In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Mike Johnston, an infrastructure engineer at Supergiant.io, discussed how to use Kubernetes to set up a SaaS infrastructure for your business. Mike Johnston is an infrastructure engineer at Supergiant.io with over 12 years of experience designing, deploying, and maintaining server and workstation infrastructure at all scales. He has experience with brick and mortar data centers as well as cloud providers like Digital Ocean, Amazon Web Services, and Rackspace. His expertise is in automating deployment, management, and problem resolution in these environments, allowing his teams to run large transactional applications with high availability and the speed the consumer demands.

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As we have seen over and over again, a new wave of ransomware attacks has been plaguing large parts of Europe over the last couple of weeks. While the affected individuals and organizations are struggling with the very tangible business impact of the loss of revenue and operations, it’s critical to step back and review what else one could do to mitigate and minimize the damage from such attacks in the future.

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In today’s digital marketplace, business agility is praised above all else. Agility, after all, provides the opportunity to change services on a dime and ensure that customer needs are met, and expectations exceeded. But agility is a big concept and often it can be ill-defined and poorly executed upon. However, if your company wants to keep its competitive edge, it has to achieve this goal. As such, the question becomes, how do you do it?

The answer might be simpler than you think. It lies in better user experience. By dramatically improving how employees and customers interact with websites, applications and devices within the business — you can potentially change, and at the very least enhance, your company’s fortunes. This is because good user experience allows employees to be more productive in the work environment, and it affords them the ability to quickly evolve with changing customer requirements, thereby helping your company to deliver better customer engagement. New technologies play a major role in achieving great user experience, and therefore business agility. This is also the reason why so many organisations are pursuing a digital business strategy, shifting away from legacy IT services, and adopting cloud-based services instead.

The difficulty most companies face in delivering a good IT user experience, despite building more agile systems and moving data centres, applications and storage to the cloud, lies in their networks. While the digital world is moving rapidly forward, not much has changed in networks in the last 20 years. Two decades is a lifetime in technology terms, and this is why so many organisations find themselves restricted in their ability to change fast enough to support their digital growth and agility ambitions.

To achieve business agility, and deliver on the promise of better user experience of applications hosted in the cloud, companies must take a new approach to network connectivity in the enterprise. The time for change has come — and the right technology is already available. SD-WAN is the key to meeting agile business needs efficiently and effectively.

Challenged by infrastructure

The reality is, your business is only as agile, flexible and user focused as your network allows it to be. The majority of companies, and their IT departments, are still struggling to stay in control of complex networks. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, a large number of organisations are building applications and storing information in the cloud as well as on on-premise systems — these hybrid models are popular, but they do require complex changes to existing antiquated networks, which many simply can’t handle. The manual changes and hundreds of commands to configure the network can be an incredibly time and labour-intensive effort that can take months to carry out, and are prone to error, severely increasing the risk of network downtime.

Another reason can be found within your end user pool. This is because employees within most organisations are now using a range of devices to access more and more cloud-based applications and services. The thing is, across all these platforms and applications, end users expect consistent levels of network availability and performance — even when they are spread across the globe in remote locations and branch offices. Networks can strain under these circumstances, which in turn affect application performance levels, and bandwidth availability for business critical applications, and ultimately impact user experience. In fact, Riverbed Technology’s Global Application Performance Survey revealed that 89% of executives said that poor application performance negatively impacts their work on a regular basis — and this is no way to foster productivity or agility.

The key to optimisation

These problems require more than a patchwork approach to upgrading legacy network architectures. Simply reacting to network hotspots and user complaints is a recipe for failure; the only winning strategy is to get out in front of the challenges.

Providing effective long-term solutions requires a rethink of networking itself. Today’s organisations need a resolution that fundamentally redefines the way networking is done to better align with new, cloud-centric business practices. It needs to be more than an incremental approach of replacing manual processes with automated ones, and should take the form of a holistic solution that supports business-aligned orchestration and management of the network.

This is where SD-WAN can be of help, as it enables organisations to make on-the-fly adjustments to network performance and application delivery using embedded services such as application optimisation and QoS from a centralised location, and therefore can meet businesses’ ever-changing needs, when they need them. Ultimately, this translates into reduced costs and operational complexity, as well as increased agility to deliver superior-performing applications and experiences to users.

Technology delivers user experience

SD-WAN allows businesses to streamline and simplify how hybrid networks are deployed and managed. This in turn enables organisations to provide fast and secure delivery of applications hosted on-premises or in the public cloud to employees — boosting end user experience, agility and also productivity.

SD-WAN also enables organisations to direct traffic and deploy advanced network services from a centralised location, with mere clicks of a mouse. Reducing the time to market through efficient configuration and provisioning is vital in a world that is constantly evolving — and the good news is much of this can be automated. What’s more, an app-centric SD-WAN will automatically identify the applications in the organisation’s network and group them into logical categories based on business criticality, and apply network-service policies to those categories based on built-in best practices.

These benefits of flexible reengineering of your company’s network are endless. Application aware SD-WAN can automatically route user sessions to cloud hosted services, send voice traffic to their highest-quality network paths; segregate employee traffic from that of partners and customers; and send recreational Internet traffic through the most rigorous firewalls — all adding to risk mitigation.

SD-WAN can offer organisations a much more holistic approach that makes orchestrating enterprise and cloud connectivity easier and more cost-effective, which is why the SD-WAN market is expected to grow significantly in the next several years. According to Gartner, by the end of 2019, 30% of enterprises will use SD-WAN products in remote branches, up from less than 1% at the end of 2015.

In today’s digitally-driven world where business velocity is increasing, and end users have higher expectations of technology, it is imperative to rethink the way things have always been done. Until organisations rethink their network structure, they will struggle to deliver user experience and find agility unachievable. 

The shift of IT workloads to hybrid cloud computing continues to grow, fuelled in part by the rise of digital transformation projects. Worldwide spending on public cloud services and infrastructure is forecast to reach $266 billion in 2021, according to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC).

Although spending growth will likely slow during 2016-2021, the market is still expected to achieve a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21 percent. Moreover, public cloud services spending will reach $128 billion in 2017 — that’s an increase of 25.4 percent over 2016.

Public cloud market development

The United States will be the largest market for public cloud services accounting for more than 60 percent of worldwide revenues throughout the forecast, and total spending of $163 billion in 2021.

Western Europe and Asia-Pacific excluding Japan (APeJ) will be the second and third largest regions with 2021 spending levels of $52 billion and $25 billion, respectively. APeJ and Latin America will experience the fastest spending growth over the forecast period with CAGRs of 26.7 percent and 26.2 percent, respectively.

However, according to the IDC assessment, six of the eight regions are forecast to experience CAGRs greater than 20 percent over the next five years.

“In Western Europe, the public cloud market is going to more than double in the 2016-2021 time frame led by strong spending growth in Germany, which is also the largest national market, Italy, and Sweden,” said Angela Vacca, senior research manager at IDC.

The U.S. industries that will see the fastest growth in public cloud services spending are professional services (21.5 percent CAGR), media (21 percent CAGR), retail, and telecom (each with a CAGR of 20.9 percent).

The U.S. industries that will spend the most on public cloud services are discrete manufacturing, professional services, and banking. Together, these three industries will account for nearly one third of all public cloud services spending in the United States in 2021.

In Asia-Pacific excluding Japan, banking, professional services, and telecom will deliver more than a third of the region’s public cloud services spending in 2021 while the industries with the fastest spending growth will be professional services, personal and consumer services, and process manufacturing.

Software as a service (SaaS) will remain the dominant cloud computing type, capturing two thirds of all public cloud spending in 2017 and nearly 60 percent in 2021.  Spending on infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) will grow at much faster rates than SaaS with five-year CAGRs of 30 percent and 29.7 percent, respectively.

Outlook for enterprise adoption growth

In terms of company size, more than half of all public cloud spending will come from very large businesses (those with more than 1,000 employees) while medium-sized businesses (100-499 employees) will deliver about 20 percent of spending throughout the forecast.

Large businesses (500-999 employees) will see the fastest growth with a five-year CAGR of 22.8 percent. While purchase priorities vary somewhat depending on company size, the leading product categories include CRM and ERM applications in addition to server and storage hardware.

“I will be talking about ChatOps and ChatOps as a way to solve some problems in the DevOps space,” explained Himanshu Chhetri, CTO of Addteq, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @DevOpsSummit at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that SkyScale will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
SkyScale is a world-class provider of cloud-based, ultra-fast multi-GPU hardware platforms for lease to customers desiring the fastest performance available as a service anywhere in the world. SkyScale builds, configures, and manages dedicated systems strategically located in maximum-security facilities, allowing customers to focus on results while minimizing capital equipment investment.

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With tough new regulations coming to Europe on data privacy in May 2018, Calligo will explain why in reality the effect is global and transforms how you consider critical data. EU GDPR fundamentally rewrites the rules for cloud, Big Data and IoT.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Adam Ryan, Vice President and General Manager EMEA at Calligo, will examine the regulations and provide insight on how it affects technology, challenges the established rules and will usher in new levels of diligence around personal data.

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Did you know that the reservations systems of the biggest carriers mostly run on a specialized IBM operating system known as Transaction Processing Facility (TPF). Designed by IBM in the 1960’s it was designed to process a large numbers of transactions quickly. Although IBM is still updating the code, the last major rewrite was about ten years ago. With all the major technologies changes since then, it’s clear that IBM has already accomplished a herculean task by keeping an application viable for over 50 years!

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Runaway cloud computing cost may be causing an information technology industry crisis. Expanding requirements, extended transition schedules and misleading marketplace hype have made “Transformation” a dirty word. Questions about how to manage cost variances and deviations with assets and cost across different suppliers abound. A recent Cloud Tech article explained that while public cloud offers considerable cost savings in comparison to private or on-premises based alternatives, there may also be significant hidden costs. Operational features like auto-scaling can cause costs to soar in line with demand for resources, making predicting costs difficult and budgeting even harder. There is also an acute need for a holistic and heterogeneous system that can track the costs of cloud services from the point of consumption (e.g., an application or business unit) down to the resources involved (e.g., storage or compute service).

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Calligo has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Calligo is an innovative cloud service provider offering mid-sized companies the highest levels of data privacy. Calligo offers unparalleled application performance guarantees, commercial flexibility and a personalized support service from its globally located cloud platforms. Through its four pillars of focus, Calligo delivers a platform that businesses can trust to deliver the high level of service and protection they expect and is lacking in many cloud offerings.

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