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Hybrid cloud adoption: why vendors are making the switch in 2022 and why you should too

Source: Finance Derivative

Aruba Enterprise Marketing Manager, Massimo Bandinelli

Despite the low start-up cost and convenience of public cloud solutions, vendors are now re-evaluating their operations and looking to reap the benefits of hybrid offerings.

In the wake of the global pandemic, Massimo Bandinelli, Aruba Enterprise Marketing Manager, believes that 2022 is the year that businesses need to re-examine their IT infrastructure and move towards newer and better solutions.

Business operations have undergone a massive transformation in recent years as the integration of digital technology has grown immensely across the industry. The World Economic Forum predicts great technological changes for the future, and global boardrooms are no different. The digital revolution doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon. In 2022 and beyond, organisations will continue to fuse the lines between physical and digital worlds, as they observe how technology can enhance how we work in today’s post-pandemic world and utilise it to drive productivity and futureproof operations.

Thanks to the shift towards remote working, cloud computing has now become a key component of IT operations for enterprises. It was unsurprising that 96% of US data centre experts reported increased demand for data centre services since the start of the pandemic, according to a recent survey by ABB Power Conversion. This is just the beginning. Business owners are likely to continue to invest in a range of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, automation, big data analytics, 5G and more, driving more data centre demand for many years to come. Without a solid cloud framework, the joining of these innovations would be unsupported and risky.

The move towards modified hybrid solutions is becoming a trend amongst vendors in the industry, since they offer a combination of private and public cloud design. So how can enterprises benefit from switching from a public cloud solution to a more bespoke hybrid offering? Let’s examine this more closely.

Looking towards hybrid cloud options

Whilst public cloud solutions have the appeal of flexibility, ease of use and low capital expenditure, these advantages come at the cost of a greater number of drawbacks. One disadvantage is that companies are forced to make performance and functionality compromises because of the regulations that govern external cloud platforms. As a result, companies may become too dependent on these platforms, making it impossible for them to switch vendors. Additionally, as enterprises scale up their cloud operations over time, the low-cost setup will likely result in high operating costs.

In essence, the hybrid cloud provides a bespoke offering of different technologies, customised to a company’s requirements and objectives. With this solution, a public cloud (cloud) is combined with a physical data centre (private cloud), allowing for the sending and receiving of data and applications between cloud and on-premises data centres. Among the greatest benefits of hybrid cloud computing are security, scalability, cost and compliance. Let’s explore them individually.

Greater scalability

Industry leaders have grown accustomed to unexpected events over the past two years. Regardless of how well they meet the needs of their business, demand is always subject to change. To manage this, the hybrid cloud offering gives IT pioneers the flexibility to easily react to unpredictable spikes in demand. For example, public clouds can offer additional capacity in the short term, whilst on-premises data centres can be used to store long-term fixed data. Enterprises can utilise this combination of offerings to optimise the versatility of their cloud framework, whilst keeping access costs to a minimum or exceeding their existing capacity.

Maximised data security

Hybrid cloud allows IT managers much greater control over their data. Private cloud is the ideal model for storing highly sensitive data, whilst public cloud can be used when handling less delicate data. The combination of these two offerings enables companies to lower their operation costs without comprising the protection of their data. The centralised management system of a hybrid solution enables solid technical security measures such as encryption, access control, automation, orchestration, and endpoint protection to be implemented easily, resulting in a safer and more protected data flow.

Compliance is critical

Data regulation is an evolving landscape, and it is expected to become even more complex as cyber security and privacy become more prominent priorities for global leaders and regulators in the coming years.

In determining the right cloud solution for their business, enterprise leaders should focus especially on the issue of data sovereignty. The concept of data sovereignty dictates that digital data should be governed by the laws within the nation it was collected or created. This principle applies not only to EU countries, but also to businesses that gather, store or process data from EU-based organisations. Users of the public cloud model can expect to face a complicated set of compliance rules and regulations, due to the high levels of control that this type of solution demands over data. With companies having to sacrifice a certain degree of management over their data, combined with a lack of transparency from most public cloud vendors, it can often be challenging to locate data and determine how it is stored.

In contrast, hybrid offerings allow complete visibility, as IT leaders are able to maintain their own storage and networking infrastructure whilst storing data in a private cloud. Moreover, adopting a hybrid cloud solution can help organisations to achieve total compliance with regional and industry standards, whilst simultaneously generating evidence that can help report and audit their performance with confidence.

Given the rapid growth in demand over the last few years, it’s unsurprising that data management challenges are expected to rise in 2022 and beyond. As opposed to using public cloud solutions alone, businesses that start to embrace a bespoke hybrid cloud offering will be better equipped to respond to these fluctuating changes in demand whilst still ensuring continuous innovation as well as compliance and protection of consumer data.

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Business

Businesses must continue to adopt Agile to stay nimble and here is how

By Shalini A. Nair, Associate Vice President, Corporate Initiatives, Quality, Infosys

As enterprises strive to stay ahead in their digital journeys, with the constant threat of disruptions from digital natives, increasing consumer expectations and the rapid advancement of technology, their ability to adapt quickly is heavily dependent on their ways of working. Successful organisations have navigated their journeys on a solid Agile-DevOps foundation.

Agile is a revolutionary approach to speed up software development and has stood the test of time. In a rapidly evolving technology landscape, a long wait time for software release is a surefire way to lose clients and business. 

Agile philosophy uses an incremental approach to software development with increased stress on flexibility, collaboration, resiliency, and customer satisfaction. It has spawned many methodologies such as Scrum, Kanban, and Extreme Programming with each approach speeding-up software development differently. More recently, we’ve had Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Spotify-based scaling, LESS and other scaling frameworks, designed to enable large software projects to be Agile. DevOps practices, tools and culture bring down the barriers between development and operations, with focus on increasing automation. Agile in conjunction with DevOps has become immensely relevant for large, medium, and small enterprises to be nimble as they traverse their digital transformation journeys.

Shalini A. Nair

Many organisations that have successfully adopted Agile-DevOps at scale have seen a significant improvement in their engineering outcomes. For instance, in 2016, a leading global bank that used DevOps to rework its IT operations noticed an uptick in its software release cycle by 40% and a 70% reduction in testing efforts

A product-led and platform-driven approach to work is gaining prominence with Agile and DevOps serving as foundations. This brings in a holistic approach to elevating the enterprise focus from engineering outcomes to business value.

Pitfalls of falling behind on Agile

Ignoring Agile comes with its own set of disadvantages. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) was found to not be following Agile software acquisition guidelines across all its weapons programs. This was said to have a direct impact on its ability to respond to evolving threats. The DoD has since changed its approach to double down on Agile methodologies for speedy development and deployment of software to tackle threats. 

Agile can bring great success when done right

While adoption of Agile ways of working pr can be approached through various pathways, here are some insights on how it can be used to sustain success.

Holistic Agile mindset: Implementing Agile in silos can drastically reduce an organisation’s ability to bring in agility and efficacy. Agile practices, tools, and principles should be applied across the entire software engineering and operations lifecycle to ensure opportunities for better business outcomes. Beyond the technical and IT departments, functions such as product sales, marketing, finance, operation, and human resources should adopt agile principles and practices and work in sync to bring in business agility consistently across the enterprise. A leading telecom player in New Zealand adopted Agile in a way that 40% of its employees were moved into a cross-functional team comprising IT, networks, product marketing, and digital verticals. This helped the fledgling telco-only company to transform into a digital services provider. 

Rethinking how to measure value realised: Agile emphasises performance indicators such as velocity, productivity, quality, and throughput, that need to be enhanced. In addition, impact on business – customer conversion, growth, user feedback, product returns, cost of sales – must be monitored and measured. As product-led operating models take shape, the concept of objective and key results (OKRs) to track the flow of value becomes the next evolution in the agile governance.  

Sustained Enablement: As an organisation gets larger, the Agile skills start to get patchy because only a small cohort of specialists know them, or these skills are shared in an ad-hoc manner. This isn’t sustainable and organisations must invest in thorough, ongoing business-wide training programs, hands-on learning, with investments in coaching to bring everyone on the same page. 

Being ready to constantly adapt: Agile is a software development philosophy that has been evolving as software engineering evolves – Scrum, Kanban, XP, Scaling frameworks, DevOps and now the advent of AI have all become entwined as enterprises transform their ways of working.  Focusing too much on process adherence and not the outcome can be detrimental. Organisations may evolve their Agile practices and new needs may emerge. Having an adapting and evolving mindset is key to Agile success. 

Data transparency and culture to reward accountabilityOrganisations must share data in an accessible way with the teams to keep them in the loop regarding business outcomes. Failures from experiments should not be a taboo. There has to be a cultural shift to bring in guardrails to encourage experimentation, take failure in stride and reward accountability for mistakes.

For instance, a well-known truck manufacturer used the Scrum method to shorten a five-year development cycle to just 18 months by ensuring 100% availability of team members and complete transparency and communications across departments.   

Works across small, medium, and large enterprises: Looking at the operating principles and the focus on speed may make one think that Agile is best suited only for small or medium enterprises. A hybrid scaling framework adapted to the enterprise’s needs can help scale this in very large organisations too, bringing in a culture of agility and innovation.  For example, a large enterprise such as Amazon, which has global operations with hundreds of thousands of employees, has also successfully deployed Agile methodologies at scale. In each of its multiple product lines, Amazon uses hybrid teams comprising web developers, product owners, merchandising specialists, and more. They are given enough freedom to pursue certain business outcomes once the planning documents are approved. 

Still relevant

Agile methodology was introduced in the early 2000s, but its guiding principles are even more relevant in this rapidly changing business and technology landscape. Over the years, adopting various agile approaches, such as Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming, Scaling frameworks, and more recently in conjunction with DevOps have demonstrated significantly better outcomes, if used mindfully, consistently and with clear goals. Organisations that invest in Agile-DevOps foundation can quickly evolve their ways of working in real time to adapt to the rapid pace of change in technology and markets to be ready for the AI-led digital future.

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Business

Storage must form the core of an enterprise cybersecurity strategy

By James ‘JT’ Lewis is the Director of Channel Sales for EMEA and APJ at Infinidat

It’s no wonder that in PwC’s 24th Annual Global CEO Survey, leaders ranked cyberattacks second place amongst the most serious of all possible economic, social, political, business, and environmental threats. Ransomware attacks represented 12% of breaches of critical infrastructure in the last year. 

Cyber security experts have estimated that global cybercrime costs will exceed 7.5 trillion Euros this year, according to CyberSecurity Ventures. Enterprises run on data and when it’s hacked or corrupted by cybercriminals, the disruption can topple an operation overnight, with multi-million Euro consequences.

The irony is that if the fallout from a cyberattack happened that quickly, it may be less problematic to recover from. Remedial action should be started immediately and any damage minimised. The actual problem is much more insidious because when cyber attackers target an enterprise, they usually wait for almost 6 months before taking action. This increases their ransom power and without the right data controls, the victim’s only option may be to concede to whatever financial demands are being made. In that timeframe, their primary data, the live data your business operations depend, on could have been exposed to all kinds of criminal activity.

JT Lewis

For this reason, enterprise storage has become a main target of cybercriminals for the most damaging and hard-to-detect ransomware and malware attacks. One reason why enterprises still get trapped is because a cybersecurity strategy tends to focus on keeping criminals out in the first place, rather than accepting that attacks will most likely happen and there is an impetus for having a watertight strategy. The wolf will definitely keep knocking and will get inside your house. So, what steps can you take?

Firstly, cybersecurity’s emphasis must widen, to address three areas – detection, resilience and recovery – and plug the vulnerability gap that cybercriminals have been exploiting. Combining resilience (the ability to instil defensive security measures to repel attacks), detection (the ability to know when data is corrupted and whether a known good copy of data is free of ransomware or malware), and recovery (the ability to bounce back and recovery with a known good copy of the data) from cyberattacks, is the key to hardening storage infrastructure.

Converging cyber resilience, detection, and recovery on an integrated enterprise storage platform is an advancement over former siloed approaches that rely on disparate tools and technologies. It makes the cyber capabilities more air-tight and ensures a rapid recovery of data within minutes to thwart cybercriminals, nullifying ransom demands and minimising downtime or damage to the business.

There are some key features of enterprise storage that need to be in place to ensure cyber resilience against today’s cybercriminals, all of whom are highly skilled technology experts. These include ensuring the immutable nature of the data, recovered from a copy you can trust. Air-gapping to separate the management and data planes to protect the data. A secure forensic environment, to analyse the data thoroughly and ensure the fastest recovery speeds possible is critical.

Immutable snapshots allow the end user to roll back the clock and recover guaranteed, uncorrupted copies of their data, before the execution of any malware or ransomware code introduced by an attacker. Immutable snapshots ensure data integrity because they prevent data copies from being altered or deleted by anyone. Even internal systems administrators are locked out of immutable snapshots manipulation. The enterprise can be confident that any disruption or damage caused by the intrusion is minimal.

Logical air gapping adds a further layer of security, by creating a safe distance between the storage management layer and the immutable snapshots. There are three types of air gapping. Local air gapping keeps the data on premises, remote air gapping makes use of a remotely hosted system and hybrid air gapping combines the two.

Fenced forensic environments help speed up the recovery process by providing a secure area to perform a post-attack forensic analysis of the immutable snapshots. The purpose here is to carefully curate data candidates and find a known good copy. The last thing an enterprise wants after an attack is to restore data infiltrated with malware or ransomware.

Once these core elements are present within your storage infrastructure, the whole restoration can progress like clockwork. It’s why our focus as an organisation is dedicated to educating IT leaders about the need for a convergent, tripartite approach. One that combining cyber resilience, detection, and recovery on a single storage platform. Reliance solely on backups and preventing attacks is no longer enough to secure storage systems.

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Business

Streamlining the road to net-zero through carbon reporting

By Paul Rekhi, Head of Carbon Services at Advantage Utilities

Understanding the evolution of our carbon footprint is key to comprehending the urgency and significance of emission reduction today. According to the Global Carbon Project, between 2011 and 2020, carbon dioxide emissions averaged at 38.8 billion tons per year, but our land and ocean sinks which convert this CO2 have only been able to support 21.7 billion tons yearly. This deficit in emissions is what has caused the atmospheric CO2 growth rate which in turn has led to global warming and climate change. These are defining issues for businesses, hence the need to report and then reduce carbon emissions is more important than ever. I recently hosted a webinar where I discussed this very point, advising businesses on how to implement a credible plan to achieve net-zero as well as lower energy costs. 

In this article, I will share those insights, discussing how ESG emerged as a key consideration for businesses today. I will then outline how businesses can go about measuring their carbon by using the carbon-ethics cycle which includes the steps they should take to streamline the road to net-zero via effective carbon reporting.

Paul Rekhi, Head of Carbon Services

The distinction between net-zero and carbon neutral

There is an important distinction to be made about what we mean by ‘net-zero’ and ‘carbon neutral’. Net-zero involves counting emissions, then organically removing these emissions from the business. What carbon neutrality involves is the same accounting principle of greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting but also taking accredited carbon offsets to help counteract GHGs released and reaching a zero-carbon footprint. However, to get to true net-zero you have to account for it – that means having oversight into your scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions. 

Scope 1 emissions are direct emissions such as company facilities and vehicles. Scope 2 emissions primarily involve indirect emissions stemming from purchased electricity, heating and cooling. Finally, Scope 3 emissions involve everything else your business does; this starts with upstream activities, everything that happens before your organisation – ‘from cradle to gate’, including bought goods, employee commuting and leased assets,  through to  downstream activities, everything that happens after – from gate to grave, such as processing of solid products, transportation and investments.

The importance of carbon reporting

As corporate guidance emerged and the damaging effects of excess carbon emissions were accepted, this led to large companies being required to report on their scope 1 and 2 emissions. If an organisation meets two or more of the following criteria; a turnover or gross income of £36 million or more; balance sheet assets of £18 million or more; or 250 employees or more; then they must stay compliant with UK government regulations such as theStreamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR) and Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme (ESOS). Of the 5.5 million UK businesses, only 7,000 fall into the category of having over 250 employees. 

But this is not just a checkbox exercise, it is a strategic move. Proper carbon reporting not only ensures compliance but also positions your organisation as a responsible and forward-thinking entity, which is why it has become widely accepted for organisations to establish an ESG department.

The carbon-ethics cycle

To enable businesses to track their carbon emissions, we created our carbon-ethics cycle, to enable organisations to measure, manage and reduce their emissions as efficiently as possible. 

Our starting point is to understand businesses – their sites, their objectives and their needs. From here, businesses should measure and certify their scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions which act as an organisation’s benchmark on how much carbon was associated with their business, within a given period – usually by financial year. Without first measuring emissions, you cannot manage emissions, making progress towards net-zero very difficult. 

Once we have that benchmark, consultation with each department of the business is crucial to effectively reducing emissions, looking at how energy is used (when and where) as well as how it is procured. From there, technology such as solar PV, heat pumps and voltage optimisation, can be used to make energy savings and increase sustainability. 

Reducing/offsetting emissions may also be necessary if reducing emissions is not possible. The final step is to report and re-certify their emissions, allowing comparisons to be made to benchmark data. And this is an ongoing process, so the cycle can begin again on the journey to net-zero. But what this cycle achieves is a streamlined process that enables the most progress to take place.

So where are we right now? With large companies required to report on their carbon, other companies are also taking it upon themselves to expand their own reporting. There are several types of clients that get in touch with us to measure their carbon and reduce their emissions. One of them are the large companies, but others include organisations with supply chain partners requesting carbon data, companies with competitors measuring carbon emissions, environmentally conscious companies as well as others.    

A structure to measuring carbon within your organisation

Businesses all start from the same position: having to change their processes and behaviour in order to measure carbon. Progress is only made by building upon this foundation, with Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) offering the next step in ensuring compliance throughout the business. On top of that, policies are overlaid which runs and controls the business.

But there are also two ‘floors’ that are missing in this structure. The first of these is accounting, reporting and marketing. Without measuring and accounting what it is that you are doing as a business, the effects of your progress will be minimal, which is why marketing is also crucial to enhancing brand image and customer loyalty. The final step is planning and execution, fundamental to realising your organisation’s goals. This cannot be forgotten as this is where businesses must ensure they have all the experience, expertise, knowledge and skills in place to report for what they do.

To conclude, businesses implementing carbon reporting will find that progress towards net-zero is far easier. The need to reduce emissions is clear and the systematic measurement, management, and subsequent reduction of emissions is made a tangible possibility through the streamlined and efficient approach outlined in the carbon-ethics cycle. A collaborative and structured carbon reporting process allows businesses to meet reduction targets successfully, ultimately leading to the attainment of net-zero status.

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