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The hybrid cloud: it’s a buzzword which refuses to go away.

This month is a case in point. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, arguably the two biggest and most influential cloud computing organisations, both made announcements on the theme.

The general availability of Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016 was seen as “another big step in hybrid cloud”, Microsoft argued, with a “cloud-ready OS” which “inherently enables hybrid cloud.” AWS, on the other hand, announced a previously-rumoured hybrid cloud partnership with VMware, the two companies pointing out its leadership in public and private cloud respectively.

Demand is certainly there. According to IDC, more than 70% of IT organisations in western Europe will commit to hybrid cloud architectures by 2017. IBM, who announced their own object storage for hybrid clouds last week, released their own study which backed up those figures; 78% of C-suite executives polled said their cloud initiatives were coordinated or fully integrated, up from 34% in 2012.

As Sebastian Krause, IBM Cloud Europe general manager wrote for this publication at the time: “Executives expect hybrid cloud adoption (in particular) to support their organisation’s growth in three main ways: by facilitating innovation, lowering total cost of ownership and by enhancing operational efficiencies and enabling them to more readily meet customer expectations.”

Sounds great, right? But there may be a catch.

Charles Crouchman is CTO at enterprise cloud and virtualisation software provider Turbonomic. He argues that plenty of organisations eulogising over hybrid cloud instead have ‘multi-cloud’. “While we hear a lot of discussion about hybrid cloud, the truth is that the majority of organisations aren’t there yet,” he tells CloudTech.

“A truly hybrid cloud would allow workloads to switch seamlessly between cloud environments, whether public or private, depending on the needs of the organisation,” Crouchman adds. “Instead, what the vast majority of organisations have now is multi-cloud; while they have a number of environments, both private and public, and workloads may fluctuate in size and demand, barring exceptional circumstances those workloads will stay where they were first placed.”

Essentially, if you’re using multiple clouds, it does not automatically make it hybrid. Back in August, Turbonomic polled almost 2,000 IT decision makers, and the verdict which came back was that many organisations did not have the skills needed to manage a multi-cloud environment. This was backed up by a study from HyTrust in September which found that while 60% of VMworld attendees polled said they plan to move to a multi-cloud model, data encryption and security remain serious stumbling blocks. Interestingly, almost a third said that, if they were using two or more clouds, they preferred a flavour combination of AWS and Azure.

“This is quite believable when one considers that by their very nature multi-cloud environments aren’t managed from a single user interface,” explains Crouchman. “An organisation’s private and public clouds have, in most cases, come from separate vendors, each working differently, with their own management tools and interfaces.

“This adds extra complexity on top of an already potent mix of challenges, such as deciding which workloads should be placed in which cloud; balancing cost and performance across all environments; while meeting service level agreements and quality of service obligations.”

For Crouchman, this is indicative of a stepping stone approach; if companies are still experiencing trouble with deploying multi-cloud environments, then a truly hybrid approach is a long way away. So what would in his opinion be the perfect scenario? “In an ideal future, organisations would use autonomic, economic-based intelligence to manage multi-cloud environments and ultimately deliver hybrid cloud, with workloads always in the best possible place to suit business needs and provide peak performance,” he says.

“In such a system, the multi-cloud environment would be treated as an economy in its own right; with resources bought and traded depending on their applications’ – or end users’ – real-time needs, while obeying the organisation’s own budgetary rules.”

What happens when the different parts of a vehicle become smarter than the vehicle itself? As we move toward the era of smart everything, hundreds of entities in a vehicle that communicate with each other, the vehicle and external systems create a need for identity orchestration so that all entities work as a conglomerate. Much like an orchestra without a conductor, without the ability to secure, control, and connect the link between a vehicle’s head unit, devices, and systems and to manage the lifecycle of people, systems and devices, transportation and fleet services are at risk of having connected, yet disparate systems.

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We’re soon going to need a new descriptor going forward when we refer to the “data centre”. This rings true because network virtualisation across private and public environments means the locations of compute and storage resources to facilitate “on-demand” networking do not sit statically in what could be considered a typical data centre anymore. Virtual workloads now dart around like bees in a field of clover. It’s no longer a question of “if” but “when” all of this will affect your network.

Cisco estimates cloud platforms will process 86% of workloads by 2019, whileRightScale reports 95% of businesses use on average three public clouds and three private clouds. These dynamic pools of computing and storage resources are making traditional data centres like fax machines; you still likely have one, but hardly anyone uses it and what they are using it for is highly specialised.

Since the introduction of the first virtual machines, server admins have benefited from a more dynamic compute model that also helped lower costs associated with equipment, power, cooling and maintenance.  Data centre administrators are now able to apply the concept of virtualisation to the network, which had become the bottleneck to dynamic, application-centric infrastructure. As a result, network admins and application developers are able to utilise the pools of compute, storage and now networking to rapidly provision new applications or expand existing ones on demand.

This changeover to virtual infrastructure has a profound effect on cybersecurity. In old-school data centres, the majority of data travelled north from servers to the firewall and south from the firewall to servers. However in virtual and software-defined networks, up to 80 percent of traffic travels east and west among virtualised applications and various network sectors. This traffic now goes virtually (pun intended) uninspected by the very security foundation that was deployed to protect it.

This trend could prove disastrous for businesses that utilise virtualised networks. If a threat were to get introduced into this new environment – and there are no shortages of techniques the bad guys are employing to infiltrate today’s data centre networks – the threat could then run unimpeded to spread and infect much of the infrastructure without anything to stop it.

Virtual workloads now dart around like bees in a field of clover – it’s no longer a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’ this will affect your network

What’s more, mobile apps, cloud apps and partner apps all connect services to users outside data centres through pathways not scanned by traditional security controls. All it takes is a single malware compromise on a minor web service and the entire network is at risk.

To keep virtual public and private clouds secure, a good rule of thumb is to segment your network and applications like we’ve done in our physical networks. This is called micro-segmentation in the software-defined world, which allows virtualised elements to be logically grouped together and establishes rules for how these groups can communicate with one another. This level of segmentation is also critical for getting control of cloud-based workflows traveling in new directions due to cloud platforms and domains.

However, micro-segmentation by itself is only part of the solution. To combat threats that get introduced into the virtual network, businesses also need advanced threat prevention security that works alongside micro-segmentation to actually inspect all traffic, keeping the bad stuff out and ensuring only what is desired gets through.

Advanced threat prevention security in virtualised environments, like any pooled networking resource, needs to be centrally orchestrated and provisioned so it can follow apps and workflows as they are created, grow and move. Also, the security should be intelligent enough to understand how all assets and elements are classified to ensure the proper security actions can be applied, regardless of where an asset is at any given time.

This requires a new security model that consolidates threat information across traditional gateway as well as within the virtualised space and provides consistent policy management, protections, logging and reporting wherever your data goes. By adopting these principles, organisations can start adapting the same level of protections safeguarding their physical networks now into their virtual networks.

When you figure out what to call the new networking, don’t forget to consider which directions your data travels and how to re-think your security strategy to keep data and resources protected.

Ten short years ago, Apache Hadoop was just a small project deployed on a few machines at Yahoo and within a few years, it had truly become the backbone of Yahoo’s data infrastructure. Additionally, the current Apache Hadoop market is forecasted to surpass $16 billion by 2020.
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In the next forty months – just over three years – businesses will undergo extraordinary changes. The exponential growth of digitization and machine learning will see a step function change in how businesses create value, satisfy customers, and outperform their competition. In the next forty months companies will take the actions that will see them get to the next level of the game called Capitalism. Or they won’t – game over. The winners of today and tomorrow think differently, follow different strategies, deploy different technologies, make cybersecurity a top priority and are cognizant the clock is ticking.

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You have great SaaS business app ideas. You want to turn your idea quickly into a functional and engaging proof of concept. You need to be able to modify it to meet customers’ needs, and you need to deliver a complete and secure SaaS application. How could you achieve all the above and yet avoid unforeseen IT requirements that add unnecessary cost and complexity? You also want your app to be responsive in any device at any time.
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SYS-CON Events announced today that Embotics, the cloud automation company, will exhibit at the 19th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Embotics is the cloud automation company for IT organizations and service providers that need to improve provisioning or enable self-service capabilities. With a relentless focus on delivering a premier user experience and unmatched customer support, Embotics is the fastest and easiest way to automate provisioning across private/public/hybrid cloud infrastructures. Its flagship product, Embotics vCommander, is used by organizations including Nordstrom, NASA, Fanatics, Informatica and Charter Communications.

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