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If you use the cloud, it’s probably for a few main reasons: you can store large amounts of data, you can share your data easily, and you’re very unlikely to lose your data. But cloud data loss does happen, and even if the chances are low, it still might happen to you. Make sure you’ve protected your data from every angle to make sure you never lose it, no matter what happens.

Server failure

When you or your business stores something on the cloud, to you it seems like it’s backed up in a bunch of places because you can use it so easily from multiple devices. That data is actually stored on a server and available to you via the internet. The cloud companies who own these servers do their utmost to protect your data, but sometimes servers fail, which wipes information. There’s not a lot anyone can do about it. To protect yourself against server failure, back up your data in two places, be it two clouds or a cloud and an external storage device.

Inclement weather

Google lost data from a data centre in Belgium because of an unlucky number of lightning strikes. No matter what these companies do to protect your data, they can’t control the weather. The probability of a weather incident interfering with your cloud storage is low, but it’s not impossible. Think about if a bigger natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina struck a city with lots of servers. Not only would cloud services stop working, the data would probably disappear due to extreme server damage.

Cyber attacks

Your small business or personal computer probably won’t end up the direct victim of a cyber-attack, but the companies storing your data are much bigger and more likely targets. Security breaches, unfortunately, happen relatively frequently. Sometimes, your data gets copied and stolen. Other times, it gets deleted. To protect yourself, look into your most effective cloud security options. You may want to encrypt your data, password protect everything, or use two-factor authentication.

Malware and password theft

A cyber-attack on Amazon isn’t aimed at you directly. Malware, though? That targets your machine specifically, installing nasty files that like to steal your data, like your passwords. If you lose even one password, you can end up losing everything you have stored, depending on how you use your cloud. Change your passwords often, get good virus protection on your computer, and back up your data in multiple places. Try not to use the same password for everything, either. If you’re worried about malware at work, set up strict security protocols for how your employees can reach certain cloud data.

Cloud data loss comes from both physical and cyber threats, which is why your security needs to exist in both realms as well. Secure your cloud data online to make it less hackable, and remember to back it up to an external device so you have copies of your data not connected to the internet at all.

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For years the benefits of the cloud have been the subject of much debate within the IT industry. In the past, sceptics claimed that the cloud wasn’t reliable or secure — although Gartner sought to dispel that myth. Now, the sceptics are harder to find and Gartner doesn’t have to dispel as many cloud myths. Our latest Businesses @ Work report shows that companies are not only enabling their employees to use their own apps and mobile devices at work, but are also utilising a range of cloud apps in order to boost connectivity with customers, contractors and partners via cloud-based portals. And 76% of IT decision-makers say digital initiatives will be very important or critical to their businesses in 2016.

And with Microsoft, Adobe, SAP and Oracle now adopting a cloud first approach, whether through internal development or via acquisition, it’s safe to say that the digital revolution is here. Look no further than Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s now famous first letter to employees, pledging that Microsoft would thrive in a cloud-first world. His big bet on cloud is paying off, as Microsoft Office 365 extended its lead as most popular cloud app this year, growing its customer base 116 per cent within Okta’s network.

SAP has also invested heavily in innovating the business, allocating $50 billion to driving digital transformation. The company is committing to a cloud-first strategy by allowing its customers to trade in on-premises software licenses in favour of new ones in the cloud, a move that 74 per cent of customers are saying has encouraged them to adopt cloud services. Our report confirms this, revealing that cloud application adoption for SAP grew 133 per cent in our network in 2015. This has enabled SAP to position itself as an industry leader and an agile partner to its customers.

The driving force behind cloud transformation

Why are the software giants investing in the cloud? Put simply, it’s because cloud is driving businesses forward and Microsoft, SAP and others want to drive their customers’ businesses forward.

Studies clearly indicate that cloud technologies allow companies to be more agile, improve cost efficiency, increase security and promote collaboration internally and externally with customers. The Exact 2015 SME Cloud Barometer report, an independent study of SME leaders across Europe and the US, found that companies embracing digital transformation are likely to grow faster and enjoy twice the profit of their non-cloud using rivals. Consequently, 47 per cent of SMEs now use at least one cloud business software tool.

Setting cloud security concerns straight

Another driving factor is security. In the past, the idea that cloud was less secure than on-prem was one of the main barriers to cloud adoption. Today, it’s clear that’s not the case. Reports from Ovum suggest that even large enterprises cannot replicate the security provided by the cloud using on-prem software. Attitudes in the industry are changing as well, as shown by a recent Cloud Security Alliance survey, whichrevealed that 65 per cent of IT leaders think the cloud is as or more secure than on-premises software.

Digital transformation starts with identity

IT leaders certainly aren’t afraid of cloud anymore. Our Businesses @ Work report shows 83 per cent of companies in our network are leveraging at least one off-the-shelf cloud app like Salesforce, Office 365 and Box. And 80 per cent of enterprises are building custom applications on their platforms. We’re now witnessing an unparalleled increase in cloud application usage globally. There are no signs of slowing as businesses continue to make efforts to enable their partners, customers and contractors to connect through cloud-based applications, websites or portals.

Now that organisations are beginning to embrace the cloud, what’s the next big hurdle? Figuring out how to manage identities. When every device and app that connects to the cloud has an individual account attached to it, the need for companies to ensure they can control the flow of data is amplified. Effective identity management can improve customer experience, maintain competiveness, generate new revenue and strengthen security. As the cloud drives traditional software companies to change their business models and put the needs of customers at the forefront, the next big priority for enterprises in the cloud is to make sure enterprises can easily and securely authenticate and manage users. 

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Samsung has agreed to acquire California-based cloud provider Joyent, adding another cloud platform to the Korean giant’s ever-increasing portfolio of mobile, cloud and IoT services.

The move came after Samsung assessed a “wide range of potential companies in the public and private cloud infrastructure space”, and saw Joyent as the standout with an “experienced management team with deep domain expertise and a robust cloud technology,” according to Samsung mobile communications CTO Injong Rhee.

From Joyent’s perspective, CEO Scott Hammond and CTO Bryan Cantrill both chipped in with their reasons for the deal. “Until today, we lacked one thing,” Hammond wrote in a blog post. “We lacked the scale required to compete effectively in the large, rapidly growing and fiercely competitive cloud computing market. Now that changes.” Naturally, Cantrill looked at the news from more of a technologist’s perspective. “As our engineering teams got to know one another, we found that beneath the exciting vision was a foundation of shared values: we both cared deeply about not only innovation but also robustness – and that we both valued complete understanding when systems misbehaved,” Cantrill wrote.

“The more we got to know one another, the clearer it became that together we could summon a level of scale, agility and innovation that would be greater than the sum of our parts – that together, our technology could create a new titan of container-native computing,” he added.

Like a lot of these deals, the original intent was not acquisition; Samsung had previously examined Manta, Joyent’s object storage system, for implementation but, as Cantrill noted, Joyent had never seen a request at such scale. When Joyent went back to Samsung and explained they did not have sufficient hardware to perform the requested test, Samsung provided it – and the rest, it appears, was history.

“We work closely with startups to bring new software and services into Samsung, and one of the ways we do this is by driving strategic acquisitions,” said David Eun, Samsung global innovation centre president. “Joyent is a great example of a leading and disruptive technology company that will make unique contributions to Samsung while benefitting from Samsung’s global scale and reach.”

Joyent will continue as a standalone brand after the acquisition, while financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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DevOps engineers are notoriously difficult to find. If you needed further proof of this fact, a new study by Indeed.com has revealed that DevOps engineer is the #1 hardest IT job to fill in North America, leading a list that includes software and mobile engineers.

An organisation’s inability to hire – and retain – systems engineers, build automation engineers, and other titles usually grouped under “DevOps” is a major roadblock to digital transformation efforts; in fact, the majority of organisations say the biggest roadblock to cloud migration is finding the right IT talent, not security, cost, or legacy systems.

There is certainly no easy answer — but here are several ways that organisations are attempting to reduce its impact.

The power of automation

Most companies hire DevOps engineers to automate deployment for frequent or continuous deployment. In reality, this means that much of a DevOps engineer’s time is spent deploying and configuring daily builds, troubleshooting failed builds, and communicating with developers and project managers — all while the long-term work of automating deployment and configuration tasks falls by the wayside.

It is possible that the term “DevOps engineer” itself contributes to this confusion and poor prioritisation; many say there is (or should be) no such thing as a DevOps engineer and they should more properly be called by their exact function in your team, like storage engineer, deployment automation engineer, and so on.

The value of deployment automation and the progress towards some variety of “push button” deployment to test environments is obvious; a survey by Puppet found that high performing IT teams deploy thirty times more frequently than low performing teams. Infrastructure automation is often lower on the priority list but of equal importance, and involves the ability of virtual machines to scale, self-heal, and configure themselves. Anecdotally, our experience is that most organisations do the bare minimum (auto scaling), while the vast majority of infrastructure maintenance tasks are still highly manual.

The fact that your DevOps engineers — or if you prefer different titles: build automation engineers, Linux administrators, Puppet engineers, etc. — do not have time to automate tasks (that could save them more time in the future) is clearly a problem. Your sluggish progress on deployment automation drains resources every day. But your lack of infrastructure automation can quickly become a punishing business problem when you find that auto scaling fails, or you forgot to update a package, or your SSL cert is not automatically renewed, or your environment is not automated to deal with your cloud provider’s infrequent outages. Slow deployment pipelines are bad, but broken infrastructure is worse.

Such events cause what we will call “reactive automation”, a sudden burst of interest in infrastructure automation that quickly fades when everything goes back to normal. Unfortunately, the templates and configuration management scripts that automate infrastructure buildout and maintenance themselves must be maintained, and if no one is paying attention, another infrastructure failure is bound to happen.

The result is a team of stressed, overworked engineers that wish they could focus on the “cool stuff”, but are instead stuck in firefighting mode: exactly the opposite of what you want to happen.

“Hire more DevOps engineers”

When faced with overworked engineers, the natural answer is: let’s hire more. But of course you are already doing that. Most companies have a standing open position for DevOps engineer. Is there another answer?

The second answer is training some of your existing systems engineers in new tools and new cultural frameworks. This certainly needs to happen, but will take some time. The other answer is outsourcing. Outsourcing can mean any number of things, but there are two flavours that best complement DevOps teams. The first is outsourcing infrastructure automation. The second is outsourcing day-to-day, boring, repetitive infrastructure maintenance tasks and around-the-clock monitoring.

Infrastructure automation is in many ways the ideal set of tasks to outsource; the line in the sand between your team’s responsibilities (the application) and the outsourced team (the infrastructure) is relatively clear for most applications, and there is often little time, initiative, or advanced experience to automate infrastructure in-house. Your in-house engineers keep doing what they are doing — managing daily builds, interfacing with developers — and the outsourced team co-manages the templates and scripts that control scalability, security, and failover. This team should also integrate this automation with your existing deployment pipeline.

This works out even better if the same team manages day-to-day patching, monitoring, alerting, log management, change management, etc., much like a traditional professional services or managed services team. These are items that distract your valuable DevOps engineers from more important tasks, and also wake them up at 3am when something goes wrong. When you outsource, you are still fulfilling “you build it, you own it” principle, but at least you have a team telling you when things break and helping you fix it faster.

Managed service providers (MSPs) are not what they used to be — in a good way. Among its many positive effects, the cloud has forced MSPs to evolve and provide more value. Now you can use it to your advantage.

The enterprise DevOps team

As DevOps makes its way to the enterprise, the nature and definition of “DevOps team” will change. Enterprises will continue to struggle to attract talent away from big tech. You will likely see more differentiation in what DevOps means, as traditional network engineers become cloud network experts and Puppet engineers become cloud configuration management masters, leading to a complex medley of “traditional” and “cloud” skills.

Adopting DevOps involves adopting a certain amount of risk, and enterprises want to control that risk. They will rely more heavily on outsourced talent to supplement growing internal teams. This will help them achieve higher deployment velocity and automation more quickly, and put guardrails in place to prevent new DevOps teams from costly mistakes.

DevOps engineers will always be hard to find. Great tech talent and great talent generally is hard to find. The key is knowing how to protect your business against the drought.

The post DevOps Engineer: #1 Hardest Job to Fill appeared first on Logicworks Gathering Clouds.