“We are still a relatively small software house and we are focusing on certain industries like FinTech, med tech, energy and utilities. We help our customers with their digital transformation,” noted Piotr Stawinski, Founder and CEO of EARP Integration, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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“We were founded in 2003 and the way we were founded was about good backup and good disaster recovery for our clients, and for the last 20 years we’ve been pretty consistent with that,” noted Marc Malafronte, Territory Manager at StorageCraft, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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“With Digital Experience Monitoring what used to be a simple visit to a web page has exploded into app on phones, data from social media feeds, competitive benchmarking – these are all components that are only available because of some type of digital asset,” explained Leo Vasiliou, Director of Web Performance Engineering at Catchpoint Systems, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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For over a decade, Application Programming Interface or APIs have been used to exchange data between multiple platforms. From social media to news and media sites, most websites depend on APIs to provide a dynamic and real-time digital experience. APIs have made its way into almost every device and service available today and it continues to spur innovations in every field of technology.
There are multiple programming languages used to build and run applications in the online world. And just like every other language, there is always the need for an interpreter when trying to communicate with someone who doesn’t speak the same language as you. This is where APIs come into play, APIs act like the interpreter helping different independent services interact and interpret the data shared with each other.

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Your homes and cars can be automated and self-serviced. Why can’t your storage? From simply asking questions to analyze and troubleshoot your infrastructure, to provisioning storage with snapshots, recovery and replication, your wildest sci-fi dream has come true.
In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 20th Cloud Expo, Dan Florea, Director of Product Management at Tintri, provided a ChatOps demo where you can talk to your storage and manage it from anywhere, through Slack and similar services with Tintri’s web services architecture and APIs. Impress your DevOps team with smart and autonomous infrastructure.

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“Peak 10 is a hybrid infrastructure provider across the nation. We are in the thick of things when it comes to hybrid IT,” explained Michael Fuhrman, Chief Technology Officer at Peak 10, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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For many enterprises, migrating towards a cloud delivered approach for IT systems is an attractive proposition. Cost efficiency and business agility are big drivers for CIOs to make the move.  Most modern companies have either started migrating toward a public cloud or they are in the early planning and analysis phases of doing so.

At the same time, making the jump from on-site infrastructure to cloud-hosted platforms is not free of challenges such as, regulations, data governance, billing and cost management. One of the CIO’s highest priorities must be to minimise migration risk.

According to a LinkedIn Information Security Community survey, 49 percent of CIOs and CSOs feel that one of the major barriers to cloud adoption is the fear of data loss and leakage and 59 percent believe that traditional network security tools/appliances worked only somewhat or not at all, in the cloud.

Before an organisation makes the leap to the cloud, it’s imperative for CIOs and CSOs to address the following risks and concerns:

Regulatory requirements: Depending upon the industry, a company may be subject to more stringent regulations such as PCI DSS (payment cards), SOX, and HIPAA (health data). While the cloud doesn’t change the process and requirements needed in order to meet those regulatory standards, it often means that an organisation will need to leverage new approaches and technology. Some examples include identity and access management (IAM), audit logging and anomaly detection, and incident response and responsible disclosure. 

Data governance: In addition to, or a part of, regulatory requirements is having a well-formed strategy for data governance and locality. As with on-premises, CIOs need to make sure that they have a well-defined data access policy in place to ensure that users can’t access or move data unless they are first approved. In addition to data access, encryption of sensitive data (both in-transit and at rest) should be implemented, and in the case of HIPAA, it’s required.

Infrastructure and application security: One of the main changes to infrastructure security in the Cloud is the move to a software-defined security model instead of a hardware-defined appliance and perimeter-based model. The same network planning needs to take place up-front, but it should be done with remembering that there is no true perimeter, and that all resources are elastic.

Due to this elastic, programmatic environment, it’s advised to have a continuous change monitoring solution in place so that there are never any configuration “surprises” that can potentially expose critical data or assets. In addition to infrastructure security, application security testing should be ideally performed during every new update that is delivered to provide continuous security assurance.

The best migration approaches 

Once the IT department has fully addressed these risk factors, they can move on to plan the best cloud migration approach to meet the company’s business objectives and requirements. While there are a number of approaches used in the industry, below are the most broad:

Lift and shift: This approach involves mapping the on-premises hardware and/or VMs to similar resource-sized cloud instances. For example, if a company’s front-end application server has 4 CPUs, 64GB of RAM, and 512GB of local storage, they would use a cloud instance that matches that configuration as closely as possible. The challenges with this approach is that on-premise solutions are typically over-provisioned with respect to resources in order to meet peak loads as they lack the elastic, auto-scaling features of cloud. This results in increased cloud costs, which may be fine if this is a short-term approach

Refactor and rearchitect: In order to best maximize the features of cloud, such as auto-scaling, migration can be the forcing function to take some time and re-architect the application to be more performant and also keep the costs under control. It is also a good time to re-evaluate technology choices, as a company may be able to switch some solutions from more expensive commercial ones, to open-source or cloud-native offerings.

Shelve and spend: This third approach involves retiring a monolithic on-premises application and moving to a SaaS solution. An example of this would be an HCM (Human Capital Management) application, which is often times a disparate set of code bases tied together with a relational database, migrating to an offering such as Workday HCM. This allows the modernisation of business logic and offloads the operational burden of the service and infrastructure to the SaaS provider.

While there are a number of hurdles and challenges to overcome when it comes to cloud migration, these approaches can ensure that CIOs and CSOs take the best route in order to capitalize on the benefits of moving to the cloud, while minimising risk at the same time.

“We are focused on SAP running in the clouds, to make this super easy because we believe in the tremendous value of those powerful worlds – SAP and the cloud,” explained Frank Stienhans, CTO of Ocean9, Inc., in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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Microsoft has announced revenues of $23.3 billion (£17.9bn) in its most recent financial quarter – with cloud again at the heart of its success.

This will be something of a familiar story to those who have taken notice of Microsoft’s financials over the past year or so, with CEO Satya Nadella telling analysts that financial year 2017 “all up was a tremendous year of customer momentum with cloud, AI, and digital transformation.”

Microsoft does not disclose specific product revenues but instead gives a guideline; Azure revenue went up 97% year over year, with Office 365 commercial revenues up 43%. The company instead puts its revenues into a few buckets. ‘Productivity and business processes’ – the Office 365 side – was at $8.45 billion over the most recent quarter, an increase of 21%, while ‘intelligent cloud’ – Azure and server products – rose 10% to $7.43bn.

“Our technology world view of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge is resonating with businesses everywhere,” Nadella said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “Every customer I talk to is looking for both innovative technology to drive new growth, as well as a strategic partner who can help build their own digital capability. Microsoft is that trusted partner.”

Among the quarter’s highlights for Microsoft included the acquisition of Cloudyn in June, to help Azure customers manage and optimise their cloud usage, as well as joining the open source Cloud Foundry Foundation as a gold member and an expanded partnership with cloud storage provider Box focusing around machine learning. The latter angle was noted by Nadella, who told analysts: “The core currency of any business going forward will be the ability to convert their data into AI that drives competitive advantage.”

Meanwhile, another company whose cloud arm stands out alongside the rest of their results is SAP, who filed yesterday. Revenues for the German software giant were at €5.8 billion (£5.2bn) for Q2, with cloud revenues seeing the biggest growth at 29% to €932 million.

You can read the full Microsoft release here.