TRAVERSING THE MULTI-CLOUD WORLD

HERE IS A HANDY CHECKLIST FOR YOUR MULTI-CLOUD STRATEGY

For many enterprises, the move to multi-cloud environments is inevitable as they seek to avoid vendor lock-in and accelerate innovation and better failover options.

According to the latest IDC forecast, over 90 percent of enterprises worldwide will be relying on a mix of on-premises/ dedicated private clouds, multiple public clouds, and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs.

Distributing workloads across multi-cloud environments offers IT organisations an opportunity to optimise costs, negotiate favourable SLAs and customise capacity.

While uptake of multi-cloud architecture has started to gain momentum, IDC notes that not all businesses are sufficiently prepared to implement cloud roadmaps due to migration and skills-related challenges. The research firm advises businesses to take stock of their applications and develop a phased modernisation roadmap for each one, thereby enabling them to make appropriate cloud decisions for the multi-cloud era.

What are the top challenges in the adoption of a multi-cloud strategy? The key challenges in adopting a multi-cloud strategy include lack of testing, cost control, and poor governance.

“A common pitfall during cloud implementation is to migrate several business areas at once, without testing applications first. For instance, it is wiser to begin migrating a smaller area, such as the business’ email system, before shifting large volumes of sensitive data. Another common blunder is trying to force fit on-site applications for use on the cloud, which may eventually prevent them from running at full capacity. Instead, it may be logical to thoroughly consider how an application functions and how the cloud may be able to support this,” says Stephen Gill, Academic Head of the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Heriot-Watt University Dubai.

He adds that handling ongoing subscription and ad-hoc service costs can be quite challenging with just a single cloud approach. Ensuring control over costs and cloud service usage is even more when relying on multiple cloud providers. A multi-cloud environment can be expensive if not managed effectively. A successful multi-cloud strategy is only realised when the enterprise has visibility over consumption patterns for optimisation of resources and cost savings.

Paulo Pereira, Senior Director, Systems Engineering – METI at

Stephen Gill

Nutanix, says moving to a hybrid cloud system from a private or public cloud infrastructure or an in-house data center is a time-consuming and resource-intensive process. “The current applications and workload should be seamlessly portable and operable across an on-premises framework as well as a third partymanaged public cloud. Many organisations do not have the in-house IT skills required for analysis and deployment and need to call in external consultants or use a managed service provider,” he says.

According to James Petter, VP International, Pure Storage, managing and migrating data and applications between different locations is essential. Increasingly, organisations that are adopting modern applications are more reliant on the individual clouds that house their workloads and data. Using multiple providers in this way can cause issues as data is stored in multiple, disparate silos. This will make it harder to extract value and meaningful insight from that data. Organisations should develop a data architecture strategy that incorporates the right tools, technologies and partnerships to ensure flexibility and agility to avoid silos.

“Using more than one cloud can make governance hard to navigate. Compliance rules are often governmentmandated and can mean certain data like personally identifiable information cannot leave the country. A robust strategy needs to be in place for what data is stored in different clouds before,” he says.

The Rightscale State of the Cloud report found that cloud governance was the top challenge in 2019, with 84% of enterprise respondents listing it as a concern, especially because they have a multi-cloud strategy in place.

Gill says governance of cloud computing is tricky even in the case of a single cloud provider but becomes more challenging multi-cloud. Multicloud providers present on-demand, self-service resources with infinite capacity, which makes it challenging for organisations to gain visibility into, and manage, what is being used. Without visibility into consumption, it is impossible to oversee and control the environment and also challenging to ensure that data is stored in the ‘correct location’ as per the security protocol.

Multi-cloud security challenges

There is also an increasing concern about securing the multi-cloud architecture as it adds new complexities into the enterprise security models for CISOs.

Avinash Gujje, Practice Head – Infrastructure, Cloud Box Technologies, says multi-cloud security enforcement is difficult, especially at this point where there is a huge jump in remote workers accessing IT systems from outside the firewall. Additionally, SaaS adds another layer of challenges since customers are unaware of data storage locations. Yet another element of security hinderance relates to set policies that may not be applicable with the ever-changing IT environments and makes it difficult to adhere to a single set policy.

“Given that the multi-cloud environments typically focus on the business and IT factors driving it (intentional or not) and that organisations tend to first provision the services they need to address, security and governance becomes an afterthought and hence proves

Paulo Pereira

Avinash Gujje

Morey Haber

Giuseppe Brizio

difficult more than anticipated,” says Moussalam Dalati, General Manager- Middle East, Liferay.

This makes the multi-cloud strategy quite challenging because it involves testing, replicating, and documenting policies that were implemented with another provider. And making sure that, differences, are well mapped internally for any further use such as business continuity plan, disaster recovery layers (and understand if they differ between providers), access control, SDLC workflow, data privacy, incident management and many others. This humongous list of tasks makes it difficult to implement security in a staged or process by process fashion, he says.

Morey Haber, chief security officer, BeyondTrust, comments that enforcing security policies in multi-cloud environments is difficult because the entitlements, permissions, rights, and corresponding features differ between cloud service providers. In addition, the terminology used to describe an entitlement is likely different between providers (even though they do the same thing), requiring manual mapping by end-users to ensure consistency between multi-cloud environments.

Giuseppe Brizio, CISO EMEA, Qualys, offers another perspective on the challenges that multi-cloud presents: “Due to the wide variety of APIs involved in multi-cloud environments, it is hard for customers to build automation to control security, utilisation, inventory, and remediation. Therefore, having the capability to build user-defined workflows for security and compliance policies — either standard or custom — and execute them on-demand, becomes extremely important in increasingly complex multi-cloud and hybrid IT environments.”

Sam Curry, chief security officer, Cybereason, suggests the best recommendation for those seeking to enforce security policies in multi-cloud environments, or to monitor them and protect them actively, for that matter, is to invest in dedicated DevSecOps.

“Policy enforcement is a critical first step to helping the security department do what it should by partnering with IT and DevOps and by using automation as much as possible to get the policy right, audit correct policy adherence and focus on the humans in the stack as the attackers are the real subjects for the security department. This is done by developing tools, translation layers, services, new protocols, instrumentation and much more.”

The cost conundrum

Many companies move to the cloud for the cost-savings its on-tap model can bring, but the multi-cloud model complicates things without enough guidance. It is important for enterprises to understand and manage the costs and needs associated with their multicloud strategy.

“The easiest way to safeguard budgets when workloads are bound to fluctuate is with flexible consumption models that allow you to pay for only what you use. In fact, according to recent IDC data, as-aservice models are the ticket to solving one of IT decision makers’ top concerns — accurate capacity planning. In addition to the financial benefits, comprehensive as-a-Service offerings build in a package of services to support customers with all their business needs,” says Petter from Pure Storage.

Pereira from Nutanix agrees that as IT and cloud teams grow their multicloud adoption, technology budget owners are often surprised by unexpectedly high cloud bills. To prevent uncontrolled spending, cloud teams need tooling that provides unified visibility across on-prem and public clouds, along with automated cost governance policies to keep their cloud spend within budgets

“In order to ensure that the benefits of using public clouds are not overshadowed by a huge increase in spend, there are three key things that cloud admins need to ensure. Gain visibility into the cloud spend across teams, business units and, most importantly, cloud boundaries, and track the cloud spend against allocated budgets with real-time alerts to notify admins when the budget is exceeded,” he sums up.

THE CHANGING FACE OF RETAIL

RIVERBED WEBINAR THROWS LIGHT ON HOW TO ENHANCE DIGITAL USER EXPERIENCE FOR THE RETAIL INDUSTRY

Customers expect a seamless, always-on experience across all available shopping channels and from any device in today’s digital age. They are focused on self-service and determine what they would buy based on the lowest cost and convenient delivery options.

As online sales grow, many retailers are compelled to spend heavily on new digital capabilities, websites, mobile, and web apps. The retail sector needs to achieve rapid transformation that enables fast, secure user experiences at optimum cost to succeed in a highly competitive business environment. However, delivering a high-quality digital experience for customers can be a daunting task given the broad variance in customer device types and network connectivity.

In association with CXO Insight ME, Riverbed organised a webinar to discuss how retailers can take control with full fidelity visibility and accelerated performance while enhancing the digital user experience.

Samer Bounasreddine, regional sales manager-retail at Riverbed, kicked off the webinar by stressing the importance of digital transformation for retail enterprises and citing a Riverbed Retail Digital Trends Survey which showed that 89 percent of consumers say a positive digital experience is just as important as prices. He then drew attention to another recent Riverbed survey, which revealed 51 percent of organisations in the region are planning to migrate their workloads to the cloud, and 28 percent of employees would work remotely even after the pandemic.

“We are uniquely positioned to meet the digital transformation objectives of retailers. Most of these organisations need to move to the cloud and enhance the digital user experience. We address this in our latest product portfolio, which includes an advanced visibility solution that helps visualise, measure, and monitor end-toend digital experience across applications to websites to the underlying network infrastructure. Through a single portal, powered by AI and ML, you can optimise and troubleshoot any performance issues before impacting your user experience. We are also ready to support and accelerate the performance of your applications whether it is on-premises or the cloud with our application accelerator solution.”

Continuing in the same vein, Meraj Mohammed, regional pre-sales consultant – retail at Riverbed, said retailers across the GCC are leveraging advanced technologies such as AI and ML to drive business outcomes. “IT decisions have a direct impact on revenue and the customer experience. So, it would be best if you made the right technology decisions at the right time across the whole app delivery model. We have solutions that can scale from local branches to data centre environments, and all the way up to the cloud. In addition, we support our retailer customers in enhancing, optimising and prioritising the performance of their business-critical applications.”

He added that Riverbed provides a unified network performance management solution that examines at every packet on the network and helps create a holistic and correlated view of end user experience and track every business transaction. “We provide tools that can help you monitor end user experience across web services and custom apps and troubleshoot more quickly with end-to-end visibility across applications and the network to uncover hidden performance issues and pinpoint their causes. We can help retailers build networks of future with Riverbed network and acceleration solutions which combine WAN optimisation, SD-WAN and security.”

The event also featured a panel discussion with some of the leading retailers in the UAE around digital transformation initiatives.

“The pandemic has accelerated our digital transformation plans. We have pushed forward our plans to have more digital channels and provide an omnichannel experience to our customers in the last two years. As a result, we have a digital-first strategy now,” said Tabish Asifi, group IT governance lead at Majid Al Futtaim.

Santosh Sundaram, senior IT manager at AW Rostmani Group, said: “We started our digital transformation journey in 2018, and we have a cloud-first approach. We are focused on building digital products to enhance the customer experience and moving away from our traditional brick-andmortar model to a hybrid approach. We are also leveraging AI and ML to build predictive models and reduce risks from the changes in the technology landscape.”

Participating in the discussion, Lalit Sujera, team leader of the infrastructure solutions group at GBM, shared some of the common pain points of the retail enterprise. “During the pandemic, all retailers increased their bandwidth as a short-term fix, but optimising network performance and reducing latency are still the major issues they face. Also, most of them have adopted hybrid cloud environments to enable business continuity, where visibility is absolutely critical. They need full-stack visibility into their IT estate, and this is where Riverbed and GBM can help.”