Who is accountable for SSH-related, key-based access in your organization? In many enterprises, this is not clear, leading to assumptions that leave you vulnerable to attack and compliance violations as well. This article will address the challenge of SSH user key-based access from the perspective of compliance.
It’s all about access control. All the regulations, laws and frameworks exist to ensure, at a minimum, that protected data (PII, ePHI, credit card data, etc.) has authorized access. It doesn’t matter whether that access is being requested by a machine, admin or business user.

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Rackspace and OVH have announced the openings of new data centres in Frankfurt and London respectively.

The former cited EU and Swiss data protection regulations as part of the reason for its move, while the latter said that ‘in spite of Brexit’ it was still committed to the UK market.

“This marks a significant step forward for OVH in supporting UK customers with a local dedicated gateway into our worldwide network,” said Hiren Parekh, director cloud EMEA at OVH. “We are offering low latency, guaranteed bandwidth and enhanced DDoS protection for all of our customers.” Jeff Cotton, president of Rackspace, said: “Rackspace’s first data centre in Germany marks another key milestone for our DACH portfolio and reflects our investment in the German market.”

The new German data centre means Rackspace will operate 12 worldwide, while OVH is opening its fifth data centre in 12 months, after Australia, Singapore, Poland and Germany.

The two companies have been busy outside of their data centre remits in recent months. In May, Rackspace announced the acquisition of TriCore Solutions, an enterprise app management provider, as well as unveiling their new CEO, former EarthLink boss Joe Eazor. Last month, OVH announced a €400 million (£358.6m) funding round in order to help expand its global strategy.

Also among Rackspace’s recent highlights was announcing a deal with Google Cloud for managed services support, while OVH was named as the top cloud computing vendor in Europe in May in terms of price and performance. 

Open source software adoption continues to disrupt the traditional IT markets, as enterprise CIOs and CTOs seek ways to evolve by working with progressive vendors and service providers who have a proven track record of open innovation.

The growth of digital business transformation and the Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to drive large investment in IT operations management (ITOM) through 2020, according to the latest global market study by Gartner. A primary driver for organisations moving to ITOM open-source software (OSS) is lower cost of ownership.

OSS ITOM market development

While acceptance of OSS ITOM is increasing, traditional closed-source ITOM software still has the biggest budget allocation today. Moreover, complexity and governance issues that face users of OSS ITOM tools cannot be ignored.

“In fact, these issues open up opportunities for ITOM vendors. Even vendors that are late to market with ITOM functionality can compete in this area,” said Laurie Wurster, research director at Gartner.

Gartner believes many enterprises will turn to managed ITOM or ITOM as a service (ITOMaaS) enabled by open-source technologies and provided by a third party. With OSS, vendors can provide more cost-effective and readily available ITOM functions in a scaled manner through the cloud.

Through 2020, public cloud and managed services are expected to be leveraged more often for ITOM tools, which will drive growth of the subscription business model for both cloud and on-premises ITOM.

However, on-premises deployments will still be the most common delivery method. This imposes multiple challenges to incumbent ITOM vendors. First, those vendors that do not offer a cloud delivery model will face continuous cannibalisation from ITOM vendors that can deliver ITOM through both cloud and on-premises.

Second, platform vendors are providing some native ITOM functionalities on their public clouds. Customers that are running workloads solely on these platforms may prefer these native features. There are also hybrid requirements for ITOM tools that can seamlessly manage both cloud and on-premises environments.

Future of cloud services and OSS for ITOM

Customer demand has driven traditional software vendors to transform and adapt to the changing technology and competitive landscapes. Competitive pressure from cloud (SaaS offerings) and commercial OSS (offerings with a free license plus paid support) is forcing ITOM providers to move toward subscription-based business models for both cloud and on-premises deployments.

The influx of new, smaller ITOM vendors focused on one or two major tool categories will continue to cause disruption for large traditional suite vendors. Given this situation, traditional vendors will need to react by changing how their products fit together.

More importantly, according to the Gartner assessment, traditional vendors need to change how their solutions are sold as customers exert significant pressure to shift to offering cloud-based services.

Amazon Web Services hit $4.1 billion (£3.13bn) in revenue for the most recent quarter, contributing almost 11% of Amazon’s overall revenue, according to the company’s latest financial results.

The figures represent a significant rise from the previous two quarters, where AWS revenue was at $3.54bn and $3.66bn. Run rate for AWS now stands at $16bn, up from $14bn for the last quarter, while overall net sales for Amazon stood at $38.0 billion.

In a conference call with analysts, Brian Olsavsky, Amazon chief financial officer, fielded several questions on the topic of AWS. “We are seeing great customer adoption,” he said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “Our usage in all of our large services are actually accelerating and they’re growing at a rate higher than our revenue growth. So you’re seeing great adoption. We are seeing AWS customers migrate more than 30 databases over the last year and a half.”

Discussing profitability – or rather, how AWS’ operating margin had significantly decreased, to 22.3%, the lowest for at least six quarters – Olsavsky pointed to a 71% increase in assets acquired under capital leases, the majority of which was for Amazon’s cloud arm. “We’ve really stepped up the infrastructure to match the large usage growth and also the geographic expansion – and that is showing up in tech and content,” he said.

As AWS is the only cloud provider out of Amazon, Google and Microsoft to fully disclose its financial figures, it is therefore difficult to fully compare. Google’s ‘other revenue’ bucket, which includes cloud, was at $3.1 billion for the most recent quarter, while Microsoft’s ‘intelligent cloud’ bucket, including Azure among others such as server products, hit $7.43 billion. Google added the number of cloud deals above $500,000 had tripled year over year.

According to a note published by Synergy Research yesterday evening, Amazon managed to gain 1% in market share over the last four quarters in spite of its dominant position, with Microsoft growing 3%, Google 1% and IBM staying steady. This evidently has a knock on for the rest of the market, with the following 10 players – whose combined market share is just over half of Amazon’s – falling 1%, and the rest of the market dropping significantly. As previously, of the second-tier players, Alibaba and Oracle are growing the quickest.

“The increasing dominance of hyperscale players continues to play out, with all four leading companies having cause to celebrate,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy in a statement. “While Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform are doubling in size, IBM continues to dominate in hosted private cloud and AWS is still over three times the size of its nearest competitor.

“Some of the numbers are actually pretty spectacular,” Dinsdale added. “The year on year market growth rate is nudging down as we expected in such a large market, but it remains at comfortably over 40% and AWS alone generated revenue growth of $1.2 billion over the last four quarters.”

You can take a look at Amazon’s full report here.

Postscript: As reported by multiple sources, the rise in Amazon stock yesterday as the results were announced briefly put Jeff Bezos to the top of the pile as the richest person in the world, ahead of Bill Gates, before shares fell a few hours later putting Gates back on top.

Read more: AWS, Azure, and the state of play right now

Blockchain technology is taking over the world. It is an ingenious invention by a person or a group of people known by the pseudonym, Satoshi Nakamoto. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 8 years, you have heard of Bitcoin. The underlying technology behind Bitcoin is called blockchain. It is a public ledger of all the Bitcoin transactions ever happened on its network.

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Any startup has to have a clear go –to-market strategy from the beginning. Similarly, any data science project has to have a go to production strategy from its first days, so it could go beyond proof-of-concept.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence in production would result in hundreds of training pipelines and machine learning models that are continuously revised by teams of data scientists and seamlessly connected with web applications for tenants and users.

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Microsoft has joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a San Francisco-based organisation aiming at sustaining containers and microservices architectures, as a platinum member.

The Redmond giant joins 14 other companies in the platinum membership category, including Docker, Google – who originally designed Kubernetes before donating it to the CNCF – and IBM.

The foundation’s mission statement is to “create and drive the adoption of a new computing paradigm that is optimised for modern distributed systems environments capable of scaling to tens of thousands of self-healing multi-tenant nodes.”

Microsoft said joining the CNCF was ‘another natural step’ on its open source journey. The company last month joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation as a joint member, paying $100,000 per annum for three years.

“We are honoured to have Microsoft, widely recognised as one of the most important enterprise technology and cloud providers in the world, join CNCF as a platinum member,” said Dan Kohn, CNCF executive director in a statement. “Their membership, along with other global cloud providers that also belong to CNCF, is a testament to the importance and growth of cloud native technologies.

“We believe Microsoft’s increasing commitment to open source infrastructure will be a significant asset to the CNCF,” Kohn added.

Alongside this, Microsoft has announced the launch of Azure Container Instances (ACI), which aims to deliver containers simply and efficiently without the effort of managing virtual machine infrastructure. The company also introduced the ACI Connector for Kubernetes in open source, which enables Kubernetes clusters to deploy to Azure Container Instances. “ACIs are the fastest and easiest way to run a container in the cloud,” wrote Corey Sanders, Azure director of compute, adding it was the first service of its kind.

The product is available in public preview for Linux customers, with Windows support following ‘in the coming weeks’, the company said.

Read more: A comparison of Azure and AWS microservices solutions

Consumers’ expectations for always-on technology are continually increasing, with businesses looking to see where they need to make changes to support this. Users expect their applications to be available and functioning at optimal performance, considering it almost a basic human right, with even the most minor disruptions a cause for uproar.

A recent survey by digital operations management provider PagerDuty found that resolving consumer-impacting incidents takes IT teams approximately double the amount of time consumers are willing to wait for a service that isn’t performing. This level of expectance has translated into the workplace, where users wish to have 100% access to more applications across multiple devices.

In addition to this, making up an increasing proportion of the workplace are digital native millennials, expecting instant access to information having grown up with broadband, smartphones, laptops and social media as the norm. A PwC study recently showed that 59% of millennials surveyed highlight a prospective employer’s technology provision as crucially important when choosing a job.

This demonstrates just how important it is for all users to have access to important applications at any time. This demand requires a complex virtualised infrastructure, while aggressive performance SLAs are on the rise and corporate management teams continue to squeeze software licensing costs, creating a challenging environment for even the most efficient IT department.

Why backing up everything the same way doesn’t always work

With such high expectations for application availability, organisations can be tempted to reflect this approach in their backup and recovery strategies to ensure that users can access all applications regardless. Even with the best IT operations in practice, system failures can be caused by any number of things from natural disasters to human error and power outages. In the event of catastrophe, users may want their corporate coffee voucher app back up and running in time for Monday morning, however, protecting all data and application code in the same way is not always the most economic approach, regardless of storage technique.

In a world where IT directors and businesses are faced with an increasingly complex application set, and a growing number of on-premise, cloud and hybrid storage options, not to mention pressures to save money and innovate, IT teams should refrain from the temptation to bet the house on one backup methodology. When assessing back-up and recovery options, businesses should look to a hybrid storage model to meet their individual needs. The most common enterprise use for cloud storage today is in fact off-site backup and archiving and with a hybrid cloud storage model companies can use a combination of on-premise storage and storage in the public cloud to deliver even better value. For example, they may choose to migrate non-mission critical applications to the public cloud and keep critical ones on premise for increased security.

A structured approach to restoration

Once a storage strategy has been implemented, it’s important that organisations don’t deploy just one backup methodology. Instead, they should utilise tools that can forecast acceptable risk profiles for the re-deployment of applications, including analysis of licensing costs, budgeting capital expenditures and assessment of application availability versus business risk.

Whilst some applications are mission critical to the running of a business, for example trading tools in the financial industry, some applications, such as timesheets for recording employee activity, can endure downtime with fewer ramifications. An estimated 20 per cent of organisations’ applications are non-mission critical, so maximising resource utilization and improving virtual application performance across hybrid environments will be key to ensuring business continuity in the event of catastrophic breach.

With the right tools in place, and a multi-option approach that clearly forecasts backup and recovery implications, organisations can deploy the most cost-effective mix of applications and data at every phase, and ensure backup and recovery judgement isn’t clouded by the demands of its users. The key is understanding that every business is on its own journey of digital transformation and will be at different stages within a growing virtualized environment that needs a tailored back-up and recovery plan that isn’t simply backing up every application.