Bobby Hellard

By now, most businesses have made or are at least planning to make the shift to the cloud. As the benefits of a hybrid and multi-cloud environment become well-known, organisations are turning to VMware’s hybrid cloud platform: VMware Cloud on AWS.

VMware Cloud on AWS offers organisations scalability, support for strategic initiatives, and cost savings for use cases like data centre extension, disaster recovery (DR), and more. Organisations across varied industries—especially tech services, financial services, education, and healthcare—are prepared to embrace VMware Cloud on AWS.

Moving to VMware Cloud on AWS simplifies cloud adoption and reduces the disruptions associated with other cloud initiatives. By evaluating the fit, identifying organisational benefits, and being mindful of the elements involved in making the move, you’ll further reduce the risks that hinder large IT infrastructure transformation projects.

For any organisation considering VMware Cloud on AWS, think about the following five key aspects. These will help ensure that you leverage all of the benefits and ultimately realise a seamless migration.

Define business objectives and success criteria

Before embarking on your cloud journey, identify the business objectives that cloud will help your business achieve. Organisations across industries turn to the cloud in order to:

• Deliver consistent global operations
• Cost-effectively expand their data centre footprints
• Leverage cloud-native tooling to enhance data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to improve market and business performance
• Improve business resiliency from natural disasters, cyberattacks, ransomware, and power outages,
• Reduce costs associated with building and managing data centres
• Increase elasticity

If your business objective is to deliver consistent global operations, which cloud locations offer your proximity and low latencies between applications, storage, and users? If your business objective is to improve business resiliency, how quickly do business-critical applications need to be restored after a disaster event?

Once you understand your goals for cloud adoption or migration, learn from others who have similar use cases.

Match business objective to primary VMware Cloud on AWS use cases

Organisations are adopting VMware Cloud on AWS to satisfy four primary use cases. The first use case, data centre extension, allows businesses to augment their existing on-prem data centres with cloud resources and add test/dev capabilities without building out a physical data centre. VMware Cloud on AWS offers these companies a cloud environment that’s operationally similar to their on-prem VMware environments.

The second most popular use case is cloud migration. Transition your on-prem data centre into the cloud in an efficient, frictionless manner. Migrating VMware workloads from on-premises to VMware Cloud on AWS avoids the hidden costs of refactoring applications and re-skilling your workforce. Wholly or partially replacing existing on-prem and colo data centres lowers facilities, cooling, and labour costs, freeing up funds for strategic business initiatives.

Another popular use case is leveraging AWS integrated apps to perform early predictive analytics, access artificial intelligence (AI), and utilise machine learning capabilities to develop unstructured and semi-structured data to yield actionable market and business analysis. VMware Cloud in AWS opens up integrations and reduces latency between your applications and Amazon Native services.

Finally, disaster recovery (DR) rounds out this use case quartet. Cloud-based DR can be brought online within seconds or minutes—much faster than traditional DR sites. VMware Cloud on AWS is a perfect fit for companies that want to implement a DR solution for the first time, modernise their DR solution, reduce DR costs, or protect specific application workloads with a cloud-based DR solution.

VMware Cloud on AWS provides a stepping stone to the cloud. Immediately realise benefits from moving VMware workloads into the cloud with minimal retraining, then focus on more intensive applications that require additional time and effort.

Plan your ideal migration

As you plan your move to VMware Cloud on AWS, heed the lessons learned about configuring network, storage, and compute resources from others who have paved the way. First and foremost, use the tools and expertise you already have in-house. You may already have the necessary tools in-house such as site recovery manager (SRM), hybrid cloud extension (HCX), Double-Take, and hybrid linked mode.

Next, choose the right connectivity. Plan, document, iterate, and consult with your experts. It will be worth the up-front investment of time. Know your application’s limitations and abilities when connecting to any other environment (e.g., extending Layer 2, VPNs, direct connect, re-IPing of VMs, and geographical locations).

Phase your migration to reduce risk. Document compliance requirements; implement a corresponding security baseline; and automate the set-up of the environment for running secure, scalable workloads to minimise errors.

Boost your cloud environment

Once you’ve completed the first few phases of your migration, look for opportunities to boost your cloud environment. An organisation that is extending or migrating its data centre could evaluate the powerful AWS services that are now available.

Take advantage of direct integrations of AWS and VMware Cloud on AWS, such as leveraging AWS Key Management Service to store VMware Cloud on AWS encryption keys; CloudFront for CDN; application and network load balancer for traffic flow and SSL offload; and RDS and Dynamo DB or managed SQL and NoSQL databases. Meanwhile, an organisation that implements cloud-based DR could leverage underutilised resources for test/dev activities.

Consider VMware Cloud on AWS for business resiliency

Downtime outages don’t choose convenient times for your business or customers. Traditional DR requires considerable capital and effort to build secondary sites, replicate data, proactively test, and staff the environment.

Cloud-based DR offers multiple advantages, including geographic diversity, rapid scale-up using on-demand services, annual DR testing, and DR software that automates and orchestrates rapid recovery for lower recovery time objectives (RTOs) and less risk.

The five types of cloud-based DR (cold standby, pilot light, warm standby, scaleup active-active, and full active-active) provide a spectrum of services, with many choices. VMware Site Recovery, which is built right into VMware Cloud on AWS, is an integrated option that includes needed on-prem components.

Get measurable, repeatable value from your cloud migration with VMware Cloud on AWS and a clear blueprint that advances from proof of concept to AWS native integrations for DR, test/dev, and production workloads. 

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

The dawn of a new decade represents a good opportunity for a more rounded assessment of cloud computing to take place – and according to industry analyst Synergy Research, the ‘remarkable transformation’ has seen the enterprise data centre hit hardest.

Synergy has kicked off 2020 with a couple of notes looking back at wider enterprise IT spending, as well as the impact of SaaS revenues. As the decade began (below) spending on cloud infrastructure services barely moved the needle; but as data centre hardware and software spend plateaued in the middle half of the decade – only seeing an increase in 2018 – last year’s projections revealed that cloud spending had finally overtaken on-prem.

Over the whole decade, Synergy noted, average annual spending growth for the data centre was 4% – and even the majority of this was due to the first three years of growth. For cloud services, the figure was 56% across the whole decade.

When it came to SaaS revenues, it has been a similar story: annual revenues are now north of $100 million at a growth rate of 39% per year. This compares with a growth in perpetual license software of just 4% per year. Microsoft, the ‘very clear software market leader’ throughout the decade as Synergy puts it, has seen its total software revenues double and SaaS revenue grow from zero to more than $20 million across the decade.

The usual suspects have seen significant growth in terms of organisations moving to SaaS-based models, from customer resource management (CRM) to human capital management (HCM). Yet enterprise resource planning (ERP) is one area which is still somewhat underrepresented, Synergy argues.

As John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research Group, puts it, the emergence of various huge SaaS platforms around enterprise collaboration, from Workday, to Zendesk, to Cloudera, forced the hand of traditional software vendors to push SaaS more strongly.

Analysis

For those who have been involved in the industry over the past decade, the above is by no means new information. Yet it is certainly interesting – and more than a little fun – to look back and assess various growth points and predictions.

At the beginning of the decade SaaS, powered by the explosive growth of Salesforce, was clearly the poster child for cloud computing use cases. Looking at a Gartner market trends report from 2012 focusing on SaaS, as this publication reported at the time, many of their prognostications rang true. Gartner predicted that SaaS-based CRM would grow at three times the rate of on-premise applications, while noting that SaaS-based ERP would take a tougher route to cannibalisation. Each analyst report around the time put SaaS in the biggest bucket, followed by IaaS and then, much lower down, PaaS.

Infrastructure services naturally took a lot longer to earn trust among enterprises and other large organisations. Ovum’s 2013 Trends to Watch report around private and public clouds correctly identified Microsoft and Google as the key pretenders to Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) crown. Gartner’s 2013 Magic Quadrant for IaaS had two leaders; AWS and CSC. The latter merged with HP Enterprise Services in 2017, before Microsoft moved into the leaders’ zone in 2014 and the status quo remained for three years before Google joined the party.

The conversations around public versus private in the first half of the decade were legion. Indeed, exploring an emerging technology, assessing what can be done where and the security concerns are cyclical – take blockchain as a more recent example. Industries with particularly sensitive data concerns were naturally reluctant to move to different infrastructure. It was around the 2013 mark that the first real shoots of hybrid cloud were seen among organisations. A Rackspace study in August of that year found three in five enterprise respondents saw hybrid as the future, with the company affirming that hybrid was ‘enterprise ready’ for CIOs.

As the decade ticked over into its second half, the benefits of multi-cloud became more clearly defined. Assuaging vendor lock-in was one thing, but as the complexity of workloads increased, so did understanding. Some providers will be more efficient than others depending on your organisation’s data needs, be that around backup and disaster recovery, or analytics and insights. As Melissa Di Donato, CEO of SUSE, told this publication just earlier this week, her company’s strategy is to look upon this as a moveable feast.

Ultimately, the maturation and saturation in the cloud software and infrastructure markets in particular – platform may still have a little way to go, although Kubernetes has had an exceptionally strong 24 months – have seen the next wave of cloud services move in. It is all underpinned by data; K8s and containers are a part of that, but so are blockchain and artificial intelligence technologies. The quality and quantity of organisations citing machine learning capability as the primary reason to move mostly or all-in on a hyperscaler – Formula 1, Sainsbury’s and Walt Disney Studios just to name three recent examples – proves that companies are comfortable in the cloud, and want to see what’s next.

It can therefore be seen as a chicken and egg question: to what extent has the past decade been about natural technological advances, and how much has been through vendor strategy? Ultimately, and at risk of this being a cop-out, the answer is a bit of both.

Dinsdale cited ‘dramatic improvements’ in hosting and computational capabilities, leading to increasingly sophisticated enterprise applications and myriad ways of crunching, processing and analysing data both in terms of software and infrastructure. Yet much in the same way that studies show being in a plane is safer than being in a car, enterprises have understood this comparing cloud with on-prem. Breaches still happen, but as this publication has frequently reported, they are often self-inflicted. A lot of hard yards have gone into this from the vendor point of view – and expect this gap to gradually lessen over time.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

When Melissa Di Donato joined SAP in 2017, having counted Salesforce, IBM and Oracle among her previous employers, she told this publication it was like ‘coming home.’ Now, as chief executive of Linux enterprise software provider SUSE, it is more a step into the unknown.

Yet it is not a complete step. Working with a proprietary software company means your experience is primarily in selling it, implementing it and aligning it to others’ business needs. With SUSE, Di Donato knows far more acutely what customers want.

“Though I don’t have a whole load of open source experience per se, I’ve got all the detail and all of the understanding of what it is to be a SUSE customer,” Di Donato tells CloudTech. “That’s really important because, as we go to market and look at who we want to be, who we are for, who we are now and who we want to become, it’s really about embracing this collaborative nature of creating software in a community, but pivoting around customer needs.”

Having that portability, regardless of what platform you choose, is becoming very important – what’s good on Azure today may be better on Google tomorrow

Since being named as SUSE CEO in July, Di Donato has been visiting customers and crafting the company’s message around two themes. For the enterprise market, while the buzzwords around containers, software-defined storage, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud remain, solid progress is harder to come by. Add in that every customer has different needs, after all, and the strategy needed to be boiled down somewhat.

Not unlike other organisations, SUSE’s customer base is split into various buckets. You have traditionalists, which comprise about 80% of customers, hybrid beginners, cloud adopters and cloud-native; the latter three all moving in ever decreasing circles. Regardless of where you are in your cloud journey, SUSE argues, the journey itself is the same. You have to simplify, before you modernise, and then accelerate.

Di Donato argues that cloud and containers are ‘very, very overused words’, and that getting to grips with the technology which holds the containers is key – but all journey paths are valid. “Whether cloud means modernising, or container means modernising, VMs, open source… [customers’] version of modernising is really important, and they want to simply and modernise to then get to a point where they can accelerate,” she says. “Regardless of what persona you are, what customer type you are, everyone wants to accelerate.”

These days, pretty much everyone is on one of the hyperscale cloud providers as well. SUSE has healthy relationships with all the major clouds – including AWS, which is a shot in the arm for its occasionally-criticised stance on open source – aiming to offer partnerships and value-adds aplenty.

The problem is that the hyperscalers do little to assist the simplification process. At re:Invent in December, AWS said that at last count it offered more than 175 services. “We’re overwhelmed by the number of services and tools being offered to our customer base,” says Di Donato. “There’s a whole different conversation [before] about how, as a complex enterprise, [you] get to public cloud. If you have one small application on public cloud, [you can] choose from hundreds more.”

So what can SUSE do? Ironically enough, by offering as many options as possible to its customers. “How do I get our natives and traditionalists, at two opposite ends of the spectrum, into an environment where they can move and continually modernise?” says Di Donato. “It’s going to need to be flexible, it’s going to need to be agnostic, it’s going to need no lock-in and be able to simplify the complexity around the various components that hyperscalers have.

“Having that portability, regardless of what platform [customers] choose, is becoming very important,” Di Donato adds. “What’s good on Azure today may be better on Google tomorrow – and we have to have the flexibility and simplicity to be able to move our customers over, the easiest way forward.”

The other message – and arguably an even more important one – is around ‘daring to be different.’ It was the title of an article Di Donato wrote on LinkedIn when she joined SUSE, which focuses on the wider community and message. “I’m fortunate to have a platform from which I can be an activist and an advocate for openness, diversity and inclusion,” Di Donato wrote at the time, adding she particularly advocated opportunities for girls to move into STEM. “I believe we can all give back more than we take.”

The ‘openness’, given SUSE’s heritage, should be a given – but it isn’t across every area. “The company is inherently open and collaborative – in an open source environment you can contribute literally from anywhere – however you don’t see a load of diversity in open source as an industry right now,” says Di Donato. “The need to always have diversity and inclusion on the agenda is really important.”

More than anything else, this was priority number one when Di Donato took over the reins at SUSE. Among other initiatives, an employee network around women in tech was launched. It is now more than 150-strong, for men and women “to ensure we evangelise the brand and get out there and show the world just how diverse we are and can be in open source at SUSE,” as Di Donato puts it.

Di Donato has been discussing greater representation for women in STEM for almost as long as she has been a senior executive. At her first role, at SAP as an R3 developer, she was the only female in her cohort. “10 years ago we stopped talking about women in tech because we were getting bored of it in the UK, right?” she says.

The headlines keep on coming, however. As CloudTech reported in October, the Forbes Cloud 100, an influential list of top privately-held cloud companies, featured a grand total of three firms led by women. The month before, another Forbes list, of America’s 100 most innovative leaders, featured just one woman, drawing opprobrium.

Even in her current role, Di Donato has gone to certain geographies to find herself the only female in the room. “We haven’t come very far,” she says, laughing ironically. “I tend to think that for any network of people that talk this passionately about a particular topic, over decades, you would think the dial would move. Yet we still struggle.”

As a mother of three and newlywed – having previously been widowed when her youngest child was 18 months old – Di Donato is especially concerned at getting more focus for parents, such as not penalising them if a family crisis meant they could not make the office.

Women need to be role models to show young executives the importance of being capable of juggling more than just one or two things

Rachel Keane, co-founder of the Women in Data series of events, previously told this publication of another danger for women: in an industry as fast as cloud computing, a year away means a huge gap of knowledge. Nothing is insurmountable, however. “For most people, they can’t imagine naturally what they’re capable of,” says Di Donato. “You can only understand what you’re capable of at a turning point in your life.

“We need to be role models to show other executives, particularly young talent, the importance of being capable of juggling more than just one or two things.”

More than anything else, however, wherever you are today, it is about being true to one’s self. Di Donato wants to exemplify this with her platform as CEO. “I’m faced with maybe exacerbating the fact that I’m quite loud, I’m quite vocal, I speak to a lot of employees, a lot of customers, and I’m a woman, right?” she says. “That’s a learning experience for me too – try and communicate in a way that people understand and are used to, but at the same time don’t lose myself either.

“I am enthusiastic and I am passionate and focused, and I am opinionated and I am driven,” adds Di Donato. “I don’t want to lose that purely because I’m different than everybody else right now.”

Picture credit: SUSE

Read more: Building confidence and power: Exploring greater female leadership and participation in cloud and data analytics

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Dave Mitchell

Jane McCallion

In many organisations today, IT is more than a utility: it has become an essential platform for their ongoing business development. Therefore, they crave a superior IT experience for their employees and other key stakeholders. For most, cloud computing is a fundamental ingredient of the digital transformation agenda.

The common commercial use cases for public cloud services have already been exploited by many organisations. Front-office applications, such as customer relationship management, online commerce, and numerous consumer-facing apps, constitute the bulk of the workloads that reside on cloud service provider shared infrastructure.

These initial use cases have validated the proven benefits of cloud computing architectures that are appealing to software developers – including speed of deployment, dynamic resource acquisition, application elasticity, and service reuse across workloads.

Leveraging the inherent benefits of cloud service offerings, organisations are now focused on the potential of utilising IT infrastructure for innovation, process improvement, streamlined operations, entering new markets, and the creation of a preemptive response to potential disruption by new tech startups.

According to the latest worldwide market study by the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV), organisations report success with public cloud initiatives, especially those forward-looking business transformation projects related to digital growth.

Meanwhile, mission-critical, security-dependent applications — such as customer databases, transaction processing, finance and accounting, supply chain, and manufacturing — are somewhat less likely to reside on a public cloud service provider’s platform.

This is particularly true for highly regulated industries, such as financial services and healthcare, where the greatest proportion of their online business processes have yet to move to a cloud service delivery model.

In many cases, these computing and storage workloads are better suited to the private cloud — or a mixture of public, private, and non-cloud traditional IT infrastructure.

In order for the next phase of cloud computing benefits to be realised, an open and adaptable approach to IT infrastructure architecture is required to address the multitude of use cases.

The evolution of cloud services adoption

The hybrid IT model permits public clouds, private clouds, and on-premises non-cloud IT infrastructure to connect across all three standardised technology interfaces: Linux OS, Open Container Initiative, and Kubernetes. These technologies enable developers to innovate with scale and agility, improving responsiveness and constraining cost, despite growing complexity.

Hybrid IT enables workloads to be deployed on the optimal compute and storage environment.

• Public clouds are well suited for many front-office workloads.
• Private clouds are well suited for many of the mission-critical workloads where the benefits of cloud are desirable — but the security and assurance of a private environment are preferred.
• And traditional IT environments are suited for workloads that don’t inherently take advantage of cloud benefits — and demand the dedication of computing resources.

According to the IBM IBV assessment, as hybrid cloud solutions become widespread, there will be more variations of cloud service adoption across all industries. However, in the more regulated industries, the cloud service mix will tilt toward private cloud adoption, rather than public cloud. In the less regulated industries, the cloud service mix will likely tilt the other way.

In all cases, there’s a universal need to interoperate between public, private and traditional IT.

Hybrid cloud’s intrinsic interoperability and portability can mean that organisations are less likely to become locked in to a proprietary environment or to one particular public cloud service provider. Savvy CIOs and CTOs will choose to place their workloads on the best-fit platform and maintain interoperability between IT environments and between different public cloud service providers.

Why freedom to choose matters

Hybrid cloud can also help to address security concerns and other potential barriers to an otherwise successful cloud service deployment. The IBM IBV research study findings indicate that IT security and governance are the two top reasons cited as justification to keep enterprise workloads on-premises.

Armed with hybrid cloud solutions, organisations can run applications and store data in the specific IT environments best aligned with security, regulatory, and governance requirements.

Hybrid cloud also allows enterprises to manage their cloud transition dynamically, selecting acceptable levels of downtime and overcoming the possibility of operational constraints.

The next chapter in the evolving cloud computing story is about gaining access to enhanced capabilities – in particular, the cloud-enablement of complex mission-critical software apps.

The IBM IBV outlined key steps toward the hybrid cloud model:

Architect the destination: Think open, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud. Your organisation will live with the decisions you make today for years. Think through which of your workloads fit best in the public cloud, private cloud, and traditional IT environments. Avoid both environment lock-in (to only one of the three) and vendor lock-in, and reassess approaches that might not survive as standards and technologies evolve.

Sequence the journey: Avoid “ready, fire, aim” approaches. Layout a careful, clear roadmap of what you want to do and in what order. You may experience pressure to skip ahead without building a solid, open foundation. Resist it.

Mobilise the right skills and assets: Draw upon talent within and outside your enterprise. It’s important to develop and maintain in-house skills, but working with trusted third-party services providers, enabled by greater interoperability, can help bridge short-term gaps while reducing fixed costs.

Manage to create clear outcomes: Establish meaningful qualitative and quantitative measurements and be tenacious in holding to them. Remain flexible and incorporate new technologies as they emerge. Always stay true to your business, architectural, and technical principles.

The hybrid IT strategy questions to ask include:

• To what extent do your people understand the implications and opportunities of next-generation cloud on your business and your competitive environment?
• How is your organisation, and your competition, taking advantage of hybrid cloud, particularly data and processes that, until recently, have been difficult to move?
• What adjustments have you made in hiring and training to have the right people at the right time working on the right things in dynamic ecosystems powered by hybrid cloud?

The quest for hybrid IT nirvana

In summary, organisations will continue to seek the essential benefits of a hybrid model because it offers them the freedom of choice that forward-thinking CIOs and CTOs require. Put simply, they’ll need the flexibility and agility of a Hybrid IT environment to achieve their bold goals for digital transformation.

From the C-suite perspective, this quest isn’t about technology. Rather, it’s about applied IT enabling strategic business outcomes. The goal: deliver a unified experience across platforms that abstracts the underlying IT infrastructure. The ‘everything-as-a-service’ platform accelerates the achievement of commercial objectives. It also reduces the risk of cyber threats by assuring digital trust.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

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The way that consumers and end-users interact with businesses and their services has changed dramatically in the last decade. Today, nearly every transaction is supported by applications, meaning the role of IT has evolved from being a back-office function to a strategic enabler that makes the difference between success and failure for everyone in the business. 

If organisations want to succeed in 2020 and beyond, they need to deliver seamless user experiences. The only way to achieve this is with a multidisciplinary view of user experience and digital services across the organisation. Digital business application owners, IT and DevOps teams need to understand the direct link between user experience, application performance and business outcomes.

Struggling with tunnel vision

However, while the data to unlock that insight is already flowing through the business and being analysed, it’s usually siloed across disparate tools. This makes it nigh on impossible to understand data in context and turn it into actionable answers that can improve business outcomes.

These silos have evolved as different teams within the organisation have adopted their own tools for a variety of use cases. These tools all provide important information, but their siloed nature leaves individual teams with tunnel vision, as they are unable to see the wider context of what each set of data means for the business as a whole.

As a result, it is very difficult to determine the impact IT performance has on business outcomes without a lot of manual correlation. That takes time and in some cases is nearly impossible to do at all given the dynamic and complex nature of modern cloud environments. As such, it fails to provide actionable answers when they’re needed most – in real-time.

Looking at the bigger picture

To make more informed decisions and prioritise efforts to optimise digital services based on the impact on business outcomes, organisations need access to software intelligence that provides context. For example, IT teams and application owners could use business and application performance data to prioritise initiatives to improve customer journeys based on how revenues and conversions are being affected. This can only be achieved by breaking down the silos between tools and implementing a common data model that ties user experience, customer behaviour and application performance data together with business metrics.

If that data model is combined with deterministic AI, which provides precise insights into the root cause of anomalies, it’s possible to analyse the vast quantities of data flowing through the organisation and uncover real-time answers to business questions. In some cases, these answers can be used to automate remediation, so teams within the business don’t even need to manually intervene and resources can be used more effectively to provide better outcomes for the organisation.

Getting ahead of the game

Ultimately, today’s businesses live or die based on the ability to deliver perfect software and seamless digital journeys. In such an environment, it’s crucial that everyone in the organisation has access to real-time answers that reveal how business outcomes are being impacted by application performance. That’s impossible to achieve if everyone is just looking at their own piece of the puzzle.

Digital business application owners, IT and DevOps teams need to put their heads together and work collaboratively to see the full picture of what’s happening. By breaking down the walls between tools and taking a new, multidisciplinary approach to how they run the business, organisations can leap ahead of their competitors in 2020, by unlocking the answers they need to improve business outcomes.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

To say 2019 was a busy year for cloud would be no surprise. Yet the past 12 months has seen innovation, expansion, and drama which represents a poke in the eye for those who dismiss the industry as being consolidated and saturated.

Without any further ado, here is CloudTech’s traditional look back on the year in focus – and what the following 12 months will have in store for industry players and watchers alike.

The new hybrid cloud: Outposts leads and others follow

It was the hottest topic as 2018 drew to a close; the launch of AWS Outposts, with VMware as partner in crime, which promised to deliver a ‘truly consistent hybrid experience’ to ‘virtually any’ on-premises facility.

Naturally, as Microsoft and Google’s big events rolled around in 2019, attention turned to this area above all others. Google Cloud Next in April saw the launch of cloud services platform Anthos. Or, rather, it was a relaunch: to ‘build and manage modern hybrid applications across environments’, as well as accommodate AWS and Azure. In November, Microsoft launched Azure Arc, and outlined its theory of ‘hybrid 2.0’. Hybrid capabilities ‘must enable apps to run seamlessly across on-premises, multi-cloud and edge devices’, as Azure CVP Julia White noted at the time.

This means that the three largest cloud vendors are in a state of ‘collaborative détente’ right now, in the words of Pivot3 CMO Bruce Milne. Speaking to CloudTech at VMworld in August, Milne noted of the ‘obvious strategic tension’ to “watch this space because that friction is sure to generate sparks eventually.”

Kurian’s busy year as Google’s cloud chief

Another area industry watchers pencilled in for 2019 was how Thomas Kurian would take over the mantle left behind by Diane Greene as Google Cloud’s CEO. Among the in-tray items for the new boss were expansion and enterprise sales – or in the case of the latter, at least talking a good game.

This was exemplified in Kurian’s debut speaking slot as chief executive. At a Goldman Sachs conference in February, the former Oracle executive told delegates that old-school sales tactics were key to pushing Google’s message of differentiation. How has that gone? It’s hard to say; while Google still remains shy when it comes to revealing specific cloud figures, the overall soundbites have been solid around customer momentum and partnerships, while Anthos was well received.

As far as 2019 went, Google was the busiest hyperscaler in terms of acquisitions. While AWS had CloudEndure at the start of the year and Microsoft moved for Movere in September, Google’s shopping list had four items in total. Alongside Looker, the biggest deal, were moves for enterprise data pipeline provider Alooma, storage firm Elastifile, and VMware workload runner CloudSimple. New expansion areas included Poland, Switzerland, and Japan.

Open source providers open a can of worms

Maintaining your open ethos and turning a profit is frequently an area of tension, particularly for companies who deal in cloud and big data software. Indeed, 2019 was set to be a vital year for open source development in this context; the IBM-Red Hat acquisition hinted at it.

So it proved. In February, Redis Labs modified its licensing terms with this in mind, before having to change them again to appease open source and developer communities. The change meant developers were free to use the software, modify the source code et al – which they of course were always allowed to do – stipulating that the end result could not be a database, caching, search, indexing or stream processing engine, or anything to do with machine learning, deep learning, or artificial intelligence.

The month before, Confluent secured a $2.5 billion valuation having undergone a license change of its own. At the time, co-founder Jay Kreps maintained that the way forward building fundamental infrastructure layers was with open code. “As workloads move to the cloud we need a mechanism for preserving that freedom while also enabling a cycle of investment, and this is our motivation for the licensing change,” he wrote.

Speaking to CloudTech at the time of the change, Redis CEO Ofer Bengal said that, aside from AWS – frequently cited as the primary culprit for this behaviour – ‘the mood [was] trying to change’ between the big clouds and open source software providers. The proof of this theory was borne out in April, when Google Cloud announced at Next what it described the ‘first integrated open source ecosystem’ with seven vendors. Confluent and Redis Labs were both part of this group, with Bengal joining Kurian on stage to announce the deal.

Trump’s turn: Microsoft pips AWS to JEDI contract in shock decision

For the vast majority of 2019, the common consensus was that Amazon Web Services would secure the $10 billion JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) cloud contract. Yet many were not banking on the intervention of the US President. In July, around the time Oracle’s legal challenge was running out of gas, President Trump announced he was looking at the procurement process, citing complaints from multiple rivals.

In October, the Department of Defense announced Microsoft had won the contract. Many industry pundits took to link the stormy relationship between the president and Jeff Bezos to explain the decision; a book from former secretary of defence James Mattis alleged that President Trump told him to ‘screw Amazon’ out of the contract.

AWS has, not surprisingly, sought to appeal the ruling. Aside from the procurement process itself, this publication explored the definition of multi-cloud in a federal context. The award was, and always had been, for a single provider – a bone of contention in itself. Yet given AWS has been running the CIA’s cloud for years, what does this mean? “The DoD argued [it needed] one supplier simply because [they] need the level of tight integration and security,” cloud pundit Bill Mew told CloudTech in October. “I totally buy that if that’s their argument – but then why are they not going to the same supplier the CIA has?”

2019’s major cloud mergers and acquisitions

October: Digital Realty acquires Interxion for $8.4bn in biggest data centre deal of them all
August: VMware moves in for Pivotal and Carbon Black at combined $4.8bn
June: Google Cloud looks to Looker in $2.6bn all-cash deal for greater multi-cloud analytics
June: Salesforce to acquire Tableau for $15.7bn to combine AI with BI bulk (link to MarketingTech)

2020 outlook

Henrik Nilsson, vice president EMEA, Apptio

As seen in other software industries, overly aggressive price wars would likely upset the cloud market. As a result, AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform will all continue to enhance their specialities in 2020 – for instance focusing on scale, or a specific sector, or AI capabilities – to provide differentiation.

This will have a knock-on effect on costs. Apples to apples comparisons of pricings is already difficult, but moving forward businesses will have to do a much better job of tying value to cloud to make the right decisions for their business needs. In 2020 companies will need to establish a cloud centre of excellence and a ‘FinOps’ mindset, whereby all areas of the business have greater understanding of, and accountability for, cloud spend.

Dave Chapman, head of customer transformations, Cloudreach

The new era of enterprise cloud adoption will be among ‘cloud-native businesses’; organisations built directly with the cloud’s scalability and efficiency in mind. We’ve already seen how valuable it can be to have this agility built into a company’s DNA – look no further than the behemoth that is Netflix – so in 2020, expect to see more organisations migrating workloads to the cloud in an effort to meet the growing demands of today’s digital businesses.

Sanjay Castelino, chief product officer, Snow Software

Today’s cloud infrastructure is relatively easy to understand compared to what it will look like in 2020 and beyond. For example, when provisioning a cloud instance today, a user only needs a basic idea of how it operates and what it will cost. But when new cloud approaches like serverless become more popular, cloud usage will be managed by the people writing code.

In serverless computing, the code drives the cost to deliver the service, and businesses are not yet prepared to deal with these new consumption models. In the next year, companies need to priorities understanding consumption models because those models will have a significant impact on their business.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.