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Enterprise Cloud 2.0 Technology Solutions, Strategy and Use Cases
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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…
SD-WAN has arrived and is undeniably a hot topic in the networking industry given the 60+ solution providers vying for a share of wallet. Enterprises are looking to SD-WAN technology to facilitate better connectivity among their branches, improve application quality of service and drive down data transport costs. Recent industry research1 has predicted that 30% of companies will adopt SD-WAN services by 2019. Consequently, flexibility, automation, service agility with a centralized control and management plane are the top advantages that SD-WAN vendors are promising to…
While executive management focuses on the opportunities that digital transformation presents for their corporations, IT business leaders are busy planning how to deliver its effect. One of the most important and least discussed topics on every corporation’s digital journey is organizational transformation. Every senior level IT leader in the Global 2000 is debating the type of skills, culture and organizational model that’s needed to build and run a secure digital enterprise. Many CEOs think that they should adopt the Facebook, Amazon, Google, et al., model,…
Talk to any CEO of a Global 2000 firm about their IT staff, and most say they would fire the vast amount of them if they had another, lower cost, way to deliver digital value. Most of this thinking comes from the fact that large enterprise technology providers are oligopolies within their segments and use this market power to charge large sums for their products and services. In short, the global economy has been locked into a small number of very large technology firms that…
On February 21st, ONUG conducted a live webinar in which the IT executive co-chairs of the Software-Defined Security Services Working Group presented an overview of the requirements for the three primary use cases that will underpin the working group’s activities in 2019: #1 Binding Security Policies to Workloads – Policies should be bound to workloads, such as virtual machines, containers, applications, services or micro-services. #2 Single Policy, Multiple Deployments – Write security policy in one place and deploy in multiple places, where workload policy would then…
