In his Opening Keynote at 21st Cloud Expo, John Considine, General Manager of IBM Cloud Infrastructure, led attendees through the exciting evolution of the cloud. He looked at this major disruption from the perspective of technology, business models, and what this means for enterprises of all sizes. John Considine is General Manager of Cloud Infrastructure Services at IBM. In that role he is responsible for leading IBM’s public cloud infrastructure including strategy, development, and offering management. To date, IBM has launched more than 50 cloud data centers that span the globe. He has been building advanced technology, delivering “as a service” solutions, and managing infrastructure services for the past 20 years.

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When it comes to meeting the new requirements of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), cloud users could well have the advantage. That may sound counter-intuitive; as one of the biggest hurdles facing companies that have migrated to the cloud is exposure of data, since the perimeter is no longer a firewall at the company edge.

GDPR is set to take effect on May 25, 2018. The end goal of this legislation is to strengthen and enforce the security of personal data.  This new legal framework dictates that any company doing business in the EU, with EU citizens or that is EU-based will be held liable for any breach of data. GDPR regulation impacts virtually any company across the globe that does business in Europe, and it will likely become the new de facto standard for the care and management of customer data moving forward.

Fines for not adhering to the requirements can cost up to 20m EUR (around $24m) or 2-4% of annual global revenues, whichever is larger. The mitigating circumstance is that a company will not be held liable if they have encrypted their data in motion and it is then hacked. Let me repeat: securing data that goes into the cloud through encryption will be a critical piece of GDPR compliance.

Ultimately, the clear majority of businesses worldwide will now need to make sure their networks are encrypted. In recent weeks, major players such as Amazon and Microsoft have all indicated they will endeavor to comply with the new directive.

So, what can cloud providers do to tackle GDPR compliance?  The answer is network virtualised services.

Traditionally service providers would deploy appliances specifically built for each function such as firewalls and routers. For encryption, appliances often provide basic encryption capability for slow speed links. For higher speed or better performance, specialised hardware is necessary, but this approach adds significant cost to the equipment and requires an end-point that is vendor specific to match the proprietary hardware encryption.

Low-cost universal customer premises equipment (uCPE) allows service providers to remotely setup software services such as encryption, firewalls, and routers with zero touch provisioning. These virtualised network functions (VNF) can be downloaded and configured remotely. The uCPE is an off-the-shelf server provided by the service provider or customer. Using off-the-shelf devices over specific built appliances will drastically reduce the cost of premises equipment as will the use of software functions instead of appliances because one server can operate many different functions.

Relying on apps to handle encryption is not enough; as recently as 2016, a study by Blue Coat Systems, Inc. showed the 98% of the 15,000 apps surveyed would not meet GDPR requirements. Even if the vendors or developers claim that their products do, how does an IT department test this premise? Instead of relying on appliance manufacturers to protect data in motion, it is now possible for specialised security companies to create virtualised encryption VNFs to add to the service chain of functions. Service providers can remotely deploy virtualised encryptors to protect data-in-motion from the client's site right to the server in a data centre. Encrypting the stream to the cloud was a recommendation given at the RSA conference in San Francisco earlier this year.

Virtualisation speaks to the issue of scaling, be it a small company with limited IT resources that would have to outsource the project or a large corporation with many branch sites to address. Scaling the project based on cost is covered by the step-and-repeat process of virtualisation. Time to deploy is also a scaling issue. With zero-touch provisioning, it’s possible to automate the process so that downloading the software to commissioning can take as little as 30 minutes.

Most cloud deployments are not limited to a single cloud application. A recent RightScale State of the Cloud Report suggests that 85% of enterprises prefer this approach. With virtualised encryption, it’s possible to now encrypt in a hybrid cloud with different flows going to various cloud providers. All of the encryption can be managed by a unified key system, which can be controlled by either the service provider and/or the customer.

And the quality of the protection? While IPSec has been the past standard for data transport, it provides poor performance in a software form. IPSec is a framework of open standards that has traditionally offered security to tunnel between VPN endpoints at the IP layer. Standardised in 1995, it is noted for its complexity, intensive CPU requirements and latency. Many companies have tried to compensate for this with specialised IPSec proprietary hardware. While hardware improves performance, it does force vendor dependency. Now, however, we no longer have to rely on this standard and instead can use 21st Century government-grade software solutions. The best part is that the cost is a fraction of hardware encryption.

Agility, scaling, and flexibility are the three tenants of network functions virtualisation. Virtualised encryption covers all these points. Maybe this is the NFV killer app that service providers have been looking for to create new revenue-bearing services. In the ever-changing threat environment for data-in-motion, virtualised encryptors, through the nature of software templates, offer modern techniques for upgrading technology and scaling to meet new and changing customer requirements, thus offering the best means of ensuring GDPR compliance.

NetApp has disclosed its most recent financial figures – revenues of $1.42 billion (£1.07bn) for Q218, up 6% year over year with CEO and president George Kurian telling analysts the company ‘continues to substantially outpace the growth of the all-flash array market and competitors’.

Alongside the total quarterly revenues, NetApp posted a GAAP net income of $175 million, up from $109m this time last year, with predicted net revenues to be in the range of $1.425bn and $1.575bn in the third quarter of fiscal 2018.

Wall Street appeared more than pleased with the results, with NetApp’s stock rising to its highest in almost six years following the announcement. Writing for The Motley Foo, Anders Bylund said NetApp’s stock jump was a ‘surprise’, adding that strong sales of flash-based storage arrays and cloud-based data analytics tools were key to its success.

“Unlike competitors’ approaches, which are siloed and do not embrace the cloud, we help organisations unify their data across the widest range of cloud and on-premises environments to realise its full value for competitive advantage,” Kurian told analysts. “Data is at the heart of companies’ digital transformation, and we are winning because we are enabling customers’ success through data.

“No one matches our expertise in data management, our leadership in growing market segments and our open ecosystem approach,” added Kurian. “Our advantage is the result of decades of software-based innovation, strategic focus and the ability to partner effectively.”

Among the company’s highlights in the most recent quarter included a partnership with Microsoft, powering Microsoft Azure’s enterprise network file system (NFS) service, updating Data Fabric, its solution to move and integrate data management across cloud and on-premises, and a customer win in the form of US public health information exchange Healthix.

You can read the full results here.

Digital transformation is about embracing digital technologies into a company’s culture to better connect with its customers, automate processes, create better tools, enter new markets, etc. Such a transformation requires continuous orchestration across teams and an environment based on open collaboration and daily experiments.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Alex Casalboni, Technical (Cloud) Evangelist at Cloud Academy, explored and discussed the most urgent unsolved challenges to achieve full cloud literacy in the enterprise world.

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Our work, both with clients and with tools, has lead us to wonder how it is that organizations are handling compliance issues in the cloud. The big cloud vendors offer compliance for their infrastructure, but the shared responsibility model requires that you take certain steps to meet compliance requirements.
Which lead us to start poking around a little more. We wanted to get a picture of what was available, and how it was being used. There is a lot of fluidity in this space, as in all things cloud. The fact that DevOps Security plays into the cloud compliance model – particularly in dynamic cloud environments – makes it even more fluid.

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Cloud Governance means many things to many people. Heck, just the word cloud means different things depending on who you are talking to. While definitions can vary, controlling access to cloud resources is invariably a central piece of any governance program.

Enterprise cloud computing has transformed IT. Cloud computing decreases time-to-market, improves agility by allowing businesses to adapt quickly to changing market demands, and, ultimately, drives down costs.

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The notion of improving operational efficiency is conspicuously absent from the healthcare debate – neither Obamacare nor the newly proposed GOP plan discusses the impact that a step-function improvement in efficiency could have on access to healthcare (through more capacity), quality of healthcare services (through reduced wait times for patients) or cost (through better utilization of scarce, expensive assets).

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Modern software design has fundamentally changed how we manage applications, causing many to turn to containers as the new virtual machine for resource management. As container adoption grows beyond stateless applications to stateful workloads, the need for persistent storage is foundational – something customers routinely cite as a top pain point. In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 21st Cloud Expo, Bill Borsari, Head of Systems Engineering at Datera, explored how organizations can reap the benefits of the cloud without losing performance as containers become the new paradigm.

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Cloud computing has come a long way over the last several years. It has gone from an emerging technology used in tech startups, to a catalyst for driving enterprise business transformations. According to IDC’s CloudView 2017 report, 70 percent of CIOs say they embrace a “cloud-first IT strategy.” This shows that cloud has moved way beyond the early-adopted phase, where born in the cloud startups were the only ones putting data and applications in the public cloud. Today, global enterprises have embraced the cloud as a means to achieve agility and innovation, and are rapidly driving cloud adoption to new heights.

Still, looking at it another way, just how far has cloud come? Have cloud users configured their organisations to truly get the most out of the technology? The same IDC report suggests the answer is no. According to CloudView 2017, only 16 percent of worldwide organisations have in place the skills and processes they need to manage the evolving cloud environment efficiently.

Here at CloudHealth Technologies, we work with customers who are grappling with these same challenges every day. Many customers expanded into the cloud quickly, and they’re struggling not only to get visibility into the systems and teams using it, but to develop a holistic strategy to fully harness the power.

The good news is, the enterprise has been making strong progress in transitioning from early adoption to mature usage of the cloud. They’re beginning to develop the organisational skills they need to gain productivity and efficiency in the cloud. And they’re developing new roles that take advantage of the new skillsets required to compete in cloud-first environments.

Here are a few ways we're seeing innovative organisations getting it done:

Adopting a disruptive attitude

The cloud can be a threatening technology within the enterprise. For all the promised benefits of innovation and agility, it requires a fundamental shift in the skills, people, processes and technologies within an organisation. All enterprises will inevitably encounter some level of resistance to adopting the cloud, and thus it's critical to approach it as a disruptive innovation.

The first step is to make the commitment. Companies need to have change agents, and employees need to buy into the change. Tech companies embrace this counter-revolution mentality when it comes to cloud. Enterprises need to as well.

Aligning their business

Once companies have committed to a cloud-first approach, they need to ensure that everyone is aligned on how the move to cloud will help the organisation accomplish its goals. The chief goal must be driving business transformation that enhances value to customers, increase top-line revenue, and improves competitiveness of your business. At the end of the day, cloud is the vehicle that’s fueling their transformation. It's critical to develop and communicate a clear vision, and to get buy in from your key stakeholders.

Hiring and locating great cloud talent

To succeed in the cloud, companies need to create a culture that will attract the people with cloud skills that are going to make a difference. The culture needs to be open, collaborative, and fast moving. People who have great skills in the cloud want to work with other people who are great at cloud. As Steve Jobs used to say: “A players” want to work with “A players.” It's critical to cultivate this culture in a small team before rolling it out more broadly. Often an organisational tipping point must be achieved to drive cultural change.

Creating a ‘learning organisation’

It’s not enough to create a solid organisational plan for the cloud; the organisation has to learn and keep learning. The Japanese call it a “Kaizen” mentality – a system that continuously improves. When it comes to cloud, you need to always be analysing, measuring, and figuring out how to change things to make them better. Everything should be subject to continuous improvement.

Creating new leadership roles

One of the most important moves a modern cloud-first organisation can make is to create a function for cloud governance. A typical enterprise may have hundreds of teams using the cloud, each of which has great ownership over the applications and infrastructure they manage. It is critical to empower these teams with the ability to harness the innovation and agility enabled by the cloud, but it is also equally important to ensure your teams are adopting best practices, driving standards, gaining efficiencies, and complying with critical policies and frameworks. Increasingly we are seeing enterprises create governance teams that help drive the impedance mismatch between agility and control, increasing the cloud IQ across the organisation, and enabling business success.

Building technical knowledge

At the end of the day, while building out the team is critical, companies still need deep technical knowledge in areas where cloud matters. It’s essential to have people with a deep understanding of cloud architectures, programming, cloud services, DevOps, and key technologies (e.g. containers, microservices) that are required in the cloud. But the list of new areas of knowledge to learn is constantly growing and changing, and it is imperative to build a learning organisation that can continue to grow and learn together. In addition to enabling greater cloud success, it is also a critical tool for retaining organisational talent.

While the technology may be more than 10 years old, we're still very early in harnessing the true power of the cloud. We have come so far, but still have so many opportunities to grow and learn. The cloud has great potential to fundamentally transform our businesses, but achieving success requires that we adopt new roles, processes and technologies to support this change. Your cloud transformation won’t happen overnight. But if you dedicate yourself to the task and learn from others’ successes and mistakes, you be able to compete in a cloud-first environment – and win.

In his general session at 21st Cloud Expo, Greg Dumas, Calligo’s Vice President and G.M. of US operations, discussed the new Global Data Protection Regulation and how Calligo can help business stay compliant in digitally globalized world.
Greg Dumas is Calligo’s Vice President and G.M. of US operations. Calligo is an established service provider that provides an innovative platform for trusted cloud solutions. Calligo’s customers are typically most concerned about GDPR compliance, application performance guarantees & data privacy.

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