In this week’s episode of The Cloud Gurus, join Michael Wohl and William Norton as they unpack the headlines and implications of CloudBolt’s latest Industry Insights, “The Real State of FinOps.” They delve into the paradox of widespread FinOps adoption versus the challenge of realizing tangible value, as revealed in the study. Listen in as they discuss the key findings, share their insights on the current state of FinOps, and explore what these trends mean for organizations navigating the complexities of cloud cost management. Don’t miss this conversation that promises to shed light on the future of FinOps. Tune in now! Grab your copy of the research: https://www.cloudbolt.io/solution-briefs/the-real-state-of-finops/
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This week, Cloud Guru Will Norton sits down with Jason Rinehart, a seasoned platform architect and cloud computing strategist, to delve into the intricacies of modern IT and cloud strategy in enterprises. Jason shares his deep insights gathered over years of experience in the industry, bringing clarity to the evolving landscape of cloud computing.
The discussion begins as Jason presents his background in IT and cloud computing. They then discuss on the pivotal role of a platform architect in today’s IT industry, highlighting the crucial responsibility of aligning technical investments with strategic business objectives and integrating them seamlessly with existing IT infrastructure.
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Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!
Channel Futures’ 2023 MSP Outlook: Cybersecurity, Automation Will Be Paramount
Allison Francis, Channel Futures, December 30, 2022
“According to Raum Sandoval, CISO, Entara, implementing additional security measures and solutions can be a complex and time-consuming process. This is where governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) comes in. By focusing on GRC, businesses will be able to identify their most pressing risks and develop a plan for addressing them in an orderly and systematic way. To support this process, we are likely to see an increase in the use of virtual chief information security officer (vCISO) services to help businesses navigate this shift effectively.
“Automation will also be increasingly important for providers and customers alike, particularly smaller shops. According to Javid Khan, CTO, IT By Design, 2023 will be all about automation and innovation. This will be driven by customers who will push their IT providers to prepare for the ever-looming recession with more creative, cost-effective technology. ‘Automation will be key for reducing the time required to resolve service tickets and fulfill the more mundane daily tasks,’ says Khan. ‘The automation will garner extra time for tech teams to focus on higher priority projects or additional revenue-generating special projects, boosting profitability.’” READ MORE
DevOps Must Embrace Automation in 2023
Mike Vizard, DevOps.com, January 3, 2023
“A survey of 500 engineering and software development professionals in the U.S. suggests more DevOps teams than ever need to resolve to embrace automation at a deeper level in the new year. The survey, sponsored by Chronosphere, a provider of an observability platform, found engineers spend, on average, more than 10 hours per week attempting to triage and understand incidents. That equates to a quarter of a 40-hour workweek. Overall, 96% of respondents said they spend most of their time resolving low-level issues, with 88% reporting that amount of time negatively impacts them and their careers because so much time is spent troubleshooting IT issues.
“Chronosphere CEO Martin Mao said much of the stress DevOps teams encounter results from reliance on DevOps platforms that organizations built themselves. Platforms built and supported by a vendor today typically provide higher levels of automation that reduce overall stress levels, he added. It’s not clear how big an appetite for change any organization that has built their own DevOps platforms may have in 2023. The challenge is that the initial cost of swapping in a commercial platform may appear high given the fact that the legacy platform is already deployed. However, the cost of the acquisition of a new platform needs to be weighed against the total cost of ongoing operations. A lot of soft costs show up in, for example, higher turnover rates for DevOps professionals that are likely to find a more rewarding job elsewhere that is less tedious.” READ MORE
Top 10 Cloud Computing trends to Look Out for in 2023
Aiswarya PM, Analytics Insight, January 2, 2023
“Succeeding in the cloud can be complex, and CIOs have continued to fumble their cloud strategies in 2022 in a variety of ways, industry observers say. Topping the list of typical cloud strategy are three mistakes that fall under the heading of mental blueprint blunders: assuming that a cloud strategy is an IT-only endeavor, that all data must be moved to the cloud, and that a cloud strategy is the same as a data center strategy. In addition to going it alone, insisting on moving all data to the cloud, and approaching the cloud the way they would a data center, CIOs also often fall prey to flawed thinking about the scope of their digital transformation, either by failing to have an exit strategy or believing it is too late to implement a cloud strategy at all.
“CIOs also blow their cloud strategy out of the gate by confusing a cloud strategy with an implementation plan or confusing an ‘executive mandate’ or ‘cloud first’ motto with an actual cloud strategy, according to Gartner. The blueprint for each company’s digital transformation is unique and requires a deep dive into all IT systems by the entire C-suite and IT team to optimize the outcome, analysts note. No third party knows an enterprise better than its executives and employees. But perhaps the worst sin CIOs can make, analysts across the spectrum agree, is fail to plan for the shift in culture and skills required to devise and implement a successful cloud strategy.” READ MORE
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Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!
Almost everything is in the cloud—and experts are worried
Robert Stevens, Fortune, October 24, 2022
“For seven hours last December, huge chunks of the internet shut down without warning. For companies, the damage was severe. The culprit? A single outage in Amazon’s cloud computing servers in Northern Virginia, where several million square feet of computers buzz throughout the night for customers as diverse as ESPN and McDonald’s. The incident, by no means isolated, reveals how much companies and governments outsource computing power to a handful of centralized services. Just three companies, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, command about two-thirds of cloud infrastructure.
“Vili Lehdonvirta warns that these cloud providers have become so powerful that they already rival the power of nation-states, and that the organizations that rely on them are leading themselves to internet serfdom. The obvious solution to the threat of technological dependency would be to stop using the cloud so much and return to the decentralized computing that prevailed in the 1990s, during which companies ran their own servers. But that is easier said than done. Nor is there much incentive for organizations to avoid the cloud in the short term. Meanwhile, the leading cloud companies are piling up the money and consolidating their dominance. Amazon alone commands a third of the cloud computing market, and last year sourced 74% of its $24.8 billion profit line from AWS. The money will continue to pour in: Research firm Gartner predicts that customers will spend $600 billion on its services by the end of next year.” READ MORE
DevOps Burnout? Try Platform Engineering
Luca Galante, TheNewStack, October 20, 2022
“Are we in the middle of the Great DevOps Burnout? This report from Haystack says yes. Eighty-three percent of the 258 software engineers surveyed reported feelings of burnout from high workloads, inefficient processes, and unclear goals and targets. Only 26% of participants reported working solely on product development, whereas 74% reported working on operations tasks in some capacity. There is a growing conversation in the DevOps community about whether developers can or want to take on operations tasks. The cognitive load on developers in setups like these is overwhelming and creates a variety of organizational inefficiencies. Here, experienced backend engineers take on infrastructure tasks and help less experienced developers on their team with DevOps work. This additional responsibility prevents them from focusing on developing features and delivering the most value to the company.
“For many organizations, the key is platform engineering, designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud native era. Platform engineers build what is often called an internal developer platform, which covers the operational necessities of the entire life cycle of an application. Platform engineering tries to enable true DevOps by following a Platform as a Product approach to strike the right balance between maintaining developer freedom and finding the right level of abstraction. Platform teams pave paths of least resistance, called golden paths, for developers using the platform, drive standardization by design and connect various parts of the toolchain together to build a coherent and improved developer experience. This enables self-service capabilities for the organization while abstracting away the unnecessary complexity that contributes to cognitive load. Internal developer platforms are also associated with a lower change failure rate, which means fewer late-night shifts or weekend work for engineers being on call.” READ MORE
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Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!
70% of tech infrastructure will be cloud-based within three years
Duncan MacRae, CloudTech, October 6, 2022
“Cloud is quickly becoming the corporate norm, and is being used by companies to drive dramatic improvements beyond cost and scalability, including increased innovation, faster time to market and insights, and enhanced cybersecurity. A study by the Hackett Group found that 70% of all technology infrastructure will be cloud-based within two to three years. Typical companies are seeing post-migration reduction in technology infrastructure costs of 12%.
“Other significant benefits include: A 36% increase in developer time devoted to innovation, a 45% reduction in time to market for new product features and functionality, a 53% reduction in the time to achieve actionable insights from data, a total of 44% fewer security and other critical infrastructure incidents, and a 52% average reduction in down-time. Top performers in the study saw even more dramatic benefits, including a 37% reduction in technology infrastructure costs (more than 3x of what typical companies achieved) and an average of 15 percentage points greater improvement across nearly a dozen objectives tracked in the study.” READ MORE
81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending by C-suite
VB Staff, VentureBeat, October 7, 2022
“According to a new study from Wanclouds, 81% of IT leaders say their C-suite has directed them to reduce or take on no additional cloud spending as costs skyrocket and market headwinds worsen. As organizations move forward with digital transformations they set out on at the beginning of the pandemic, multicloud usage is becoming increasingly unwieldy, and costs are difficult to manage across hybrid environments. Furthermore, a wrench has been thrown into IT teams’ plans over the last two quarters in the form of the market tumult. Rising inflation and interest rates, along with fears of a potential recession have put increasing financial and operational strain on organizations. As a result, many companies are reevaluating their digital ambitions as cloud spending is brought under the microscope.
“The report reveals that IT decision-makers are taking action to rein in costs, with 39% noting they’ve decided to move or leave significant cloud consumption and high-performance workloads on premise, and a further 29% noting they’ve switched public cloud providers in the first half of 2022 due to high prices. Visibility and tracking of cloud spending is also being challenged by the industry’s embrace of hybrid and multicloud infrastructure, which can be more complex to manage. For instance, as containers become increasingly utilized as the go-to platform for hybrid cloud strategies, 70% of those implementing Kubernetes say it has increased their overall cloud spending. In addition, only slightly more than 4 out of 10 IT leaders say they have visibility today into costs and consumption across their entire cloud environment.” READ MORE
IT Pros Lack Time, Support to Learn Vital Cloud Computing Skills
Nathan Eddy, ITPro Today, October 10, 2022
“Organizations are battling a cloud computing skills literacy gap as they look to further their investments in cloud-based technologies, according to a Pluralsight survey. Cloud security, networking, and data were the top areas where skills gaps persist among technologists, with survey respondents citing budget and time constraints among the chief headwinds preventing them from upskilling. In addition, the report found that nearly a third (32%) of respondents say employers emphasize hiring rather than upskilling, a tactic that could shift as the number of qualified IT professionals looking for employment stays low. The study also indicated upskilling could be a promising method to retain IT talent, with employees 94% more likely to stay with a company that invests in their skill development.
“Of those looking to boost their cloud computing skills, 71% of respondents said they prefer daily or weekly learning opportunities, and 64% said they prefer to learn by doing with hands-on tools such as labs and sandboxes. Cloud learning must start with basic cloud fundamentals, meaning understanding the principles of cloud computing and how they can be applied to the specific organization, Firment said. In fact, the study showed that nearly two-thirds (64%) of technologists are still at the beginning stage of their cloud learning and are looking to achieve basic cloud literacy. Once that baseline is achieved, Firment said technologists should begin diving into specific cloud computing skills, such as cloud security, database management, networking, architecture, and machine learning.” READ MORE
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Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!
81% of companies had a cloud security incident in the last year
Duncan MacRae, CloudTech, October 3, 2022
“As many as 81% of organizations have experienced a cloud-related security incident over the last 12 months, with almost half (45%) suffering at least four incidents. The underlying issue for these security incidents is the dramatic increase in security and operational complexity connected with cloud deployments. And, since the organizations in this study currently host two fifths (41%) of their applications in the cloud but expect to increase to 57% over the next 18 months, this complexity will continue to increase. More than half (51%) of the security decision makers in the study believe security risks are higher in the cloud than on premises, citing several issues that contribute to those risks. The most common cloud-related security incidents respondents have experienced are: Security incidents during runtime (34%), Unauthorized access (33%), Misconfigurations (32%), Major vulnerabilities that have not been remediated (24%), A failed audit (19%).
“The study also investigated how responsibility for securing cloud-based applications is currently assigned across internal teams. This varies widely across organizations, with enterprise security teams (25%) the most likely to manage app security in the cloud, followed by operations teams responsible for cloud infrastructure (23%), a collaborative effort shared between multiple teams (22%), developers writing cloud applications (16%) and DevSecOps teams (10%). However, the number of security incidents indicates that none of these models are effective at reducing security incidents. When asked who should be responsible for security cloud-based applications, again, there was no clear consensus. The challenges connected with shared responsibility models is that security teams and development teams have very different goals and objectives.” READ MORE
Cloud Migration: A Recurring, Never-Ending Process
Christopher Tozzi, ITPro Today, October 5, 2022
“Although there’s a tendency to think of cloud migration as a one-time journey that you complete and then never have to do again, most businesses are actually in the midst of constant cloud migration. Today, more than 90% of businesses use the cloud. That means they’ve already completed the cloud migration process that got their workloads into the cloud in the first place. But it doesn’t mean that they’re not still undertaking cloud migration. There are many types of cloud migration, and making the initial move into the cloud is only one.
“In addition to making the initial move into the cloud, organizations may expand into multicloud or hybrid cloud architectures, or even repatriate some of their workloads back on-prem. Plus, in some cases, a business may end up performing the same type of cloud migration more than once. It could, for example, undertake a multicloud migration in order to add a second cloud to its architecture, then do another multicloud migration by adding a third cloud down the line. Because of these factors, businesses should never imagine that they’ve moved beyond cloud migration. They should instead prepare to plan and implement cloud migrations of all types on a recurring basis” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>READ MORE
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Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!
Here is this week’s news:
Cloud security pros expect elevated risk for serious data breaches
Matt Kapko, Cybersecurity Dive, September 14, 2022
“The perception of growing risk amid common occurrences accentuates the persistent cloud security challenges organizations confront as they deploy and invest in more cloud infrastructure. System downtime due to misconfiguration and cloud data breaches were the most commonly reported security incidents among the 400 cloud engineers and security professionals surveyed. Snyk commissioned Propeller Insights to conduct the survey during the second quarter of 2022.
“This gap in cloud infrastructure visibility underscores the increased complexity organizations encounter in cloud-native infrastructure. Two-fifths of respondents said cloud-native service and architecture adoption inflicts a major impact on cloud security efforts due to additional complexity.” READ MORE
6 Tips for Controlling Your Cloud Costs in a Recession
Christopher Tozzi, ITPros, September 12, 2022
“The last thing you need in times of economic gloom is a cloud environment that costs more money than it should. That’s why now’s a great moment for businesses to step back and assess their cloud spending, then determine how they can steel it against the recession that may be on the horizon.
“Keep reading for tips on preparing your cloud environment for a possible recession — and, beyond that, keeping cloud costs under control even after boom times return.” READ MORE
Start with a logical cloud architecture
David Linthicum, InfoWorld, September 9, 2022
“Throughout my career as a practitioner and teacher of cloud architecture and general enterprise architecture, I’ve focused on the distinction between logical and physical architectures. It’s no secret what they comprise: A logical architecture is a structure of technology concepts that does not name specific technologies or brands, while a physical architecture does contain specific technologies and brands.
“When I design a cloud computing architecture, I first ask what problems need to be solved. I then determine what an acceptable solution will require. Next, I list the items that need to be part of the architecture and their relationships to each other: databases, middleware, encryption, storage, compute, application development, etc. Again, no specific technologies, only technological concepts that can contribute to solving the overall problems.” READ MORE
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Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!
Here is this week’s news:
3 multicloud lessons for cloud architects
David Linthicum, InfoWorld, September 3, 2022
“Many cloud architect friends of mine see multicloud on the horizon, but they don’t think they’re prepared for its extra complexities. Most of them initially pushed back on the concept of multicloud much like they pushed back on cloud computing in general before it became a thing.
“Cloud architects who now look down the barrel of multicloud deployments can increase their chances of success by applying these three tips:” READ MORE
90% Of Orgs Say Multi-Cloud Helps Achieve Business Goals
Bill Doerrfeld, DevOps.com, September 1, 2022
“Multi-cloud is the new normal. And thankfully, this new normal isn’t just happenstance—it’s driving positive outcomes.
“New findings show that most organizations benefit from using multiple cloud providers. Multi-cloud adoptions are helping achieve business goals, such as improving reliability and scalability and increasing overall security and governance. However, nearly all organizations (94%) admitted that they have some avoidable cloud spending and skills shortages continue to hold back a fully-realized multiple-cloud success.
“HaschiCorp recently released the 2022 State of Cloud Strategy Survey: Making Multi-Cloud Work. In addition to showcasing the positive outcomes of multi-cloud adoption, the report found a trend toward automation frameworks that help operationalize multi-cloud. Below, I’ll explore the report’s key takeaways to see what CloudOps and platform teams can garner from current multi-cloud trends.” READ MORE
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Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!
Here is this week’s news:
IT leaders struggle with application modernization, survey finds
Anirban Ghoshal, InfoWorld, August 10, 2022
“A majority of IT leaders said in a recent survey that they struggle with the process of application modernization, according to a report from Asperitas Consulting. Application modernization, according to Gartner, is the process of migrating legacy systems to new applications or platforms, including the integration of new functionality. The concept has gained popularity due to enterprises’ efforts to scale and innovate faster, and all respondents to the Asperitas survey say that application modernization is in fact critical for their businesses.
“More than 45% of IT leaders polled say that the applications they have modernized so far were critical to their businesses, followed by 28% saying that the completion of the process enabled them to innovate faster and scale rapidly. At least 25% of respondents said that modernization improves productivity, followed by 11% claiming that implementing the process could make their enterprises more attractive to employees and customers.” READ MORE
4 reasons projects fail – and how to avoid them
Faiz Khan, DevOps.com, August 17, 2022
“Digital transformation – the use of data, tech, algorithms, machine learning and more to develop new models of work and serve stakeholders – can enable companies to achieve growth via previously untapped potential. According to Mordor Intelligence, digital transformation was valued at $263 billion in the manufacturing market alone in 2020. By 2026, it’s projected to reach $767 billion.
“Despite the seemingly limitless rewards, organizations remain wary of digital transformation. Almost three-quarters (70%) of digital transformations fall short of their objectives, often with profound consequences, according to Boston Consulting Group, who suggest that delivering fundamental change at scale in large, complex organizations is challenging.” READ MORE
Engineering, Finance Teams Struggle to Connect Cloud Costs, Business Value
Nathan Eddy, InformationWorld, August 8, 2022
“With market volatility on the rise and economic headwinds gathering, CIOs are looking to rent cloud-based IT infrastructure and software on subscription-based models rather than placing big tech bets on lump-sum investments.
“A recent Gartner report found cloud consulting and implementation and cloud managed services are expected to reach $255 billion this year, with spending on data center systems forecast to experience the strongest growth of all segments in 2022.” READ MORE