Is your business falling behind in the race to the top?

Your business moves fast. Different, often-competing units within your enterprise want to achieve business priorities, drive efficiencies, and rapidly produce revenue. They’re relying on IT to provide the resources necessary to grow fast. They need what they need and they need it now—as in yesterday.

How can you ensure fast compliant delivery of resources—be it virtual machines (VMs), applications, public cloud resources, or other types—so your business can grow quickly without friction and delay? The answer: IT automation.

We’ve recently posted our eBook, The 7 Secrets of IT Automation, which gives you the opportunity to learn a step-by-step action plan to unlock the potential of your hybrid and multi-cloud environment.

This is the fifth in a weekly blog series examining each of the seven secrets. This week we’ll look at Secret 5: Control Costs Without Compromising Capabilities.

Secret 5: Control Costs Without Compromising Capabilities

As hybrid cloud environments scale, manual cost tracking processes tend to fail fast and scripting can’t keep up when new services are added or when pricing changes (which is often). Did you know 39% of cloud engineers don’t take action to save cost, according to the 2021 State of FinOps report?

You need to be able to understand what’s going on with your cloud spend, then visualize how to optimize that spend, and finally act on those optimization insights automatically. Make sure you implement systems and policies that give you the ability to see and compare costs among all of your cloud resources, both public and private. Plus, you need these systems to work in a true multi-cloud environment and not in a fragmented fashion, in a way that automates optimization. Leverage best of breed approaches to keep your cloud costs in check without compromising on the benefits of using cloud resources, paving the way for accelerated digital transformation in a financially-responsible manner.

Secrets No More: Unlock the Power of IT Automation. See How CloudBolt Can Help.

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:

Companies missing security in rushed cloud adoptions

Samantha Schwartz, Cybersecurity Dive, April 6, 2021

“More than one-third of global businesses have internet-accessible cloud storage. The configuration is justified in some cases, but Unit 42 found 30% of those businesses store sensitive or personally identifiable information (PII) in internet-facing cloud storage. The exposed sensitive data was of note to researchers as “anyone who knows the right URLs can access the data without passwords or other authentication,” the report said. 

Ninety-three percent of malware found in cloud storage is in executable (.exe) or dynamic link library (.dll) files. Cloud storage data contains less than 0.01% of malware, though researchers recommended an investigation into how the malware penetrated storage.”

Digital Transformation Is Coming Of Age

Khadim Batti, Forbes, April 7, 2021

“Investing in the right technologies is also critical to success. To ensure business continuity post-pandemic, organizations are readily adopting cloud-based tools as cloud computing has become instrumental to the modern data ecosystem. Hybrid cloud solutions are expected to gain more traction because of speed, security, and scalability. Large public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, Google, IBM and Oracle are investing heavily in the hybrid setup as well.

BCG suggests that 70% of digital transformation initiatives fall short of their objectives and eventually fail. If digital transformation is imperative, then why is the success rate so low?”

Hybrid cloud is getting more popular, but there are some big challenges

Sead Fadilpašić, ITProPortal, March 31, 2021

“However, there are major challenges ahead, mostly around cloud-based identity and access management (IAM). This is according to a new report from Google Cloud and identity management company ForgeRock. 

Based on a poll of 300 IT executives globally, the two companies found that, while cloud adoption overall is increasing, investment and interest in hybrid cloud is ‘particularly high’.”

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. A recent market report indicated that 83% of organizations believe security is a huge challenge. There are numerous points of potential failure in your enterprise and understanding them early can be the difference between averting disaster and not.

In our newest eBook, 7 Essentials for Public Cloud Security Optimization, we cover the seven essential tips every enterprise needs to consider to keep their public cloud environments secure. You’ll learn a step-by-step methodology for keeping your organization safe while navigating public cloud. Don’t miss your chance to learn the essentials right here.

Read the eBook for free here, and if you’re ready to take your public cloud security optimization strategy to the next level, sign up to talk to us today.

See how CloudBolt simplifies public cloud security optimization for enterprises today.

Is your business falling behind in the race to the top?

Your business moves fast. Different, often-competing units within your enterprise want to achieve business priorities, drive efficiencies, and rapidly produce revenue. They’re relying on IT to provide the resources necessary to grow fast. They need what they need and they need it now—as in yesterday.

How can you ensure fast compliant delivery of resources—be it virtual machines (VMs), applications, public cloud resources, or other types—so your business can grow quickly without friction and delay? The answer: IT automation.

We’ve recently posted our eBook, The 7 Secrets of IT Automation, which gives you the opportunity to learn a step-by-step action plan to unlock the potential of your hybrid and multi-cloud environment.

This is the fourth in a weekly blog series examining each of the seven secrets. This week we’ll look at Secret 4: Automate, Provision and Manage Resources—Intelligently.

Secret 4: Automate, Provision and Manage Resources—Intelligently

Self-service IT, in and of itself, makes the lives of all technological stakeholders in your enterprise, much easier. Provisioning time can be cut from weeks to minutes. You’ll save on costs, and your users – from admins to DevOps and others – will get what they need and complete projects to meet business objectives. You may be asking: “That all sounds great, but what do I do about day-2 management?”

Great question! Once your IT resources are provisioned, managing them can’t be overlooked. Get a plan to deploy and manage the complete service lifecycle for resources. Use platforms and set policies that discover and ingest brownfield resources. And, make sure the solution you choose is able to maintain compliance throughout.

Secrets No More: Unlock the Power of IT Automation. See How CloudBolt Can Help.

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:

The Truth About Cloud Security

Ashley Wiesner, SDxCentral, March 30, 2021

“Centralized security is one of the major benefits of cloud environments. Since cloud-based networks consist of numerous endpoints and devices, network management can become difficult. Managing everything centrally improves traffic analysis and streamlines the monitoring of network events. Reduced cost is also cited as a benefit of cloud security. In fact, Oracle reported to Forbes enterprises typically save 30% to 50% once moved to the cloud. This is because cloud security doesn’t require dedicated hardware. 

This not only reduces the upfront investment but it also minimizes administrative overhead and IT team costs – security solutions offer constant protection with minimal human intervention, reducing IT teams interaction with security solutions. The next benefit plays off of the above benefit – reduced overhead. Manual security reconfigurations and regular security updates are a thing of the past when enterprises work with reputable cloud service providers and security platforms. These tasks that once were a drain on resources are not managed on your behalf. Reliability is another benefit of cloud security. With adequate security measures in place, enterprise users can access data and applications from the cloud no matter their location or device.”

Cloud Security Alliance Releases Latest Survey Report on State of Cloud Security Concerns, Challenges, and Incidents

David Marshall, VMBlog, March 30, 2021

“The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and AlgoSec announced the results of a new study titled, ‘State of Cloud Security Concerns, Challenges, and Incidents.’ The survey, which queried nearly 1,900 IT and security professionals from a variety of organization sizes and locations, sought to gain deeper insight into the complex cloud environment that continues to emerge and that has only grown more complex since the onset of the pandemic.

The survey found that over half of organizations are running 41 percent or more of their workloads in public clouds, compared to just one-quarter in 2019. In 2021, 63 percent of respondents expect to be running 41 percent or more of their workloads in public cloud, indicating that adoption of public cloud will only continue. Sixty-two percent of respondents use more than one cloud provider, and the diversity of production workloads (e.g., container platforms, virtual machines) is also expected to increase.”

Cybersecurity Fears Trigger Migration From the Public Cloud

Jack M. Germain, TechNewsWorld, March 26, 2021

“The reports raise questions about deciding to use public or private cloud platforms or going to hybrid cloud use to supplement existing on-premises data centers. A report that Accurics published in late February shows it takes 25 days on average for companies to fix cloud infrastructure misconfigurations. Results also show that nearly a quarter of all violations correspond to poorly configured managed infrastructure services offerings. This makes it easier for attackers to discover an organization’s services, read their data, and potentially make modifications. Now watering hole attacks are emerging in the cloud, where they can cause much more damage than in on-premises environments.

When implemented correctly, hybrid cloud drives efficiencies. The report found that a more efficient total cost of IT operations is the biggest driver (41.3 percent) of hybrid cloud adoption. That is significant, given the shift to a distributed workforce model where businesses now need to access data and applications in new, different, and often complex ways. Businesses, however, need to implement a hybrid cloud in a way that will optimize environments to maximize efficiencies. This is why over half of organizations (52.7 percent) strongly agree on the need to engage with experts, such as managed cloud providers.”

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

Is your business falling behind in the race to the top?

Your business moves fast. Different, often-competing units within your enterprise want to achieve business priorities, drive efficiencies, and rapidly produce revenue. They’re relying on IT to provide the resources necessary to grow fast. They need what they need and they need it now—as in yesterday.

How can you ensure fast compliant delivery of resources—be it virtual machines (VMs), applications, public cloud resources, or other types—so your business can grow quickly without friction and delay? The answer: IT automation.

We’ve recently posted our latest eBook, The 7 Secrets of IT Automation, which gives you the opportunity to learn a step-by-step action plan to unlock the potential of your hybrid and multi-cloud environment.

This is the third in a weekly blog series examining each of the seven secrets. This week we’ll look at Secret 3: Orchestrate or Continue to Complicate.

Secret 3: Orchestrate or Continue to Complicate

For your journey to digital transformation, it’s critical to understand the importance of orchestration. Orchestration goes hand in hand with automation, however it offers a key distinction. It should liberate you and your end users from manual and cumbersome tasks. Admins can also coordinate functions, security, teams, compliance activities, and cloud services with orchestration.

In short, orchestration is all about the automation of multiple tasks. These include optimizing coding to prevent error; coordination, arrangement and management for cloud services and systems; management of networks and connections to disparate systems, including those in different geographic regions, and others. Get orchestrating—you’ll be glad you did.

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 infrastructure spending passed on-prem data centers in 2021

Ron Miller, TechCrunch, March 19, 2021

“‘New data from Synergy Research Group shows that enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services continued to ramp up aggressively in 2020, growing by 35% to reach almost $130 billion. Meanwhile enterprise spending on data center hardware and software dropped by 6% to under $90 billion,’ the firm said in a statement.

The total for on-prem spending includes servers, storage, networking, security and related software required to run the hardware. ‘The software pieces included in this data is mainly server OS and virtualization software. Comparing SaaS with on-prem business apps software is a whole other story,’ Dinsdale said.”

Cloud Security Alliance and ISACA come together for new cloud auditing certificate

James Bourne, CloudTech News, March 22, 2021

“The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and ISACA have announced the launch of a new cloud auditing and security certificate – aimed at being the first such ‘global, vendor-neutral, technical credential’ in the industry.

The Certificate of Cloud Auditing Knowledge (CCAK) aims to ‘fill a gap in the industry for competent technical professionals who can help organisations mitigate risks and optimise ROI in the cloud’, as the companies put it. The certification builds upon the already-available CCSK (Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge) from the CSA, and is designed to complement ISACA offerings, such as the Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA).”

Tech spending powers the roaring ’20s as cloud leads the charge

Dave Vellante, SiliconAngle, March 20, 2021

“We believe tech spending will increase 7% to 8% in 2021, but we don’t expect investments in cloud computing to attenuate as workers head back to the office. This is not a zero-sum game and we believe that pent up demand in on-premises data centers will complement those areas of high growth that we saw last year, namely cloud, artificial intelligence, security, data and automation.

Some 63% of respondents had a cloud-friendly answer as shown in the first two bars, whereas 30% had an on-prem-friendly answer as shown in the next three bars. What stands out is that only 5% of respondents plan to increase their on-prem spend above pre-COVID levels. And as the demarcation lines between cloud and on-prem become more gray, a hybrid world is emerging that will require hardware and software investments that reduce latency and are proximate to users, buildings and distributed infrastructure. So we see spending in certain key areas continuing strong across the board that will require connecting on-prem to cloud and edge workloads.”

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

Is your business falling behind in the race to the top?

Your business moves fast. Different, often-competing units within your enterprise want to achieve business priorities, drive efficiencies, and rapidly produce revenue. They’re relying on IT to provide the resources necessary to grow fast. They need what they need and they need it now—as in yesterday.

How can you ensure fast compliant delivery of resources—be it virtual machines (VMs), applications, public cloud resources, or other types—so your business can grow quickly without friction and delay? The answer: IT automation.

We’ve recently posted our latest eBook, The 7 Secrets of IT Automation, which gives you the opportunity to learn a step-by-step action plan to unlock the potential of your hybrid and multi-cloud environment.

This is the second in a weekly blog series examining each of the seven secrets. This week we’ll look at Secret 2: Extensibility Matters – Across All Your Systems.

Secret 2: Extensibility Matters – Across All Your Systems

Isn’t it terrible when stuff just doesn’t work? This applies not just to our everyday lives but can be especially infuriating when your enterprise technology hits its limits – most often in the form of a lack of extensibility. It can bring progress and productivity to a screeching halt. It doesn’t have to be this way. To get ahead, you need private data centers (vCenter, Hyper-V), public clouds, and/or Infrastructure-as-Code platforms (like Terraform) to work together.

Empower your users to leverage new and legacy technology whenever and however they need them by leveraging codeless integration. Promote an “adopt the best technology vs. best of suite” mindset. Successfully extending to multiple cloud providers in an organized fashion while trying to predict the future doesn’t have to be a painful task. Don’t make your developers wait for months just for integration of new technologies. Extensibility makes it happen.

Secrets No More: Unlock the Power of IT Automation. See How CloudBolt Can Help.

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 security is a shared responsibility. Where’s the confusion?

Samantha Shwartz, Cybersecurity Dive, March 15, 2021

“Ensuring the integrity and security of the cloud is a two-party responsibility. The Cloud Security Alliance defines the shared responsibility models as internal security teams owning apps, data, containers and workloads in the cloud while the CSP takes on the physical security of the cloud infrastructure. 

The heart of the shared responsibility model centers on humans and trust. Trust erodes when customers misunderstand what security measures fall under the CSP. More often than not, customers understand what’s expected of them, but confusion grows in the varying security requirements between infrastructure, platform and software cloud environments.” 

The cloud is green. Let’s get on with migration

David Linthicum, InfoWorld, March 12, 2021

“A new report from IDC shows that the continued growth of public cloud computing could prevent the emission of more than 1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) from 2021 through 2024.

Reduced power consumption and emissions means we’re basically doing more with less. The greater efficiencies from aggregated computing and storage resources are motivating enterprises to move from discrete corporate data centers to better utilized and shared resources in public clouds.”

Official: Executive Order to Address Cloud Security Through Procurement

Mariam Baksh, Nextgov, March 16, 2021

“The White House plans to double down on commercial cloud technology through an upcoming executive order in response to the massive hacking campaign that leveraged cloud services to gain broad access into the networks of several federal agencies.

In the so-called SolarWinds hack, perpetrators used a trojanized update of the network management company’s software as well as common techniques like password spraying to gain initial access into nine federal agencies and about a hundred companies. But they also exploited a weakness in Microsoft’s Active Directory Federation Service to jump to organizations’ cloud-hosted Office 365 accounts and move laterally to other parts of organizations’ systems.”

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