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Stop talking about cloud – and start talking about what cloud can enable

(c)iStock.com/Clint Spencer

Cloud computing is still a very trendy topic of discussion among technology leaders around the world. It’s easy to see why; cloud adoption rates are on the rise and are predicted to continue their upward trend, while cloud service providers (CSPs) continue to roll out new features, products, and services.

Times are good in the world of cloud computing – but I believe the conversation has begun to change and is about to change to a greater extent.

Cloud, as we all know, is a platform option and not an end onto itself. As technology professionals have always known, a platform is only as effective as what it can be used for. In recent conversations with customers and colleagues, I have attempted to steer the conversation – trying to be a good enterprise architect – more towards what an enterprise can use cloud for, as opposed to the “I need to be running on cloud because the CIO wants it” discussion.

There are any number of excellent examples of enabled technologies and processes that cloud can and should be the basis for, and this is where the conversation and the focus needs to gradually move to.

DevOps

DevOps is more than just a shift in how operations, development and the business stakeholders technically work together to develop new services. It is a cultural shift within an enterprise, which changes how business and technology relates to each other.

This cultural shift causes technology organisations to move at a different pace than previously – a pace which can keep up with the business demands of time to market, as well as product and services lifecycles.

At the heart of this new pace is cloud’s ability to rapidly provision and change development and test environments. Cloud’s ability to create and change hybrid environments also allows for additional flexibility and more effective costing for development, test, deployment, update, and retirement of services.

Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) and the technologies that support it are rapidly growing in use and importance in the technology and business world.

The diversity of industries looking at IoT is on the rise. Even financial services firms are looking at IoT as a possible competitive edge in the marketplace. The simplest way to describe IoT conceptually is the transmission, collection, aggregation, analysis and reaction to, large number of small size sensor or device data.

This requires considerable and ever changing compute resources to handle this data as various stages of the process. The flexibility of cloud and the ability of a hybrid cloud to easily put resources ‘close to the action’ make it an excellent choice for an IoT platform.

Geographic distribution of services

Many times, customers have asked how they can cost effectively distribute services across a geographically diverse enterprise. These enterprises are no longer willing, and in many cases able, to put together a business case for standing up replicated server installations at multiple points on the globe.

Enter the hybrid cloud. In a multi-region hybrid cloud environment, the regions that live in the public cloud space can be geographically located close to business centres to enable users to utilise services from the region closest to them. This provides a geographic distribution of services at a much lower cost, and also enables the rapid deployment of a new site, change in resources in a region, or retirement of a site as user and business patterns change.

High availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR)

Similar to geographic distribution, enterprises are tired of having to stand up a secondary set of hardware to be used only sparingly until a HA or DR event occurs. Today’s business environment simply won’t tolerate it.

Recent introductions, or upgrades, by many CSPs and cloud platform vendors have been focused on solving this problem, in the cloud. For example, Microsoft’s Automated System Recovery (ASR) product has gone through a major update with the focus being the provisioning of a passive DR environment in the Azure Cloud. The on-prem or in-cloud environment is replicated in a separate Azure cloud space. The virtual machines are then inactivated except for two, which remain up to monitor the primary site and maintain storage integrity. When an event is recognised by the monitoring VMs, the secondary site is activated and services restarted in the cloud.

Conclusion

These are just a very few cloud enabled technologies; many more exist and more than that have yet to be discovered. We as technology leaders need to shift the conversation within the enterprises we support back to what the future state looks like based on business need, and utilise cloud as a platform option to attain that future state.

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Cisco argues worldwide cloud traffic will reach 8.6 zettabytes by 2019

(c)iStock.com/cherezoff

Global cloud traffic will more than quadruple between now and the end of 2019 from 2.1 to 8.6 zettabytes (ZB), according to research from Cisco.

The findings, which appear in the firm’s latest Global Cloud Index study, put a variety of reasons for this explosion in growth, from the continued popularity of public cloud services in the business domain, the increased degree of virtualisation in private clouds, and growth of M2M connections.

A zettabyte is 10 to the power of 21 bytes, approximately equal to a thousand exabytes or a billion terabytes. To put it another way – as Cisco described back in 2011 – an exabyte would have the capacity to hold more than 36,000 years of HD quality video. So theoretically, a zettabyte would be able to hold 36 million years of video. Better make sure you’re comfortable before diving into that particular boxset.

Yet the large numbers don’t stop there. Cisco also predicts the Internet of Everything (IoE) will generate a mind-bending 507.5 ZB per year – 42.3 ZB per month – by 2019. The repositories for the storage of data will continue to change as the years progress, with the networking giant arguing that by 2019, the majority (51%) of stored data will not be on the PC, but on smartphones, tablets, and M2M modules among others.

In terms of global data centre and cloud traffic, annual global data centre IP traffic is projected to reach 10.4 ZB by the end of 2019, up from 3.4 ZB last year. But the strain of the traffic going through the data centres is likely to be mitigated by technologies such as software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualisation (NFV), Cisco explains. Lower data centre tiers could carry over 40 ZB of traffic per year.

The numbers just keep going up and up; by 2019, consumer cloud storage traffic will be 1.6 gigabytes per user per month, compared to 992 megabytes per month last year. Cisco also predicts that by 2019, 55% of the consumer Internet population – more than two billion users – will be using personal cloud storage, up from 1.1bn in 2014.

These numbers aren’t as explosive, showing both the reach of cloud technologies currently and the potential user base it can still tap into, as Doug Webster, vice president of service provider marketing at Cisco explains.

“The Global Cloud Index highlights the fact that cloud is moving well beyond a regional trend to becoming a mainstream solution globally, with cloud traffic expected to grow more than 30% in every worldwide region over the next five years,” he said.

“Enterprise and government organisations are moving from test cloud environments to trusting clouds with their mission-critical workloads. At the same time, consumers continue to expect on-demand, anytime access to their content and services nearly everywhere,” Webster added. “This creates a tremendous opportunity for cloud operators, which will play an increasingly relevant role in the communications industry ecosystem.”

Of course, we now play the waiting game to see if these exciting predictions come true. Have hope, though, that these targets may even be conservative; in 2011, Cisco argued “today we live in a world of petabytes and exabytes, but we’ll need to add the term zettabyte to our vocabulary by 2015.”

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How to Harness the Power of Digital Transformation By @IsaacGe0rge | @CloudExpo #Cloud

Right now it feels like the whole world is moving to digital at breakneck speed. Banks, insurance companies, retailers and large manufacturers are all looking at how they can digitally transform the organisation to keep up with customer demand, business expectations and compete globally. However, while digital transformation is becoming all-pervasive agreement on what digital transformation actually means, how to leverage its potential, and most importantly how to make a digital transformation project a success still remains elusive for many.

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‘C’ What Your IAM System Lacks in a Customer-Centric World | @CloudExpo #Cloud

The age of mobile applications, pervasive use of social media and growing demand for accurate consumer data are converging to drive significant changes in how organizations connect with and market to their respective customer bases — as well as the technologies they use to do so. It’s becoming increasingly clear that legacy technologies that weren’t purpose-built for consumer-facing use cases will no longer suffice.
Take, for instance, identity and access management (IAM) systems. Historically used to manage a business’s internal employee records, many brands leverage modified IAM systems to manage their customer identity records as well. These brands are finding, however, that there are significant differences between managing corporate data resources and managing exabytes of consumer-generated data, and these differences simply can’t be addressed effectively with IAM systems.

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Enterprise IT, Liferay, Opinion, rollout

3 approaches to a successful enterprise IT platform rollout strategy

enterprise IT rolloutExecuting a successful enterprise IT platform rollout is as much about earning widespread support as it is about proper pacing. It’s necessary to sell the rollout within the organization, both to win budget approval and to gain general acceptance so that adoption of the new platform goes smoothly.

Each group being asked to change their ways and learn this new platform must have the value of the rollout identified and demonstrated for them. The goal of the rollout process is to see the platform solution become successfully adopted, self-sustaining, efficient in assisting users, and, ultimately, seamlessly embedded into the organization’s way of doing business.

Deploying a new solution for use across an organization boils down to three approaches, each with their advantages and drawbacks: rolling out slowly (to one department at a time), rolling out all at once (across the entire organization), or a cleverly targeted mix of the two.

Vertical Rollouts (taking departments one at a time, slow and steady)

This strategy applies when selecting a single department or business function within the organization (ex: customer support, HR, etc.), for an initial targeted rollout and deploying the new platform in phases to each vertical, one at a time. The benefit here is a greater focus on the specific needs and usage models within the department that is receiving full attention during their phase of the rollout implementation, yielding advantages in the customization of training and tools to best fit those users.

For example, the tools and interfaces used daily by customer service personnel may be entirely irrelevant to HR staff or to engineers, who will appreciate that their own solutions are being streamlined and that their time is being respected, rather than needing to accept a crude one-size-fits-all treatment and have to work to discover what components apply to them. It’s then more obvious to each vertical audience what the value added is for them personally, better garnering support and fast platform adoption. Because this type of rollout is incremental, it’s ripe for iterative improvements and evolution based on user feedback.

Where vertical, phased rollouts are less effective is in gaining visibility within the organization, and in lacking the rallying cry of an all-in effort. This can make it difficult to win over those in departments that aren’t offered the same immediate advantages, and to achieve the critical mass of adoption necessary to launch a platform into a self-sustaining orbit (even for those tools that could benefit any user regardless of their department).

Horizontal Rollouts (deploying to everyone at the same time)

Delivering components of a new platform across all departments at once comes with the power of an official company decree: “get on board because this is what we’re doing now.” This kind of large-scale rollout makes everyone take notice, and often makes it easier not only to get budget approval (for one large scale project and platform rather than a slew of small ones), but also to fold the effort into an overall company roadmap and present it as part of a cohesive strategy. Similar organizational roles in the company can connect and benefit from each other with a horizontal rollout, pooling their knowledge and best practices for using certain relevant tools and templates.

This strategy of reaching widely with the rollout helps to ensure continuity within the organization. However, big rollouts come with big stakes: the organization only gets one try to get the messaging and the execution correct – there aren’t opportunities to learn from missteps on a smaller scale and work out the kinks. Users in each department won’t receive special attention to ensure that they receive and recognize value from the rollout. In the worst-case scenario, a user may log in to the new platform for the first time, not see anything that speaks to them and their needs in a compelling way, and not return, at least not until the organization wages a costly revitalization campaign to try and win them over properly.  Even in this revitalization effort, a company may find users jaded by the loss of their investment in the previous platform rollout.

The Hybrid Approach to Rollouts

For many, the best rollout strategy will borrow a little from both of the approaches above. An organization can control the horizontal and the vertical aspects of a rollout to produce a two-dimensional, targeted deployment, with all the strengths of the approaches detailed above and less of the weaknesses. With this approach, each phase of a rollout can engage more closely with specific vertical groups that the tools being deployed most affect, while simultaneously casting a wide horizontal net to increase visibility and convey the rollouts as company initiatives key to overall strategy and demanding of attention across departments. Smartly targeting hybrid rollouts to introduce tools valuable across verticals – while focusing on the most valuable use case within each vertical – is essential to success with them. In short, hybrid rollouts offer something for many, and a lot specifically for the target user being introduced to the new platform.

In executing a hybrid rollout of your enterprise IT platform, begin with a foundational phase that addresses horizontal use cases, while enticing users with the knowledge that more is coming. Solicit and utilize user feedback, and put this information to work in serving more advanced use cases as the platform iterates and improves. Next, start making the case for why the vertical group with the most horizontally applicable use cases should embrace the platform. With that initial group of supporters won over, you have a staging area to approach other verticals with specific hybrid rollouts, putting together the puzzle of how best to approach each while showcasing a wide scope and specific value added for each type of user. Importantly, don’t try to sell the platform as immediately being all things to all people. Instead, define and convey a solid vision for the platform, identify the purpose of the existing release, and let these hybrid rollouts take hold at a natural pace. This allows the separate phases to win their target constituents and act as segments to a cohesive overall strategy.

If properly planned and executed, your enterprise IT platform rollout will look not like a patchwork quilt with benefits for some and not others, but rather a rich tapestry of solutions inviting to everyone, and beneficial to the organization as a whole.

 

roguen kellerWritten by Roguen Keller, Director of Global Services at Liferay, an enterprise open source portal and collaboration software company.

CISA, data protection, News & Analysis, Policy and Regulation, Safe Harbour

Opinion divided on impact of CISA ruling on Safe Harbour

Open DataThe new US Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), passed in the US Senate on Tuesday, has made it even harder for data sharing between the US and EU, according to critics.

However, attitudes to data sovereignty and the institution of a new Safe Harbour agreement seem to be polarising across both sides of the Atlantic.

Former White House cyber security advisor French Caldwell, chief evangelist at GRC software company MetricStream, said he recognised the ‘libertarian’ argument but that those at the front line in the IT industry have a more realistic grasp of the immediate issues. “Libertarians are strongly opposed and it’s easy to sympathise with that position. Once the door opens to information sharing, the arrangement might go from voluntary to mandatory over time,” said Caldwell.

However, security people on the ‘front lines’, at banks, electrical utilities, energy companies and hospitals, are fighting a war, he said. “Well financed gangs of criminal hackers are attacking businesses and government agencies daily. And as we’ve seen over the last few years, nation-states are probing for weakness. These cyberattacks amount to cyberwar,” said Caldwell.

The significant privacy protections in the CISA legislation will provide protections from anti-trust rules. Better still, it would bring data holders into a protective information sharing culture with federal agencies, he argued.

However, a UK counterpart saw the CISA ruling differently. “This is bad news. Just as the EU makes it clear that it’s a serious problem if security agencies get easy access to personal data, the US Government makes it even easier for this snooping to happen,” said Mike Weston, CEO of data science consultancy Profusion.

The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act will make it significantly harder for the US and Europe to agree a replacement for the collapsed Safe Harbour provisions, according to Weston. “Without assurances that European citizens’ personal data is protected, it’s hard to see how such an agreement might be reached. The biggest stumbling block is that while US citizens are afforded some protection by the USA Freedom Act, none applies to citizens of other nations.”

In a Microsoft blog posting its chief legal office Brad Smith called on the US government to respect European Union privacy laws for transatlantic personal data in the post-Safe Harbour era.

The note describes privacy as a ‘fundamental human right’ and urges the US government to commit to only accessing private information stored in the United States about EU citizens in a manner that ‘conforms with EU law, and vice versa’.

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Webair to Give Presentation at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | @WebairInc #Cloud

Webair, a leading provider of Cloud Hosting, Colocation and Managed solutions, today announces that its Chief Technology Officer, Sagi Brody, will speak at Cloud Expo 2015 Silicon Valley, to be held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. Cloud Expo 2015 Silicon Valley is a world-class conference that brings together thought-leaders and cutting edge practitioners in the cloud / utility computing, Big Data, Internet of Things (IoT), Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC), DevOps and Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) space, which, in addition to prestigious industry keynotes and informative general sessions and panels, features a busy exhibition floor.

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AutoTrader to Present at @DevOpsSummit | #DevOps #API #Microservices

IT is often cast in a dichotomy where things are either viewed as traditional, stable, and safe or innovative, impermanent, and vulnerable. There have been multiple attempts to organize these classifications in a fashion that make IT budget and planning more predictable such as various agile methodologies, DevOps, and the bimodal model.
What qualifies as success depends on the customer and producer involved in a project. A survey conducted by Scott Ambler in 2013 suggests that being on schedule is valued more than being on budget, and coding to specification is of the least concern among the three.

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Jason Bloomberg to Keynote at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | #IoT #Cloud #DevOps

In today’s enterprise, digital transformation represents organizational change even more so than technology change, as customer preferences and behavior drive end-to-end transformation across lines of business as well as IT. To capitalize on the ubiquitous disruption driving this transformation, companies must be able to innovate at an increasingly rapid pace.

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Infrastructure as a Service, Networks, News & Analysis, Tata

IZO Private Cloud will snatch back IT assets from the public cloud, says Tata

Money cloudTata Communications claims its new IZO Private Cloud service will help CIOs wrestle back control of their IT from the public cloud. It could reunite CIOs with their IT and give them unprecedented access to their public and private clouds after half a decade of having their entire data centre estate wrenched from their grasp in a painful breakup.

The new service, unveiled at Cloud Expo Asia, is described as a ‘game-changing’ cloud enablement platform that, by seamlessly integrating hybrids with public clouds, extends the control of the CIO over all the IT assets affecting their employer. Tata claims it will empower enterprises to connect to the world’s biggest clouds and build high-performance IT infrastructures. It will achieve this by creating a union of different cloud, colocation and managed hosting environments and making this hybrid work together as one unit.

The new service will eventually be available in 12 locations worldwide but is currently installed in India, Singapore, Hong Kong, the US and UK. The multi platform integration will be tempered with enterprise-grade security, says Tata, and offers its CIO administrators ‘unparalleled visibility’ and control via a single-pane-of-glass management, claims Tata.

Tata Communications’ ecosystem comprises 20 service providers and includes Microsoft Azure, Office365, Amazon Web Service, Google Cloud Platform and Salesforce, with over 50 data centres across the globe. Currently 24% of the world’s Internet routes travel over Tata’s network, which is the largest wholly-owned subsea cable network in the world. Its Tier 1 IP network provides backbone connectivity to over 240 countries and territories across 400 points-of-presence.

The IZO Private Cloud breaks down the final barriers blocking enterprise cloud adoption, claimed Tata Communications’ president Genius Wong. “This is the next step on our mission to harness our partners and data centre infrastructure so CIOs can be put back in control of their cloud and data centre estate.”

The cloud news categorized.