A quarter of IT firms in Europe are already operating tiered applications across on-premise and off-premise environments; yet only a few companies have long term strategies in place, according to the latest note from IDC.

The study, which polled more than 800 IT and line of business decision makers in 11 European countries, found that while 31% prefer to hook up their systems to apps on a public cloud with back-end systems on-premise, 8% went for ‘bursting’ capacity into off-premise. 40% of respondents segregated on- and off-premise environments, with 20% not venturing into public cloud at all.

Only one in five line of business respondents said they would find standardising on one or two infrastructure (IaaS), platform (PaaS), or software as a service (SaaS) vendors acceptable, a number which goes up to one in three for the IT side.

IDC cited companies such as ING Bank and Siemens whose model purports to consume cloud content from several locations, as well as the ‘challenges’ this presents to CIOs. The analyst firm cited a multi-cloud strategy “based on hiring staff with negotiation skills, expanding investments in automation software, and revising cross-country connectivity options” as a result.

“Connecting cloud environments with ad hoc bridges in a hybrid fashion won’t be enough in 2018… nor will standardising on one external provider, at least for large or innovative companies,” said Giorgio Nebuloni, IDC’s European infrastructure group research director. “Developers and line of business require ‘best of breed’, and the purchasing department wants to avoid being locked in.”

The growing need for multi-cloud was covered by this publication earlier this week, when Thor Culverhouse, CEO of Skytap, mentioned it in the context of how the wider war around the cloud – not so much a two-horse race between Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft – had not started yet. “CIOs are starting to wake up to the fact that there’s going to be multiple clouds to address multiple workloads and applications,” he told CloudTech.

Only 55.4% of companies meet all PCI DSS compliance standards, according to a new report released by Verizon. While this number is up 7% from 2015, it still translates to nearly half of retailers, IT services companies, payment software providers and hospitality organisations do not adequately protect credit cardholder information.

Companies had the greatest difficulty meeting the following requirements, many of which are related to infrastructure compliance and policies:

• Requirement 3 – Protect stored cardholder data. Requirement 3 also saw the second highest use of compensating controls globally.
• Requirement 6 – Develop and maintain secure systems, covering the security of applications, and particularly change management.
• Requirement 11 – Test security systems and processes, including vulnerability scanning, penetration testing, file integrity monitoring, and intrusion detection.
• Requirement 12 – Maintain information security policies. Control 12.8 (Manage service providers with whom cardholder data is shared) was the weakest of the Requirement 12 controls.

Additionally, 44.6% of companies fall out of PCI DSS compliance within nine months of validation.

At a time when 51% of compliance officers in financial services firms report a skills shortage in compliance, it is perhaps no wonder that many companies have fallen behind. Rather than hire more staff, sixty-seven percent (67%) of IT leaders would prefer an automated approach to infrastructure compliance, which is usually a cloud-based solution. One of the many reasons that cloud solutions are appealing is that the cloud platform (such as AWS or Azure) takes care of most physical security controls, reducing the overall cost and effort of building a compliant system. More than 50 percent of new 2017 enterprise North American application adoptions will be composed of SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS solutions, according to Gartner.

Infrastructure compliance automation on the public cloud (Amazon Web Services, Azure), which is referred to as Continuous Compliance or DevSecOps, has received increased attention in 2017. In basic terms, infrastructure compliance automation consists of several cloud-based tools, such as configuration management and infrastructure templates, that allow engineers to easily spin up compliant infrastructure, track configuration changes, and reduce manual compliance work.

The complexity of meeting infrastructure compliance requirements is growing, especially for companies that host large amounts of sensitive financial data. As companies explore cloud options, expect to see a shift in compliance management away from manual compliance work and towards cloud automation.

The post Nearly Half of Companies Fail to Meet PCI DSS Compliance Standards appeared first on Logicworks.

SYS-CON Events announced today that N3N will exhibit at SYS-CON’s @ThingsExpo, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
N3N’s solutions increase the effectiveness of operations and control centers, increase the value of IoT investments, and facilitate real-time operational decision making. N3N enables operations teams with a four dimensional digital “big board” that consolidates real-time live video feeds alongside IoT sensor data and analytics insights onto a single, holistic, display, focusing attention on what matters, when it matters.

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Today companies are looking to achieve cloud-first digital agility to reduce time-to-market, optimize utilization of resources, and rapidly deliver disruptive business solutions. However, leveraging the benefits of cloud deployments can be complicated for companies with extensive legacy computing environments.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Craig Sproule, founder and CEO of Metavine, will outline the challenges enterprises face in migrating legacy solutions to the cloud. He will also present an approach to address those challenges, accelerate the process, and minimize the risk of the migration.

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Another day, another research study which reveals the benefits of the public cloud tinged with security concerns.

This time, a report from Barracuda Networks has shown that while respondents – 300 IT decision makers from companies across the US – expect the percentage of their infrastructure in the public cloud to almost double in five years, three quarters (74%) say security concerns restrict their organisations’ migration.

Yet perhaps the most worrying aspect of the research was around confusion with regard to the shared responsibility model of cloud computing. More than three quarters (77%) of those polled say public cloud providers are responsible for securing customer data in the cloud, while 68% believed vendors are responsible for securing customer applications as well.

This is not the first time this publication – or indeed, Barracuda – has noted the disparity. Back in July, a report from the company found similar misgivings. It’s worth repeating again what Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, the two leading companies in the space, have to say on it.

AWS describes the relationship between vendor and customer as being responsible for security ‘of’ the cloud – compute, storage, networking, and so forth – and ‘in’ the cloud, such as customer data, applications, and identity and access management, respectively. For Microsoft, it’s a question of differentiating between software, infrastructure, and platform as a service. SaaS has more responsibility for the provider, going down through PaaS, IaaS and eventually on-prem which is of course entirely the customer’s responsibility – but with data classification always the responsibility of the user.

Here, the issues do not appear to have changed, with Barracuda making a series of recommendations to organisations. First, partner with third-party security vendors who support a wide range of ecosystems for a multi-cloud scenario – a situation Skytap, who this publication recently featured, affirmed – as well as look for vendors that provide a common management scheme. Naturally, Barracuda is adept at each of these scenarios.

“This survey confirms what we are hearing from customers and partners – security remains a key concern for organisations evaluating public cloud, and there’s confusion over where their part of the shared responsibility model begins and ends,” said Tim Jefferson, Barracuda vice president public cloud in a statement.

“Many organisations realise that cloud deployments can be inherently more secure than on-premises deployments because cloud providers are collectively investing more into security controls than they could on their own,” added Jefferson. “However, the organisations benefiting most from public cloud are those that understand that their public cloud provider is not responsible for securing data or applications and are augmenting security with support from third-party vendors.”

Two in three UK IT decision makers polled in a new study say their organisation is losing out on revenue as they lack specific cloud expertise.

The report, put together by Rackspace and the London School of Economics, polled 950 IT decision makers and 950 IT pros and found 67% of the latter believed they could bring greater innovation to their organisation with the ‘right cloud insight’. 85% said greater expertise within their organisation would help them recoup the return on their cloud investment.

Almost half (46%) of IT decision makers say they find it hard to recruit the best talent to manage their organisation’s clouds, with migration project management, native cloud app development, and cloud security among the skills companies are struggling with to hire. Similarly, competition for talent, an inability to offer competitive salaries, and difficulties in providing sufficient career progression and training were also cited as barriers to recruitment.

With this in mind, almost three quarters (72%) of respondents said they were looking to increase their firm’s cloud usage in the coming five years. The research evidently denotes a friction point; 84% of IT decision makers said it took ‘a number of weeks or more’ to train new hires, with 37% opting for ‘months’.

Will Venters, assistant professor of information systems at LSE, said cloud technology had been a ‘victim of its own success’. “As the technology has become ubiquitous among large organisations – and helped them to wrestle back control of sprawling physical IT estates – it has also opened up a huge number of development and innovation opportunities.

“However, to fully realise these opportunities, organisations need to not only have the right expertise in place now, but also have a cloud skills development strategy to ensure they are constantly evolving their IT workforce and training procedures in parallel with the constantly evolving demands of cloud.

“Failure to do so will severely impede the future aspirations of businesses in an increasingly competitive digital market.”

According to Firebrand Training, an IT training and project management course provider, the top five cloud skills organisations – and employees – need to get on board for this year include database and big data, application security, and containers.

The Rackspace research polled executives from the UK, US, Germany, Benelux, Switzerland, Mexico, Singapore, Australia and Hong Kong.

SYS-CON Events announced today that NetApp has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
NetApp is the data authority for hybrid cloud. NetApp provides a full range of hybrid cloud data services that simplify management of applications and data across cloud and on-premises environments to accelerate digital transformation. Together with their partners, NetApp empowers global organizations to unleash the full potential of their data to expand customer touchpoints, foster greater innovation and optimize their operations.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that B2Cloud will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
B2Cloud specializes in IoT devices for preventive and predictive maintenance in any kind of equipment retrieving data like Energy consumption, working time, temperature, humidity, pressure, etc.

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