#eweekchat - CrowdChat

Next-Gen Cloud Services

JOIN US: This is a chat-based conversation about new types of cloud (and cloud delivery) services, which are becoming more pervasive and diversified than ever. We are becoming more dependent on the cloud each day--especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Join us!

#eweekchat @tonycai @radio_eric @larry_lunetta @softironceo @seanleach @brucekornfeld @editingwhiz

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Stream Ended

Establishing a secure connection

Chris Preimesberger2

We've 10 mins left, how about some final thoughts and perhaps some takeaways you got from this session?

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Lots of great perspectives here. End users have it hard - where to run each application to optimize cost, performance and security. Cloud is a huge market because it solves many problems, but causes some others. Edge is growing because some apps just need to be local

really enjoyed hearing everyone's thoughts/opinions. At the end of the day, no matter which technology is better - all of this competition helps drive better end user experiences, better security and better development environments

Tony Cai - Nerdio

@brucekornfeld I would say cloud opens up many more things to consider, that often doesn't get considered until post implementation.

@brucekornfeld Not just the apps - but the data too

I think it is clear from the discussion that "cloud" now encompasses the entire IT ecosystem. What makes Hybrid Cloud possible is the ability to seamlessly manage workloads from the edge to data center to private cloud to public cloud.

Final takeaway: we're all talking about cloud and how it changes customers and products we build. Great to have broad point of views. More debates is better. @editingwhiz

@TonyCai long live the cloud!

Chris Preimesberger3

Q5: How can companies determine the right balance between the need for speed and the necessity to stay up-to-date in cloud technologies, when business context changes basically every day?

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A5 Cloud has lots of advantages, like operational up time, resilience, worldwide but local geographies (eg. CDN), elastic scale etc. Slower moving but established services that need scale are easily bought as “rented” outcomes.

Fast moving business context and technical solutions may be better placed in the context of addition via Hybrid cloud or edge compute ?

Chris Preimesberger

Good point, Phil. Sounds like an entire strategy for apps, functionality and cloud/edge/IoT points needs to be coordinated at the top.

a5: From what we have seen from our most progressive customers, a dependable CI/CD pipeline, automated testing, immutable infrastructure, and DevOps/DevSecOps practices have all been common themes for their ability to deploy rapidly and safely

A5: By consuming cloud services "as a Service", organizations rely on the provider to deliver what they need. This implies the provider will know how and when to introduce new technologies.

Indeed

Tony Cai - Nerdio

A5: Companies need to evaluate whether staying up to date means a detriment to their business or can they effectively manage those changes and balancing moving quickly with adequate change management.

@TonyCai Should I stay or should I go ;-)

A5: disrupt yourself is always easier to say than to do. Hopefully, there's teams doing that and they're given enough rope. Level of invest can be set to market pace, but we all read about black swan events that upend all that. @editingwhiz

Tony Cai - Nerdio

A5: Of course COVID forced a lot of Digital Transformation in a short amount of time.

Chris Preimesberger

Jeez, we hardly mention COVID here today -- could do a whole chat on it!

@TonyCai It really is amazing. Work from home, not wanting (or being able) to add infrastructure to datacenters...its a whole new world for users trying to navigate all of this...urgently!

A5: Realize the answer is always "it depends", realize multiple environments is your reality, and try and limit complexity without hampering the business. Be flexible, and realize incremental gains are better then sweeping mandates that impose a lot of risk.

Chris Preimesberger

Absoutely, Nick. But a high-level, clear-headed headed strategy identifying all alternatives is necessary, ya think?

Chris Preimesberger0

Q5: why, it's right around the virtual corner ...

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Chris Preimesberger10

Q4: What are some new approaches vendors are using to ensure safe delivery of cloud services and to add value with ancillary features?

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A4 Cloud is now established enough that vendors are now designing for cloud specifically. This helps a lot because retrofitting security is often hard or impossible.

A4 As cloud, edge and indeed hybrid emerges as the norm a more holistic approach to security is possible for the same reason.

A4 Cloud is one piece of the puzzle and securing it as as much about all the things that touch it, including enterprise and edge. SoftIron does this with storage products to enable a continuum that is coherent for data assets in all locations.

A4: Organizations are moving to a Zero Trust framework which relies on identity-based access control and much tighter security integration between the end point and the application.

A4: Another area is for users to leverage encryption from cloud providers, but not trust them with the keys. BYOK is a movement that is starting to take hold with Cloud.

A4 I was a fan of VMware's approach before I ever got to Dell. I think abstraction and building in security is the way to go in simplifying and ensuring safety. But biggest thing is closing the gaps and burden on customers of Shared Responsibility Models.

Chris Preimesberger

Do you think identity control and access is ultimately the most efficient way to secure anything?

A4: vendors are building for and like clouds now. so good question and I think small (in terms of visibility but large in impact) has been continuous release/update (which adds to the security goal). More to where you question might be asking is also providing viz @editingwhiz

A4: To add value, vendors are adding AI-based capabilities to deal with the complexity of a hybrid cloud world. AI is now cutting down the number of trouble tickets reported and reducing the amount of time to resolve them.

A4-cont: and knowing the state of deployments, as to the value-add. @editingwhiz

Tony Cai - Nerdio

A4: Double encryption in transit and at rest as a feature, enforcing MFA as a standard, PaaS hosted connection gateways with built in security managed by the vendor. Microsoft has started to enforce their partners to beef up their security all around.

Identity and Access Management is absolutely critical especially Privileged Identities. However it, and networking are battling it out for the most overlooked area needed, based on what I see.

a4: A big area of R&D is around the safe delivery of applications in multi-tenant environments-maintaining performance/security. Technologies like WebAssembly/WASI are scalable/powerful technologies that provide high performance isolation - as opposed to docker etc.

a4: More info here - https://bytecodealliance.org

end users can now run their own key managers for all their encryption use cases - now extending to cloud.

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Chris Preimesberger

Can BYOK security become problematic due to presumed complexity, or is that actually an issue?

IdAM is a must and a building block. Otherwise, we don't have a lot to act on. @editingwhiz

a4: TLS 1.3 is another key technology that improves performance and security at the TLS level

agreed @brucekornfeld given the way that governments have treated data sovereignty and gag orders you'd have to be very foolish to hand over the security keys to a vendor. They can be compelled to divulge your info and have to keep it from you.

A4: Identity-based access control is the starting point for a "defense in depth" approach to security. No one technique will be sufficient to achieve something like Zero Trust, but it definitely is a foundational element.

Tony Cai - Nerdio

A4: RBAC - Role based access control as well.

Key management CAN be very complex. Each use case can have thousands or millions of keys. Third party key managers are designed to remove that complexity, and now they can also work with cloud app - and cloud providers are supporting it.

@larry_lunetta agreed. Not my article but I liked this read from @stackrox on some on the container space. https://www.stackrox.com/post/2020/08/guide-to-gke... #stackrox

Guide to GKE Runtime Security for GCP Workloads | StackRox: Kubernetes and container security solution
This guide discusses GKE runtime security recommendations and best practices to help harden K8s and protect your cloud-native apps

@NickBrackney Agreed. It kind of amazes me that this is so prevalent today. So many cloud apps out there where the customer just "turns on" encryption and maybe doesn't realize the vendor has the keys as well.

Chris Preimesberger0

Q4: was in the hole, now on deck ...

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Chris Preimesberger1

https://www.eweek.com/cloud/oracle-unveils-a-syste...

Oracle Unveils a System in Between Cloud, On-Premises
eWEEK CLOUD NEWS: Fully managed virtual private cloud offers all of Oracle’s public cloud services, including Autonomous Database and SaaS applications, for customer data centers.

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A3: This also reflects a strong desire to consume IT "as a Service" where the consumption model moves from capex to opex and responsibility for SLA's, etc. shift from the consumer to the provider.

Chris Preimesberger6

Q3 Is Oracle on to something with its new virtual private cloud environment? This means that Oracle will manage all of its cloud services--including its foundational Autonomous Exadata Database--behind a company’s private firewall, as if it were a conventional on-premises system

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A3 Customers want this. It enables different cost structure and that might serve a customer better. Different work loads with heavy traffic or transaction demands may work better like this. Eventually the lines of Cloud will blur and Hybrid Clouds will exist.

Tony Cai - Nerdio

So similar to Azure Stack, but Oracle's flavor of it?

A3: Press release wasn't too clear.....but I'm not sure end users will want to put "all their eggs" in the Oracle basket. Good for them though - if they have some powerful customers asking for it

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A3: goes a little back to my A1 that customers will value 'managed'. But (and maybe this is where you were going w/ 'customized'), this behind-firewall will require heavy lift of 'services' and so not so much a product-scaling oppty. imho @editingwhiz

A3: This is a growing trend. SAP has a similar capability. Customers increasingly want the flexibility of the public cloud model with the control that a private cloud provides. Ultimately, workloads will seamlessly move from the edge to the cloud.

A3-continued: so there will always be a group that want "dedicated" and that becomes more similar to the services / staff-augmentation story that we've had for decades than a product-led story. But the articles do make it sound fancy. @editingwhiz

@SoftIronCEO Agree. Hybrid cloud is the ultimate destination. This is one example of a deployment model.

@larry_lunetta Sounds right. But what is stopping the customer from building it themselves? Is Oracle's value-add significant here?

Chris Preimesberger

A3: Customers apparently want all the functionality and welcome the "one throat to choke" provider to handle all those functions for them. No best of breed here!

a3: AWS and Google have been successful providing their previously public-only cloud functionality on premise, makes it easy to have the same deployment methodologies/code no matter where your app is running. So it makes sense for Oracle to do this.

Tony Cai - Nerdio

A3: There are customers with HCI looking for the same management capability as managing public cloud. While #AzureStack is very exciting and adoption is there, different players are entering the space.

A3: not one to talk about other technology companies implementations but I think we're seeing that neither cloud nor on-premises have achieved the desired end state yet. They will continue to borrow from each other and change. We've seen that in our own journey.

@seanleach fair point. Those 'stacks' and 'outposts' ... would you say they're similar to Oracle Dedicated? FWIW, I felt the what AWS / GCP are doing is bringing the same APIs / cloud on-prem and Dedicated was about taking on the servicing.

@seanleach True, all the public cloud guys want to keep their ownership of their customer's data as they deploy in hybrid. Still locked into them, no better security...

@SoftIronCEO I agree on the "no better security". The cloud providers have amazing security teams - it is very difficult to try and build a similar organization internally. I am a huge fan of using the public cloud to be able to take advantage of this security talent

@seanleach Agreed on security provided by the cloud. However, this topic of encryption and key management doesn't get enough airtime. Why trust the cloud providers with both? separating lock and key is obviously a best practice.