Analysis What about Big Blue Hat? Or how about Big Purple? Any offers for ‘in the pink?’ The proposed coming together of IBM and Red Hat, costing the former $34 billion in total enterprise value, is the stuff of dreams for caption writers. But what does it mean for the cloud industry and the two companies involved?

From IBM’s perspective, this is a continuation of a long-standing message. Those who have followed the company closely – for instance, when announcing its multi-cloud management tool earlier this month – would note their position that many enterprises are only a short way along their cloud journey. “This is the next chapter of the cloud,” said IBM CEO Ginni Rometty in a statement. “It requires shifting business applications to hybrid cloud, extracting more data and optimising every part of the business, from supply chains to sales.”

Red Hat owns amazing assets for this cloud era, has great developer love – and provides access to pretty much every CIO on the planet

And it’s fair to say that if it’s hybrid and open you want, then Red Hat is the best place to go. As the company explained at its London customer forum as far back as 2016, the company saw itself as the second player in Kubernetes – behind Google – and the second player in Docker, behind…well, Docker. Being open is key to both companies’ ethos. “Joining forces with IBM will provide us with a greater level of scale, resources and capabilities to accelerate the impact of open source as the basis for digital transformation and bring Red Hat to an even wider audience,” said Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst.

Containers are key in this equation – indeed, they are key to both quicker app deployment and multi-cloud initiatives. Indeed, while the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Oracle became members of the Kubernetes-controlling Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) last year, IBM was a founder member in 2015. Todd Moore, IBM VP for open technologies, sits as the CNCF’s governing board chair. Red Hat, meanwhile, has Kubernetes-based platform OpenShift.

It makes an interesting fit – but was the news a surprise? Sort of. One industry executive predicted that Red Hat would get acquired this year – but they got the wrong company. Sacha Labourey, CEO of continuous delivery software firm CloudBees, posited in January that Red Hat would be bought by Google. While the target was slightly off, the sentiment was bang on.

Why? Labourey noted in a Medium post two reasons why the move was ‘inevitable’ – why Red Hat would need an open-looking IT behemoth as  surrogate, and vice versa. “Red Hat owns amazing assets for this cloud era, has great developer love and also provides access to pretty much all CIOs on the planet,” Labourey wrote. “[It] acts as a fantastic gateway to the public cloud.” On the flip side, Red Hat’s long-standing commitment to open source means that, while its yearly revenues north of $3 billion are valiant, it can’t compare to those with more billable proprietary offerings. Labourey noted VMware as an example of the latter.

Bill Mew, a 16-year veteran of IBM and now a cloud industry pundit, noted a similar convergence; IBM’s move from products to services under former CEO Lou Gerstner – albeit still making most of its money through middleware and mainframes, a ship Rometty continues to turn around – combined with Red Hat’s lack of profitability.

“The jewel in Red Hat’s crown is OpenShift,” said Mew. “As these two services organisations seek to merge their very different cultures, they are pinning their hopes on OpenShift providing a means of managing complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments.”

Yet there was a caveat. What happens when businesses are no longer struggling with the complexity of container deployment? “The problem [IBM and Red Hat] face is that they have no ecosystem control,” Mew added. “The hyperscalers hold all the cards here. Offering to provide workload portability to avoid lock-in and offering to help overcome complexity will only go so far.”

Offering to provide workload portability to avoid lock-in and offering to help overcome container complexity will only go so far

The analysts however seem to be more optimistic. IBM and Red Hat both received stellar marks in Forrester’s recent reports around public cloud development-only platforms and enterprise container platforms – and a combination of the two could see domination.

“The combined company has a leading Kubernetes and container-based cloud-native development platform, and a much broader open source middleware and developer tools portfolio than either company separately,” said Dave Bartoletti, Forrester VP and principal analyst. “While any acquisition of this size will take time to play out, the combined company will be sure to reshape the open source and cloud platforms market for years to come.”

Time will of course tell as to how this blockbuster acquisition will go. But as it transpires, Labourey’s initial bet could have been right all along. According to CNBC, citing sources familiar with the matter, Red Hat had discussed a potential sale with various buyers before going with IBM – including Google.

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.

More organisations are putting their sensitive data in the public cloud – so it comes as no surprise that cloud threats, and mistakes in SaaS, IaaS and PaaS implementation are at an all-time high.

That is the key finding from a new report by McAfee, which argues the old bugaboo of shared responsibility continues to kick in and give organisations a kick in the teeth when it comes to cloud security.

The study, the security firm’s latest Cloud Adoption and Risk Report, analysed aggregated and anonymised cloud usage data for more than 30 million users globally. Among the findings were that more than one in five (21%) of all files in the cloud contained sensitive data, while the sharing of sensitive data with a publicly accessible link has gone up 23% year over year.

Organisations have more than 2,200 individual misconfigurations per month in their infrastructure as a service and platform as a service public cloud instances, the report noted. In other words, this means an average of 14 misconfigured instances running at any one time. This makes for interesting reading when compared with findings from Netskope earlier this month, which found a plethora of violations among users’ systems based on the Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmark. The vast majority of these were related to identity and access management.

Even more worryingly, the report found that 5.5% of AWS S3 buckets analysed were set to ‘world read’ permissions. This, as regular readers of this publication will be more than aware, can essentially be a come-and-steal-my-data plea to nefarious actors. As far back as July last year, AWS was sending emails to customers to ‘promptly review’ their S3 buckets and ensure world read was only for such instances as public websites or publicly downloadable content.

McAfee warned of the risks organisations are taking when it came to IaaS security, which encompasses the aforementioned identity and access, as well as applications, network controls and host infrastructure. As the shared responsibility model notes, providers are responsible for security of the cloud, while customers are responsible for security in the cloud.

Multi-cloud has become de rigueur; while 94% of IaaS and PaaS use is in AWS, more than three quarters (78%) of organisations have both AWS and Azure. Continuous auditing and monitoring of each infrastructure and platform configuration is the only way forward, the report argues.

“Operating in the cloud has become the new normal for organisations – so much so that our employees do not think twice about storing and sharing sensitive data in the cloud,” said Rajiv Gupta, McAfee SVP of cloud security. “Accidental sharing, collaboration errors in SaaS cloud services, configuration errors in IaaS/PaaS cloud services, and threats are all increasing.

“In order to continue to accelerate their business, organisations need a cloud-native and frictionless way to consistently protect their data and defend from threats across the spectrum of SaaS, IaaS and PaaS,” added Gupta.

Writing for this publication in April, Micah Montgomery, cloud services architect at Mosaic451, noted that AWS is highly secure, but only when configured properly – and it is companies’ responsibility to ensure so. Montgomery gave five tips to organisations: know what you are doing; know what data you have; take advantage of the tools available to secure your AWS environment; beware AWS’ complexity; and ask for help if needed.

“In a general IT environment, there is a management console for every area and tool,” wrote Montgomery. “Routers, switches, firewalls, servers, and data storage all have their own, different tools, and each tool has its own management console. Once you add a cloud environment, you add another management console.

“There are already hundreds of ways to screw things up in an on-premises data environment,” added Montgomery. “The cloud adds yet another layer of complexity, and organisations must understand how it will impact their overall cyber security.”

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.

Esther Kezia Thorpe

Esther Kezia Thorpe

Cybersecurity solutions demand has remained strong during 2018, as more CIOs and CTOs need to ensure that their digital transformation projects have a high degree of digital trust built-in. Data privacy-related legislation has also fuelled the market for expert professional services that are skilled in IT security compliance.

According to the latest global market study by International Data Corporation (IDC), worldwide spending on security-related hardware, software, and services is forecast to reach $133.7 billion in 2022. Although spending growth is expected to gradually slow over the 2017-2022 forecast period, the market will still deliver a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.9 percent.

As a result, security spending in 2022 is anticipated to be 45 percent greater than the $92.1 billion forecast for 2018.

IT security market development

"Privacy has grabbed the attention of Boards of Directors as regions look to implement privacy regulation and compliance standards similar to GDPR. Frankly, privacy is the new buzzword and the potential impact is very real. The result is that demand to comply with such standards will continue to buoy security spending for the foreseeable future," said Frank Dickson, vice president at IDC.

According to the IDC assessment, security-related services will be both the largest ($40.2 billion in 2018) and the fastest growing (11.9 percent CAGR) category of worldwide security spending.

Managed security services will be the largest segment within the services category, delivering nearly 50 percent of the category total in 2022. Integration services and consulting services will be responsible for most of the remainder.

Security software is the second-largest category with spending expected to total $34.4 billion in 2018. Endpoint security software will be the largest software segment throughout the forecast period, followed by identity and access management software and security and vulnerability management software.

The latter category will be the fastest growing software segment with a CAGR of 10.7 percent. Hardware spending will likely be led by unified threat management solutions, followed by internet firewall and content management.

IDC analysts believe that banking will be the industry making the largest investment in security solutions, growing from $10.5 billion in 2018 to $16 billion in 2022. Security-related services, led by managed security services, will account for more than half of the industry's spend throughout the forecast period.

The second and third largest industries, discrete manufacturing and federal or central government ($8.9 billion and $7.8 billion in 2018, respectively), will follow a similar pattern with services representing roughly half of each industry's total IT security spending.

The industries that will see the fastest growth in IT security spending will be telecommunications (13.1 percent CAGR), state or local government (12.3 percent CAGR), and the resource industry (11.8 percent CAGR).

The United States will be the largest geographic market for security solutions with total spending of $39.3 billion in 2018. The United Kingdom will be the second largest geographic market in 2018 at $6.1 billion, followed by China ($5.6 billion), Japan ($5.1 billion), and Germany ($4.6 billion).

The leading industries for security spending in the U.S. will be discrete manufacturing and the federal or central government. In the UK, banking and discrete manufacturing will deliver the largest security spending while telecommunications and banking will be the leading industries in China.

China will see the strongest IT security spending growth with a five-year CAGR of 26.6 percent. Malaysia and Singapore will be the second and third fastest growing regions with CAGRs of 21.1 percent and 18.2 percent, respectively.

Outlook for IT security applications growth

From a company size perspective, large and very large businesses will be responsible for nearly two thirds of all security-related spending in 2018. Large and medium businesses will see the strongest spending growth over the forecast, with CAGRs of 11.8 percent and 10 percent respectively.

However, very large businesses will grow nearly as fast with a five-year CAGR of 10.1 percent. Small businesses will also experience solid growth (8.9 percent CAGR) with spending expected to be more than $8 billion in 2018.

There is a lot of excitement about quantum computing these days. Quantum computing is a holistically new way to solve hard problems based on the principles of quantum physics. The theory has already shown the potential payoff from this new technology could be tremendous, by enabling new methods for drug discovery, material design, and artificial intelligence, just to name a few.

For high-end computing, quantum computing has great promise to change how high-performance computers and data centers of the future look and operate. At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, we are especially interested in the potential for quantum computing to enable scientific discoveries and innovation using new types of quantum-accelerated supercomputers.

Expectations are continuing to grow as government and industry invest in the quantum frontier. Recently, marked increases in investment have come from targeted funding by governments in China, Australia, the European Union, and the United States, among many others, and collectively top more than 10-billion US dollars. In addition, commercial investments by IBM, Google, Intel, and a swarm of startup companies highlight a growing interest in transitioning these technologies to future computing services.

Quantum computing is expected to accelerate solutions to problems in data analytics, logistics, engineering, and software automation, and future quantum computing clouds could support the medical, financial, scientific, and defense business sectors, among other possibilities. A vibrant research community of universities and laboratories is ready to respond to the interest in translating these ideas into actual quantum computers.

But is the science of quantum computing ready for this transition from laboratory to finished product? Despite the increased attention provided by this new funding, is the field of quantum computing actually progressing toward more realizable products? Or have past decades of scientific inquiry simply generated hollow excitement?  Presently, there are only a few experimental demonstrations of quantum computing, and perhaps the “experimental” description captures these demonstrations best.

Today’s best-in-class quantum computing systems and devices are carried out in research laboratories. Most of these systems are first generation designs of new concepts for controlling quantum physics. Some commercial developments have occurred, but these systems demonstrate levels of performance that fail to justify long-term growth, manufacturability, or adoption. It is a pivotal point in the development of quantum computing, where many eyes are watching the road ahead … but are we even moving forward?

Please pardon our progress

In an effort to address the mounting need to track engineering progress, a new working group under the auspices of the IEEE Rebooting Computing Initiative has begun developing metrics and benchmarks that will help evaluate quantum computing devices and systems. The working group emerged from a recent IEEE Summit Meeting on Quantum Computing, held in Atlanta, Georgia in August 2018. A collection of IEEE and quantum computing stakeholders met to address the expanding role for IEEE in this new engineering discipline. Among many calls for action, the need to establish a framework that captured the challenges and diversity facing quantum computing was most prominent. The resulting working group began outlining an approach that would be able to monitor progress across a wide variety of quantum computing technologies and uses while also permitting the new discoveries and breakthroughs expected for such a rapidly growing field.

The IEEE working group recognizes that the framework for metrics and benchmarks must maintain a neutral perspective. Many different quantum technologies appear viable for continued exploratory research and development, and this development is likely to continue. Leading examples include superconducting electronics, trapped ions, and neutral atoms, but there is a host of other quantum physical phenomena under consideration. In addition, each of these technologies face multiple layers of integration complexity that must be monitored, from the low-level physical registers up to application performance.

The framework has been designed to capture the broadest definitions of quantum computing by detailing known use cases. This includes different models for how a quantum computer may operate as well as different applications, such as scientific simulation and unconstrained optimization. The working group anticipates extensions and refinements as new advances appear.

We expect metrics and benchmarks for quantum computing will enable better tracking of engineering progress for these early devices and systems. With support from the diversity of engineers, developers, and users, the IEEE has the resources and community necessary to evaluate, distribute, and curate metrics and benchmarks for the broader public. The IEEE community also contributes support for educational outreach, training, and workforce development, which will be vital for long-term adoption of this new technology.

Another critical piece in implementing this framework is to ensure a public-private partnership model, in which government and industrial laboratories cooperate with the broader research community on setting expectations and evaluating growth. Many researchers are contributing to the explosion in quantum computer science and engineering, and the transition of these ideas into products and services for the public needs to be traceable to sound science.

This public-private partnership benefits industry and government by building confidence and understanding of quantum computing technology. The recently announced Quantum Economic Development Consortium looks posed to play a new role in sharing information across this diverse group of industrial stakeholders.

Laying a foundation

A draft of the IEEE framework will be released during the International Conference on Rebooting Computing, November 7-9, 2018 in Tysons Corner, Virginia. The draft will be accompanied by a Request for Comments that calls on the public to provide feedback on the best metrics for tracking progress toward quantum computing devices and systems. Both documents are available on the Rebooting Computing website: https://rebootingcomputing.ieee.org/quantum

The long-term goal for the working group is to enable communication between stakeholders of quantum technology and the engineers that develop it. Much like the forecast established by the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems (IRDS), which tracked trends and capabilities of modern computing devices and turned these into challenges to the industry, we expect metrics and benchmarks of quantum computing devices and systems to do the same. While the framework is expected to support future forecasting, for now the community is exploring the best methods for measuring the path to success.

Additional contributions from Megan N. Lilly, Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

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

Bobby Hellard

Bobby Hellard

Bobby Hellard