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

Here are the blogs we’ve posted this week:

With that, onto this week’s news:

Global cloud spending saw a huge boom in Q1 2021

Anthony Spadafora, TechRadar, July 6, 2021

“Enterprise spending on cloud computing saw a big boost during the first quarter of this year according to new data from the International Data Corporation (IDC). In its latest tracker, the market intelligence firm revealed that spending on compute and storage infrastructure products for cloud infrastructure rose by 12.5 percent year over year during Q1 2021 to reach $14.1bn. Investments in non-cloud infrastructure meanwhile increased by 6.3 percent year over year to reach $13.5bn.

As businesses around the world begin to return to the office and implement hybrid working policies, sectors of the economy that suffered the most revenue loss during the pandemic are returning to growth.”

Security Problems Worsen as Enterprises Build Hybrid and Multicloud Systems

Maria Korolov, Data Center Knowledge, July 6, 2021

“According to a report released in February by Salt Security, 91 percent of companies reported API-related security problems last year. More than 80 percent weren’t sure whether the APIs they used exposed personally identifiable information, and about one fifth said they had no way of finding out which APIs exposed sensitive data.

APIs are just one example of potential attack surfaces for cloud-based infrastructure, and it’s not a surprise that cybersecurity incidents involving cloud infrastructure have now surpassed those involving on-prem resources.”

Infrastructure shifts to cloud due to remote work expose enterprises to new security threats; Security teams absorb responsibility

Grant Wernick, Security Magazine, July 7, 2021

“In a new era of hybrid workspaces, many sectors are making the shift to the cloud and adopting cloud-based SaaS applications at an accelerated pace for agility and scalability – but this practice and the efficiencies that are gained come at a cost. Business leaders are realizing that they must allot more of their resources and budgets to address new security concerns surrounding these transitions to keep their environment safe and prevent breaches.

Challenges related to infrastructure shifts to the cloud accelerated due to remote work and the COVID-19 pandemic. Deloitte found that 64% of companies enabled remote work in 2020. Over half of these companies plan to preserve this setup, resulting in a surge of cloud software and core SaaS application adoption.”

We’re here to help you anywhere on your hybrid and multi-cloud journey. Request a demo today.

We recently held a special webinar to explore the findings of the inaugural CloudBolt Industry Insights report, “The Truth About Hybrid Cloud and Digital Transformation.”

In this webinar, our Chief Marketing Officer Grant Ho teamed up with Matt Grant, a B2B tech writer and cloud industry expert, to take a deep dive into the findings from the survey of over 100 global IT leaders.

One particular area of interest was in this topline statistic: IT leaders unanimously (94%) believe that a hybrid cloud approach is critical for digital transformation, but recognize self-service IT, automation and optimization challenges often stand in the way.

“The idea of using digital technologies to transform how we work has been going on for a long time,” Matt Grant said. “There is an absolute consensus that if you want to have a totally digitally-enabled business…it would not be possible unless you had the scalability and flexibility and all the different options of the hybrid cloud.”

“It’s pretty clear that hybrid cloud is the core enabler of that successful strategy,” Grant Ho added.

Here’s more of what Grant and Matt discussed:

Watch this webcast replay to discover how your IT peers are navigating the path to digital transformation and learn the latest best practices in hybrid cloud management.

What to learn more? Schedule your demo of CloudBolt solutions today.

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

Here are the blogs we’ve posted this week:

With that, onto this week’s news:

Cloud ‘sticker shock’ explored: We’re spending way too much

Joe McKendrick, ZDNet, June 26, 2021

“Cloud computing is probably the biggest business around these days — it has become a $100-billion-a-year industry. And there’s a chance companies are paying way too much for it. That’s the conclusion drawn by Sarah Wang and Martin Casado, partners with Silicon Valley powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz Capital Management, who say the costs of cloud on a business can be staggering. “While cloud clearly delivers on its promise early on in a company’s journey, the pressure it puts on margins can start to outweigh the benefits, as a company scales and growth slows,” they wrote in a recent analysis. 

Of course, cost savings is merely the early benefit of cloud, which is presumably subsumed by the flexibility and agility cloud resources provide. Wang and Casado acknowledge as much. ‘This shift is driven by an incredibly powerful value proposition — infrastructure available immediately, at exactly the scale needed by the business — driving efficiencies both in operations and economics. The cloud also helps cultivate innovation as company resources are freed up to focus on new products and growth.’”

Now is the Time for Businesses to Rethink Their Digital Transformation Strategies

Prangya Pandab, Enterprise Talk, June 28, 2021

“In the last 15 months, markets worldwide have changed significantly. The new business and digital resiliency paradigms, as well as the accelerating evolution of technology and data management methodologies, must be reflected in Digital Transformation initiatives.

According to a 2020 IDC research, by 2023, 75% of businesses would have comprehensive digital transformation (DX) implementation roadmaps, up from 27% in 2020. This will result in meaningful transformation across all aspects of business and society.”

Public cloud vs. private cloud: What’s right for your organization?

Dashveenjit Kaur, TechHQ, June 28, 2021

“The term cloud computing can be a broad umbrella spanning a range of classifications, types, and architecture models. This networked computing model has transformed how we work — if you’re reading this, you are most likely already using the cloud. But cloud isn’t one easily definable thing — cloud computing can be broadly categorized into a few general types comprising public cloud, private, hybrid (a combination of public and private), and even multi-cloud. But which to adopt for your organization when it comes to public cloud vs. private cloud, that can be a multi-layered proposition.

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, spending on public cloud IT infrastructure increased 13.1% year-on-year (YoY) in the third quarter of 2020 (3Q20), reaching US$13.3 billion. Meanwhile, spending on private cloud infrastructure increased 0.6% YoY in the same period to US$5.0 billion with on-premises private clouds accounting for 63.2% of this amount.”

We’re here to help you anywhere on your hybrid and multi-cloud journey. Request a demo today.

CloudBolt Software recently held a webinar with our product experts to discuss the ins and outs of our Spring Release. This included updates to our CloudBolt Cloud Management Platform (CMP), CloudBolt Cost & Security Management Platform (formerly Kumolus) and CloudBolt OneFuse Integration Platform offerings.

We’re committed to helping our customers leverage IT to innovate, accomplish and stand out in crowded markets. Our product release for this spring sports new and improved features across our product portfolio to meet these needs, and we’re excited to share more on this webinar replay.

Watch this webcast replay to learn about solving cloud problems in new savvy and compelling ways. You’ll hear from product experts Nilesh Deo, Damon Tepe, Sid Smith and Rick Kilcoyne as they discuss problems, solution approaches, and expected benefits around these topic areas: 

Discover how you can accelerate your cloud journey with new cloud solutions available in CloudBolt’s spring release.

Please check out the full discussion here:

What to learn more? Schedule your demo of CloudBolt solutions today.

Does your organization need a Google Cloud governance platform? To answer this question, you first need to establish responsibility for managing and tracking data on Google Cloud. 

Letting each team or department manage their data security, data compliance, and data integrity is often unsustainable. This is because of high cost performance issues and security risks. This is why you need a governance platform.

Do you have a governance platform in place? Striking a balance between managing your data and making it accessible when needed can be difficult. Here are some cloud governance best practices to help you. 

Have Complete Visibility of Data

If you don’t have a 360-degree view of your data and its sources, it becomes difficult to answer these questions:

To deal with this problem, you need to detect all shadow IT instances within the organization. If any exists, find a way to integrate it into your authorized IT workloads. 

Put in Place a Universal Labeling Policy

To organize and classify data, you need a universal labeling policy to label all assets in the same format. If your organization operates in a multi-cloud environment, you need to be cautious. Ensure the labels you use in Google Cloud Platform follow the same format as those used in Azure or AWS.

It is important to note that Google Cloud labels must be in lowercase.

Implement Access Controls

Use PoLP (Principle of Least Provide) for your access control protocols to restrict access for users, processes, and accounts. With these access controls in place, those who receive access can only perform routine authorized activities. 

For any data stored in Google Cloud, IT should set up owner-reader privileges to control access to the organization’s data.

Enforce Data Access Audit Logs

IT needs to enable audit logs for data access. Organizations should also configure IAM (Identity and Access Management) profiles to prevent users from disabling data access audit logs. Doing this helps avoid data loss instances through security incidents, operational problems, and fraudulent activities.

IT should collect audit logs and store them securely in a storage volume with limited access for analysis whenever the need arises. 

One benefit of using universal labeling policies is it becomes easier to identify and encrypt any sensitive data. In conjunction with total visibility, user labeling policies help IT avoid the tedious task of encrypting everything. Encrypting everything usually results in performance problems.

Google Cloud data loss prevention API helps you to de-identify, tokenize, or mask sensitive data.

Conclusion

Developing policies for Google Cloud Data Governance is not difficult. The challenge lies in enforcing compliance. After all, simply misspelling a label or misconfiguring IAM policies can expose your data to corruption or risk. 

CloudBolt is a cloud management platform tailored for enforcing Cloud Data Governance on Google Cloud. You get real-time monitoring of your cloud environments and receive alerts if there are violations of your data governance policies.

We’re here to help you anywhere on your hybrid and multi-cloud journey. Request a demo today.

What is Digital Transformation?

The term “digital transformation” refers to the process of adopting digital technologies. A digital transformation strategy can help organizations achieve several objectives, including:

A digital transformation strategy can greatly vary from one business to another, encompassing a wide range of tools and processes. Each organization carries out a unique digital transformation journey, discovering the best way to adopt digital technologies and practices into its core processes and product offering.

In this article, you will learn:

Why Should You Embark on a Digital Transformation Journey?

In today’s digital economy, digital transformation is essential to keep up with the accelerated development and diversification of consumer needs. Both consumers and employees benefit from adapting the business to the digital era. Digital transformation lets you react much more quickly and more effectively to customer requirements, gaining a competitive advantage.

In the past, IT systems and software were considered a cost center. Today businesses understand that the technology needed for digital transformation is an innovative center that can directly contribute to business growth and revenues. Cloud-native technologies like Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), containers and serverless are tools that help companies better serve their customers.

Digital transformation is becoming a staple for businesses everywhere. According to Seagate, 66% of CEOs are focusing on digital strategies. Gartner reports that 56% of CEOs say that digital transformation is driving revenue growth. 

Yet, there is a gap between digital transformation initiatives and customer expectations—in a Qualtrics survey, 60% of companies reported they have a good mobile experience, while only 22% of consumers said they are satisfied with their shopping experience on mobile.

Where Should You Start on Your Digital Transformation Journey?

The following 5-step process will help you get started with a digital transformation initiative.

Evaluate the need—identify how urgently your business needs business transformation, what is the business value for specific applications or business processes, and the investment needed to digitize them. 

Create a multi-year plan—digital transformation can take time. Create a phased plan, starting with processes or applications that are easy to evolve, and are less risky. Determine your long-term budget for business transformation. The plan should include interim steps and migration strategies, to ensure that current applications continue to function while you are developing and transitioning to new applications.

Build a business plan—digital transformation is costly, but can also have major economic returns. There are two ways to “pay back” an investment in digital systems—cost savings compared to current systems, and increase in revenue. Build a business plan that combines these two elements to show how digital transformation will demonstrate a return on investment over time. Track progress against your business plan, and adapt programs to ensure they meet ROI goals.

Mitigate risk—digital transformation programs face various risks, including failed migrations, crashes, downtime, compliance violations, and cybersecurity incidents. These risks can delay and even cause the failure of a digital transformation initiative. It is important to plan for the major risks that face your project, plan how to mitigate them, and put monitoring in place so teams can recognize and respond to them.

Determine your focus—ensure your digital transformation initiative focuses on the areas that will generate the biggest impact for your business. This can include improvements in resilience, improved efficiency, contributing to a better customer experience, and enabling more agile development practices. 

What Should a Digital Transformation Strategy Include?

Here are the primary components of a successful digital transformation strategy:

Digital Transformation Journey with CloudBolt

CloudBolt is here to help you no matter where you are on your digital transformation journey. We believe the long-ingrained ways of doing hybrid and multi-cloud management are over, and that a new cloud order is taking shape.

Our orchestration and automation services help with managing your hybrid, multi-cloud environments, while empowering your developers with self-service IT. By turning your enterprise IT into the cloud provider, unleash a responsive, agile alternative to runaway IT that gives your DevOps what they want. With our cloud cost management and security optimization services, you can automate extremely complicated and time-consuming aspects of your cloud management so you can focus on more strategic initiatives. And with our integration platform, you can eliminate cumbersome custom coding to make your IT teams and tools work together more easily.

Discover how much easier your digital transformation journey can be with CloudBolt. Talk to us today.

Where are you in your public cloud security optimization journey?

Public cloud adoption is exploding. Gartner forecasts worldwide public cloud end-user spending to grow 18% in 2021 to $304.9 billion. Organizations are taking hybrid and multi-cloud approaches to digitally innovate, modernize processes, build efficiencies, and collaborate among teams. With the right public cloud approach, your development team can get the resources they need fast to move your enterprise forward.

But with any technology, there is risk. Security breaches happen, and the proliferation of public cloud has given rise to shadow IT and other threats to your critical data and infrastructure.

To help your organization make sense of the current public cloud security landscape, and provide advice on how best to navigate it, we’ve created our new eBook 7 Essentials for Public Cloud Security Optimization, which you can read for free anytime.

This is the seventh and final post in a weekly blog series examining each of the seven essentials. This week, we’re taking a look at Essential #7: Create the Right Plan for When Things Go Wrong.

Essential #7: Create the Right Plan for When Things Go Wrong

Now that you know about all the measures you need to have in place to make public cloud computing secure, it’s important to know nothing is ever 100% foolproof or truly fully secure. You can only do your level best, and that includes planning for when things do in fact go wrong. Almost three-quarters of organizations hosting data or workloads in the public cloud experienced a security incident in the last year, according to a recent Sophos report.

Develop a formal crisis response plan for what you’ll do in the event of a security incident. Test your response on a regular basis. Ensure every important stakeholder in your enterprise is involved, has input, and understands their role. Run simulations. Make necessary updates to improve your processes for when a breach or other bad episode takes place. The last thing you want is to get caught flat-footed. Simple things such as recorded certified trainings for your employees on a bi-annual basis can keep everyone alert and make security everyone’s priority.

It’s time to get your cloud security optimization in gear. Book your demo of CloudBolt’s security optimization solutions now.

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

Here are the blogs we’ve posted this week:

With that, onto this week’s news:

How has the cloud market grown in the last year?

Jenny Darmody, SiliconRepublic, June 4, 2021

“Data from Synergy Research Group suggests that enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services ramped up aggressively in 2020, growing by 35pc compared to the previous year and reaching almost $130bn. Meanwhile, enterprise spending on data centre hardware and software dropped by 6pc.

‘Clearly companies have been voting with their wallets on what makes the most sense for them. We do not expect to see such a drastic reduction in spending on enterprise data centres over the next five years, but for sure we will continue to see aggressive cloud growth over that period.’”

Massive Ransomware Hits Likely to Hasten Cloud Security Shift

Jake Holland, Bloomberg Law, June 4, 2021

“A spate of recent ransomware attacks on U.S. software, energy, and food industry giants is likely to drive adoption of cloud security technology across sectors. Use of cloud-based tools in lieu of traditional information technology security may help companies better guard against cybercrime and the reputational and legal risks that accompany such hits, attorneys and industry analysts say.

‘The cloud security and software market is still under-penetrated but growing each year, as companies recognize the value of protecting systems from weaknesses imposed by remote work and an uptick in hacks’, said Mandeep Singh, a technology industry analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.”

Hooked on public cloud? It could be eating a big chunk of your margins

Liam Tung, ZDNet, June 3, 2021

“At some point in a software startup’s journey, after it has scaled up and gained millions of users, there might come a point at which the cost of cloud harms margins, which may prompt companies to start repatriating computing infrastructure. But can they do this after growing up on variable IT costs and dodging capital expenditure?

Looking at Dropbox, it reported improving gross margins from 33% to 67% between 2015 to 2017, primarily because it moved workloads from the public cloud to cheaper in-house and co-location infrastructure. That happened as its growth rate was falling.”

We’re here to help you anywhere on your hybrid and multi-cloud journey. Request a demo today.

Where are you in your public cloud security optimization journey?

Public cloud adoption is exploding. Gartner forecasts worldwide public cloud end-user spending to grow 18% in 2021 to $304.9 billion. Organizations are taking hybrid and multi-cloud approaches to digitally innovate, modernize processes, build efficiencies, and collaborate among teams. With the right public cloud approach, your development team can get the resources they need fast to move your enterprise forward.

But with any technology, there is risk. Security breaches happen, and the proliferation of public cloud has given rise to shadow IT and other threats to your critical data and infrastructure.

To help your organization make sense of the current public cloud security landscape, and provide advice on how best to navigate it, we’ve created our new eBook 7 Essentials for Public Cloud Security Optimization, which you can read for free anytime.

This is the sixth post in a weekly blog series examining each of the seven essentials. This week, we’re taking a look at Essential #6: Comply or Die.

Essential #6: Comply or Die

A decade ago, compliance management was extremely expensive. It took considerable investment to ensure your systems were compliant along important frameworks. Today, in the public cloud world, much of compliance management is automatable. With more awareness, especially at the corporate board level, about breaches and security vulnerabilities, knowing where you stand on compliance and having a good answer for it is key. Plus, it might be driven by industry standards depending on your industry.

Understand the needs of your business when it comes to compliance, both from a regulatory and a non-regulatory standpoint. Whether it’s CIS, or the AWS Well-Architected Framework, or something else, it’s a smart practice to align what you’re doing to a framework for solid compliance. Otherwise, what you’re doing could be considered subjective and won’t stand up to scrutiny. If possible, establish automated policies to track and alert about any deviations in compliance frameworks. You can then send these alerts directly to users or to various groups through emails, Slack or other means.

It’s time to get your cloud security optimization in gear. Book your demo of CloudBolt’s security optimization solutions now.