Clare Hopping

IBM is making a big bet into the multi-cloud game with the launch of a new management tool aimed at integrating workloads from different providers.

The Multicloud Manager tool runs on IBM’s Kubernetes-based Cloud Private platform, and, while being optimised on IBM’s cloud, will allow organisations to manage and integrate workloads from other cloud vendors including Amazon, Microsoft, and Red Hat.

The launch is being supported with findings from a research report, conducted by IBM and Ovum, which found that 85% of companies surveyed were using more than one cloud environment. Despite this, four in five mission-critical workloads were still being run on-premises due to performance and regulatory issues.

Arvind Krishna, senior vice president of IBM hybrid cloud, said that companies were only ’10% to 20%’ into their cloud journeys, moving beyond low-end infrastructure as a service to higher business value.

“Like the rest of IBM’s portfolio, we have always been focused on delivering business value with the cloud,” Krishna said in a published Q&A. “It is not about scale for the sake of scale, but helping clients leverage the cloud to optimise their business, launch new business services rapidly, or enter new markets.

“To accomplish this, companies today want to deploy across multiple cloud environments, regardless of vendor, and today’s announcement is a major breakthrough in accomplishing this,” added Krishna. “It will help unlock the next 80% of business cloud innovation.”

This makes for a particularly interesting announcement when it comes to IBM’s positioning in the long-held ‘cloud wars’ saga. 2018 has seen an upturn in the company’s fortunes; three consecutive quarters of growth following 22 straight quarters of declining revenue is testament to that. Yet IBM seems to have accepted its lot – much as VMware did with its AWS partnership – with regards to cloud infrastructure leadership. In other words: enterprises are going to predominantly be on AWS and Azure, so how can they be helped otherwise?

Speaking to CloudTech back in February, John Considine, IBM general manager for cloud infrastructure services, agreed with this publication’s position that a lot of the ‘cloud wars’ narrative was bluff, bluster and obfuscation. For IBM, Considine explained, the focus was on openness and investment in emerging technologies – indeed, in a recent prediction, analyst firm CCS Insight forecast IBM to be the clear leader in quantum computing.

“Here’s the trick: for us, we are the enterprise cloud,” said Considine at the time. “This investment we’ve made in the technologies, in the underlying infrastructure… [there’s] huge growth this year in our infrastructure both in geographic and capacity expansion, but as well as new features and the rate of delivering new features. These are focused in really providing solutions for enterprises, and then helping them make this transformation.”

This open approach was emphasised again by Krishna. “By taking an open approach to cloud, IBM gives our clients the ability to mix and match their cloud environments based on what they need to accomplish,” he said. “It’s no secret that openness and interoperability are built into the very fabric of IBM’s long history, and we see these capabilities continuing to be a critical factor as we enter into this next phase of cloud and AI.”

So what does this mean for competing vendors in cloud management? As regular readers of this publication will be aware, the space is consolidating. CloudHealth Technologies was snapped up by VMware earlier this year, as well as extending its partnership with fellow management player ParkMyCloud. One company in the crosshairs could be Nutanix. Writing for The Motley Fool, Timothy Green noted IBM’s desire for brand agnosticism going back to the 1990s, as well as Nutanix’s vision to ‘meld private, public and distributed cloud operating environments [to] provide a single point of control.’

You can find out more about IBM Multicloud Manager here.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their use-cases? Attend the co-located IoT Tech Expo, Blockchain Expo, AI & Big Data Expo and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam and explore the future of enterprise technology.

Bobby Hellard

Now that the cloud has gained high momentum in the technology industry, the mystery of its popularity is no longer much of a mystery – its speed and ability to scale are what make the cloud an attractive option for businesses. With its elasticity, cloud provides organisations with the capacity they need whenever they need it, and all readily available. In contrast with internal infrastructure, where there are often large expenses up front, there’s a huge value in adopting cloud due to its concrete costs. There is also the bonus capability of adding services such as disaster recovery through an interconnected structure without a second thought.

The DevOps world in particular is one that is increasingly seeing the benefits of cloud adoption. Implementing cloud technology in an organisation that uses DevOps can lead to improved productivity and efficiency for developers, by automating processes such as building and managing code, and increasing delivery speeds.

Of course, cloud has possible drawbacks for any business area, not just DevOps, including how operational oversight may be restricted. Organisations still need to be able to adhere to compliance and provide transparency, so the goal is to keep those who are responsible involved as much as possible. While this is very manageable, since the introduction of stricter regulations – such as GDPR in the EU – IT teams need to ensure that their cloud-based infrastructure is as secure as possible to meet these requirements.

Why serverless is the next big cloud trend

One of the hottest trends of the moment for developers is serverless. Though still in its infancy, it is the natural evolution of microservices, and it addresses the main drawback of cloud-based computing – costs. Organisations only pay for what they use, and being able to scale up and/or down is implicit. Having this control over cost is a game changer, and many organisations will soon be noticing a ‘top-down’ push to move architectures in this direction.

With serverless, developers no longer have to worry about servers, infrastructure, capacity, scaling or availability – they can just focus on their application’s business logic. The basic experience for developers is ideal, given that serverless provides the ability to write code easily on laptops or in a browser. After that, the rest of the development experience can be 100% cloud-based, with the choice of immediate deployment if that is what’s wanted. Although the technology still has some way to go, as more and more companies invest in that direction to assist their DevOps teams, there will be visible growth and maturity.

Take back some time with a cheaper solution

This move to serverless provides a couple of specific benefits that will make things significantly easier for developers.

In today’s cloud focused world, any time spent on tools that are based on-premises is taking away time from writing code – which should always be a priority. Almost every vendor has a solution in the cloud or is exclusively based in the cloud from project and issue tracking, operations management, build, CI, artifactory, analytics and value stream management. All growth is in the cloud direction for tools, especially as everything else moves there, so developers should jump on the bandwagon and take back some of their time for their main objectives.

Another key benefit of working in the cloud is that the major platform providers support the latest technology trends including AI, analytics and machine learning. The most advanced DevOps teams may already be taking advantage of these bleeding edge technologies that are already supported in the cloud, but many more will be looking to embrace these in the coming months and years. Without embracing cloud in general, developers will struggle with many more cost barriers to entry.

For example, transitioning to containers is made significantly easier with cloud. You can simply interconnect any data hosted in the cloud with that platform’s support of containers – no infrastructure setup needed and no learning curve for administrators of the technology. Simply code and ship. Alongside unified management – monitoring, utilization and logging – the ease of adoption of new technology will ultimately save the business money.

Feel secure with your existing security

With any cloud service implementation comes the need for strong security, and even more so now with the recent implementation of data protection regulations like GDPR. However, many organisations using cloud may have found that less has changed since these compliance laws came into effect than they had previously expected. Companies have already been subject to frequent security reviews where they are required to prove that they protect personal data through technology, so the impact for many has been less noticeable in terms of changing or upgrading the security already in place.

For developers, and particularly those that are less confident in their existing security, there is already a wealth of guidance on best practices for developing and storing applications in the cloud. DevSecOps promotes the idea that security should be integrated at every stage of the development process, and existing guidelines include factors for monitoring, encryption, network security, incident response and application security. For a vendor that targets its cloud-based solutions at large enterprises, there are also compulsory requirements to pass through these security reviews.

On top of that, the threat landscape is constantly changing. The customer expectation of security in this is related to a company’s capability to react to new and unknown threats. How long does it take to roll out a patch or security update in a release pipeline? Does releasing a patch put the company at an unforeseen risk of other bugs or security holes being found?

Good cloud security involves a journey of constant improvement and development. But if DevOps teams can keep this front of mind, and are dedicated to upholding a cloud environment that is secure, they will be able to confidently manage any cloud platform they implement – whether that’s serverless or more traditional – and will quickly see the advantages of the increasing advances that the cloud is bringing to organisations year on year.

Do you wonder, are there significant benefits for building a culture of digital trust? New research has uncovered a direct connection between the cause and effect of bad actors in organisations across the globe. Information technology has many uses, but business leaders must be mindful of compliance.

Twenty-nine percent of employees observed at least one compliance violation at work in 2016 or 2017, according to the latest worldwide market study by Gartner. The survey, which sampled more than 5,000 employees at all levels, found that these workers are twice as likely to leave their organisation.

Fifty-nine percent of the sampled employees who observed a compliance violation were actively looking for a new job, compared with 29 percent who did not witness bad behavior.

The business case for compliance

"While attrition is not an obvious area of concern for compliance executives, it should be," said Brian Lee, compliance practice leader at Gartner. "Employee misconduct and the failure of compliance to address it plays a considerable role in motivating employees to leave their current organisation."

Mr. Lee said this sensation is particularly prevalent among employees whose exodus comes with the gravest impact. Those employees who are willing to report misconduct are those with high standards of personal integrity as well as those who exhibit the most discretionary effort.

In this Gartner survey, 67 percent of employees who exhibit superior discretionary effort and have witnessed noncompliance reported actively seeking a job with another company. This is compared with only 26 percent of employees who exhibit superior discretionary effort but have not witnessed noncompliance.

For compliance executives, the departure of employees – especially those who are among a company's most mission-critical – should be deemed as a warning of possible underlying compliance-related issues, not simply as a generic human capital ebb and flow or an HR issue with little relevance for compliance.

Employee attrition costs large organisations millions of dollars each year and the loss of a particularly conscientious employee can be debilitating, not just to culture and morale, but to employee productivity.

Creating a mandate for organisation integrity

This finding reinforces the mandate of leaders to create and promote a culture of integrity. Employees of organisations with low-integrity cultures are two to three times more likely than employees of organisations with high-integrity cultures to observe misconduct.

"Culture is contagious. If managers and executives demonstrate ethical behavior, employees see the importance of being compliant in their day-to-day workflow and their workplace as whole," said Mr. Lee. "When leaders set a model example, they can communicate to employees with similarly high standards that their organisation is in alignment with their ethical commitments."

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.

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The benefits of automated cloud deployments for speed, reliability and security are undeniable. The cornerstone of this approach, immutable deployment, promotes the idea of continuously rolling safe, stable images instead of trying to keep up with managing a fixed pool of virtual or physical machines.

In this talk, we’ll explore the immutable infrastructure pattern and how to use continuous deployment and continuous integration (CI/CD) process to build and manage server images for any platform. Then we’ll show how automate deploying these images quickly and reliability with open DevOps tools like Terraform and Digital Rebar. Not only is this approach fast, it’s also more secure and robust for operators.

If you are running infrastructure, this talk will change how you think about your job in profound ways.

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Clare Hopping

Cloud Pro

Connor Jones