ESG Blogs

With the NBA finals, NHL finals, presidential primaries, and the end of the school year, it's shaping up to be a raucous, contentious, high stakes month of June. Yet the biggest battle may be around the future of Apache Spark at high noon in the O.K. Corral Spark Summit at Hilton Union Square. 

Synergy was an important event for Citrix this year. It was an opportunity to reset, share a new vision, and introduce its new CEO, Kirill Tatarinov.

According to ESG research, 75% of organizations are currently using a public cloud service, while another 19% have plans or interest in doing so. Furthermore, 56% of all public cloud-based workloads are considered IT production workloads while the remaining 44% are classified as non-production workloads (i.e. test, development, staging, etc.).

Citrix and Microsoft are not strangers to one another. On the contrary — they’ve been successfully working together for the past 10+ years. In fact, Citrix has been one of the few companies that’s been able to dance with what many technology companies consider to be the “black widow.” But the light has been dimming between the two companies in the past few years as Citrix has experienced some rocky times, and Microsoft has enriched a competing portfolio.

Two streams of thought came together for this post. The first is that — like many families — this is the time of year for school finals. The second is that there is enormous change going on in our industry right now.

Putting those two things together I wondered what questions we might put to ourselves about where IT generally, and storage specifically, is at.

The question isn’t as simple as it might seem:

• There are lots of great reasons to embrace modern Backup as a Service (BaaS) solutions, including governance, extended data preservation, IT oversight of endpoint and ROBO backups, etc.
• There is also one overwhelmingly great reason to utilize Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) — enhanced availability of servers.

So, the question really is, can you gain a DRaaS outcome from a BaaS solution? And honestly, it isn’t just a cloud-consideration. You could just as easily ask, can you get BC/DR agility from a backup tool?

Several CISOs I’ve spoken to over the past few years agree that identity is a new security perimeter. The thought here is that a combination of mobile device and cloud use renders existing network perimeters obsolete, so security policy enforcement decisions must be driven by identity attributes (i.e. user identity, role, device identity, location, etc.) rather than IP packet attributes. We see this transition coming to fruition with the concept of a software-defined perimeter (SDP) and technologies such as Google BeyondCorp and Vidder PrecisionAccess.

To use a long-forgotten metaphor, cloud deployment is moving forward at Internet speed at many enterprise organizations. According to ESG research, 57% of enterprise organizations use public and private cloud infrastructure to support product applications/workloads today, and an overwhelming majority of organizations will move an increasing number of applications/workloads to cloud infrastructure over the next 24 months.

We're about halfway through the latest season of HBO's Game of Thrones, and I've been every bit as transfixed to the series as every other devotee I know. I may have gotten started late, but I'm definitely in it for the long haul now.

One of the things that was helpful for me as I got caught up was using the internet's various nerd communities to understand all of the nuances and details of the families and their histories. For example, the show has used "winter is coming" as a tagline from the beginning, and I wanted to get some context on what exactly that was referring to. I turned to the Wikia page for the book series, and came away with an appreciation for what the Starks mean when they say it.

I recently attended INTEROP 2016 in Las Vegas, which celebrated its 30th year (a long-time in the IT industry). What started as an interoperability expo has become the only remaining general IT show that highlights networking, along with infrastructure elements such as cloud and security. This also gives the conference a role in being the one place where you can hear talks about the entire IT stack.

Plain old TCP/IP interoperability is taken for granted, while new challenges of interoperabiity for cloud, IoT, security and networking are emerging.

I recently attended IoT World, held May 11-13th in Santa Clara. As you might expect, there was a lot of energy at the event, and enthusiasm for IoT. And it was well-attended, with reportedly more than 10,000 people expected over the course of the three days of the exhibition.

Any Talking Heads fans reading this blog? Take any French classes in high school? No? Nevermind then.

I get asked a lot about SQL on Hadoop, and I know what you're thinking: "this guy must have the coolest friends and the go to all best parties." And you're right, I do. Lenny Kravitz by a rooftop pool in Vegas. Fitz and the Tantrums. Duran Duran. The Astoria Middle School Marching Band on Loyalty Day. (10-year old daughter with a shiny new flute...)

My colleagues Doug Cahill, Kyle Prigmore, and I just completed a research project on next-generation endpoint security (login required). But just what the heck is next-generation endpoint security? Cybersecurity professionals remain pretty confused around the answer to this question. For the purposes of its research project, ESG defined next-generation endpoint security as:

Endpoint security software controls designed to prevent, detect, and respond to previously unseen exploits and malware.

At this week's Open Networking Users Group conference, IT leaders from large organizations talked about wanting to update their infrastructure with automation and new technologies. At the same time, they stressed the importance of preserving existing applications and infrastructure. Much of this seems to be from a desire to have it all, which may be impossible to achieve.

Last week was EMC World, one of the big shows of the year. As many of you will know I prefer to let a little time pass before contributing my thoughts to the blogosphere, simply to let the Kool Aid evaporate somewhat!

Of course, it was something of a strange installment of this event — it is presumptively the last one as the Dell spaceship loomed large and ready to take the EMCers back to the [integrated] future. And yet it was still EMC World; so, while it started a bit like a great band doing a cover of a song it had to do but didn’t really know, pretty soon it settled into a familiar rhythm — bold statements, touches of humor, extensive announcements and a bunch of busy-ness happening all around…

Back to one of my pet issues: the global cybersecurity skills shortage. According to ESG research, 46% of organizations say they have a “problematic shortage” of cybersecurity skills in 2016. By comparison, 28% of organizations claimed to have a “problematic shortage” of cybersecurity skills in 2015, so we’ve seen an 18% year-over-year increase.

Last week was interesting. I spent most of it in Las Vegas at EMC World, which was as much about Dell as it was about EMC itself. There was a ceremonial handoff from Joe Tucci to Michael Dell to lead the new combined entity, but Jeremy Burton was perhaps even more in the spotlight as he outlined the vision.

Much of this vision was about the balance between traditional data center environments and something he called "cloud-native" applications. Substituting "next-gen" for "cloud-native" might be more accurate, as this category included everything from PaaS to big data to containers to hybrid clouds. Hadoop, Cassandra, and MongoDB were cited as examples as cloud-native, which felt odd. Certainly they are cloud-friendly, but they're by no means exclusively cloud-centric. See my last post on cloud big data for more thoughts on this topic.

The swift pace of change in the enterprise mobility market is a positive sign for the industry, but it’s also leading to frustrating times for the information technology decision maker (ITDM). The existing technology surplus is great to see (from a choice perspective) and is clearly mapping to many of the challenges that we find in our research. These challenges include: endpoint security, threat detection, and improving collaboration and communication.

According to ESG research, enterprise organizations continue to invest in all types of threat intelligence. For example, 60% of organizations have had a threat intelligence program in place for more than 2 years, 69% consume 6 or more open-source or commercial threat intelligence feeds as part of cybersecurity analytics efforts, and 72% of enterprises plan on increasing spending on their threat intelligence programs over the next 12 to 18 months.

Okay, the presidential primaries are winding down, and while I expect lots of name-calling, insults and general sophomoric behavior this summer and fall, it’s time for both parties to step up with a strong plan for cybersecurity.

Cybersecurity? You’d really never know that it’s a national issue based upon the proceedings so far. Governor Bush put out a two-page overview while Dr. Ben Carson’s team drafted a high-level proposal. Neither of these documents really dug into existing policies, domestic challenges, or International issues. With the exception of John McAfee, no one has gotten into any detail on this topic.

Getting started with DevOps or trying to address process improvement in DevOps is almost always a challenge. The reason for this is the importance and complexity of driving change — there will always be people, process, policy, and products that need to be considered, no matter the maturity of your organization.

There are a lot of things to like about EMC World this year, especially if data protection is important to you. Kudos on the day two general session with Jeremy Burton and Guy Churchward.

To evolve from backup to data protection is to embrace complementary mechanisms that enable a much broader range of preservation of data, protection of data, and the assurance of productivity through enhanced availability initiatives, as seen in ESG’s Spectrum of Data Protection.

With PC sales on the decline, Intel is eliminating thousands of jobs while Apple and IBM are doing their best to feed the enterprise appetite for mobile apps and devices. Meanwhile, Google recognizes how workstyles are rapidly changing and is regrouping its hardware business units to potentially capitalize on innovative business trends that are altering employee behavior and the way end-users connect, interact, and consume applications.

As an initial step, former Motorola chief, Rick Osterloh, is now back at Google as SVP, running Goggle’s new hardware product line. His responsibilities will include Nexus, Chromecast, Chromebooks, Pixel C, OnHub, ATAP, and Glass.

Joe Tucci and company made a strategic decision several years ago not to enter the public cloud provider fray. Instead they took the vendor high road by indicating they would partner with cloud providers instead of competing with them. In a reversal of that strategy, EMC is now pivoting to the public cloud via their federated entity, VirtuStream.

Among a bevy of announcements at the opening of the annual EMC World show today, EMC announced the launching of VirtuStream’s "Global Hyper-scale Storage Cloud For Seamless Enterprise Storage Extensibility, Backup and Cloud-Native Object Storage”. This particular announcement, amongst the other ones planned over the next three days, is designed to play into a larger theme of “Modernize Your Data Center”; the official tag line of  EMC World 2016.

Remember when the cloud was just getting going? Somehow it morphed from the traditional concepts of hosting and XSP (I always hated that acronym) into a new class of service. Virtualization and management tools were a big part of facilitating this transformation, as was the sudden shift in economics. The problem with hosting and "other" managed services was it usually wasn't any more agile or any less expensive than doing it yourself.