Oracle has announced it’s shuttering Dyn, three years after it bought the DNS service, which will be integrated into the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. 

In a post to its website last night, the company said: “Since the acquisition of Dyn in 2016 and the subsequent acquisition of Zenedge, the engineering teams have been working diligently to integrate Dyn’s products and services into the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform. Enterprises can now leverage the best-in-class DNS, web application security, and email delivery services within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and enhance their applications with a comprehensive platform to build, scale, and operate their cloud infrastructure.”

While the FAQ page gives no deadline for migration to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, customers have reposted emails which give 31 May 2020 as the End of Life (EOL) date.

Some customers have hit out at the decision, citing the consequent culling of a free tier and loss of some functionality, particularly dynamic DNS.

On Hacker News, someone under the username jpollock said: “As a lesson to anyone else hoping to do a shutdown with a migration to a different service with your company.

“If you are going to treat me the same as any new subscriber, where I have to re-signup, re-add my payment method, export my settings and then import them again, you’re asking me to buy all over again.

“If you ask me to buy, then I get will reevaluate the relationship, and if it’s just as easy to migrate to another supplier I will move.

“Migrating internally should have been “push this button to accept the new terms and pricing, you don’t even need to talk with your registrar.”

“I’ve been a Dyn customer for over a decade, and now I’m moving because it’s just as easy to move as it is to stay.”

Others took to Twitter to announce their displeasure.

Cloud Pro contacted Oracle for confirmation of the May 2020 deadline and further comment, but hadn’t received a response at the time of publication.

Just over two years into Antonio Neri’s tenure as CEO at HPE and the company is rather a different beast to how Meg Whitman left it in November 2017.

Not much has changed structurally, but this year’s Discover conference in Las Vegas to me pointed to a change in culture. Of course, we had the usual product announcements – some of which were quite exciting – but there was a lot of time spent talking about more “businessy” elements.

GreenLake is a standout example of this. The consumption-based service was launched back in November 2017 (just as Neri took the reins, in fact) but was absolutely the star of the show this year.

It’s clear the company is now aggressively pursuing an ‘as a service’ model, rather than sell once and hope for repeat custom down the line, as has been the case in the past, with a pledge to make the full HPE portfolio available through GreenLake by 2022. While there is a bit of a fudge (you can still buy on a one-off basis rather than consumption if you really want), this to me is a big step away from the years of talking about “hybrid IT” under Whitman, which I saw largely as an attempt to give a veneer of cloudiness to HPE’s products while really maintaining a traditional, legacy vendor profile.

Speaking of the cloud, the company has really started to embrace this technology in partnership with cloud vendors – and not just old friends like Microsoft, but also AWS and Google. In particular, it’s using containerisation technology to its advantage, as well as public cloud companies’ realisation that they need to play nice with traditional vendors in order to maximise their customer pool (not everything can be hosted on a public cloud, after all).

HPE has also brought its networking business, Aruba, front and centre in the cloud conversation with a major update to Aruba Central. Indeed, it was given one of the handfuls of product slots during the keynote, with Aruba co-founder Keerti Melkote taking to the stage alongside Neri to talk about this cloud management service.

We also saw the company’s in-memory computing efforts start to bear some commercial fruit. While The Machine, as it was called, was quietly downgraded over the past few years from in-memory computing moonshot product to in-memory computing project, to really just another part of HPE Labs, its technology lives on in the shape of Primera.

This appliance – which its beaming creators were clearly delighted with at the press launch – comes with a 100% uptime guarantee (I’m not rounding up there, either) and was described to me by an independent analyst as the company’s most important storage launch in years.

There was also a lot of emphasis on the company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, including its continued partnership with Purdue University aimed at using data and analytics to solve world hunger (no, really). As we were repeatedly told, the company’s commitment to social good goes all the way back to “Bill and David” (Hewlett and Packard respectively, in case you’re not on first name terms with the company’s founders), although not an awful lot of evidence was brought along to support this claim.

Overall, particularly as someone who missed 2018’s Discover and Discover Europe, I feel there’s been a palpable change in the company over the last 18 months and I’m not the only one, which can be credited almost entirely to Neri.

As a couple of people I spoke to at the event pointed out, he’s an unusual breed of CEO nowadays; he joined HPE’s predecessor, HP as a call centre operative in 1995 and over the intervening 24 years worked his way up to the top job, rather than being a direct transplant like the four CEOs who preceded him. I understand he’s quite hands-on and will have been closely involved with the development of Aruba Central (he was HP’s networking head for a while after all), staking Primera’s 100% uptime claim and the pivot to a consumption-based business.

Without wishing to sound like I’m completely toeing the party line, HPE really does feel like a more services-oriented and collaborative business than it was just a short two years ago. I’ll be intrigued to see next year how much business is actually being done through GreenLake (of the 600 customers currently counted as doing business through the scheme, two-thirds are actually “in the pipeline”), and whether we’ll see how that 100% uptime claim has held up. If it’s done well we could be at a very exciting point in the development of storage technology and I would expect to see some more products using the same technology to be very literally unveiled.

All images: Jane McCallion/Dennis Publishing. All rights reserved.

The theme of this year’s HPE Discover conference in Las Vegas, emblazoned in the atrium of the Sands Expo Center, is “accelerating your success from edge to cloud”.

It may have come as something of a surprise, then, for delegates to hear CEO Antonio Neri close out his keynote speech by declaring his vision for the future is “cloudless”.

“We need to radically simplify and democratise the way developers and users access tools, services and data that power today’s enterprise applications,” Neri said. “And it needs to be … a new approach that obliterates the distinction between publicness and privateness and leverages the full … vibrant cloud-native computing development community for the benefit of all.”

Declaring that cloud was not a destination but an “experience”, Neri said that within five-to-ten years while the world would still be hybrid, “the illusion of interconnection will be replaced by the reality”. This “secure interoperability across clouds” is what underpins the concept of cloudless.

According to Neri, there are three ingredients, or “fabrics” as HPE is terming them, that make up cloudless.

The first is security – the “trust fabric” – which operates under a zero trust model and automates privacy and data sovereignty.

Next is the optimisation – the “connectivity fabric” – and finally embracing open source – the “value fabric”.

For now “cloudless” is very much a concept or philosophy. There are no products, there is no roadmap. However, according to Neri, we can look forward to hearing more about it at next year’s conference.

HPE has beefed up its cloud offerings at its annual Discover conference this week with a suite of updates to its cloud infrastructure and management portfolio.

The company’s flagship cloud-based network management product, Aruba Central, now sports AI-powered analytics technology integrated from Aruba NetInsight and User Experience Insight. These, the company says, will help IT professionals resolve intermittent network issues quickly while also identifying ways to optimise customers’ infrastructure for a better overall experience.

Aruba Central also has enhancements in the software defined arena. The new SD-WAN Orchestrator has an eye on edge computing, allowing administrators to easily deploy flexible and secure topologies in large-scale edge environments. According to HPE, this will allow organisations to connect thousands of branches to multiple data centres.

There’s also a new SaaS prioritisation feature that enhances the performance of SaaS applications for end users while also giving visibility and feedback of this experience to administrators.

Finally in the Aruba business segment, Virtual Gateways is now available for AWS and Azure.

It’s not just Aruba Central that’s had a spruce up, though.

HPE has also announced extensions to two of its most recent partnerships: Google Cloud and Equinix.

Organisations running containerised workloads on ProLiant servers or Nimble Storage on premise can now HPE Cloud Volumes with Google Cloud Anthos for hybrid disaster recovery, hybrid continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD), or similar.

This offering is also available through HPE GreenLake, the company’s consultancy and pay-per-use service.

With Equinix, businesses using the company’s colocation services that are looking for cloud-based disaster recovery, backup and recovery, or test and development environments can now get Data as a Service based on HPE Cloud Volumes through the Equinix Marketplace.

All of these services are available immediately.

As the low-pressure vortex continues to bring traditional summertime weather to the UK, I’ve hopped on a plane to head to this month’s hottest Las Vegas gathering: HPE Discover 2019 (and, with an expected high of 42 degrees Celsius on Wednesday, it will be hot, literally).

Once again, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is gathering customers, partners, executives and a smattering of journalists in the Sands Expo Center to tell us about its successes of the past year, provide more information on new products and services it’s ready to launch, and its wider plans for the future.

In previous years, it’s been a bit easier to speculate on what might come up during the main keynote. We’ve had former CEO Meg Whitman saying ‘goodbye,’ current CEO Antonio Neri saying ‘hello,’ and then the split of HP into HPE and HP Inc.

Things have been a bit more sedate over the past 12 months though, which does make my job of predicting what will happen this week a little more difficult. That’s not to say there’s nothing to talk about, though.

The company recently bought Cray adding yet another string to its high performance computing (HPC) bow. I don’t expect a high level of detail on what we can expect from this acquisition in the long term (although I would assume that rather like SGI it will be absorbed into the general HPE IP pool), but I’d be surprised if it isn’t at least mentioned.

It’s also interesting to note that Keerti Melkote, HPE’s president of intelligent edge and co-founder of Aruba – (now HPE’s networking business) – will be joining Neri during his keynote on Tuesday. Something tells me we may be in for some big edge computing and/or networking news.

Other perennial topics for HPE include AI and machine learning, hybrid and as-a-service IT – including its own GreenLake offering – and high-performance enterprise-grade storage.

I suspect we will also hear about the company’s recently returned ‘space computer’ – two Apollo servers that were sent to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2017 to see how this kind of technology performs in orbit, which landed back on terra firma a couple of weeks ago. While I’m not expecting a big song and dance, it would be a missed opportunity for the company not to at least celebrate the achievement in some way.

Something I’m expecting to hear less about, however, is The Machine. Originally billed as a completely new form of architecture, it then morphed into a research project and seems perhaps to have been gently absorbed into HPE Labs. Not really something that warrants top billing.

HPE Discover kicks off today with the channel partner conference, with the main event kicking off tomorrow. Stay tuned to Channel Pro, Cloud Pro and IT Pro for all the latest news and analysis from the show.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) suffered a significant outage on Sunday night that lasted nearly three hours, knocking offline services including G Suite, YouTube and Google Cloud.

The issue was first noted on the company’s cloud status dashboard at 8.25pm BST on 2 June as a Google Compute Engine problem.

Shortly, however, reports of problems with Google Cloud, YouTube and more started hitting Twitter and by 8.59pm, the dashboard acknowledged it was a “wider network issue”.

By 12.09am on 3 June, the issue was resolved but little detail is available as to what happened beyond “high levels of network congestion in the eastern USA, affecting multiple services in Google Cloud, G Suite and YouTube”.

However, someone claiming to work on Google Cloud (but currently on holiday) posted a message on Hacker News saying: “It’s disrupting everything, including unfortunately the tooling we usually use to communicate across the company about outages.”

“There are backup plans, of course, but I wanted to at least come here to say: you’re not crazy, nothing is lost … but there is serious packet loss at the least,” they added. 

In a statement, Google told Cloud Pro: “We will conduct a post mortem and make appropriate improvements to our systems to prevent this from happening again. We sincerely apologise to those that were impacted by [these] issues. Customers can always find the most recent updates on our systems on our status dashboard.”

Some, however, have questioned what exactly Google meant by “high levels of network congestion in the eastern USA”.

Clive Longbottom, co-founder of analyst house Quocirca, told Cloud Pro: “If this was the case, a lot more than GCP would have been impacted: this does not seem to have been the case. As such, it would appear that what Google possibly means is that it was excessive network traffic in its own environment in the Eastern USA.”

He suggested that the excessive network traffic was potentially caused by something internal.

“This could be something like a memory leak on an app going crazy, or (like AWS some time back) human error through a script causing a looping command bringing chaos to the environment.”

This doesn’t mean that organisations should abandon cloud for business-critical workloads, however. Owen Rogers, research director at the digital economics unit of 451 Research, told Cloud Pro: “Four hours is quite a long time … but it’s a tricky issue, because outages are going to happen now and then, and all customers can do is to build resiliency such that if an outage does occur, they have a backup.

“Using multiple availability zones and regions is a must, but if applications are business critical, multi-cloud should be considered. Yes, it’s more complex to manage; yes, you’ll have to train more people. But if your company is going to go bust because of a few hours of outage, it is an investment worth making. It appears some hyperscalers are more resilient than others, but even the best are likely to slip up occasionally.”

Cyber security professionals in the UK are struggling to hold back the ever-increasing wave of threats with limited resources, leading many to consider quitting their jobs.

These are the findings of a survey of 300 specialists working in large UK organisations with 500 employees or more.

Some 79% of respondents said they were facing a lack of resources – both technological and human – despite the increasing number of security threats faced by all businesses. The problem is so bad that nearly three quarters (72%) said they had considered leaving their jobs over it.

Half of those surveyed said a lack of cyber security specialists was their greatest problem, with ineffective technology taking second place (47%). Human error and insufficient budget were also found to be concerns, coming in at 40% and 41% respectively.

Despite 57% saying they were suffering from alert overload – with an average of 33 pieces of software in use per organisation – 65% said they thought more technology would help lift some of their burden.

Increased automation, in particular, is considered to be one of the most attractive solutions, with 86% saying their organisation would benefit from using this type of technology.

Ed Macnair, CEO of cloud security company Censornet, which commissioned the survey, said: “It’s no secret that companies of all sizes have been having a hard time finding qualified personnel to manage their often-overwhelmed security operations.”

“Until now, humans have been limited by their inability to see across multiple point products and correlate information – without huge amounts of manual work.

“Automating activity such as repetitive low-level tasks usually undertaken by a human can free up limited analyst resources to focus on more advanced tasks, helping to close staffing and expertise gaps and also help stave off cyber fatigue. It is taking the security industry beyond events and alerts and into 24×7 automated attack prevention.”

A long-running court battle between Microsoft and the US government over data sovereignty appears to be drawing to a close, with both sides calling for the dismissal of the case in light of a new law.

The case, which has been ongoing since 2013, centres around a number of emails stored in Microsoft’s Dublin data centre related to a criminal investigation into alleged drug trafficking. Redmond has repeatedly refused to comply with a warrant to hand over the emails to US law enforcement agencies, arguing that as the information is stored outside of the country it doesn’t fall under the jurisdiction of American authorities.

Prosecutors in the cas have countered by saying that because the data is held by an American entity – i.e. Microsoft – it falls under American jurisdiction, basing their arguments on the US Stored Communications Act from 1986.

Over the course of the past five years, the case has been fought all the way up to the US Supreme Court and attracted interventions and amicus briefs from the likes of Apple, Cisco, AT&T and, most recently, the European Union.

It now seems, however, that this bitterly fought battle is coming to an end – for now, at least.

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has requested the case be dismissed, according to Reuters, with Microsoft backing the call, despite the two presenting arguments to the Supreme Court justices as recently as 27 February.

The reason for the about turn is a new piece of legislation signed into effect by US president Donald Trump on 22 March, which both sides say effectively resolves the dispute. The CLOUD (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data) Act states that US law enforcement agencies have the right to issue and enforce warrants relating to data held by American companies abroad, although there is also recourse to object if the order is in conflict with foreign laws.

In the filing, Microsoft’s lawyers said: “Microsoft agrees with the government that there is no longer a live case or controversy between the parties with respect to the question presented.”

While it may be the end of this particular case, this isn’t necessarily the end of the story completely. The DoJ has acquired a new warrant for the data governed by the new law, which means there’s still opportunity for Microsoft to object and, indeed, for the whole cycle to start again.

What is business about? Executing a great idea maybe? Or perhaps delivering value to shareholders? Whatever your beliefs, the fact is that no business can run properly without an effective team. And, depending on what kind of business you’re running, your team may be the most important physical resource you have.

Building the best team you can, then, is vital to your organisation’s livelihood and success. But the job market, from a recruiter’s point of view, is becoming increasingly competitive. Figures published in March 2018 by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed that the number of overall job vacancies in the UK between December 2017 and February 2018 stood at 816,000 — 10,000 more than September to November 2017 and 56,000 more than the same period 12 months before.

Businesses are therefore fighting over a smaller talent pool to try and build their perfect teams. So how can you attract the best talent out there from this diminished stock? And then, once you’ve attracted the right employees to your business, keep them loyal, engaged and motivated too? 

What are the growth challenges facing businesses and HR professionals in today’s landscape? Read more in this survey of over 500 HR leaders.

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Building a better workplace

Over the past 10 years, what people want and expect from their place of work has changed dramatically.

Thanks to greater mobility with the advent of smartphones and the cloud, increased knowledge of startup and Silicon Valley work culture and perhaps as a reaction to the instability wrought by the global financial crisis of 2007-2008, flexible and agile working have become more desirable to workers.

In a blog post, online recruiter Jobsite listed “the agile workforce” as one of its top trends for this year.

“The fact that organisations like Sky, Google, Facebook and the NHS are among agile working’s earliest large-scale adopters says a lot about its potential. Its rapid rise as a software development methodology in the IT sector is also telling, and the value is not lost on candidates,” Jobsite says. 

Citing research carried out towards the end of 2017, the blog continues: “While 77 percent of recruiters say agile working hasn’t significantly affected the hiring process, a massive 86 percent of candidates say they’d consider changing roles if it meant working in an agile environment. And, on average, candidates with an understanding of agile working said they’d give up 16 percent of their salary to make the same switch.”

That’s not to say wages count for nothing, though, nor is an agile working environment the only way to offer an “extra something” to entice workers to your business and encourage them to stay.

Responding to the ONS’ January statistics, which covered the September – November 2017 period, Kevin Green, chief executive of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC), said: “Employers who want an edge over the competition have to design new ways to attract people, like flexible work patterns. Some may need to go to specialist recruiters to get help sourcing talent in areas where there are very few candidates.

“Our data shows employers are increasing starting salaries in a bid to get applicants. However, this isn’t translating into broader pay rise for current staff and workers are facing hard times as inflation continues to outstrip pay growth. Employers need to think about salaries and benefits for all of their staff – otherwise employees could be tempted by better offers from rival companies.”

This raises a key issue: building the best team isn’t just about the high-flyers, it’s about everyone who works within the business. After all, your organisation isn’t just made up of those at the top of the tree, it’s a contingent whole. As the Chartered Institute for Professional Development (CIPD) has pointed out, excessive pay and rewards at the executive level can have a negative effect on the rest of the workforce.

Guest stars

When deciding to augment their workforce, businesses don’t necessarily have to look to recruit on a permanent basis.

For certain projects, taking on temporary contract workers or freelancers may be the best way to bring in the skills and expertise you need without creating what could be unnecessary permanent positions.

Indeed, according to a March 2018 report by the Association of Independent Professionals and the Self Employed (IPSE), the growth in the number of workers classed as self-employed over the past 10 years has been driven largely by more and more highly-skilled individuals opting to work this way. 

This means that, while there is still competition among businesses for this kind of talent, its fluid nature gives organisations a greater chance of finding the right person for the role at the time you need them.  

Additionally, contract work can act as a facilitator to finding a standout new team member. If one contractor fits particularly well within the business and did a great job in an area where you’re likely to continue investing, there’s always the possibility of offering them a permanent role once the project they were brought on to do comes to a close.  

Bringing it all together  

Underpinning all of this is the need for proper human resource management. No matter what size business you’re running, choosing the right software or service is vital to managing remuneration and benefits, keeping track of absences and holidays, or knowing when contracts start and end.

Some of the more advanced platforms out there can also help with recruitment and onboarding, or even collaboration between different sites and locations. 

So when you’re considering how to build the best team possible for your business, it’s worth also looking at the various cloud and on-premise solutions available to make sure your HRM system can keep up with your vision for the future of your company.

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If you want to start a business, first you need a great idea. Once you’ve got that idea, though, you need to invest and in this technologically advanced age we live in, there’s a lot you need to invest in.

Similarly, if you want to grow your business, you’re going to need to invest in people and core resources, of course, but also IT.

In the fairly recent past, this would have meant significant capital expenditure in your IT estate and all the services and expertise to go along with that. Even if you were a small or micro-business, you would need at least one server if you wanted to share files and do email. If you had larger aspirations, you would be looking at a server room or data centre.

The truth is, not every business or would-be entrepreneur could afford this level of upfront investment. If you could convince your bank for a business loan, you could start down that road, but you would be saddled with that debt for a long time. If you weren’t able to raise those funds, at best growth stalled and at worst businesses died and ideas failed to even get off the ground.

About 10 years ago, however, all that began to change, thanks to the cloud.

The software buffet

For entrepreneurs of all stripes, cloud has removed many of the barriers to entry — you can host your own virtual storefront on somebody else’s infrastructure for a monthly fee and you probably don’t even need a website designer (or not at first, anyway). You can use other cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications to manage sales and customer relationships as well, rather than investing up-front for perpetual license software. Once you’re ready to bring onboard other people, you can also opt for cloud-based payroll management and other HR software.

The popularity of SaaS among SMBs is demonstrated by figures gathered by market research firm Techaisle in February 2018. These showed that in the US the number of SMBs using at least one SaaS application increased from 27 percent in 2011 to 73 percent in 2018.

A September 2017 study by the same organisation found that customer-focused cloud services were most important to SMBs, with 76 percent expecting to adopt at least one of these applications during 2018.

The beauty of this software buffet is it allows businesses of all sizes, not just startups or SMBs, to mix-and-match services, selecting what they need in the moment and adding to it as they go along. The subscription nature of the services also means that if a given service doesn’t fit the business’ needs, they can drop it and go elsewhere, without losing money or falling into contractual issues.

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Managed agility

For startups and small businesses, which face slim margins and greater vulnerability to market forces, the benefits of the flexibility offered by the SaaS model are fairly obvious. But larger businesses — all the way up to the very largest enterprises, in fact — can also benefit from it in the form of increased agility.

In a 2017 report called Cloud Strategy and Leadership, analyst house Gartner recommended: “As part of the cloud strategy, CIOs need to educate their CEOs and boards of directors about the need to invest in cloud as a style of computing that drives greater speed, agility and innovation.”

Large businesses and their CIOs are no stranger to the cloud, though. It was in some of these organisations where cloud first started to take off, albeit in the form of “shadow IT”, with the likes of Salesforce and Box making a name for themselves as companies that could deliver what the rank-and-file of an organisation needed faster and with less friction than their own IT departments.

Over time, such services have been legitimised as they have proven their value through greater productivity and ROI versus traditional software — assuming there even was a perpetual license equivalent of the service in question. Indeed, although productivity software for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations existed previously, the collaboration elements of cloud-based platforms like G Suite and Office 365 are completely novel. And it’s these types of features that can enhance agility, creativity and flexibility within a business and with external parties like partners and customers.

But the role of the CIO remains crucial when it comes to adopting cloud services, especially for agility.

As Gartner research vice president and distinguished analyst Janelle Hill pointed out in the same 2017 report: “Independent and uncoordinated journeys into cloud SaaS mean the goals, selection approach, initiation and ongoing implementation of services will be fragmented at best and siloed at worst.”

“A coordinated, value-optimised approach has the advantage of enabling multiple business units to benefit from joint decisions and shared end-user support for all of the various SaaS solutions,” she added.

Future trends

When it comes to running an agile business in the future, there are dozens of new trends gaining popularity that make use of the power of the cloud, with notable ones including DevOps and low-code/no-code (LCNC).

For these types of more technical trends, cloud is essential as it increases the speed of development and can also enable developers to offer a self-service catalogue of apps and code hosted on a cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform (IaaS). The flexible scale-up, scale-down consumption model of IaaS is also a benefit to DevOps teams, and their more traditional development counterparts, for trialling and testing new initiatives without anyone having to commit hundreds-of-thousands of pounds to building out new on-premise infrastructure.

This isn’t to say that on-premise IT is dead, though. As Gartner noted in spring 2017, the move among established, larger businesses is towards hybrid IT, which offers a more flexible solution to their needs. Indeed, the analysts predicted that by 2020 90 percent of all organisations will have adopted hybrid infrastructure management capabilities.

In short, cloud has levelled the playing field for organisations of all sizes, increasing opportunities for creativity, agility and innovation, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

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