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Cloud is often seen as the answer to a wide range of business challenges from business innovation to cost reduction. However, there is uncertainty as to whether corporations should operate a model of public, private or hybrid cloud. Here, we will discuss the common perceptions and misconceptions surrounding public and private cloud and the benefits to the enterprise in the adoption of a hybrid model.

Public vs private cloud

According to IDC, overall spending on infrastructure for cloud environments will hit $38.2 billion in 2016. It’s clear that whichever way an organisation chooses to adopt cloud services the capability will be there, but getting to that final decision on what type of services the organisation needs can be a complex process. In the past, the choice of which cloud model to adopt was largely predicated by the business conditions of the industry a company is operating in. For example, private cloud is ideally suited as an entry point for the financial services industry. Private cloud gives the organisation greater control of security and data placement decisions enabling it to comply with the audit requirements of regulators more easily, which is mission critical within the industry.

When looking at the pros and cons of public cloud, one benefit of public cloud is the near unlimited scalability. Scaling up or down can be done quickly, giving greater elasticity for unplanned projects or those that expand rapidly without warning. On the flip side, there are concerns surrounding the security and privacy of data due to the number of attacks to the public cloud. The onslaught of attacks to services that are publicly available, which invariably transcend borders is a mounting concern for companies using public cloud.

Yet, businesses are learning that despite previous barriers to the initial adoption of cloud computing technology such as compliance, customisation, utilisation and privacy requirements, hybrid cloud can offer what the business of the future needs in a secure environment. There no longer needs to be a trade-off between public and private.

Why hybrid?

The hybrid cloud market is growing fast. For the enterprise, hybrid cloud seems the natural evolution from a traditional model, providing huge benefits such as, agility, improved experience, security and compliance and increased innovation.  Markets and Markets published a report last April estimating that the global hybrid cloud market is expected to grow from USD 33.28 Billion in 2016 to USD 91.74 Billion by 2021.

Flexibility and agility

Customer expectations are ever-changing, and as such businesses are under constant pressure to providecontinually improving customer experiences. This requires a systematic and iterative approach to capitalising on a range of technologies’ capabilities – meaning fast, agile development is required. A complete hybrid cloud portfolio enables businesses to place workloads where they make the most sense. An enterprise can align its architecture to take advantage of performance requirements that only dedicated servers can offer. In addition, there is the capability to build upon prior investments in applications and IT infrastructure that an enterprise has already made.

Security and compliance

A common concern about cloud technology among enterprises is security and multi-tenancy. There is growing business pressure to shift data and processing to the cloud, but with mounting regulatory requirements and in some situations regulatory uncertainty, failure to meet these requirements could have critical business impact. A hybrid cloud system satisfies these concerns by allowing a business to choose dedicated servers and network devices that can isolate or restrict access and enabling an organisation to choose exactly where data can be placed. Yet, at the same time this can be orchestrated into one, singular, integrated piece of architecture.

Speed and experience

Cloud has reached a tipping point and the characteristics of IT investment are shifting. Moving from a situation where each organisation keeps a tight hold on their own data, IT executives are actively researching and investigating ways and platforms to integrate data with digital business partners, an experience which can only be fully realised within a cloud environment. But, an enterprise cannot rewrite all of its apps for the cloud or take all of its data to the cloud. Making it simple to migrate any existing enterprise data to the cloud to create efficient workflows with partners, yet keep other data if not needed for cloud operations on private servers, is a massive benefit to large corporations. The speed in which this can be done is what makes moving to a hybrid cloud such an attractive option.

Innovation

Companies recognise the world is being rewritten in code, as IBM Design general manager Phil Gilbert says, and cloud is the environment in which the new reality can be delivered.

Hybrid cloud is being used to make IT portfolio economics work and deliver faster app innovation. For example, DevOps can rapidly create and deploy a new app, microservice or AOI (Add On Instruction) across hybrid cloud that can be scaled up or down. Continuous innovation means being able to access data and analytics to extract deeper insights more quickly than ever before, allowing businesses to get closer to their customers and make smarter decisions in real-time.

Ultimately, when looking for the right cloud solution there is no one size fits all approach. Every hosting solution is unique, and every customer has requirements that revolve not only around technology, but also around support, financial and business objectives. The debate has moved on. It’s not really a matter of either/or — it’s both. A hybrid cloud provider 

Most organizations prioritize data security only after their data has already been compromised. Proactive prevention is important, but how can you accomplish that on a small budget? Learn how the cloud, combined with a defense and in-depth approach, creates efficiencies by transferring and assigning risk. Security requires a multi-defense approach, and an in-house team may only be able to cherry pick from the essential components.
In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Vlad Friedman, CEO/Founder of Edge Hosting, will discuss what questions to ask and the technologies to look for from your cloud service provider to ensure your applications stay online and secure.

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The cloud competition for database hosts is fierce. How do you evaluate a cloud provider for your database platform?
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Chris Presley, a Solutions Architect at Pythian, gave users a checklist of considerations when choosing a provider.
Chris Presley is a Solutions Architect at Pythian. He loves order – making him a premier Microsoft SQL Server expert. Not only has he programmed and administered SQL Server, but he has also shared his expertise and passion with budding DBAs as a SQL Server instructor at Conestoga College in Kitchener, Ontario. Drawing on his strong disaster-recovery skills, he monitors production environments to swiftly detect and resolve problems before they arise. A self-described adrenaline junkie, Chris likes tackling the biggest database problems and putting out the toughest fires – and hitting the road on his motorcycle.

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I wanted to gather all of my Internet of Things (IOT) blogs into a single blog (that I could later use with my University of San Francisco (USF) Big Data “MBA” course). However as I started to pull these blogs together, I realized that my IOT discussion lacked a vision; it lacked an end point towards which an organization could drive their IOT envisioning, proof of value, app dev, data engineering and data science efforts. And I think that the IOT end point is really quite simple…

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Unless your company can spend a lot of money on new technology, re-engineering your environment and hiring a comprehensive cybersecurity team, you will most likely move to the cloud or seek external service partnerships.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Darren Guccione, CEO of Keeper Security, revealed what you need to know when it comes to encryption in the cloud.

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Actian Corporation has announced the latest version of the Actian Vector in Hadoop (VectorH) database, generally available at the end of July. VectorH is based on the same query engine that powers Actian Vector, which recently doubled the TPC-H benchmark record for non-clustered systems at the 3000GB scale factor (see tpc.org/3323).
The ability to easily ingest information from different data sources and rapidly develop queries to make better business decisions is becoming increasingly important, particularly for those companies looking to respond to changes real-time or explore machine-learning. When paired with Actian VectorH, the industry’s fastest Enterprise SQL database that sits natively in Hadoop, Spark users have a new powerful way to help derive true business value from their data.

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“Being the one true cloud-agnostic and storage-agnostic software solution, more and more customers are coming to Commvault and saying ‘ What do you recommend? What’s your best practice for implementing cloud?” explained Randy De Meno, Chief Technologist at Commvault, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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UpGuard has become a member of the Center for Internet Security (CIS), and will continue to help businesses expand visibility into their cyber risk by providing hardening benchmarks to all customers. By incorporating these benchmarks, UpGuard’s CSTAR solution builds on its lead in providing the most complete assessment of both internal and external cyber risk.
CIS benchmarks are a widely accepted set of hardening guidelines that have been publicly available for years. Numerous solutions exist to run CIS benchmarks, including CIS’s own tool, but generating assessments that are insightful and practical for IT managers has been a persistent challenge for the space. UpGuard has been able to differentiate itself from legacy solutions by tackling that ongoing issue head on. Its data visualizations and advanced analytics enable users to find patterns in their results so that they can allocate IT resources and prioritize critical security issues.

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A great deal has been written over the past few years about the financial benefit of migrating to the public or hybrid cloud for enterprises around the world. For enterprise looking for economic benefits of moving to the cloud, the main points have always been the ability to only pay for what you need, reduced operational cost, agility, availability, and elasticity.

The naysayers continue to point to the risks and the considerable labour involved in an enterprise-wide cloud migration. I will not delve into either of those topics here – there is enough to read about that as it is. But looking further ahead, a question comes to mind: is there a global economic impact due to the adoption of cloud computing?

While I am not an economist, I believe that there is a case to be made that, given the valid risks, the global economy does benefit from large scale cloud adoption. Here are some technical areas to contemplate.

New business models

Writing for this publication last year, Louis Columbus argued that enterprises are discovering new models for doing business based on their transition to the cloud. Individual enterprises are developing these new models and, as will be discussed below, finding new means of collaboration with partners and even former competitors. This can lead to major shifts in global industries’ business models as well as the individual enterprise.

Data sharing and collaboration between entities

As business models shift based on cloud technologies and collaboration, and data sharing becomes the norm, an atmosphere of cooperation/competition can emerge. This is as opposed to the strictly competitive atmosphere that exists today.

The best example of a leading indicator – note the economic reference – is the air of cooperation, at the cloud orchestration and container support layers, between public cloud providers. Imagine if, for instance, a group of global insurance companies utilised cloud technologies to share basic liability data. Instead of expending resources to develop their own methodologies, creating barriers for themselves and their competitors, the cloud’s inherent data sharing capabilities can securely share information that eventually all the entities involved would have anyway. This type of collaboration could change the face of major industries.

Better coordination of efforts between international entities

In a world where international security entities are scrambling to ‘know’ where the next threat is coming from, information is paramount. Instead of taking years in creating complex interfaces between nation based systems, placing common information in a highly-secured, globally distributed, continuously updated, cloud-based service would be of greater benefit.

Increased speed of international transactions

The basic concept of time value of money (TVM) is just as valid today in the digital world as it was years ago. The speed at which international financial transactions are carried out, and the volume of those transactions, are critical in today’s global economy. The rise of cloud-based technologies, such as microservices architectures and automated sending of cloud-based resources, are playing a major role in the speed and volume aspects of global transactions.

Conclusion

I have not attempted to present hard economic data to show that cloud technology is having an impact globally – instead, I have hopefully stated the conversation around the global uses of cloud technologies and the impact that they can have – and are possibly already having – at a global rather than enterprise scale. Cloud technologies have the potential to change not only the way enterprises do business, but possibly whole industries – thus shifting the global economy.

«Tintri was started in 2008 with the express purpose of building a storage appliance that is ideal for virtualized environments. We support a lot of different hypervisor platforms from VMware to OpenStack to Hyper-V,» explained Dan Florea, Director of Product Management at Tintri, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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