Public clouds dominate IT conversations but the next phase of cloud evolutions are «multi» hybrid cloud environments. The winners in the cloud services industry will be those organizations that understand how to leverage these technologies as complete service solutions for specific customer verticals. In turn, both business and IT actors throughout the enterprise will need to increase their engagement with multi-cloud deployments today while planning a technology strategy that will constitute a significant part of their IT budgets in the very near future. As IoT solutions are growing rapidly, as well as security challenges growing exponentially, without a doubt, the cloud world is about to change for the better. Again.

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You don’t have to be a Wall Street professional to understand the reasons to invest in more than one company. So, why would a business choose a strategy of investing in a single cloud? It doesn’t make sense in today’s marketplace.

Initially, cloud providers like Microsoft Azure, AWS or Google Cloud were commodities using pricing as a competitive advantage. But today, these providers are differentiating themselves with unique value-add services and features that make sense for different businesses. Google, for example, offers Vision AI services, which for retail business will enable them using facial recognition to connect online and offline identifies for loyalty programs. But if a company is focused on replatforming some of its legacy applications and bringing them to the cloud, it will probably want to use Microsoft Azure SQL and Azure Active Directory.

In addition to features, companies want to consider their needs for locality, regulatory or service-level agreement challenges that each provider might address differently. When going multi-cloud, they should take advantage of “Best of Cloud” as well, leveraging the optimal feature sets from each provider that makes sense for the business.

Ultimately, if a company is not moving toward building a cloud ecosystem of microservices and applications, then it will likely fall behind competitors. Businesses should consider these four principles for building a best-in-class multi-cloud strategy.

Understand the Accordion Thesis

IT is like an accordion and at any moment, there are parts of it that are expanding and parts of it that are contracting. The contraction is standardisation, where all diverse choices are gradually squeezed down to a single standard (like the 19-inch server rack); whereas, the expanding parts are the innovations, such as machine learning, chatbots and AI. On the innovation side, an organisation needs to be able to select and experiment with an infinite number of choices. The trick in managing IT is understanding standardising and where you’re innovating, and to try not to standardise on the innovation side or innovate on the standardisation side.

The hardest part for most IT organisations is the “Fat Middle,” where it’s unreasonable to try and force a single standard choice, but where a plethora of choices is just unnecessary overhead. Most healthy businesses can tolerate two to six choices within each category, for example having both SQL Server and PostgreSQL available.

Companies can use the Accordion Thesis to inform “Build versus Buy” decisions as well. It can also be helpful for avoiding one of the greatest business risks: analysis paralysis. Do pilots, learn things, but have a bias towards building cloud native applications or microservices that will facilitate innovation, and leaning on standardised services provided by the major cloud leaders.

Take control of what’s already in the cloud

Every Fortune 500 company is using the public cloud, but most likely are not using it strategically or even on purpose. Much of this use is rogue lines of business, such as applications that the marketing team utilised because they wanted to move fast without informing the rest of the organisation. A part of a company’s cloud strategy is taking control of the ways it’s already using the cloud. As the number of applications continues to expand geometrically, businesses can find it harder and harder to understand the operational footprint of this sort of tactical ‘mix and match’ approach.

Build your own ecosystem, don’t depend on others

The more businesses have built against one cloud provider, the more likely they’ve inadvertently embraced a lot of -isms of that provider around things like storage, authentication layer, and access or network topologies that are not portable when they shift to a multi-cloud approach. The sooner a business adopts a multi-cloud strategy, the less it’ll have to rework to make it possible.

Once a business has identified the differentiated features and services it wants to take advantage of, it can bind them to its applications using a system broker. Imagine a service broker like a fund manager: it has access to all the different options and connects them together. This ecosystem is what will differentiate innovation, enabling companies to create additional applications that take advantage of best-in-class features from leading cloud providers.

Don’t conflate the present with the future

Another reason to diversify a cloud portfolio is that the future is unknown. In 2000, people thought the space was so crowded that “it was finished” when up against leaders like Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo! and Excite. Today, there is a similar — albeit misguided — implicit assumption: “Cloud is done because the major players are here.”

Just because AWS was there first, and has tapped into a decade of pent-up demand, it’s foolhardy to believe AWS will always be the market leader. When a business adopts a standard that has at least two vendors, then it can protect itself to some degree against the unknown.

Of course, the engineering team may have some resistance to a multi-cloud approach because they assume there is upfront work to learn a new cloud’s commands. This may seem obvious to some, but the languages of Microsoft Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud are like romance languages: they’re all very similarly rooted. There are minor changes for each provider, so this shouldn’t be a major hurdle, or, a business can use software which automatically translates between these cloud infrastructure providers.

There’s a reason that the top banks, auto-manufactures, telecoms and other Fortune 100 companies are all adopting multi-cloud strategies: innovation is key to their success. The speed of innovation is now more paramount than ever, especially given that competitors have a lower barrier for entry with the reduced cost of outsourcing 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.

Clare Hopping

IBM thinks it has gained a head-start on the slowly emerging quantum market with the launch of what it has described as the first commercially useable integrated quantum computing system.

Quantum computing is based on the principles of quantum mechanics and aims to take advantage of subatomic particles existing in more than one state at any time. Its much-vaunted potential therefore is in its ability to read between the lines and come up with calculations we can only dream of today.

It has the potential to make current standards fall desperately short. For instance, according to Microsoft, while classical computers would take one billion years to break encryptions such as RSA, a quantum research project the company is aiming to put together in 2019 would break it in 100 seconds.

The IBM Q System One, once released, can be seen as something of a milestone in the processes involved. The sheer technological effort thus far has ensured practically any quantum project has gone no further than the laboratory stage. Even the most minimal fluctuations in temperature, or the merest ambient noise will put qubits awry, which have only 100 microseconds of useful lifespan as it stands anyway.

To help mitigate against this, IBM’s design includes a nine foot tall, nine foot wide case of half-inch thick glass forming an airtight enclosure that can open effortlessly using motor-driven rotation. The company certainly didn’t skimp when it came to the design, enlisting multiple design studios alongside Goppion, a Milan-based manufacturer of high-end museum display cases whose ‘clients’ include the Mona Lisa and the Crown Jewels at the Tower of London.

“For the first time ever, IBM Q System One enables universal approximate superconducting quantum computers to operate beyond the confines of the research lab,” IBM trumpeted in a press release. “The IBM Q System One is a major step forward in the commercialisation of quantum computing,” said Arvind Krishna, SVP hybrid cloud and director of IBM research. “This new system is critical in expanding quantum computing beyond the walls of the research lab as we work to develop practical quantum applications for business and science.”

More than meets the eye

Don’t think you can fill out a form, send it off and then receive a shiny box from IBM in return just yet, however. The company did not reveal how much a machine would theoretically cost, nor even a provisional release date.

The Q System One is a 20 qubit computer which, in real-world terms, unfortunately does not account for very much today. Towards the end of 2017 IBM reached the 20 qubit milestone with 50 the next target. Yet to put that in comparison, James Clarke, who heads up Intel’s quantum research unit, told New Scientist at the start of this year his team was looking to longer-term goals, saying a device will need a million qubits before it has a truly significant impact.

IEEE, the engineering standards organisation, has long had something of a sceptical view around the timeframes regarding quantum initiatives. Travis S. Humble, distinguished scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory who leads the IEEE working group around quantum computing, wrote for this publication a note of caution that despite it being a ‘pivotal point’ in the technology’s development, ‘many eyes [were] watching the road ahead, but [not] moving forward.’

Writing for the IEEE in November Mikhail Dyakonov, researcher in theoretical physics at the University of Montpellier, put it particularly succinctly. “A useful quantum computer needs to process a set of continuous parameters that is larger than the number of subatomic particles in the observable universe,” he wrote.

So are IBM, Intel, Microsoft et al all therefore ploughing millions of dollars into a wild goose chase? Not yet at least. Analyst firm CCS Insight posited that those who are interested in cloud should become interested in quantum and its potential to ease the burden currently experienced by silicon workloads. The company predicted in October that IBM would win the race to launch the first commercial quantum computing applications, putting the year at 2022.

Alternately, let The Verge give a different perspective on the Q System One launch. “[They are] still very much experimental devices…supposed to be research tools,” wrote James Vincent, “letting us work out, qubit by qubit, how quantum devices might work at all."

Picture credit: IBM

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their use-cases? Attend the co-located IoT Tech Expo, Blockchain Expo, AI & Big Data Expo and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam and explore the future of enterprise technology.

At CloudEXPO Silicon Valley, June 24-26, 2019, Digital Transformation (DX) is a major focus with expanded DevOpsSUMMIT and FinTechEXPO programs within the DXWorldEXPO agenda. Successful transformation requires a laser focus on being data-driven and on using all the tools available that enable transformation if they plan to survive over the long term. A total of 88% of Fortune 500 companies from a generation ago are now out of business. Only 12% still survive. Similar percentages are found throughout enterprises of all sizes.

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Clare Hopping

Cloud is the motor for innovation and digital transformation. CIOs will run 25% of total application workloads in the cloud by the end of 2018, based on recent Morgan Stanley report. Having the right enterprise cloud strategy in place, often in a multi cloud environment, also helps companies become a more intelligent business. Companies that master this path have something in common: they create a culture of continuous innovation.

In his presentation, Dilipkumar Khandelwal outlined the latest research and steps companies can take to make innovation a daily work habit by using enterprise cloud computing. He shared examples from companies that have benefited from enterprise cloud computing and took a look into the future of how the cloud helps companies become a more intelligent business.

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Andrew Keys is co-founder of ConsenSys Enterprise. He comes to ConsenSys Enterprise with capital markets, technology and entrepreneurial experience. Previously, he worked for UBS investment bank in equities analysis. Later, he was responsible for the creation and distribution of life settlement products to hedge funds and investment banks. After, he co-founded a revenue cycle management company where he learned about Bitcoin and eventually Ethereum.

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David Linthicum’s On-Demand #Serverless Keynote at @CloudEXPO

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Data center, on-premise, public-cloud, private-cloud, multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud, IoT, AI, edge, SaaS, PaaS… it’s an availability, security, performance and integration nightmare even for the best of the best IT experts.

Organizations realize the tremendous benefits of everything the digital transformation has to offer. Cloud adoption rates are increasing significantly, and IT budgets are morphing to follow suit. But distributing applications and infrastructure around increases risk, introduces complexity and challenges availability at every turn.

To embrace DX and to come out on top, there are four underlying principles that should guide you. Understanding these four essentials along with their relevance and impact will elevate you to DX Hero status now. Jonathan will provide a high-level overview of these principles and how some of his organization’s clients have embraced them with resounding success.

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