Apple has decided not to go ahead with the Irish data centre it wanted to start building in the western town of Athenry because it’s taking too long to obtain planning consent. 

The tech giant wanted to build its latest European data centre in the country because of its proximity to green energy sources – a responsibility it’s taking seriously. However, these plans have been hindered by the slow pace of planning authorities.

“Despite our best efforts, delays in the approval process have forced us to make other plans and we will not be able to move forward with the data centre,” Apple said in a statement. “While disappointing, this setback will not dampen our enthusiasm for future projects in Ireland as our business continues to grow.»

Ireland’s High Court approved the plans to build the data centre, but local residents raised strenuous objections which took the case to the Supreme Court. These repeated appeals have been the primary factor delaying the company’s plans to build a facility in the area.

“There is no disputing that Apple’s decision is very disappointing, particularly for Athenry and the West of Ireland,” Ireland’s Minister for Business and Enterprise Heather Humphreys said. “The Government did everything it could to support this investment… These delays have, if nothing else, underlined our need to make the State’s planning and legal processes more efficient.” 

Ireland’s government wants to make it easier for big businesses like Apple to build new data centres and tech infrastructure in the country as such deals bring in big bucks for the economy. Ireland now wants these structures to be viewed as «strategic infrastructure», which means they should sail through the planning approvals process.

Apple will now put all of its energy into building a second data centre in Denmark after opening its first facility in the country late last year. The second data centre was announced in July and is due to begin operations in the second half of next year.

Google revealed it has reached an agreement to acquire Israeli cloud migration startup Velostrata for an undisclosed fee.

Formed in 2014, Velostrata is a company that provides software solutions for businesses that want speedy cloud migration and workload mobility. It has 25 employees who will work alongside Google at its office in Tel Aviv.

Google Cloud’s vice president of engineering, Eyal Manor, expressed excitement at reaching an agreement with the startup, that is still subject to closing conditions, and adding further migration tools to its cloud services.

«This acquisition will add to our broad portfolio of migration tools to support enterprises in their journey to the cloud. That way, businesses can simplify their onboarding process to Google Cloud Platform, and easily migrate workloads to Google Compute Engine,» he said.

«We’re excited about the talented team that will be joining us in our Tel Aviv office, and the technical strength they bring to Google Cloud.»

Velostrata has a hybrid cloud solution that decouples storage from compute resources, leaving the storage in place on-premises while running a virtual machine in the cloud, allowing customers to easily and quickly migrate virtual machine-based workloads like databases and DevOps, to and from the cloud.

Velostrata founder Issy Ben-Shaul said the team were proud to join Google Cloud.

«Over the years, Google Cloud has made significant investments in building a robust cloud infrastructure that delivers industry-leading availability, reliability and security,» he said.

«Google Cloud continues to innovate with advanced compute and service platforms. We are proud to join forces and help pave the way for enterprise customers to transform their most demanding enterprise workloads on Google Cloud Platform.

«We are truly excited about the future ahead of us and looking forward to continuing the journey together as part of Google Cloud when the deal closes.»

StubHub has selected public cloud providers Google Cloud and Pivotal to power its ticketing platform, helping it grow its mobile presence and make it easier for customers to engage with the brand.

The company will make use of Google Cloud and Pivotal’s entire stack of services, covering machine learning, analytics, databases, serverless computing and developer tools to build new apps and services to inspire customers.

“StubHub is all about the customer. Everything we create, from our mobile products to our customer service, reflects a deep desire to put the needs of fans first,” said StubHub CTO Matt Swann. “We intend to set the bar for what highly curated fan experiences can be at scale before, during and after the event, everywhere fans expect us to be. We have bold plans for innovation in the years ahead.”

Many of Google and Pivotal’s cloud-based services will replace StubHub’s legacy infrastructure that’s no longer meeting demands of its digital products. This will significantly speed up the time it takes for products and services to arrive on the market, making it more competitive.

“Digital transformation is on the mind of every technology leader, especially in industries requiring the capability to rapidly respond to changing consumer expectations,» Bill Cook, president of Pivotal said. «To adapt, enterprises need to bring together the best of modern developer environments with software-driven customer experiences designed to drive richer engagement.»

One of the new ways StubHub will be using Google and Pivotal is offering its customers to interact with live events around the world. It will also use 17 years worth of data to predict how, where and when to communicate with fans.

“Google Cloud Platform’s global presence, scale, and world-class AI and data solutions, coupled with Pivotal’s services and platform will help StubHub offer the best customer experience,» Brian Stevens, chief technology officer of Google Cloud added.

With GDPR set to come into force later this month, organisations of all sizes are racing to comply with a new set of tougher data protection laws.

Cloud Pro caught up with Citrix’s chief privacy and digital risk officer Peter Lefkowitz at Citrix Synergy 2018, hosted in Anaheim, California, to discuss what the new legislation means for organisations, how it changes the way businesses approach privacy, and how Citrix itself has changed in light of imminent GDPR enforcement.

«We’re just at that moment – we’re 16 days out – so I’m spending a lot of time on it, but it’s not just internal system compliance, it’s looking at our products – what data do they collect, what are our retention rules, how do we promote ourselves to customers?» he said. 

Citrix’s bid to comply with GDPR, according to Lefkowitz, has included updating all global contracts, putting out a new data privacy addendum, standard contractual clauses – pushing those to «77,000 of our active customers in April» – and new terms for all its partner channel and suppliers.

The cloud-centric company has also asked its suppliers to sign up to new privacy terms, and fill out a questionnaire, so Citrix knows «who their security contacts are, where we go in the event of an incident, who to contact, and that sort of thing».

On how GDPR has changed the way Citrix operates internally, Lefkowitz said: «By virtue of the fact the GDPR is so focused on accountability, on all of these controls, and on transparency, it has raised privacy awareness and security design awareness to a higher level, so we now have some of the members of our executive leadership team who want regular updates on these topics.

«It has raised that discussion up against how we design our products, how we manage our services, what we do on the back-end.»

Lefkowitz’s comments chimes with chief product officer PJ Hough’s assertion that Citrix is not only GDPR-ready itself, but has made efforts to ensure wider compliance among its associates in the industry.

«For all of our existing commercial products we have gone through GDPR review already, and we have actually not just complied ourselves, we’re actively engaged with many of our large European and global customers to help them become GDPR compliant in their entire deployment,» he said at a press Q&A following the opening keynote address.

«So I would say as we bring more of our products online we will be compliant with the regulations in all the markets in which we serve.»

CEO David Henshall added, in the same session, that regulatory compliance is «woven into how we think about the company – how we think about delivering cloud services – it’s just part of the fabric».

Lefkowitz continued to outline specifically how Citrix is helping its partners and customers through an array of blogs, white papers, schematics, and a range of different materials featured online, outlining its approach to GDPR and data protection more generally.

«We’ve done training internally, for our support organisations, for our sales force, for our legal department, for a lot of people that touch customers and touch suppliers, so people are aware of what the key issues are. The goal is to really be as transparent as possible – and to make it as easy as possible for our customers to use these products,» he said. 

Turning to the legislation, Citrix’s in-house privacy expert explained the benefits of GDPR include that it forces organisations into adopting healthier data protection practices – while he warned against some of the unintended consequences.

«Raising these topics, making those operation controls more of a requirement, has taken a lot of effort from every company,» Lefkowitz said.

«But if you know where your data is, where your systems are, how they’re managed, you regularly check them and update them, I think the companies that take GDPR seriously are overall going to have a better framework for security control for all of their data – particularly for sensitive personal data.»

Organisations, however, should be wary of the impact of the ePrivacy regulation, according to Lefkowitz, a separate regulation that governs electronic privacy and marketing, that sits alongside existing regulation, and is in the process of being rewritten.

«Nobody knows where it’s going to land,» he explained, adding: «We’ve all been doing this big effort around marketing systems and marketing controls around GDPR, and then probably next year we’re going to be hit with an entirely new regulation.

Lefkowitz also warned there are a number of areas under the regulation that have been left open for individual member states to pass their own laws, or enforce in their own way, going against the main purpose of GDPR; that is unifying data protection regulations across the continent, and the wider world.

«A worry is that once the regulation is in effect and countries start seeing new technologies, new instances, new breaches, we may see countries splintering a bit on some very important topics,» he explained.

He outlined a hypothetical scenario of a company heading to a lead regulator in one country, presenting its system and its controls and gaining clearance, only for another regulator in another country to pull the company up on the same issues, as a point of great concern.

In terms of regulation penalties will be enforced, Citrix’s privacy chief said the legislation brings punishment under GDPR to the same standards as that under existing laws, with the whole notion of fines of 2% and 4% annual revenue based on competition and antitrust law.

He explained there will be two prongs to the regulatory approach based on the severity of non-compliance.

Outlining the first, he said: «Some of the regulators have already spoken publicly about this – they’ve hired more staff – so on 28 May, they’re going to go out and really look for basic stuff that hasn’t been done.» This will include situation in which an organisation doesn’t have a privacy policy, or if there’s evidence they’re not giving somebody access rights.

«Tranche two is going to be when the really, really, really, really bad stuff happens – the breach that has a horrendous impact, that easily could have been avoided; the company that is selling lists of sensitive information and not following up on controls – we’ve heard a little something about that recently – those I think the regulators will take very seriously,» explained Lefkowitz. 

«Time will tell whether the fines will be similar to what we’ve seen under competition law. I can’t make a guess at that; just the fact that the regulators will have that in their back pocket I think will make a significant difference in compliance.»

«You don’t get lucky 64 times in a row,» says Werner Knoblich, Red Hat’s SVP and GM of EMEA, pointing to the open source company’s unprecedented streak of quarterly revenue growth.

Red Hat posted $772 million in revenue for the fourth quarter of the 2018 fiscal year, 23% higher than over the same period in 2017. The company is riding high on a burgeoning market that’s seen a shift towards containerisation and open source in recent years.

Knoblich argues that Red Hat’s core philosophy of open source, and its bet on Kubernetes and hybrid cloud just over five years ago, is helping to place the company at the forefront of application development, particularly as others have historically relied on vendor lock-in.

The Switzerland of hybrid cloud

«We often talk about ourselves as being Switzerland,» says Knoblich. «We’re becoming the abstraction layer to ensure people aren’t locked in. It’s one of the reasons we are still an independent company.

«It’s one of our key value propositions – being a neutral company. If years ago HP or IBM had acquired us, we would have lost our neutrality. The ecosystem’s other players know this as well, as open source is an innovation engine.»

Red Hat’s 2018 Summit will be a particularly memorable one in years to come as it marked the year that IBM, a rival platform provider, announced it would shifting its WebSphere applications over to Red Hat’s OpenShift.

«There’s endorsement there,» says Knoblich. «IBM is now fully containerising all of its WebSphere applications, making them available on OpenShift. It’s their preferred platform. We see WebSphere as a direct competitor to us in terms of JBoss (Red Hat’s application server), and they’re fully switching over to our technology. It’s a gigantic endorsement that we’ve done the right things with OpenShift.»

Its record growth is being fuelled by an increasing willingness to embrace open source services among markets that have traditionally been locked to Windows-based systems.

«We struggled in the early days when we were mainly a pure Linux company,» says Knoblich. «Our sweet spot was countries and industries where there was heavy Unix usage and not just pure Microsoft – then we did Unix replacements, not necessarily Microsoft migrations.

«There’s not really a struggle anymore, because even a Microsoft customer is becoming a very good target for us – they also need to containerise their applications and automate their environment,» adds Knoblich.

«Our portfolio has grown so much that we have so many more possibilities. Even if a customer says ‘I’m staying completely on Windows, I don’t want to switch to Linux’, even for this customer we have offerings that can provide value where a couple of years back we had nothing.»

The lure of open source

Red Hat also attributes a great deal of its success to its ability to outmanoeuvre its rivals when it comes to talent acquisition.

«Every single company is fighting for the same talent,» says Knoblich. «Google tries to hire best developers in the world, so does Deutsche Bank, Barclays, Volkswagen. But if you’re the best developer, you can choose. Companies need to be attractive to these developers, otherwise they won’t get them.»

He argues that if employers don’t start offering developers a means to work within open source communities, they risk alienating budding talent looking to build experience.

«As a developer, where do you build your CV? It’s on Github. They want to make a name for themselves, not just put on a CV that they worked at Barclays or whoever.»

If companies don’t allow them to do this, the developer will say ‘this company is limiting my career path, so I won’t join them’. That’s what accelerated the whole [open source] movement.»

A shift of this kind can require a cultural change, something that Red Hat, as a veteran in open source space, has been fostering among other companies in the role of a consultant.

«Often the legal department is the big issue – they say ‘we can’t have our employees making submissions to open source communities with the domain email address of the employer’.

‘What’s the legal exposure if I as an employee make a commit and something goes wrong with the code? Is there a liability?»

Finding the next industry standard

Having placed an early stake on hybrid, Red Hat is hoping to once again position itself ahead of the competition. Part of that shift will be to invest in what it sees as the next big thing: serverless.

«It was kind of introduced by Amazon, but with that, again, they’re trying to lock their customers to their platform,» says Knoblich, commenting on AWS’ shift towards offering a dynamic cloud service that handles the allocation of machine resources – normally handled by a server.

He explains that Red Hat is looking at making a serverless offering as a function of OpenShift in the near future, competing directly with Amazon.

However, possibly the biggest focus for the company will be in the untapped multi-cloud management space, explains Knoblich, as customers look for products that make it easier to handle large numbers of deployments.

«Because the world is hybrid, customers will have different environments – on-premise, VMware virtualised environment, OpenStack, private cloud, Azure. But they somehow still need to manage it all with a single page of glass – they don’t want to have use all the individual dedicated tools.»

«That’s obviously a big play. The environment is not becoming simpler, it’s becoming, to a certain extent, more complicated,» says Knoblich. «Those management tools that bring that all together… that’s also something I think we will be focusing on.»

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Former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice warned against the growing threat of cyber warfare in an address at Citrix’s annual Synergy conference hosted in Anaheim, California.

In a half-hour speech, and follow-up Q&A session, Rice – who served under George HW Bush and George W Bush – spoke broadly on a range of subjects including the new geopolitical landscape, advancements in technology, and women in STEM.

«As somebody once said you either have been hacked and know it, or you have been hacked and don’t know it,» she told an audience of more than 5,000 at the Anaheim Convention Centre.

«People, particularly countries, are getting more aggressive at it, they’re getting more capable at it, and I don’t think anybody thought coming round the corner that the Russians would actually use bots and the like, to use infinity loops, to try stir chaos in American politics.

«That one I didn’t see coming and I have been a Russianist for a long time. And so people are finding ever-more innovative and creative ways for malevolence using cyber.»

Rice also outlined three points to address the growing threat of cyber warfare, including better cooperation between the private sector and government, more effort to get some expertise on boards, and that people can be «really stupid» when it comes to cyber.

She lamented Homeland Security, which she said she helped create, as a «monstrosity of an organisation» as it is really hard to use as an interface, adding the Edward Snowden leaks «really eroded any trust between the private sector and the government».

After outlining her point that companies should be better utilising specialists and experts on their boards, Rice then went on to claim that «human beings are the real problem».

According to Rice, a US intelligence agency conducted an experiment once where they took a USB drive and dropped it in the car park. She said a high percentage of people, who worked for the agency, picked it up and put it into their computer, concluding «human beings can’t resist doing things that are really stupid from a cyber point of view».

Elsewhere in her address, Rice outlined her views on the biggest geopolitical issues facing democracy right now – including North Korea and Iran – as well as discussing her views on why Trump and Brexit appealed to many voters.

«The people who didn’t quite benefit from globalisation, and who are now being even further disrupted by automation are the people for whom it is worth it to take a chance, because it couldn’t get worse,» she said, adding that people with global power are failing to speak the language and connect with those who have genuine concerns.

Meanwhile, Rice outlined how technology may not always be married up with the appropriate level of wisdom, explaining «technology is not good, or bad, it’s neutral – the question is how is it applied».

Amongst dipping into areas such as R&D investment, competing with Chinese, and the key threats facing the US, Rice outlined how to boost the position of women in tech.

«With girls in particular, the first thing is to educate them in a way that they don’t cut off their options early; so this is the issue of women not being STEM-ready when they get to college because they were somehow not convinced to get ready in elementary school – or even high school,» she said. 

«You hear the ‘we can’t find any women for our board’… uh, really? Yeah you can. There are lots of them out there, and it just comes from looking out of your normal channels; maybe it’s not an ex-CEO but maybe it’s someone who comes from government, or academia, or from cybersecurity – not a bad thing to have on your board these days.»

Red Hat has released the first details of its roadmap for the integration of the newly acquired CoreOS tools into its existing suite of container-based services.

The open source giant snapped up CoreOS, a highly successful cloud-native startup, for $250 million back in January, a move considered to be Red Hat’s biggest acquisition since its shift in focus towards providing Kubernetes services.

Since then, Red Hat has been silent on what tools the company would formally embrace, however, it has now confirmed that CoreOS Tectonic, Quay and Container Linux will all be integrated into Red Hat’s OpenShift container platform.

Tectonic was originally developed to solve problems associated with managing Kubernetes deployments at scale by introducing automation, supported by much-lauded ‘over-the-air’ updates. Integrated into OpenShift as ‘automated operations’, the feature should make it easier for IT admins to roll out automatic upgrades across their clusters and hosts.

Also making its way into OpenShift is Container Linux, a lightweight operating system providing immutable infrastructure for container deployments, that also benefits from over-the-air updates.

«Our number one principle is that no customer is left behind,» said Ashesh Badani, VP and general manager of OpenShift, speaking at Red Hat Summit. «We want to make sure that all the community interests, all the customers, around Container Linux are supported. We move that forward injecting Red Hat content into that.

«Tectonic was a pretty popular distribution of Kubernetes – customers really liked the fact Tectonic was focused on over the air upgrades, technologies around monitoring and metering. We’re taking all of that and converging that into the OpenShift platform, available over the next six months.»

Quay, a service that acts as a registry for managing container images, will be a standalone product of the OpenShift portfolio, the company confirmed.

Red Hat Quay will be available as an on-premise deployment or through a hosted service as Red Hat Quay.io, and will feature the same tools that made the service popular, including geographic replication, security scanning, and image time machine features.

Badani added that the integration roadmap would be fully delivered to customers by the end of the year, and that incremental progress updates would be provided, the next being at some point over the summer.

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