ESG Blogs

I was at Google Next last week in San Francisco and had the opportunity to attend a few sessions and meet with industry friends and some interesting companies. The event was packed like a major airport in a storm on the day before Thanksgiving! 

It was very clear that more than ever, Google has its sights on the enterprise market. It could be seen from many different perspectives, with its many offerings like the Chromebook enterprise product lines from multiple vendors, to sessions focused on AI in the Google cloud, cloud security, and many other topics.

I attended my first Google Next conference last week in San Francisco and came away quite impressed. Clearly, Google is throwing more of its engineering prowess and financial resources at GCP to grab a share of enterprise cloud computing dough and plans to differentiate itself based upon comprehensive enterprise-class cybersecurity features/functionality.

This video series has already featured a discussion with Christophe Bertrand talking generally about the data protection market. In this video, part of ESG's 360 Video Series, Christophe focuses specifically on explaining the key points about one of the most significant contemporary DP issues - that is, the recently implemented European GDPR (or General Data Protection Regulation). He covers how it intersects with the topic of compliance, how its impact is essentially often global, and how it poses many questions in terms of execution and rigidity. He closes by speculating on the likely imminent increase in the number of Data Protection Officer roles - and explains why they would be needed.

Earlier this week Rubrik announced the launch of a new addition to the Polaris SaaS platform: Polaris Radar. This new application focuses on the mitigation of data security incidents with ransomware squarely in its sights.  

In our 2018 IT Spending Intentions Survey, ESG identified that ransomware is on the rise and represents a concern for both business and IT leaders. Ransomware has become very pervasive and the majority of firms ESG surveyed reported experiencing ransomware last year, generating a high level of concern, with 81% of organizations reporting to be either concerned or highly concerned about ransomware.

Although storage has for many years - and often understandably - been seen as "merely" an IT necessity, its importance has never been greater than today; in this discussion, part of ESG's 360 Video Series, Scott Sinclair attributes that to the realization that access to data (which is, after all, the whole point of storage!) is recognized today as the single most valuable asset for a majority of organizations. The logical extension of this statement is, of course, that "doing" data - aka storage - better than others can in turn lead to better business results. Scott touches on both the management challenges of operating an optimal data ecosystem in a hybrid cloud world, as well as specific technologies - such as NVMe - that are adding necessary and valuable capability improvements.

The CISO role has evolved over the past few years from tactical IT manager to strategic business executive. Given this transition, what qualities are most important for making CISOs successful?

To answer this question, I went back to the data from last year’s research report from ESG and the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA). I then cut the data by respondents' role to understand what CISOs think is most important. 

The digital economy is upon us. And data is, de facto, playing an ever-greater role in determining business success. Skeptics might say that this is nothing new…after all, data has always been valuable, which is why we have been storing so much of it over the past few decades.

Let’s dig into the contemporary difference - a distinction that many businesses miss – by reviewing where we have, mostly, gotten to so far: Yes, data has long been a necessity of doing business; and the introduction of traditional IT services has improved efficiency. Email, for example, is a lot handier than having to leave voicemails for everyone, or faxing people, or - if you want to make the extreme case - using the post office. But any competitive gains that traditional IT services offer have long been negated, since everyone else gets access to the same IT services. It doesn’t matter what anyone says, you aren’t dominating your industry just because you have access to email!

Modern and transformational storage infrastructure and technologies are better equipping IT leaders to keep pace with modern data demands, and to better enable business success. That’s not just a glib assertion – it is the quantifiable result from recent ESG market research; some initial specific ‘headlines’ of which can be read about in this blog about ESG's research.  

Google Next '18 is Google's annual show focused on their cloud offerings. Once again, I'll be going to the show and I have a quick video previewing what I think are the key things to watch at Google Next '18. I think there will be some exciting announcements around hybrid cloud, containers, and more enterprise offerings. Watch the video below and, during the show, tweet to me @edwinyuen if you have questions, and if you are at the show, reach out to me to meet face to face. And look for a summary blog from me after the show for my analysis of the key announcements.

A number of articles surfaced last Friday about AWS selling network switching infrastructure used in its own environment to enterprises. This news had a ripple effect in the market as some of the major network companies saw a dip in their stock prices.

If the sources are accurate, AWS is, at the very least, contemplating this strategy. If it decides to enter the market, this could be highly disruptive to the status quo. Let’s take a minute to think about this, though--it’s not like AWS will be selling data center network switches online – well, at least not yet - I actually just checked and didn’t see any Prime Day specials. If they are seriously considering entering this market, it does highlight a number of things that AWS may have to do to capture the on-premises enterprise market share.

Hyperconverged infrastructures (HCIs) are anchored in virtualization—virtual storage, virtual compute, and virtual networking. And we know the big names in the hypervisor space: VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. Recent ESG research asked organizations what they consider to be their primary hypervisor deployed in production. Fifty five percent of organizations selected VMware vSphere, while another 36% primarily leverage Microsoft Hyper-V.

Last week, I attended Tufin’s annual customer conference, Tufinnovate, here in Boston. If you don’t know Tufin, the company focuses on network security policy management for enterprise organizations.

Sure, the letters "i" and "t" can be found together in the word "flexibility," but getting genuine flexibility in terms of the provision of IT - in other words to build IT capabilities dynamically around necessary outcomes rather than foundational inputs - has long remained a big challenge for the industry and consumers alike, both operationally and commercially.

While at HPE Discover 2018, I had the opportunity to sit down with Doug Crawford from Warner Bros. Entertainment. As it turns out, Warner Bros. Entertainment is one of HPE Aruba’s oldest customers. We discussed how they were leveraging  HPE Aruba solutions, how their environment has evolved and how they plan to leverage HPE Aruba solutions in the future to enhance the experience at the studios.

In this discussion, part of ESG's 360 Video Series, VP of ESG's Validation Services Brian Garrett explains how the ways that ESG conducts its validation services have changed over the years - not only driving a better appreciation of the value that vendors' offerings can deliver but also reflecting a change in users’ demands. The change is twofold: Whereas early testing and proving was most often around individual products and features, now the functional emphasis is much more likely to be around a complete solution - anything from HCI to data protection to cloud and “...as a service” offerings; in all these situations, flexibility and ease of use have come to the fore. Secondly the validations that ESG conducts are now much more frequently focused on the economic and business value of a solution instead of - or as well as - merely its functional efficacy. Brian discusses the reasons for these changes, and notes that actual user input is now also increasingly important to the process.

Here, Mark Bowker starts his discussion of IT mobility by defining it broadly--but-clearly--as the secure delivery of apps and data wherever and however needed. This major practical change in IT is conceptually simple to grasp but brings multiple complex challenges for IT organizations - not least of which is the dual threat of unpredictability and associated [potential for] lack of control. Mark explains that the major foci for IT around mobility are therefore security, policy, and management structures - but that isn’t to say that there is not also a major, gratifying pay-off for IT organizations that get mobility done well...

As companies adopt new technologies to support digital transformation, the need to update and adapt their monitoring and management tools becomes more and more critical. Companies that have already started to leverage public cloud and more cloud-native applications are finding that they need better monitoring tools, with the capability to monitor new application frameworks and a more application, rather than infrastructure, orientation. ESG conducted research on companies that were already using two or more public cloud providers and when we asked what they have learned about systems management based on their public cloud experiences, 30% responded they need better application and end-user experience monitoring of workloads.