Palo Alto Networks is set to shift key security workloads to Google Cloud as part of a multi-billion deal that expands the companies' existing partnership.

The security firm and cloud giant said the deal aimed to make it easier for companies to keep systems and data secure as AI is rolled out – a key concern among many in the industry thanks to a rise in AI-related security incidents.

"Every board is asking how to harness AI's power without exposing the business to new threats," said BJ Jenkins, President of Palo Alto Networks. "This partnership answers that question."

"We're removing the friction between security and development, providing a unified platform where the most advanced security is simply a native part of building what's next,” Jenkins added.

“Together with Google, we are embedding our AI-powered security deep into the Google Cloud fabric, turning the platform itself into a proactive defense system."

Moving to Google

The deal will protect live AI workloads on Google Cloud – making it easier for existing customers of both to maintain security policies and help boost Google Cloud adoption, the companies noted.

Part of this will see Palo Alto Networks migrate key internal workloads to Google Cloud, with Palo Alto shifting to Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform and Gemini large language models (LLMs) to power its AI agents.

Part of the deal will involve creating new security services powered by AI, Jenkins told Reuters.

Matt Renner, president and chief revenue officer at Google Cloud, said that the partnership would make life easier for companies that were already working with both providers on application and data security.

"This latest expansion of our partnership will ensure that our joint customers have access to the right solutions to secure their most critical AI infrastructure and develop new AI agents with security built in from the start," Renner said in a statement.

Neither company has publicly confirmed financial details of the deal, but a source told Reuters that Palo Alto would spend an amount "approaching $10 billion" over the next several years.

The companies have long had a tight partnership, with Palo Alto CEO Nikesh Arora formerly working at Google.

Securing AI infrastructure

Palo Alto Networks said its recent State of Cloud report revealed that 99% of respondents had identified at least one attack against their AI infrastructure of the previous year.

The new deal with Google Cloud is an attempt to address that challenge by adding security into multi-cloud infrastructure.

That includes end-to-end security for AI workloads and data on Google Cloud using Palo Alto Networks Prisma AIRS platform. This offers enterprises AI-driven firewalls to secure all types of cloud setups and a secure access service edge (SASE) platform to protect network access for remote workers, mobile devices, and branch offices.

"The deep alignment between the two companies ensures that customer solutions are pre-vetted and engineered to work together, removing the integration challenges and operational friction that can slow down security teams," the companies said in a statement.

"This allows customers to deploy protection faster, simplify compliance and gain a single, comprehensive view of security across their entire hybrid multi-cloud environment."

This is the cloud giant's latest security play. Earlier this year, Google announced plans to acquire Wiz security for $32 billion.

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The cloud is inescapable in 2025. It’s a $750 billion industry that underpins the vital applications, services, and platforms that power the digital economy.

Yet after more than a decade of enterprise migration and innovation in the cloud, analysis from IT infrastructure firm Kyndryl suggests many spent that time building sprawling, splintered architectures without a clear cut end goal in mind.

In the company’s annual Cloud Readiness Report 70% of CEOs admit they built their current cloud environment “by accident, rather than by design” – this often entailed periodic upgrades aimed at addressing short-term needs, rather than focusing on longer term strategic improvements.

Kyndryl said this shows that many lacked a “deliberate strategy” when pursuing cloud transformation projects, and the effects of this are starting to show with huge workload pressure placed on cloud environments, as well as growing security threats and evolving regulatory requirements.

“If companies benefitted from happenstance in the past, those days are over,” the report states. “Cloud success is no longer a matter of luck but design. The enterprises that thrive now are those that approach cloud as the foundation for intelligence, adaptability, and trust.”

AI is among one of the key factors bringing this lack of clear cut focus to light in 2025, according to Kyndryl. Organizations have increased cloud spending by 30% on average so far this year in a bid to supercharge AI adoption and build out infrastructure capacity to meet demand.

89% said these cloud investments have “made it easier to use AI” and have proved beneficial in underpinning adoption projects. Poorly designed, piecemeal cloud environments are hampering innovation on this front, however, the study added.

Indeed, 35% cited integration challenges as a top barrier to delivering a return on investment (ROI) with the technology.

Hybrid and multi-cloud in the spotlight

According to Kyndryl, hybrid and multi-cloud represent the light at the end of the tunnel for many enterprises locked in monolithic, rigid cloud setups.

Both these approaches have gained significant traction in recent years, the study found, with 84% of IT leaders revealing they now “intentionally use multiple clouds”.

Meanwhile, 41% are switching to a hybrid approach, repatriating data to on-premises environments while still hosting non-critical workloads on public cloud. This enables enterprises to balance control, compliance, and performance, the study noted.

“The gap between a reactive and deliberate cloud strategy has never been more consequential,” said Nicolas Sekkaki, global cloud practice leader at Kyndryl.

“With AI demanding seamless data access and governance requirements rapidly evolving, a hybrid cloud model is the differentiator that enables successful AI adoption,” he added.

AI-related considerations aren’t the only driving factor behind the shift to hybrid cloud, however. Kyndryl noted that geopolitical concerns and a concerted focus on data sovereignty, spurred on by regulatory requirements, are also influencing the trend.

75% of leaders said they were concerned about “the geopolitical risks associated with storing and managing data in global cloud environments”, for example, while 65% revealed they’ve “made changes to their cloud strategies” because of compliance concerns.

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Google Cloud has announced the launch of a new multi-cloud data transfer service for enterprises based in the UK and European Union (EU).

In a blog post Jeanette Manfra, senior director for global risk and compliance at Google Cloud, said the new Data Transfer Essentials scheme comes in direct response to cloud interoperability principles outlined in the EU Data Act.

“Data Transfer Essentials is a new, simple solution for data transfers between Google Cloud and other cloud service providers,” Manfra said.

Notably, under the terms of the EU Data Act, cloud providers are allowed to “pass through costs to customers” for data transfers. Manfra noted that the Google service will come “at no cost to customers”.

Key competitors including Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) also provide data transfer options for customers. In Microsoft's case these come at a cost to the enterprise, while AWS allows EU customers to transfer data at a reduced rate.

“The original promise of the cloud is one that is open, elastic, and free from artificial lock-ins,” Manfra wrote.

“Google Cloud continues to embrace this openness and the ability for customers to choose the cloud service provider that works best for their workload needs.”

What to expect with Google Cloud's data transfer scheme

According to Google, the new service is specifically designed for “in-parallel” processing of workloads distributed across multiple cloud providers, giving enterprises greater flexibility.

“Data Transfer Essentials enables you to build flexible, multi-cloud strategies and use the best-of-breed solutions across different cloud providers,” Manfra said.

“This can foster greater digital operational resilience – without incurring outbound data transfer costs from Google Cloud.”

Data transfer costs, also known as “egress fees”, have become a point of contention in the cloud computing industry in recent years.

With enterprises flocking to hybrid and multi-cloud strategies, the costs associated with transferring workloads to alternative providers have been a major hurdle.

Indeed, egress fees were a key talking point in a recent probe into the state of the UK’s cloud computing industry. The investigation, conducted by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) following an initial probe by Ofcom, found egress fees created significant barriers to multi-cloud adoption.

“Customers face both commercial and technical barriers when seeking to multi-cloud or switch their cloud provider and many currently think that the costs outweigh the benefits,” the CMA reported in early August.

“Barriers to multi-cloud negatively affect many customers’ ability to use and integrate multiple public clouds, and this limits customers’ ability and incentive to exercise choice over their cloud provider."

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As geopolitical tensions mount, UK IT decision makers are getting increasingly wary about using US cloud providers.

Research from Asanti found 95% of IT leaders are concerned about data sovereignty while a similar number have voiced worries about data residency. The result is that more than half (52%) are now taking strategic steps to reduce their exposure to US providers.

45% of those currently using US public cloud platforms said they plan to actively limit their data’s exposure to US jurisdiction in light of recent political developments.

“Organizations are becoming more aware and more wary of where their data is stored and who has jurisdiction over it,” said Stewart Laing, CEO of Asanti. “It’s no longer just about performance or cost. It’s about trust, control, and strategic sovereignty.”

There were other issues, however. More than three-quarters of those using US public cloud said that the operating costs were higher than they'd expected, and virtually all said they'd faced challenges during the migration.

On top of the costs, those bringing applications back on-premise or into colocation facilities cited limited control and customization, low data transfer for real-time applications, and security, compliance, and risk management concerns.

Two-thirds said they wished they'd taken a hybrid approach rather than going all-in on public options.

"Adapting organizational processes and culture to the cloud-based way of working was a significant challenge in migrating to public cloud," said one respondent:

"One of the biggest challenges was making sure that sensitive financial data was safe, and adhered to regulatory requirements,” another added.

The rise in companies building their own AI applications is also prompting many to reconsider their use of public cloud.

With the huge amounts of data storage and processing required, subscription models can be expensive, data transfer speeds can be too low for real-time applications, and compliance can be complicated and risky on globally distributed cloud servers.

Repatriation is easier said than done

Repatriation is by no means a simple task, however, and those embarking on this process have encountered significant challenges.

Of those actively pursuing cloud repatriation, 38% cited the complexity of moving applications back to internal systems, while 36% complained about inflexible contracts or cloud vendor lock-in.

Nearly half (41%) said they were worried about a lack of internal skills for repatriation.

Overall, while most people weren't unhappy with the cloud, they wished they had kept more applications in their own IT architecture - and that they'd planned better before taking the plunge.

Half said they should have used external consultants, and 45% that they should have made sure they better understood the public cloud providers' terms and conditions.

Four-in-ten believe they should have carried out more internal due diligence.

“Cloud is powerful – but not perfect. The lesson here is that infrastructure strategy needs to be driven by business needs, not vendor hype,” said Laing.

“We strongly advise UK organizations to revisit their current and future hosting strategies with a more critical eye, especially as AI workloads, regulatory scrutiny, and cyber threats escalate.”

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While cloud adoption continues apace, new research from Gartner suggests a significant portion of enterprises will experience ‘dissatisfaction’ in their journey in the coming years.

Analysis from the consultancy predicts 25% of organizations will experience frustration in cloud adoption projects by 2028, with a host of major hurdles causing problems.

Among these are unrealistic expectations of what the cloud can deliver, according to Gartner, as well as issues relating to poor implementation and rising costs.

“To remain competitive, companies need a clear cloud strategy and effective execution,” the consultancy said. “Gartner research indicates that those that have successfully addressed upfront strategic focus by 2029 will find their cloud dissatisfaction will decrease.”

Missed expectations in particular have been a major pain point for enterprises in recent years. Indeed, research from IDC in late 2024 noted that the growing ‘cloud repatriation’ trend had been driven by lackluster results.

Cloud repatriation entered the corporate lexicon in early 2023 when 37 Signals - the SaaS firm behind Basecamp - revealed plans to move back on-prem and save money due to rising cloud costs.

The project has since paid dividends for the company, with CTO David Heinemeier Hansson claiming the firm saved over $1 million within a matter of months.

Cloud costs have also been a recurring concern among adopters over the last two and a half years, with prices skyrocketing in late 2022. Alternative research aligning with Gartner’s shows cloud implementation and management failures have been a leading factor behind rising costs.

Research from Boomi in association with Forrester in mid-2024 showed many companies were slow to introduce cost remediation tactics, for example, or lacked a clear understanding of their own infrastructure.

This has a domino effect on the enterprise, the study found, and exacerbates wasteful spending. Statistics from the study showed nearly three-quarters (72%) of respondents exceeded their cloud budgets in the fiscal year running 2023-2024.

Firms can’t afford to botch cloud adoption in the age of AI

Enterprises flocking to the cloud are doing so at a critical time, according to Gartner.

AI and machine learning-related demands are expected to surge in the coming years, the study found, meaning organizations simply can’t afford to botch adoption strategies.

The consultancy predicts that 50% of cloud compute resources will be devoted to AI workloads by 2019, marking a huge increase from less than 10% in May 2025.

“This all points to a fivefold increase in AI-related cloud workloads by 2029,” said Joe Rogus, director of advisory at Gartner.

“Now is the time for organizations to assess whether their data centers and cloud strategies are ready to handle this surge in AI and ML demand. In many cases, they might need to bring AI to where the data is to support this growth.”

Multi-cloud challenges continue

The rise of generative AI has run in parallel with heightened interest in hybrid and multi-cloud options for enterprises, with many flocking to the latter due to the flexibility of working with multiple providers.

This too has its problems, however, and Gartner found many enterprises are encountering sizable hurdles, such problems with interoperability and poor overall results, which are contributing to the air of growing dissatisfaction.

“Many organizations that have adopted multi-cloud architecture find connecting to and between providers a challenge,” the consultancy said.

“This lack of interoperability between environments can slow cloud adoption, with Gartner predicting more than 50% of organisations will not get the expected results from their multi-cloud implementations by 2029.”

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Oracle is still focused heavily on driving multi-cloud adoption, doubling down on a message that came out of Oracle CloudWorld 2024 in Las Vegas a few months ago.

As part of Oracle CloudWorld Tour London 2025, the firm announced an expansion of its multi-cloud relationship with Azure, which includes the availability of ‘Oracle Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure on Oracle Database@Azure.’

This expansion will remove the need to provision dedicated database and storage servers, giving customers greater access to the benefits of Oracle Exadata Database Service.

Speaking at the event, Rajagopal Subramaniyan, SVP of OCI networking, covered some of the firm’s broader, strategic commitments to the multi-cloud landscape.

“Until now, the industry has lacked a deliberate multi-cloud solution. This has increased customers' complexity when it comes to moving data - the operational complexity and cost is extremely troublesome for customers,” Subramaniyan said.

“Today, we are giving you the ability, the flexibility to keep your existing cloud infrastructure investments while leveraging Oracle's Database Cloud Services natively to run your operation workloads,” he added.

He asked the audience to think of this as a transition from a ‘walled garden’ approach to a ‘network of clouds’ approach that allows for more flexibility.

“Multi-cloud is the connective tissue that unites your existing clouds into one,” Subramaniyan said.

“You can maximize the value of each of your cloud investments, enabling them to come together. A multi-cloud eliminates the reliance on a single cloud provider. This means you have the flexibility now to run your workloads with the hyperscalers of your choice,” he added.

Jason Rees, SVP of technology and cloud infrastructure for Oracle EMEA, echoed a similar sentiment when speaking at a press briefing during the event, noting that the tech giant is intent on breaking down barriers for customers.

“Oracle has really led the way on this concept of choice, of multi-cloud, and what we recognized was the need for, rather than the industry creating walled gardens, we wanted to better break those down to make it easier,” Rees said.

Oracle is all in on multi-cloud

Multi-cloud partnerships were the rallying cry of the firm’s last big event in the US, with CTO Larry Ellison calling it “the beginning of the multi-cloud era” and talking up the firm’s mission of giving customers choice.

A key factor in this sharpened focus on multi-cloud lies in the benefits of this approach amidst the generative AI boom. Fostering closer collaborative ties with major industry counterparts will ultimately drive adoption of the technology and deliver benefits for enterprise customers.

“You – our customers – are what brings this all together for us,” Oracle CEO Safra Catz said, driving home the customer-centric aim.

The event’s biggest announcement was a new tie-up with AWS that allows customers to use Oracle’s database services in AWS environments and plug data from Oracle environments into AWS applications.

“Many of our long time rivals are now our partners … Microsoft, then Google, and now AWS,” Catz said.

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The rapid evolution of cloud computing has transformed the business landscape irrevocably. A recent study revealed that 46% of enterprises already use the public cloud, and an additional 8% plan to move more workloads to the cloud within 12 months. The trend is clear: cloud strategies are no longer just about cost savings – they’re fundamental to growth, innovation, and resilience.

Yet, as organizations increasingly adopt multi-cloud architectures to avoid vendor lock-in, optimize costs, and improve agility, they also encounter a range of complexities. For executives and leaders steering this shift, one key question remains: how do we enable seamless operations across multiple cloud platforms while ensuring scalability, security, and efficiency?

Multi-cloud as a strategic imperative

Multi-cloud DevOps is undeniably challenging, but with the right strategies, the single-cloud model has evolved into a multi-cloud strategy for most organizations. The benefits are undeniable – enhanced flexibility, reduced dependence on a single provider, and the ability to choose best-of-breed services for specific workloads.

The challenge, however, lies in execution. The lack of standardization is the Achilles’ heel of multi-cloud DevOps. Each hyperscaler brings its own tools, APIs, and processes, which can create operational silos and slow down the very agility these architectures aim to achieve. This is where the role of DevOps becomes pivotal. DevOps teams are the bridge between the promise of multi-cloud and its operational reality – but only if equipped with the right strategies and tools.

To address this, adopting infrastructure as code (IaC) solutions is essential. IaC allows teams to define and manage infrastructure programmatically, creating a consistent operational language across different clouds. This accelerates deployment cycles, reduces human error, and ensures repeatability. For example, with tools like Terraform or Pulumi, DevOps teams can create a common operational language, ensuring that processes run seamlessly across all platforms. This approach streamlines deployments and reduces human error, a common risk in manual configurations.

Additionally, containerization technologies like Docker and orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes play a critical role in creating a unified operational framework. These tools abstract the underlying infrastructure, enabling teams to deploy, scale, and manage applications consistently, regardless of the cloud provider.

Organizations that invest in these technologies are better positioned to tackle multi-cloud complexities head-on.

The role of automation in multi-cloud

Automation has always been a cornerstone of DevOps, but traditional automation techniques often fall short. This is where AI/ML is proving transformative. For instance, AI-powered monitoring tools can detect anomalies in real-time, suggest pre-emptive fixes, and even automate recovery processes, minimizing downtime and mitigating risks. Moreover, AI can automate labor-intensive tasks like generating test cases, writing documentation, and managing compliance requirements. This frees up DevOps engineers to focus on innovation rather than routine operational tasks.

The integration of AI into DevOps workflows is no longer optional – it’s essential. Many organizations leveraging AI to optimise their CI/CD pipelines have reported significant improvements in deployment speed, quality, and team productivity. These gains highlight the transformative potential of AI in overcoming the operational challenges of multi-cloud environments.

Security and compliance in a multi-cloud world

Security and compliance are among the most pressing concerns for any organisation adopting a multi-cloud strategy. Each cloud provider has unique compliance requirements, and managing these across multiple platforms can be tough. A fragmented approach to security can leave organizations vulnerable to data breaches and regulatory penalties.

The solution lies in adopting a DevSecOps model, which integrates security directly into the CI/CD pipeline. By embedding security checks at every stage of the development lifecycle, teams can identify and mitigate vulnerabilities early, ensuring that applications are secure before they are deployed.

Cross-cloud security frameworks and automated security protocols are also critical. These tools allow organizations to enforce consistent security policies across all platforms, reducing the risk of misconfigurations and compliance violations.

The shift from reactive to proactive security is one of the most significant developments in multi-cloud DevOps. By implementing security measures that are integrated, automated, and scalable, organizations can achieve the agility they need without compromising on integrity or compliance.

Fostering collaboration across teams

Multi-cloud DevOps isn’t just a technical challenge; it’s a cultural one. The need for close collaboration among diverse teams – developers, operations, security experts, cloud architects, and data scientists – is greater than ever. Without an environment that promotes shared learning and collaboration, even the most advanced tools and processes will fall short.

Fostering a culture of continuous learning is essential. Regular training sessions on multi-cloud best practices, hands-on workshops with emerging tools, and cross-functional team engagements can help bridge knowledge gaps. For example, hosting hackathons or innovation days focused on multi-cloud challenges can inspire creative solutions while encouraging collaboration.

Organizations must also invest in platforms that facilitate knowledge sharing and transparency. These can help streamline communication and keep everyone aligned on project goals and progress.

The future of DevOps in multi-cloud

The future of DevOps in multi-cloud environments will be shaped by AI-driven autonomy. Generative AI has the potential to go beyond automating routine tasks to support strategic decision-making. Imagine an AI system that generates deployment-ready code, provides predictive insights into potential risks, and even recommends adjustments to project roadmaps based on real-time data.

While this vision may seem futuristic, it’s closer than many realise. Forward-thinking organizations are already laying the groundwork for these capabilities by investing in AI research and development. Those who act now will be at the forefront of this next wave of innovation, gaining a significant competitive advantage in the process.

The journey to mastering multi-cloud DevOps is both complex and transformative. It requires more than just technological prowess; it demands a mindset shift, a commitment to continuous innovation, and a relentless focus on creating value. Organizations that succeed in this new era won’t just adapt to multi-cloud environments – they will harness their full potential to reimagine what’s possible and set the pace for the future of digital transformation.

Digital transformation has become something of a modern cliché, a catch-all term for organizations embarking on technology shifts and upgrades. As Deloitte noted recently, however, “organizations often struggle to determine which actions drive the most impact and which investments yield the most enterprise value”.

This suggests a hangover from the digital goldrush of the pandemic but it’s also a reflection of how organizations need more help to not just understand what they are buying but also in exploring different upgrade models, ecosystems, and licensing options.

The role of the channel should not be underestimated in making this happen. Of course, many channel partners already play a key role when it comes to providing advice and services around product implementation and integration, but when it comes to selling cloud services it can get a little hazy. 

Cloud providers have not always been the most forgiving when it comes to making it easy for partners and their customers to move between services.

This is unlikely to change, so what’s the answer? Demand for cloud is still increasingly driven, according to Canalys research, by ‘mega-trends’ such as cyber security, sustainability, and AI. 

Customers want flexibility in infrastructure to take advantage of these trends, where they can provide the most value. Whether this is on-premise or with public or private cloud providers, the point is simple.

If customers are to realize the true value of a hybrid multi-cloud policy, they need to be able to do so, easily and cost-effectively – and this will require a layer of software that sits across cloud services.

Double trouble

One of the biggest problems facing customers is the fact that the majority of vendors tend to charge twice for each cloud deployment. 

There are separate licenses for on-prem and public cloud deployments. If a customer has invested in on-prem, for example, it cannot be repurposed for public cloud.

This creates a big problem for customers looking to move forward with transformations, to take advantage of the benefits of hybrid cloud environments. 

Looking after existing investments in cloud, especially in a volatile economy, is not just prudent but should be entirely normal in the new age of IT infrastructure.

Cloud differs from traditional customer and reseller engagement; it needs to be more fluid to enable customers to really take advantage of rapid, on-going shifts in technology. 

No customer wants to be financially penalized for a decision that may have been right for the business 12 months ago. This is cloud's greatest strength, enabling flexibility and helping customers build resiliency and competitiveness.

For channel partners, this may seem like virgin territory. Some may see this double hit as an opportunity for short-term gain but the reality is technology is changing so fast that customers need increasing amounts of help to ensure they are in the best place possible to take advantage of these changes.

This, of course, can come at a cost, which is why licenses also need to be flexible. If a customer decides to shift to a multi-cloud environment, why should it have to pay twice? 

As vendors and channel partners it is our duty to reassess how we work with customers, how we can help them do more and be better businesses.

A license to control

We see this as a big opportunity for the channel to help shape hybrid cloud migration, adding value through licensing flexibility but also optimization of workloads. 

If we, as vendors, can change licensing to enable partners and their customers to drive infrastructure in a way that suits their businesses, then that has to be a good thing. By removing a barrier to change, we are opening up an opportunity to see a bigger picture.

The opportunity for partners here is increased service revenue. Workload optimization is increasingly key to getting value out of cloud investment. Not all workloads are equal after all. 

Customers need help in understanding this and recognizing the multiple benefits. As well as cost, there are further advantages such as reduced energy consumption, faster throughput, more unified data, and greater productivity.

This is why we believe in a portable license, a ‘bring your own license’ scheme that enables seamless portability of an on-premise license into a public cloud environment, supporting application migration and management across multiple clouds at no extra licensing cost. 

It’s about simplifying IT operations, across multiple environments, with flexible, interoperable solutions that fit with the specific needs of the customer. 

For some channel partners, this may represent a transformation of sorts, but at the moment all businesses need to be adaptable in order to embrace those changing customer needs. 

This is only going to get more pressing, as organizations explore the opportunities presented by what Canalys described as technology mega trends. 

For the channel, it is better to be on the front foot rather than standing still, helping customers identify the trends they can exploit to their benefit, instead of sitting on their heels and watching opportunity disappear into the distance.

At a time when enterprises are grappling with economic pressures while simultaneously managing the explosive growth of data, it’s critical for the channel to be flexible to the changing needs and demands of organizations.

But how can the channel respond when fundamental market shifts change enterprises’ business strategies and create new opportunities?  

Similarly, how can resellers and system integrators be profitable when technology trends are forcing end-user organizations to rethink their business and data management models?

Drivers of data mobilization

Take the transformation brought about by multi-cloud strategies and mobilization of enterprise data, for example. 

In recent years, we have seen the rise of multiple cloud offerings, mobile devices being deployed across entire workforces, and millions of sensors pumping out data in large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) applications, all of which have created massive data flows at the edge.

This mobilization of data has been further accelerated by hybrid working and re-engineering of supply chains to achieve resilience. 

If you add in the startling growth of unstructured data like images, designs – reckoned to be around 75% of data generated by 2025 - it can’t be stored in traditional databases, and there is scope for enterprises to achieve new levels of data intelligence and customer insight.

Trusted partnerships – four main characteristics

These sea changes in data’s generation and use have rapidly undermined the wisdom of tying enterprise data to on-premises data centers and storage infrastructures. 

As a result, vendors are placing emphasis on trusted strategic partnerships to help meet partners’ business goals and enterprise customers’ more sophisticated data needs in the multi-cloud era. 

The right channel partnership has four main characteristics: 

Building long-term trust

The first element of successful partnerships is a focus on strategic, long-term, relationships with trusted channel partners that deliver phased revenue growth. 

This should be a key focus, rather than resorting to short-term tactics such as widening distribution arrangements or rapidly appointing an abundance of untested partners. 

The most effective way to deliver these end customer goals is through establishing, investing in and nurturing strong and transparent partnerships with a core of proven UK partners. 

Calling upon expert knowledge

The second characteristic is partners’ expertise. UK organizations have understandably been buffeted by cost pressures and global upheavals. 

As such, they urgently require effective strategies for managing and liberating their unstructured data. 

Most of all, they want to better understand how they can leverage the cloud offerings for complete scalability across their business, achieve greater savings and simplicity, while protecting critical data against ever-growing cyber threats.

Revenue generation focus

Third, to help channel partners boost their knowledge and make money from multi-cloud opportunities, vendors need a sustained focus on developing joint revenue development strategies with their channel partners’ sales teams, with initiatives in various areas:

1. Investing in market development with each partner and securing strategic accounts using market intelligence and establishing joint sales opportunities.
2. Maintaining strong alliances with global providers to enable sales opportunities for large enterprises with an international footprint.
3. A continual focus on service excellence; continuously updating and supplying sales and technical training, face-to-face partner training and regular product development sessions for partners’ sales and technology delivery teams.

Joint innovation models

The fourth component of partnership success is agile innovation, such as capitalizing on the rise of open source and collaborating with modern technology – the joint innovation model. 

Vendors can also help channel partners enhance profitability, based on innovative approaches to alliance capabilities and by trailing and testing new profitability models. 

In the multi-cloud arena, vendors are continuing to invest in new capabilities in hybrid cloud storage which makes enterprises’ file data systems more agile, scalable and cost-effective for partners and end users alike. At the same time, cybersecurity continues to be an acute challenge that businesses are facing.

Over the last 12 months, 69% of large businesses in the UK say they have experienced a breach. As such, being ready for cyber-attacks like ransomware is critical for organizations. To help with this challenge, modern hybrid cloud platforms are now providing ransomware detection and recovery capabilities. 

These new features enable organizations that experience ransomware attacks to wind back to the precise moment before the attack and rapidly restore file systems at multiple edge points from there –  in a matter of minutes. 

This is a last line of defense for businesses, as they can mitigate and detect attacks with their hybrid cloud platform to further bolster security. 

Hybrid cloud providers are also providing open-source repositories to help partners capture potential ideas for new product developments from end-user interactions and challenges for personalized product development. 

The future of the channel relies on strong partnerships

The mobilization of enterprises’ data to edge applications and hybridized workplaces has posed questions for customer organizations and channel partners alike. 

They need to adapt and tackle the acute challenges presented by this acceleration of digitisation, including scaling existing solutions at a manageable cost for unprecedented data growth, while protecting files in a landscape of increasing cyber threat. 

But change brings opportunity with it, too. By building long-term channel strategies based on trusted relationships, collaborating with expert partners, a mutual focus on revenue generation, and a joint approach to innovation, vendors are helping partners grow and ensure successful business transformation in the cloud era.

Organizations are continuing to waste money on cloud resources that they do not require, with 50% admitting that overprovisioning of cloud resources was a major factor.

Idle or underused resources came just behind and a lack of skills was blamed by 43% of respondents to a survey.

Other factors included “temporary” cloud resources that are never ended, such as a service trialed by a customer that is never switched off, along with varying geographical costs resulting in more spending than expected.

The report from HashiCorp and Forrester, released this week, indicated the issue of overspending has not changed from last year’s figures.

Overprovisioning occurs when a customer reserves resources in the cloud, such as CPU or storage, but doesn’t actually use them. 

While overprovisioning may simply appear like bad management or a loss of administrative control at first glance, the increasingly complex nature of cloud tooling can lead to customers buying services that are not necessarily needed.

While it might be possible to dynamically allocate resources in some instances - serverless architecture is a good example - this can result in performance or capacity issues, meaning reserving resources in advance is often unavoidable. 

One solution to the challenge of overprovisioning is careful monitoring of actual usage in order to optimize cloud spend and gain visibility over one’s estate.

The adoption of best practices across an entire organization, such as using automation and infrastructure-as-code, can also cut down on overprovisioning through the implementation of well-defined processes around resource usage while also improving scalability. 

HashiCorp’s report noted that the approach of adopting best practices also lends itself well to a multi-cloud environment. Almost all of the organizations surveyed that had done so said that multi-cloud was working well for them, or would be shortly. 

The potential difficulties in adopting those practices should not be underestimated, though, the report read. 

An issue that pervades the IT industry, 27% of respondents said skill shortages was one factor complicating the operationalization of multi-cloud in their organization. Siloed teams and a lack of training were also concerns.

Once best practices are in place, or well on the way, organizations are then well-placed to take advantage of savings by selecting services from a variety of vendors and avoid being locked-in to one particular cloud.

While avoidable cloud spend appears static compared to the previous year, the report concluded organizations that are further along the journey to the adoption of best cloud practices, including the creation of a platform team, reported a reduction in overprovisioned, idle, or underused resources as contributing factors.

The storage industry is entering a period of expected growth despite challenging economic conditions, with research from Fortune Business Insights predicting that the market will surge from a 2023 valuation of $247.3 billion to $777.9 billion by 2030.

This growth rate highlights the insatiable appetite among businesses globally, driven by both a rapid growth of data volumes and heightened demand for artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, and cloud-based services, the study suggests.

It's against this optimistic backdrop that Pure Storage heads into its Pure Accelerate annual conference, a 1,000 attendee-strong celebration of data storage and management being held in Las Vegas next week. Sustainability is also likely to get plenty of airtime, as well as cloud-native development, data management, and data protection.

Artificial intelligence in the spotlight

As one might expect, AI is set to feature heavily at Pure Accelerate 2023, with a range of sessions catered specifically for data engineers, IT leaders, and data scientists tasked with “building and innovating around data pipelines”.

The company has positioned itself as a key vendor in the emerging AI space in recent years, serving organizations spanning the media and entertainment, financial services, and pharmaceutical industries.

In May this year, the company announced a partnership with South Korean-based voice recognition provider, MediaZen, to provide the FlashBlade storage platform for use in its R&D operations.

This will enable MediaZen to markedly improve time-to-market for its AI services and modernize its legacy storage architecture, the companies said at the time.

The generative AI boom of the last nine months, prompted by the emergence of systems such as ChatGPT, has heralded the rapid adoption of automated systems among businesses globally.

But this shift means business considerations such as reliability, scalability, and cost are now more pressing than ever, leading organizations to assess how their IT architecture can accommodate for adoption.

 Ahead of the conference, Charlie Giancarlo, CEO at Pure Storage told ITPro that the company views recent generative AI developments as a prime opportunity to capitalize on this burgeoning market space – and it’s an area Pure Storage has an established foothold in.

“It’s clear that our continued innovation strongly resonates with our customers, whether it’s for artificial intelligence and machine learning, rapid recovery from ransomware, high performance databases, electronic design automation and video editing, traditional or cloud-native applications, and now also for secondary storage environments such as content and media stores, enterprise imaging, and even traditional backup and archive,” he said.

Sustainability and green supply chain innovation

Pure Storage customers and partners will be well aware of the growing necessity of supply chain sustainability and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations.

Sessions at the conference will explore the unique sustainability-related challenges that both customers and partners currently face.

This will include how to develop a ‘greener’ data storage estate and how sustainability and energy efficiency have emerged as key considerations for IT decision makers today.

Last year, Pure Storage announced a comprehensive shift toward advancing its sustainability efforts and enabling customers to curtail their environmental footprint.

This included the launch of the new Pure1 Sustainability Assessment, which gives customers broader visibility of their environmental impact and provides recommended steps to optimize energy efficiency.

The company has also sharpened its focus on improving the sustainability of its core products, including the FlashBlade//S suite of tools. These now provide more than double the power efficiency as previous versions, the company said.

Bucking industry challenges

Pure Accelerate 2023 comes amid a challenging period for the data storage industry, with acute macroeconomic factors placing strain on both providers and customers alike.

Despite this, Giancarlo said that the company has performed well during difficult operating conditions, adding that there are emerging opportunities for growth in the coming months.

While its most recent earnings call showed a 5% decrease in year-on-year revenue to $589 million, the company still exceeded analyst expectations.

“We were pleased with our recent Q1 performance in what continues, overall, to be a challenging IT environment,” Giancarlo told ITPro. “While we saw continuing caution by enterprise and cloud customers in Q1 similar to what we saw in Q4, we also experienced enhanced demand for our most cost efficient solutions, especially Evergreen//One.”

Giancarlo said the company expects to continue increasing its market share and “pick up even greater momentum” amid a flurry of new products and services rolling out in the year ahead.

ITPro will be covering Pure Accelerate 2023 live from Resorts World Las Vegas between 12 June and 16 June. To stay up-to-date with the latest news and announcements from the conference, follow our live blogs and subscribe to our newsletter.

Data security provider Cohesity has expanded its partnership with Google Cloud and unveiled Cohesity Turing, a new set of AI technologies that integrate into its multi-cloud data platform. 

Speaking at its Cohesity Catalyst virtual conference, the firm said the development will enable organizations to leverage their entire data estate through a single, secure workflow that covers on-premises, multi-cloud, and edge environments.

The expanded partnership adds integration between Cohesity Data Cloud, Cohesity’s AI-ready data security and management platform, and Vertex AI, Google Cloud’s fully managed machine learning (ML) platform that helps businesses accelerate the deployment of ML and AI models.

By combining its own capabilities with Vertex AI, customers can gain new insights into the same data they are already securing and managing on the Cohesity platform, the firm said. 

Customers could, for example, quickly search across large swathes of data to discover threats, answer specific questions, or quickly recover data using contextual searches.

“Vertex AI is one of the best platforms for building, deploying, managing, and scaling ML models - and we’re excited that Cohesity is joining our growing open ecosystem to help more customers get value from their data via AI,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO at Google Cloud. 

“Cohesity’s excellent data security and management capabilities, combined with Google Cloud’s powerful generative AI and analytics capabilities, will help customers get exceptional insights into their backup and archived data.”

What is Cohesity Turing?

Essentially, Cohesity Turing is a collection of AI/ML tools and technologies designed to power deeper insights for customers. 

Currently, users can use it for ransomware anomaly detection through advanced modelling, advanced threat intelligence, data classification, as well as predictive capacity planning with machine-driven recommendations.

Cohesity said it plans to continue expanding the offering’s capabilities as new AI needs emerge, while also promoting its responsible and safe implementation.

Coming soon, customers will also be able to gain further benefits from Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) AI model workflows, which are designed to derive deeper insights or quickly find content in petabytes of data.

In an announcement, Cohesity president and CEO Sanjay Poonen said that to gain the transformative benefits from generative AI, businesses require rapid insights from their data utilizing cutting-edge and leading AI/ML models. 

“We are excited to be leading the charge in generative AI in the data security and management industry, as we build out next-gen generative AI solutions for our category,” he said.

“We also agree with Google that AI must be handled securely and responsibly. With our unique platform, Cohesity not only provides phenomenal search via our built-in indexing capabilities, but robust security protocols to help customers maintain control and privacy of their data at every turn.”

Expanded integrations

Speaking at the Catalyst event, Cohesity also announced an expansion of the Data Security Alliance. 

Netskope, ServiceNow, and Zscaler are now part of the group, which was set up by Cohesity back in November 2022 to help businesses better defend against cyber attacks through vendor collaboration.

They join the existing pool of members, which includes BigID, Cisco, CyberArk, Mandiant, Okta, Palo Alto Networks, PwC UK, Qualys, Securonix, and Splunk.

“With the addition of new security partners Netskope, ServiceNow, and Zscaler and our growing portfolio of security integrations, we have one of the most robust data security ecosystems in the industry to help fight the threat of attacks,” Poonen said.

Dell has unveiled a wide-reaching expansion of its Apex offerings, including multiple public cloud storage solutions and a cloud platform portfolio to provide multi-cloud by design architecture.

With Apex Cloud Platforms, Dell aims to provide customers with infrastructure, software, and cloud in collaboration with Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware.

Apex Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure and for VMware expand the choice of public cloud customers when it comes to stack software deployment, with the former highlighted for its centralized data management and governance through Azure Arc integration.

Also announced was Apex Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift, through which Dell will provide multi-cloud container orchestration.

Chuck Whitten, co-COO at Dell emphasized that Dell has sought to provide customers with choice and flexibility when it comes to their cloud setup, in particular for those that have already invested in a multi-cloud environment across these various vendors.

“I’m excited about this,” said Matt Hicks, CEO at Red Hat.

“When we look at something like OpenShift, we have to create this marriage between the application platform that OpenShift provides built on Kubernetes and extending it with the actual infrastructure.

“I think that combination with Apex Cloud Platform, and the deep integration with OpenShift consoles management lets you use the skills that you have, and offers more of that choice of being able to run that on-premise in the way that you want to with simplicity there.”

Multi-cloud by design, not by default

Dell CEO Michael Dell promised the company would release the “largest expansion ever” to Apex as part of its commitment to multi-cloud by design.

“Multi-cloud by design isn’t just a tagline; we’re making it real,” Dell said.

Rola Dagher, global head of channel at Dell, told ITPro that the firm is committed to using Apex to provide customers with what they need, where they need it.

“How do we go in and enhance the existing product with the innovation that is needed for our partners, to go out there and show how to optimize and enhance,” 

“More than ever right now, it’s stability that our partners are looking for. How do we continue to enhance and help them understand how to run their business every day, and enhance and change the business by embedding new technologies in pre-existing portfolios.”

Dell also announced two new solutions for AWS: Apex Block Storage and Apex File Storage.

With these in place, customers can bring Dell’s flagship block and file storage to their AWS environments, especially helpful for firms seeking scalability and cost management.

Dell claimed that Apex Block Storage can offer up to 300% greater performance per dollar, and gave the example of AI and machine learning as performance-heavy workloads that Apex File Storage can support.

To oversee data, storage, and containers across multi-cloud Dell also announced a new pair of software as a service (SaaS) offerings, Dell APEX Navigator for Multicloud Storage and Dell APEX Navigator for Kubernetes.

Customers can use Navigator to bring consolidated deployment, monitoring, and mobility for Apex Block and File storage across a number of public clouds, as well as their Kubernetes storage management. 

Whitten called it a “game changer” for letting businesses put the right workloads in the right place, at the right time.

John Roese, global chief technology officer at Dell, told ITPro that there are ‘two schools’ of customers: the more advanced ones who have approached Dell for support with multiple clouds, and those that have failed to act on changing landscapes and are now stuck in one cloud.

While both can benefit from Apex Navigator, he said the latter could use it best to seize insight.

“I think the ones that will need it first are that don’t know what’s going on in their environment, and Navigator gives you those observability and mobility capabilities.”

The Cloud Platforms portfolio will be available in the second half of 2023, while Apex Block and File Storage for AWS is available now.

All the announcements were made in the day-one keynote at Dell Technologies World 2023 in Las Vegas this week.

Dell’s second in-person conference since the COVID-19 pandemic sees the industry mainstay ditch the riverboat faćades of Las Vegas’ Venetian for the tropical, South Seas-themed Mandalay Bay. 

Far from just being superficial, the move to a larger venue is fullling anticipation that Dell Technologies World 2023 will be its biggest yet, both in terms of size and the scale of the company’s strategic ambitions.

Multi-cloud as a service, the future of work, modern data infrastructure, edge computing, and cyber security are among the core themes, as the firm hopes to move on from recent layoffs and reaffirm its overall vision.

All eyes on Project Alpine

Updates to Dell Apex will without a doubt consume a lot of bandwidth, due to its broad portfolio spanning multi-cloud, storage, and security. But we also expect to hear more on Project Alpine, which the firm first teased last year.

Dell seeks to bring block, file, and object storage under one roof, regardless of the hyperscaler that customers use. Indeed, cloud has never been more important, and if Dell can offer customers more consistency, they could be onto a winner.

Its acquisition of cloud orchestration startup Cloudify in January could also fit into this vision for a seamless cloud experience.

Gartner has also identified edge architectures as a key trend influencing the future of cloud, with Dell vying to position itself to meet this demand.

Setting the pace on AI

Customers and partners will also be excited to see how Dell handles the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) for business, and how innovations in this space fit into its broader strategy.

It’s more or less impossible that generative AI won’t get a look-in. And indeed, CEO Michael Dell will touch on how Dell can “create a better future for all through the powerful combination of technology and human creativity”. 

The day-two keynote – ‘Embracing new potential’ – will explicitly focus on AI, and it’s likey Dell will lay out how companies can adopt these systems more effectively, in areas such as improving data insights. This is opposed to the glitzy appeal of chatbots.

Dell announced an AI initiative with Nvidia in January which fits this mold exactly, with a slew of its next-generation Dell PowerEdge servers optimized for AI and analytics work alongside Nvidia’s H100 AI chips. The firm has also promised ‘intelligent’ services across the breadth of its services, and this also seems like prime real estate for competitive, valuable AI.

Generative AI could change security among other fields, and if Dell can capitalize on this by introducing quality-of-life features such as generative summarisation of dense data at the edge, it could help to cement its place in the IT stacks of existing customers.

Dell has room to maneuver, with a customer base that would certainly benefit from a means to adopt AI seamlessly, without the need the train training large datasets.

Sustainability as a core tenet

The words “Dell Datastore” are likely to be on the lips of keynote speakers too. Championed at last year’s conference, Dell’s fastest-ever storage option is the kind of product ripe for new upgrades when it comes to energy efficiency.

Anxieties around business energy bills surged last year, and with businesses set to bet on sustainability as the key to long-term stability, it would be remiss of Dell to not properly address sustainability and wider ESG implementation in its announcements.

That shouldn’t just mean inviting prominent figures like film director James Cameron to deliver a “trailblazer” talk. Dell’s designated an entire ‘sustainability journey’ for attendees, but it remains to be seen whether the actual substance matches the theme’s prominence.

Like with most major tech conferences in 2023, the elephant in the room at Dell Technologies World will be layoffs. The firm outlined plans in February to cut 6,650 roles worldwide, equivalent to 5% of its total workforce, after it sustained particularly poor device sales. We’ll certainly be hoping to drill down into how Dell plans to address these anxieties.

ITPro will be covering Dell Technologies World 2023 between 22 May and 25 May. Stay up-to-date with the latest news and updates by following our live blogs, and subscribe to our newsletter to catch the latest in-depth stories.

Cloud storage provider Wasabi Technologies has announced the appointment of tech industry veteran Jon Howes as its new vice president and general manager for EMEA.

Howes brings 20 years’ experience to the business, with extensive expertise in scaling go-to-market models for tech companies in EMEA, including Juniper Networks, Oracle, and Infovista.

At Wasabi, his initial priorities include growing the firm’s channel presence, scaling its partners and customer base, as well as strategically increasing its headcount in key European markets - such as the UK, France, and Germany.

Ultimately, Wasabi is looking to build on its recent growth across the region, having snapped up a flagship deal with Liverpool Football Club, as well as 1,800 other new partners. 

The firm also revealed it has achieved a near-90% APR growth rate.

“Demand for predictably priced, secure, high-performance cloud storage is growing at an unprecedented pace in EMEA, making Wasabi a perfect fit for the market,” Howes said. 

“Our immense traction across Europe is a testament to the value we bring to enterprises and organizations across sports, media and entertainment, surveillance, education, healthcare, and more.”

Wasabi has also established a full go-to-market team to support these growth ambitions, which includes Eric Peters as country manager of Benelux and Southern Europe, Daniel Arabié as his equivalent for Central Europe/DACS, and Kevin Dunn as the lead for the UK, Ireland, and the Nordics.

The new managerial additions bring extensive sales and channel experience from previous roles at AWS, Cloudian, EMC, Juniper Networks, and Nimble Storage.

“Being at the helm of Wasabi’s EMEA operations is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I look forward to the expansion of Wasabi hot cloud storage in this important region along with our industry-leading team,” Howes added.

Wasabi has positioned itself as a scalable cloud storage provider, with no fees for egress or API requests, and no vendor lock-in. 

Its accompanying suite of products and tools includes the recently-announced Wasabi Surveillance Cloud, which offers bottomless storage for video surveillance, and its Carbon Footprint Calculator, which helps partners accurately measure and report on energy use. 

The company said its offering is ideal for the channel due to its ease of use, integration functionality, and high level of protection.

Since opening its Amsterdam storage region back in 2019, Wasabi has expanded its capabilities with further storage regions in London, Frankfurt, and Paris to help meet customer data sovereignty needs. 

The firm has also raised more than $500 million in funding to support its international expansion ambitions. 

In order to future-proof your business, an essential part of longer term success today is in embracing the cloud. And what will help you stay ahead of the competition is a cloud strategy that’s agile enough to meet ever-changing needs.

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As organisations' data and analytics efforts become more mature, they collect more diverse data and perform more sophisticated analytics.

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As organisations seek to become more competitive, they are often moving to cloud data warehouses (CDWs) and cloud data lakes (CDLs) to help manage large volumes of diverse data and perform advanced analytics. In many cases they are using multiple cloud providers to fit their needs.

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Genesys and Google Cloud have expanded their partnership to help organizations improve their customer support operations.

The deal will see Genesys add its Genesys Multicloud CX solution to Google Cloud, enabling organizations to deploy a private edition of its customer experience platform on Google Cloud infrastructure. Genesys said with its solution, organizations will have an “open multi-cloud path to embrace the next step of their customer experience (CX) evolution on Google Cloud infrastructure.”

The firm also plans to deepen its integration with Google Cloud Contact Center AI (CCAI), BigQuery and Kubernetes Engine (GKE). By doing this, Genesys said that organizations can use real-time streaming events and historical data from across their businesses on their preferred infrastructure for governance, controls, and customization across multiple private and public cloud environments.

The two companies will also collaborate on next-generation applications of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and data analytics to develop new products in areas such as customer journeys, automated customer care, predictive customer satisfaction, AI-driven multi-factor authentication, and unique conversational channels that leverage Google Search, Maps, and other services.

Genesys has also enabled organizations to directly access Genesys’ customer experience solutions through the Chrome OS by embedding it in the Chrome web browser. This will allow customer service agents to access such solutions to find information to help customers

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, said today’s consumers expect instant and exceptional service experiences at the click of a mouse or tap of a smartphone. "Partnering with Genesys will help build the future of digital customer service, as businesses and service teams bring together artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics to deliver the best possible outcomes for consumers,” he said.

Tony Bates, CEO and chairman of Genesys, said to thrive in this new customer-led landscape, companies must deliver the personalized experiences people want.

“Google is a pioneer in deep consumer knowledge; partnering with such an innovator will be a true game-changer for customers and employees around the world,” he added.

Google Cloud CCAI is currently available as a native integration for Genesys Multicloud CX and through the AppFoundry for the Genesys Cloud CXTM platform. Genesys Multicloud CX private edition is expected to be available for Google Kubernetes Engine within the next 90 days globally.

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84% of enterprises using cloud computing have a multi cloud strategy and hybrid cloud adoption is becoming increasingly popular.

Your organisation needs flexible solutions that can run high-performance data analytics, and AI applications if it wants to stay competitive and continue innovating. A solution like the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, specifically designed for a cloud-native, hybrid-multi cloud infrastructure, can help with cloud adoption and releasing new AI services quickly.

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Ori Industries has teamed up with VMware to assist enterprises with edge computing deployments on hybrid, telco, and multi-cloud platforms.

"Edge computing is entering the mainstream", according to a 2021 Gartner report. “However, many enterprises struggle with their existing cloud deployments proving to be a barrier to edge adoption.”

Ori Global Edge on VMware Telco Cloud Platform enables a multi-connected edge by leveraging multiple points of presence (PoPs) that connect to teleco and communications service provider (CSP) infrastructure on one end and cloud services on the other.

Additionally, interoperability between VMware Telco Cloud Platform and Ori Global Edge will help reduce complexity, accelerate service velocity, and enhance cloud-native service management at the edge.

The fully functioning edge platform will connect to any cloud environment in telco, hybrid, or multi-cloud. Furthermore, customers can enjoy more reliable service at the edge with low latency, high-availability applications that generate and process data locally, eliminating the need to transfer data back to the cloud.

Ori Global Edge’s Workload Placement feature orchestrates application requirements on-demand and can scale up workloads to meet traffic spikes in real time. With zero-touch provisioning, VMware Telco Cloud Platform simplifies Kubernetes operations for multi-cloud deployments.

“Enterprises are looking for new ways to engage customers and deliver next-generation experiences. That means having the right application deployed where the user is,” explained Stephen Spellicy, vice president of product marketing, service provider and edge at VMware.

“Edge computing is the final piece of the puzzle and working with Ori Industries’ multi-access edge computing platform will give mutual customers the ability to deploy a solution that helps cover all their environments – whether telco, hybrid, multi-cloud or edge – to meet their business needs. ”

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To lay the foundation for modern application development, increase agility, and reduce cost, IT leaders are migrating their infrastructure to a cloud model that often spans multiple public cloud providers and their own data centre.

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SysTools has launched a new tool to help customers migrate their cloud email data with ease.

Data loss and downtime concerns discourage companies from moving business-critical applications from one cloud to another.

Cloud Migration Service by SysTools promises secure and seamless data migration, thanks to its built-in pre-migration plans, implementation, and testing models.

"The most difficult aspect of cloud migration is its complexity; as a result of the deployment structure and methods necessary for developing and maintaining cloud migration, most businesses seek to outsource core cloud migration services, SysTools understands this need and provides frictionless data migration experience to our customers," explained Debasish Pramanik, managing director and co-founder of SysTools.

A fully managed service, SysTools’ Cloud Migrator also displays accounts’ migration status in real time. Capable of concurrent migration, the platform allows simultaneous migration of up to 40 mailboxes. Mails that have been discarded or deleted do not make it to the destination cloud. Additionally, the service supports multi-cloud data transfer with a migration speed of up to 40GB per hour.

SysTool Cloud Migrator is compatible with Lotus Notes, Office 365, OneDrive, and Gsuite, among other cloud storage solutions.

“There are many factors, including lower prices, flexibility, agility, and security, are projected to fuel demand for cloud migration, and many organizations have yet to begin their migration journey due to the complexity of moving multiple applications," said Anurag Singh, co-founder and CEO of SysTools.

Red Hat has unveiled the latest version of its Kubernetes management offering that it claimed would provide greater flexibility for managing and scaling hybrid and multi-cloud environments in a unified and automated way.

Its Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.3 includes additional support for importing managed Kubernetes clusters for Red Hat OpenShift on AWS (ROSA), as well as OpenShift clusters on IBM Power systems.

Red Hat said this builds on supported managed Kubernetes clusters for Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud (ROKS), Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO), Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated (OSD) and IBM Z.

There is also support for the provision of on-premises Red Hat OpenShift clusters on Red Hat OpenStack directly from Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management. It added that customers could also manage clusters more effectively by discovering and importing clusters from cloud.redhat.com, which would help manage more advanced features and alleviate the manual effort of importing clusters individually.

Red Hat said that with cluster hibernation, customers can also schedule clusters that are not in use to go into hibernation mode to preserve resources and better manage cloud costs.

There is also better integration between Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, which Red Hat claimed would accelerate the automation and cohesion between cloud-native clusters, virtual machines, and traditional infrastructure with streamlined tooling and coordination.

When containerized environments need to connect with traditional IT environments, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management can automatically trigger Ansible Playbooks before or after key lifecycle actions, such as application and cluster creation.

The company said this would make it easier to automate tasks like configuring networking, connecting applications to databases, constructing load balancers and firewalls, and updating IT service management (ITSM) ticketing systems.

Dave Lindquist, general manager and vice president, software engineering, advanced Kubernetes management at Red Hat, said cloud-native applications and services are not an island.

“We need to meet organizations where they are to bridge the divide between traditional IT infrastructure and cloud-native development so that IT teams can focus on innovation rather than trying to get disparate technologies to work together,” Lindquist said.

Tim Grieser, research vice president, enterprise system management software at IDC, said IT executives see IT automation and configuration management tools as ways to embed the competitive advantages of speed and quality. As such, investments continue to address traditional IT environments and modern application architectures.

“The reality is that both environments are critical to business success. The automation of technology processes and the orchestration of multiple processes are critical and increasingly required to enable scale for I&O teams as software delivery cycles increase,” Grieser added.

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.3 will be generally available in the coming weeks.

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Multi-cloud environments have evolved over the years and as the digital landscape has changed, so too have enterprises.

This new way of managing online services has provided a number of benefits for many organisations. Using more than one cloud provider allows businesses greater flexibility in how they set up their digital environment as well as giving them the option to select the services and capabilities that best fit their needs.

By mixing and matching services from different providers, businesses can provide a better service to their customers and ensure they stay competitive in an ever-changing market.

However, with this new form of data management and sharing, there are always new challenges to keep in mind. If an organisation does choose to have a multi-cloud deployment, it must ensure it’s safe and secure.

According to IBM, 85% of organisations operate in a multi-cloud environment, so it’s paramount that security considerations are taken into account and the right controls are in place.

The challenges

Utilising a multi-cloud deployment comes with its own set of challenges. Storing data in multiple cloud platforms means there is a large environment to secure and different security issues to tackle from one provider to the next.

It's useful to synchronise security policies across the different vendors that host the data so the policies are consistent across the board. Businesses also need to have complete visibility across all products, which can be complicated if they all have different security features.

In addition, if businesses can’t monitor the whole scope of their deployments it may give attackers more space to attack or infiltrate them.

With this in mind, the security tools need to be able to view and share information across all deployments to reduce the complexity and increase efficiency. It’s also extremely important to maintain data compliance rules and have uninterrupted protection among the workloads at all times.

Identity and access management

One way of securing your multi-cloud deployment is through identity and access management (IAM). This helps to keep track of users and control access to certain data and services. It also makes life easier for IT managers to control user access to specific information across an organisation.

It essentially enables IT managers to allow users to access specific online resources like networks, storage systems, devices and more. it's central to any directory service and helps strengthen the security of a deployment.

Thanks to the wide variety of IT resources available, it has never been more important to have competent user management in a multi-cloud deployment to ensure the right people are accessing the right materials. Plus, by having greater control of user access, companies are able to operate more efficiently as many processes are automated instead of having to manually manage access to networks.

Regulations like GDPR also mean there is increased pressure to monitor and protect access to certain sensitive data. IAM is a great way to manage this risk and relatively low cost, meaning it’is accessible to companies of all sizes.

Identity as a service

When using IAM in the cloud, it can be complemented by using identity as a service (IDaaS) usually carried out by a third-party service provider.

By opting to use these kinds of third party solutions, enterprises are able to manage security risks and meet legal requirements with a service that can be scaled fairly simply and extensively if needed.

IDaaS has a number of core features which are common across many providers:

Multi-factor authentication

Multi-factor authentication (MFA), also known as two-factor authentication, is a way of confirming a user’s identity by requiring two or more verification factors to gain access to an online resource. It's more secure than just having a username or password as it requires extra identifying information.

Users must have a combination of a password and something in their physical possession like a mobile phone, token keyring, or a form of biometric technology in order to gain access to an online resource.

This is a core component of IAM and helps decrease the risk of successful cyber attacks and is essential for multi-cloud deployments.

Biometrics

Biometrics uses a person’s physical attributes for identity confirmation. The most common real-world examples of this would be fingerprint unlocking on smartphones and laptops, as well as facial recognition tech like Apple’s FaceID. This also applies to retina recognition, full facial recognition, hand or even DNA usage.

This gives your deployment additional security as a user has to be physically present to gain access to the system using their biometrics and underlines the reliability of this form of authentication as it's based on unique data.

Single Sign-On (SSO)

Single sign-on (SSO) allows users to log into one application and then be given access to other designated applications. It helps provide a seamless experience to users as they don’t have to constantly log into different services or applications and reduces the friction involved.

An example of this is Google services where by signing into your Google account you can then access Gmail, Youtube, Drive and more without having to sign in each time.

If a cloud deployment is located on different platforms, it will help users if they don’t have to use too many usernames and passwords to access certain services. By having SSO, username and password sprawl can be reduced while improving the security at the same time. As it's harder for credentials to be compromised, there will be less of a need for multiple usernames and passwords across the services a business provides.

Making the right choice

The way businesses choose to secure their multi-cloud deployments will vary depending on how the organisation’s environment is set out and who should be able to access different parts of it.

Having the right tools in place ensures the correct security is implemented within an organisation with multiple cloud platforms. Plus, it's a good way to reduce complexity across a deployment and by centralising the security, businesses can ensure employees or users only have access to the information they are supposed to and respect data compliance rules.

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.

Hybrid, multi-cloud adoption is only growing, and with it, an increasing number of data, applications, and workloads are moving to cloud. As more employees work from home and interactions shift from in-person to online, cloud usage is expected to hit a new high.

To keep critical business information safe, security analysts need complete visibility into their entire IT ecosystem—networks, applications, and activities—running on premises and in the cloud. They need the ability to detect threats in real time, identify the use of unauthorised cloud services, and gain clear visibility into whether their cloud accounts and resources are properly configured to maintain security.

The IBM Security QRadar security information and event management (SIEM) solution offers deep integrations with multiple cloud services, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Salesforce.com, Microsoft Office 365, IBM Cloud®, and more.

Learn more about how the QRadar solution can help you secure your cloud environment in this whitepaper.

This article originally appeared in Issue 10 of IT Pro 20/20, available here. To sign up to receive each new issue in your inbox, click here.

The cloud now forms an integral part of every business' IT infrastructure. Increasingly, however, the growth of the cloud market and incredible range of choice of products and platforms on offer has led to multi-cloud fatigue.

The often-haphazard deployment of cloud services from multiple vendors has also created management challenges that have been exacerbated thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. Are we now in a situation where CTOs need to take action to rationalise their cloud deployments?

The latest cloud study from IBM reveals that 64% of executives plan to migrate more mission-critical workloads to the cloud in the next two years. If not done carefully, however, this could easily lead to more cloud bloat and a consequent aggravation of management and service support issues.

While it can be tempting to just throw money and resources at the problem, this can often result in expanding existing cloud deployments or buying new services without the due diligence needed to ensure they can be integrated efficiently and securely with legacy installations. Information technology service management (ITSM), when coupled with cloud management platforms (CMPs), has, in some cases, exposed weak links in existing cloud infrastructures.

Management of large multi-cloud deployments is also difficult to do effectively. According to the State of the Cloud 2020 report from Flexera, applications are often siloed across the cloud architecture, with a third (33%) of respondents to this year’s survey using multi-cloud management tools.

“Businesses often adopt a multi-cloud strategy to deliver specific applications or services, avoid cloud vendor lock-in, reduce costs, enable flexibility and increase scalability,” explains Paul Stapley, practice director at Logicalis. “However, multi-cloud adoption presents challenges for people and processes, as the more platforms you have, the more challenging it becomes to manage them. CTOs can face security challenges, connectivity reliability (problems), performance issues, and inconsistent service offerings, making it challenging to utilise and operate multi-cloud deployments efficiently.”

Reducing the cloud architecture's complexity would enable a far more cost-effective, secure, and efficient cloud service to be constructed and then managed. The danger of businesses' reaction to COVID-19, which saw a rush to implement ever more cloud services, is an unstructured and unplanned expansion with consequent weak security and lack of management oversight.

Is one cloud enough?

CTOs struggling to manage multi-cloud deployments and ‘cloud bloat’ may wonder if moving everything back to a single cloud is the way forward, but that’s not necessarily the best answer, either.

“With a clear strategy and approach for using multiple clouds, businesses can avoid the issue of ‘cloud bloat’,” Maynard Williams, MD of Accenture Technology UK tells IT Pro. “This strategy must cover both the specific use cases for cloud service provider offerings and how transactions work end to end when they may span multiple clouds. For example, a business might put all of a particular type of workload, such as analytics, onto a specific cloud platform, while ensuring that an issue can be traced across multiple stacks. It also needs to consider hybrid options and transitional states as applications migrate to the cloud.”

Reducing the footprint of a business' cloud deployments can also deliver much tighter security. Concerns about public cloud's safety remain high, with Cavirin reporting nine out of ten cybersecurity professionals (91%) are extremely-to-moderately concerned about public cloud security. The most prominent challenge organisations face to their security operations is visibility into infrastructure security (44%), followed by setting consistent security policies across cloud and on-premises environments, and with compliance, which tied at 42% each.

Speaking to IT Pro, Anne Hardy, CISO at Talend says: “Cloud security covers various aspects, the most important being governance, network, logical access control, data protection, security logging and monitoring, security incident response and disaster recovery. Every one of these aspects cannot be managed in the same way with AWS, Azure or GCP (Google Cloud Platform). This variation across multi-cloud deployments means a business needs a team of the right people who can understand all of these areas and the security needs of each.”

Whether and how businesses rationalise their cloud infrastructure will depend on their medium to long-term planning. As Logicalis' Paul Stapley says, each company will react differently. “We know the correct cloud brings many benefits to the correct workloads. The reasons for both adopting and moving workloads need to be right. By no means is it a one-size-fits-all approach, or a set-in-stone process. As technology advances, and business needs change, the cloud is built to adjust accordingly to best manage those variations.”

New normal IT

Is a single cloud deployment the future of IT infrastructure? The Trinity of AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Azure offer all businesses – no matter their size – a cloud deployment platform that can be lean and efficient. The one cloud approach seems distant at this point, however, and the propensity to use multiple cloud deployments often from different vendors shows little sign of slowing. Indeed, the pandemic has accelerated the expansion of public clouds to cope with remote mass working demands, with much of this new deployment being fragmented.

“Most enterprises will choose to work with at least one of the public cloud hyperscalers,” Accenture’s Maynard Williams explains. “And there’s good reason for this: There’s a great deal of competition in the market, so they’re investing heavily in areas like streamlining migration, adapting services for private clouds and pushing out to the edge. In addition, they are investing in a variety of industry-specific cloud solutions – for example, GE Healthcare is running its Health Cloud on Amazon AWS. A bespoke cloud deployment strategy can allow a business to get far more out of these investments than they could realistically achieve alone.”

Williams continues: “For most organisations, the optimal way forward is to select a primary hyperscaler for the majority of mission-critical workloads, and then work with one or more secondary providers dictated by the specific needs of the business. This might depend on regulations, industry, concentration of risk or specialised workloads. This enables the organisation to build core skills and experience on one platform but, take advantage of specialised solutions where it makes the most sense.”

All enterprises large and small, understand that in the post-COVID era, flexibility will be crucial to their long-term sustainability in their marketplaces. The cloud will continue to be a foundation all businesses use to deliver the IT services they need.

Cloud bloat and the management and security issues these bring will be addressed. However, the cloud is a flexible space that can expand and contract as needed. Can one cloud serve all these requirements? It's an unlikely scenario. But more streamlining and using fewer vendors look set to become the norm.

Most organisations are already aware of the benefits of cloud migration. It enables them to expand their business whilst using existing infrastructure and can have a positive impact on data growth and customer experience.

Not only that, but the cloud can also offer enhanced security and increase productivity, which is why IT leaders are all including the cloud as part of their digital transformation strategy, accelerated in part by the pandemic.

The cloud helped businesses through massive disruption, and having successfully continued operations, the cloud has shown resilience and the reason why cloud adoption will continue to grow, with spending on public cloud services expected to reach $396 billion in 2021, growing a further 21.7% in 2022 to reach $482 billion, according to Gartner, Inc.

But with all that the cloud has enabled, and continues to offer, could businesses end up burdened by hidden costs in the years to come?

Vendors can make their cloud offerings appear considerably more cost-effective than in-house solutions, but if business owners don’t need to take advantage of the complete technology that the cloud offers, the cost of adoption may be greater than necessary.

For example, there’s the risk of cloud outages that impact downtime (infrequent, but possible) so if you’re thinking about moving operations to the cloud, it’s critical that you’re aware of as many of the hidden costs as possible.

Unexpected costs of migrating to the cloud

Cloud migration is never a simple process. Pitfalls can wait either in plain sight - such as upfront monetary costs, often large but easily legislated for - or in the shadows. It’s these hidden costs that are the real debilitator. Without thorough planning or technical understanding, enterprises may find themselves far over budget and too deep to escape.

Hidden costs often appear in the form of operational and recurring expenditures, such as the pay-as-you-go cloud model offered by vendors. Without the required level of expertise within the enterprise, pay-as-you-go models may be misunderstood.

Enterprises can pay for vast amounts of cloud storage to house swathes of data. With no storage limit, data will continue to be stored on the cloud servers, bringing an incremental cost. What’s more, it’s likely that most of this data doesn’t need to be stored in the cloud. On-premise servers still have a role to play, while many enterprises are guilty of blanket decisions when it comes to data, rather than taking the time to sift through what’s relevant and important to maintain.

To shine a light on this blind spot, enterprises must ensure their in-house IT departments are brimming with relevant expertise. Existing employees can be upskilled to plug skills gaps, but sooner or later there will be a problem or a technology that stretches the department to breaking point.

Acquiring external talent at some point down the road is unavoidable, in the form of consultants, new hires, and vendor support. Due to the unpredictability of cloud migrations, both in terms of surfacing issues and in the introduction of emerging technologies, having the foresight to realise which specific skills are going to be required down the line is not always apparent, adding to this expense.

This unpredictability stems from the fact that organisations will want to tailor their cloud technology to integrate seamlessly with their existing set of systems. As the web of infrastructure expands, it becomes more difficult to maintain optimum performance levels because of the complexity that customisation brings. As deployments are scaled, their problems and complexities are also magnified, forcing the enterprise to invest in additional resources.

How to calculate whether you can afford cloud migration

Though the specific amount of hidden costs remain a mystery until they are encountered, that doesn’t mean that when devising a cloud migration budget, they shouldn’t be accounted for. Budgets should have the buffering capacity and be scalable, just like the cloud technology it will be invested in.

It's certain that the cloud migration journey is by nature unpredictable, yet there is one consistent element that can be counted on: change. The enterprise and cloud migrations are both dynamic. Performance requirements, changes in usage and market needs, vendor support packages, will all be affected at one point or another.

This acts as one of the major advantages and disadvantages of the cloud. On the other hand, on-premise infrastructures also suffer from these faults.

Enterprises can start their cloud journeys by taking an audit of current IT infrastructure costs in order to reveal what they are currently paying. Then try and estimate the potential cloud infrastructure costs. For this there must be an understanding of the network, storage, and database capacity required to run applications selected to operate on the cloud, Typically cloud pricing structures are quite complex, however, vendors are increasingly simplifying their offerings.

Weighing the pros and cons of cloud migration

With the costs of cloud migration identified, it’s up to the individual enterprise only to decide whether the journey is worthwhile. Budgets, industries, and priorities vary, but what is certain is that at least partial migrations to the cloud will bring a host of benefits that ultimately do make businesses more competitive.

For those struggling to finance migrations, it may be time to look for more cost-effective methods. Cloud migrations do not need to happen en masse. Internal inspections can dictate which applications will benefit the most from integrating with the cloud. If the value isn’t foreseen in transferring a certain application, then don’t.

Of course, risk is a factor in every decision, particularly one with high financial implications. Enterprises can complete a thorough risk analysis by uncovering the hidden costs of their planned cloud migration and comparing them to existing costs and their risk appetite. Risks can’t be eradicated but they can be accounted for.