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Some mainstream IT buyers might think that most cloud infrastructure vendors and service providers are essentially alike. But there are key differences. Besides, given the body of market research to the contrary, there’s clearly no such thing as a «one-size-fits-all» cloud solution.

Furthermore, if you believe that a hybrid cloud should support an IT agenda to transform a business, then a viable solution must consider the pre-existing systems of record within the enterprise. That’s why forward-thinking CIOs often seek information and guidance on two fronts.

First, they want to know how to extract costs from their legacy IT investments. Second, they desire to use that assessment exercise to free-up budget and fund innovation via a DevOps model that would streamline new cloud-native technology deployments.

That’s why pragmatic CIOs understand the reality of a coexistence environment, where current on-premises IT systems must be an integral part of the total digital transformation equation.

Applying the best of both worlds

In previous global market studies, senior executive decision makers have stated that they are likely to always have a blend of traditional on-premises IT and cloud-based services. Cloud computing has enabled organizations to increase their overall utilization of existing IT assets.

Consider these highlights from a recent survey of senior executives:

• 92 percent of surveyed executives said their most successful cloud initiative enabled creation and support of new business models.
• Executives said they expect 45 percent of workloads to stay on dedicated, on-premise systems, even as cloud adoption expands.
• 83 percent of high-performing organizations said their cloud initiatives are coordinated or fully integrated within the organization.

According to the latest worldwide market study by IBM Institute for Business Value, there are four main reasons why organizations are strategically combining cloud-based services and traditional IT into tailored hybrid solutions.

Fifty-four percent of surveyed executives cited the most popular reason for implementing hybrid cloud solutions as lowering the total ownership cost of technology.

Forty-two percent of respondents believe that operational efficiencies can stem from selecting the most compatible infrastructure and middleware.

Forty-two percent of respondents also said that cloud services are proven to accelerate innovation by enabling quick prototyping of new ideas for faster experimentation.

To meet customer expectations, forty percent of respondents reported that cloud’s agile and composable attributes enable faster time to market for new products and services.

Additional findings from the market study

The optimal Hybrid IT environment will differ by individual enterprise. Case in point; executives say they need to decide which IT and business functions can be delivered through cloud computing with a projectable, positive business outcome.

In two years, most organizations plan to use software-as-a-service (SaaS) with a variety of applications. However, many believe that their adoption of cloud could be restrained by three major deployment challenges — security and compliance requirements; cost structure considerations; and risk of operational disruption.

Despite these challenges, successful companies are delivering business value through hybrid cloud in three areas – operations, finance and innovation. Seventy-six percent of surveyed executives said their most successful cloud initiative has significantly achieved expansion into new industries. Close behind were the creation of new revenue sources and new business models.

That being said, fifty-seven percent of executives from high performing organizations identified cost as the most important criterion in deciding which workloads should be moved to the cloud.

One way to achieve an optimal hybrid solution is to tap into the capabilities and data that resides on existing systems. The study also found that innovation advantages can be gained by utilizing application programming interfaces (APIs) and by enabling access to external technical talent.

Likewise, conducting rapid IT experimentation gives innovative organizations the ability to test and fail quickly. Cloud computing is proven to enable nimble development and testing. What’s more, quick and automated resource provisioning can shorten applications development time.

In summary, taking advantage of hybrid cloud services is much easier and more effective when companies rely on skilled and experienced technology partners that provide expertise on recent trends, best practice methodologies and proven hybrid architecture frameworks.

Hybrid cloud information and guidance

You have a choice; you can select the vendor that has all the hybrid IT components- technology, products and professional services – that you will ultimately need to succeed. Choose to deploy an optimal hybrid cloud configuration and gain a strategic competitive advantage that will give you a decisive edge in your industry.

Learn how to gain a flexible and secure IT service delivery platform with an optimal hybrid cloud solution that’s designed, engineered and deployed as the best-fit for your particular digital business transformation requirements and technical specifications.

In the era of microservices and cloud-native applications, Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) is going through a major transformation. The combination of containers and continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) is enabling rapid deployment of software like never before. And though the languages, runtimes, frameworks, deployment targets have changed dramatically, the tooling hasn’t evolved much. Developers are still relying on traditional integrated development environments (IDEs) such as Visual Studio, Eclipse, and IntelliJ. While they may be powerful, they are definitely not designed to take advantage of emerging technologies.

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Israel-based cloud storage and data protection company CTERA Networks has received $25 million (£18.9m) in an investment round led by US-based Bessemer Venture Partners, which brings the company’s total financing to nearly $70 million to date.

Cisco and Israeli investment management firm Vintage Investment Partners also participated alongside Bessemer in the investment round.

The funds will be used to boost the company sales and marketing initiatives as well as to push global customer acquisition of its CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform, which allows a gold standard for file storage, collaboration and data protection among secure and distributed enterprise organisations.

The CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform assimilates endpoint, office and cloud file services with uncompromising IT security, cloud choice and automation. The company claims that it is the only solution that can address a variety of end-user computing file management and data protection requirements.

It enables organisations to sync, serve and protect data from one centrally managed solution that is 100 per cent secure and deployable on any cloud infrastructure, all behind the customer’s firewall.

Liran Eshel, co-founder and CEO at CTERA: “With organisations increasingly looking to modernise their data infrastructures, CTERA is uniquely poised to provide secure tools that offer easy and globally accelerated access to files and backups. This newly announced investment round will enable CTERA to deliver best-in-class products, support and service to an even broader collection of forward-thinking enterprise customers.”

Jeff Denworth, CTERA SVP marketing, wrote in a blog post that the funding was a “terrific validation” of the company’s vision and execution. “While the business is growing at a very healthy pace, we’ve made the decision to ‘power up’ the sales execution and solution delivery engine to tackle a unique market opportunity that CTERA is well posed to lead in,” he said.

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The company may only be a week old – but Dell Technologies is already challenging the traditional leaders in the cloud infrastructure space, according to new data released from Synergy Research.

Naturally, this statement isn’t quite telling the whole truth. Even though Dell Technologies came into being on September 7, the company’s history, having come about following the completion of Dell’s $67 billion acquisition of EMC, and all it entails – Virtustream, Pivotal, VCE et al – means it is more a question of semantics than anything else.

The Synergy verdict for Q216 revenues shows Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) as the overall leader by a nose, with 15% of the overall market including public cloud hardware, private cloud hardware, and software, while Cisco (14%) and Dell/EMC (13%) took the silver and bronze medals respectively.

The overall numbers show the continuation of a well-known trend.

The cloud software market is growing more quickly than the others, yet remain smaller. Microsoft has the lion’s share of the market, with VMware – another Dell Technologies subsidiary – in second place. Synergy notes the other primary players in this space are Huawei, IBM, Lenovo, NetApp, and Oracle.

“While total spending on data centre infrastructure remains relatively flat, cloud share of that spending continues to rise as an ever-increasing portion of computer workloads migrate to either public or private clouds,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research founder and chief analyst, adding: “We are also seeing that within the cloud infrastructure market, hyperscale cloud operators are accounting for an ever-larger share of overall capex. This is a trend which is not going to change any time soon.”

The verdict of HPE leading the way was also echoed in the most recent analysis from IDC, in figures released in April of this year.

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In April 2015, one of the world’s biggest jewellery heists occurred at the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company in London. Posing as workmen, the criminals entered the building through a lift shaft and cut through a 50cm-thick concrete wall with an industrial power drill. Once inside, the criminals had free and unlimited access to the company’s secure vault for over 48 hours during the Easter weekend, breaking into one safety deposit box after another to steal an estimated $100m worth of jewelry.

So why weren’t the criminals caught? How did they have free reign into all of the safety deposit boxes? It turns out that the security systems only monitored the perimeter, not inside the vault. Despite the burglars initially triggering an alarm to which the police responded, no physical signs of burglary were found outside the company’s vault. So the perpetrators were able to continue their robbery uninterrupted. In other words, the theft was made possible by simply breaching the vault’s perimeter – once the gang was inside, they could move around undetected and undisturbed.

Most businesses do not have store gold, diamonds or jewelry. Instead, their most precious assets are data. And they’re not stored in reinforced vaults, but in data centres. Yet in many cases, both vaults and data centres are secured against breaches in similar ways. Organisations often focus on reinforcing the perimeter and less on internal security.

If attackers are able to breach the external protection, they can often move inside the data centre from one application to the next, stealing data and disrupting business processes for some time before they are detected – just like the criminal gang inside the Hatton Garden vault were able to move freely and undetected. In some recent data centre breaches, the hackers had access to applications and data for months, due to lack of visibility and internal security measures.

Security challenges in virtualised environments

This situation is made worse as enterprises move from physical data centre networks to virtualised networks – to accelerate configuring and deploying applications, reduce hardware costs and reduce management time. In this new data centre environment, all of the infrastructure elements – networking, storage, compute and security – are virtualised and delivered as a service. This fundamental change means that the traditional security approaches of securing the network’s perimeter is no longer suitable to address the dynamic virtualised environment.

The main security challenges are:

Traffic behaviour shifts: Historically, the majority of traffic was ‘north-south’ traffic, which crosses the data centre perimeter and is managed by traditional perimeter security controls. Now, intra-data centre ‘east-west’ traffic has drastically increased, as the number of applications has multiplied and those applications need to interconnect and share data in order to function. With the number of applications growing, hackers have a wider choice of targets: they can focus on a single low-priority application and then use it to start moving laterally inside the data centre, undetected. Perimeter security is no longer enough.

Manual configuration and policy changes: In these newly dynamic data centres, traditional, manual processes for managing security are too slow, taking too much of the IT team’s time – which means security can be a bottleneck, slowing the delivery of new applications. Manual processes are also prone to human errors which can introduce vulnerabilities. Therefore, automating security management is essential to enable automated application provisioning and to fully support data centre agility.

Until recently, delivering advanced threat prevention and security technologies within the data centre would involve managing a large number of separate VLANs and keeping complicated network diagrams and configuration constantly up-to-date using manual processes. In short, an unrealistically difficult and expensive management task for most organisations.

Micro-segmentation: Armed guards inside the vault

But what if we could place the equivalent of a security guard on every safety deposit box in the vault so that even if an attacker breaches the perimeter, there is protection for every valuable asset inside? As data centres become increasingly software-defined with all functions managed virtually, this can be accomplished by using micro-segmentation in the software-defined data centre (SDDC).

Micro-segmentation works by coloring and grouping resources within the data centre with communication between those groups applied with specific dynamic security policies. Traffic within the data centre is then directed to virtual security gateways.  The traffic is deeply inspected at the content level using advanced threat prevention techniques to stop attackers attempting to move laterally from one application to another using exploits and reconnaissance techniques.

Whenever a virtual machine or server is detected executing an attack using the above techniques, it can be tagged as infected and immediately quarantined automatically by the ‘security guard’ in the data centre: the security gateway. This way, a system breach does not compromise the entire infrastructure.

Once an application is added and evolves over time, it is imperative for the security policy to instantly apply and automatically adapt to the dynamic changes. Using integration to cloud management and orchestration tools, the security in the software defined data centre learns about the role of the application, how it scales and its location. As a result, the right policy is enforced enabling applications inside the data centre to securely communicate with each other. For example, when servers are added or an IP address changes, the object is already provisioned and inherits the relevant security policies removing the need for a manual process.

Just as virtualisation has driven the development of scalable, flexible, easily-managed data centres, it’s also driving the next generation of data centre security. Using SDDC micro-segmentation delivered via an integrated, virtualised security platform, advanced security and threat prevention services can be dynamically deployed wherever they are needed in the software-defined data centre environment. This puts armed security guards around inside the organisation’s vault, protecting each safety deposit box and the valuable assets they hold – helping to stop data centres falling victim of a Hatton Garden-style breach.

Mike described the overlay of Cloud, Mobile, Social and Big Data across the traditional legacy of hardware, software and telco services, constituting the ‘Third Platform’ and beginning around 2006.
He highlighted the general explosion of the technology innovation ecosystem, everything from 3D Printers through Augmented Reality to the Blockchain, are each executing major levels of disruptive change, in parallel to one another.
As they intersect and synthesize so even larger virtual market opportunities are opened up, from digital currencies to entirely new app sets for the public sector to new mass market gaming niches.

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Most enterprises are struggling to innovate and are not investing enough into new technologies to counter disruptive measures. As a result, in a few years, their products are becoming irrelevant in the market. Examples of Blackberry, Nokia, Kodak, Blockbuster have been quoted numerous times. Technology has lowered the entry barrier to innovation, and new entrants can easily disrupt the entire business models in a matter of months. Geographical borders do not guarantee any competitive advantages anymore. Any breakthrough or new idea travels around the world in a matter of minutes.

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Businesses have been warned and they’ve been previously shown up for not having the required knowledge over the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – now, a new piece of research from mainframe firm Compuware argues that more than two thirds of organisations do not have a comprehensive plan in place for how they will act.

The research, which quizzed 400 CIOs across Europe and the US, found that just over half (55%) of European businesses believe they are ‘well-briefed’ on the GDPR, while 63% argued data complexity is a major hurdle in achieving compliance with the new regulations.

The new rules, which come into effect on May 25 2018, concern users’ ‘right to be forgotten’, as well as a right for them to know when their data has been hacked, as well as transferring data to another service provider without the fear of vendor lock-in. The former is a particular concern in the research; only 52% of companies said they could comply with it right now.

Perhaps most worryingly, 68% of those polled said they ‘can’t always know where customer data is’ due to the complexity of modern IT. The use of outsourcing and mobile technology makes it more difficult, the research notes, cited by 81% and 63% of respondents respectively. That said, over half (51%) of CIOs say they can locate all of an individual’s personal data quickly.

“To comply with the GDPR, businesses need to keep stricter control of where customer data resides,” said Dr Elizabeth Maxwell, Compuware EMEA technical director. “If they don’t have a firm handle on where every copy of customer data resides across all their systems, businesses could lose countless man-hours conducting manual searches for the data of those exercising their ‘right to be forgotten’.

“Even then, they may not identify every copy, leaving them at risk of non-compliance.”

Any UK businesses thinking that because of the Brexit EU vote they don’t have to comply with the new regulations will be in for a rude awakening. Speaking to this publication before June’s referendum, Jonathan Mepsted, UK managing director at Netskope, argued the legislation – if you are looking to do business in the European Union, you are in. The Compuware research also found that more than half (52%) of US businesses hold European customer data, meaning they are also liable.

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Even though almost all of the channel recognises the potential benefits of cloud computing, only two thirds of companies polled by the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) and Intermedia say they are offering cloud services today.

The research, which was conducted by Vanson Bourne and polled 150 senior decision makers from managed service providers, value added resellers and systems integrators, found there were ‘significant’ barriers when it came to channel organisations selling cloud services today. 82% argue cultural changes within an organisation are a challenge, while staff skill shortages (81%) and cloud marketing and positioning (80%) were also cited.

78% of end user organisations are using at least one cloud-based service today, according to figures, up from 61% according to the CIF, but the channel has been unable to keep up down to a lack of vendor support, argues Alex Hilton, Cloud Industry Forum CEO.

“The channel is clearly struggling when it comes to cloud deployments and is missing out on major opportunities as a result,” said Hilton. “Resellers that do sell cloud services are reporting a wide range of benefits, from improved competitive edge to extended revenues and market reach. This puts channel resellers that haven’t yet made the move at a distinct disadvantage.”

“While the channel has recognised cloud’s potential, resellers, as made evident by these findings, aren’t getting the support they need to transition, said Eric Weiss, Intermedia SVP marketing.

“Beyond tailored levels of support and technical expertise, partners need help differentiating, which is why 82% of respondents incorporate value adds and 59% view white label programmes as critical or very important to their success. This is why Intermedia has put such an emphasis on its private label resale programme – so partners can create solutions customised to their customers’ needs while owning the relationship, pricing and branding.”