According to IDC, only 25% of organizations have repeatable strategies for cloud adoption, with 32% having no cloud strategy at all, describing the need for a best practice based repeatable framework for planning cloud adoption that drives business success.

This Forbes posting from Joe McKindrick also references this research, describing that “only about one in seven organizations with multiple cloud workloads (14%) actually have managed, or optimized cloud strategies. The largest segment, 47%, say their cloud strategies tend to be on the fly — opportunistic, or ad hoc”, and that “only a somewhat larger group, 11%, were at the next-best level, “managed,” in which their enterprises are “implementing a consistent, enterprisewide best-practices approach to cloud;” and “orchestrating service delivery across an integrated set of resources.”

Vendors like AWS and VMware offer ready to use best practices that can help plug this gap.

AWS: Enterprise cloud adoption maturity

These challenges correlate with a simple adoption planning model offered by Stephen Orban, head of enterprise strategy at Amazon AWS and previously CIO of Dow Jones.

From his experiences enterprise organisations progress through four main stages of enterprise cloud adoption maturity, consistent with the IDC research:

Organising for the cloud: Building a cloud centre of excellence

In VMware’s whitepaper ‘Organizing for the Cloud’ (30-page PDF) they say the key to this transformation of IT is the implementation of a ‘Cloud Operating Model’. Central to this blueprint is that the IT team should become a cloud service broker, an incremental step up in a maturity model that they describe as a cloud capability model.

They also describe that creation of a ‘Cloud Centre of Excellence’ is the best way to achieve the required changes to the IT organisation itself. This COE should create an online knowledge base of best practices, and defining job roles and responsibilities, such as cloud leader, architect, analyst, administrator and developer and a service catalog manager among others.

Having implemented this matrix of new capabilities the IT team can then seek to identify and achieve the organisational improvements that will be of value to their business, such as:

• Faster response to business needs
• Faster incident resolution
• Improved infrastructure deployment coordination
• Improved ability to meet SLAs

Fundamentally what VMware recommend that is the headline message of Enterprise Cloud is that it will achieve an increased focus on higher value initiatives.

IT value transformation

The headline resource from VMware to answer this question is this study commissioned from the IT Process Institute, their white paper: ‘IT Value Transformation Roadmap‘ 3 (24 page PDF).

In this document they offer a blueprint for a Cloud Maturity Model, a ladder of maturing capability that you can compare your organisation to, and use as a framework to plan your own business transformations, where:

“This cloud computing strategy brief presents a virtualisation- and private-cloud-centric model for IT value transformation. It combines key findings from several primary research studies into a three-stage transformation road map.”

In short this is an ideal strategy blueprint for any existing VMware customers. It proposes a three step maturity model that begins with virtualisation and grows into full utilization of cloud computing across three stages of:

• IT production – Focus on delivering the basics and proving value for money.
• Business production – Utilise technology to better optimise business processes.
• ITaaS – Fully embrace utility IT as a Service, and leverage technology for enabling new service innovation.

This corresponds with an increasing maturity in the use of virtualisation, SaaS and other cloud architecture principles and external services, that begins with where most customers are now, mostly halfway through phase one.

Becoming a transformational leader: Start your journey

It also corresponds with a journey for the CIO as well; from operational manager of a cost centre with poor value for money perceptions, through to a boardroom-level change agent who is directly driving new profit-making initiatives.

Specifically the paper makes the point that this evolution results in the CIO being recognised for delivering strategic IT value:

What is strategic IT value? Strategic IT value is demonstrated when IT plays a key role in a company’s achievement of overall business strategy. In other words, when IT is keenly focused on business outcomes and plays a significant role in optimising and improving core value chain processes. Or, when the IT organisation drives innovation that enables new technology-enabled product and service revenue streams. When IT is effective, results can be measured by improved customer satisfaction and market share gains.

In contrast many CIOs can find themselves in somewhat of an operational corner – responsible for keeping the lights on but perceived as a poor value-for-money cost base for doing so. The IT Process Institute describe how CIOs can break this constraint cycle and shift from a cost focus to delivering strategic value for the business, through this three step progression.

VMware Cloud on AWS

In Taming the Digital Dragon McKinsey describe the hybrid cloud model as the blueprint for digital transformation, and AWS and VMware have released a major innovation to accelerate its adoption.

Announced on 28 Aug 2017 Amazon has launched VMware Cloud on AWS. With this update, VMware’s Software-Designed Data Center (SDDC) can now be used on Amazon’s AWS infrastructure, enabling users to run VMware applications across consistent public, private, or hybrid vSphere-based cloud environments, while also having optimized access to AWS services. This service was designed to support popular use cases, including data centre extension, as well as application development, testing, and migration.

The post AWS / VMware Enterprise Cloud adoption maturity – VMware Cloud on AWS appeared first on CBPN.

Awareness of phishing has grown significantly in recent years, and users are more suspicious than ever of emails that land in their inbox from unknown or questionable senders. In response to this, cybercriminals have had to become savvier with their phishing tactics. They’ve looked to new methods of phishing that are harder for users to expose. The latest of these phishing tactics uses spoofed cloud applications – a new trend that businesses need to watch out for.

Early phishing

Phishing was once all about simplistic deception. A cybercriminal would pose as, for example, a government official or customer service representative, and contact an unknowing victim. The victim, wanting to comply with the law or prevent their account being shut down, would happily and unwittingly give over their personal details to the cybercriminal.

However, this form of scam has started to decline in success. As phishing became more and more popular within the threat landscape, user awareness and understanding about it increased. Users are now less likely to openly share personal information or open suspicious attachments. They also know to look for poor spelling, grammar or strange email addresses when looking through their inbox. Technology, too, caught up with traditional phishing methods: major email providers now tend to alert users of a questionable email or source domain. Similarly, spam filters block large numbers of phishing emails before they even reach their recipients.

Most businesses are now well equipped to defend themselves from traditional phishing attacks, so phishers have had to think of more innovative ways to trick the average person; phishing has had to become more sophisticated. The motivation of phishing attacks is now also shifting: rather than tricking employees into disclosing financial or personal information, hackers are now far more interested in collecting valid business credentials.

Phishing today

Phishing in the cloud is the newest method used by phishers today. Take this year’s Gmail phishing scam, which impacted an estimated one million accounts. The widespread attack replicated through people’s Gmail contacts when they clicked on a bogus Google Doc that appeared to have been shared by a known contact. Part of what was so startling about the scam was how believable it was; hackers used a deceptively named web app – working from within Google’s system for developers. By calling a malicious third-party app “Google Docs,” the attackers were able to trick people into thinking they were being asked to click on a legitimate document, when in fact they were granting account access to hackers. Hackers could then use this permission to see victims’ contacts, read their emails, track locations, and see files created in G Suite.

This attack underscores the security risks of OAuth, which Google uses to streamline authentication. Through OAuth, users don’t have to hand over any password information. They instead grant permission so that one third-party app can connect to their Internet accounts for, say, Google, Facebook or Twitter.

In the Google attacks, hackers exploited this capability, aware that the user could grant them access to their personal information without even needing to re-enter their login details. As the phishing scam shows, the existence of such protocols makes it easier for users to allow access to third party applications, but in turn, makes it easier for hackers to also get access without needing the credentials themselves.

The Google phishing scam’s success relied on psychological manipulation. By impersonating Google Docs, hackers automatically gained the trust of a number of users – just a small change in how the application domain was disguised successfully convinced users that the application was trustworthy.

Next-gen phishing

Whilst traditional phishing scams now fail to reel in most of us – with their suspect spelling and senders – the Google Docs phishing attack demonstrated how a new breed of cloud phishing can trick even some of the most tech-savvy users. Next-generation phishing will see hackers manipulate user trust further by creating malicious applications disguised as legitimate applications, which users download and use. The widespread adoption of SaaS applications has made this an attractive vector for threat actors, and one that has not yet been exploited to its full potential.

In response to the Gmail attacks, Google implemented a number of new security measures: machine learning, improved email filtering, and malicious URL detection, all of which improve email security. Some providers now even give users a warning when they attempt to reply to an email address that is outside of their corporate domains, which is very useful within the workplace.

Although cloud providers will do their best to prevent and warn users of phishing scams, some individuals will still get hooked on a phisher’s line. Employee training therefore remains the first bastion of defence against phishing attacks. Enterprises should also consider investing in security technologies that can detect these threats as they advance. 

Over the last several months, intent-based networking (IBNS) has gained momentum as a newly viable technology that aims to further automate traditional network management. Although IBNS has existed for a few years now as a general concept, it was more buzz than reality until Cisco® launched its first IBNS software package earlier this year.
What is intent-based networking?
Traditionally, network administrators manually translate business policies into network device configurations, a time-intensive and error-prone activity that contributes to rising OpEx. But as digital transformation initiatives continue to reshape the way organizations approach their business and IT strategy, it’s becoming more difficult to stay on top of policy and configuration changes by hand.

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Everyone could agree that silos created unnecessary separation, protectionism, and bureaucracy. No one would dare argue that having rigid silos were somehow good for the organization.
Silos were, therefore, the easy target. They became the mantle onto which leaders could lay all past transgressions, and, in so doing, they became a convenient artifice to allow the leader to proclaim the dawn of a new era of integration, collaboration, and communication.
Silos are dead!
Except they never quite died, did they? In spite of all the talk, silos have persisted. They now just have different names. But the danger remains just as real, and their negative impact grows more significant every day.

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Rackspace has announced it is to acquire managed service provider Datapipe in what is being touted as the ‘biggest acquisition by far’ in the company’s history.

The company added it would make Rackspace the world’s leading provider of multi-cloud managed services, managed public cloud services across all the hyperscale infrastructure vendors, and – by a larger margin – the managed hosting and private cloud market.

“As we’ve learned more about one another, leaders of Rackspace and Datapipe have been struck by how similar our two companies are,” wrote Joe Eazor, Rackspace CEO in a company blog post announcing the news. “Rackspace intends to build on the industry leadership the two companies have established in reliability and support to create a new level of end to end customer experience.”

The acquisition once completed – sometime in the fourth quarter, Rackspace added – will overtake the previous buyout of TriCore Solutions, announced back in May, in size. “When Rackspace went private late last year, we did so mainly because, at this point in our history, we need to make major, long-term investments in the capabilities our customers are demanding,” added Eazor. “And that’s just what we’re doing.”

Since Eazor took over, around the same time as the TriCore acquisition was announced, the company’s focus on managed cloud services has been clear. Writing his debut blog as CEO, Eazor noted: “Thanks to the strategy Rackspace adopted a few years ago, it’s got the early lead in the managed cloud space. My goal here is to build on that foundation and make us the world’s preeminent IT services company.”

The acquisition of Datapipe therefore plays very nicely into this trend. The company has been featured in this publication on various occasions, not least when the British Medical Journal (BMJ) used Datapipe to transform its infrastructure. As CloudTech noted when telling this story in September last year, the BMJ’s environment was not the easiest to work with; one release per month changed to up to four releases per day, with content and services built and delivered around APIs as opposed to weekly batch file transfers.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Picture credit: Rackspace Afterparty TechStars Boulder 2011, by Andrew Hyde, used under CC BY / Modified from original

If you’re taking the plunge and migrating to cloud technologies, make sure you do a full return on investment (ROI) assessment – as companies who do are almost 50% more successful in realising cost savings.

This is the key finding from a new study issued by global IT provider Unisys. The report, conducted by IDG, polled 400 IT and business executives across eight countries and found four out of five respondents expected cost savings from adopting the cloud. An even higher number (82%) of those polled who had conducted formal ROI analysis up front said cost savings matched their expectations, compared to only 57% who had not previously assessed ROI.

In a similar vein, more than two thirds (68%) of respondents said they had contracted with a third party for cloud migration, with almost three quarters (72%) using the partner for cloud strategy and planning, and an even higher number still (79%) saying this partnership had helped their organisation achieve expected cost savings.

Organisations report the number of on-premises data centres continues to go down, from 43% usage per organisation today to 29% by 2019, with private cloud usage up to 28% from 20% and public cloud up to 21% from 18% in the same timeframe. As is often the case with such surveys, the questions also focused on the benefits of cloud computing, with improved disaster recovery and business continuity, agility and flexibility, more efficient storage, reduced capital costs and standardisation of IT all cited.

“Migration offers a plethora of cloud options…however, those choices can create unforeseen complexities that can easily derail expectations,” said Paul Gleeson, vice president of cloud and infrastructure services at Unisys. “Those organisations that plan their cloud migration carefully, drawing on the expertise of established partners where it makes the most strategic sense, are the ones best positioned to realise operational, financial and competitive success from cloud transformation.”