HubSpot, SendGrid, and Nutanix are among the top publicly traded cloud companies to work for, with Algolia, Asana and Canopy taking the honours for private firms, according to new research.

The study comes from workplace ranker Glassdoor alongside Battery Ventures, and puts the analysis together based on CEO approval rating as well as ‘positive business outlook.’  

The report is the second from the companies, after 2016’s analysis. Since then, several companies have swapped over from private to public, including AppDynamics, Coupa, Dropbox, and Okta. Companies who made the private lists twice include Chef, Demandbase, and Smartsheet.

With a CEO approval rating of 96% and a positive business outlook of 89%, HubSpot took the top level for public cloud computing companies, ahead of Ultimate Software and Guidewire Software. The private sphere saw higher scores. Algolia took top spot with 100% approval in CEO Nicolas Dessaigne, as well as a 100% positive business outlook, with the company given a score of 4.9 out of 5.0 in the report. To even make the top 50, companies had to achieve a score of 4.4.  

The report’s ultimate goal is to show how important company culture and employee happiness is in an increasingly competitive tech and software as a service (SaaS) economy.

As this publication reported earlier this week, one potential path for ensuring a happy workforce is to enlist machine learning capabilities, using the example of Eightfold.ai, which claims to be the first AI-based talent intelligence platform combining analysis of publicly available data as well as internal data repositories.

According to research from PayScale last year, AT&T, General Electric and Oracle provide the best remuneration for top performers, with the role of enterprise IT architect, at a median salary of more than $138,000, the most valued. The average employee tenure at a Silicon Valley cloud-based enterprise software company is 14 months, down from 19 months elsewhere.

 “Since we first partnered with Glassdoor to compile these lists, the cloud has only grown in influence and market power, and some of the private companies we previously featured have now gone public or been acquired,” said Neeraj Agrawal, Battery general partner. “We view these rankings as a key indicator of company health and potential growth.”

You can find out more about the report here.

The many IoT deployments around the world are busy integrating smart devices and sensors into their enterprise IT infrastructures. Yet all of this technology – and there are an amazing number of choices – is of no use without the software to gather, communicate, and analyze the new data flows. Without software, there is no IT. In this power panel at @ThingsExpo, moderated by Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff, Dave McCarthy, Director of Products at Bsquare Corporation; Alan Williamson, Principal at ParkerGale Capital; Chris Matthieu, Director IoT Engineering at Citrix; and Peter Vanderminden, Principal Industry Analyst at Flatiron Strategies looked at the protocols that communicate data and the emerging data analytics that bring its full value to the enterprise. The era of Big Data and «Little Big Data» has arrived, and will soon be eating an enterprise near you!

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If public cloud services are in your IT mix, the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) is a great way to evaluate security needs and develop a robust security strategy. The NIST CSF identifies five key cybersecurity functions – “Identify,” “Protect,” “Detect,” “Respond,” and “Recover” – to organise recommended security controls into actionable work streams. AWS users can use the CSF to plan security strategies and investments for optimal protection and coverage.

To get you started, let’s look at the five top-level CSF functions and identify some of the unique issues you’ll face when applying them to your public cloud implementation. Visibility (or the lack of it) is a common theme for each area, and it’s a problem that needs to be addressed.

Here are the five CSF functions (descriptive quotes directly from NIST):

Identify

"Develop the organisational understanding to manage cybersecurity risk to systems, assets, data, and capabilities.” – NIST

Understanding your specific cloud implementation is, of course, necessary before you can plan and implement an effective security strategy. It’s tougher than you might think: the cloud is far harder to get your arms around than a captive data centre (where servers can be physically counted and institutional controls are more mature).

Clouds are completely virtual, they change incredibly fast, and relationships between cloud entities can be very tough to see and visualise. If you can’t see the core elements of your cloud, you can’t identify what needs to be done to secure them. What is needed is a platform that can clarify your cloud so you can visualise exactly what’s going on.

Protect

"Develop and implement the appropriate safeguards to ensure delivery of critical infrastructure services." – NIST

Choosing security tools and services to protect your infrastructure is a familiar task. But the cloud’s different: recent data breaches attributed to S3 configuration errors show how easily things can go wrong. Need to share some data with a third party? A quick and easy bucket permissions change gets it done instantly – but it can also instantly create a huge vulnerability.

Continuous automation is the answer and should be one of the most powerful capabilities of your platform. Monitoring the security posture of thousands of ephemeral cloud entities is a task well beyond human reach – so your platform should do it for you.

Detect

"Develop and implement the appropriate activities to identify the occurrence of a cybersecurity event." – NIST

The final three CSF functions change the focus from “planning and preparing” to “responding.” NIST’s “detect” function includes controls for improving coverage, reducing time-to-detection, and assessing event severity.

If you’re familiar with AWS CloudTrail, you know you have plenty of data about your cloud’s operations. A lack of data isn’t the problem – but making sense of what you have is another matter. By automatically analysing AWS CloudTrail data to eliminate spurious alerts, you can zero in on the incidents that really matter – quickly and decisively.

Respond

"Develop and implement the appropriate activities to take action regarding a detected cybersecurity event." – NIST

Responding to a cybersecurity incident is a bit like organising a battlefield counterattack. It’s chaotic, stressful and confusing – and if you don’t understand your adversary’s original attack, your odds of success are low. On AWS, understanding incidents is a challenge: you’ll have plenty of data (AWS logs everything) but analysing that data to understand the attack takes skill and time.

You need a platform that excels at correlating data from across AWS to clarify the who, what and how of every incident. That way, you’ll have a clear map to guide your response, develop mitigation strategies, assess impacts and provide definitive updates to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Recover

"Develop and implement the appropriate activities to maintain plans for resilience and to restore any capabilities or services that were impaired due to a cybersecurity event." – NIST

The last CSF function deals with two imperatives: restoring systems to normal (yours and any third-party systems affected by the attack) and integrating what you’ve learned back into your security framework. Your platform must have the ability to deliver a complete and accurate picture of the attack pays dividends. Without it, recovery efforts are likely to be incomplete and coordination with other affected parties will be a challenge.

Organise and guide cloud security efforts

Applying NIST’s CSF framework to your AWS implementation is great way to organise and guide your cloud cybersecurity efforts. Use it to identify gaps, organise your teams and guide security investments with an eye on the unique demands of AWS. Having a platform that has the ability to capitalise on the extensive data available from AWS will go a long way towards meeting the goals set out in the NIST CSF.

Adam Shepherd

Jonathan Parkyn

Almost every single day-I talk to people who are planning to move their organization’s data to the cloud. What’s more, this cloud excitement is vertical-agnostic. It’s hard to find an industry that isn’t thinking about cloud migration. Cisco predicts that, by 2021, 94% of global data center traffic will be processed in the cloud.

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With KubeCon and CloudNativeCon taking place in Copenhagen this week, it is not surprising that a series of Kubernetes-based announcements has hit the wires over the past 24 hours – with Cisco, Red Hat and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) taking top honours.

The CNCF, which maintains Kubernetes alongside other open source technologies, has announced the launch of a certified Kubernetes application developer (CKAD) examination, alongside a Kubernetes for Developers course.

The decision was made to expand the training and certification from administrators – more than 1,500 people have registered for the certified Kubernetes administrator (CKA) exam – to app developers. More than 700 developers have already signed up to beta test the CKAD exam, which is open to all entrants and costs $300.

The rationale behind the move is simple: as Kubernetes has grown and matured, so too has the demand for app developers who want to build projects on top of it. The CNCF cites figures from Indeed.com which showed that in March, 2% of all software engineer jobs posted on the portal demanded Kubernetes skills – a number which is only going to rise significantly.

At the Open Source Leadership Summit in March, Kubernetes became the first project to ‘graduate’ from the foundation, with CNCF saying the technology was ‘mature and resilient enough to manage containers at scale across any industry in companies of all sizes.’

Elsewhere, Cisco announced Kubernetes support for AppDynamics and Cisco CloudCenter to help enable greater enterprise adoption of the technology. Support with AppDyanmics will help organisations gain end-to-end visibility on performance metrics, as well as correlating Kubernetes performance with business metrics, while CloudCenter support focuses more on multi-cloud environments.

“The Kubernetes platform has emerged as the de facto container solution as customers accelerate adoption of containerised application architectures,” said Kip Compton, vice president of the Cisco Cloud Platform and Solutions Group. “But organisations are still challenged to efficiently and confidently utilise Kubernetes as they modernise legacy applications and develop new cloud applications.

“With our latest Kubernetes support, customers can now easily adopt production-grade Kubernetes across multi-cloud environments.”

Red Hat, meanwhile, has launched the Operator Framework alongside the Kubernetes open source community, to aid the building of applications on the platform. The move builds on Operators, an initiative put together in 2016 as a method of packaging, deploying and managing Kubernetes applications.

“We believe that the new Operator Framework represents the next big step for Kubernetes by using a baseline of leading practices to help lower the application development barrier on Kubernetes,” a blog post reads. “The project delivers an SDK and the ability to manage app installs and updates by using the lifecycle management mechanism, while enabling administrators to exercise operator capabilities on any Kubernetes cluster.”

Read more: Why Kubernetes networking is hard – and what you can do about it

Multi-cloud is certainly a compelling trend – but according to new data from IDC, fewer than 10% of European organisations are fully on-board with a multi-cloud strategy.

The analyst firm argues that multiple cloud service usage will be an inevitability – but understanding and strategy from European firms varies wildly.

More than a third of firms polled overall (34%) said they had no plans to move workloads from current cloud providers in the coming 12 months. Yet for the UK market, 29% of respondents do have plans, with IDC noting UK businesses are much more fluid when it comes to multi-cloud.

In total, only 9% of organisations polled were considered multi-cloud ready, with IDC designating them as ‘pathfinders.’ 43% of respondents were designated as ‘travellers’ and 38% ‘pedestrians’; IDC argues that these middle organisations are stuck in the transition process from hybrid cloud environments. The remaining 10% were considered ‘bystanders’ – those unlikely to make moves in the space.

IDC adds that, while these results show reticence among European businesses, it is still relatively early days for assessing the ‘how’ and ‘where’. “While the perception of multi-cloud infrastructure as an end goal certainly resonates with European organisations, there remains uncertainty over what a multi-cloud strategy looks like and how this strategy should be disseminated within an organisation,” said Michael Ceroici, IDC research analyst for European multi-cloud infrastructure.

As regular readers of this publication will be aware, a major aspect of getting multi-cloud right is through security. Writing in March, Chintan Patel, CTO Office at Cisco, argued that while it is easier to deploy new IT services in a multi-cloud world, user visibility and behaviour suffers with it. “In order to obtain the level of control in a multi-cloud environment, it is essential to have the cloud controls and technologies in place to allow businesses to get the protection and visibility they need,” Patel wrote. “Businesses can no longer afford to be complacent when it comes to a multi-cloud security strategy.”

“Virtually all European enterprises will soon use multiple cloud services. The smart ones are already actively planning for those services to be benchmarked, price-compared, and selected against each other based on the workload need,” said Giorgio Nebuloni, IDC research director for European multi-cloud infrastructure.

“To get there, a central point of control based on software and potentially services is needed, as are strategic approaches to skillsets, processes, and data centre infrastructure.”

Rene Millman