It’s Time to Convene!

As leaves in the east start to color, the ONUG Community is getting ready to convene in New York City! That wonderful city of great restaurants, entertainment, diversity and culture. Over the years, I’ve realized that ONUG possesses the power to convene IT business leaders from all industry segments of the economy and from all over the world. ONUG Fall on October 19th and 20th, hosted by Raytheon Technologies, will be no different; in fact, it will be our largest gathering since ONUG Fall 2019! The main theme of the conference is that multi-cloud is enterprise computing.  The community will gather around connectivity, security, observability and automation of multi-cloud infrastructure through panel conversations, live demonstrations, social networking and some awesome cocktail receptions and dinners.

Multi-cloud is much more than a technology choice. If done right it delivers options and choices for developers and infrastructure teams to create business value at speed and scale. Over the past several years, it has become clear that the “All In” single cloud provider strategy does not meet business needs as it entwines and entangles a business into its constructs and frameworks limiting a corporation’s ability to create value. When a second cloud provider is introduced to an “All In” company, either through merger or acquisition and/or a developer’s attraction to its tools, the organization is more often than not ill-equipped to operationalize, resulting in lost opportunities, revenues or worse. 

The argument in the large enterprise over the past few years has shifted from private vs. public cloud toward multi-cloud. Multi-cloud includes private data center resources. Now multi-cloud is hard; there are many pieces that are missing which enable smooth multi-cloud enablement.  One thing is clear–don’t expect the CSPs to help much here. Yes, some are more interested in multi-cloud than others, but by and large, the job to deliver multi-cloud is from traditional IT suppliers plus new start-ups.   

A new ecosystem is developing to address multi-cloud networking, security, observability and automation. Just this week, two new networking companies launched to address multi-cloud connectivity, those being Graphiant and Nile Network. These two companies are joined by Alkira, Aviatrix, Prosimio and Pensando (recently acquired by AMD). Intel has a new networking group led by seasoned networking executives, all focused on multi-cloud connectivity. A new market is opening up, driven by ONUG, that replaces MPLS and internet transport with semi-private wide area networking that puts control and security back into the hands of the large enterprise consumer. We’ll talk alot about this at ONUG Fall.

All the traditional IT suppliers, such as HPE/Aruba, Dell, VMware, Cisco, etc., are messaging a multi-cloud story as they build the product underpinnings for its delivery. Service providers too such as Verizon, AT&T, Equinix, DE-CIX, etc., are all offering multi-cloud peering points to deliver direct connectivity to CSP IaaS/PaaS and SaaS providers.

On the cloud security front, AWS and Splunk recognized the critical issue of standardizing multi-cloud security telemetry and joined the ONUG Collaborative in advocating a solution to address the deluge (millions per sec) of cloud security telemetry and logs that fill Security Operations Centers’ (SOCs’) tools and in turn increase security analyst toil as they strive to keep their corporations safe. This new market for open, multi-cloud security telemetry is driven by the ONUG Community and is called the Cloud Security Notification Framework or CSNF.   

CSNF will be on full display at ONUG Fall in NYC. Microsoft, Oracle, Google and IBM Cloud will be showing how they map their cloud security telemetry and logs into the CSNF open Canonical Data Model to deliver a standard stream of cloud security telemetry that is ingested into SIEMs, SOARs and security data lakes. There are some 22 cybersecurity partners now participating in the Collaborative. CSNF delivers an open and multi-cloud approach to cloud security that promotes a disaggregated set of solutions that address multiple consumption models and use cases.

This is a huge achievement for the community, and I hope you and your staff can attend ONUG Fall in NYC as our guest, where Daniel Conroy of Raytheon and ONUG Collaborative founding member will deliver the keynote with Joe Bernik of BofA, diving into how to create digital value safely.   

While CSNF starts its adoption journey, the ONUG Collaborative Steering Committee voted to start a new project around policy as code. This new Policy as Code Working Group is in team formation mode with members from BofA, Citi, FedEx, Oracle, E&Y, Network2Code, GE Healthcare, GCP, Azure, Cisco, Lacework and IBM populating the working group thus far.  The first meeting is being scheduled for late September. We welcome your participation. To join just go here.

It’s the ONUG Board’s position that enterprise computing is multi-cloud computing. Multi-cloud delivers the broadest range of tools, frameworks and constructs for enterprise developers in their quest to deliver digital value for their corporations. Simply put, multi-cloud delivers corporate value creation at speed.

We welcome you to join the ONUG Community in NYC on October 19th and 20th to see a wide range of multi-cloud solutions so you can put them to work for your corporation. Register to join us here

Author's Bio

Nick Lippis

ONUG