Bobby Hellard

Adam Shepherd

• 93% of enterprises are securing remote locations with a centralised approach that rarely scales to secure every endpoint and identity of remote branch locations, leaving an enterprise more vulnerable to a breach
• Enabling network security is the greatest challenge enterprises face when managing a highly distributed network with numerous remote locations
• In an era of cloud-first networks, nine out of 10 companies are still relying on centrally managed networks that don’t scale for remote system users, creating productivity bottlenecks
• 75% of enterprises experience branch and remote location network interruptions several times a year or more frequently, costing an organisation thousands of dollars an hour in lost productivity

The challenges of scaling cloud services to grow a digital business are many and are well-explained in the recent research report, Remote Office Networks Pose Business and Reliability Risk A Survey of IT Professionals (27 pp., PDF, no opt-in), published on August 2019 by Dimensional Research in collaboration with Infoblox. This report provides valuable insights into why scaling cloud services is essential for growing a digital business.

The study’s findings reflect how remote branch and production locations’ lack of IT security and site personnel are one of the most challenging constraints to overcome and keep growing their business.

99% or nearly all enterprises with distributed operations suffer adverse business impacts from network interruptions. Of the many causes of network disruption, one of the most common is not directing traffic to the closest point of entry into cloud platforms.

Taking a software-based approach to wide-area networking (SDWAN) is proving effective in improving cloud-based application performance, including Microsoft Office 365 cloud-based application performance. The report shows how SD-WAN is replacing outdated centralised IT models that lack the scale to flex and support new digital business models.

Key insights from the research report include the following:

Enterprises realise the model of relying on centralised IT security isn’t scaling to support and protect the proliferation of user devices with internet access, leaving branch offices less secure than ever before

Every IT architect, IT director, or CIO needs to consider how taking an SD-WAN-based approach to network management reduces the risk of a breach and data exfiltration. 93% of enterprises are securing remote locations with a centralised approach that rarely scales to secure every endpoint and identity of remote branch locations, leaving an enterprise more vulnerable to a breach.

Enterprises are upgrading their core network services, including DNS, DHCP, and IP address management, on cloud-based DDI platforms to bring greater security scale and reliability across their enterprise networks. Enterprises are also devising Zero Trust Security (ZTS) frameworks to secure every network, cloud, and on-premise platform, operating system, and application across their branch offices. 

Chase Cunningham of Forrester, Principal Analyst, is the leading authority on Zero Trust Security, and his recent video, Zero Trust in Action, is worth watching to learn more about how enterprises can secure their IT infrastructures. You can find his blog here.

75% or the majority of an enterprises’ branch offices experience network interruptions several times a year, with 49% of them requiring three or more hours to resolve remote office network outages

Enterprises continue to pay a very high price in lost productivity due to network interruptions and the time it takes to troubleshoot them and get a branch or remote location back online.

Enterprises are upgrading their core network services, including DNS, DHCP, and IP address management, on cloud-based DDI platforms to bring greater scale and reliability across their enterprise networks. Cloud-based DDI platforms enable enterprises to manage networking for hundreds to thousands of remote sites with unprecedented cost-efficiency.

Relying on centralised IT creates many challenges and security threats for remote offices, with the most costly not having IT staff at remote sites

Network security at remote locations is the greatest challenge enterprises face when managing a highly distributed network with numerous remote locations. A contributing factor to security being the leading challenge of managing a highly distributed network is the lack of IT employees at remote branches. 65% of enterprises are routinely sending IT employees to remote branches to resolve networking issues alone.

Travel costs combined with lost productivity from having to send IT technicians out for a week or longer to solve network performance issues is another reason why enterprises are adopting cloud-based DDI platforms.

Enterprises are adopting cloud-based DDI platforms that enable enterprises to simplify the management of highly distributed remote networks as well as to optimise the network performance of cloud-based applications

Dimensional Research’s study reflects how enterprises are meeting the challenge of increasingly complex, distributed networks that have a proliferating number of remote locations and endpoints. The majority of enterprises, 71%, are looking to integrate core network services, DNS, DHCP, and IP address management, into a single cloud-based DDI platform.

The problem is, conventional DDI solutions for branch locations are too slow or complicated for a cloud-first world. The following graphic from the study shows what is motivating enterprises to adopt SD-WAN today:

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.

You may have heard that creating a cloud centre of excellence (CCoE) is formative in your cloud strategy, resulting in a huge difference in the value of cloud migration for an organisation. Here’s how to plan it out for success.

What is a cloud centre of excellence?

In the simplest terms, a CCoE is a team of experts, either in-house or external, who have the knowledge, experience and skills to help you plan and move to the cloud. In reality, in order for your CCoE to be successful, it must be run by the people who are charged with implementing a fundamental shift in the way that your company thinks and works.

This change needs to happen across the whole organisation, and as such, it must be a cross-functional team of people. They need to understand how to develop and manage cloud strategy, governance and best practices, but also have business as well as technical skills, security know-how, product knowledge, and much more.

It’s all about the team: Avoiding silos for cloud adoption

In many organisations, there is a varied understanding and use of cloud technologies. In some cases, there might even be different infrastructures used in different areas of the business. While cloud adoption is growing year on year, it’s often led by key individual decision-makers or departments, and the rest of the company is left unsure how to proceed, or even why, creating uneven cloud use or strategy, even within the same enterprise.

While technology is a huge part of cloud adoption, people are what the success of your cloud strategy will ultimately hinge upon. If your business cannot get employees at every level on board and understanding what it takes for business transformation, you may have lost before you’ve begun. A CCoE makes sure that cloud adoption isn’t siloed and reserved for one-off projects by enthusiastic or forward-thinking departments, instead providing a strategy and path for cloud adoption company-wide.

What is a CCoE responsible for?

Planning to move to the cloud is not the same as the move itself, or embracing change and innovation once you’re there. You can start small, but remember that your needs will change as your cloud roadmap moves from planning to migration and growth. Technology and responsibilities can and will shift over time. As such, you should ensure that there is the ability to scale and to learn within and across your CCoE overall. As a starting point, think about four distinct cross-functional roles that need to be filled:

• Structure and operations: What operations are you focusing on, and how can you ensure consistency across departments in the organisation? Which teams should you be interacting with, and how can you pull departments on board and make sure you’re on the same page? As you interact with various parts of the company, these members of the CCoE will identify limitations, such as potential security challenges and opportunities, for example, valuable places to implement CD/CI pipelines
   
• Evaluation: Your CCoE team needs to stay ahead of the technical curve. Cloud technology is a fast-paced world, and cross-functional experts will stay on top of new services or feature enhancements, knowing how to implement these for your own business strategy. With this in place, your organisation begins to feel a culture of confidence, and an ability to lead rather than follow when it comes to cloud strategy
   
• Governance: Security and governance need to be at the center of everything, implemented from day zero so that you can keep to DevOps practices and pipelines without being held back due to error or lack of understanding. Your CCoE should be setting the groundwork for an organisation as they move to the cloud. Keeping the policy and security requirements in place behind the scenes is an integral part of a CCoE  
   
• Innovation: The right people for a CCoE will be risk-takers who are results-oriented. The cloud is no place for caution, it allows you to think and move fast, trying new things and iterating and monitoring, measuring and trying again. Smart thinkers who enable strategy and innovation are key, working across departments to understand the security and layers of the cloud and how to work with them instead of in spite of them

Who benefits from a CCoE?

When an organisation experiences consistency in approach and strategy, everyone benefits. Adoption and speed of cloud strategy are improved automatically when you use a “templatised” deployment, and have the right people in the right places for success.

A CCoE enables value at every level. All stakeholders know what’s expected of them, what they are responsible for and why, resulting in far less uncertainty or frustration. The leadership and IT teams now have a better understanding of the steps they need to take to meet their goals and a unified approach to onboarding new technologies, lessening the learning curve and the need for troubleshooting. The customers and end-users are now supported by innovation and best practices.

The principles to make this happen

Building the right team for a CCoE isn’t a simple task. Internally, you might find that you want to start building this essential part of your organisation, but you don’t have the knowledge of technology or best practices to make this happen. If that’s the case, an external advisor is essential to guide you in building your CCoE, a consultant that can support you in recruiting or training personnel to adequately represent teams across the whole organisation, and then become a partner as your cloud journey progresses. The added benefits include:

• Strategy: Cloud is not the end destination, but rather the enabler for organisational growth. With guidance, you can build a roadmap for success and long term change, understanding where to put your resources and budget, and how to govern your cloud adoption overall to make the most out of this innovation
   
• Experience: Tried and tested insight into the best practices of cloud adoption. Your CCoE team will have a partner with years of experience to support them internally, with advice and support every step of the way
   
• Know-how: A wide range of knowledge and skills, from security to product strategy. A cloud expert can highlight the gaps you need to be filled, and give accurate steps to follow so that you get it right the first time

However you build your cloud centre of excellence, it’s foundational for building a cloud strategy that is both sustainable and scalable across an organisation, maximising your ability to reduce risk, and see benefits from the cloud.

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.

Bobby Hellard

Slack has introduced Workflow Builder, a tool to create a customisable channel within a channel.

This, the company says, will remove productivity «roadblocks» by streamlining projects within Slack.

It’s been a busy year for the communications platform, with new productivity features launched every other month, such as tighter security controls and user-friendly upgrades such as dark mode.

Here, the company is going after workflow productivity with a feature that enables users to get information from their team sent straight to them, instead of creating an extra, temporary channel.

«Raise your hand if you rely on other people and teams to get work done,» Slack rhetorically asked in its blog. «By our count, there’s a 70% chance you do. Coordinating projects with others requires getting the right information to the right people in real-time. Yet steps like making requests, asking for updates, and providing context to teammates are hardly instantaneous – and often halt progress altogether.»

Slack’s answer to this is Workflow Builder, a «visual tool» for users to automate routine functions with custom workflows – essentially a channel within a channel to collect specific requests for your projects.

Slack uses a new starter as an example, where rather than tracking down the relevant people, whom you might not know yet, or trying to find specific documents relating to a project they’re now on, Workflow Builder provides a quick and accessible repository where the newbie can get up to speed.

Alternatively, the organisation can set up a «welcome workflow» that allows the new person to fill out a form letting the rest of the team know about them, which is one way to cut out awkward getting to know you chit-chat.

These custom forms are also a way of working out what your channel’s needs are. For example, finding out everyone’s thoughts on team meetings: Each member can fill in the form and let each other know about their availability and so on.

This is also useful for incident reports, recording issues with your company’s website for instance, where you let the team know something’s wrong and you create a shareable file of the issue for the IT department.

This is also a very quick feature, requiring just a minute and a reasonable amount of clicks (it took us only five clicks to create our own workflow).

Amazon Web Services (AWS) claims it has fully migrated its consumer databases from Oracle to its own offerings – but don’t expect the mudslinging between the two companies to end just yet.

Jeff Barr, AWS evangelist, took to the Seattle giant’s official blog to confirm the last Oracle database had been turned off. AWS claims it has reduced its database costs by more than 60%, latency of consumer-facing applications was reduced by 40%, and database admin overhead went down by 70% moving to managed services.

“Over the years we realised that we were spending too much time managing and scaling thousands of legacy Oracle databases,” wrote Barr. “Instead of focusing on high-value differentiated work, our database administrators spent a lot of time simply keeping the lights on while transaction rates climbed and the overall amount of stored data mounted.”

This was by no means the only snarky remark. AWS went to the trouble of creating a video, complete with cheers, encapsulating the moment when the final Oracle DB was switched off (below), while the slide which accompanied Barr’s blog, albeit lacking somewhat in detail, was captioned ‘bye bye Oracle’.

Regular watchers of AWS and Oracle keynotes will recall various claims made by one company against the other. Only last month Larry Ellison’s OpenWorld keynote in San Francisco, which touted the company’s autonomous, next-generation cloud, compared variously with Amazon’s position on shared responsibility – a concept which Oracle is looking to eradicate.

Last November, AWS chief executive Andy Jassy noted that AWS had turned off its last Oracle data warehouse at the beginning of that month, and added that almost 90% of all databases had moved to cloud-based relational database Aurora and non-relational database DynamoDB.

The overall migration project was not limited to switching off databases. Barr added that employees who focused primarily on Oracle database admin work were retrained on AWS, as well as ‘cloud-based architectures’ and cloud security. “They now work with both internal and external customers in an advisory role, where they have an opportunity to share their first-hand experience with large-scale migration of mission-critical databases,” wrote Barr.

AWS did note that some third-party applications were ‘tightly bound’ to Oracle and were therefore not migrated.

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

It started with DevOps. Then there was NetOps. Now SecOps. Or is it DevSecOps? Or maybe SecDevOps?

Whatever you decide to call it, too often the end result is little more than the same old siloes with shiny new names. We've become so focused on "what do we call these folks" that we sometimes forget "what is it we're trying to accomplish".

Shakespeare said that a rose would smell as sweet by any other name. Let's apply that today to the number of factions rising in the operations game. Changing your name does nothing if you don't change your core behaviours and practices.

Back when cloud first rose – pun intended – there were plenty of pundits who dismissed enterprise efforts to build private (on-premises) cloud. Because it didn't fit the precise definition they wanted to associate with cloud. They ignored that the outcome was the measure of success, not measuring up to someone else's pedantic definition. They sought agility and efficiency and speed by changing the way infrastructure was provisioned, configured, and managed. They changed behaviours and practices through the use of technology.

Today the terminology wars are focused on X-Ops and what we should call the latest arrival, security.

I know I've used the terms, and sometimes I use them all at the same time. But perhaps what we need is fewer distinctions. Perhaps I should just say you're either adopting "modern ops" in terms of behaviours and practices or you're remaining "traditional ops" and that's all there is to it.

Modern ops employ technology like cloud and automation to build pipelines that codify processes to speed delivery and deployment of applications.

And they do it by changing behaviours and practices. They are collaborative and communicative. They use technology to modernise and optimise decades old processes that are impeding delivery and deployment. They work together, not in siloed X-Ops teams, to achieve their goal of faster, more frequent releases that deliver value to the business and delight consumers.

Focusing on what to call "security" as they get onboard with modern ops can be detrimental to the basic premise that delivery and deployment can only succeed at speed with a collaborative approach. Slapping new labels on a new focused team just builds differenter siloes; it doesn't smash them and open up the lines of communication that are required to operate at speed and scale.

It also unintentionally gives permission to other, non-security ops to abdicate security responsibilities to the <SecDevOps | DevSecOps> team. Because it's in their name, right?

That's an increasingly bad idea given that application security is a stack and thus requires a full stack to implement the right protections.  You need network security and transport security and you definitely need application security. The attack surface for an app includes all seven layers and, increasingly, the stack comprising its operational environment. There is no room for silos when it comes to security.

The focus of IT as its moving through its digital transformation should be to modernise ops – from the technology to the teams that use it to innovate and deliver value to the business. Modern ops are not consumed by concern for titles, they are passionate about producing results. Modern ops work together, communicate freely, and collaborate across concerns to build out an efficient, adaptive delivery and deployment pipeline.

That will take network, security, infrastructure, storage, and development expertise working together.

In the network, we use labels to tag traffic and apply policies that control what devices can talk to which infrastructure and applications. In container clusters we use labels to isolate and restrict, to constrain and to disallow.

Labels in organisations can have the same affect.

So maybe it would be better if we just said you are either modern ops or traditional ops. And that some are in a transitional state between the two. Let's stop spending so many cycles on what to call each other that we miss the opportunity to create a collaborative environment in which to deliver and deploy apps faster, more frequently, and most of all, securely.

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.

Preparing for the adoption of new technologies is challenging for many large enterprise organisations. That's why savvy CIOs and CTOs seek information and guidance from vendors that can assist them on the journey to achieve digital business transformation. Meanwhile, investment in artificial intelligence (AI) systems and services will continue on a high-growth trajectory.

According to the latest worldwide market study by International Data Corporation (IDC), spending on AI systems will reach $97.9 billion in 2023 – that's more than two and a half times the $37.5 billion that will be spent in 2019. The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for AI in the 2018-2023 forecast period will be 28.4 percent.

Artificial intelligence market development

"The AI market continues to grow at a steady rate in 2019 and we expect this momentum to carry forward," said David Schubmehl, research director at IDC. "The use of artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) is occurring in a wide range of solutions and applications from ERP and manufacturing software to content management, collaboration, and user productivity."

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are top of mind for most organisations today, and IDC expects that AI will be the disrupting influence changing entire industries over the next decade.

Spending on AI systems will be led by the retail and banking industries, each of which will invest more than $5 billion in 2019. Nearly half of the retail spending will go toward automated customer service agents and expert shopping advisors & product recommendation systems. The banking industry will focus its investments on automated threat intelligence and prevention systems and fraud analysis and investigation.

Other industries that will make significant investments in AI systems throughout the forecast include discrete manufacturing, process manufacturing, healthcare, and professional services. The fastest spending growth will come from the media industry and federal or central governments with five-year CAGRs of 33.7 percent and 33.6 percent respectively.

Investments in AI systems continue to be driven by a wide range of use cases. The three largest use cases — automated customer service agents, automated threat intelligence and prevention systems, and sales process recommendation and automation — will deliver 25 percent of all spending in 2019. The next six use cases will provide an additional 35 percent of overall spending this year.

The use cases that will see the fastest spending growth over the 2018-2023 forecast period are automated human resources (43.3 percent CAGR) and pharmaceutical research and development (36.7 percent CAGR). However, eight other use cases will have spending growth with five-year CAGRs greater than 30 percent.

Decision-makers across all industries are now grappling with the question of how to effectively proceed with their AI journey.  That's why the largest share of technology spending in 2019 will go toward services, primarily IT services, as firms seek outside expertise to design and implement their AI projects.

Hardware spending will be somewhat larger than software spending in 2019 as firms build out their AI infrastructure, but purchases of AI software and AI software platforms will overtake hardware by the end of the forecast period with software spending seeing a 36.7 percent CAGR.

Outlook for AI applications development growth

On a geographic basis, the United States will deliver more than 50 percent of all AI applications development spending throughout the forecast period, led by the retail and banking industries. Western Europe will be the second-largest geographic region, led by banking and discrete manufacturing.

China will be the third-largest region for AI spending with retail, state or local government, and professional services vying for the top position. The strongest spending growth over the five-year forecast period will be in Japan (45.3 percent CAGR) and China (44.9 percent CAGR).

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