It’s no wonder the adoption of hybrid cloud is exploding. Hybrid cloud combines the best of both worlds: the integration and optimization of both on-premises private clouds and third-party public clouds to handle the workloads and processes for which each is best suited. It’s becoming more and more clear that, at least from a cloud infrastructure standpoint, we’re going to be living in a hybrid world for the foreseeable future.

As powerful and versatile as a hybrid infrastructure can be, managing such an infrastructure is not without its challenges. In the absence of a robust cloud management platform (CMP), you’ll have to manage each cloud service yourself using each cloud service provider’s toolset. Unfortunately, companies don’t have the in-house expertise or resources to do this.

So, you’ll need a cloud management platform. At the same time, not all cloud management platforms are created equal. For this reason, there are certain criteria you must keep in mind to ensure that you select a CMP that enables you to get the most out of hybrid cloud infrastructure while optimizing your organization’s overall performance. 

For best results, any CMP you select should support the following:

Self-service IT and user empowerment

Your cloud management platform needs to empower users to get what they need, when they need it, without having to go through a lengthy and frustrating provisioning process. When devs and others get frustrated, they start spinning up their own servers, which may even continue running unchecked after a project has ended.  

Giving users a single, self-service interface let’s them easily manage and provision cloud resources on demand. Since administrators can set provisioning conditions, you can maintain critical controls over your infrastructure even as you provide end users more control over their access to resources.

Multi-cloud management

With the right cloud management platform, there should be no need to learn new, vendor-specific user interfaces.

Having a number of vendor-specific features to choose from can be valuable, but having to grapple with multiple teams from multiple departments attempting to manage and access resources in separate environments is a drain on time, money and resources. You should only have one interface that easily communicates with disparate technologies on the back end, and enables undetectable changeover of technologies without missing a beat.

Brownfield deployment & discovery

Cloud management should never require that you rip and replace existing solutions. Your CMP should integrate with all your existing systems without hassles or workarounds and provide full visibility into your entire IT environment.

Without full visibility into your total ecosystem, it can feel like you’re staring into a dark abyss. You need a solution that can hunt down every last server in your IT environment and deliver a holistic view of both your IT assets and all activity running across them. This is the only way to continuously reallocate and optimize your environment.

Service lifecycle management & orchestration

The speed with which organizations need to deploy software and complex applications continues to accelerate. You need to keep up in order to stay competitive, but you also have to grapple with the entire service lifecycle and ensure a dependable, accurate build that holds up under compliance scrutiny.

With the right cloud management platform, architecting solutions in a repeatable, compliant fashion can be a breeze. The deployment of storage, network, and compute resources across multiple servers and clouds can be automated, replacing lengthy manual processes and ensuring a consistent experience for your end users. And thanks to this automation, you can consistently and repeatably maintain standards of compliance.

Role-based access control & governance

When it comes to resource provisioning, it is crucial to be able to control who gets access to what as well as what they can do with it. Maintaining control via manual processes, as has often been done in the past, is not only inefficient; it’s also prone to user error.

A robust CMP should also rely on automation to remove any complexity and uncertainty from resource provisioning. It can determine ownership of specific resources and automate approvals and configurations so they are triggered based on defined groups and services criteria. Not only does automated, roles-based provisioning benefit end users, it also allows admins to easily maintain a detailed and auditable access history for both on-premises and cloud-based systems. 

Centralized management and reporting

Hybrid cloud infrastructures can have a lot of moving parts. And in a large enterprise, these infrastructures can support thousands of users.

Your CMP must be able to control this chaos and provide full visibility into your systems and their users. This requires a single “pane of glass” that can collect data from disparate technologies and provide a centralized view of activities across all environments. The system should also be capable of producing reports revealing true chargeback, showback, and overall cost. As important as these detailed consumption insights can be to senior management, they also improve decision making, budgeting and forecasting for IT admins. 

Cost transparency & service health

At the end of the day, when managing a hybrid cloud environment, IT admins need to worry about two things: cost and performance. For this reason, the right CMP should support both cost transparency and insight into service health. 

On the cost transparency side, you should be able to quickly identify expensive systems or usage outliers by owner and environment. You should also be able to visualize and compare the relative costs of public and private cloud resources. This will allow you to make sure that at any given time the enterprise is using the most cost-effective cloud for the job.

On the service health side, your CMP should facilitate continuous infrastructure testing, empowering IT to test all aspects of service delivery, including dependent processes and integrations, thus ensuring availability for end-users.

Extensibility for both legacy and future technology

Cloud technologies continue to evolve as do the cloud needs of your organization. This makes it very difficult to predict what sort of services or solutions your CMP will need to support next year, next month and beyond.

For this reason, extensibility is key to the long-term viability of any CMP. That is, your CMP needs to be flexible enough to work with what you have now and adapt to whatever is coming in the future. Extensibility allows you to grow your cloud environment in line with the shifting demands and the expanding possibilities of cloud technology.

Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

Right after Thanksgiving, we’ll be at the last big tech conference of the calendar year, AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas from Dec. 2-6. Come visit us at Booth 2231 and sign up for some time to see CloudBolt in action!

In addition, we blogged this week on five can’t-miss cloud-related sessions you can check out at AWS re:Invent.

With that, onto this week’s news:

Hybrid cloud architecture proving an easy sale

Nick Farrell, Channel Eye, Nov. 14, 2019

“Enterprises plan to aggressively shift investment to hybrid cloud architectures, with respondents reporting steady and substantial hybrid deployment plans over the next five years.

Cloudy outfit Nutanix has released details of its second global Enterprise Cloud Index survey and research report, which states that the vast majority of 2019 survey respondents (85 percent) selected hybrid cloud as their ideal IT operating model.”

Global public cloud services market expected to grow 17% in 2020

Lance Whitney, TechRepublic, Nov. 13, 2019

“As more organizations hop onto the cloud to outsource management of their applications, infrastructure, and other assets, revenue for the cloud services market is projected to jump by 17% in 2020, says Gartner. 

In dollars, the market would bring in $266.4 billion next year, up from $227.8 billion this year. Forecasting even further, Gartner expects the market’s revenue to rise to $308.5 billion in 2021 and $354.6 billion in 2022.”

Hybrid cloud architectures are becoming more commonplace. Some enterprises want to augment their current physical infrastructures with a public cloud deployment that acts as a failover. Others simply want scalable off-site storage for their backups. Hybrid cloud deployments are available in many organizations today. But such deployments also come with management challenges. Orchestrating a hybrid infrastructure during its adoption and in the long term is no walk in the park.

So, what is cloud orchestration?

Cloud orchestration is the use of programming language to manage interactions and interconnections between workloads on private and public clouds. Cloud orchestration software connects automated tasks to create a cohesive workflow.

In a typical hybrid setup, engineers manage two silos – the private on-premises deployment and the public cloud platform. Orchestration is a great method for managing complex cloud setups. However, it requires a significant investment in time to build and maintain. Each organization must customize the orchestration to its business needs.

Poorly put-together cloud orchestration software can cause growing pains in an organization. For this reason, you should make sure you get things right. And, even then, a lot of engineering goes into it as the resource needs of the organization grow. 

Here are the three main challenges with cloud orchestration software.

1. Tooling

There are a ton of popular open-source cloud orchestration software solutions that are constantly evolving. Since most products in this space are young, they’re prone to inconsistencies and bugs. This means that organizations are often caught up in lengthy troubleshooting of their cloud environments whenever issues arise. Consequently, it’s necessary to stay on top of the latest updates and changes in the cloud orchestration software in use.

Commercial orchestration tools make things much easier. They offer a more stable and reliable toolset, but it comes at a cost. The enterprise should pick a tool with reasonable licensing fees and excellent support. Keep track of recurring charges since they can quickly add up.

2. Security

Security can be a major concern for most popular cloud orchestration software. Some tools come with insecurely encrypted APIs and are a security risk. Normally, they’ll need to have SSL added separately. This presents the enterprise with a challenge since third-party packages may not get frequent updates and patches. Performance is usually not optimal out of the box. IT staff members have to optimize hardware and provide each infrastructure setup with a customized orchestration solution.

3. Connectivity

It is important to monitor and maintain connectivity in a hybrid cloud setup. With a private cloud deployment, orchestration relies on LAN. A hybrid deployment requires a reliable and redundant WAN connection between the public cloud and the private cloud. In most cases, an existing Internet connection between the two clouds would suffice. But most organizations prefer a high-speed Internet connection or a dedicated low-latency connection to the public cloud.

For example, Amazon Web Services has a Direct Connect product that helps customers to set up an 802.1Q Ethernet connection to their public clouds. Such a connection supports multiple VLANs and allows access to various parts of the company’s resources.

Conclusion

Organizations that wish to improve their productivity and efficiency on the cloud need to consider orchestration. The benefits of having an efficient and faster workflow far outweigh the challenges of cloud orchestration.

Experience the leading hybrid cloud management and orchestration solution. Request a CloudBolt demo today.

Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

Earlier this week on our blog, we looked at six top benefits of moving to a cloud automation system, and how it can impact enterprise IT in the areas of digital innovation.

In addition, we were proud to announce recently that CloudBolt was named to the 2019 Deloitte Technology Fast 500™! Learn more here.

With that, onto this week’s news:

Juniper aims to ease wired, wireless, multicloud management

Michael Cooney, Network World, Nov. 12, 2019

“Juniper has enhanced its network and hybrid cloud management software by integrating further the AI technology it recently acquired from Mist and adding new features to its Contrail Enterprise Multicloud software.

“The company recently closed the agreement to buy wireless-gear-maker Mist for $405 million and promised to meld the Mist technology with Juniper’s. Mist is known for its cloud-managed artificial-intelligence-based wireless service called WiFi Assurance that measures performance and service-level metrics to make wireless networks more predictable and reliable, the company said.”

Reluctance to automate leads to problems for enterprise network firewalls

Ian Barker, Beta News, Nov. 12, 2019

“Enterprises are slow to abandon manual processes, despite being short of staff, and a lack of automation, increasing network complexity and limited visibility are contributing to costly misconfigurations and increased risk.

This is among the findings of the 2019 State of the Firewall Report released today by security automation specialist FireMon, the report is based on responses from almost 600 people. The report reveals that cloud adoption is up significantly — 72 percent of respondents are managing some form of hybrid cloud environment today, compared to the 53 percent in the 2018 report.

However, processes to manage these networks are not keeping pace, 65 percent of respondents are still not using any form of automation to manage their security policies. 38 percent of C-level respondents say that change management processes are ad hoc, such as using email to send requests to firewall admins and spreadsheets to track network changes. Only 23 percent have real-time visibility into network security risks and compliance, and 35 percent of respondents only found out about a misconfigured firewall causing issues through urgent phone calls, emails and texts.”

As cloud security improves, a weak link emerges: people

Paul Gillin, SiliconANGLE, Nov. 10 2019

‘“A huge misconception is that the infrastructure-as-a-service model extends security to the customer’s systems when the providers are only securing the systems they are hosting,’ said Jesse Emerson, vice president of Americas managed security services at managed security services firm Trustwave Holdings Inc.

‘Simply put, when you use cloud services, the providers are responsible for securing the underlying infrastructure – customers are responsible for securing their data and applications,’ said Robert Sadowski, trust and security marketing lead for Google LLC’s Cloud Platform.”

Cloud DevOps is growing. It’s becoming a key cog in the pursuit of competitive advantage for many enterprises.

So, what is DevOps? There is no standard definition. However, we can loosely define it as a set of concepts that automate the processes between software development and IT teams. According to Gartner:

DevOps is a cultural shift that promotes collaboration between operations and development teams which demands a linked toolchain of technologies to facilitate change.

Pinpoint the Business Case for Cloud DevOps

The needs of the enterprise must drive the Cloud DevOps initiative. It’s easy to focus more on the tools and methods of doing DevOps and forget what the customer needs. Justify the need for DevOps by identifying the business goals it helps to achieve.

Define What Cloud DevOps Means for Your Organization

Define DevOps for your organization in a manner that your team will understand. Doing this will provide a banner for people to embrace and get behind. It will make it easier to get everyone on board. Make sure the definition is precise, short, and supports the business justification

Pick a “First-Mover” Application

You shouldn’t implement DevOps in one fell swoop. Instead, deploy it step by step. Each step must satisfy the following qualities:

Build a Team

You cannot have an effective DevOps initiative without people. Choose a competent team to handle the process. As a rule, you should prioritize attitude over skills. The lack of skills is a solvable problem, but a bad attitude can derail the Cloud DevOps initiative. Recruit motivated and smart team players who understand the risks associated with the initiative.

Come Up with Objectives and Success Metrics

People are central to any Cloud DevOps initiative. You need to understand and implement motivators, set objectives, and have clear success metrics. This will allow you to identify and reward the people hitting the right milestones. Assign objectives within teams and make sure to align them to the business goals.

Zone in On Constraints

Infrastructure and operations leaders should pinpoint the key bottlenecks limiting the throughput of the Cloud DevOps initiative. This will allow them to identify the roadblocks that are keeping them from hitting targets. They can, then, work on addressing these roadblocks.

Don’t Scale Too Early

Many organizations rush to scale Cloud DevOps before they try to get approval. This often leads to a catch-22 situation where they can’t start DevOps because they don’t know how to scale. Consequently, they can’t learn how to scale because they can’t start.

Request a Demo to Learn More about Cloud Devops for IT Experts

Help your Cloud DevOps pros be all they can be. Sign up today for a demo of CloudBolt.

Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

Earlier this week on our blog, we looked at the four things organizations should seek in a cloud orchestration platform and highlighted some can’t-miss hybrid cloud sessions at next week’s Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando.

Speaking of Ignite, if you’re headed out to the show next week, we’d love to see you. Sign up for some time to chat with us about your hybrid cloud management and orchestration needs here.

With that, onto this week’s news:

NetApp Introduces Keystone: Simplifying Storage For Hybrid, Multi-Cloud World

Joseph Kovar, CRN, Oct., 29 2019

“NetApp Tuesday introduced NetApp Keystone, which the company said simplifies the acquisition of data storage and management technology whether for on-premises data centers or in the cloud.
NetApp Keystone, unveiled on the opening day of this week’s NetApp Insight 2019 conference, allows customers to purchase their on-premises and cloud-based storage capabilities without worrying about future requirements by allowing data to be migrated as needed across on-premises, private clouds or public clouds, and either purchased outright or on a consumption model, NetApp said.”

CRV leads $40M round into cloud networking and security startup Aviatrix

Maria Deutscher, Silicon Angle, Oct. 28, 2019

“Cloud management startup Aviatrix Systems Inc. today announced that it has raised a $40 million funding round led by Charles River Ventures to launch a new growth push.

Five-year-old Aviatrix will use the capital to add staff across its sales, product development, customer support and other core teams. The investment comes about two months after the startup moved into a bigger office in Santa Clara, California, to accommodate planned workforce expansions.

Aviatrix provides a suite of networking and security services for enterprise cloud environments. The toolkit works across all the major infrastructure-as-a-service-service platforms, which allows companies that use multiple clouds to centralize management operations in one interface instead of handling the administration of each deployment separately.”

Rackspace security alliance with Armor aims for hybrid cloud

Spencer Smith and John Moore, SearchITChannel, Oct. 25 2019

“A new Rackspace security deal with Armor aims to attract mid-market and low-end enterprise customers looking to shore up their hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

The San Antonio-based managed cloud services company plans to integrate Armor’s technology into its portfolio of security services. Armor, a security-as-a-service provider, will contribute its Armor Anywhere platform, which includes intrusion detection, vulnerability scanning, patch monitoring, log management and threat hunting among other tools and capabilities. The integration of Armor into Rackspace security services will be available for customers across major private and public cloud platforms in 2020, according to Rackspace.”

SEE HOW CLOUDBOLT CAN CHANGE YOUR HYBRID CLOUD ENVIRONMENT. REQUEST A DEMO TODAY!

Business units, both big and small, want to get on the cloud. After all, the cloud does help reduce operating and capital costs. At the same time, the cloud has made IT more complex. This is because of the amount of data and processes spread across multiple systems. Manageability and coherence of all these interconnections and interactions can turn into a nightmare for the IT department. This is where a cloud orchestration platform comes in.

What is a cloud orchestration platform?

A cloud orchestration platform provides a single interface to manage multi-cloud deployments. This includes transferring assets to the cloud, monitoring apps, storing data, and managing compliance and security. Cloud orchestration technology works with heterogeneous systems deployed in different geographical locations with different providers.

Should your business invest in a cloud orchestration platform? The answer is yes. Here are some of the fundamental functions and features to look out for.

Integration with Automation

The ability to integrate with intelligent automation is key to a successful orchestration platform. You get a highly functional and more robust solution that can carry out workflows effectively. It’s impossible to set up workflows without this marriage between orchestration and automation. You can go with a stand-alone product and integrate it with existing automation tools. Or, you can opt for a comprehensive solution with intelligent automation built in. The latter is the better choice.

Good User Experience

The whole point of cloud orchestration software is to simplify the cloud. You want to deploy services fast and efficiently. For this to happen, the orchestration solution should be user-friendly. You shouldn’t have to spend too much time creating workflows. After all, you invested in the platform to avoid this. Also, rolling out the tool to the entire organization should be a seamless process. If it requires specialized knowledge or extensive training, then you might want to look elsewhere.

Reusable Components for Workflows

For workflows to be effective, they must be flexible, robust, and scalable. Creating workflows from scratch is usually a tedious process. So, it’s best if you can reuse workflow components down the road. This makes it easier to create new workflows.

Reporting Functionality

Reporting is critical to the success of your enterprise. Reporting allows you to pinpoint inefficiencies in your operations. For example, it allows you to identify problems and underperforming users. Reports also enable those not in IT to see the work done and its overall value. Make sure the reports are flexible enough for consumption by a wide variety of audiences.

Conclusions on Cloud Orchestration Platform Selection

You can get off-the-shelf cloud orchestration software from a wide variety of vendors. Alternatively, DevOps teams can implement a custom cloud orchestration solution through automation and management tools. Whatever the case, these tips will help with the evaluation process.

An enterprise-class cloud orchestration platform can change everything. See how CloudBolt can help. Request a demo today!

Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

Earlier this week on our blog, we looked at the capabilities required for cloud management suites and setting up your organization for cloud success.

If you missed it, CloudBolt launched CloudBolt 9.0––Cumulus last week. You can find all the details on the release and watch a replay of our launch webinar here.

Lastly, CloudBolt will be at Microsoft Ignite in Orlando from Nov. 4-8. If you’re looking to get your hybrid cloud questions answered, sign up for some time to chat with us at the show. We’d love to see you!

With that, onto this week’s news:

Extreme Networks Unveils ExtremeCloud IQ Cloud Management Application

Deborah Schalm, DevOps.com, Oct. 22, 2019

“Extreme Networks, Inc, a cloud-driven networking company, today announced availability of ExtremeCloud™ IQ, the industry’s first end-to-end cloud management application that leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence to provide enterprises with insights, as well as complete visibility, control, and automation of their entire network. With this announcement, Extreme is also introducing “Co-Pilot,” a new automation feature that will help IT administrators save time and effort on an increasing number of everyday tasks. The ExtremeCloud IQ application can be deployed in the public cloud, private cloud, or on-premises, providing enterprises with unmatched flexibility to accomplish their business objectives.”

Seven digital transformation trends for 2020

Ben Moore, Channel Life, Oct. 22 2019

“MuleSoft has released the report ‘Top 7 Digital Transformation Trends Shaping 2020’ which outlines the most timely digital transformation trends for 2020 and explores their impact across industries.

The top trends, according to Mulesoft are:

  1. Connecting the consumer experience. 
  2. Data-driven business.
  3. Artificial intelligence and machine learning.
  4. Multi-cloud computing. 
  5. Partnering with IT to turbocharge the business. 
  6. Co-creating value with external stakeholders. 
  7. Co-creating value with external stakeholders.”

Ubuntu 19.10 released with Kubernetes at the edge and multi-cloud infrastructure

Christina Cardoza, ITOps Times, Oct. 18, 2019

“The latest version of the open-source Linux distribution Ubuntu is now available. Version 19.10 comes with a strong focus on Kubernetes and the edge.

Canonical has added strict confinement to MicroK8s — is zero-ops Kubernetes solution. According to the company, this will provide enhanced edge computing capabilities and ensure isolation and secure Kubernetes environments. Users can extend MicroK8 with Istio, Knative, CoreDNS, Prometheus and Jaeger.”

See how CloudBolt can help you get the most out of your cloud. Request a demo today!

Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

Earlier this week on our blog, we explored Cloud Solutions in the Multi-Cloud Era. We also officially announced the launch of CloudBolt 9.0—Cumulus.

With that, onto this week’s news:

Recent AWS Billing Error Points to Need for Partner-Led Cloud Management

Kelly Teal, Channel Futures, Oct. 15, 2019

“Telecom expense management has been a familiar part of the indirect channel landscape for at least a dozen years. But the need for its more evolved counterpart, cloud management, provisioned through partners, is becoming more apparent.

In late September, word quickly spread that Amazon Web Services had overbilled a number of customers throughout the world. It was an accident, and one that AWS caught and corrected right away. Nonetheless, the incident made clear that channel partners can, and should, play a larger role in their enterprise clients’ cloud management efforts.

And therein lies the real opportunity for channel partners. While there is legitimate reason to track and monitor cloud expenses for organizations, there is even more call to ensure they use what they buy, and control consumption.”

Nutanix Outlines Cloud Footprint Expansion As Talk Of Acquisition Rears Head

Antony Savvas, Data Economy, Oct. 11, 2019

“Nutanix is planning to increase its data centre footprint further to support the increased number of data storage, disaster recovery and cloud orchestration and management services it is planning in the near- to medium-term.

The company now generates the majority of its sales from software and services, which is a far cry from when it gained quick traction for its hyperconverged infrastucture (HCI) appliances a few years ago.

At the firm’s annual .NEXT EMEA customer and partner event in Copenhagen this week, Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey (pictured) told Data Economy: “We will expand our cloud reach as the compute has to come to the customer data now being generated in the cloud and at the edge.”

He said this would involve widening the company’s partnerships with data centre operators and public cloud providers to increase the number of the firm’s cloud regions, to make sure services more easily comply with data laws such as GDPR and data sovereignty demands from both enterprises and governments.”

CenturyLink Adds Google to Cloud Destinations

Edward Gately, Channel Partners Online, Oct 15, 2019

“CenturyLink has expanded its Cloud Connect Dynamic Connections service to Google Cloud Platform.

The move provides a new option for connecting business premises and public data centers to cloud environments. It allows self-serve, real-time, dedicated network connectivity across thousands of endpoints in North America, Asia Pacific and Europe through CenturyLink’s global fiber network.

Chris McReynolds, CenturyLink‘s vice president of core network services, tells Channel Partners the top three public cloud providers are Google, Microsoft and Amazon, and adding Google to his company’s cloud destinations for Dynamic Connections is “key to supporting the customers’ need to move and stand up workloads when they want and where they want.”