The concept of ‘everything as a service’ has been around the industry for a few years – yet according to the latest note from 451 Research, the increased demand for managed security, disaster recovery and networking is forcing its rise to the mainstream.

The analyst firm argues that the ability to ‘connect the dots’ with managed services will provide a key differentiator to both channel partners and service providers, as new kinds of managed services emerge. According to the company’s Voice of the Enterprise: Hosting and Cloud Managed Services study, from earlier this year, managed services and security services are aligned to approximately half of the total hosting and cloud opportunity, with that number increasing year by year.

“This spending trend, alongside feedback from providers, indicates there is an appetite for a wider range of bundled offerings from the managed service sector including systems integrators, VARs, and others with service deliver experience,” said Rory Duncan, 451 research director for managed services and hosting in a statement.

“We see a significant opportunity for technology vendors to partner with service providers to offer higher value, niche and vertical offerings as these services rapidly emerge,” he added.

This publication first examined everything, or anything as a service (XaaS) back in 2014. The rather modest example given at the time was around desktop as a service, which would have included from a service provider an office suite, or the SaaS side, servers (IaaS), as well as maintenance and a physical endpoint, offering the customer one fee and one ‘throat to choke’ for the product’s delivery.

In other words, this example offers up a managed service. But as a blog post from Chargify, a subscription billing software provider, put it back in February, XaaS is ‘extending beyond cloud computing’, pervading multiple industry models, and could kickstart the smart home revolution.

“[We] expect to see a myriad of more traditional industries and non-subscription products pivot to include ‘as a service’ in their offerings,” the company wrote. “Consumers are businesses are embracing the many benefits of the subscription model, and businesses should be looking at how to incorporate XaaS into their own roadmaps for future success.”

More CIOs and CTOs are choosing to architect and deploy hybrid multi-cloud computing environments in 2017. The trend is being driven by growing demand to support digital transformation projects that are led by the C-suite.

Newly released results from the CloudView Survey 2017 reveal the top drivers of cloud adoption – include improving agility and security, as well as standardising IT infrastructure.

Cloud computing market development

As multi-cloud environments and hybrid cloud become more prevalent, the survey revealed that 87 percent of cloud users have adopted some capabilities for a hybrid cloud strategy – that’s an increase of 17 percent compared to 2016, according to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC).

“Beyond adoption and maturity, a series of questions on ‘why are’ or ‘why aren’t’ respondents moving more workloads to the cloud makes up a key part of the study,” said Benjamin McGrath, senior research analyst at IDC.

Additional findings from the study include:

• 56 percent of users run more than one type of cloud deployment
• 40 percent of cloud users are “cloud First” organisations

“When we look at the shift in IT spend over the next 12-24 months to more of a mix of multiple types of cloud deployments, we see each type of organisation take a different journey,” added McGrath.

The study gathers data on the journey to cloud and how it differs by vertical – and micro-vertical – by country, by company size, company age, and by job title.

What industry-specific projects are moving to the cloud? What are end-users looking for from their vendors in each country? How will all that change over time?

CloudView 2017 encompasses thousands of surveys from line-of-business cloud buyers and IT operations staff on cloud adoption rates, trends, and attitudes.

Survey respondents are from more than 6,000 organisations worldwide, all of whom are current users of cloud services.

To gain a complete picture of potential cloud customers along the journey, data is also collected from respondents at organisations who are not currently utilising cloud.

If you are thinking about moving applications off a mainframe and over to open systems and the cloud, consider these guidelines to prioritize what to move and what to eliminate.
On the surface, mainframe architecture seems relatively simple: A centrally located computer processes data through an input/output subsystem and stores its computations in memory. At the other end of the mainframe are printers and terminals that communicate with the mainframe through protocols.

For all of its apparent simplicity, mainframe architecture can be extraordinarily complex. Mainframes process thousands of transactions per second and require an extensive infrastructure to house and maintain them. The hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of terminals (think of a bank’s ATM network) require a message routing scheme that can quickly prioritize and route transaction requests.

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As enterprise cloud becomes the norm, businesses and government programs must address compounded regulatory compliance related to data privacy and information protection. The most recent, Controlled Unclassified Information and the EU’s GDPR have board level implications and companies still struggle with demonstrating due diligence. Developers and DevOps leaders, as part of the pre-planning process and the associated supply chain, could benefit from updating their code libraries and design by incorporating changes.

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Unlike legacy ERP systems that can cost several hundred thousand dollars in capital expenditure, cloud ERP is relatively a lot more affordable. They are also viewed as a lot more stable given that the data is stored on decentralized servers. But besides these, moving your ERP to the cloud can bring in a number of other lesser understood benefits.

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Data reduction delivers compelling cost reduction that substantially improves the business case in every cloud deployment model. No matter which cloud approach you choose, the cost savings benefits from data reduction should not be ignored and must be a component of your cloud strategy.
IT professionals are finding that the future of IT infrastructure lies in the cloud. Data reduction technologies enable clouds — public, private, and hybrid — to deliver business agility and elasticity at the lowest possible cost, making cloud the deployment model of choice for IT infrastructure going forward.

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Today’s fast-paced work environment finds employees striving to improve efficiency, productivity and communication. In an attempt to excel at work, they often use applications, services, data storage and sharing beyond IT’s approval. This practice — known as shadow IT — is having an obvious impact on technical support teams by undercutting sound governance and reducing operational efficiencies. According to Gartner, by 2020, one-third of security breaches will be because of shadow IT.

There are five ways, though, that IT can become a trusted ally across an organisation and build a plan of action against the security vulnerabilities and unnecessary costs of shadow IT.

Seek out the biggest shadow IT opportunities

Information is knowledge and knowledge is power. Take inventory of who is using what programmes across the company. With this information, IT can then assess potential issues and make appropriate changes. Monitor closely to see if any new and unknown tools or applications pop up in regular scans. Depending on results, an enterprise-wide vulnerability scan may be necessary. Network sniffers and security scanning tools can provide detailed information on new and unknown data streams. And while monitoring does not remove the threats of shadow IT, it does provide the IT department with better insights and the ability to start risk assessments or research alternative solutions.

Assess security and efficiency risks and provide suitable alternatives

Take advantage of creating an open dialogue with your colleagues — your internal customers — across the company. Listen to their feedback, learn more about the problems they’re trying to solve, and be willing to provide input on which tools may be a security concern and offer an alternative. I once had a request to review a tool that was already approved and deployed by another department in the organisation. In this case, it was a lot easier (and a lot cheaper) to adjust our plan to add a few more licenses than it would have been to initiate a whole new contract.

Encourage employees to come forward with their requirements

Let’s look at supporting teleworkers as an example. If you don’t have an IT-approved way of enabling employees to work remotely, it is almost certain they will find a way to do so on their own. That’s when things get tricky. There is a tendency for IT organisations to not be as open to new requirements needed by employees to do their job.

IT should offer a safe haven for those employees and departments to come forth with their requirements and even suggest possible solutions that they would like to see implemented. By working together, IT can then take a look at the programmes, determine the risk and offer comparable solutions, where needed, to achieve beneficial outcomes for all.

Become more involved in the application selection process

This truly comes down to trust and relationships. It is important for IT to build a rapport with every department head and meet regularly to discuss their technology strategy. Establishing an open dialogue between departments and the IT organisation helps to remove the “us” versus “them” notion and makes technology transparency and potential risks of adopting unapproved technologies less of an issue. Having a seat at the table in the strategic planning stage will reduce most surprises around shadow IT down the road.

Keep in mind that not all shadow IT is bad

It is very possible that not everything you discover when mitigating shadow IT is bad. The tools you discover are truly the voice of the customer, showing you what teams really need to be successful. And it even may be that these applications can be beneficial to other departments. Be open to feedback from the department heads and work together to have IT be part of the strategic planning for the department and company from the beginning.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that shadow IT doesn’t have to be prevalent if there is open communication between IT and its customers. Employees typically engage in shadow IT because they think it will save time and money by not involving IT in the approval process for the technology they want to use to be more efficient.

In reality, going around IT just bypasses the critical management, integration, and security and compliance — related safeguards they support. While it may take a bit of time, additional due diligence and even a bit of hand-holding make it possible to mitigate the risk of shadow IT and safeguard the security, profitability and efficiency of the entire company.

“As we’ve gone out into the public cloud we’ve seen that over time we may have lost a few things – we’ve lost control, we’ve given up cost to a certain extent, and then security, flexibility,” explained Steve Conner, VP of Sales at Cloudistics,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’re here to tell the world about our cloud-scale infrastructure that we have at Juniper combined with the world-class security that we put into the cloud,” explained Lisa Guess, VP of Systems Engineering at Juniper Networks, 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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