Bobby Hellard

Data visualisation has become one of the hottest tools in data-driven business management over the past few years. As business intelligence software becomes a more central part of companies’ toolkits and data practices, visualisations have improved while concurrently becoming more precise and versatile.

Even so, not every case of a business implementing BI software and data visualisation is a success. Although they are meant to streamline data analysis and comprehension, they can sometimes produce the opposite effect.

A recent survey by Ascend2 revealed that despite their best intentions, many companies fumble their data visualisation implementations and end up doing more harm than good. While this has not necessarily affected the popularity of BI and data visualisation, it does raise some interesting questions about what companies can do right.

The survey shows that while many have had success with their data visualisation and data dashboard strategies, a majority have only been somewhat successful, or worse, unsuccessful. 

Regardless, dashboards and visualisation confer significant benefits for organisations, so they are not likely to go anywhere.

Why some visualisations are less successful

The survey responses indicate that while data dashboards are still being used and developed, the number of companies that are experiencing strong success with them has dropped. When asked about the overall effectiveness of their data dashboard strategies, only 43% of those surveyed described it as very successful. Meanwhile, 54% called it somewhat successful, while 3% were unsuccessful in deploying data visualisations and dashboards.

One of the biggest challenges is that fewer respondents believed they had consistent access to the data they required. A major benefit of dashboards is that they provide only the data that is relevant to each user and exhibits it in an easily digestible manner. However, dashboard design can sometimes go awry and become either too cluttered or too sparse, obscuring important information in the process.

Indeed, the number of respondents who claimed they frequently or always had the right data to make business decisions fell from 44% in 2017 to 43% in 2018.

A focus on a specific type of data visualisation can misrepresent data, while a strong focus on one type of data can exclude up to 80% of a company’s full data stream

Nevertheless, it does appear that visualisations and dashboards are gaining popularity. The survey found that a total of 84% of respondents planned to increase their overall budgets for data dashboards and visualisations to some extent, although most only plan on increasing it moderately.

This is because despite the challenge of successfully implementing a data visualisation strategy, visual language has been proven to improve productivity and efficiency in the workplace.

Why companies will keep investing in visualisations

One big reason many companies undergo less-than-optimal implementations is that they do not have an effective answer to the question, “What is data visualisation?” For many, the definition is as simple as charts made from spreadsheets and basic diagrams. However, today’s business intelligence tools offer a significant variety of visuals that can make almost any data easier to comprehend and actionable.

A report by the American Management Association has found that visualisation tends to improve several aspects of companies’ decision making. According to the AMA, 64% of participants made decisions faster when using a visualisation tool, while another found that visual language can shorten work meetings by up to 24%.

More importantly, the AMA report cites additional third-party studies demonstrating that visual language helps problem solving, improving efficiency by 19% while overall producing 22% higher results in 13% less time.

With that in mind, however, the report by Ascend2 may be cause for concern, or at least a call to action, for many companies employing data dashboards. The importance of design and precision cannot be overstated when planning a data visualisation strategy.

In some cases, a focus on a specific type of visualisation can misrepresent data or make it harder to understand. Other times, a strong focus on one type of data—such as structured data—can exclude up to 80% of a company’s full data stream.

Having a clear deployment strategy that understands an organisations’ specific needs and objectives can also make the process easier. The Ascend2 study discovered that companies which focused on objectives that are more important—instead of those that are more challenging, but less critical—can also help organisations increase their success with data dashboards and visualisations.

Coursing the right plot

Data visualisations will continue to be a central part of organisations’ data practices. The improvements it offers for decision-making, consensus, problem-solving, and more make it a key part of business success. Still, companies should focus their efforts on building data visualisation strategies and data dashboards that give their teams the information they need, and deliver it consistently.

Editor's note: This article was written in association with StudioWorks.

For the enterprise, managing cloud costs has become a huge problem. Public cloud continues to grow in popularity and top providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google offer competitive prices to attract enterprises. But your search to save money shouldn't stop there. There are many factors – some of which IT teams initially overlook – that can increase a public cloud bill. Fortunately, organisations can avoid any unwanted billing surprises with a smart cloud cost management strategy.

Enterprises progressing through their cloud adoption need to ensure that they have cost management strategies in place to control their spend as they continue to migrate services to cloud providers. Let’s examine some cloud cost management strategies that you can use to reduce your cloud costs immediately.

The challenges of managing cloud costs

Cloud infrastructure offers many benefits for organisations but it also presents a variety of challenges. The benefits are easily seen – scalability, control, security etc. – but it's also important to understand how moving to the cloud impacts your organisation. A major factor that contributes to the challenge of cloud cost management is the difficulty that organisations have in tracking and forecasting usage. Unpredictable budget costs can be one of the biggest cloud management pain points.

The ability to scale up and down on demand has allowed resource procurement to transition from sole ownership of the finance or procurement team to stakeholders across IT, DevOps and others. Such democratisation of procurement has initiated an ever-growing group of cost-conscious stakeholders who are now responsible for understanding, managing and optimising costs.

Before you move your infrastructure to the cloud, it is important to evaluate how much the public cloud will cost. Like any IT service, the public cloud can introduce unexpected charges.

The first step of a cloud cost management strategy is to look at the public cloud providers' billing models. Take note of how much storage, CPU and memory your applications require, and which cloud instances would meet those requirements. Then, estimate how much those applications will cost in the cloud. Compare your estimates to how much it currently costs to run those apps on premises. Some workloads are more cost-effective when in-house due to data location and other factors.

When using multiple public cloud providers, integration and other factors can lead to unexpected fees. Think ahead and plan application deployments to see where you might incur additional costs. Also, look at your cloud bill and see what you are charged for access, CPU and storage. The ability to track spending across more than one cloud is invaluable.

Before you commit to a cloud vendor, you have to understand your business requirements and examine what a certain vendor is offering. At first glance, most vendors have similar packages and prices, but when you examine them in detail, you might discover, for example, that one vendor has a dramatically lower price for certain types of workloads.

Organisations should also avoid vendor lock-in. Moving workloads from one cloud vendor to another can sometimes be difficult. Organisations sometimes end up paying higher prices than necessary because they didn't do their homework upfront and it is subsequently too difficult to migrate applications or workloads after they are in production.

Key areas where you can cut your cloud costs

To reduce your cloud costs, you must first identify waste by uncovering inefficient use of cloud resources. Cloud cost management is not a one-and-done process, but you can immediately start saving money on your cloud infrastructure costs if you address key areas that account for the majority of wasted cloud spend and budget overruns.

Ensure teams have the direct ability to see what they are spending. It’s easy to get carried away spinning up services, unless you know exactly what you are already spending. Identify what you have, and who owns it. Tag resources with user ownership, cost centre information and created time to give you a better handle on where the spend originates. This information can be used to track usage through detailed billing reports.

Once you have a handle on what your spend is, set budgets per account. Doing this after establishing a baseline ensures that you are setting practical and realistic budgets that are based on the actual usage. Look to whitelist Instance types (RDS & EC2) to only allow instances of specific types (e.g. t2.medium) or of classes (e.g. t2-*), or of sizes (e.g. *-micro, *-small, *-medium).

Prevent staff from provisioning unapproved virtual instances from the marketplace that include software license costs, or from using specific OS or DB engines from vendors with whom you do not have enterprise agreements in place or are too costly to run at scale. Review in which regions you have services running. The cost of services per region can vary as much as 60%. So you need to ensure you are balancing the need with running services in a given region with the cost of doing so. You can use instance scheduling to start and stop instances on a planned schedule. Shutting down environments on nights and weekends can help save you 70% of runtime costs. Look to determine which environments need 24×7 availability, and schedule the rest.

Manage your storage lifecycle by ensuring that you are rotating logs and snapshots regularly and backup and remove any storage volumes that are no longer in use. Ensure that you are using only one Cloudtrail configuration and have added additional ones only when absolutely necessary. Also, ensure that sandbox or trial accounts are only utilised for exploration purposes and for the duration committed.

Another technological solution that can help to reduce operating expenses is the use of containers. Often used by IT teams taking DevOps approaches, containers package applications together with all their dependencies, making them easier to deploy, manage and/or migrate from one environment to another.

Last, but not least, use a cloud cost management vendor. Many organisations decide that tackling these cost optimisation chores on their own takes too much time and skill. Instead, they leverage services from a reputable cloud cost management vendors. Cloud cost management is one of the major pain points various organisations have when migrating to the cloud. Cloud costs can sometimes be difficult to estimate, due to the complexity of the cloud infrastructure. 

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.

There’s no denying that solutions that optimise data capture business success today. Platforms as a service that handle many aspects of an enterprise’s customer-facing data have revolutionised the way large companies interact with their customers, driving increased personalisation, better service, and higher value interactions.

This flexibility of PaaS solutions such as Salesforce has enabled an amazing 360-degree customer experience and tremendous growth in value. It has also enabled citizen developers to take governance into their own hands, often without the appropriate understanding or controls required to minimise the threat of bad actors, internal or external to the enterprise.

Most PaaS solutions are outfitted with a proactive security framework to enable success, but many CISOs, CIOs, and IT leaders lack the full understanding of the shared responsibility required to ensure ongoing compliance.

There are some common scenarios we’ve all heard of, such as the pharmaceutical rep who brings his book of business with him to a competitor. And then there are more surprising scenarios, like the healthcare organisations that unknowingly expose protected health information to all their customer service reps, or the wealth management companies whose summer interns have access to all the Social Security numbers of their high net-worth customers.

These are vulnerabilities created, more often unintentionally, by admins and developers trying to support the business the best they know how. They are also preventable with the right governance framework and internal controls to limit access.

The robust security capabilities offered by the PaaS often get purchased and “turned on” but don’t actually do anything to provide insights into risks or prevent the actions of bad actors. As with many security capabilities, enterprises unfortunately buy and “turn on” these premium features without an understanding of what their responsibility actually is nor how to create the appropriate governance model based on the real threats.

Why PaaS can be a vulnerability

Platforms as a service offer tremendous security capabilities but can be implemented in an insecure way when data governance is an afterthought. The tremendous flexibility to support the line of business tends to be the driver, with governance and compliance relegated to a last-minute scramble.

Vulnerabilities happen when the wrong people — or maybe worse, everyone within an organisation — receives unfettered access to the data housed within a platform. Granting systemwide administrative access to anyone on the payroll is a recipe for disaster. Why do part-time interns need access to sensitive information like Social Security numbers, loan origination data, and credit card specifics? You guessed it: They don’t. In cases such as these, ignorance is not bliss. It’s dangerous.

The first step in correcting this common mistake is learning exactly what data lives in your enterprise’s PaaS. You need a clear, objective data-governance plan, so everything from compliance needs to shareholder obligations need to be accounted for.

Some questions that can guide your data audit include:

• What information actually sits in your instance?
• Where is information being stored?
• Who has access to the information?
• Are you meeting compliance requirements?
• How do we value the data?

How to achieve proper security

It may sound odd, but thinking like a hacker can help shore up your platform’s security. Find the holes and cracks, and work to spackle them shut. Once that’s accomplished, resolve to continuously assess risks and perform mitigation. Staying up-to-date on your security posture requires constant effort, and eating the elephant is easier one bite at a time. Start with figuring out your why and informing an aligned road map forward.

To shore up your platform’s security and protect your data — the lifeblood of your enterprise, implement a few basic steps:

1. Figure out who cares: Determine who in the organisation has expertise, knowledge, and accountability to your PaaS data. If you can’t find owners who care, you should assume your problem is larger than you realise.

2. Start somewhere: Data inventory and classification can be scary, but if you don’t know the data you have, it’s difficult to determine how you feel about it. Start with a simple exercise to learn what is collected and stored in your system. From there, you have context for how you value this data and what are the appropriate controls to put in place.

3. Ask who sees what: Start with some hypothetical scenarios and see what answers come back. Do the right people have access to the right information? Have you applied a privileged access management approach to the data?

Once you’ve started with these basics, you have the knowledge to create an actionable strategy to get where you want to go. Remember, proper security is not a checklist; it’s an evolving journey without a final destination. Your governance journey evolves as your PaaS evolves, one agile sprint at a 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.

Keumars Afifi-Sabet

Container orchestration platforms exist to make container use a whole lot easier. Running any application on a container will make it portable. However, when the time comes to scale or add services, you’re going to run into problems without a platform to manage and stitch it all together, and it will quickly become too difficult to handle.

When it comes to AWS, there are three main options – each with pros and cons. The choice you make will ultimately come down to your business needs and ongoing maintenance capabilities.

To help you decide, here are the pros and cons of each managed service:

ECS: the native choice

Elastic Container Service (ECS) was AWS’ first offering for managed container orchestration. For many, this is the easiest option, and it certainly has the least amount of components to get familiar with.

As a heavily integrated orchestration platform, it’s a great choice for anyone happy with the AWS ecosystem and who wants the benefits and familiarity of AWS services and support. It’s also cost-effective, as you don’t have to pay for the control plane and can use the built-in AWS code tools as well as enjoy fine-grained identity and access management (IAM) for Services and Tasks.

When your business wants to deploy an application onto ECS, the operations can be defined for each application individually, dictating for example which containers have access to S3 and which don’t.

When is ECS not the best choice?

As a proprietary AWS solution, cloning your applications to a different cloud vendor won’t be a simple task if you go with ECS. In addition, the orchestration platform has limited support for routing, currently supporting only path-based routing, and not host-based or header-based routing. Another factor to consider is that ECS is slower to respond to state changes than the others in the Big Three, so if you’re looking to a highly performant solution – it’s not going to be the right fit.

Who is ECS good for?

If you are looking for simplicity with good value for your investment, and these factors aren’t deal breakers for you, ECS is a great beginners option, and perfect for any business without experienced DevOps to operate their orchestration. I recommend it if you have a limited amount of services (<10) to deploy on the cloud. Without the bells and whistles which make the solution more complex, you might find ECS to be preferable for your company.

EKS: the Kubernetes choice

EKS is AWS’ offering of Kubernetes, the open-source container orchestration platform that has become popular. As EKS is a managed service by Amazon, this eliminates a lot of the hassle that comes with the initial installation and maintenance of Kubernetes going forward. Amazon EKS runs upstream Kubernetes. It’s not a different flavor, so you get the same functionality as if you created your own Kubernetes cluster, which makes the platform easy to clone if you want to run multi-cloud in the future.

As an open-source platform, EKS has the benefit of thousands of developers that are working on its technology constantly, actively contributing to functionality and new features. Unique selling points worth mentioning include namespace isolation, where you can split your cluster with logical boundaries, for example limiting developers to using a specific amount of resources of the cluster. Moreover, it provides the ability to run cron jobs and stateful workloads.

EKS offers a much faster deployment time than ECS, with results in a few seconds, allowing you to deploy several times a day and feedback fast for changes. Everything can be declared using the kubectl command line tool, and there are plenty of integrations. These include service-to-service communications and native scaling of both Pods and Worker Nodes, enabling your developers to focus on their business logic and deliver new features. I’d also highlight Helm, a package manager that provides the ability to bundle together several applications or business logic for deploying and updating a whole unit in one piece.

What should you watch out for with EKS?

It’s important to realize that Kubernetes isn’t the right choice for everyone. Your business will have the added cost of the control plane each month, and there is a much steeper learning curve than you would experience with ECS, and currently fewer integrations with AWS overall. Unlike ECS, the IAM to AWS is not built-in, so your developers or DevOps will need to install additional tools for this functionality.

The other serious limitation is pod density, a unique issue to EKS. Every container (pod) is bound to a certain private IP in your VPC, and if your application utilizes many replicas or microservices your cluster will scale but not due to the fact that your instance ran out of CPU or memory, rather that your instance ran out of IPs to allocate to the worker nodes.

This results in additional costs, and can be limiting as your developers will have limited IPs for smaller size instances used by the worker nodes. If your microservices scale quickly and by high volume, this is an important factor to consider.

Who is EKS right for?

The critical question here is, once the installation is complete, who is going to be responsible for taking ownership of it? Managing and maintaining EKS needs dedicated specialists, and if you don’t have the manpower, another option might be a better fit.

Fargate: The container on-demand choice

With Fargate, it’s a whole new game. You don’t have to create your own control plane or instances, there are no clusters needed, no need for infrastructure upgrades or maintenance. Instead, you specify how many resources you want to use, and pay as you go. This gives you the opportunity to focus on the design and build of your applications, rather than spending time worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

The best thing about Fargate is rapid horizontal scaling, the ability to scale on demand. Developers simply create containers and deploy to the Fargate service. Easy set-up, no learning curve.

Fargate is not suitable for stateful workloads, requiring your application to be stateless, which is one of the main reasons why some companies wouldn’t choose Fargate. Additionally, although the ability to scale to tens of thousands in no time is exciting, in reality not many businesses need this functionality, making the cost harder to justify.

Who would be a good fit for Fargate?

Only you can know if your budget suits choosing Fargate rather than investing in a DevOps team, and if the benefits of scaling on demand are worth the higher cost. This is most likely if you have just a handful of services.

For many, Fargate works well as a hybrid solution, allowing your applications to scale where necessary for on-demand tasks rather than using it 24/7. Another consideration is to isolate those workloads with sharp surges in resource usage and run them on Fargate to minimize the impact on the performance of your ECS or EKS clusters.

In closing, EKS is an increasingly popular choice for container orchestration, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right solution for your business needs. Remember, the more features and functionality there are, the more complexity it introduces, and the more resources you will need to manage your ecosystem. It’s in your best interest to make sure that you actually need the bells and whistles before choosing the shiny new thing.

Read more: AWS, Azure or Google: Do the differences between cloud providers really matter?

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.

Demand for computer servers, disk storage systems, and networking hardware deployed within an enterprise hybrid cloud environment remains strong. Moreover, the investment in non-cloud on-premises infrastructure seems assured by the CIO and CTO need to deliver superior security and compliance with IT regulatory requirements in several key industries.

According to the latest worldwide market study by International Data Corporation (IDC), vendor revenue from sales of IT infrastructure products for cloud environments — including public and private cloud — declined 10.2 percent year-over-year in the second quarter of 2019 (2Q19), reaching $14.1 billion.

Cloud IT infrastructure market development

IDC also lowered its forecast for total spending on cloud IT infrastructure in 2019 to $63.6 billion, down 4.9 percent from last quarter's forecast and changing from expected growth to a year-over-year decline of 2.1 percent.

Vendor revenue from hardware infrastructure sales to public cloud environments in 2Q19 was down 0.9 percent compared to the previous quarter (1Q19) and down 15.1 percent year over year to $9.4 billion.

This segment of the market continues to be highly impacted by demand from a handful of hyperscale cloud service providers, whose spending on IT infrastructure tends to have significant upward and downward swings. That ongoing fluctuation creates volatility for the IT infrastructure vendors.

After a strong performance in 2018, IDC expects the public cloud IT infrastructure segment to cool down in 2019 with spending reaching $42 billion — that's a 6.7 percent decrease from 2018. Although it will continue to account for most of the spending on cloud IT environments, its share will decrease from 69.4 percent in 2018 to 66.1 percent in 2019.

In contrast, spending on private cloud IT infrastructure has shown more stable growth since IDC started tracking sales of IT infrastructure products in various deployment environments. In the second quarter of 2019, vendor revenues from private cloud environments increased 1.5 percent year-over-year reaching $4.6 billion. IDC expects spending in this segment to grow 8.4 percent year-over-year in 2019.

 

Overall, the IT infrastructure industry is at crossroads in terms of product sales to cloud vs. traditional IT environments. In 3Q18, vendor revenues from cloud IT environments climbed over the 50 percent mark for the first time but fell below this important tipping point since then.

In 2Q19, cloud IT environments accounted for 48.4 percent of vendor revenues. For the full year 2019, spending on cloud IT infrastructure will remain just below the 50 percent mark at 49 percent.

Longer-term, however, IDC expects that spending on cloud IT infrastructure will grow steadily and will sustainably exceed the level of spending on traditional IT infrastructure in 2020 and beyond.

Spending on the three technology segments in cloud IT environments is forecast to deliver growth for Ethernet switches while computing platforms and storage platforms are expected to decline in 2019.

Ethernet switches are expected to grow at 13.1 percent, while spending on storage platforms will decline at 6.8 percent and compute platforms will decline by 2.4 percent. Compute will remain the largest category of spending on cloud IT infrastructure at $33.8 billion.

Sales of IT infrastructure products into traditional (non-cloud) IT environments declined 6.6 percent from a year ago in Q219. For the full year 2019, worldwide spending on traditional non-cloud IT infrastructure is expected to decline by 5.8 percent, as the technology refresh cycle driving market growth in 2018 is winding down this year.

By 2023, IDC expects that traditional non-cloud IT infrastructure will only represent 41.8 percent of total worldwide IT infrastructure spending — that's down from 52 percent in 2018. This share loss and the growing share of cloud environments in overall spending on IT infrastructure is common across all regions.

Most regions grew their cloud IT Infrastructure revenues in 2Q19. Middle East & Africa was fastest growing at 29.3 percent year-over-year, followed by Canada at 15.6 percent year-over-year growth. Other growing regions in 2Q19 included Central & Eastern Europe (6.5 percent), Japan (5.9 percent), and Western Europe (3.1 percent).

Cloud IT infrastructure revenues were down slightly year-over-year in Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan) (APeJ) by 7.7 percent, Latin America by 14.2 percent, China by 6.9 percent, and the USA by 16.3 percent.

Outlook for cloud IT infrastructure investment

Long-term, IDC expects spending on cloud IT infrastructure to grow at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.9 percent, reaching $90.9 billion in 2023 and accounting for 58.2 percent of total IT infrastructure spend.

Public cloud data centres will account for 66 percent of this amount, growing at a 5.9 percent CAGR. Spending on private cloud infrastructure will grow at a CAGR of 9.2 percent.

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.

Keumars Afifi-Sabet

Bobby Hellard

Digital Realty has announced it is to acquire Interxion in an $8.4 billion (£6.52bn) transaction which is touted as the largest data centre deal in history.

Interxion, a provider of European colocation data centre services, will join the Digital Realty team to create a ‘leading pan-European data centre presence’. The companies estimate the combined entity will cover more than two thirds of the GDP in Europe, with Interxion currently holding 53 carrier- and cloud-neutral facilities across 11 European countries.

The companies claim various benefits of the transaction: building upon Digital Realty’s record in hyperscale development and its associated benefits for enterprise customers is cited, as well as solving the public and hybrid cloud architectural requirements of a global customer base.

Digital Realty’s CEO, A. William Stein, will serve as chief executive of the combined company, while Interxion CEO David Ruberg will head up the EMEA business.

The deal beats Digital Realty’s own record when it purchased DuPont Fabros for $7.6bn in 2017.

“This strategic and complementary transaction builds upon Digital Realty’s established foundation of serving market demand for colocation, scale and hyperscale requirements in the Americas, EMEA and Asia Pacific and leverages Interxion’s European colocation and interconnection expertise, enhancing the combined company’s capabilities to enable customers to solve for the full spectrum of data centre requirements across a global platform,” said Stein in a statement.

Consolidation of the market was to be expected, according to analyst firm Synergy Research. In a note at the beginning of this year, the company said it expected to see ‘a lot more’ data centre M&A over the coming five years. Analysis of the transactions over the past two years saw a significant dip in overall value in 2018 compared with 2017, despite a greater number of deals.

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.