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Enterprise Cloud 2.0 Technology Solutions, Strategy and Use Cases
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As companies are trying to become more agile to provide new services to their customers at a faster pace, more and more of them are embracing Network Automation in some shape or form. Network Automation can be very powerful, but it comes with a price: it’s frighteningly dangerous! A mistake in the automation toolchain can bring down an entire organization! Well, you might argue that a mistake made by an engineer typing the wrong command in a single device SSH session can have a similar…
It’s all about the edge. Edge compute, edge containers, micro data centers – these are the latest terms gripping the Internet industry and making the promise of a sweeter tomorrow, filled with more data and faster processing in the ethereal Internet of Things. The edge seeks to provide the IoT we’ve been promised by a simple mechanism: moving data processing closer to where it is collected, closer to the things. However, there’s a fundamental problem with the thesis of the edge revolution. The edge is…
Over the past five years, the ONUG Community has struggled to find security solutions that protect workloads placed in the cloud. Not only has the community struggled with the lack of technical solutions, but their SecOps teams were unprepared, and automated compliance reports are hard to come by. The ONUG Working Group on software-defined security services (S-DSS) has been working on this problem and are ready to release a reference solution at ONUG Spring in Dallas on May 7th and 8th. Nearly all ONUG…
Ever since Ernest Lefner and I co-founded ONUG back in 2012, the idea of creating a safe space to encourage openness of discussion and facilitate the sharing of information between IT executives from different companies and industries was first and foremost. We did this with closed-door sessions we call “roundtable discussions.” There were no vendors, no press, no bloggers allowed to participate; these closed-door sessions were open exclusively to IT executives. Some of the most sensitive and insightful information was exchanged and in seven years,…
Think about how an enterprise network used to operate. The network was contained within fixed parameters — and at most, you’d connect to applications that were located offsite in a data center. Any capacity increases were planned out months in advance and applications were carefully rolled out on a periodic basis, with little ability to adapt on the fly. It all seems so slow compared to the modern network. Nowadays, the cloud allows businesses to obtain scalable infrastructure and resources, and gives users the ability…
A few weeks ago, I was having dinner with ONUG Board member and co-chair Harmen Van der Linde of Citi. As board members, we are always focused on what ONUG can and should do to benefit the vast majority of community members as this is ONUG’s differentiation. That is, ONUG is a global 2000 IT business leader user group, and as such, we look at the industry through the lens of IT consumers. We spent a good amount of time on the differential question. What…
The ONUG Community has encouraged the shift from hardware to software infrastructure’s acceleration. The reason? Speed. Software-based infrastructure reduces the time to deliver new digital products and services to market. It’s a core competency of the digital transformation age in which we live. At ONUG, we know that most IT organizations take three to five years to transform and deliver software infrastructure. Note that it took Netflix five years for its organization to transform and gather the skills, processes and people to stream video at…
Organisations are increasingly evaluating retiring their legacy architectures – such as routers at the branch – due to the continuing migration of applications to the cloud. In November 2017, Forrester projected that 2018 would be the year that more than 50 percent of enterprise applications would be hosted in public and private clouds. However, in 2018, that figure reached 96 percent of 997 small-medium sized businesses and enterprise companies surveyed now use cloud services. As the migration to cloud-based applications and infrastructure accelerates further, organisations…
Certain communities in the industry have been preaching that infrastructure should be code. That is, infrastructure should be clickable, meaning that configuring an application dependency map, firewalls, networking, load balancers, etc., should be as easy as clicking a few buttons. There is no doubt that the industry is moving in this direction; consider F5’s $650 million purchase of NGINX, which is most often used as a clickable load balancer. Not only is NGINX a good example of clickable infrastructure but its business model is a…
All Global 2000 firms are awash in infrastructure data. Every device that an application flows through, be it network equipment, firewalls, servers, load balancers, cloud providers, service providers, storage, etc., provide data to communicate state metrics, events, logs, et al. That is, all the devices that an application depends upon to deliver the intended user experience have some data that provides insight into how it’s operating. The problem is using this data to understand user experience on an end-to-end basis is extremely difficult today as…
