It is one of the largest trends of this year, and now it has gotten affirmation from IDG: cloud initiatives are becoming ever-more complex as the technology hits full maturity.

The findings appear in the media and analyst firm’s ‘Cloud Insights’ report for 2018. The study, which polled 550 respondents – all of whom are involved in the cloud buying process to some extent – found almost one in three (30%) were using both multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies.

For those who have a multi-cloud approach, the simple fact of having more options was the biggest benefit, cited by 59% of those polled. Quicker and easier disaster recovery (40%), and increased flexibility through working across multiple clouds (38%) were also cited.

Naturally, more IT budget is being devoted to these projects. While spend in proportion to IT remains similar – 30% according to this study, compared with 28% for a similar study in 2016 – the monetary amount has gone up, from $1.62 million two years ago to $2.2m this year. For enterprises, the figure is around $3.5m, while for SMBs it is $889,000, up from $286,000 in 2016.

Of this spend, the CIO, or uppermost IT executive, holds most sway. 71% of those polled in such a position said they had ‘significant influence’, with the CTO further back on 54%.

It is interesting here to look back at how far the industry has come over the past several years. In 2011, when the question was asked over organisations’ plans with regard to utilising computing infrastructure or applications via the cloud, just over half (51%) said at least a part of their infrastructure was cloud-based, with 21% saying they planned to move within three years. Today, those figures have changed to 73% and 10% respectively.

While it’s an implicit note that not everything will be, or indeed can be, moved to the cloud – it was interesting to note the recent comments of Diane Bryant, late of Google, around how McDonald’s still has mainframes and is ‘not ashamed of it’ – the report studiously notes this progress.

Yet challenges still remain among buyers. Vendor lock-in is the primary concern, cited by 47% of those polled, while concerns around where data is stored (34%) and the general security of cloud computing solutions (34%) are also of concern.

“IT organisations are being asked to improve the speed of IT service delivery and react to changing market conditions. Cloud solutions provide the flexibility to do just that,” said Julie Ekstrom, SVP of IDG Communications. “Organisations are relying on a mix of cloud delivery models to meet this need; however it requires management of multiple vendors.

“As tech executives explore new areas of cloud investment, they examine their portfolio of cloud vendors to see what solutions can grow and what new vendors will work collaboratively with their existing portfolio for ease of adoption,” Ekstrom added.

You can find out more about the research here.

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Oracle is facing a legal threat after a lawsuit has alleged the company used ‘threats and extortive tactics’ when selling its cloud products.

The City of Sunrise Firefighters’ Pension Fund is suing Oracle for allegedly misleading shareholders and ‘misrepresenting the true drivers of [its] cloud revenue growth.’

“Defendants falsely attributed the company’s revenue growth in its cloud segment to a variety of factors and initiatives, including, among other things, Oracle’s “unprecedented level of automation and cost savings”, as well as the company being “customer-focused” and “intimate partners with our customer””, the document stated. “In truth, Oracle drove sales of cloud products using threats and extortive tactics.”

As an example, the document alleged that Oracle threatened customers with audits of their non-cloud-based software until they agreed to take on a cloud license.

The document added that this practice became clear on March 19 2018, which was around the time of Oracle’s third quarter financial results. According to those results, cloud revenues went up 32% year over year and represented 16% of the company’s overall revenue. Despite this the financial press reported mixed results and stocks fell. The document alleged that ‘analysts and market commentators connected Oracle’s poor financial performance to its improper sales tactics.’

Much of Oracle’s announcements in recent months has been around its autonomous database and associated features. At an event in California last week, Oracle CTO and executive Larry Ellison unveiled autonomous transaction processing (ATP) capabilities, based on a specific database type.

According to the document, the use of such tactics, including around automation, “concealed the lack of real demand for Oracle’s cloud services, making the growth unsustainable and ultimately driving away customers.”

Oracle has responded to the claims, with Deborah Hellinger, head of communications, saying: “The suit has no merit and Oracle will vigorously defend against these claims.”

The software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) market continues to grow rapidly – and IDC is predicting the overall infrastructure market will be worth $4.5 billion (£3.53bn) by 2022.

The figure, which appears in the analyst firm’s latest SD-WAN Infrastructure Forecast, takes into account the significant uptick in SD-WAN investment, with infrastructure revenues going up 83.3% in 2017 to reach $833 million.

Another report, IDC’s Market Share – the first from the company for this category – sees Cisco and VMware at the top of the tree. The analysis notes the recent M&A activity around the market, with Cisco acquiring Viptela and VMware buying VeloCloud last year. The analysis includes both hardware and software used in SD-WAN deployments.

IDC defines the technology as ‘an architecture that leverages a hybrid WAN using at least two or more connection types.’ This can include MPLS, broadband internet, 3G, 4G, and more.

“The emergence of SD-WAN technology has been one of the fastest industry transformations we have seen in years,” said Rohit Mehra, IDC vice president of network infrastructure. “Organisations of all sizes are modernising their wide area networks to provide improved user experience for a range of cloud-enabled applications.

“Incumbent networking vendors have quickly realigned their routing and WAN optimisation portfolios to take on the growing cadre of startups in this market,” added Mehra. “Enabled by a rapid uptake across the service provider domain, SD-WAN infrastructure will continue to grow rapidly in the coming years, providing a beachhead for other software-defined networking and security functions in the enterprise branch.”

Previous research from IHS Markit in April found that enterprises were getting their heads turned by the benefits of SD-WAN as they focus on more complex cloud deployments. According to the North America-based study, three quarters (74%) of organisations polled had conducted SD-WAN lab trials in 2017, with many of these planned to move into live production this year.

Regular watchers of the industry would have seen this expansion coming, however. Writing for this publication in November, Steve Brar, director of solutions marketing at Riverbed Technology, the rise of SD-WAN has forced IT teams to rethink their entire networks.

“SD-WAN has proven invaluable to companies with large numbers of users spread across many sites who are accessing cloud-based applications,” Brar wrote. “With SD-WAN, these organisations are now able to centrally orchestrate and manage direct connections from geographically dispersed locations to the cloud. They can define and instantly apply policies that govern security and performance across the network using one management console.”

Every business wants to operate like a tech company today. Companies can’t thrive without improving IT, and executives must decide where to house and process data – under these circumstances, cloud strategies are increasingly nuanced.

A Forrester study found that just 4% of organisations run their applications exclusively in the public cloud today, and 77 percent of organisations are using multiple types of clouds, both on-premises and off-premises.

So do you take the public or private cloud route? This can be a complicated question for companies, so let’s look at some starting considerations.

Chick-fil-A uses a mixture of private and public cloud to support operations by deploying small Kubernetes clusters in each store to support transactions

Most of IT’s budget and attention is focused on what used to be called “off-the-shelf applications”: email and calendaring, collaboration apps and industry specific software. These applications are often slow-moving fodder in a cloud strategy and should be moved to public cloud first. Gartner expects more than 70 percent of businesses will be substantially provisioned with cloud office capabilities by 2021.

Moving these types of applications off-premises frees up resources to focus on building out larger software development and delivery capabilities, the core asset for any successful digital transformation.

Complying with regulation

When collecting user data – location, personal information, credit card information – there are a whole list of compliance issues that will drive cloud choice.

Sifting through various regulations and barriers to decide whether to use a public or private cloud for storing a user’s data, will throw up many questions that need answers. For instance, how do government policies shape operations and strategies? Certain safety measures or auditing points can create huge costs and public cloud solutions might have done the work already. What rules and regulations govern the data being collected? Do we own the data? What is the geographical definition of ownership – does anyone else share it?

While compliance issues may seem like a productivity blocker, understanding why they exist and working with auditors will help determine business imperatives.

Regulations are aimed at avoiding nefarious uses such as selling personal data to advertisers or stockpiling profiling data to meddle in politics. The data management needs of the GDPR are driving many organisations to reconsider where they store user data. Often, running their software on private cloud affords more control. On the other hand, there are cases where using a public cloud service is better. Complying with all payment handling and tax regulations globally might be easier to achieve with public cloud-based services. Handling sensitive documents might also be better outsourced.

Of course, pure public cloud is rarely an option. Retailers, for instance, often have competitive concerns that drive them away from using Amazon Web Services (AWS), or other cloud software companies might not want to use Google’s tools.

Pinning down technical requirements

Nailing a comprehensive list of technical requirements will create a good checklist. These should include operability of different database frameworks, load balancing, licensing ramifications and bandwidth limitations. For example, Chick-fil-A uses a mixture of private and public cloud to support operations by deploying small Kubernetes clusters in each store to support transactions.

When moving to public clouds, engineering teams lose certain operational controls and often need to re-architect their code. New runtime environments in public cloud often require new skills as well. However, none of these concerns are impossible to solve.

Cloud costs

Different cloud solutions don’t lend themselves to easy comparisons like new phones do: run down a checklist of features and specs, then weigh against the price tag. Cloud architectures are complex and need to be visualised too far forward in time. The process is similar to buying solar panels, where the upfront cost hurts, but businesses are playing a longer game with the investment. However, businesses need to be sure they are staying put (to keep the analogy going) with strategy, features and hardware, such as servers and an ops team. Those can quickly become painful losses if, in a couple years, overhead costs aren’t assessed correctly.

There are some basic starting points:

• What features of public cloud would be better than private cloud – and how can real financial value be assigned to them?
• How useful are machine learning tools in the cloud being considered? A retailer could use such services easily to start targeting ads or upselling recommended items, and so they might choose Google’s cloud. Or maybe for regulatory reasons, or because the retailer can do it better themselves, they’ll do this processing on their own, private cloud

The focus on business outcomes is what should drive the choice of public versus private cloud. It’s all too easy to look at either option based purely on cost. When IT is a core business enabler, the best approach is to consider how much money the chosen service can make the company. Focus then shifts to what type of infrastructure enables software teams.

Compliance issues may seem like a productivity blocker – but understanding why they exist and working with auditors will help determine business imperatives

A platform that focuses on delivery speed to enable designing better, more productive and profit driving software is preferable. In some cases, this might mean modernising an existing, private cloud-based stack. Oftentimes, organisations operate under five, ten, or even decades old notions of how software should be developed and run. Shifting to a more contemporary, agile approach can drive dramatic results.

Seeing through the clouds

A business has to understand what it is building – it’s surprising how many engineering teams still build in the dark.

Companies should ask themselves: how much traffic will the application get? Will it only be used internally? Who affects the load? What data handling and process regulations need to be followed? Will the application branch out to other areas of the business? If it touches the public – will it be mobile?

The questions don’t end. In a point of transition like we’re seeing in IT, it’s good to err towards maximising flexibility to provide the most options in the future as needs change. Over the next five years (if not longer) businesses will experiment with new strategies and business models, and they’ll need an IT partner who is equality deft and ready for whatever exciting adventure comes next.

Intel has upped its total addressable market (TAM) for what it calls the ‘data-centric’ era of computing from $160 billion to $200bn – with Navin Shenoy, president and general manager of the company’s data centre group, saying it is “the biggest opportunity in the history of the company.”

Shenoy was speaking at the company’s Data-Centric Innovation Summit in Santa Clara, and took to a company editorial to outline his plans.

“I find it astounding that 90% of the world’s data was generated in the past two years – and analysts forecast that by 2025 data will exponentially grow by 10 times and reach 163 zettabytes,” Shenoy wrote. “But we have a long way to go in harnessing the power of this data.

“A safe guess is that only about 1% of it is utilised, processed and acted upon – imagine what could happen if we were able to effectively leverage more of this data at scale.”

Shenoy noted how the confluence of edge computing, mapping, cloud, computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI) was making this opportunity more apparent. Naturally, the company has a variety of products which aim to make the process more seamless. Silicon photonics, combining a silicon integrated circuit and a semiconductor laser, aims to provide high performance computing in hyperscale data centres, while Intel’s Optane DC persistent memory focuses on quicker performance with greater affordability.

What’s more, Intel added that more than $1 billion in revenue came from its processors designed for artificial intelligence workloads.

“We’ve entered a new era of data-centric computing,” Shenoy explained. “The proliferation of the cloud beyond hyperscale and into the network and out to the edge, the impending transition to 5G, and the growth of AI and analytics have driven a profound shift in the market, creating massive amounts of largely untapped data.

“When you add the growth in processing power, breakthroughs in connectivity, storage, memory and algorithms, we end up with a completely new way of thinking about infrastructure,” he added.

“To help our customers move, store and process massive amounts of data, we have actionable plans to win in the highest growth areas, and we have an unparalleled portfolio to fuel our growth – including performance-leading products and a broad ecosystem that spans the entire data-centric market.”

Autonomous driving was cited as a key example of how these technologies will converge – Shenoy described it as having life-saving potential – and it makes sense given Intel’s other bets in this area. But perhaps a small note on the maths may be required. Last June, Intel said the ‘passenger economy’ – a strategy for autonomous cars, as well as the potential gains made by time saved driving – could have the potential to hit $7 trillion across the market. Earlier that year, the company said it had ‘unwavering confidence’ in its chances of taking the autonomous driving market.

You can read Shenoy’s editorial in full here.

The cloud has brought about many benefits for organisations and adoption is understandably increasing. Gartner earlier this year projected that the worldwide public cloud services market would grow 21.4 percent in 2018 whilst Forrester has found that global cloud services revenues totaled £112.5 billion in 2017, and is predicted to grow up to £137.2 billion by the end of 2018. With this huge growth in cloud adoption, effective security is paramount. Recent cyber-attacks have highlighted that organisations across all industries and of all sizes are the target of ongoing attacks.

With all the advantages that cloud brings including flexibility, efficiency and strategic organisational value, it is certainly a development many ambitious businesses are looking to utilise. It can provide the platform that enables a modern organisation to grow, expand into new markets and coordinate their strategy and plans. With many organisations now encouraging remote and home-working and operating internationally with diverse, multi-cultural teams the cloud is increasingly important to helping organisations collaborate, organise, share information (securely) and scale up.

Some of the biggest companies in the world, for example Google, Microsoft and Amazon are committing massively to the cloud, underlining the belief that the technology has huge commercial potential. These companies expect to see significant growth in the market which will fuel their future financial performance. Indeed, in Microsoft’s most recent financial result in July cloud was credited as driving a record fourth quarter result for the company.

It is another indication that the cloud is growing and adoption is increasing. Even Luddites will – perhaps slower than most – come to realise the huge benefits cloud can bring to an organisation, provided that security is kept front of mind. Ineffective and security-compromising use of the cloud is worse than not using the cloud at all. As such, proper planning is crucial.

With any new technology and system, it is vital that proper procedures are put in place to keep data safe and secure and to ensure employees use the system properly and maximise the impact it can have. Training needs to coordinate these efforts. The cloud is no different. It is IT’s job to make sure that the cloud creates the ROI and efficiency gains that senior executives will be looking for. This means taking the time to plan the implementation and then invest in training and support for employees.

Security has to be one of the main considerations when it comes to using the cloud. As with any IT system it can lead to a breach and loss of data. The cloud does not eradicate this vulnerability, it changes the dynamic, meaning CISOs and their teams need to be on the front foot when it comes to keeping the cloud secure. A successful breach will be a major setback for adoption of the technology within an organisation, especially if the context in which the breach takes place is a management that see it as a cost rather than an opportunity and a gain.

To ensure cloud has the backing of management therefore, there must be a laser focus on security. There won’t be much credit when the cloud remains secure – that is expected – but there will be a major downside if it goes wrong. With all this in mind let’s focus further on some of the key issues and questions around cloud security:

What is the impact of the cloud in terms of organisational security?

Cloud introduces new security risk to organisations because publicly exposed APIs are the underlying infrastructure that makes the cloud and cloud applications run. Unlike the http/s view of websites, which is largely choreographed for user experience and constrained on what is exposed or exploitable, APIs are built with fully exposed controls to support orchestration, management and automated access to the environment and applications. APIs provide a rich target for exploitation and introduce another dimension the challenges of expanding boundaries that were not seen in traditional enterprise on-premises perimeters.

Is security in the modern digital world like an open city, as opposed to traditional corporate computing, which is more like a castle?

Attackers will take the path of least resistance, and employees – and IT in many instances – will unwittingly help them. There will always be employees who will fall prey to phishing, surf exploited sites, or use free Wi-Fi from a coffee shop to open the door for the attacker. Also, common infrastructure weaknesses are the ‘exploit of choice’ to land a beachhead within an organisation, such as using an SQL query to find cached credentials, or finding a publicly exposed unpatched server to exploit. And then there is always the fallback to first-initial-plus-last-name with password1234.

How do we stop hackers from taking over the identities of victims in order to gain access to systems? Any real-life examples that demonstrate this?

There is no way to prevent intrusion through exploiting identity. The best that can be done is to slow attackers down by using good identity hygiene: implementing multi factor authentication, using longer pass phrases over passwords, deprecating expired employee accounts and monitoring access logs. However, the industry is making improvements in identity around trust by using multi-context analysis strategies that include time of access, country of origin, host computer in use, and other behavioural analyses to add weight to identity.

At the end of the day, organisations need to put in place robust procedures and make employees accountable for keeping networks safe and secure. The cloud introduces new security risks for organisations that will need to be managed effectively by the CISO; failure to do so could be very costly to an organisation both financially and reputationally. We have seen cyber-attacks generate headlines around the world recently – think WannaCry and Petya – to see notable examples of this.

Then you have the recently implemented GDPR, effecting any company who works within the EU. Inadequate data protection procedures under this regulation leads to increased penalties and fines for companies. This should focus the minds of executives on the challenges of implementing robust cyber defences, but too often this is not the case.

I would not want to see the adoption of cloud held back by fears over security, instead I believe cloud should be adopted by organisations that are ambitious to grow and effectively collaborate to solve problems and drive business performance. The penalties resulting from GDPR for example and from other regulations should not be a deterrent to implementing new technologies and systems. To me the focus should instead be on planning effectively and then implementing a solution that works and by this, I mean it is safe, secure and enables improved operational performance.

Today, data is the new fuel for business. New age technologies like artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, blockchain, and machine learning – all needs data to be stored, processed and analysed. Large amounts of data are generated exponentially, with a rise in internet users over the past several years. According to ‘Data Never Sleeps’, the report from Domo, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is generated every day.

This data tsunami puts forth challenges for IT infrastructure to provide low latency and higher storage performance as many enterprises need real-time data processing and faster access to stored data. Access to high performance SSDs using legacy storage protocols like SATA or SAS are not enough as they still have higher latency, lower performance, and quality issues.

NVMe-enabled storage infrastructure

NVMe is a high performance scalable host controller interface protocol that is needed to access high performance storage media like SSDs over PCI bus. NVMe is the next generation technology which is replacing SATA and SAS protocols, and offers features required by enterprises that focus on processing high volume real-time data.

The main differentiator in NVMe, SATA, and SAS is the number of commands supported in a single queue. SATA devices support 32 commands, SAS supports 256 commands, while NVME supports up to 64k commands per queue, and up to 64k queues. Queues are designed to take advantage of parallel processing capabilities of multi-core processors.

Source: http://www.nvmexpress.org/wp-content/uploads/NVMe_Overview.pdf

NVMe protocol is characterised by the fact that existing applications are getting accelerated and enabled by real-time workload processing within NVMe enabled infrastructure. Infrastructure can be a legacy data centre or at an edge. Such performance is achieved as NVMe consumes significantly fewer CPU cycles as compared to SATA or SAS where CPU consumption is on a higher side. This feature allows businesses to get maximum returns from their existing IT infrastructure.

NVMe-based infrastructure for IoT workloads

NVMe-based systems will be the key element in processing IoT and machine learning workloads.

Multiple sensors that stream generated data at a faster rate and need to push into databases require a higher bandwidth. Also, consumed data needs to get processed and analysed at a higher computing rate, and return back to devices with analysed data. This entire operation needs high performance and a low latency network, plus a storage ecosystem to respond at an equal rate to the network. NVMe over fabrics can be used with IoT use cases that utilise message-based commands to transfer data between a system and a target SSD or system over a network (Ethernet, Fibre Channel or InfiniBand).

Conclusion

Any enterprise using SSDs will get the benefit from the application of NVMe protocols. NVMe-based infrastructure will be ideal for use cases representing SQL/NoSQL databases, real-time analytics, and high performance computing (HPC). NVMe enables new applications for machine learning, IoT databases, and analytics, as well as real-time application performance monitoring and security audits. NVMe offers scalable performance and low latency options that optimise the storage stack – and is architected to take full advantage of multi-core CPUs which will drive rapid proliferation in technology advancement in upcoming years.

Editor’s note: Find out more about IPv6 here – understanding the benefits, imperatives and barriers to IPv6 transition

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