Blogs

I spent the last few days at AWS re:Inforce 2019, here in Boston. It was my first AWS event and I came away with a few strong impressions:

Extreme will be celebrating the 4^th of July holiday with its latest acquisition, Aerohive. In what seems to be a trend for Extreme, it was able to pick up the company for a good price (especially when compared to other recent WiFi acquisitions). The big difference, however, is that in this case it did not just acquire the assets, but rather the whole company. Translation – this one should be a bit smoother, more predictable and hopefully lacking surprises!

The big news in Las Vegas this week was HPE’s decision to go all in on “as a service.” Emboldened by its success with GreenLake, Antonio Neri announced the entire HPE portfolio would be available “as a service” by 2022. To be clear, HPE will continue to sell products via traditional CapEx methods, as well, offering its customers choice. Its premise is that it believes that cloud is not a destination, but rather it is an experience and so this announcement challenges the notion that cloud first equals public cloud only, and deliver the same cloud experience with Greenlake. The new “as a service” option will include subscription, pay-per-use and consumption models and fall under the GreenLake brand.

That title might sound odd…although to those that have watched HPE closely for the last few years (and back into its HP version), the meaning is probably clear.

My colleagues Scott Sinclair and Bob Laliberte have written insightful summaries and analyses in their blogs about the event. Here are the links to Bob and Scott's blog. There’s no point me reiterating what they have already covered thoroughly. Scott and Bob and I also put together this ESG On Location Video from the event with some additional thoughts.

The technology industry moves at a blistering pace. New shining stars of innovation emerge constantly. And leaders that once dominated the market landscape can quickly get pushed to the wayside.

If HPE Discover 2019 showed me anything, it is that HPE will not be pushed around or aside. The company that has long claimed to be built on innovation has found its footing. HPE Discover 2019 was HPE’s message to the IT industry that the innovation has never stopped.

I recently had the opportunity to connect with Avon Puri, Rubrik’s CIO and Sveta Shandilya, Rubrik’s Head of IT Planning and Operations. The company has also recently made a significant IT hire in Rinki Sethi, who joined as CISO.

I was curious to know how a fast growing “digital-native” organization (i.e., 10 years or less of existence – Rubrik was founded in 2014) leverages its own technology and for what purposes. You know, the old “dog food” concept.

How do you go in five years from a few to over 1500 employees, keep introducing data protection solutions to the market, and make the whole thing work?

C-Scape at Cisco Live is always a good event and this year was no exception. I wasn’t sure what to expect as so many changes had occurred during the last year, but I was pleasantly surprised to find strong progress made in the cybersecurity services realm and excellent answers to all of my burning questions.

Before GDPR became official in May 2018, I heard a similar story from many CISOs. In the past, data privacy programs were legal exercises focused on data classification and governance. Yes, there were security angles around compliance, DLP, and incident response, but legal had oversight around which data was considered as private and what could and could not be done with sensitive data.

Last week, I attended Cisco Live US in San Diego to hear the latest and greatest from Cisco executives and technology leaders. Following Cisco’s campus refresh a couple of months ago, the company continued to execute against its Intent-based networking imperative with a number of announcements aimed at making your network solutions smarter, simpler, and more secure.

In the cybersecurity world, we cheer when companies are as successful as CrowdStrike in their recent IPO. This kind of success helps fuel the energy level across the entire cyber industry, rising the tide for all who are focused on keeping the world safe from cyberattacks.

Winning in this market requires more than just a deep understanding of cyberattacks and how to stop them. It requires a deep understanding of what challenges organizations are facing as they strive to protect themselves while their attack-surface grows, amid a growing base of adversaries who are innovating at a pace that rivals many of the world’s most successful tech companies.

On-premises integration is vital to hybrid cloud strategies. Many organizations have an on-premises-first mindset as they begin to formulate their hybrid cloud strategies. According to ESG research into hybrid cloud trends, when asked to identify the most important consideration in these decisions, more than half cited seamless compatibility with their on-premises infrastructure. Furthermore, nearly three-quarters of organizations stated that it was critical or very important that public cloud service providers offer solutions that integrate with their on-premises environments.

Cisco held its annual customer event, CiscoLive, in San Diego this week, while hosting industry analysts like me at C-Scape. As part of the agenda, the Cisco security team provided details on its present position and future strategy. Here are a few of my takeaways:

Sophos announced in June 2019 that it has acquired Rook Security, which it will integrate across all products. In today’s managed security services (MSS) landscape, it’s imperative to have managed detection and response (MDR). The requirement to enter MSS no longer demands a security operations center (SOC) and SOC analysts (though those are still necessary to the enterprise). Rather, strong security vendors, such as Sophos, can broaden services with an acquisition of an MDR provider. In this case, Rook Security does have a SOC and SOC analysts, making this a boon to Sophos. The new MDR solution will initially launch in the Americas later this year. An invitation-only early access program (EAP) will focus on existing endpoint detection and response (EDR) customers to gain feedback from them on the new solution.

Google has a vision of offering the most complete and comprehensive data platform in the industry. It wants to provide a true end-to-end data platform across clouds, and the last two words there are key. Customers want an end-to-end multi-cloud data platform and Google is committed to delivering just that. As such, Google continues to invest in areas that enable it to further this goal, and this morning Google announced its intentions to buy Looker for $2.6 billion in an all-cash transaction. It’s a natural acquisition for Google as the companies have worked together for years and share hundreds of the same customers.

Oracle ultimately had to choose a cloud partner as customer demand for cloud consumption continues to rise. In fact, ESG captured a 10% year over year increase (29% to 39%) of companies that are taking a cloud first policy when it comes to new application deployments. These dynamics cranked up the pressure on the Oracle business as they seemed to try to hold on to legacy on-premises approaches with their customers. And why not….margins are excellent and it is a massive investment for Oracle to build out global data centers. Sure, Oracle has cloud offerings, but they appeared to be more like nice window dressing than what the likes of Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google GCP are offering (and expanding) in the market.

One question we often hear at conferences and industry events is whether IT organizations can get more value out of the data copies that they already have. 

You bet they can. It’s been right there in front of them for a long time. As my colleague Vinny Choinski from the ESG Validation team points out, capacity efficient snapshot technology has been around for decades. It was pioneered in primary storage systems in the late 90s (e.g., EMC, IBM, Hitachi…) and got a capacity savings boost when it was combined with deduplication in data protection appliances (e.g., Data Domain) and purpose-built continuous data protection and data management solutions (e.g., Actifio). IT orgs have primarily been using these solutions for a quick and cost-effective alternative to traditional restores and some have been leveraging them to make copies for test and development. Now, backup solutions with the ability to “instantly” boot virtual machines from a writeable snapshot (e.g., Veeam) and data management solutions (e.g., Cohesity, Rubrik, Datrium) have expanded the value and the potential uses of this powerful technology, but, for most organizations, the value of these powerful technologies is a secret that’s locked up in an organizational silo. This silo is locking the value of data, limiting the return that can be realized by re-using it for additional purposes to serve the organization/business.

The past few weeks in technology news have been particularly interesting…and alarming.

On the ransomware front, the city of Baltimore made first page May 7 for an attack that apparently could have been avoided by patching their Microsoft environment 2 years ago. With practices like this, it makes me wonder what their backup habits are/were…. It is reported that the city will incur a cost of 18 million between lost revenues and recovery or recreation efforts. Baltimore: Give me a call. I can set you up with great backup for a lot less! I know many vendors who could help.