Someone, somewhere at your organization is discussing cloud. In strategy meetings someone has said “Let’s move it to the cloud.” At the watercooler or in the breakroom you’ve probably overheard snippets of conversation about micro services, DevOps, cloud strategy, and a host of other cloud-speak. The cloud conversation is everywhere because more companies are moving to the cloud. But they are running into trouble by not defining the expected business outcomes.

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Don't Put the Cart Before the Horse

The first question you should ask at your company is “What are we trying to accomplish with the cloud?” Too many organizations start investigating cloud options before identifying desired business outcomes.

Without knowing the answer to this first question, it is difficult to define the ecosystem for your cloud. And the second question is “What is the ecosystem you need to enable in your cloud?”

The third question is, how will you get there and what is your strategy? An all too often unasked part of that question is, “do you have the skills, knowledge and resource availability to take this on?”

Advantech’s WISE-PaaS/RMM 3.1 is an open standardized IoT software platform for users by applying MQTT, a standard and popular IoT M2M protocol for device and server communication.

WISE-PaaS/RMM 3.1 comes with more than 100 RESTful APIs including, account management, device management, device control, event management, system management, and database management. RESTful APIs create new web services and help integrate functions and data with their management tools. Furthermore, WISE-PaaS/RMM 3.1 will release WISE-Agent source code as open source. WISE-Agent software works on the device side, helping customers to develop their own applications. WISE-PaaS/RMM highly enhances connectivity for hardware, software, devices and sensors, and helps customers to transform their business to include IoT cloud services.

Based on WISE-PaaS/RMM 3.0 for remote device monitoring and management, version 3.1 offers centralized management and a dashboard builder for data visualization. Customers can develop dashboards to monitor and manage all their connected devices. WISE-PaaS/RMM 3.1 is also integrated with Node-Red, which is a “drag and drop” logic editor tool for users to access data and features in WISE-PaaS/RMM 3.1 for device flow and action control management.

To provide a stable and reliable centralized management platform, WISE-PaaS/RMM 3.1 includes server redundancy whereby devices can have direct connection with the security of a back-up server if the main server loses connection. This is designed to make sure data and services auto-sync between the main server and the back-up server. WISE-PaaS/RMM 3.1 also provides a hierarchical server, which supports the main server and sub-server structure at the same time. Users can use the sub-server for local device management and use the main server to collect data from local servers in order to disperse the load on the main server.

www.advantech.com

ioSafe’s BDR 515 is a unique fire- and waterproof hybrid backup and disaster recovery (BDR) appliance designed to eliminate downtime, protect data and provide near-zero recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs), even during times of internet outage. The BDR 515 enables data to be protected onsite as well as securely replicated to the cloud.

Powered by Windows Server 2012 R2 and StorageCraft® ShadowProtect® SPX, the ioSafe BDR 515 has a flexible architecture that can be administered by partners and is available in capacities between 5 and 30TB. Other features include:

Similar to other BDR solutions, the 515 has the ability to spin-up both local or remote replicated version of a primary server in the ioSafe Cloud. The ioSafe BDR has a tremendous advantage in that during an actual disaster scenario, it allows for up to 30TB of data to be recovered onsite, immediately after the disaster, giving a business the best chance to be back at full strength quickly — regardless of bandwidth. 

https://iosafe.com/

Riverbed Technology has released enhancements to Riverbed SteelCentral that bring major advances to troubleshooting capabilities and improved monitoring across the cloud while simultaneously improving ease of use and scalability. These enhancements continue to support a common theme of improved SteelCentral platform integration while enhancing several critical capabilities, including:

Further, SteelCentral vastly improves the ability to monitor applications deployed on PaaS and containerized environments. As these environments dynamically scale during peak and off-peak periods, conventional performance monitoring tools that trace interactions between servers cannot coherently represent application behavior. This release introduces the Application Performance Graph that visually maps interactions between application modules in real-time, regardless of the underlying infrastructure. This reveals dependencies and hotspots obscured by the elasticity of the environment so that IT can observe and fix issues with the most overarching business impact.

www.riverbed.com

By now, the benefits and simplicity of cloud computing are well understood, and the promise of benefits like cost-savings, greater efficiency, and increased application agility have inspired companies of all sizes to kick start their journey to the cloud. In fact, it’s expected that the cloud infrastructure and platform market will grow by 19% annually from 2015 to 2018, reaching 43 billion dollars by 2018.

Ultimately, the question these days is not “if” businesses will move to the cloud, but rather “when.” At the same time, as cloud functionality becomes more complex and IT professionals are increasingly relied upon to manage and deploy cloud services, many organizations struggle to manage their cloud deployment of choice — public vs. private — in a manner that produces the most efficiency and ROI.

To that end, it’s helpful to understand the benefits and challenges — and accompanying management best practices — of each approach to better inform an organization’s cloud integration strategy.

The Private Cloud 

A private cloud — hosted on an organization’s proprietary architecture — provides a valuable benefit in today’s cloud landscape: the element of control, primarily, greater controlling governance over the services catalog. Businesses that stand up their own private clouds can offer a self-service portal for endusers in their organization that allows access only to IT-approved services, which in turn helps meet data compliance and security requirements.

There is also an element of cost control inherent to private cloud deployments. IT professionals familiar with the public cloud likely know that all too often an organization can be stuck contending with a cloud provider’s on-demand or spot pricing, meaning it’s difficult to accurately predict how much that service will cost per month or per quarter. Comparatively, a private cloud offers administrators the ability to control that spend by monitoring chargeback and showback records to quantify how efficient that infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is in serving the needs of its endusers.

Red Hat, Inc. has announced the general availability of Red Hat Cloud Suite and Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8, helping to bridge the gap between development and operations teams at the scale of cloud computing. With today’s newly-available products, Red Hat now offers a complete, integrated hybrid cloud stack with a container application platform (OpenShift by Red Hat), massively scalable infrastructure (Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8) and unified management tools (Red Hat CloudForms), all available individually or via a single, easy-to-deploy solution with Red Hat Cloud Suite.

A growing number of organizations are building private clouds1, to give them massively scalable and modern infrastructure, while maintaining increased security and control. According to the Red Hat Global Customer Tech Outlook 2016, a global survey of Red Hat customers, private cloud deployments are expected to outpace public cloud by 6x. In addition, development teams are looking to streamline the creation and deployment of new cloud-native applications while IT leadership is hoping to meet growing business demands with cloud-based automation.

Red Hat’s latest cloud solutions help answer these needs through the availability of:

Red Hat’s OpenStack-based private cloud solutions provide an open foundation to meet production-level needs of today’s modern businesses, combining highly-scalable infrastructure and management with developer productivity, backed by a broad ecosystem of certified hardware and software providers. Available as a single platform with Red Hat OpenStack Platform or as an integrated offering through Red Hat Cloud Suite, Red Hat’s cloud solutions help customers build scalable, fault-tolerant, IaaS environments.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8

Forming the backbone of Red Hat’s hybrid cloud offerings is Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8, the latest version of the company’s highly scalable IaaS platform based on the OpenStack community “Liberty” release. A co-engineered solution that integrates the proven foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Red Hat’s OpenStack technology to form a production-ready cloud platform, Red Hat OpenStack Platform is becoming a gold standard for large production OpenStack deployments. Hundreds of global production deployments and even more proof-of-concepts are underway, and in the information and telecommunications industry, a strong ecosystem of industry leaders are rallying around Red Hat OpenStack Platform for transformative network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) deployments.

The software-defined data center is either an overused buzzword for a sector filled with tire kickers, or the breakout trend of 2016, depending on which industry experts are quoted. Yet IT managers know there’s a profound transition taking place as control of data center gear shifts from hardware to software.

The latest data show they’re allocating budgets accordingly. According to an April 2016 survey, 66% of CIOs plan to expand their use of software-defined data center technologies this year.1 Spending for software-defined data centers is forecast to increase 14% in 2016, although present deployments represent just 21% of data centers surveyed in early 2016.2 For many enterprises, it’s not an option; Gartner estimated that by 2020 75% of organizations will need to implement a software-defined data center3 in order to support the DevOps approach and hybrid clouds they need as part of agile digital business initiatives.

First Servers, Then Networks 

Thanks to virtualization technologies debuting over a decade ago, server and networking domains are already well on their way to software-defined control. By 2013, 51% of servers were virtualized,4 and today in 2016 server virtualization rates exceed 75% in many organizations.5 Before long, software-defined network virtualization from Cisco, Juniper Networks, Barracuda, and more also took hold, such that a Gartner report cited in a May 2016 trade publication forecasts that 10% of customer appliances will be virtualized by 2017, up from 1% this year.6

For the data center, virtualization meant that gear-filled glass houses where one could practically get a tan from the heat of servers, switches, and spinning disks didn’t need so much hardware. Less hardware meant less costly square footage, electricity for operation and cooling, and capital outlays that were depreciated across five years. While staff expertise required for operating the data center didn’t go away, it shifted to more valuable activities because their prior tasks became easier as management interfaces improved.

Next Up: Storage

The next logical evolution of the software-defined approach is data storage — traditionally a big-iron, big price tag dominated sector, and one that’s poised to deliver tremendous improvements. Research & Markets estimated the software-defined storage market as totaling $1.4 billion in 2014,7 growing at about 34% annually through 2019 — thought just a fraction of the overall $36 billion storage market that year.8

Intel® has released Xeon® processor E5-2600 v4 product family delivers the foundation for modern, software-defined clouds. New Intel® SSDs, including Intel’s first 3D NAND drives optimized for cloud and enterprise workloads, deliver fast, dependable data access.

Collaborations with leading cloud software and solution providers, new industry programs help accelerate businesses’ access to enterprise-ready, easy-to-deploy cloud solutions.

Intel Corporation today announced a range of new technologies, investments and industry collaborations aimed at making it easier to deploy agile and scalable clouds so businesses can deliver new services faster and drive revenue growth.

Businesses want flexibility and choice in cloud deployment models to support innovation while maintaining control of their most strategic assets. Despite a willingness to invest in modern software-defined infrastructure (SDI)1, businesses find the prospect of doing so themselves to be complex and time-consuming.

Intel is easing the path with new processors, solid state drives and a range of industry collaborations to help businesses deliver new services at the scale and speed previously found only in the most advanced public clouds.

As everyday consumers themselves, today’s workforce has explicit expectations for mobility that mirror the demands of the customers they serve. In fact, more than 90% of IT decision makers (ITDMs) see enterprise mobility as the critical function for customer engagement, competitiveness, and operational productivity in 2016.1

Enterprise mobility plays a leading role in the digital workplace. However, the digital workplace is transforming how IT services are delivered to endusers. Employees want to access network resources from any device, at any time, and from any location. Not only is this good for employee morale, general satisfaction, and productivity, it also gives the business a competitive advantage, thereby enabling a fast response to market changes and customer needs more efficiently.

One of the IT suite’s major challenges, then, is how to ensure enterprises continue to keep up with the rapid-fire pace that the demands present. It takes more than just redefining business processes to take advantage of mobile, rolling out apps on the enterprise store, and providing employees with flexible options for choosing devices and apps. It requires ensuring that your mobile app actually delivers a quality experience while your workforce uses them. After all, what drives the business benefit of a digital workplace is not whether the workforce simply has access to apps, content, and data. What counts is usage and performance as experienced by the workforce in the field.

Therefore, with these demands ever present, the dialogue surrounding how to leverage Mobile Application Performance Management (Mobile APM) is heating up. The current technology landscape holds more questions than answers that address how enterprises can ensure that business critical “apps that matter” deliver an excellent experience to mobile workforce users. While the IT suite’s ultimate goal may be to create a solid digital workplace strategy, one has to know the critical components that make up this mobile toolkit before a strategy can be methodically put together — and be alert to the forces holding back the execution of that strategy in order to achieve it.

Mobile APM vendors have responded accordingly with products that provide mobile app developers with capabilities like crash analytics, app error reporting, service performance metrics, and data consumption tracking. As important as these Mobile APM capabilities are, they primarily solve problems for consumer-facing apps because the capabilities of these vendors lack visibility into important aspects of the enterprise enduser, which is comprised of their identity, role, and business function, the full range of apps and devices they use, and the business activities for which employees are responsible.

Cloud is the IT structure of the future due to its scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. But does the option of a public cloud, private cloud, or even a mix of these environments work for every organization? The simple answer is no. Companies in highly regulated industries such as financial services, health care, education, and government are often stymied by governance, risk, and compliance concerns related to data stored and accessed in the cloud. But all hope is not lost — there is the fourth option of the community cloud.

A community cloud is the lesser known version of cloud infrastructure, although it is relatively popular amongst particular industries. As defined by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), community cloud is an “infrastructure [that] is provisioned for exclusive use by a specific community of consumers from organizations that have shared concerns. It can be owned, managed, and operated by one or more of the organizations, in the community, a third party, or some combination of them, and it may exist on or off premises.” In essence, a community cloud is a subset of the public cloud, but tailored for a particular industry and may be offered as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Since the community cloud is personalized, it is adapted to fit the exact performance, security, and compliance requirements of the industry or community it serves.

This form of cloud has been around for several years as groups of companies or legal entities that share a similar risk profile have banded together to secure computing resources in a multi-tenant environment. Whether it is a group of hospitals or a consortium of financial services firms working together, the community can be comprised of organizations that are related to each other in some way such as the same industry, parent company, holding company or association.

Is There a Need for This Fourth Cloud Option?

Until now, the majority of cloud discussions focused on private, public, or hybrid platforms. Very little has been written on the community cloud and its role within particular industries. Even though companies must adhere to strict security and data governance policies that cannot be met in the public cloud, this should not exclude them from using cloud infrastructure. Rather, community cloud answers their needs and can be found in these industries:

As with each cloud infrastructure platform, there are benefits and drawbacks to community cloud. Some firms may worry that their competitors are using and sharing the same resources, and there may be a small likelihood of data leakage or loss of a technological competitive advantage. Additionally, internal IT departments may not want to have a community organization or third-party provider administer the cloud. The loss of control can be a roadblock. The benefits of reduced operating costs, efficient management, lessened risk, and strong security and compliance as outlined above far outweigh these risks.

As we move from the data center and transition into the cloud, what comes next? That’s the question on many CIOs’ minds as they contemplate how to increase customer experience and deliver an environment of true digital enablement where users are capable of conducting their jobs in an always-on, anywhere, anytime world. What they run into at the edge of the cloud is a hazy area — The Fog — where the Internet of Things (IoT) exists. This fog is going to become increasingly critical to both endusers and CIOs alike as smart and connected devices, meant to bring data from every point imaginable, become part of the enterprise.

We are defining the digitally enabled enterprise as an organization that embraces technology and services to improve the customer experience (CX) it delivers to both internal and external customers and, in doing so, often changes the nature of the organization itself. The alignment of and investment in technology and business models is critical to more effectively engage digital customers at every touchpoint in the CX lifecycle. It doesn’t matter the type of business, where it’s located, or in many cases, how large the organization is; the focus on customer experience is pervasive and all consuming.

Achieving an improved level of customer experience — including a superior level of customer engagement and satisfaction — requires continually testing and deploying new service models and technologies. These include four key technologies and solution areas that comprise the next generation platform of IT: cloud, analytics, mobile, and social.

When we look across a broad spectrum of industries, what we’re seeing is the myriad of ways that CXOs of every stripe are fully embracing the digital world and digital technologies to build the digitally enabled enterprise. And IoT is shaping up to become a part of that ecosystem and customer experience.

Let’s take a step back and look at what the IoT is shaping up to be. Some of the hype surrounding the IoT makes the hype around the cloud look small in comparison. It is often talked about as the next step on an internet evolutionary ladder. IoT is comprised of those devices in the world that we use and take for granted every day — from building systems to cars and trucks to vending machines — all using sensors and internet connectivity to capture and exchange information.

Cloud vendors are quick to tout the benefits offered by on demand IT compared to traditional on premise IT service models. Their marketing materials offer many examples of the benefits realized from moving to the cloud for increased service agility, efficiency, and cost savings. The lure of cost savings generated by moving from a capital expenditure to operating expense based, on-demand service is often cited by IT leaders as a key factor in their decision to move to cloud service support.

Indeed many federal agencies have committed significant dollars to the promise of cloud efficiencies and IT cost savings. As of 2014, it is estimated that cloud investments represent 5% of total IT spending, the equivalent of approximately $3B annually (IDC Press Release from 9/16/14).

In the rush to gain on demand IT efficiencies and savings and meet federal mandates such as the Cloud First Initiative, many have forgone careful planning to ensure their goals are met and promises from cloud vendors are delivered. Unfortunately, failure of cloud projects is not uncommon and often federal timelines for realizing benefits from cloud services are overly optimistic. To date, OMB auditors have issued over 747 recommendations as of January 2015 to address the trend of failing IT acquisitions. OMB has confirmed only ~23% have been fully addressed to date (Next Gov, 2/11/15).

In addition to addressing audit recommendations, agencies also need objective insight to better evaluate proposals and contract terms from cloud vendors. Without independent outside analysis, it is unlikely agencies will be able to establish a criteria for identification of best value or effective control and oversight mechanisms. The future of cloud acquisition will remain bleak unless organizations begin to address the root issues of evaluating cloud services and match rigorous independent analytical review with cloud acquisition planning practices.

The heart of the issue lies in the source of most cloud savings and benefit data: the cloud service provider (CSP). Since cloud services are still relatively new to the federal government, there are few independent benchmarks to establish how quickly or effectively cloud services benefits should be realized in a mission environment. As a result, agencies are dependent on cost and performance projections from competing CSPs to set targets for their service performance. This dependency gives the advantage to the CSP in evaluation of proposals and negotiation of cloud contract terms and conditions. Further, it incentivizes CSPs to bundle their prices in such a way that make it difficult for the government to compare costs or determine relative value of CSP proposals. The inevitable outcome of this dependency is that government leadership is at a disadvantage in evaluating the performance of cloud services in their mission environment.