Cloud Tech | January 25, 2019
While the enterprise push to public cloud continues apace, it does not hurt to hear of figures which puts the scope of the journey in perspective. According to new figures from Ping Identity, only one in five enterprises polled said they have more than half of their IT infrastructure hosted in the public cloud. Three quarters (75%) in comparison have a hybrid approach. Perhaps not surprisingly, the key aspect holding these organisations back is security. 43% of the 300 US-based respondents said it was the biggest obstacle to cloud adoption, while 37% said it was the biggest barrier to software as a service (SaaS) adoption. There are plenty of reasons to be fearful. More than a quarter (27%) of those polled admitted they have experienced a breach of customer identity data stored either in a public cloud, on-premises or SaaS app provider's cloud. As a result, 71% said they were spending more on protecting customer identity data on a yearly basis. When it came to specific security tools, multi-factor authentication was cited by nine out of 10 respondents as an effective control. Yet only 60% of firms polled said they used it. Identity federation and biometric authentication were also seen as key methods, but adoption was low at 34% and 22% respectively. Even though the new year is only less than a month old, research has shown continued enterprise concern around security in the cloud. According to NetEnrich, large enterprises were 'eagerly adopting cloud infrastructure, applications and services', albeit with three quarters (72%) noting security was their top priority for this year.
Read More
SDxCentral | January 15, 2019
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based monitoring provider LogicMonitor implemented new capabilities into its platform to help DevOps professionals peer into microservices and containerized applications. LogicMonitor’s self-named performance monitoring platform is based on a SaaS architecture and relies on automation to collect performance data from a variety of environments. This includes on-premises, cloud, and hybrid architectures such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, servers, storage, networks, virtualization, applications, websites — and now Kubernetes, microservices, and containerized applications. As Kubernetes and other containerized environments grow increasingly popular, monitoring these environments has created new challenges for enterprises. These architectures are more difficult to monitor than more traditional environments because of the increase in application data, and they are more complex than what traditional monitoring tools are equipped to handle. Prior to today’s launch, LogicMonitor offered Docker container monitoring. “With increasing adoption of Kubernetes to orchestrate these containers, we saw a need to provide a more comprehensive container monitoring solution that integrates with orchestration,” said Sarah Terry, manager of product management at LogicMonitor. LogicMonitor’s new Kubernetes monitoring tool provides event-based Kubernetes monitoring. According to the company, the tool will monitor as an enterprise splits a monolithic service into microservices orchestrated with Kubernetes. The tool does this by automatically adding and removing cluster resources from the monitoring platform. The Kubernetes monitoring also eliminates the need to have an agent on every node. According to Terry, this is because the tool relies on two applications running in the cluster: one as a pod for monitoring and the other as a pod for discovery. The discovery application reads the Kubernetes event stream and leverages LogicMonitor’s existing API to keep everything up to date. Data is collected from Kubernetes nodes, pods, services, and containers using the Kubernetes API.
Read More
Cloud Tech | August 17, 2018
Machine learning, cloud-native and containers are going to be key growth drivers of the future enterprise software stack – but it could be the end of the road for software as a service (SaaS). That’s the verdict from an extensive new report by venture capital fund Work-Bench. The full 121-slide analysis (Scribd), titled ‘The Enterprise Almanac: 2018 Edition’, aims to dissect a ‘once in a decade tectonic shift of infrastructure’, focusing on the new wave of services that will power the cloud from the end of this decade onwards. “Our primary aim is to help founders see the forest from the trees,” wrote Michael Yamnitsky, report author and VC at Work-Bench. “For Fortune 1000 executives and other players in the ecosystem, it will help cut through the noise and marketing hype to see what really matters. It’s wishful thinking, but we also hope new talent gets excited about enterprise.” If this analysis is anything go by, there will be plenty to get excited about in the coming years. Large technology companies are winning at AI, Work-Bench asserts. And why not? This publication has devoted plenty of column inches in recent months to how among the hyperscalers are using artificial intelligence and machine learning as a differentiator – indeed, Google Cloud this week launched pre-packaged AI services to try and stay one step ahead of the competition. It’s not so much of a differentiator if everyone’s getting in on the act, though. And this is where others are struggling. “Despite hopeful promise, startups racing to democratise AI are finding themselves stuck between open source and a cloud place,” the report notes.
Read More