Bobby Hellard

At this year’s Microsoft Ignite conference, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella placed the focus on consistent developer experiences in multi- and hybrid-cloud, alongside the announcements of new initiatives for “cloud-delivered quantum computing.” Nadella, in his keynote speech in Orlando, also emphasized the role of a consistent and reliable management platform across various cloud environments – including AWS and Google Cloud.

For instance, Azure Arc, which was introduced on the first day of Ignite, is “a control panel built for multi-cloud, multi-edge, and for the first time managed data services for where the edge compute is,” stated Nadella.

Before the premier Microsoft Ignite event for IT decision-makers, Microsoft had provided journalists an 87-page document that listed all news items to expect from the conference. But here are the top five announcements you should know about:

Azure Arc – manage resources anywhere

The Azure Arc control panel will let organizations leverage Azure to manage their resources across AWS and Google Cloud. The panel will also work for Linux and Windows Servers, and Kubernetes clusters as well. Furthermore, it will allow users to take limited Azure data services to these platforms. Previously, Azure Stack only worked on a limited set of hardware. Though Arc doesn’t have all Azure services, it will be a single platform for enterprises to manage their resources across a multi-cloud environment and their data centers. Owing to the complexities in hybrid environments, the control panel can be a single tool to keep enterprises in the Azure ecosystem.

Endpoint Manager – modernise device management

Per the keynote speech, Microsoft is set to combine ConfigMgr with Intune services that will allow organizations to manage laptops, PCs, tablets, and phones they issue to their employees, all under the Endpoint Manager. It’s also introducing a plethora of tools as well as recommendations to help companies modernize deployment strategies. Also, ConfigMgr users can now get a license to Intune, which will allow them to move to cloud-based management. Because security remains a significant concern in the BYOD world, managing all devices becomes a massive challenge for the IT department. With the latest offering, you can do away with multiple tools and get a single view of deployments.

Power Virtual Agents – the no-code bot builder

One of the most interesting announcements made at Microsoft Ignite has to be the introduction of Power Virtual Agents – the new ‘no-code/low-code’ tool for building chatbots. The tool uses Azure’s machine learning smarts to let users create chatbots by leveraging a visual interface. It will also allow users to integrate actual code. With the visual, anyone can build a chatbot and the creators will gain a better understanding of the user requirements than a developer who aren’t involved with business groups.

Azure Synapse – limitless analytics

Touted as the “limitless” analytics service, Microsoft introduced Azure Synapse Analytics, which is a combination of big-data analytics and data warehousing. The company said, “The service can use either serverless or provisioned resources to provide a unified experience to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for immediate BI and machine learning applications.” However, users can run existing data warehousing workloads with Azure Synapse. Microsoft said that it would be similar to integrating Apache Spark with SQL.

Microsoft 365 – Project Cortex

Microsoft 365 platform is also getting new additions this year. The company introduced Project Cortex, which is a new service in Microsoft 365 that leverages AI to classify all of an enterprise’s content into topics. The latest addition is set to create a network of knowledge that “improves individual productivity and organizational intelligence, helping identify experts on specific topics, and surfacing knowledge through interactive experiences across Microsoft 365.” The new service comes after Microsoft Teams and is now in private view. It is expected to be available in 2020.

Read more: With Azure Arc, Microsoft aims to go beyond traditional hybrid cloud – with Anthos and Outposts for company

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.

Another day, another example of misunderstanding shared responsibility when it comes to cloud security. Or is it?

A new report from identity and access management (IAM) provider Centrify has argued that while many organisations understand the basics of shared responsibility, the increasing complexity of workloads means that confusion occurs when it comes to privileged access.

The study, titled ‘Reducing Risk in Cloud Migrations: Controlling Privileged Access to Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Environments’, polled more than 700 respondents across the UK, US, and Canada. Three in five (60%) respondents said security was the leading challenge when it came to cloud migration generally, while more than half (51%) affirmed they were taking different approaches to securing cloud workloads compared with on-premises.

Yet the responses begin to unravel after this. 60% of those polled said they believed cloud providers were responsible for securing privileged access. This goes to show that while some data may be more privileged than others, it all falls under the same bucket.

Cloud providers, as they frequently note, are responsible for the security of the cloud – infrastructure and uptimes et al – while the onus is on the user for security in the cloud; applications and data. While not being able to cut the cord completely, vendors have gradually taken more proactive steps; none more so than Amazon Web Services, who this time last year launched a new offering to help mitigate against open bucket misunderstandings – which are frequently an open goal for criminals.

For Centrify, the company’s focus on privileged access management (PAM) can be seen in other survey responses. More than two thirds (68%) of those polled said they were not implementing PAM best practices for cloud environments, while more than three quarters (76%) said they use more than one identity directory for their cloud strategy, putting them at risk of ‘identity sprawl’ attacks.

Organisations predominantly saw applying privileged access controls as a way to secure access to cloud service management – cited by 71% – while secure access to cloud workloads and containers was cited by more than half (53%). The report notes how that the more specific the privilege is, the interest diminishes in securing it.

In terms of best practices companies utilise, unsurprisingly the most popular was multi-factor authentication across all privileged access accounts – albeit only cited by 60% of those polled. The remaining factors were used by less than half of respondents, from operating a ‘least privileged access’ model (43%), to privileged session monitoring (38%). It must be noted that many of these questions come down to how many clients have an ‘all-in-one’ security offering, compared with a more bits-and-pieces strategy.

Centrify argues there are five key actions organisations should take; understanding privileged access to cloud environments was the company’s responsibility; reducing risk associated with identity sprawl; enforce a least privilege model; employ a common security model; and modernise your security approach, focusing on cloud-native PAM.

“We know that 80% of data breaches involved privileged access abuse, so it’s critical that organisations understand what they are responsible for when it comes to cloud security, and take a least privilege approach to controlling privileged access to cloud environments,” said Centrify CEO Tim Steinkopf. “Too much access and privilege puts their workloads and data at risk.”

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

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.

Bobby Hellard

Dale Walker

The initial commercial interest in cryptocurrency IT infrastructure was the potential to enable an alternative to government-backed fiat currencies. However, now most of the forward-looking focus is on blockchain, the distributed ledger technology that underpins the new applications.

Although deployments are still very much in the realm of the early adopter, blockchain has proven advantages across several vertical industries: it is safe, decentralised, transparent and can reduce intermediary costs.

Blockchain use case market development

While many CIOs and CTOs believe that blockchain likely has a way to go before becoming a mainstream technology within their sector, five compelling use cases across asset tracking, financial services and digital identity are already in production.

They offer valuable business process improvements to the pioneering organisation that has already deployed a blockchain — whether in terms of increased efficiency, reduced fees and fraud, or full transparency across the whole network.

According to the latest worldwide market study by Juniper Research, the total value of B2B cross-border payments immutably stored on a blockchain will exceed $4.4 trillion by 2024 — that's up from $171 billion in 2019.

Blockchain enables real-time clearing and settlement for B2B transactions, while offering increased transparency and reduced costs. These practical applications can deliver significant other benefits.

The new research revealed that financial institutions will save $7 billion by 2024, due to the automation of ‘Know Your Customer’ checks, allied to the involvement of blockchain in identifying users via self-sovereign identity.

Juniper Research assessed 15 leading blockchain vendors, scoring them on experience in the sector, marketing efforts and customer deployments along with their blockchain solutions. Juniper identified the 5 leading vendors as follows: IBM, Infosys Finacle, Guardtime, R3 and Ripple.

The analyst research scored IBM highly for its diverse blockchain solutions in production, with a strong client base for many vertical industries. Additionally, Infosys Finacle has established itself as a leading blockchain provider for financial institutions, with global partners and popular solutions.

"The implementation of blockchain is part of a wider strategy for financial institutions to digitally transform operations," said Dr Morgane Kimmich, research analyst at Juniper Research. "Blockchain will enable stakeholders to reduce operational costs in a competitive market that is becoming increasingly commoditised."

The research found that Ripple, Visa and IBM are driving blockchain innovation in cross-border payments. Ripple has led the market since 2012, capitalising on its early mover advantage to grow to over 200 financial institution partners in 2019.

Outlook for blockchain applications innovation

However, Ripple is facing increased competition from Visa B2B Connect and IBM Blockchain World Wire, which have already grown their presence in 60 countries and have high-profile partners in the financial services ecosystem.

Moreover, the Juniper analyst anticipates that both companies will continue to exploit their global presence, trusted brand names and established business partner networks to scale their solutions. These market leaders are experienced in market development, moving new product and service offerings beyond the early adopter segment. More deployment growth is sure to follow their lead.

Interested in hearing more in person? Find out more at the Blockchain Expo World Series, Global, Europe and North America. 

IBM is looking to target financial services customers with the launch of what is being claimed as the world’s first financial services-ready public cloud – in association with Bank of America.

In some respects, this can be seen as a glorified customer update. Bank of America will be a ‘committed collaborator’ to use the platform, built on IBM’s public cloud, and will host key applications to support its 66 million banking customers.

Yet the companies have collaborated extensively on the product, naturally designed to stringent security practices. The duo is working with Promontory, an IBM business unit focused on financial services regulatory compliance consulting, while strict compliance will be enforced among ISVs or SaaS providers who wish to participate.

Red Hat OpenShift will be deployed as the product’s primary Kubernetes environment to manage containerised software, with more than 190 API-driven services being issued to create new cloud-native applications.

Financial services is an important battleground for the leading clouds. Amazon Web Services (AWS) cites three primary customers in this industry; Liberty Mutual, Starling Bank, and Capital One. The latter hit the headlines for the wrong reasons after a data breach was confirmed in July, although the company subsequently noted its cloud operating model helped solve the issue at greater speed. For Microsoft Azure, MetLife, German savings bank Provinzial and South African Nedbank are among its key clients.

This is not the entire story, however, as many financial services firms are looking to hybrid cloud to ensure sufficient digital adoption. According to a report from Nutanix issued in April, more than one in five financial organisations polled said they were deploying a hybrid cloud model, with the vast majority (91%) saying hybrid was their ‘ideal’ IT model.

“This is one of the most important collaborations in the financial services industry cloud space,” said Cathy Bessant, Bank of America chief operations and technology officer in a statement. “This industry-first platform will allow Bank of America to use the public cloud, putting data security, resiliency, privacy and customer information safety need at the forefront of decision making.

“By setting a standard that addresses the concern of hosting highly confidential information, we aim to drive the public cloud to a safety level that is unmatched,” Bessant added.

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.

Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. Microsoft’s most eye-catching announcement at MS Ignite earlier this week was around Azure Arc which, similar to AWS Outposts and Google Anthos, allows Azure to run and be run on its hyperscale rivals.

The rationale, as the company has put it in the press materials, was to go beyond the usual definitions of hybrid cloud in an area which is rapidly becoming more than table stakes for the hyperscalers. Mark Russinovich, Azure CTO, told ZDnet that it was what the company is considering as ‘hybrid 2.0.’

“Enterprises rely on a hybrid technology approach to take advantage of their on-premises investment and, at the same time, utilise cloud innovation,” Julia White, Azure corporate vice president, wrote in a blog post. “As more business operations and applications expand to include edge devices and multiple clouds, hybrid capabilities must enable apps to run seamlessly across on-premises, multi-cloud and edge devices.

“Without coherence across these environments, cost and complexity grow exponentially,” added White. “Today, we take a significant leap forward to enable customers to move from just hybrid cloud to truly deliver innovation anywhere with Azure.”

First up on the list of services to go into Arc are Kubernetes and Azure SQL Analytics. Customers will now ‘have the flexibility to deploy Azure SQL Database and Azure Database for PostgreSQL Hyperscale where they need it on any Kubernetes cluster’, as the company puts it.

While the three hyperscalers now have options where services can be deployed on different clouds, don’t imagine for a moment that they are all arm-in-arm walking into the sunset singing Kumbaya. At the time of VMworld in August – VMware having extensive partnerships with the three biggest clouds – Pivot3 CMO Bruce Milne noted the ‘tension’ in the air.

“There’s an obvious strategic tension in VMware’s collaboration with the hyperscale cloud providers, but for now it appears they’ve agreed to a collaborative détente,” said Milne. “Watch this space because that friction is sure to generate sparks eventually.”

Nick McQuire, VP enterprise at CCS Insight, noted the changes Microsoft had made, but with a caveat.

“Over 60% of enterprises use multiple clouds and a mix of on-premises and public cloud computing in their businesses so providing a single control pane, consistent management and security across this multi-dimensional environment is now becoming the new rules of engagement in the cloud wars,” said McQuire. “It means that Microsoft is becoming more attentive to customer needs, but it is also an indication that battle lines of competition in cloud are shifting towards managing the control pane.

“With the arrival of multi-cloud management in Azure, we are now seeing perhaps the biggest shift yet in Azure’s strategic evolution.”

Perhaps the most comprehensive analysis was from regular Forbes contributor Janakiram MSV. Alongside noting the changes to the control plane, Janakiram noted where Microsoft is looking in terms of customer focus. “With Azure Arc, Microsoft is enabling enterprises with legacy infrastructure to join the hybrid cloud bandwagon,” he wrote. “Microsoft is not alienating customers running legacy hardware and VMs from the hybrid cloud. VMs are treated as first-class citizens in the world of Azure Arc.”

“Microsoft’s hybrid strategy based on Azure Arc and Azure Stack looks compelling and convincing,” Janakiram added. “Azure Arc’s key differentiation lies in the balance between traditional, VM-based workloads and modern containerised workloads that operate in the same context of the hybrid and multi-cloud environments.”

You can find out more about Azure Arc by visiting here.

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.

Continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) software provider CircleCI has been acting on its expansion plans following the $56 million (£44.8m) secured in series D funding in July. Now, the company is ready for business in London – and has hired a new head of EMEA to push things along.

Sharp observers looking at the almost 250 faces which comprise the CircleCI team would have noticed a recent addition at the foot of the list. Nick Mills joined the company in September having previously held leading sales roles at Stripe and Facebook, among others, invariably concerned with international expansion.

At CircleCI, Mills will be responsible for EMEA – which the company says represents almost a quarter of its overall business – in everything which is classified as non-engineering. “There’s a huge amount of expansion opportunity,” Mills tells CloudTech. “I’ve already had some interesting conversations in the first few weeks here with companies in fintech and mobility, on-demand services. They really see CircleCI and CI/CD as a fundamental critical enabler that can help their teams increase productivity.”

The company certainly appears to be seeing gains from this bet. Big tech names on the customer roster include Facebook, Spotify and Docker, while investor Scale Venture Partners described the company earlier this year as the ‘DevOps standard for companies looking to accelerate their delivery pipeline while increasing quality.’

For CEO Jim Rose, who has been in London this week for the launch, it is the expansion of a journey which began for him in 2014, first as COO before moving up to the chief executive role a year later.

“When I first got to the company, there were about 30 individual logos in the CI/CD market, and that’s been whittled way down,” Rose tells CloudTech. “Now there is, really, ourselves, a couple of smaller, standalone, very focused CI/CD players, and then you’ve got some of the larger platforms that are trying to go end-to-end.”

Rose cites the ‘peanut butter manifesto’, the now infamous document from Yahoo which used the foodstuff as a metaphor for businesses spreading themselves too thinly across multiple offerings, as evidence for why the larger platforms will struggle.

“We have really gone for the opposite of that strategy,” he explains. “For the vast majority of large customers, you can only move certain systems one at a time. Customers ask us all the time… how do we build that CI/CD system but also the most flexible system so that regardless of what you have in place inside of your overall enterprise or team, it’s really easy and seamless?”

There are various aspects which pull together the company’s strategy. Back in the mid-2000s, if a company built a new application it would hire a bunch of developers, flesh out the spec, write custom code across every line and then package and ship the resultant product. As Rose puts it, any custom code written today takes on the mantle of orchestrating all the pieces together, from the plethora of open source libraries and third-party services.

Continuous delivery is a hornet’s nest – it’s very easy to get to version one, but then the complexity comes as your developers start pushing a lot faster and harder

“What we’re helping customers do is, across all of these hundreds and thousands and millions of projects, start to take a heartbeat of all those different common components and use that to help people build better software,” says Rose. “If you have a version that’s bad or insecure, if you’re trying to pull a library from a certain registry that has stability problems, if you have certain services that are just unavailable… these are all new challenges to software development teams.

“Using the wisdom of the crowd and the wisdom of the platform overall, we’re starting to harness that and use that on behalf of our customers so they can make their build process more stable, more secure, and higher performing.

“Honestly, continuous delivery is a hornet’s nest,” adds Rose. “It’s really complicated to run into one of these systems at scale. It’s very easy to get to version one, but then the complexity comes as you bring it out to more teams, as you add more projects, as your developers start pushing a lot faster and a lot harder.”

For a large part of the company’s history, the individual developer or team of developers was the route in for sales; almost in an infiltrative ‘shadow IT’ context, whether it was the CTO of a small startup or a team lead at a larger company. While this can still be the case at enterprise-level organisations, CircleCI realised it needed more of a top-down, hybrid sales approach.

“One of the biggest changes in our space – not just CI/CD, but the developer space more generally – is developers historically have not been conditioned to pay for things,” says Rose. “If you needed a new tool, a new script, the developers would either go out and create it on their own or they use an open source service.

“What’s changed over the last two or three years is now developers, because their time is so valuable, have the budget and the expectation that they have the opportunity to pay for services that help you move faster. A lot of what we do from a sales perspective is help development teams understand how to procure technology. What’s necessary? What do you think about what you look at? How do we help you through that commercial process?”

Mills will be looking to guide EMEA customers through this process, with the stakes high and the motivation to assist leading tech companies strong. “A lot of companies are successful in and of themselves and can build their businesses, but the space we’re in really has the potential to enable the most successful tech companies today and of the future,” Mills explains.

“Ultimately, the creation they can generate as companies can obviously help them move quickly, increase the scale and pace of product delivery,” he adds. “To me, that feels like incredibly high-level work to be doing and high value.”

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.

Esther Kezia Thorpe