Oracle has announced it has joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) at the platinum level, boosting its push for Kubernetes with new open source product releases.

The foundation, whose role is to help sustain containers and microservices architectures, said Oracle’s ‘key role will help define the future of enterprise cloud.’

“CNCF technologies such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, gRPC and OpenTracing are critical parts of both our own and our customers’ development toolchains,” said Mark Cavage, vice president of software development at Oracle. “Together with the CNCF, Oracle is cultivating an open container ecosystem built for cloud interoperability, enterprise workloads and performance.”

Oracle becomes the third such vendor to sign up to the CNCF in a matter of weeks, after Amazon Web Services (AWS) confirmed its participation earlier this month and Microsoft did so in July. The cast list of the CNCF now reads like a who’s who of cloud computing, with Oracle the last holdout among the first and second tier players.

Alongside this, Oracle is releasing Kubernetes on Oracle Linux, as well as open sourcing a Kubernetes installer for its cloud infrastructure. “Developers gain unparalleled simplicity for running their cloud native workloads on Oracle,” as the company put it.

This is one of various initiatives Oracle has recently been putting into place regarding open source. The company announced in June it was making investments into Kubernetes, with a blog post from the developer team saying at the time: “Oracle is investing in Kubernetes first and foremost as a way to deploy and operate our new cloud services. We think our understanding of operating Kubernetes will translate into value for the community as we turn our real-world experience into action.” In the same month, Oracle also announced three new open source container utilities.

The company’s most recent financial results, in June, saw total cloud revenues hit $1.36 billion (£1.06bn), or 13% of overall revenue, with Larry Ellison predicting its platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) businesses will outperform the software arm in due course.

With Q118 earnings set to be announced later today, Wallace Witkowski, writing for MarketWatch, said the company is “expected to mark a major milestone in its transition from traditional software sales to the cloud.”

Editor’s note: This story will be updated later with the announcement of Oracle’s financial results.

The “Digital Era” is forcing us to engage with new methods to build, operate and maintain applications. This transformation also implies an evolution to more and more intelligent applications to better engage with the customers, while creating significant market differentiators.
In both cases, the cloud has become a key enabler to embrace this digital revolution. So, moving to the cloud is no longer the question; the new questions are HOW and WHEN. To make this equation even more complex, most of the time we are dealing with complex portfolios, many including hundreds of legacy applications.

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If you want to get ahead – and get better paid – in the cloud game, then chuck in the sysadmin role and become a DevOps engineer instead.

That’s the primary finding from Puppet’s 2017 DevOps Salary Report, which finds that 66% of DevOps engineers and 69% of software engineers in the US take home pay packets of more than $100,000 per year – up 2% and 3% respectively from the year before – while sysadmins on six figures were only at 31%.

Naturally, this disparity lent itself among the 3,200 technology professionals polled to job titles themselves. DevOps engineer was the most popular overall with software engineer in second place, with the roles reversed for the US. System administrator was the fifth most cited occupation, behind system developer or engineer and architect.

Not surprisingly, more experienced respondents were more likely to be earning the bigger bucks, with more than half (56%) in the industry for between 15 and 20 years making more than $100k, a figure that rises to 63% for 20 years’ experience or more.

When it came to the number of servers employees were responsible for, there was a general trend of bigger is better. Only 27% of those managing fewer than 100 servers earned six figure salaries, compared with 52% for those managing 100,000 or more. Only 6% of respondents identified themselves as female with a ‘small number’ identifying as non-binary – a rise, albeit small, on the previous year’s survey.

“As more enterprises fundamentally change the way they deliver IT services and software to users around the globe in support of digital transformation efforts, they are also challenged with finding the right talent to help increase deployment speed and innovation,” said Alanna Brown, Puppet director of product marketing. “To address these issues, they are adopting new processes, technologies and cultural norms to keep pace with the rapid rate of change.

“This year’s salary report reveals that organisations are investing more heavily in talent and positions that better support DevOps as they rush to transform their businesses and remain competitive,” added Brown.

You can read the full report here (registration required).

According to IDC, only 25% of organizations have repeatable strategies for cloud adoption, with 32% having no cloud strategy at all, describing the need for a best practice based repeatable framework for planning cloud adoption that drives business success.

This Forbes posting from Joe McKindrick also references this research, describing that «only about one in seven organizations with multiple cloud workloads (14%) actually have managed, or optimized cloud strategies. The largest segment, 47%, say their cloud strategies tend to be on the fly — opportunistic, or ad hoc», and that «only a somewhat larger group, 11%, were at the next-best level, “managed,” in which their enterprises are “implementing a consistent, enterprisewide best-practices approach to cloud;” and “orchestrating service delivery across an integrated set of resources.”

Vendors like AWS and VMware offer ready to use best practices that can help plug this gap.

AWS: Enterprise cloud adoption maturity

These challenges correlate with a simple adoption planning model offered by Stephen Orban, head of enterprise strategy at Amazon AWS and previously CIO of Dow Jones.

From his experiences enterprise organisations progress through four main stages of enterprise cloud adoption maturity, consistent with the IDC research:

Organising for the cloud: Building a cloud centre of excellence

In VMware’s whitepaper ‘Organizing for the Cloud’ (30-page PDF) they say the key to this transformation of IT is the implementation of a ‘Cloud Operating Model’. Central to this blueprint is that the IT team should become a cloud service broker, an incremental step up in a maturity model that they describe as a cloud capability model.

They also describe that creation of a ‘Cloud Centre of Excellence’ is the best way to achieve the required changes to the IT organisation itself. This COE should create an online knowledge base of best practices, and defining job roles and responsibilities, such as cloud leader, architect, analyst, administrator and developer and a service catalog manager among others.

Having implemented this matrix of new capabilities the IT team can then seek to identify and achieve the organisational improvements that will be of value to their business, such as:

• Faster response to business needs
• Faster incident resolution
• Improved infrastructure deployment coordination
• Improved ability to meet SLAs

Fundamentally what VMware recommend that is the headline message of Enterprise Cloud is that it will achieve an increased focus on higher value initiatives.

IT value transformation

The headline resource from VMware to answer this question is this study commissioned from the IT Process Institute, their white paper: ‘IT Value Transformation Roadmap‘ 3 (24 page PDF).

In this document they offer a blueprint for a Cloud Maturity Model, a ladder of maturing capability that you can compare your organisation to, and use as a framework to plan your own business transformations, where:

“This cloud computing strategy brief presents a virtualisation- and private-cloud-centric model for IT value transformation. It combines key findings from several primary research studies into a three-stage transformation road map.”

In short this is an ideal strategy blueprint for any existing VMware customers. It proposes a three step maturity model that begins with virtualisation and grows into full utilization of cloud computing across three stages of:

• IT production – Focus on delivering the basics and proving value for money.
• Business production – Utilise technology to better optimise business processes.
• ITaaS – Fully embrace utility IT as a Service, and leverage technology for enabling new service innovation.

This corresponds with an increasing maturity in the use of virtualisation, SaaS and other cloud architecture principles and external services, that begins with where most customers are now, mostly halfway through phase one.

Becoming a transformational leader: Start your journey

It also corresponds with a journey for the CIO as well; from operational manager of a cost centre with poor value for money perceptions, through to a boardroom-level change agent who is directly driving new profit-making initiatives.

Specifically the paper makes the point that this evolution results in the CIO being recognised for delivering strategic IT value:

What is strategic IT value? Strategic IT value is demonstrated when IT plays a key role in a company’s achievement of overall business strategy. In other words, when IT is keenly focused on business outcomes and plays a significant role in optimising and improving core value chain processes. Or, when the IT organisation drives innovation that enables new technology-enabled product and service revenue streams. When IT is effective, results can be measured by improved customer satisfaction and market share gains.

In contrast many CIOs can find themselves in somewhat of an operational corner – responsible for keeping the lights on but perceived as a poor value-for-money cost base for doing so. The IT Process Institute describe how CIOs can break this constraint cycle and shift from a cost focus to delivering strategic value for the business, through this three step progression.

VMware Cloud on AWS

In Taming the Digital Dragon McKinsey describe the hybrid cloud model as the blueprint for digital transformation, and AWS and VMware have released a major innovation to accelerate its adoption.

Announced on 28 Aug 2017 Amazon has launched VMware Cloud on AWS. With this update, VMware’s Software-Designed Data Center (SDDC) can now be used on Amazon’s AWS infrastructure, enabling users to run VMware applications across consistent public, private, or hybrid vSphere-based cloud environments, while also having optimized access to AWS services. This service was designed to support popular use cases, including data centre extension, as well as application development, testing, and migration.

The post AWS / VMware Enterprise Cloud adoption maturity – VMware Cloud on AWS appeared first on CBPN.

Awareness of phishing has grown significantly in recent years, and users are more suspicious than ever of emails that land in their inbox from unknown or questionable senders. In response to this, cybercriminals have had to become savvier with their phishing tactics. They’ve looked to new methods of phishing that are harder for users to expose. The latest of these phishing tactics uses spoofed cloud applications – a new trend that businesses need to watch out for.

Early phishing

Phishing was once all about simplistic deception. A cybercriminal would pose as, for example, a government official or customer service representative, and contact an unknowing victim. The victim, wanting to comply with the law or prevent their account being shut down, would happily and unwittingly give over their personal details to the cybercriminal.

However, this form of scam has started to decline in success. As phishing became more and more popular within the threat landscape, user awareness and understanding about it increased. Users are now less likely to openly share personal information or open suspicious attachments. They also know to look for poor spelling, grammar or strange email addresses when looking through their inbox. Technology, too, caught up with traditional phishing methods: major email providers now tend to alert users of a questionable email or source domain. Similarly, spam filters block large numbers of phishing emails before they even reach their recipients.

Most businesses are now well equipped to defend themselves from traditional phishing attacks, so phishers have had to think of more innovative ways to trick the average person; phishing has had to become more sophisticated. The motivation of phishing attacks is now also shifting: rather than tricking employees into disclosing financial or personal information, hackers are now far more interested in collecting valid business credentials.

Phishing today

Phishing in the cloud is the newest method used by phishers today. Take this year’s Gmail phishing scam, which impacted an estimated one million accounts. The widespread attack replicated through people’s Gmail contacts when they clicked on a bogus Google Doc that appeared to have been shared by a known contact. Part of what was so startling about the scam was how believable it was; hackers used a deceptively named web app – working from within Google’s system for developers. By calling a malicious third-party app “Google Docs,” the attackers were able to trick people into thinking they were being asked to click on a legitimate document, when in fact they were granting account access to hackers. Hackers could then use this permission to see victims’ contacts, read their emails, track locations, and see files created in G Suite.

This attack underscores the security risks of OAuth, which Google uses to streamline authentication. Through OAuth, users don’t have to hand over any password information. They instead grant permission so that one third-party app can connect to their Internet accounts for, say, Google, Facebook or Twitter.

In the Google attacks, hackers exploited this capability, aware that the user could grant them access to their personal information without even needing to re-enter their login details. As the phishing scam shows, the existence of such protocols makes it easier for users to allow access to third party applications, but in turn, makes it easier for hackers to also get access without needing the credentials themselves.

The Google phishing scam’s success relied on psychological manipulation. By impersonating Google Docs, hackers automatically gained the trust of a number of users – just a small change in how the application domain was disguised successfully convinced users that the application was trustworthy.

Next-gen phishing

Whilst traditional phishing scams now fail to reel in most of us – with their suspect spelling and senders – the Google Docs phishing attack demonstrated how a new breed of cloud phishing can trick even some of the most tech-savvy users. Next-generation phishing will see hackers manipulate user trust further by creating malicious applications disguised as legitimate applications, which users download and use. The widespread adoption of SaaS applications has made this an attractive vector for threat actors, and one that has not yet been exploited to its full potential.

In response to the Gmail attacks, Google implemented a number of new security measures: machine learning, improved email filtering, and malicious URL detection, all of which improve email security. Some providers now even give users a warning when they attempt to reply to an email address that is outside of their corporate domains, which is very useful within the workplace.

Although cloud providers will do their best to prevent and warn users of phishing scams, some individuals will still get hooked on a phisher’s line. Employee training therefore remains the first bastion of defence against phishing attacks. Enterprises should also consider investing in security technologies that can detect these threats as they advance. 

Over the last several months, intent-based networking (IBNS) has gained momentum as a newly viable technology that aims to further automate traditional network management. Although IBNS has existed for a few years now as a general concept, it was more buzz than reality until Cisco® launched its first IBNS software package earlier this year.
What is intent-based networking?
Traditionally, network administrators manually translate business policies into network device configurations, a time-intensive and error-prone activity that contributes to rising OpEx. But as digital transformation initiatives continue to reshape the way organizations approach their business and IT strategy, it’s becoming more difficult to stay on top of policy and configuration changes by hand.

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Everyone could agree that silos created unnecessary separation, protectionism, and bureaucracy. No one would dare argue that having rigid silos were somehow good for the organization.
Silos were, therefore, the easy target. They became the mantle onto which leaders could lay all past transgressions, and, in so doing, they became a convenient artifice to allow the leader to proclaim the dawn of a new era of integration, collaboration, and communication.
Silos are dead!
Except they never quite died, did they? In spite of all the talk, silos have persisted. They now just have different names. But the danger remains just as real, and their negative impact grows more significant every day.

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