Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has expanded its global cloud portfolio with the launch of SovereignSecure Cloud in Europe, designed specifically for governments, public sector enterprises, and regulated industries.

EU organizations face a broad range of regulations, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), the NIS2 Directive, and the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA).

And promising sovereignty across data, operations, and digital infrastructure in the EU, TCS said its new offerings will enable enterprises to strengthen regulatory compliance, achieve digital autonomy, and enhance security, without compromising on speed, agility, and interoperability.

SovereignSecure Cloud for the EU, said TCS, is based on a multi-layered approach. It comprises a sovereign cloud layer delivered through hyperscalers, providing scale and the flexibility to operate securely within the EU regulatory framework.

The national sovereign cloud layer enables country-specific localization while bringing operations under a unified control plane. And its enterprise cloud services layer, meanwhile, leverages the EU-specific TCS Enterprise Cloud Framework, a unified orchestration and control layer designed to enable enterprises to dynamically apply the appropriate level of sovereignty across data, operations, and technology based on workload, risk, and sector.

"European organizations are looking to strike a balance between addressing supply chain and sovereignty risks while ensuring leverage of frontier technologies to be globally competitive," said Sapthagiri Chapalapalli, head of Europe at TCS.

"TCS SovereignSecure Cloud solutions mark an important milestone for TCS in Europe, as our customers can now benefit from a pragmatic approach to cloud that ensures resilience and sovereignty that is contextualized to the enterprise."

Alongside the launch, TCS is also introducing the TCS Sovereignty Consulting and Delivery Framework in the EU, with the aim of helping organizations become a 'minimum viable sovereign enterprise', with the right balance between control and flexibility.

Using a risk-based approach, said TCS, it categorizes workloads by importance and applies the right level of sovereignty to each, focusing effort on the areas with the greatest impact to mitigate risk.

The launch of TCS SovereignSecure Cloud in the EU follows its rollout in India last year, followed by expansions into Kenya, East Africa, and the Philippines.

And, said TCS, it builds on the firm's strength in the European region, where it has been operating for more than 45 years, with an existing workforce working from 58 offices across the region, with 10 data centres and 21 delivery locations across Europe.

"Harnessing sovereign AI unlocks sovereign cloud adoption advantages. Sovereign AI, which is built and operated within national boundaries, enables enhanced operational efficiency and supports local regulations compliance," said Pradeep Devalla, head of sales and solutions, cloud unit – growth markets.

"Sovereign AI and sovereign cloud collaboration facilitate the creation of advanced, culturally attuned digital services that protect sensitive information and reinforce digital sovereignty."

Las complejidades que conlleva la gestión de entornos híbridos, nube privada o multicloud pueden abrumar a la mayoría de los equipos de TI. Estos equipos necesitan un marco sólido de gestión que garantice la coherencia, la optimización del rendimiento y la seguridad en todos los entornos.

VMware Cloud Foundation y VMware vSphere Foundation son productos diseñados para satisfacer diferentes niveles de necesidades de infraestructura. Este documento proporciona una comparación detallada que le ayudará a elegir la oferta de VMware adecuada.

Esto es lo que aprenderá sobre las plataformas:

• Cómo están diseñadas las plataformas para satisfacer diferentes niveles de necesidades de infraestructura.
• Cómo pretende Broadcom reducir el coste total de propiedad
• Un resumen de cómo actualizar los productos VMware más antiguos a las ofertas más recientes.

Por Broadcom y TD SYNNEX

Le complessità derivanti dalla gestione di ambienti ibridi, private-cloud o multi-cloud sono una sfida per la maggior parte dei team IT. Questi team hanno bisogno di un solido framework di gestione che garantisca coerenza, ottimizzazione delle prestazioni e sicurezza in tutti gli ambienti.

VMware Cloud Foundation e VMware vSphere Foundation sono prodotti progettati per soddisfare diversi livelli di esigenze infrastrutturali. Questo documento fornisce un confronto dettagliato che vi aiuterà a scegliere l'offerta VMware più adatta.

Ecco cosa scoprirete sulle soluzioni:

• Come le piattaforme sono progettate per soddisfare diversi livelli di esigenze infrastrutturali.
• In che modo Broadcom mira a ridurre il costo totale di proprietà
• Come aggiornare i vecchi prodotti VMware alle nuove offerte.

Prodotto da Broadcom e TD SYNNEX

Die Komplexität, die mit der Verwaltung von Hybrid-, Private-Cloud- oder Multi-Cloud-Umgebungen einhergeht, kann die meisten IT-Teams überfordern. Diese Teams benötigen ein robustes Management-Framework, das Konsistenz, Performance-Optimierung und Sicherheit in allen Umgebungen gewährleistet.

VMware Cloud Foundation und VMware vSphere Foundation sind Produkte, die für unterschiedliche Anforderungen an die Infrastruktur konzipiert sind. Dieses Dokument bietet einen detaillierten Vergleich, der Ihnen bei der Auswahl des geeigneten VMware-Angebots helfen wird.

Im Folgenden erfahren Sie mehr über die Plattformen:

• Wie die Plattformen für unterschiedliche Infrastrukturanforderungen konzipiert sind
• Wie Broadcom die Gesamtbetriebskosten senken will
• Einen Überblick darüber, wie ältere VMware-Produkte auf die neueren Angebote aufgerüstet werden können

Unterstützt von Broadcom und TD SYNNEX

Les complexités liées à la gestion d'environnements hybrides, cloud privé ou multi-cloud peuvent submerger la plupart des équipes informatiques. Ces équipes ont besoin d'un cadre de gestion solide qui garantisse la cohérence, l'optimisation des performances et la sécurité dans tous les environnements.

VMware Cloud Foundation et VMware vSphere Foundation sont des produits conçus pour répondre à différents niveaux de besoins en matière d'infrastructure. Ce document fournit une comparaison détaillée qui vous aidera à choisir l'offre VMware appropriée.

Voici ce que vous apprendrez sur les plates-formes :

• Comment les plates-formes sont conçues pour répondre à différents niveaux de besoins en matière d'infrastructure
• Comment Broadcom vise à réduire le coût total de possession
• Les grandes lignes de la mise à niveau des anciens produits VMware vers les nouvelles offres.

Réalisé par Broadcom et TD SYNNEX

The complexities that come from managing hybrid, private-cloud or multi-cloud environments can overwhelm most IT teams. These teams need a robust management framework that ensures consistency, performance optimization, and security across all environments.

VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware vSphere Foundation are products that are designed to meet different levels of infrastructure needs. This document provides a detailed comparison that will help you choose the appropriate VMware offering.

Here’s what you’ll learn about the platforms:

• How the platforms are designed to meet different levels of infrastructure needs
• How Broadcom aims to reduce the total cost of ownership
• An outline of how to upgrade older VMware products to the newer offerings

Powered by Broadcom and TD SYNNEX

A growing number of Oracle Java users are considering switching to another provider, new research shows, as cost concerns are driving developers towards open source options.

A new survey of over 2,000 Java professionals commissioned by Azul found 88% of respondents were considering switching to another Java Virtual Machine (JVM) or Java Development Kit (JDK).

This marks an increase on the 72% of Oracle Java users who said they were thinking about transitioning away from the platform in 2023, with 42% citing cost as their primary concern.

Since Oracle shifted to an employee-based pricing model in January 2023, 82% of business users have expressed some level of concern over its approach, the report found.

Just over two fifths of these users stated they were either ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ concerned, with this figure rising to 55% when restricted to Java 17 users.

Oracle ended free commercial support for Java 17 in October 2024, leaving users having to opt between paying Oracle to continue to use the platform and receive support, upgrade to Java 21, replace Java with another language, or opt to migrate to an alternative JDK.

The second most common reason professionals gave for considering the switch was a preference for open source options, cited by 40% of respondents.

Moreover, 46% of the companies considering the switch identified free OpenJDK releases paired with paid support services as the preferred alternative to Oracle.

Oracle Java customers also noted the firm’s sales tactics (37%), restrictive policies (33%), and audit risk (32%), as additional worries that were driving their potential migration away from the platform.

Java remains a top enterprise choice for cloud and AI

Despite cost concerns, Java remains an integral programming language for a vast number of organizations due to its cross platform and backward compatibility, stability, and efficacy in enterprise-level applications.

Azul noted that only 1% of potential survey participants around the world were disqualified due to the fact they didn’t use Java, “a testament to the language’s ubiquity in modern development environments.”

For example, almost 70% of respondents said that at least half of their enterprise applications were either built with Java or run on a JVM.

In the AI arena, 50% of respondents who build AI workloads use Java over other popular languages like Python, despite the latter’s reputation as a preferred language for developing AI applications.

Azul said the growing adoption of cloud services is only further fueling uptake of the language, with just under two-thirds of organizations using Java in the cloud stating 50% of their compute costs originate from Java systems.

The report also found underutilization of cloud compute capacity remains a problem for enterprises. Nearly three-quarters (71%) of respondents said more than 20% of their cloud compute capacity is unused.

This presents a serious problem as cloud expenses continue to rise, with 38% of survey participants stating their organization has established new internal rules for cloud asset management to reduce this inefficiency.

Additionally, when asked why they use a high-performance JDK, 61% of respondents said they used it in order to optimize their cloud compute costs.

The Make-A-Wish Foundation is one of the most recognizable charities globally, bringing joy to thousands of children and providing vital support for families during extremely challenging times. To date, it’s provided ‘wishes’ to more than 520,000 children with life-limiting and life-threatening conditions. They come in the form of a memorable experience for the individual, and their families.

But serving thousands of families and delivering these experiences is an intensive process that demands an extensive web of digital platforms and services to underpin operations.

When Oli Wilson joined up as technology lead in 2021, the organization embarked on a comprehensive overhaul of its legacy IT systems. The charity wanted to modernize operations and ensure it could continue serving families and delivering vital services. 

As with any large charity or organization undergoing digital transformation, encountering significant challenges is common. Alongside technical and cultural hurdles, Make-A-Wish was also forced to contend with budgetary constraints, and the need to strive for delivering value for money. These are pressures charities feel more acutely than their commercial counterparts, and may limit spending power.

Modernizing legacy infrastructure

Wilson tells ITPro, upon joining Make-A-Wish, the immediate goal was to modernize its legacy IT systems with lasting, impactful changes. That’s not to say the incumbent infrastructure wasn’t severely inhibiting the organization, but Make-A-Wish was conscious that carrying on would incur heavy costs in future. 

“The brief initially was to centralize a lot of the IT operations,” he says. “We managed to set up an internal service desk in under a month. Rather than have all of the tickets go to an external party, all of them would be triaged by me.

“We then built the team by bringing on our first member, and then at the same time placing a lot of emphasis on cloud computing to try and move away from the legacy on-premise hypervisors we had.”

While these hypervisors were performing, they were racking up operating costs, Wilson says. This would come alongside the capital eventually needed to replace the hardware, which “is not cheap”. The team “scaled down back to the bare minimum” with its on-site hardware, then began rapidly moving toward cloud adoption, selecting Azure in particular. 

Wilson believes the shift to another provider would’ve been “more complex”, costly, and presented major hurdles. Given the speed at which the organization wanted to modernize – and within the budget constraints it was adhering to – Azure represented the logical option.

The reason? Familiarity. Having been familiar with Azure in previous roles, and with the team already using Microsoft products, he was confident a “lift and shift” process could be achieved relatively rapidly. 

“I'm very familiar with the platform, and we’re a Windows house as it is," he says. You do have your contenders like your Rackspaces and your AWS and so on. But, for us, in terms of a lift and shift, that was the most reasonable option both looking at it from a project and operations perspective and establishing how we do this with minimal impact to the wider organization.

“We wanted the simplest transformation, but also the most impactful.”

Unlocking flexibility with Azure Virtual Desktops

The team deployed an Azure virtual desktop as part of the project, which Wilson says unlocked immediate benefits in terms of workplace flexibility and security. 

This transformation took place during the pandemic, so the flexibility afforded to staff to work 100% remotely was very much welcomed. This then allowed the team to dial in on its primary focus of providing services to families and children.

“Most of the organization uses that tool [Azure virtual desktop] now,” he says. “When they want to take advantage of bringing their own device we can log them into a virtual desktop, which completely segments all of our data, keeps it off their device, but also gives them a very intuitive workspace.”

“Everyone kind of knows the Windows environment,” Wilson adds, which made the shift a rather streamlined experience for staff and removed a potential hard learning curve. The shift to Microsoft 365, too, has unlocked benefits for broader team productivity, collaboration, and communication, he says. 

Wilson had initially feared the cultural changes tied with such an overhaul would be a barrier. But the staff began utilizing a variety of collaboration and conferencing tools, such as Microsoft Teams, and were keen to “jump on board” with 365, Wilson says; even the more reluctant staff adapted in no time. 

“To see people who, when I started were technologically scared, to now be almost super users of the Teams environment and pushing it with colleagues is really rewarding."

Acute cost considerations

Although cost is a key consideration during any digital transformation, the problem becomes more acute for a charity working on a limited budget, Wilson says. Although senior staff were keen to support the project – which gave Wilson’s team the confidence to press ahead – this isn’t to say they were given a blank cheque. Wilson, who hails from a commercial background, admits this was a novel experience.

“Coming from a commercial background, the money I’m asking for was always going to be distilled back down to profit if I don’t use it, so there’s not a material impact on my department,” he explains. “Whereas, in the charity sector, that’s not what we’re looking at. 

“We’re looking at how I maximize every penny in the charity to go further. If I’m spending money on Azure, or hardware, then actually that’s money that we could otherwise put toward wishes. So every purchasing decision I make needs to have that gauge between the good, the band, and the immediate benefits.”

These cost considerations were also, in part, why the foundation decided to pursue Azure as a cloud provider and use Microsoft 365 products.

The charity capitalized on services specifically geared to their organization through Microsoft 365 Nonprofit packages. This offered savings that might not have been delivered if the team had shifted to another provider.

This lift and shift to Azure and adoption of 365 delivered marked financial benefits, he claims. “We’re talking tens of [percent points] in savings that we’ve been able to achieve in the technology operations environment. This frees us up to invest in other areas. 

“If we’re at 100% efficiency internally – in a perfect world – that’s a return that allows us to continue delivering wishes and creating memories that we pride ourselves on.”

Liverpool Football Club (Liverpool FC) is one of the world’s most renowned soccer institutions, with a massive global fan base and a rich history of success. As a prominent brand in the sports industry, the club has recognized the importance of digital transformation and embarked on a journey to improve its operations and fan experiences.

One of the key challenges Liverpool FC faced was managing its large digital media workflows and handling vast volumes of content. The club generates and distributes a substantial amount of digital content across various platforms. This includes live match broadcasts, highlights, interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, and promotional materials. The sheer magnitude of Liverpool FC’s digital media workflows posed significant challenges in terms of content creation, distribution, storage, and accessibility.

Understanding the need for change

Traditional on-premise infrastructure Liverpool FC has traditionally relied on proved to be inadequate for efficiently managing the club’s digital media workflows, says Drew Crisp, its senior vice president of digital.

“Initially, we would have done this anyway because all of our media archives are on-premise and were on traditional 24 spinning disks, and actually accessible [only] when you're in the office,” he tells ITPro. It was always the plan to get data into the cloud, Crisp adds, as it would be “faster, quicker, easier to access”. 

Liverpool FC faced numerous challenges with its infrastructure, including slow data access, limited remote access capabilities, performance bottlenecks, and the physical limitations of storing and processing large volumes of content. He adds COVID-19 accelerated plans. “It brought forward a bunch of stuff because hybrid working doesn't lend itself particularly well to accessing archive when it's on a bunch of hardware that's in the office.”

Recognizing the importance of data as a critical asset, Liverpool FC crafted a robust data management strategy to support its operations. Crisp stresses how important this was, adding: "We needed a capability that is remotely accessible, really quick and really easy to use, but also which could enable us to do future things – not just with archived content, but post-production content we could share with partners."

This would also improve the decision-making processes. By harnessing the power of data analytics, Liverpool FC could gain valuable insights into fan behavior, preferences, and engagement patterns. These insights would guide its marketing efforts, fan engagement initiatives, and overall business strategies. A data-driven approach would help Liverpool FC understand its fans better, tailor its content offerings and deliver personalized experiences to its global fan base.

Scoping out a cloud partner

To overcome these challenges and unlock new opportunities for growth, efficiency, and fan engagement, Liverpool FC embraced the cloud by partnering with Wasabi as its storage provider. The club revolutionized its digital workflows through this agreement and maximized the potential of its vast media library.

“I mean, the biggest advantage, as we see with wasabi cloud is we don't have to pay for egress. From a commercial model perspective, as well as speed and efficiency, actually, it does an awful lot for us. Because you don't pay commercially, you can ingest really quickly and then you can get into operation,” says Crisp.

Neither the club nor Wasabi encountered major challenges, and the migration's success means the club is exploring how else it can use the cloud in the future. Ultimately, Liverpool FC’s decision to move to the cloud has provided a solid foundation for future improvements to its end-to-end content workflow.

Wasabi’s cloud storage has allowed Liverpool FC to store and access its media content with ease and speed, eliminating the performance issues and physical limitations of its previous on-premise infrastructure. It's also provided Liverpool FC with scalability and flexibility, allowing it to adjust its storage capacity according to changing needs and demands.

This has translated into measured improvements. Liverpool FC can now share and access data across various teams and departments within the club, which facilitates better collaboration and communication. It’s also streamlined workflows, reducing the time and resources required for content creation, distribution and management.

Crisp says the organization’s editors are “probably three times more efficient in its eight-hour day than they would have been previously waiting for all sorts of things to upload, download and edit on the fly”.

“From an efficiency and time point of view, that means that they can get through more content and create more content significantly faster,” he continues. “I'd say probably, we probably do 20-30% more content now than we did previously.”

Cloud has come a long way since the early days when valid concerns over data security deterred many businesses from tapping into its potential. Organizations working in sensitive areas, such as the defense sector, have been particularly reluctant to embrace the cloud.

In recent years, however, the need for more efficient collaboration with both partners and customers, as well as a desire to improve productivity and innovation, and the potential for cost savings, has made the cloud more attractive to even the most cautious.

The increasing prevalence of cloud technology has made it more attractive for companies like Leonardo UK. The company recently became the first major UK defense corporation to transition to secure cloud infrastructure – in partnership with Microsoft Azure – as part of its £100 million digital transformation strategy.  

Big data at your fingertips

Leonardo deployed an Azure platform across its UK business, giving scientists and engineers the capacity to securely access data and applications from anywhere by tapping into a remotely accessible ‘digital backbone’. This backbone provides the support structure for the company’s systems, apps, networks, and employees and, over time, will speed up product research and slash development costs.

It’s part of the £100 million strategy that involves rolling out digital factories across the UK, all tapping into the cloud-enabled common data environment. Big data is within reach of engineers, while customers and partners can securiely access the information and apps they need at any one time. 

The 13-month project started in January 2022 with the task of creating a data platform for Leonardo’s electronics division. “Rather than a ‘build it and they will come’, this was very much a minimum viable prodcut (MVP) approach, get the capability into the hands of the users as quickly as possible,” says Gareth Hetheridge, director for digital and IT at Leonardo. “That landed very, very well.”

Hetheridge’s team established a functional MVP within four months. The project’s success led to three more iterations throughout the year and, in the second half of 2022, they built a secure cloud platform in parallel. They migrated the data platform, originally built on-premise, to Microsoft Azure in March 2023, after it received accreditation from the MoD. 

A security-first cloud migration

Although implementing the platform was a quick process, security was a major concern throughout, as it would be for any defense company. Leonardo had to make sure its data would be secure in the cloud, and it meeted the relevant regulations, for instance. The company worked closely with the provider to guarantee the security of the data, while also investing in its own security measures to keep potential threats at bay. 

Leonardo was also concerned with data sovereignty, says Hetheridge. The firm had to ensure data would remain within the UK, so only sought a provider with domestic data centres. This came alongside deploying additional security layers, like encryption and data segregation, and applying the MoD Secure by Design principles and the NCSC cloud security principles. 

Hetheridge says there are always challenges in moving to the cloud, but he’s pleased with the progress the company made, especially in learning how to work with different partners – one of the more interesting challenges, as far as he’s concerned. “How do we drive and get the best from collaborating across multiple technology partners to drive this forward? This is a new domain for Leonardo."

Reaping the benefits of a secure cloud platform

Leonardo is still in the early stages of its cloud migration project, but it’s already migrated  some production workloads, and plans to move more this year.

Already, though, implementing a cloud-based platform has led to cost savings, Hetheridge tells ITPro, as the platform provides access to cloud-based services that are more efficient than previous on-premises systems. This has led to quicker task-completion.

The platform has also improved collaboration among staff, who can collaborate much easier between departments and across locations. The digital backbone, meanwhile, has given the company the capacity to automate tasks, with staff freed up to innovate and solve problems.

Adopting the digital backbone also feeds into fulfilling the MoD’s Digital Strategy for Defence, which aims to unleash the make the most of defence data. Leonardo uses the cloud to access data analytics capabilities difficult to develop on-premises, while Azure's cloud-native tooling gives Leonardo that valuable high-security posture. It’s also provided a more secure environment for data storage and management. With strict access controls and encryption, the platform ensures data is secure and protected from potential cyber threats. 

Finally, the platform offers scalability, allowing Leonardo to expand or contract as needed without having to invest in additional hardware or infrastructure. It’s resulted in greater flexibility, enabling Leonardo to respond quickly to changing market conditions.

Leonardo has also tapped into its cloud platform to suport collaborative modern defence projects, such as the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP). This requires partners to work closely together in an agile fashion, which is supported by secure cloud technology.

The challenge now is how to operate across multiple classifications, specifically developing software at a lower classification and then pushing it to a higher level on deployment. This feature will be important, as it’ll allow the firm to develop new ideas quickly, without worrying any more than necessary about security.

Global businesses running cloud, data center, and infrastructure operations have been urged to spend time reshaping their capabilities amid challenging economic conditions.

Pressure on infrastructure and operations (I&O) teams is expected to grow over the next year as organizations contend with rising costs, acute macroeconomic strain, and a rapidly evolving business landscape, according to experts at Gartner. 

Paul Delory, VP analyst at Gartner, said that 2023 will be a year for organizations to “refocus, retool, and rethink” their infrastructure capabilities and technology stack as many seek to optimize operations and work around tightening budgets. 

“In the current economic climate, the biggest problem companies face in 2023 may not be IT infrastructure,” he said. “I&O teams, however, will be impacted by economic and geopolitical forces and will have a vital role to play in ameliorating their effects.”

“This won’t be a year to realize grand ambitions, but it marks a moment to refocus, retool and rethink your infrastructure. In every crisis lies opportunity, and in this case, the chance to make positive changes that may be long overdue.”

Gartner’s claims were revealed at its IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference, hosted in Sydney. 

Analysts highlighted four key areas in which business operations are being transformed amid a period of economic uncertainty and re-evaluation for firms. 

1. Optimizing and ‘refactoring’ cloud infrastructure

Despite a rapid uptake of public cloud in recent years, Gartner warned that “many deployments are ad hoc and poorly implemented", which is having an adverse effect on organizations’ ability to maximize their cloud estate. 

Across the year, the consultancy said I&O teams will “have an opportunity to revisit assembled or poorly architected cloud infrastructure” as firms scramble to get the most out of their IT estate. 

“The focus of refactoring cloud infrastructure should be on optimizing costs by eliminating redundant, overbuilt or unused cloud infrastructure; building business resilience rather than service-level redundancy; using cloud infrastructure as a way to mitigate supply chain disruptions; and modernizing infrastructure,” Gartner said. 

This sharpened focus on optimization will deliver cost savings and efficiency improvements long-term if done correctly, Gartner added. Research from the firm found that 65% of application workloads will be “optimal or ready” for cloud delivery by 2027, marking a significant increase from 45% in 2022. 

Underused cloud infrastructure is an issue that’s emerged in organizations in recent years due to a surge in pandemic-related cloud adoption.

However, with rising cloud costs impacting businesses globally in the last 15 months, this issue has come to the fore for many. 

Spiraling costs have prompted organizations to ‘reassess’ their relationship with the cloud and cut back on spending.  

2. New application architectures driving infrastructure changes

I&O teams are under intense pressure to meet evolving demands for new types of infrastructure, Gartner said. This includes an increased focus on edge infrastructure for “data-intensive” applications, serverless edge architectures, and 5G mobile services. 

By 2026, Gartner predicts that 15% of on-premises production workloads will run in containers, up from less than 5% in 2022. 

This highlights the need for more flexible infrastructure, however, the consultancy warned that teams “must evaluate options with” care and consider their ability to manage and integrate new workloads while working in the face of time constraints.

“Don’t revert to traditional methods or solutions just because they’ve worked well in the past,” said Delory. “Challenging periods are times to innovate and find new solutions to meet business demands.”

Containers have increasingly become a go-to way for developers to build, test, and deploy applications across multiple environments, including on-prem data centers and in the cloud. 

Research from NetApp, for example, shows that containers require less system resources than traditional or hardware-based virtual machine environments.  

Greater efficiency, enhanced application development, and increased portability are also among key benefits of containers highlighted by NetApp. 

3. Data center teams adopting cloud principles on-prem

According to Gartner, 35% of data center infrastructure will be managed from a cloud-based control plane by 2027, from less than 10% in 2022. 

This increase is being propelled by the fact that “data centers are shrinking and migration to platform-based colocation providers”, the firm noted. This, combined with new as-a-service models for physical infrastructure is providing organizations with “cloud-like service-centricity” to on-prem infrastructure. 

In the year ahead, Gartner said I&O professionals should focus on “building cloud-native infrastructure within the data center” to optimize and streamline operations. 

Gartner’s research also urged teams to focus heavily on migrating workloads from owned facilities to co-location facilities, or embrace as-a-service models for physical infrastructure. 

Migrating and integrating workloads poses challenges for businesses, however. 

With firms facing an increasing array of cloud-related options spanning public, private, and hybrid cloud, making the correct decision based on their individual circumstances, needs, and financial capabilities could make or break a successful migration. 

4. Skills growth a key priority for businesses

The pervasive issue of skills deficits will continue to plague businesses in the year ahead, meaning that attracting and retaining talent will be critical to ensuring success in infrastructure modernization projects. 

“Lack of skills remains the biggest barrier to infrastructure modernization initiatives, with many organizations finding they cannot hire outside talent to fill these skills gaps. IT organizations will not succeed unless they prioritize organic skills growth,” Gartner said. 

To tackle this growing issue, I&O leaders must make operations skills growth their “highest priority” in 2023. This includes encouraging I&O staff to “take on new roles”, expand skills through training programs, and encourage cross-functional training to ensure a broader range of applicable skills throughout teams. 

This heightened focus on cross-functional training could be key for organizations moving forward, with the consultancy’s own research predicting that 60% of data center infrastructure teams will have “relevant automation and cloud skills” by 2027. 

This marks a significant increase from just 30% in 2022, highlighting the growing appetite for firms to develop more multi-skilled teams. 

New EU cloud security labeling proposals could force the three major cloud providers to overhaul their business practices in order to continue operating in the region, according to reports.

Draft documents, not yet officially presented to the public, in their current wording suggest providers will be required to engage in a joint venture with an EU-based firm. 

The documents add that non-EU operators, including US firms, will only receive a ‘minority stake’ in such ventures, which aim to improve security by providing an EU-based point-of-contact for regulatory purposes. 

Employees with access to EU data would also be required to undergo screening processes and be located within one of the EU’s 27 member states.

The documents, seen by Reuters, relate to the EU’s plans to introduce a cyber security label that will be required if a company, like Microsoft, Google Cloud, or AWS wishes to handle sensitive data in the EU.

The latest proposals put forward by the EU cyber security agency, ENISA, form part of the EU certification scheme (EUCS), which aims to establish a union-wide certification regime for cloud providers. 

This, ENISA has said, will “further improve the union’s internal market conditions for cloud services by enhancing and streamlining the services’ cyber security guarantees”. 

“The draft EUCS candidate scheme intends to harmonize the security of cloud services with EU regulations, international standards, industry best practices, as well as with existing certifications in EU member states,” ENISA said.

EU data sovereignty 

A key component within the draft documents centers around the requirement that cloud services must be operated and maintained within the EU. 

In addition, the document outlines requirements that customer data stored and processed in the EU will be subject exclusively to EU regulations and take precedence over non-EU laws. 

“Certified cloud services are operated only by companies based in the EU, with no entity from outside the EU having effective control over the CSP (cloud service provider), to mitigate the risk of non-EU interfering powers undermining EU regulations, norms and values,” the document reads.

“Undertakings whose registered head office or headquarters are not established in a member state of the EU shall not, directly or indirectly, solely or jointly, hold positive or negative effective control of the CSP applying for the certification of a cloud service,” it added.

The move could spark concern for non-EU cloud service providers - particularly the three major hyperscalers, all of which have a major stake in the union, according to Philip Brining, co-founder and director of Data Protection People. 

"The proposed cyber security labeling rules, which require non-EU cloud providers to establish joint ventures with EU-based firms, may present challenges for providers like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon amongst others,” he told ITPro. 

“Compliance with the requirements would involve significant restructuring and potential delays in obtaining the EU cybersecurity kite mark. These companies, with their extensive customer bases and data management responsibilities, could face a competitive disadvantage compared to EU counterparts.”

In March, industry stakeholders criticized the EU’s current approach to cloud regulation, noting that its proposals could prove highly inhibitive for non-EU operators. 

A report from the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE) described the proposed certification scheme as “discriminatory” toward non-EU providers. 

A key point of contention highlighted by ECIPE was the requirement that non-EU cloud providers must register their head offices and global headquarters within the region. 

Gavin Millard, Deputy CTO at Tenable echoed Brining’s comments, noting that the current proposals could be highly inhibitive to non-EU-based providers due to the requirement to operate alongside a third party. 

“Whilst the protection of sensitive data from external entities should be paramount, the requirement to have an EU-based third party with a majority stake in the venture could be a ridiculously high barrier for the cloud services providers to do business in Europe,” he said. 

“It could be far more achievable and palatable to mandate and audit the siloing of sensitive data from non-EU employees of the cloud giants, than trying to force a potentially damaging commercial relationship with a third party.”

Millard added that while larger cloud providers could be impacted by the move, smaller organizations and software vendors may also be seriously affected. 

"The draft proposal could also greatly impact other software vendors and businesses, as they've built platforms to be cloud-specific, leveraging services only available on a particular provider,” he said.

“If providers based outside the EU can't provide a cloud platform deemed suitable, it's going to take a significant effort for companies doing business in the EU to reengineer their products to support the ‘EU Cloud’. Implementing could be a huge headache for both US and EU-based organizations, creating unnecessary friction by replacing one risk with another."

Cloud marketplace provider Pax8 has announced the appointment of software as a service (SaaS) expert David Powell as its new vice president of sales strategy. 

Reporting to Jared Pangretic, the firm’s SVP of sales for the Americas, Powell will lead sales strategy efforts to help drive growth and revenue, with a key focus on helping MSPs to strengthen their cyber security offerings. 

In an announcement, Pax8 said the hire is part of its commitment to helping MSPs expand their cyber security strategies in a rapidly growing security environment. 

“We are thrilled to have someone of David's caliber join Pax8 during this significant period of our company's growth,” Pangretic said. 

“David's passion for the channel community is evident in his efforts to empower MSPs and help them succeed in a constantly evolving market. 

“His extensive network and deep understanding of the MSP landscape have earned him a reputation as a trusted advisor and thought leader in the industry.”

Powell has spent more than 26 years in the industry, accumulating deep experience in SaaS, as well as across account management, security, sales and marketing, channel strategy, and business acquisitions and development.

He joins Pax8 from Evo Security, where he was chief revenue officer for the identity and access management (IAM) platform provider. 

Prior to that, he was president of employee productivity software specialist Prodoscore, and has also served as SVP of growth at ConnectWise.

Powell has also had a notable impact at various SaaS businesses, including Logic Monitor, which went on to be acquired by Vista Equity Partners, and Perch Cybersecurity, which was snapped up by ConnectWise. 

In total, he has been a part of three successful exits and seven acquisitions during his career to date.

Pax8 chief commerce officer Nick Heddy said this track record will “undoubtedly prove invaluable” to the company as it looks to drive further growth. 

“We are particularly excited about his amazing work and contributions in the MSP realm, and we look forward to seeing his contributions drive our partners’ continued success," he said.

Commenting on his new role, Powell said his aim is to help MSPs of all scales “navigate the complex landscape of cyber security threats”.

“As the prevalence of these threats is not diminishing, but instead anticipated to continue expanding and intensifying over time, my aim, in tandem with Pax8's mission of fostering MSP achievement, is to help MSPs implement strong and all-encompassing cyber security solutions that ensure the protection of both their organization and their clients," he said.

The inaugural HFS Horizons: Cloud Native Transformation, 2022 report examines the capabilities of 20 IT service providers and management consultancies offering differentiated approaches to meet the transformation needs of clients.

This research effort assesses how well service providers are helping their clients to envision and deliver cloud native transformation outcomes. HFS recognizes IBM as Horizon 3 with "driving transformation with hybrid cloud assets and differentiating M&A investments".

Download now to learn more.

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While cloud adoption continues to rise globally, only a small portion of businesses are yet to fully maximise the impact of their transition, according to new research from PwC.

A survey of more than 1,000 business executives found that while 78% of leaders have adopted cloud technology in “most” or “all parts” of their business, just 10% have fully unlocked the potential to drive operational improvements and deliver tangible benefits for their organisations.

This minority of “cloud-powered” businesses have effectively adopted cloud and are reaping the rewards of this process, with many expecting to see continued revenue growth of 15% - or greater - off the back of their transformation projects.

Cloud-powered companies were four times more likely to say they face “no barriers to achieving cloud transformation” across a range of areas, PwC revealed.

This has enabled them to deliver marked improvements to organisational resilience, productivity, and decision-making, and unlock significant cost savings.

PwC identified four key areas of value that distinguish the so-called "cloud-powered" companies from those that aren't fully realising the potential benefits of cloud technology across their business.

A holistic approach to cloud

Cloud-powered companies were found to be twice as likely to pursue a “multi-faceted” and non-linear cloud approach, meaning that they have bucked traditional transformation processes.

Rather than going from workload migration and asset modernisation to cloud-native development, 70% of these organisations have adopted a combined approach which focuses on applying the method that “makes the strongest business case for their goals”.

“And once they decide, they’re committed,” PwC said. “Cloud-powered companies are nearly four times as likely as other companies to sustain their current strategic focus.”

This sharpened focus on delivering tangible improvements in specific areas of the business has enabled them to maximise impact and avoid becoming bogged down in overburdening transformation programmes.

“While most cloud-powered companies have implemented enterprise-wide transformations and moved operations to cloud, they also don’t shy away from considering when it doesn’t make sense to go there,” PwC said.

C-suite collaboration is key

Cross-functional collaboration is a key factor for success at cloud-powered companies, according to the professional services giant.

CIOs at cloud-powered firms are far more likely to be “in sync” with key business functions and have stronger alliances across the C-suite, resulting in a more aligned and concise vision during the formative stages of cloud transformation projects.

Additionally, cloud-powered companies were found to prioritise closer collaboration with chief human resources officers (CHRO’s) and talent teams to ensure that the organisation has the right talent to effectively realise projects.

“This should come as no surprise given how critical it is to acquire or develop the right skills to make the most of cloud investments (while keeping legacy systems up and running),” PwC said.

The importance of a formal data strategy

Executives at cloud-powered companies “understand that data is at the heart of transformation efforts”, according to PwC.

In fact, cloud-powered businesses are far more likely to have a formal enterprise-wide data strategy in place, with 88% establishing a clear-cut vision compared to just 59% among other firms.

This concise focus on how to effectively leverage data has enabled cloud-powered firms to develop a more “streamlined architecture” to modernise their data and concentrate on “building the skills and operational changes needed to become a data-driven organisation”.

Cloud governance and control focus

Governance is a key concern for cloud-powered companies, according to PwC’s research, with 80% having cloud governance resources in place and 78% stating they have “formal and distinct cloud controls”.

Increasingly, these innovative organisations consider the potential risks that cloud poses throughout the various stages of a transformation project, as well as the long-term considerations with regard to cyber security, data privacy, and compliance.

Similarly, cloud-powered organisations were also found to have focused heavily on educating the C-suite and board on how relevant risks related to cloud technology can be identified and addressed.

IT infrastructure services provider Kyndryl has announced new cloud native services that it says will help customers accelerate their cloud application modernisation.

New Kyndryl Cloud Native Services have been developed to help customers migrate, modernise, and optimise critical workloads on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

The move comes at a time when many businesses are experiencing slow digitisation modernisation progress due to complexities, technology silos, as well as a shortage of critical in-house IT skills.

In response to this, Kyndryl said its services will help customers streamline their cloud application modernisation by providing a framework of code assets, workflows, expertise, and the end-to-end lifecycle.

“We’ve seen companies increase their use of cloud over the last few years but have had barriers to adoption – whether it’s the complexities of hybrid or multicloud landscapes or the lack of skills and expertise to manage their IT estates,” said Harish Grama, leader at Kyndryl's Cloud Global Practice.

“These new services are a direct outcome of Kyndryl’s ongoing journey to expand our innovation and offerings through strategic partnerships and new technology, which we have not been able to do before.”

One of the world’s largest IT infrastructure services providers, Kyndryl serves customers across 60 countries, specialising in designing, building, managing, and modernising complex information systems.

Formerly IBM’s managed infrastructure business, the company split from the IT giant in November 2021 and has since gone on to strike up partnerships with the three major hyperscalers: AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

Aligned with the cloud adoption frameworks of these partners, Kyndryl Cloud Native Services include automated backup, patching, KPI monitoring, security, alerting, and incident management.

Through these offerings, Kyndryl said it is targeting faster routes to innovation through enhanced productivity, as well as a simplified procurement process with consistent delivery across clouds. Other perks will include more cost-effective cloud migration and modernisation, integration of other technologies such as artificial intelligence, the firm said.

Ultimately, the aim is to offer more efficiency and agility, via quicker cloud deployments, reduced developer set-up time, easier management, and more resilient applications.

The provider added that it is focused on transforming customer cloud operations through the use of infrastructure as code (IaC) and policy as code for secure-by-design delivery principles that allow customers to take an automation-first approach.

The cloud has revolutionised business IT, creating flexibility and affordability for companies to establish systems and perform complex tasks that once were only available to the most biggest organisations with the most resources.

However, something of a paradox exists at the heart of cloud migration. While the promise of the cloud is simplicity and scalability, the huge variety of options and providers on offer can result in complexity and costliness, with businesses ending up paying for more than they need across multiple vendors.

To realise the true benefits of the cloud, it’s important to create a clear roadmap to plan your cloud migration.

Key questions

To develop a roadmap that will ensure that your cloud migration will deliver what you need from it without costing you the Earth, there are some key questions that you need to ask yourself.

The first is the ‘why’. Understanding what you want to achieve from your migration is key to developing a plan. Perhaps you’ve outgrown your existing hardware or it is on the verge of becoming obsolete. You might want to cut costs, or build scalability or flexibility into your operations. Knowing what your goal is is vital for assessing the success of your migration, and will underpin your entire plan.

The ‘why’ is naturally followed by the ‘how’. Who will be the team responsible for the migration? This might be handled in-house by your IT team, or you might want to bring in outside specialists to help or take charge. Whatever the case, it’s essential that everyone is working together and knows what their place is in the plan.

This is also the stage where you need to prepare your existing infrastructure for the migration. Are you planning a hybrid environment? Can you foresee any compatibility issues, and what can you do to mitigate these? The better prepared you are, the more likely you are to avoid the biggest bumps in the road.

Finally, you need to get the timing right. The timeframe will be dictated by various factors, such as the amount and type of data to be migrated to the cloud and when the timing will be best for your business operations. Migrations can be done quite quickly or over an extended period of time, and it will be up to you and your migration team to decide what is best for your company.

Next steps

When your roadmap is ready, it’s time to put it into action. You are likely to encounter issues and roadblocks (whether large or small) during your migration and it’s important to not let them derail you from following your roadmap. Knowing the kinds of issues you are likely to face will help you to prepare for them and know what to do if they arise.

And once the migration is ‘complete’, that isn’t the end of the story. You are likely to have other tasks and goals ahead of you. After all, the beauty of the cloud is in its flexibility and scalability, so it will serve you to take a long-term perspective on your migration and the future management of your infrastructure.

To learn more about creating and executing your roadmap and what comes after, read our co-branded IT Pro/ANS report, ‘Future-proofing transformation: An end-to-end roadmap for SMB cloud migration’

While the cloud is now a well-established technology, navigating the many available options and carrying out a successful cloud migration can still be challenging.

For SMBs, with limited budgets and resources, the difficulties are multiplied and with hundreds of vendors offering thousands of different products and configurations between them, working out which one – or ones – is right for you can be tricky even if you have a clear idea of what your business needs.

This IT Pro special report looks at how SMBs can make best use of the public cloud, from planning and executing a migration to ensuring its continued success as your business grows.

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The decision to change the name of Oracle’s flagship tech conference from ‘OpenWorld’ to ‘CloudWorld’ doesn’t quite encapsulate its new business strategy. There’s no official explanation for the change, either; we are simply left to assume that it’s about a stronger focus on cloud-based technologies. Despite the name change, Oracle’s attitude to cloud is now more open than ever before.

A better description of what’s going on came from one of its partners; during the opening keynote of this year’s conference, the CIO of the Irish security firm Johnson Controls, Diane Schwarz, used an old African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to further, go together”.

Today, there are three well-defined leaders in the cloud market – Amazon Web Service (AWS), Microsoft and Google – and some might suggest Oracle isn’t necessarily the fourth biggest, with Alibaba and IBM also jostling for position. Oracle, however, might have identified a winning strategy to break into that top tier by, ironically, working with the other providers. Or, to put it another way, by being more open.

A future of connected clouds

The use of multiple cloud services – buying applications and infrastructure from different providers – has become more popular than some vendors would like. After all, multi and hybrid cloud scenarios haven’t always been championed by the major providers – including Oracle – and that is something Larry Ellison would like to change.

During his afternoon keynote, the Oracle CTO suggested that cloud environments had become more like walled gardens, where the customer puts data in, often for free, but is then penalised if they want to take it out or move it – a process that is known as an ‘egress’ charge.

Nearly all of the leading cloud providers have, at some point, charged for data egress, though many within the industry see it as an inhibitor of innovation. It’s particularly troublesome for smaller businesses, as it makes it almost impossible to predict the full cost of data management. In his keynote, Ellison called for the eradication of egress fees and for the “garden walls to come tumbling down”.

There were a lot of references to AWS within this segment of the keynote, which may have involved a degree of trash-talking in the past. This time, it felt more like a new approach for Oracle, one that is at odds with an industry famous for vendor lock-in. From start to finish, Oracle CloudWorld felt like a grand pitch for a more open, more interoperable, cloud market. The company is investing heavily in a portfolio of services that can be connected with those of other cloud providers – even those that belong to its biggest rivals.

A good example of this is the Oracle and Microsoft multi-cloud deal – Oracle Interconnect for Azure. It’s described as a ‘simple’ path to a multi-cloud environment, with customers able to use Oracle database services, such as MySQL, within Azure over a low-latency connection. In his keynote, Ellison suggested Oracle would look to build more of these connections, for the benefit of the customer. He sees it as the next logical step in cloud computing, dubbing it “an internet of clouds”.

The infrastructure for success

There's one thing that could potentially derail Oracle’s grand connected cloud plan, and that's the willingness of the other providers to open their systems. The main leverage Oracle will have is customer demand, and that's certainly a powerful incentive. It also seems so simple an idea, it’s almost unbelievable that it has taken this long to arrive.

At the heart of Oracle’s plan is the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), which is a holistic cloud platform that provides all the necessary controls and tools for customers to build, migrate, and deploy cloud technologies. The vice president of OCI, Leo Leung, told us that the technology for cloud providers to connect has always been there and it's simply a case of industry willingness.

Major companies like Nvidia, Vodafone, and Red Bull are all using OCI in some form as a platform to build their own cloud applications – all three are also customers of the other cloud providers. Vodafone, for example, uses a combination of AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle.

Oracle Alloy is another fascinating product; it’s a platform that enables other companies to essentially become their own cloud providers. Again, it’s Oracle providing the infrastructure and the customer using it to build or enhance their cloud offerings. These are products that provide a platform but not a limitation because Oracle recognised that choice is an attractive offer.

As Oracle CloudWorld 2022 came to an end, it was hard not to be impressed. As to whether it will work, only time will tell. Could we see an end to vendor lock-in and egress fees in the cloud market? Stranger things have happened, as they say, or as one Oracle executive put it, referencing a new Amazon collaboration with MySQL Heatwave; “Working with AWS... something we would have thought was impossible a few years ago”.

Oracle opened its CloudWorld conference in Las Vegas with several new distributed services as it looks to expand its cloud portfolio.

The new services include Oracle Alloy, an infrastructure platform that enables customers to become their own cloud providers, and a version MySQL Heatwave optimised for Microsoft Azure.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's (OCI) Distributed Cloud is a platform that offers access to cloud services from anywhere via public, multi-cloud, hybrid, and dedicated environments. However, Oracle suggests that customers want more flexible cloud deployment options, with specific capabilities for low-latency connections and stronger controls for managing data regulations.

Organisations want to move their workloads to the cloud but are often faced with hurdles such as security, governance, and stringent data protection guidelines, according to Clay Magouyrk, the executive vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

"With OCI's Distributed Cloud, we're able to give our customers the flexibility they need to deploy cloud services wherever they choose – and we're ultimately changing the way our customers think about the cloud," Magouyrk said.

Customers seeking to run workloads in specific locations and in a cloud of their choice are cited as examples by Oracle. Alloy offers up an infrastructure platform that service providers, software vendors, and other organisations (even telecommunications and cloud providers) can use to roll out their latest offerings to their own customers.

It can also be used independently within the user's data centre, where they can better align their workloads to regulatory requirements. The aim of the platform is to provide a space for these organisations to offer their own cloud services in a way that's customisable and streamlined.

Oracle is also continuing its ever-expanding partnerships with Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS); the company has announced that MySQL, its relational database management system, is now available on AWS and will also be on Azure in the coming months.

The announcements also include Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure, which is now available across 12 regions through the Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure services.

Google Cloud has announced the launch of Software Delivery Shield (SDS) which aims to fortify businesses' resistance to software supply chain attacks that have proliferated in the last 12 months.

Announcing the new product at its Google Cloud Next conference, SDS is a fully managed software supply chain solution that was designed to address five key areas of supply chain security: application development, continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD), supply of software, policies, and production environments.

The new product aims to equip developers and security teams with the tools to create cloud applications free from supply chain vulnerabilities which has become a mounting concern across the industry

It will also work alongside other Google Cloud services like Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Cloud Build, Cloud Deploy, and more, bringing with it a score of features that promote collaboration between IT, DevOps, and security teams.

Providing protection for software at the development stage, SDS includes a new service called Cloud Workstations (preview) which gives developers managed development environments on Google Cloud's platform.

These environments will be browser-based and fully customisable, with options for collaborative configuration across IT admins and security teams that aim to promote better overall app development security, according to Google Cloud.

Cloud Workstations won't store code locally and come with features such as private ingress/egress, identity access management (IAM) policies, and forced image updates to proactively prevent common security issues in development.

Google Cloud's family of integrated developer environment (IDE) plugins, Cloud Code, will also support a new feature called Source Protect which offers developers real-time feedback within their IDE, identifying vulnerable dependencies and license reporting.

Many of the software supply chain-related issues from the previous few years have been rooted in vulnerable dependencies which can be difficult to check manually. GitHub's Dependabot, for example, has been available since April 2021 and offers similar dependency-scanning capabilities to developers with the aim of securing the open source software space.

Software supply chain security is an area of increasing concern for tech leaders. A recent survey of C-suite executives identified that software supply chain attacks are a ‘chief concern’, with just 32% of respondents indicating that their supply chain was ‘very secure’.

Google Cloud said one of the primary routes to attack open source software is through the compromise of CI/CD pipelines and has strengthened both its CI and CD platforms, Cloud Build and Cloud Deploy, as a result.

New security feature integrations will be added to both platforms such as deep IAM controls, isolated environments, and approval gates to give DevOps teams greater governance over app builds. The cloud giant said these are "key parts" of the overall SDS product.

Protecting the runtime environments is also as important has protecting the development pipeline, Google Cloud said, which is why it also added new security features to the GKE and Cloud Run containerised app runtime platforms.

New capabilities for GKE, currently in preview, will now offer a more comprehensive view of the security posture of clusters and workloads. Teams can now access detailed reports, automatically assigned vulnerability severity ratings, and insights into operating system flaws and workload configurations.

All the new reporting available to GKE can also be fed into Cloud Logging allowing for security event information to plugged directly into a business' a security information and event management (SIEM) system.

SDS also introduces a policy engine for the strictest environments, Binary Authorisation, to establish a chain of trust across the entire software supply chain.

It's what Google Cloud is calling a deploy-time security control that only trusted container images can be deployed on GKE or Cloud Run - images must be signed by trusted authorities during the development process in order for them to be deployable.

SDS can be used alongside Google Cloud’s Assured Open Source Software service, announced in May, which ensures that open source software used within an environment has been vetted by Google.

The service now covers over 250 packages, written in both Java and Python, all of which have been scanned and tested for vulnerabilities by Google. In this way, Assured Open Source Software and SDS can both speed up and improve the security of cloud deployment, through the collection and distribution of verified software.

Faster response with Chronicle Security Operations

A separate announcement made at Google Cloud Next was the introduction of Chronicle security operations, a cloud-based software suite that aims to allow teams to detect, investigate, and respond to threats more quickly.

Chronicle Security Operations will bring together SIEM technology with the security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) products from its earlier Siemplify acquisition, as well as its Google Cloud's own threat intelligence and Mandiant's incident management tools, and bundle it all under new Chronicle branding.

“With Chronicle, we no longer have to make the tough decisions around which data we can afford to log and how little retention we can live with,” said Mike Orosz, chief information security officer at infrastructure management provider Vertiv.

“Insufficient security event monitoring is a thing of the past, and there is no better time than now to align to best practices.”

The branding for Siemplify's SOAR and SIEM tech will now be Chronicle SOAR and Chronicle SIEM respectively, and host of new features have reached the product family, all in preview.

The suite seeks to provide teams with cloud-scale security data using Google’s hyperscale infrastructure and petabytes of contextual information, up-to-date threat intelligence, and automated responses to common security threats including phishing and malware.

With Chronicle Security Operations, Google Cloud also aims to provide security teams with a number of quality-of-life features and data aggregation tools to improve threat insight.

These include a single display that combines information on chosen entities from multiple data sources, including Google Cloud Threat Intelligence, integrated alert management between Chronicle SIEM and SOAR, and pre-built responses to cloud-based alerts to speed up threat resolution.

SAP workloads are business-critical for many organisations around the world. As a result, any technology or deployment direction that SAP takes has tremendous impact on its customers.

The mandate to migrate to SAP HANA and then SAP S/4HANA is one such direction. The urging to move to the cloud is another one. Together, these strategic directives from SAP have caused the equivalent of earthquakes in many datacentres.

Download this report from IDC to learn more about the challenges that business face, the RISE with SAP offering and IBM's offering that expands on this.

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Hyper converged infrastructure (HCI) has been around for some time, and now with the increase in migration to the cloud, HCI is being utilised more and more as the foundation for running hybrid cloud IT operations.

This study from the IDC delves into how HCI is being utilised today, sharing how hyper converged infrastructures are being used in greater scale across a wide range of organisations.

Download this study now to realise how HCI is the perfect solution for today’s infrastructure technology challenges, and how Dell’s EMC Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI measures up.

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Kyndryl has announced a new partnership with Oracle that will see the IT infrastructure services provider deliver its managed cloud solutions to the enterprise.

The collaboration sees Kyndryl become a delivery partner for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), incorporating a range of new services that leverage Oracle technologies to help businesses modernise and shift their applications to the cloud.

The provider is aiming to build upon its participation in the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) to extend the reach of its service delivery capabilities across the network.

In an announcement, Kyndryl said it is also planning to create customer solutions in the areas of data modernisation and governance, AI-driven innovations for industries, cyber security and resiliency, and transformation of mission-critical workloads to the cloud.

“We are pleased to expand our collaboration with Oracle and will work to help customers modernise applications and workloads to accelerate and succeed on their journey to the cloud,” commented Stephen Leonard, Global Alliances & Partnerships Leader, Kyndryl.

Additionally, the company will be supporting Oracle Cloud@Customer and Oracle Exadata offerings with IT infrastructure services to assist customers with consolidating databases, lowering administration costs, and improving uptime.

“The combination of Kyndryl managed services and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides a versatile and efficient foundation for companies to confidently move, build and run their mission-critical IT operations in the cloud,” Leonard added.

To help boost its OCI expertise, the Kyndryl has established a new global competency centre, alongside dedicated resources to expand and increase Oracle Cloud certifications across its managed services team.

As an Oracle partner, Kyndryl said it will place a focus on several key areas, which include resiliency and disaster recovery options, network and edge computing capabilities, data analytics services, as well as advanced database consolidation and migration of on-premises ERP software to OCI.

“Enterprises are feeling intense pressure to modernise their businesses rapidly while maintaining the continuity of mission-critical operations,” said Doug Smith, senior vice president of Strategic Partnerships at Oracle. “The combination of Kyndryl’s expertise and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure empowers these organisations to realise their desired business outcomes from the latest technological innovations.

“Through this partnership, we will expand our reach, helping more customers around the world move critical workloads to the cloud.”

AWS has cut the ribbon on its new AWS Mainframe Modernization service, designed to make it easier for customers to modernize mainframe-based workloads by moving them to cloud.

The tool allows users to refactor their mainframe workloads to run on AWS by transforming their usual mainframe-based applications into modern cloud services. Alternatively, customers can keep their applications as written and re-platform their workloads by reusing existing code and applying minimal changes.

It’s able to do this thanks to its built-in managed runtime environment, which provides the required compute, memory, and storage to run both refactored and re-platformed applications. It also helps automate the details of capacity provisioning, security, load balancing, scaling, and application health monitoring.

With no upfront costs, customers will only pay for the amount of compute provisioned, Amazon confirmed in its announcement.

“Customers often tell us that AWS is the best place to run any type of application because of its unmatched breadth and depth of purpose-built services. However, businesses in a wide variety of industries have relied on mainframes to run business-critical applications for decades,” commented William Platt, general manager of Migration Services at AWS.

“These businesses naturally want to modernize their mainframe-based applications to reduce costs and eliminate technical debt, but they don’t know how or where to get started.”

AWS Mainframe Modernization also offers continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) capabilities, which enable modern application development and deployment best practices. Amazon says that will allow businesses to operate their modernized workloads in production on an ongoing basis and unlock “greater agility, elasticity, and cost savings".

“With AWS Mainframe Modernization, customers and systems integrators can now more quickly and easily refactor or replatform mainframe applications to run in the cloud,” Platt added. “AWS Mainframe Modernization provides the necessary tools for organizations to take full advantage of the elasticity, scalability, and reliability of AWS, while also saving time and money.”

The offering is generally available now in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), and South America (São Paulo). Other AWS Regions are expected to be added in the coming months, the firm said.

Amid constant changes, businesses must move rapidly to embrace new work styles. Recent research suggests that over 90% of enterprises are accelerating cloud adoption plans due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

While no two transformations are the same, breaking down the effort into two stages has proven beneficial.

Download this whitepaper to uncover the many ways AWS can help.

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The pressures on businesses to keep up with the speed of innovation is mounting. Not only did COVID-19 force many organisations to completely transform their approach, with many turning to the cloud, but recent economic pressures are only adding to this demand.

Modern digital transformation has always been underpinned by the anything as a service (XaaS) model, which allowed enterprises to pursue the greener grass of digitisation, higher efficiencies and new products and services. With the purpose and nature of these traditional cloud models changing, though, it prompts us to ask whether the XaaS approach is fit for purpose in today's age.

As digital transformation only accelerates, with the global market expected to grow to $1 trillion by 2025, how organisations tap into it, given the changing nature of XaaS and cloud computing, might determine whether projects end in success or failure.

The shifting sands of cloud computing

"Digital transformation is about apps, data, and user experience (UX). Cloud reminded us that it was not about keeping the lights blinking but about those apps and data that power our businesses,” says Mike Dorosh, senior director analyst at Gartner. “The first decade or so of the cloud was all about figuring it out and getting there. We saw a lot of lift and shift of apps without a whole lot of refactoring or reworking.”

Since about 2019, though, organisations underwent a shift towards cloud nativisation – that is the use of the native platform capabilities of the cloud, while software vendors also optimised their apps for cloud deployments, Dorosh adds. We’ve also seen a shift in buying focus from infrastructure as a service (Iaas) capabilities, which is capital-free and on demand, to platform as a service (Paas) becoming the focus. Gartner sees the market as combined infrastructure and platform services now, with customers selecting the platform not for IaaS benefits but for the best PaaS fit and software vendor mix.

"In addition, most of the IT services market has shifted to focus on cloud adoption, as well as delivering traditional on-prem hybrid cloud services from the cloud,” he continues. “The hardware vendors are all beginning to deliver their hardware ‘as a service’. At the same time, most enterprises realised the move to the cloud had the benefit of modernising how they deliver and consume IT. Their cloud journeys will take years, and the rising tide of adoption will drive cloud tech further into enterprises.”

The XaaS supremacy

With almost everything in the IT stack becoming readily available in as-a-service forms, most commodified IT systems will be consumed this way, VP and principal analyst with Constellation Research, Dion Hinchcliffe, tells IT Pro. “This leaves differentiation of the businesses as the last major bastion of existing and new custom development in IT departments. In this way, IaaS has become the foundation for most new IT, with SaaS providing a quick way to adopt and scale new applications.”

PaaS, however, which is the most evolved and strategic form of the as a service model, has become a way to quickly climb the cloud maturity cure when it comes to successfully delivering on differentiated IT. What’s known as integration as a service, too, has become a key cog, making it much easier to connect together multiple IT systems in the cloud with trends like seamless customer experience (CX) becoming ever more critical to the business.

Contrary to wider sentiment, though, principal analyst at Forrester, Lee Sustar, tells IT Pro the XaaS model is somewhat outdated. This uses the framework of cloud application services, development services, data analytics services and infrastructure services, which all collectively underpin digital transformation.

“Lift and shift has given way to differentiation based on workload affinity and new capabilities in the cloud and the edge as well as residual needs for on-premise infrastructure,” Sustar says. “The result is an IT estate that may encompass SaaS for many enterprise applications, some on-premise workloads that remain due to inherent difficulties in modernisation, data security or latency concerns, and edge computing where content distribution or local computing is needed. The public cloud, and increasingly multiple public clouds, are the centre of the IT estate.”

Digital transformation, at your service

Cloud is essential to digital transformation today, since cloud provides a scalable, flexible, elastic, easily accessible and cost-efficient platform to run the business, says IBM’s EMEA solutions leader for data and technology transformation, Ahijit Chatterjee. Without this layer, the enterprise would not be able to achieve the required automation and orchestration for the subsequent data layer, comprising big data and analytics.

The increased agility – being able to quickly deploy hardware and applications – and the flexibility of a pay as you go model moves traditionally Capex models to Opex where enterprises are able to experiment at a significantly lower their risk. They can also act in an agile way and try out different use cases before prioritising and focus on the top ones.

During the pandemic, digital transformation picked up like never before, with all manner of businesses engaging in projects. “Both CX and digital workplace were updated for the times in time frames that many didn’t believe were possible before,” Hinchcliffe adds. “We saw mortgage companies moving to all digital servicing, including the actual document signatures themselves. We saw healthcare networks adopt telehealth for delivering healthcare services that were almost always delivered in-person before. The cloud is what made these shifts happen so quickly and so well, and it was, in particular, PaaS and IaaS that made it happen so rapidly for thousands of organisations."

"Yara, one of the world’s leading fertilizer companies and a provider of environmental solutions, created an industry-wide business platform to connect and empower independent farmers,” Chatterjee tells IT Pro. “It will use Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and artificial intelligence (AI) to provide hyperlocal weather forecasting, crop damage prediction, and real-time recommendations. Already downloaded by over 600,000 farmers, this platform is transforming Yara’s existing supplier relationship and expanding its value."

Moving to the cloud has become an enabler towards goals like operational efficiency, higher value creation, and better CX leading to more growth as well as revenue for the enterprise. Digital transformation enabled by cloud‐based applications and supported by emerging technologies is gradually becoming the core of the intelligent enterprise.

IT infrastructure services provider Kyndryl has expanded its global alliance with Dell Technologies in the form of a new cyber resilience solution to protect critical business data.

The partnership is focused on providing cyber incident recovery, offering cyber resilience through Dell’s high-performance storage, servers, and data protection systems.

Kyndryl says the new jointly developed solution has been designed to help secure critical data sets and provide a verified process to recover data back into a business.

It uses an “air-gapped” data vault from Dell, which means one copy of the data is offline and cannot be accessed to help ensure availability in the event of a cyber incident.

“We’re excited to expand our relationship with Dell and look forward to delivering solutions, services and support that customers need to store and protect their data and recover from cyber threats,” commented Kris Lovejoy, Global Security and Resiliency practice leader at Kyndryl.

“Through this important alliance, we will work together to help companies improve performance and availability of critical data, predictive maintenance, non-disruptive upgrades and refreshes.”

Dell recently elevated Kyndryl to Titanium Black Global Partner status in the Dell Technologies Partner Program – a status that recognises partners it deems best equipped to support customers through their digital transformation.

Building on 20 years of engineering and go-to-market collaboration, the firm says its new status and expanded alliance will enable customers to enhance their digital innovation and business transformation.

Ultimately, Kyndryl’s new Cyber Incident Recovery with Dell Technologies offering aims to enhance and complement existing backup and disaster recovery solutions, help minimise the impact of cyber incidents, as well as enable a quicker return to normal operations with a greater likelihood of recovering critical data.

“It’s more important than ever for companies to have confidence in the protection of their critical data to ensure cyber resiliency,” said Denise Millard, senior vice president, Global Alliances, Dell Technologies. “Dell and Kyndryl are well positioned to help our customers succeed in the multicloud and data era.”

The partnership follows a string of deals for Kyndryl, which completed its spin off from IBM in November 2021. These include a major cloud migration deal with Microsoft, two separate edge computing partnerships with Nokia and Lenovo, and a deal with AWS to create a cloud 'centre of excellence' for customers.

BT has selected Google Cloud for a five-year partnership that will support the telecom giant's plan for company-wide digital transformation and the creation of new services.

The project, led by BT’s Digital unit, will introduce a range of Google Cloud products and services: from cloud infrastructure and data analytics, to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), as well as security and API management.

BT said it hopes to use these tools to deliver improved customer experience, as well as reduce costs and risk, and build new revenue streams.

BT launched its Digital unit in January 2021 with the aim of developing and delivering products and platforms for the healthcare and data sectors, with solutions such as cloud-based unified communications (UC) and collaboration services. However, its digital transformation work can be traced back to 2016, when BT revealed its Digital Possible initiative that offered CIOs assistance in adopting digital transformation in their organisations.

However, the unit has also been tasked with internal overhauls, including transforming the state of BT's overall IT and digital innovation, and will lead the changes set out under the Google Cloud partnership. This includes creating a group-wide data strategy built on artificial intelligence (AI), and a new strategy to overhaul product development based on continuous innovation and automation.

Commenting on the announcement, BT chief digital and innovation officer Harmeen Mehta described the Google Cloud partnership as “one of a series of strategic moves that BT Digital is taking to help accelerate BT’s growth and digital transformation”.

“This is a partnership that is deeper than just at the technology level. It will help Digital as a whole supercharge BT and drive its return to growth,” he added.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said that the tech giant is “proud to collaborate with one of the world's leading providers of communications services and play an integral part in its digital transformation journey”.

“By deploying our full cloud capabilities, and support from our SRE organisation, our goal in this partnership is to set up BT with the tools it needs for future growth and innovation,” he added.

Google Cloud and BT have already begun working together on adopting Google’s technology, with the migration of core data scheduled to be finalised by 2023.

The news comes eight months after BT and Google announced a security partnership that saw the UK operator roll out new Google Cloud products to the managed security services market.

Singapore’s Home Team Science and Technology agency (HTX) has chosen Microsoft to develop a sovereign cloud to accelerate its digital transformation.

HTX said the agreement will play a key role in helping domestic services, such as the police or civil defence force, to deliver improved safety and security to all citizens, residents, and visitors to the city-state.

The sovereign cloud will be built on Microsoft’s Azure platform and equip HTX with on-demand high-performance cloud computing and data storage resources. It hopes this will help the agency quickly adopt and create new technologies and reduce time-to-market in introducing new digital capabilities.

It added that it will provide home team officers on the ground with real time data to help them respond quicker to incidents and make decisions faster.

“This strategic partnership with Microsoft to develop a sovereign cloud here in Singapore will enable us to push the boundaries of innovation and be in the forefront of technology,” said Chan Tsan, CEO of HTX and deputy secretary of the Ministry of Home Affairs.

“This way, we will be well-poised to exponentially enhance the capabilities of the home team and to keep Singapore as the safest place on the planet.”

Microsoft will also provide additional training and educational opportunities as part of the agreement, including 600 training places along with exam certificates to be made annually to the organisation. It hopes that the training will advance the technical skills of cloud technology professionals in Singapore.

“We’re delivering a trusted sovereign cloud that adheres to and meets the needs of the Singapore government – one that will expedite their digital transformation efforts,” said Judson Althoff, executive vice president and chief commercial officer at Microsoft. “Our agreement will enable key technological advancements and provide access to data and insights to help drive change across various communities."

Although Microsoft does have an Azure cloud region in Singapore, it remains unclear as to where the new sovereign cloud will be housed. Building data centres in the city is still restricted but the government is planning to lift the ban on their construction once new rules placing strict energy efficiency requirements on all new sites come into force.

Google Cloud has announced a distributed cloud portfolio of fully managed hardware and software services that can be accessed from the edge or a customers' data centre.

The new portfolio was one of the biggest announcements to come from the first day of Google Cloud's virtual Next 21 conference on Tuesday.

The Google Distributed Cloud has been built on Anthos and is aimed at businesses that need to migrate or modernise applications or process data locally with Google Cloud products, whether that's databases, machine learning (ML) or even third-party services from other leading vendors

It can run across multiple locations, according to Google Cloud, including Google's network edge, operator edge, customer edge and also customer data centres. The first products to be announced within this portfolio were Google Distributed Cloud Edge and Google Distributed Cloud Hosted.

The latter is designed to run sensitive workloads and doesn't require a connection to Google Cloud at any time in order to manage infrastructure, services or APIs. It simply uses a local control portal that's managed in Google's Anthos, and will be available in preview during the first half of 2022.

"Our goal is to make your journey to the cloud easy," Sachin Gupta, the GM and VP of product for IaaS at Google Cloud, said. "With transformative capabilities to help you innovate faster and save money, we follow an open approach to give you the greatest flexibility and choice as your organisation evolves."

Elsewhere, the cloud giant also unveiled data-centric updates such as Vertex AI Workbench, a unified service to build and deploy ML models faster to accelerate time-to-value. The company also revealed an autoscaling and serverless service in partnership with 'Spark'. Available now in preview, it aims to enable customers to get started in seconds and scale infinitely, regardless if they start in BigQuery, Dataproc, Dataplex or Vertex AI.

There were also multiple announcements around sustainability, such as Carbon Footprint Reporting, which provide actionable reports of the carbon footprint associated with a customer's Cloud usage. Google Earth Engine, which will become available for select enterprise customers, lets organisations combine the power of cloud computing, satellite imagery and AI to decarbonise their operations.

What's more, Google Cloud will also proactively alert customers of all idle cloud instances and their associated carbon footprints with Carbon Reduction Recommendations. If customers choose to delete them, they'll reduce their cloud carbon footprints.

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Nutanix and Citrix are joining forces to provide both the infrastructure and software to support customers as they transition to hybrid working arrangements.

The two companies will offer secure, on-demand and elastic access to apps, virtual desktops and data across all kinds of devices, from any location, and at any scale, Citrix and Nutanix have announced.

This partnership sees Nutanix providing hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) with the virtualisation firm Citrix bringing desktop as a service (DaaS) and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments to the table.

Under the agreement, Nutanix will become a Citrix preferred choice for HCI hybrid and multi-cloud deployments through the Nutanix Cloud Platform. This will support Citrix’s Virtual Apps and Desktops services on top of these cloud environments, with customers able to take advantage of Nutanix’s HCI, whether on-prem or in the public cloud.

Citrix will, in turn, become the preferred enterprise end-user computing system on the Nutanix Cloud Platform. Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, which is part of the flagship Citrix Workspace productivity suite, allows businesses to access their systems, information and tools in a singular experience, with contextual security policies layered on top.

The two companies claim that customers will be able to take advantage of a unified digital workspace platform that delivers both applications and security, as well as IT efficiency and productivity across a variety of sectors.

This venture means Citrix and Nutanix are the latest firms to attempt to enact a hybrid work strategy in the products and services on offer. This effort sees the companies throwing their weight behind desktop as a service (DaaS) and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) as a means for workers to access essential tools and services in a secure manner across all kinds of environments, including the office, the home, and otherwise.

In the delivery of these services, Citrix and Nutanix will also collaborate on go-to-market programmes and enablement, as well as product roadmaps and customer support.

Earlier this month, both Google and Microsoft independently announced their own hybrid work products through a reconfiguration of their core Workspace and Teams platforms. Facebook, too, is trying to tackle hybrid work through its Horizon Workrooms virtual reality (VR) experience.

Before starting a cloud migration project, it is critical to understand the strategies and tools available to you, which will depend on your organisation’s goals, timelines, service level agreements, and workload requirements. For example, your migration strategy may prioritise modernisation of applications or reducing your on-premises data centre footprint.

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Deloitte Canada has acquired SAP consultancy firm Clockwork for an undisclosed sum.

The acquisition will help Deloitte Canada strengthen its SaaS solution deployment, cloud migration, and custom application development. Clockwork will also help grow the firm's partnerships with cloud providers Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

"It should come as no surprise that we're excited to have the Clockwork team join Deloitte," said Anthony Viel, Deloitte Canada CEO.

Viel continued, "Apart from expanding our presence as a leading Canadian SAP consultancy, Clockwork's recognized brand and experienced leaders are an especially important aspect of this move, one that is sure to strengthen our SAP technical skills, assets, and market leadership in the space."

In addition to enhancing Deloitte's SAP and cloud transformation offerings across a range of verticals, the addition of Clockwork will help the firm serve a new market of clients in the public and private sectors.

The SAP Enterprise Solutions practice of Deloitte Canada will add 45 employees from Clockwork to its Toronto, Montreal, and Calgary offices. The co-founder and former president of Clockwork, Mike Roach, will join the firm as a new partner.

"We're no strangers to Deloitte, and while we've formed a solid working relationship in the past, it's another thing entirely to be teaming up under one name," said Mike Roach, Consulting partner, Deloitte Canada, and former co-founder and president at Clockwork.

"By gaining access to a plethora of Deloitte resources and relationships, we hope to achieve even more for our clients and can't wait to tackle new challenges together."

Earlier this year, Deloitte Canada acquired digital consulting firm The Working Group to support its mid-market and large clients' digital and cloud transformation journeys. The firm also acquired Groundswell Group to enhance artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud transformation capabilities in Western Canada and across the nation. Clockwork marks Deloitte Canada’s third acquisition in 2021.

Expenditure on Kubernetes is rising dramatically, and most businesses are struggling to accurately project how much they’re expecting to spend on their container orchestration systems in future.

Over the last year, Kubernetes-related costs surged for 68% of businesses, according to research by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which manages the ecosystem. Just 12% of businesses lowered their Kubernetes expenses, while among organisations to have sustained an increase, half saw it jump by more than 20%.

Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration system for automating app deployment, scaling and management. While it was originally designed by Google, Kubernetes is now maintained by the CNCF.

The trend does not come as a surprise, according to the report, because as most organisations adopt cloud-native architectures and scale up Kubernetes environments, the associated cloud costs will rise.

Despite costs projected to spiral, however, there’s a disconnect between these rising expenses and how well most businesses are able to accurately forecast Kubernetes costs, project these, and instigate processes that can manage overspend.

CNCF and the FinOps Foundation surveyed senior IT staff from their extended communities of 195 organisations, which is a small sample size but serves as a representative sample of a cross-section of businesses.

The vast majority of respondents either don’t monitor Kubernetes spending at all, 24%, or rely on monthly estimates only, 44%. Only 13% used accurate show-backs while 14% had a chargeback programme in place.

“As more organisations adopt cloud-native architectures and scale up Kubernetes environments, the associated cloud costs will rise,” the report said. “However, the FinOps for Kubernetes survey uncovered a disconnect between these rising expenses and how well most respondents have been able to accurately and effectively monitor Kubernetes costs, predict those costs, and instill processes that can curtail unnecessary overspend.

“Whether spending $10,000 per month or 100x that, the lack of real-time cost visibility and the insights and actions that organisations can take from that suggests that the majority of organizations leveraging Kubernetes can become significantly more cost-efficient – and do so without impacting performance.”

As cloud costs continue to rise for the majority of businesses, the report urges organisations to adopt processes and systems to track how much they spend. Firms should look beyond basic cost estimations and should instead seek to allocate costs back to granular environments and projects for show-back and chargeback.

This article originally appeared in the March edition of IT Pro 20/20, available here. To sign up to receive each new issue in your inbox, click here.

Firms move to the cloud for all manner of reasons, but right at the core is a desire to, in some way or another, do things better. To achieve that goal ‘better’ needs to be defined and performance measured both before and after implementation. But this is often easier said than done and performance measurement can be hard to quantify, especially when cloud is enabling something completely new.

The first step in measuring success is setting up your benchmarks or goals so that you have something against which to judge performance. But that’s not always easy, nor the metrics always obvious with cloud implementations, because true digital transformation will deliver a very different ‘after’ that simply might not have a ‘before’ to be directly compared with.

Phillip Morse, partner at global strategy consultancy Altman Solon, tells IT Pro: “It’s important to set goals that measure what the cloud means to business outcomes and not focus on metrics isolated to IT services alone. For example, setting goals that measure a better customer journey, improved sales metrics, and more uptime would measure the overall service level quality of the company not just its IT services.”

That’s a view also expressed by Sandeep Kumar, vice president and head of future of technology at Capgemini, who says: “Organisations that struggle with cloud strategy do so because they do not understand and measure correctly the business value impact of cloud.” He explains that faster time to market and access to different technical capabilities can lead to very different business propositions – the inference being that the ‘before’ and ‘after’ may not measure like against like.

Making the leap from SMART to HARD

Organisational changes made in a cloud implementation can cut right across different parts of the business, meaning that it’s hard to set metrics against which to measure early on.

Ahmed Alainiah, technical and operations manager at Talbott’s Biomass Energy Systems, explains how his goal setting process has adapted to the changes brought about by digital transformation.

“Although businesses will generally set their goals to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time bound), I strongly believe that goals can’t be always measurable and a leap of faith is required between now and then.” This approach can be necessary when a cloud strategy puts in place new systems that don’t have a direct comparator with the old.

“You can always reset your goals when you've got enough data to 'right size' expectations,” he says, adding that for him this is encapsulated in transforming SMART goals to HARD ones (Heartfelt, Animated, Required, Difficult), with a focus on “lead results, acting lean, and adapting to change so we achieve the best results possible”.

Measuring financial savings

There’s still a lot of room for traditional metrics, however. Nick McQuire, chief of research, enterprise at CSS Insight, tells IT Pro that “most firms do set financial goals, and cost reduction has become even more central to cloud strategies during the pandemic. We are seeing enterprises getting more ambitious with their cost reduction targets especially when it comes to offloading data centre and real estate costs, largely fuelled by the cash crunch many are experiencing at the moment”.

But these infrastructure savings are only part of the story. Kumar gives the example of a bank whose cloud API platform allowed automated self-enrolment, reducing onboarding time to one-fifth of the pre-cloud requirement. Upfront cloud platform and personnel costs were greater than continuing with its previous system, but brought financial and reputational benefits post-implementation.

Alainiah also extols the virtues of spending to save, telling IT Pro: “We hired a digital marketer to promote our project and generate online leads. No results could be gained or measured unless the conversion rate, site visit counts and social media channels, and so on were properly set up on the cloud, which I would say is very difficult to do until you have some baseline data to work with.” So, measurement and metrics can’t always start until the digital transformation is complete and in use. This makes goal setting and success measurement something of a leap of faith.

Navigating choppy waters

In navigating the choppy waters of measuring the success of a cloud strategy, it’s important to take a rounded approach. Morse tells IT Pro: “Taking a 360 degree look at how the cloud is improving customer experience is more valuable than measuring narrow, cloud-focused outcomes alone.” Kumar agrees, saying: “It’s important to be strategic about the goals organisations set for their cloud programme and ensure their goals are business focused and measured in business value terms.”

There is a role for the cloud provider to get ‘hands-on’ with this, according to McQuire, who says: “Setting the right goals is so important to the success and failure rate of cloud projects. In our view, more work needs to be done by the cloud providers to help businesses set and execute goals in this area moving forward.”

HPE has unveiled an overhaul of its storage business that has a greater focus on edge-to-cloud software and infrastructure, delivered through its consumption-based GreenLake subscription platform.

The new storage subscription model is comprised of three parts: a storage platform called the 'Data Services Cloud Console', new subscription services in its GreenLake Cloud service, and a storage management tool called HPE Alletra.

Considered the latest milestone in the company's larger shift towards a services model. The new subscription model aims to provide holistic cloud software provisioning, from billing to data processing, and also more financial flexibility for its customers.

The Data Services Cloud Console is an API with which customers can manage cloud and data-centric operations. It can be used for HPE-led application automation and developers can use it to access infrastructure and data as code.

HPE Alletra, however, is a completely new 'pay-as-you-go' suite of cloud storage tools, managed through the Data Services Cloud Console. It aims to deliver a unified operation from edge to cloud, with customers no longer needing to make specific hardware choices. Instead, Alletra will run on all-NVMe (nonvolatile memory express) HPE systems, which includes HPE Alletra 9000 and Alletra 6000.

The tech giant said the new offerings will simplify edge to cloud management, but there are some concerns, according to Forrester's cloud analyst, Naveen Chhabra. Customers will not only still need to have substantial technical knowledge to fully utilise the service, but the new model may do little to alleviate friction in the procurement process.

He also told IT Pro that decision-makers will have to evaluate the tech and overall pricing, which will require a full understanding of the finer details of the service, its payment model and the overall costs. What's more, he suggests that customers will still be responsible for their data centre facilities, which only adds to the complexity.

However, Chhabra also explained that companies moving to edge computing should not be seen as the "panacea" for data centre infrastructure vendors. While companies will require more compute storage infrastructure, HPE will be up against established firms that are already specialists in this area. The likes of Honeywell, Schlumberger, and Siemens already provide embedded tech infrastructure and Chhabra suggests it might be difficult for HPE to find traction with its pay-as-you-use offerings.

"Tech infrastructure, certainly, is an embedded solution in all these edge use-cases, but not the leading solution," argues Chhabra. "Hence, leading with an IT solution will not cut the ice much longer and deeper. These tech vendors that are going after edge use-cases and with flexible pay-per-use pricing will have to go to these vertical solution builders and get themselves embedded, to the point that the factory floor decision-maker won't even know whether it's HPE, Dell, or Lenovo under the hood."

"The tech infrastructure vendors will continue to remain relevant and known in the IT deployments but not in the true edge scenarios as they would like," Chhabra added. "Will businesses care if Siemens bases its solution on a low cost yet reliable system from an ABC vendor? Maybe not as much."

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Embattled Chinese telecoms giant Huawei is pivoting towards software and cloud services in a bid to attract more developers.

The firm launched six new cloud products over the weekend, further expanding its ambitions to take on the likes of Alibaba, Amazon, and Google, according to CNBC.

The six cloud products include containers, artificial intelligence (AI) programming assistants, databases, computing services and infrastructure software. Each was launched at the company's three-day developer conference in Shenzhen, which has cloud, AI and open source as its main theme.

The announcement also included a $200 million investment in Huawei's developer programme, which aims to boost its software ecosystem and cloud services.

Huawei's cloud efforts have paid off, according to Canalys Research, with revenues jumping 168% year on year in 2020. However, the firm is still far behind the likes of Amazon and Alibaba in China. Huawei Cloud is currently the second-largest player in China with a 17.4% market share, compared to Alibaba's 40%, according to Canalys.

"By 2025, 100% of enterprises around the globe will be utilising cloud technology," said Richard Yu Chengdong, executive director of Huawei. "Cloud is the future of the ICT industry and the foundation for enterprises digital transformation. Developers are the soul of the industry."

The cloud update comes after a tough year for Huawei, with its hardware unit struggling in the face of US sanctions. Its 5G equipment and services have been shunned in the US and UK over security fears and its smartphone sales have declined swiftly. It is widely believed that the lack of Google services on its Mate and P series of handsets is a big turn off for Western customers - although reports also suggest a decline in China too.

The firm has been rapidly building out its own operating system, pivoting Harmony OS from an IoT-focused platform to one that can work on high-end smartphones. It is due to be released on Huawei handset in the coming weeks, but it's still in need of development and is a far cry from Android.

Cloud services are more secure, sustainable, agile, and cost-effective than ever before and companies are finding fewer reasons to stay on-premises (also known as ‘on-prem’). In fact, nine out of ten new Atlassian customers choose cloud over on-prem—and even die-hard traditionalists are starting to make the move.

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It is expected that over the next two years, there will be a 45% increase in organisations running more than 30% of their production applications on public cloud infrastructure. Hybrid cloud is clearly becoming the default configuration for most organisations, combining growing public cloud usage with existing on-premises workloads.

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IDC Research hails the recently launched IBM Maximo Application Suite, which provides asset monitoring, maintenance and reliability applications in one single integrated platform, as a "bold move in the right direction for IBM".

Read IDC's point of view on the new Maximo solution, with a particular focus on the flexibility of multi-cloud deployment as well as the new licensing model that helps businesses scale up by easily installing additional applications as needed.

IBM has ditched subscription-based cloud pricing in favour of a 'pay as you go' scheme as it continues to transform its central focus to cloud provision.

With the Cloud Pay as you Go with Committed Use model, customers will need to negotiate a certain amount of cloud usage they’d be committing to pay for month after month, as well as discounted pricing.

IBM's main selling point for its new cloud pricing model is that customers won't be met with penalties for using more than is expected. Instead, customers will be charged at the normal discounted rate they’ve negotiated for their expected cloud usage.

"With this billing model, you commit to spend a certain amount on IBM Cloud and you also receive discounts across the Cloud platform,” said Amit Patel, offering management, direct sales and Haley Lucey, IBM cloud content experience.

"You are billed monthly based on your usage, and unlike a subscription, you continue to receive a discount even after you reach your yearly committed amount."

The change comes after another mixed round of financial results for the computing giant, with a 10% surge in cloud growth overshadowed by the sharpest overall revenue decline in five years.

IBM's cloud business earned $7.5 billion during Q4, with revenue from Red Hat also increasing by 19%. However, this wasn't enough to raise overall revenues, which dropped 6% between October and December.

The pivot to pay as you go pricing is also part of a wider shift in pricing strategy, with IBM also announcing last week that it’s raised the prices of its Enterprise Plan for Db2 on Cloud programme from January 2021.

The console user experience is also getting an overhaul, IBM says, with changes including visualisation of progress towards a cloud commitment, with ways to identify any discount, spending progress and remaining time on a commitment.

Customers can also look at their spending break down, month by month, as well as a detailed usage dashboard for each specific calendar month.

US web infrastructure firm Cloudflare has devised its own tool that lets web developers build and host websites.

Taking advantage of the company’s global infrastructure network, Cloudflare Pages is a hosting service that supports platforms built directly on the edge using the JAMstack architecture.

The firm has described this as “the next breakthrough in the web performance battle” due to the way it takes advantage of edge computing, with Cloudflare claiming performance will be almost twice as fast as other platforms.

Beyond this, Cloudflare also suggests its Pages service will be secure and scalable, saving developers time on integrated disparate systems, as well as benefitting from seamless GitHub integration to ease the development process.

“From day one Cloudflare was built to service developers. Over the last ten years, millions of developers have counted on us for our network performance and security services,” said Matthew Prince, Cloudflare CEO and co-founder. “With Cloudflare Pages, we're now providing them with a scalable, fast, secure, cost-effective platform to build next-generation applications that they can deploy globally.

“Internally, we believe it's only a matter of time before an individual developer builds a billion-dollar company on their own. We hope Cloudflare Pages will provide the building blocks to help make our belief a reality.”

Its scalability can be attributed to the fact it’s built on Cloudflare’s global network of more than 200 cities, the company added, while running on the edge means Pages will be within 100 milliseconds of 99% of the internet-connected population.

The firm is also hoping to soon integrate Cloudflare Pages with its Cloudflare Workers serverless development platform, so users can integrate third-party APIs into their own platforms. This will allow frontend developers versed in JavaScript to build scalable backends to their applications in the same language.

The security of the platform, meanwhile, is being assured with free SSL as standard, alongside the firm’s Web Application Firewall (WAF). The company will also provide support for the latest web standards with HTTP/3, the QUIC transport layer network protocol, and image compression.

UK mobile network operator Giffgaff has outlined plans to shift its entire IT infrastructure and operations to Amazon Web Services (AWS), completing its migration from on-premise data centres by the end of the year.

Giffgaff will opt into more than 60 of AWS' 175 cloud services, the company announced, including compute, analytics, storage, databases, containers and machine learning. In doing so, the firm will become the first European mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) to be powered by AWS in its entirety.

The company will have shifted its IT infrastructure and application development operations to AWS by 2021, as it aims to become more capable of experimenting at pace, and speeding up a host of internal processes. The company claims to have already transformed its development lifecycle from a complex and monolithic approach to a modern, microservices-based architecture that’s enabled fast-paced development.

“We started out with a traditional, on-premises infrastructure, but the need for ongoing maintenance made this model overwhelming for our technical team. For example, it used to take us up to two weeks to provision a new server,” said chief operating and technical officer at Giffgaff, Steve MacDonald.

“When we began to adopt AWS, we were able to turbocharge our development lifecycle by focusing on innovation rather than wasting time on maintenance. It’s such a powerful capability for a digital-native business like ours.”

While the announcement is still fresh, the firm has been partnering with AWS for some time already, using AWS analytics and machine learning services, for example, to understand members’ network experiences.

Aggregating and analysing data across all cases helped the company create an early warning system for network incidents. Prior to moving to AWS, too, it could take Giffgaff up to two weeks to provision a server, which can now be done within a matter of minutes.

Adopting a continuous delivery approach, and moving containerised workloads to the fully managed Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), meanwhile, has freed up 3,000 days of engineering and development time, according to Giffgaff.

This is equivalent to refocusing up to 15 people on innovation, and has allowed them to devote more resources to creating new apps for members.

Implementing a hybrid multi-cloud strategy that fits your organisation’s needs can be complicated. You need a way to operate seamlessly across physical, virtual, and cloud. Join us to learn how Veritas provides the tools you need.

The COVID-19 crisis has had a profound impact on all of us, but one of the most drastic changes has been to business IT. Digital transformation and remote collaboration have been catapulted to the top of CIOs’ priority list, and companies have found themselves supporting scores of remote workers.

But with a vaccine tantalisingly close to rollout, how will these trends evolve once it’s safe to go back to the office? Joining us this week to discuss the potential long-term impact of COVID on the UK’s cloud market is Frank Jennings, commercial & cloud Lawyer at Wallace LLP.

Footnotes

• Post COVID-19: The end of the office as we know it?
• Navigating the public cloud
• Alibaba's cloud growth outpaces AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud
• Cloud infrastructure spending surges 33% in Q3
• What is a managed IT service?
• How the enterprise can embrace hybrid cloud
• Five minutes with… Adam Gerrard, Yodel CDO
• What are the risks of cloud adoption?
• Five reasons why digital transformation is essential for business growth
• Digital transformation? Don’t bother unless you plan to address risk
• Brexit could cost UK firms £1.6bn if data-sharing agreement isn’t reached
• European court invalidates primary EU-US data transfer mechanism
• What is GDPR? Everything you need to know, from requirements to fines
• Now is the time to embrace remote working
• Microsoft overhauls its privacy policy amid EU concerns
• Managing cloud lifecycles
• The road to recovery: Growing your business in China
• Why you need to include the cloud in your disaster recovery plan
• Channel Pro

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