Software-Defined WANs (SD-WANs) are, along with artificial intelligence, the talk of the town, but they have their limitations for fast cloud back-up and restore. However, before SD-WANs organisations had to cope with conventional wide area networks – just plain old WANs – with all applications, bandwidth congestion and heavy quality of service (QoS) going through one pipe using multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) to connect each branch office to one or more clouds.

The advent of the SD-WAN was a step forward to a certain extent, allowing branch offices to be connected to wireless WANs, the internet, private MPLS, cloud services and to an enterprise data centre using a number of connections. In essence, SD-WANs are great for midsized WAN bandwidth applications with their ability to pull disparate WAN connections together under a single software- managed WAN.  Yet, they don’t sufficiently resolve latency and packet loss issues. This means that any performance gains are, again, usually due to inbuilt deduplication techniques.

SD-WANs and SDNs

Some people may also think of SD-WANs as being the little brother of their better-known sibling: Software-defined networking (SDN). Although they are related since they are both software-defined, the difference is that SDN is often for internal data centre use at a branch or an organisation’s headquarters, while SDN is perceived as being architecture.

In contrast, SD-WANs are a technology you can buy to help manage a WAN. This is done by using a software-defined approach that allows for branch office network configurations to be automated, compared to the past when they were handled manually.  This latter, traditional approach required an organisation to have an on-site technician present. So, if for example, an organisation decides that it wants to roll out teleconferencing to their branch offices, the pre-defined network bandwidth allocations would have to be manually re-architected at each and every branch location.

SD-WANs allow all of this to be managed from a central location using a graphical user interface (GUI). It can also allow organisations to buy cheaper bandwidth while maintaining a high level of uptime. Yet much of the SD-WAN technology isn’t new, and organisations have also had the ability in the past to manage WANs centrally. So, SD-WANs are essentially an aggregation of technologies that create the ability to dynamically share network bandwidth across several connection points. What’s new about them is how they package all of the technologies together to make a whole new solution.

Bandwidth conundrum

However, buying a cheaper bandwidth won’t often solve the latency and packet loss issues. Nor will WAN optimisation sufficiently mitigate the effects of latency and packet loss, and it won’t improve an organisation’s ability to back up data to one or more clouds. So, how can it be addressed? Well the answer is that a new approach is required. By adding a WAN data acceleration overlay, it will be possible to resolve the inherent WAN performance issues head on.  WAN data acceleration can also handle encrypted data, and it allows data to be moved at speed at a distance over a WAN.

This is because WAN data acceleration takes a totally different approach in the way it addresses latency and packet loss issues. The only limitation is the speed of light, which is simply not fast enough. Yet, it governs latency. So, with traditional technologies, latency decimates WAN performance over distances. This will inevitability effect SD-WANs and adding more bandwidth won’t change the impact that latency can have on WAN performance.

TCP/IP parallelisation

By using TCP/IP parallelisation techniques and artificial intelligence to control the flow of data across the WAN, it’s possible to mitigate the effects of latency and packet loss – typically customers see a 95% WAN utilisation rate. The other upside of not using compression or dedupe techniques is that WAN data acceleration will accelerate any and all data in identical ways. There is no discrimination about what the data is.

This permits it to reach Storage Area Networks (SANs), and by decoupling the data from the protocol, customers have been able to transfer data between SAN devices across thousands of miles. One such Bridgeworks customer, CVS Caremark, connected two virtual tape libraries over 2,860 miles at full WAN bandwidth. This achieved a performance gain of 95 times the unaccelerated performance. So, imagine the performance gains that could be achieved by overlaying SD-WANs with WAN data acceleration solutions such as PORTrockIT and WANrockIT.

Making a difference

These WAN performance gains could make the difference to cloud or data centre to data centre backup times, while also having the ability to improve recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs). So, rather than having to cope with disaster recovery, organisations could use SD-WANs with WAN data acceleration overlays to focus on service continuity. They would also be wise to back-up their data to more than one location, including to more than one cloud.

Furthermore, the voluminous amounts of data that keep growing daily can make backing up data to a cloud or simply to a data centre a very slow process. Restoring the data could also take too long whenever a disaster occurs, whether it be caused by human error or by a natural disaster. Another tip would be to ensure that more than one disaster recovery site is used to back-up and restore the data. These DR sites should be located outside of their own circles of disruption to increase the potential of being able to maintain uptime whenever, for example, a flood affects one or more of them. You might also like to keep certain types of sensitive data elsewhere by creating an air gap.

Cloud backups and security

Whenever the cloud is involved in backing up and storing data – or any network connectivity for that matter – there should also be some consideration about how to keep the data safe from hackers. Cloud security has improved over the years, but it’s not infallible – even the largest of corporations are fighting to prevent data breaches on a daily basis, and some including Facebook have been hacked.

Not only can this lead to lost data, but it can also create unhappy customers and lead to huge fines – particularly since the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations came into force in May 2018. The other consequence of data breaches is lost reputation. So, it’s crucial to not just think about how to back up data to the cloud, but also to work on making sure its security is tight.   

That aside, you may also wish to move data from one cloud to another for other reasons because latency and packet loss doesn’t only affect an organisation’s ability to back and restore data from one or several clouds. It can also make it harder for people to simultaneously share data and to collaborate on certain types of data-heaving projects, such as those that use video data. Yet, CVS Healthcare has found that WAN data acceleration can mitigate latency and packet loss while increasing its ability to back up, restore, transmit and receive, as well as share data at a higher level of performance.

Case Study: CVS Healthcare

By accelerating data, with the help of machine learning, it becomes possible to increase the efficiency and performance of the data centre, backing up data to more than one cloud, and thereby improving the efficiency and performance of their clients. CVS Healthcare is but one organisation, that has seen the benefits of WAN data acceleration. The company’s issues were as follows:

• Back-up RPO and RTO

• 86ms latency over the network (>2,000 miles)

• 1% packet loss

• 430GB daily backup never completed across the WAN

• 50GB incremental taking 12 hours to complete

• Outside RTO SLA – unacceptable commercial risk

• OC12 pipe (600Mb per second)

• Excess Iron Mountain costs

To address these challenges, CVS turned to a data acceleration solution, the installation of which took only 15 minutes. As a result, it reduced the original 50GB back-up from 12 hours to 45 minutes. That equates to a 94% reduction in backup time. This enabled the organisation to complete daily back-ups of its data, equating to 430GB, in less than 4 hours per day. So, in the face of a calamity, it could perform disaster recovery in less than 5 hours to recover everything completely.

Amongst other things, the annual cost-savings created by using data acceleration amounted to $350,000. Interestingly, CVS Healthcare is now looking to merge with Aetna, and so it will most probably need to roll this solution out across both merging entities.

Any reduction in network and data latency can lead to improved customer experiences. However, with the possibility of large congested data transfers to and from the cloud, latency and packet loss can have a considerable negative effect on data throughput. Without machine intelligence solutions, the effects of latency and packet loss can inhibit data and backup performance.

Eight tips for cloud back-ups

To improve the data acceleration of SD-WANs, as well as the ability to perform a cloud backup and restore large amounts of data fast, consider the following 8 best practice tips:

• Defer to the acronym PPPPP, which means Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance because of network upgrades – whether they be LAN or WAN upgrades.

• Begin by defining the fall-back plan for cloud back-up, and at what stage(s) this should be invoked. Just pushing on with the hope that you will have fixed all the issues before it is time to hand it over is crazy, and no one will thank you for it.

• Know when you have to use the fall-back plan because you can learn the lesson for next time while keeping your users and operations working as your primary focus. This may involve having more than one cloud to back up data to, and some types of sensitive data may require you to create an air gap to ensure data security remains very tight.

• Remember that SD-WAN have great potential to manage workflow across the WAN. You can still overlay data accelerations solutions, such as WANrockIT and PORTrockIT, to mitigate the effects of latency for faster cloud back-up and restore.

• Consider whether you can implement the fall-back plan in stages, rather than a Big Bang implementation. If it’s possible, can you run both in parallel? By implementing a fall-back plan in stages, you can take time to learn what works and what doesn’t to allow for improvement to be made to your ability to SD-WAN-data acceleration overlays to improve cloud back-up and restore efficiency.

• Work with users and your operations team to define the data groups and hierarchy and to get their sign off for the plan.  Different types of data may require different approaches or require a combination of potential solutions to achieve data acceleration.

• Create a test programme to ensure the reliability and functionality as part of the implementation programme.

• Monitor and feedback – is it performing as you expected? This has to be a constant process, rather than a one-off.

SD-WANs are a popular tool; they can gain marginal performance achievements by using WAN optimisation, but this does not address the underlying cause of poor WAN performance: latency and packet loss. To properly address the increasing latency caused by distance, organisations should consider opting for an SD-WAN- with a data acceleration overlay for cloud back-ups.

To achieve business and service continuity, they should also back up their data to more than one cloud.  This may require your own organisation to engage with more than one cloud service provider, with each one located in different circles of disruption. So, when one fails for whatever reason, back-ups from the other disaster recovery sites and clouds can be restored to maintain business operations.  

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

As the name suggests, DevOps describes a close collaboration between software development and operations teams in IT. The goal? To create a faster and more effective way of developing and managing software by delivering features, fixes and updates in a more efficient manner. But you’ve already heard about these advantages elsewhere.

DevOps strategies and their success have been highly publicised, citing faster lead times, more frequent code deployment and quicker incident recovery times for IT teams. However, transitioning to this method of management is often approached incorrectly.

The emergence of DevOps as a buzzword has created a surge in new technologies, all claiming to make the journey from separate development and operations silos, to a collaborative approach, much simpler. The recent innovations in virtual and cloud-based technologies have supported this surge. However, deploying new technology isn’t necessarily the best way to begin this shift – a cultural change is often required first.  

By nature, IT workers will favour technological tools as their preferred method of meeting business objectives. Tools are tangible, usually arrive with installation guidelines, and their purpose is well defined. Cultural changes, however, do not come with an instructional guidebook and can therefore be harder to implement during a DevOps journey.

A common challenge of DevOps is ensuring both teams — development and operations —respect each other’s thoughts and opinions. There have often been long baked-in divisions between those teams, both organisationally and culturally. Unlike technological tools, you cannot change attitudes by deploying a simple update. Colleagues from both departments will come with past experiences and motivations which may be at odds with the mindset required to make DevOps a success.

To get around this, organisations should make the decision-making process simple and without hierarchy. Teams should be able to have an open and respectful debate, and fundamentally, everyone will be working towards the same objective. Information sharing tools can therefore make the decision-making process easier, as actual production and build metrics will be visible to all.

Data is not subjective, so ensuring visibility of live running statistics will ensure that decisions are made based on actual performance information, rather than the personal opinions of workers in either team.

This reassurance through visibility can improve team dynamics, as it reduces the feeling of risk and uncertainty. In fact, when researchers at Google studied over 180 engineering teams, they found that the most important factor in predicting a high performing team is psychological safety — feeling safe taking considered risks within the team. In a relatively new area of collaboration, like DevOps, this sentiment could not be more critical.

Cultural hesitations can also be made easier by publicising the success of projects which have been completed this way. Perhaps more importantly, organisations need to be clear about the benefits that DevOps is providing to specific teams.

Some workers can be short-sighted and will have a natural bias to strategies that clearly complement their own efforts. Successful communication of the benefits of DevOps will differ between workers from development and operations, so organisations should consider this in their internal communications strategies.  

The goal of DevOps is to help deliver software quickly, robustly and efficiently. However, it is often misinterpreted as simply a need to deploy new technological tools to meet this goal.  In practice, DevOps relies more on cultural acceptance than the integration of new tools.

Of course, the organisational change can be supported by a collection of improved software development practices, but organisations cannot rely only on these tools. Ultimately, it starts with a change to people’s mindsets.  

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

Research published by Eurostat reveals the UK is the sixth largest cloud users among other countries in the EU.

According to statistics published by the European Statistical Office, British enterprises claim to have a relatively high rate of cloud adoption, with 41.9% of companies adopting some form of cloud service. This is compared with the average of 26.2% in EU nations.

The UK is marginally behind some predominant Scandinavian countries like Finland, Sweden, and Denmark, which have 65.3%, 57.2%, and 55.6% of cloud users, respectively.

Figures show organisations in the UK are overtaking the rest of Europe in cloud adoption with a 17.9% increase over 2014, compared to a relatively modest EU-wide average increase of 7.2%.

Eurostat experts Magdalena Kaminska and Maria Smihily said:

“Cloud computing is one of the strategic digital technologies considered important enablers for productivity and better services. Enterprises use cloud computing to optimise resource utilisation and build business models and market strategies that will enable them to grow, innovate and become more competitive.

Growth remains a condition for businesses' survival and innovation remains necessary for competitiveness. In fact, the European Commission in the wider context of modernisation of the EU industry develops policies that help speed up the broad commercialisation of innovation.”

The rate of cloud adoption in France and Germany was far below average with just 19% and 22%, respectively.

Furthermore, the data shows that only 23% of European businesses use cloud computing power for enterprise software and just 29% of firms use cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) tools and apps.

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.

Keumars Afifi-Sabet

Connor Jones

Opinion AWS re:Invent is always rich in product launches. Some products are entirely new, while others are updates or enhancements to existing tools. The 2018 event was no exception. In case you missed it, here’s a drive-thru on some of the best products – and one important statement – from this year’s show.

AWS Marketplace for Containers

Announced at the Global Partner Summit keynote, the AWS Marketplace for Containers is the next logical step in the Marketplace ecosystem. Vendors will now be able to offer container solutions for their products, just as they do with AWS EC2 AMIs.

The big takeaway here is just how important containerisation is and how much of a growth we see in the implementation of containerised products and serverless architectures in general. Along with the big announcements around AWS Lambda, this solidifies the push in the industry to adopt serverless models for applications.

AWS Marketplace – Private Marketplace

The AWS Marketplace has added the Private Marketplace to its feature set. You can now have your own marketplace that’s shared across your AWS Organisations. This is neat and all, but I think what’s even more interesting is what it hints at in the background.

It seems to me that to have a well-established marketplace at all, your organisation is going to need to begin its journey on the DevOps trail. This news shows that a good deployment pipeline is really the best way to handle a project, whether for external or internal customers.

Firecracker

This looks really cool. Firecracker is a virtualisation tool that is built specifically for micro VMs and function-based services like Lambda or Fargate. It runs on bare metal… wait, what? I thought we’re trying to move away from our own hosted servers?! That’s true. However, consider all the new IoT products and features that were announced at the conference and you’ll see there’s still a lot of bare metal, both in use and in development. I don’t think Firecracker is meant solely for large server farm type setups, but quite possibly for items in the IoT space.

The serverless / microservice architecture is a strong one, and this allows that to happen in the IoT space. In fact, I’m currently working on installing it onto my kids’ Minecraft microcomputer.

Andy Jassy says what?

In the fireside chat with Andy Jassy in the partner keynote, there were several things I found interesting. But one comment stood out from the rest:

“I hear enterprises, all the time, wanting help thinking about how they can innovate at a faster clip. And, you know, it’s funny, a lot of the enterprise EBC’s I get to be involved in… I’d say roughly half the content of those are enterprises asking me about our offering and how we think about our business and what we have planned in the future, but a good chunk of every one of those conversations are enterprises trying to learn how we move quickly and how we invent quickly, and I think that enterprises realise that in this day and age if you are not reinventing fast and iterating quickly on behalf of your customers, it’s really difficult to be competitive.

“And so I think they want help from you in how to invent faster. Now, part of that is being able to operate on top of the cloud and operate on top of a platform like AWS that has so many services that you can stitch together however you see fit. Some of it also is, how do people think about DevOps? How do people think about organising their teams? You know… what are the right constraints that you have but that still allow people to move quickly.”

He said DevOps! Apparently, larger companies that are looking to change don’t just want fancy tools and new technology. They also need help getting better at affecting change.

That’s absolutely outside the wheelhouse of AWS, and clearly a call-to-action for the partner community.

Read more: AWS looks to redefine hybrid cloud at re:Invent 2018 – plus make big moves in blockchain

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.

If cloud is part of the conversation for organisational digital change, then cloud security will forever be not far behind. According to new research from Unit 42, compliance needs to be stepped up, yet cryptojacking may be on the decline.

The company – the threat intelligence arm of Palo Alto Networks – put together analysis based on existing threats to cloud security over the second half of 2018, focusing on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud environments.

The majority of findings predictably belied the spirit of the festive season. Almost one in three (29%) organisations assessed had potential account compromises, while more than two in five (41%) access keys had not been rotated at all over the past three months.

It only takes a brief glance at recent industry headlines and trends to come to the conclusion that any organisation could be at risk. Indeed, while the concept of shared responsibility for cloud security must again be emphasised – as the very first page of the Unit 42 report illustrates – it must be noted vendors are trying to help ease the burden.

For AWS environments, companies inadvertently setting ‘world-read’ permissions to their data repositories is the classic recipe for disaster. In 2017 the vendor spruced up its dashboard design, giving bright orange warning indicators for buckets which were publicly accessible. Feeling even this wasn’t enough, last month saw the launch of Amazon S3 Block Public Access, which aims to demarcate the process by offering configuration at the account level, on individual buckets, or on future buckets created.

Those who do walk through this open door can therefore get up to any nefarious scheme they choose. In the case of Tesla at the start of this year, for example, hackers got into unsecured S3 buckets to mine cryptocurrencies. Yet while more than one in 10 (11%) organisations experienced cryptojacking activity in their environments, it represented a significant decrease from 25% in May. Unit 42 puts this shift down to a combination of better detection tactics and weakening crypto value.

More good news, albeit unsurprising, came in the shape of container adoption. According to the research, one in three organisations analysed use native or managed Kubernetes orchestration, with a quarter utilising managed services in the cloud. AWS, Google and Microsoft all have products in this space – and for the former, as re:Invent showed last month, breadth of portfolio, from containers tightly integrated with AWS, to managed services, to more ad hoc approaches, is the key differentiator on the vendor side.

Yet the report warns that basic security hygiene is not being observed for container services, making Kubernetes pods vulnerable to attack. 46% of those polled had not applied ‘appropriate network policies’ for their managed Kubernetes services. Organisations should not rely on basic authentication for this, the researchers argue, as brute force attacks can result, instead going for IAM roles.

As far as compliance goes, however, the figures were ‘undeniable’, in the report’s words. One in three (32%) organisations publicly exposed at least one cloud storage services, while half (49%) of databases checked were not encrypted. While Unit 42 notes exposed public cloud storage is slowing trend, data encryption will have the potential to become a much more serious issue with GDPR top of mind. “Clearly, organisations have a long way to go before they can claim compliance in their public cloud environments,” the report warns.

You can read the full analysis here (pdf, 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.

Clare Hopping