Our work, both with clients and with tools, has lead us to wonder how it is that organizations are handling compliance issues in the cloud. The big cloud vendors offer compliance for their infrastructure, but the shared responsibility model requires that you take certain steps to meet compliance requirements.
Which lead us to start poking around a little more. We wanted to get a picture of what was available, and how it was being used. There is a lot of fluidity in this space, as in all things cloud. The fact that DevOps Security plays into the cloud compliance model – particularly in dynamic cloud environments – makes it even more fluid.

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Cloud Governance means many things to many people. Heck, just the word cloud means different things depending on who you are talking to. While definitions can vary, controlling access to cloud resources is invariably a central piece of any governance program.

Enterprise cloud computing has transformed IT. Cloud computing decreases time-to-market, improves agility by allowing businesses to adapt quickly to changing market demands, and, ultimately, drives down costs.

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The notion of improving operational efficiency is conspicuously absent from the healthcare debate – neither Obamacare nor the newly proposed GOP plan discusses the impact that a step-function improvement in efficiency could have on access to healthcare (through more capacity), quality of healthcare services (through reduced wait times for patients) or cost (through better utilization of scarce, expensive assets).

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Modern software design has fundamentally changed how we manage applications, causing many to turn to containers as the new virtual machine for resource management. As container adoption grows beyond stateless applications to stateful workloads, the need for persistent storage is foundational – something customers routinely cite as a top pain point. In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 21st Cloud Expo, Bill Borsari, Head of Systems Engineering at Datera, explored how organizations can reap the benefits of the cloud without losing performance as containers become the new paradigm.

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Cloud computing has come a long way over the last several years. It has gone from an emerging technology used in tech startups, to a catalyst for driving enterprise business transformations. According to IDC’s CloudView 2017 report, 70 percent of CIOs say they embrace a “cloud-first IT strategy.” This shows that cloud has moved way beyond the early-adopted phase, where born in the cloud startups were the only ones putting data and applications in the public cloud. Today, global enterprises have embraced the cloud as a means to achieve agility and innovation, and are rapidly driving cloud adoption to new heights.

Still, looking at it another way, just how far has cloud come? Have cloud users configured their organisations to truly get the most out of the technology? The same IDC report suggests the answer is no. According to CloudView 2017, only 16 percent of worldwide organisations have in place the skills and processes they need to manage the evolving cloud environment efficiently.

Here at CloudHealth Technologies, we work with customers who are grappling with these same challenges every day. Many customers expanded into the cloud quickly, and they’re struggling not only to get visibility into the systems and teams using it, but to develop a holistic strategy to fully harness the power.

The good news is, the enterprise has been making strong progress in transitioning from early adoption to mature usage of the cloud. They’re beginning to develop the organisational skills they need to gain productivity and efficiency in the cloud. And they’re developing new roles that take advantage of the new skillsets required to compete in cloud-first environments.

Here are a few ways we're seeing innovative organisations getting it done:

Adopting a disruptive attitude

The cloud can be a threatening technology within the enterprise. For all the promised benefits of innovation and agility, it requires a fundamental shift in the skills, people, processes and technologies within an organisation. All enterprises will inevitably encounter some level of resistance to adopting the cloud, and thus it's critical to approach it as a disruptive innovation.

The first step is to make the commitment. Companies need to have change agents, and employees need to buy into the change. Tech companies embrace this counter-revolution mentality when it comes to cloud. Enterprises need to as well.

Aligning their business

Once companies have committed to a cloud-first approach, they need to ensure that everyone is aligned on how the move to cloud will help the organisation accomplish its goals. The chief goal must be driving business transformation that enhances value to customers, increase top-line revenue, and improves competitiveness of your business. At the end of the day, cloud is the vehicle that’s fueling their transformation. It's critical to develop and communicate a clear vision, and to get buy in from your key stakeholders.

Hiring and locating great cloud talent

To succeed in the cloud, companies need to create a culture that will attract the people with cloud skills that are going to make a difference. The culture needs to be open, collaborative, and fast moving. People who have great skills in the cloud want to work with other people who are great at cloud. As Steve Jobs used to say: “A players” want to work with “A players.” It's critical to cultivate this culture in a small team before rolling it out more broadly. Often an organisational tipping point must be achieved to drive cultural change.

Creating a ‘learning organisation’

It’s not enough to create a solid organisational plan for the cloud; the organisation has to learn and keep learning. The Japanese call it a “Kaizen” mentality – a system that continuously improves. When it comes to cloud, you need to always be analysing, measuring, and figuring out how to change things to make them better. Everything should be subject to continuous improvement.

Creating new leadership roles

One of the most important moves a modern cloud-first organisation can make is to create a function for cloud governance. A typical enterprise may have hundreds of teams using the cloud, each of which has great ownership over the applications and infrastructure they manage. It is critical to empower these teams with the ability to harness the innovation and agility enabled by the cloud, but it is also equally important to ensure your teams are adopting best practices, driving standards, gaining efficiencies, and complying with critical policies and frameworks. Increasingly we are seeing enterprises create governance teams that help drive the impedance mismatch between agility and control, increasing the cloud IQ across the organisation, and enabling business success.

Building technical knowledge

At the end of the day, while building out the team is critical, companies still need deep technical knowledge in areas where cloud matters. It’s essential to have people with a deep understanding of cloud architectures, programming, cloud services, DevOps, and key technologies (e.g. containers, microservices) that are required in the cloud. But the list of new areas of knowledge to learn is constantly growing and changing, and it is imperative to build a learning organisation that can continue to grow and learn together. In addition to enabling greater cloud success, it is also a critical tool for retaining organisational talent.

While the technology may be more than 10 years old, we're still very early in harnessing the true power of the cloud. We have come so far, but still have so many opportunities to grow and learn. The cloud has great potential to fundamentally transform our businesses, but achieving success requires that we adopt new roles, processes and technologies to support this change. Your cloud transformation won’t happen overnight. But if you dedicate yourself to the task and learn from others’ successes and mistakes, you be able to compete in a cloud-first environment – and win.

In his general session at 21st Cloud Expo, Greg Dumas, Calligo’s Vice President and G.M. of US operations, discussed the new Global Data Protection Regulation and how Calligo can help business stay compliant in digitally globalized world.
Greg Dumas is Calligo’s Vice President and G.M. of US operations. Calligo is an established service provider that provides an innovative platform for trusted cloud solutions. Calligo’s customers are typically most concerned about GDPR compliance, application performance guarantees & data privacy.

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Say hello to the Cloud Analytics Academy. The program, launched today by Snowflake Computing alongside Amazon Web Services (AWS), Looker, Talend and WhereScape, aims to help executives lead their organisations in data warehousing, BI, and more.

The curriculum is designed by Kent Graziano, Snowflake chief technical evangelist, with the partnering companies chipping in with their expertise.

There are three courses; the ‘executive fast track’ is the one-size-fits-all course with five sessions on key technologies and key techniques; the ‘cloud foundation track’, being aimed more as a beginner’s course, and the ‘modern data analytics track’, which is focused more at advanced users and strays into topics such as agile data warehousing and Python.

Prospective students are encouraged to take all three courses; completing one track earns a Cloud Analytics Academy certification, while completing all three means they achieve Academy Master certification.

“Organisations of all sizes now face enormous pressure to deliver analytics faster and at a lower cost than ever before, and many are looking to the cloud to address these challenges,” said Mark Budzinski, CEO of WhereScape. “We’re excited to partner with Snowflake to help data professionals gain the knowledge needed to maximise the benefits cloud data warehousing offers.

“We also want to help data professionals understand how automation can help IT be more agile in their development and operational efforts to deliver value to the business faster,” added Budzinski.

The press materials cite a Gartner report which puts growth of the worldwide software as a service (SaaS) market at more than 63% by 2020. According to a study from BARC Research and Eckerson Group, four in five firms said they were planning to increase the use of cloud for BI and data management in the coming year.

You can find out more about the Cloud Analytics Academy here.

Facebook’s newest data centre in Nebraska will be entirely wind-powered, as work on a $430 million wind farm in the region begins.

The Rattlesnake Creek wind farm, built by Enel Green Power North America, the renewable energy arm of the Enel Group, will have a total installed capacity of 320 MW, 62.5% of which will be sold to Facebook to power its data centre in Papillon, approximately 120 miles from the installation.

The Nebraska data centre constitutes Facebook’s sixth data centre in the US, and ninth globally. Facilities already exist in Oregon, Iowa, and North Carolina, with plans underway in Texas and New Mexico, while its portfolio outside of the US consists of sites in Lulea, Sweden, Clonee, in Ireland, and Odense, in Denmark. According to a report from the Omaha World-Herald in June, when Facebook awarded contracts to subcontractors from neighbouring states, the site was expected to ‘take shape’ by Thanksgiving.

“This project consolidates our growing presence in the US as our company enters into a new state and expands our business with new partners,” said Antonio Cammisecra, head of Enel Green Power in a statement. “We are thrilled to be able to support Facebook’s growing renewable energy needs in Nebraska and be part of driving economic development in the region.”

On the other side of the coin, Digital Realty has announced the launch of a second data centre in Frankfurt. The company, with more than 130 data centres across the globe, says it aims to capitalise on what it describes as the second largest market in Europe behind London. Companies with operations in Frankfurt include Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and Alibaba to name a few.

“Given its central location, excellent infrastructure, and concentration of leading international businesses, Frankfurt is widely regarded as the connectivity, commercial and financial capital of Germany,” said William Stein, Digital Realty CEO in a statement. “We are pleased to be able to support our customers’ global growth requirements on our state of the art Sossenheim campus.”

According to recent industry figures, Digital Reality continues to compete alongside Equinix for supremacy in the colocation market. The former confirmed its merger with Dupont Fabros Technology in September – with a total enterprise value of more than $35 billion as a result – while the latter completed the acquisition of 29 data centres from Verizon, beefing up their respective stakes.

Equinix’s most recent customer win came in the form of Singapore-based DBS Bank, who announced earlier this week that it would become the first bank in the country to launch a new cloud-based data centre. The move is alongside more general cloudy ambitions for the bank, with partnerships already in place with AWS and Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

In a recent survey, Sumo Logic surveyed 1,500 customers who employ cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). According to the survey, a quarter of the respondents have already deployed Docker containers and nearly as many (23 percent) are employing the AWS Lambda serverless computing framework.
It’s clear: serverless is here to stay. The adoption does come with some needed changes, within both application development and operations. That means serverless is also changing the way we leverage public clouds. Truth-be-told, many enterprise IT shops were so happy to get out of the management of physical servers within a data center that many limitations of the existing public IaaS clouds were forgiven. However, now that we’ve lived a few years with public IaaS clouds, developers and CloudOps pros are giving a huge thumbs down to the constant monitoring of servers, provisioned or not, that’s required to support the workloads.

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