone Apps

Google was obviously a search company to start with, and the enterprise iterations of G Suite include a Custom Search that places an Explore button at the bottom of application interfaces that provides useful tips but also searches across related documents in your Drive and the Web, allowing you to drag elements into the document you are working on.

There are site-building tools such as My Business that allow you to quickly create a web presence for your company. The Google App Maker, available with Business and Enterprise Editions, takes this further, letting you develop software to automate business processes. Again, Add-ons and extra apps integrate with the main software to provide extra functionality. For example, you can plug in Apogee Leave Management to stitch this conveniently into the Calendar, so any leave booked shows up automatically.

Google’s mobile apps provide easy options for working on documents offline and on the move. You will have to tag the files you want to work on offline, so they can be downloaded and stored locally, but after that you can work on them with your smartphone or tablet when there’s no Internet connection. The changes will be synchronised back to the cloud next time you have a connection. Like Microsoft’s smartphone apps, the features are reduced over the Web-based apps.

Google G Suite review: Verdict

The choice of Google G Suite really depends on how your organisation can work with the need to be online most of the time, and also how much you will need authentic Office-format documents. Switching to a model focused around the cloud is a big cultural change, which could be uncomfortable if your staff tends to work away from reliable network connections.

For some businesses, however, the online aspect has a bonus — your software is entirely managed, and your technical support needs thereby dramatically reduced. You can get a similar experience with the Business Essentials version of Office 365, which only provides the Web-based software, not desktop. With G Suite, however, all your users need is a working computer running any operating system with an Internet connection and a browser, (which can even be Internet Explorer 6) so there’s no software to install. This has made G Suite particularly attractive for education, where the low cost of entry of Chromebooks is an added bonus.

The live collaboration aspects of G Suite are mature and seamless, too. It’s very easy to set up a document and have umpteen users work on it together, with their changes reflected in real time as they work. This is something that won’t be anywhere near as easy to accomplish with the desktop editions of Microsoft Office applications, despite the recent cloud editing enhancements. However, not all companies need or want to work this way, and the majority are likely used to operating in a more standalone fashion, as they will have done for decades.

In summary, whilst Microsoft Office applications are unquestionably more powerful and fully featured than their G Suite equivalents, the Google alternative has the edge when it comes to uncomplicated cloud-based collaboration. So it’s really a matter of “horses for courses” as to which is best for your company. More traditional businesses pumping out Office-format documents regularly will want to stick with the Microsoft choice. But if your employees regularly work together on documents, and particularly if you have a lot of remote workers, G Suite makes this simple to achieve.