Shopify is moving its infrastructure to Google Cloud. The Alphabet Inc. unit’s cloud service will host the e-commerce company’s online stores. It’s the latest win for Diana Greene, Google’s cloud chief, and the latest loss for Amazon. A series of large retailers have recently selected Google or Microsoft over Amazon, including Home Depot and Williams-Sonoma Inc.

In the case of Shopify, the Ottawa-based company will still use Amazon for parts of its cloud infrastructure, but the majority of it will now be handled by Google. Shopify is an interesting case as its mission is to provide websites and tools to assist smaller merchants in selling online so they can compete with big e-retailers like Amazon. It serves over 600,000 businesses, thus deals with huge amounts of data and traffic. Shopify has grown rapidly since its IPO in 2015, seeing its stock grow in value by over 700%. It is currently valued at around $15B.

Transitioning most of its infrastructure to Google means that the e-commerce platform can rely less on its own data centers and spend more time developing its platform that makes it easier for merchants to sell online.

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Read more: Bizety

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Have you ever looked at your AWS bill and wondered how on Earth you ended up paying so much every month? The odds are the biggest slice of that bill is from EC2, and most likely from the cost of running instances (servers).

It’s a common problem and the good news is that it has already been solved! By utilising Amazon spot instances for your workloads you could be saving up to 80% on your EC2 bill. It sounds sounds too good to be true, right? Well that’s what I thought when I was shown the technology, one year later I’d quit my job and now I’m writing blog posts about it. The biggest issue I have is convincing people that I’m telling the truth!

How does it work?

So the basic idea is that you allow a 3rd party bidding engine to purchase AWS spot instances on your behalf. Once the spot instances have been purchased the same engine gets a copy of your AMI (server image), and installs it on the spot instance.

Your application is then up and running on a spot instance instead of a full price, on-demand instance. You’re already saving up to 80% at this point. The really clever part is that the algorithm that runs the bidding engine also knows when AWS are going to take the spot instance away from you. With this information it ensures to get you a replacement spot instance, migrate your application and continue as if nothing had happened, with 100% uptime.

Not only that but rather than the measly two minutes that AWS gives you to migrate, this algorithm allows for fifteen minutes application draining (nearly 8x more time).

How do I integrate it?

No install required and practically no configuration, you just need to allow a cross account role for the service and you’re away. You can be up and running in as little as 5 minutes. Now you’re probably wondering what workloads can be run on spot instances, good news is that the engine is already natively running:

• Auto scaling groups
• Kubernetes
• Docker
• ECS
• EMR
• RDS slaves, and much more….

What’s the catch?

No catch, you only pay for the service if you’re utilising it. If you stop using it, you stop paying, there’s no contract. Too good to be true, right? I know, I’ve heard it too many times, but don’t take my word for it, just see actual screenshot of a customer installation.

Want to know how you could be making these kinds of savings? Get in touch with our specialists for a demo today.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) today joined its rivals in releasing a blockchain service, half a year after its CEO cited a lack of “practical use cases” for the technology.

Basing its blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) on Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric networks, AWS wants to give developers the tools they need to develop their own blockchain apps.

AWS’s Blockchain Templates allows users to quickly launch either a public or private Ethereum network, or a private Hyperledger Fabric network, with the templates creating and configuring all the AWS resources needed based on the cloud giant’s pay-as-you-go pricing structure.

AWS’s push into the blockchain market sees it follow in the footsteps of rivals including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, which have all deployed versions of this technology.

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Read more: Cloudpro blog

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New public cloud security report detects a spike in cryptojacking, mismanaged cloud storage, account takeover, and major patches getting overlooked.

RedLock’s second annual Cloud Security Trends report digs into lessons learned from attacks and breaches over the past year. Researchers found the top issues in the cloud are account compromises, which affected 27% of organizations, cryptojacking (25%), risky configurations (51%), and missing high-severity patches in the cloud (24%).

On average, 27% of organizations experienced potential account compromise, including major companies Uber, Tesla, OneLogin, Aviva, and Gemalto. Risky configurations affected 51%; among them were FedEx, Deep Root Analytics, and Under Armour. Nearly one-quarter (24%), including Drupal, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, and Intel, missed high-severity patches in the cloud.

Cryptojacking has gone mainstream as attackers have unprecedented access to high-powered public cloud computing resources, affecting major corporations like Tesla, Gemalto, and Aviva. One-quarter of organizations had cryptojacking in their environments, compared with just 8% last year. Badhwar says activity has ramped up 300% in the last quarter, partially because the bar to enter the world of cryptomining is low and the payoff is high.

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Read more: Dark Reading

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The first time I was asked to design a multi-cloud approach for a platform, I thought ‘this guy must be on drugs!’. For most people involved with public cloud computing it’s still fairly taboo to even talk about it. The reasons are fairly obvious; you spent time and effort choosing the best cloud provider for your needs, a good deal of man-hours architecting & building your platform, surely doubling up on the number of platforms is madness? Well, maybe not. Issues around vendor lock, price changes (in AWS specifically) and disaster recovery have got CEO’s and CTO’s looking at the long term future of their platforms.

Do you want to:

• Spin up resources in any public cloud
• Migrate traffic from one vendor to another
• Take advantage of pricing discounts
• Have faster content delivery speeds

Then maybe the multi-cloud approach isn’t such a crazy idea after all!

How does it work

The key here is to have a redundant (or active/active) setup for the key parts of your public facing infrastructure; DNS, CDN and Compute layers. We’ll imagine for the sake of ease that the origin in our example is running a Kubernetes stack, which doesn’t use vendor specific services. In the real world you’d likely have dependencies outside of your cluster, but discussing the intricacies of public cloud vendor-lock is a blog post all of its own.

DNS

While having a 2nd DNS provider is not strictly necessary, if you’re providing a truly fault tolerant system, it needs to be there. It wasn’t that long ago that one of the world’s biggest DNS providers (Dyn) was completely knocked offline in a DDoS attack, leaving 1000’s sites (including big names like Spotify, Twitter and and PayPal) unreachable. In any case, smart DNS services can be used to route traffic to multiple Content Delivery Networks based on; a user’s geolocation, current CDN latency times, time of day, etc. Next-generation providers already have all these features baked into their products, and routing traffic based on real-time metrics is now affordable for small businesses, not just the large enterprises.

CDN

In this setup the CDN need not actually be aware at all that you’re using multiple DNS providers or multiple clouds, it’s just the middle man, accelerating content to the end user.  It’s always the case that one CDN will outperform another in a given region. By utilising multiple CDN’s your customer is getting the best possible experience based on their location, mapping the right CDN vendor to the end user. There’s inevitably a bit of complication by having multiple CDN’s, mostly due to custom configurations and unique ‘edge’ functions. With a little bit of elbow grease custom configurations can usually be copied from one CDN to another in days, not weeks. Remember, you can’t have sophistication without complexity, they’re bedfellows!

Compute

Now here’s the ‘sexy’ part of the configuration.  By utilising a cloud load balancer you abstract the public cloud (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) as the end destination for a web request. The cloud load balancer provides all the features you’d expect of (say) an Amazon ELB; horizontal scaling, health checks, automatic add/remove of nodes in a cluster. But as the cloud load balancer is not vendor specific, it means traffic can be routed to anywhere you like.

What are the use cases?

Performance
As previously stated CDN latency differs from vendors in regions. To absolutely guarantee the quickest delivery of your content a multi-CDN approach has to be used.  Likewise your company may have presence in multiple regions, some may be better served by AWS, others by Azure. With a multi-cloud approach you consume services that best meet your need.

Disaster recovery/high availability
If you think you’re safe because everything’s ‘in the cloud’ then you’d do well to read the story of the code guys. If you don’t know, in a nutshell, their AWS account was; hijacked, held to ransom and then maliciously deleted.  They lost everything, including all their backups…they’re not a company anymore. If your responsible for disaster recovery, then enabling your workload in another public cloud is actually pretty savvy

Avoid costly vendor lock
It hasn’t happened yet, but every IT manager lives in fear that AWS will suddenly start ramping up the costs (personally I don’t think it will ever happen as it’s not their model and never will be). Price rises do happen though (Google recently added a massive price hike to use ‘Maps’ application), and it might be on the CDN level or the compute layer. Either way, if you’ve built your platform using the multi-cloud approach, then you can just switch the services you’re consuming. Typically public cloud use is charged per request or per hour, so you’re not tied into complicated exit strategies, you can just leave!

To sum up…

The multi-cloud approach is real and achievable. In my honest opinion it’s almost entirely academic at this point, as I talk to a lot of companies ‘looking’ at it or ’thinking’ about it. I myself have drawn up several proposals for customers, all of which now sit firmly in email archives, to be dusted off when they ‘revisit it, in the future’. It’s my belief that the shift to the cloud has been so painful for most companies, that the idea of adding another cloud fills them with dread. Once the dust settles, in a few more years, the multi-cloud will start to become more commonplace, but for now it remains the domain of the brave.

If you’re one of these, if you have any questions about how to effectively adopt the cloud for your business, or how to optimize your cloud performance and reduce costs, contact us today to help you out with your performance and security needs.

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Cloud storage enables companies to store their data in third-party data centers through a cloud provider. Organizations are rapidly adopting the cloud, but there’s a concern: is data safe in the cloud?

The issues regarding cloud security are somewhat complex, but they fall into two broad categories:

1. Security issues faced by cloud providers (organizations providing software-, platform-, or infrastructure-as-a-service via the cloud)
2. Security issues faced by their customers (companies or organizations who host applications or store data on the cloud)

There are concerns that cloud computing is inherently less secure than traditional approaches. The paranoia is due largely to the fact that the approach itself feels insecure, with your data stored on servers and systems you don’t own or control. However, cloud computing security offers a range of security options to make sure your data is encrypted and safely stored.

Cloud storage providers and enterprises share responsibility for cloud storage security. Cloud storage providers implement baseline protections for their platforms and the data they process, such authentication, access control, and encryption. From there, most enterprises supplement these protections with added security measures of their own to bolster cloud data protection and tighten access to sensitive information in the cloud.

Cloud storage risks

Cloud security is tight, but it’s not infallible. Cybercriminals can get into those files, whether by guessing security questions or bypassing passwords.

But the bigger risk with cloud storage is privacy. Even if data isn’t stolen or published, it can still be viewed. Governments can legally request information stored in the cloud, and it’s up to the cloud services provider to deny access. Tens of thousands of requests for user data are sent to Google, Microsoft, and other businesses each year by government agencies. A large percentage of the time, these companies hand over at least some kind of data, even if it’s not the content in full.

Cloud security controls

These controls are put in place to safeguard any weaknesses in the system and reduce the effect of an attack. While there are many types of controls behind a cloud security architecture, they can usually be found in one of the following categories.

Deterrent controls

These controls are intended to reduce attacks on a cloud system. Much like a warning sign on a fence or a property, deterrent controls typically reduce the threat level by informing potential attackers that there will be adverse consequences for them if they proceed. (Some consider them a subset of preventive controls.)

Preventive controls

Preventive controls strengthen the system against incidents, generally by reducing if not actually eliminating vulnerabilities. Strong authentication of cloud users, for instance, makes it less likely that unauthorized users can access cloud systems, and more likely that cloud users are positively identified.

Detective controls

Detective controls are intended to detect and react appropriately to any incidents that occur. In the event of an attack, a detective control will signal the preventative or corrective controls to address the issue. System and network security monitoring, including intrusion detection and prevention arrangements, are typically employed to detect attacks on cloud systems and the supporting communications infrastructure.

Corrective controls

Corrective controls reduce the consequences of an incident, normally by limiting the damage. They come into effect during or after an incident. Restoring system backups in order to rebuild a compromised system is an example of a corrective control.

There are several approaches enterprises take to ensure their data is secure in the cloud. Let’s take a look at them.

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Cloud data encryption

To keep data secure, the front line of defense for any cloud system is encryption. Encryption methods utilize complex algorithms to conceal cloud-protected information. To decipher encrypted files, would-be hackers would need the encryption key. Although encrypted information is not 100% uncrackable, decryption requires a huge amount of computer processing power, forensic software, and a lot of time.

Data encryption in the cloud is the process of transforming or encoding data before it’s moved to cloud storage. Typically cloud service providers offer encryption services — ranging from an encrypted connection to limited encryption of sensitive data — and provide encryption keys to decrypt the data as needed.

Encryption is, so far, the best way you can protect your data. Encryption works as follows: You have a file you want to move to a cloud, you use certain software with which you create a password for that file, you move that password-protected file to the cloud and no one is ever able to see the content of the file not knowing the password.

Data encryption is regarded as one of the most effective approaches to data security, scrambling the content of any system, database, or file in such a way that it’s impossible to decipher without a decryption key. By applying encryption and practicing secure encryption key management, companies can ensure that only authorized users have access to sensitive data. Even if lost, stolen, or accessed without authorization, encrypted data is unreadable and essentially meaningless without its key.

Some cloud services provide local encryption and decryption of your files in addition to storage and backup. This means that the service takes care of both encrypting your files on your own computer and storing them safely on the cloud.

Organization-wide security policies

Organizations using the cloud should adopt security policies related to data security (actually, all organizations should adopt them, but with the cloud it’s even more important to do so).

This is mostly related to passwords and general security practices. The best cloud protection in the world won’t help you if you use simple-to-guess passwords, or if someone from your organizations reveals passwords and other sensitive data to bad actors.
It’s important to have clearly defined security policies to prevent such scenarios.

Always backup your data

Cloud storage is, by its nature, secure from various cyber attacks and even natural disasters. It also offers a way to backup and restore data. Still, it’s smart to backup vital company’s information on in-house servers, just to be completely sure that crucial information is not lost in case of problems with the cloud provider.

Trust, but verify

You have to validate the faith you put in your cloud provider. Trust is essential because everyone must have access to your infrastructure if you are going to move and build quickly. But it’s essential that you also monitor and audit continuously so you can verify business-critical activity and manage risk effectively.

Final thoughts

No system is 100% safe, but cloud infrastructure almost reaches this goal. Data is safe in the cloud, but some precautions have to be in place to ensure everything works smoothly. This mostly pertains to company policies about passwords and encryption.

If you have any questions about how to effectively adopt the cloud for your business, or how to optimize your cloud performance and reduce costs, contact us today to help you out with your performance and security needs.

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2017 was a ‘pivotal’ year in expanding public cloud service adoption according to IDC – with spending growth remaining at a constant level despite the overall market tripling in size.

The figures, which come from the analyst firm’s latest Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Tracker, show that while the overall growth rate for 2017 was a little smaller than the previous year, revenue growth of the top 16 providers by market share went up. The top tier vendors now capture more than half (50.7%) of the overall market.

Software as a service (SaaS) remains the largest bucket by some distance at $74.8 billion (£56.5bn) globally, with IDC predicting the SaaS market will hit $163bn by 2022 – well ahead of overall 2017 figures of $116.7bn. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) spending last year was at $24.9bn, while platform as a service (PaaS) was at $17bn.

PaaS remained the fastest growing of the three markets, showing a 47.1% year on year increase, compared with IaaS (39.9%) and SaaS (22.4%). Both PaaS and IaaS however saw slightly slower growth when compared to the previous year’s figures, of 48% and 45% respectively.

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Read more: Cloud Computing News

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Business of all sizes, geographies, and industries are turning to cloud services. According to a survey by RightScale, both public and private cloud adoption have increased in the last year.

The survey shows that the number of respondents now adopting public cloud is 92 percent, up from 89 percent in 2017, while the number of respondents now adopting private cloud is 75 percent, up from 72 percent in 2017. As a result, the overall portion of respondents using at least one public or private cloud is now 96 percent.

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Gartner predicts that this trend will continue through 2020, by which time most companies are expected to have cloud-first or cloud-only policies. Factors behind this change include things like lower operating costs, improved time to market, better collaboration, and increased flexibility.

The cloud is a great way to run a business, since it offers many advantages and only a few disadvantages.

Before we dive in the benefits a company can achieve by adopting cloud infrastructure, let’s take a quick a look at what exactly cloud computing is, and how can companies migrate to the cloud.

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is a term used to describe the use of hardware and software delivered via network (usually the Internet). The term comes from the use of cloud shaped symbol that represents abstraction of rather complex infrastructure that enables the work of software, hardware, computation and remote services.

Simply put, cloud computing is computing based on the internet. In the past, people would run applications or programs from software downloaded on a physical computer or server in their building. Cloud computing allows people access to the same kinds of applications through the internet.

Cloud computing is based on the premise that the main computing takes place on a machine, often remote, that is not the one currently being used. Data collected during this process is stored and processed by remote servers (also called cloud servers). This means the device accessing the cloud doesn’t need to work as hard.

By hosting software, platforms, and databases remotely, the cloud servers free up the memory and computing power of individual computers. Users can securely access cloud services using credentials received from the cloud computing provider.

Cloud computing benefits

Here’s a list of key benefits an enterprise can expect to achieve when adopting cloud infrastructure.

1. Efficiency / cost reduction

By using cloud infrastructure, you don’t have to spend huge amounts of money on purchasing and maintaing equipment. This drastically reduces capex costs. You don’t have to invest in hardware, facilities, utilities, or building out a large data center to grow your business. You do not even need large IT teams to handle your cloud data center operations, as you can enjoy the expertise of your cloud provider’s staff.

Cloud also reduces costs related to downtime. Since downtime is rare in cloud systems, this means you don’t have to spend time and money on fixing potential issues related to downtime.

2. Data security

One of the major concerns of every business, regardless of size and industry, is the security of its data. Data breaches and other cybercrimes can devastate a company’s revenue, customer loyalty and brand positioning.

Cloud offers many advanced security features that guarantee that data is securely stored and handled.

Cloud storage providers implement baseline protections for their platforms and the data they process, such authentication, access control, and encryption. From there, most enterprises supplement these protections with added security measures of their own to bolster cloud data protection and tighten access to sensitive information in the cloud.

3. Scalability

Different companies have different IT needs — a large enterprise of 1000+ employees won’t have the same IT requirements as a start-up.Using cloud is a great solution because it enables enterprise to efficiently — and quickly — scale up/down their IT departments, according to business demands.

Cloud based solutions are ideal for businesses with growing or fluctuating bandwidth demands. If your business demands increase, you can easily increase your cloud capacity without having to invest in physical infrastructure. This level of agility can give businesses using cloud computing a real advantage over competitors.

This scalability minimizes the risks associated with in-house operational issues and maintenance. You have high-performance resources at your disposal with professional solutions and zero up-front investment. Scalability is probably the greatest advantage of the cloud.

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4. Mobility

Cloud computing allows mobile access to corporate data via smartphones and devices, which is a great way to ensure that no one is ever left out of the loop. Staff with busy schedules, or who live a long way away from the corporate office, can use this feature to keep instantly up-to-date with clients and coworkers.

Resources in the cloud can be easily stored, retrieved, recovered, or processed with just a couple of clicks. Users can get access to their works on-the-go, 24/7, via any devices of their choice, in any corner of the world as long as you stay connected to the internet. On top of that, all the upgrades and updates are done automatically, off-sight by the service providers. This saves time and team effort in maintaining the systems, tremendously reducing the IT team workloads.

5. Disaster recovery

Data loss is a major concern for all organizations, along with data security. Storing your data in the cloud guarantees that data is always available, even if your equipment like laptops or PCs, is damaged. Cloud-based services provide quick data recovery for all kinds of emergency scenarios — from natural disasters to power outages.

Cloud infrastructure can also help you with loss prevention. If you rely on traditional on-premises approach, all your data will be stored locally, on office computers. Despite your best efforts, computers can malfunction from various reasons — from malware and viruses, to age-related hardware deterioration, to simple user error.

But, if you upload your data to the cloud, it remains accesible for any computer with an internet connection, even if something happens to your work computer.

6. Control

Having control over sensitive data is vital to any company. You never know what can happen if a document gets into the wrong hands, even if it’s just the hands of an untrained employee.

Cloud enables you complete visibility and control over your data. You can easily decide which users have what level of access to what data. This gives you control, but it also streamlines work since staff will easily know what documents are assigned to them. It will also increase and ease collaboration. Since one version of the document can be worked on by different people, and there’s no need to have copies of the same document in circulation.

7. Competitive edge

Not every company will migrate to the cloud, at least not yet. However, organizations which adopt cloud find that many benefits that cloud offers positively impacts their business .

Cloud adoption increases every year, since companies realize that it offers them access to world-class enterprise technology. And, if you implement a cloud solution now, you’ll be ahead of your competitors.

Conclusion

Cloud computing adoption is on the rise every year, and it doesn’t take long to see why. Enterprises recognize cloud computing benefits and see how they impact their production, collaboration, security and revenue.

By using a cloud-based solution, an enterprise can prevent a lot of problems that plague organizations that rely on on-premises infrastructure.

If you have any questions about how to effectively adopt the cloud for your business, or how to optimize your cloud performance and reduce costs, contact us today to help you out with your performance and security needs.

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Alibaba Cloud’s expansion outside of China and Asia Pacific has been well documented – and now the provider is firming up its commitments with the launch of a new EMEA partner program.

The partner program will aim to look at four key areas; developing digital transformation in targeted vertical industries; supporting the development of talent; advancing technology innovation; and enhancing marketplaces.

The overall effect, in the company’s words, is ‘to create an inclusive ecosystem that can benefit all those involved’. What this means is the support of companies such as Intel and Accenture, as well as Station F, the world’s largest startup campus.

Amazon is certainly the target for Alibaba globally. According to the latest note from analyst firm Synergy Research, AWS leads across all geographies, with Microsoft and Google comprising the top three everywhere instead of Asia Pacific, where Alibaba is second.

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Read more: Cloud Computing News

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Today, the success (or failure) of almost all business ventures is tied to technology, and many companies are tech businesses. As a business grows and expands, so does its IT infrastructure needs.

Faced with increasing demands, businesses are looking for ways to scale their infrastructure. However, scaling traditional, on-premises, IT infrastructure is costly. You have to buy and maintain new hardware, update your software and train your staff.

Before cloud computing, to keep with latest technological trends, companies had to invest a lot of capital and time in their IT infrastructure. Companies had to spend large quantities of money just to stay in the (technological) game.

With the advent of cloud computing most of these roadblocks have disappeared. Cloud infrastructure offers the ability to scale IT infrastructure up or down, depending on the company’s current needs.

Scalability, along with security and cost-effectiveness, is one of the greatest advantages cloud can offer. However, the cloud migration process can be painful without proper planning, execution, and testing. A survey found that only 27% of respondents were extremely satisfied with their overall cloud migration experience.

On a list of the most common cloud-related pain points, migration comes right after security.

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What is cloud migration?

Cloud migration is the process of moving data, applications and other business elements from an organization’s on-premises computers to the cloud – a virtual pool of on-demand, shared resources that offer compute, storage, and network services at scale.

If you’re a company with on-premises computing, you want to be able to grow without being dragged down by outdated and under-utilized resources. In modern business landscape, a business has to be agile and flexible, to be able to quickly adapt to the market’s demands.  Cloud offers a way to do that. Cloud infrastructure offers many benefits, compared to the on-premises infrastructure.

Here are they in short:

• cost reduction
• security
• scalability
• mobility
• disaster recovery
• control
• conpetitive edge

Cloud migration steps

1. Plan and prepare for migration

Before you start the actual migration to the cloud, you have to prepare for it. The level of preparation details depends on your business, but there are some basic steps you should take.

First, you should be clear about the reasons why you’re moving to the cloud. The cloud offers many benefits, but you must be sure what exact benefits your organizations will get by moving your applications to the cloud.

It may be a good idea to assign a manager to plan and oversee the entire migration process. During a large migration project, organizations have to make many technical plans and decisions, and having a specialist is critical to the success of the project.

When you move an application from an on-premise data center to the cloud, there are two ways you can migrate your application—a shallow cloud integration or a deep cloud integration.

For a shallow cloud integration (sometimes called “lift-and-shift”), you move the on-premise application to the cloud, and make no—or limited—changes to the servers in the cloud for the purpose of running the application. Any application changes are just enough to get it to run in the new environment. You don’t use cloud-unique services. This model is also known as lift-and-shift because the application is lifted “as is” and moved, or shifted, to the cloud intact.

For a deep cloud integration, you modify your application during the migration process to take advantage of key cloud capabilities. This might be something simple like using auto scaling and dynamic load balancing, or it might be as sophisticated as utilizing serverless computing capabilities for portions of the application.

2. Choose your cloud environment

Before you start your cloud migration, you have to decide what kind of cloud model will you adopt. First you must choose whether you want to go single or multi-cloud.

A single cloud environment is accomplished by using a single cloud provider to serve any and all applications or services that the organization decides to migrate to the cloud. Single cloud environments can utilize either private or public clouds, using whichever one better serves their current and future needs.

They enable organizations to move workloads to the cloud as their needs grow, with the option to expand the number of virtualized servers if their need grows beyond a single cloud server’s limits. Often, organizations with a single cloud model are employing the cloud for a single service or application, such as email, enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), or similar.

In a multi-cloud environment, an organization uses multiple different public cloud services, often from multiple different providers. The different clouds may be used for various tasks to achieve best-of-breed results or to reduce vendor lock-in. This reflects the growing acknowledgement that not all clouds are created equal — Marketing and Sales, for instance, likely have different needs than Software Development or R&D, and different cloud solutions can meet those requirements more effectively.

Multiple clouds also give organizations added peace of mind by minimizing dependence on any one provider, often decreasing costs and increasing flexibility.

Based on a service that the cloud is offering, we are speaking of either:

• IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service)
• PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service)
• SaaS (Software-as-a-Service)
• or, Storage, Database, Information, Process, Application, Integration, Security, Management, Testing-as-a-service

3. Migrate applications and data & review

If you have planned your migration carefully, the actual migration process should go smoothly and quickly.

Depending on the size of your databases and applications, you will use different techniques for actually copying everything over. If you don’t have too much to migrate, you can just copy the data over your internet connection. This approach isn’t ideal for larger workloads. You might have very long transfer times or charges from the cloud provider. To deal with this, you could compress the data before sending it. Alternatively, you could ship your physical drives to the provider to reduce bandwidth costs.

It’s important to take of security during the migration. Any temporary storages for your data should be as secure as the end destination.
Cloud providers will most likely give you access to various cloud migration tools. Use them to help you with migration.

Even after you’ve finished migrating everything to the cloud, there are a few more things to consider. Most important is resource optimization. The cloud is optimized for dynamic resource allocation, and when you allocate resources (servers, for example) statically, you’re not taking advantage of the cloud’s strengths. As you move into the cloud, make sure your teams have a plan for distributing resources to your application.

Conclusion

Moving your business applications and data to the cloud can be a great strategic move that gives you a competitive edge by reducing IT costs, enabling application scalability and many other benefits.

The complexity of the cloud migration process depends mostly on the size and complexity of your business operations. In this article, we have covered the basic steps you should have in mind when migrating to the cloud.

If you have any questions about how to effectively adopt the cloud for your business, or how to optimize your cloud performance and reduce costs, contact us today to help you out with your performance and security needs.

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A new study from Juniper Research found that spending on IoT cybersecurity solutions is set to reach over $6 billion globally by 2023. It highlighted rapid growth, with spending by product and service providers (in consumer markets) and end-customers (in industrial and public services markets) to rise nearly 300% over the forecast period.

Juniper claimed that there are major differences in the way in which IoT business risk is perceived and perceptions on how regulation should be applied. It cited the home as an example of where poor long-term device support and little fear of ramifications in case of a breach would serve to keep spending low.

The research forecasts that the rise of edge computing services to enable near-real-time IoT applications would present additional security challenges, which in turn will drive industry spend. It cited an increased attack surface as raising business risk.

Meanwhile, the need to ensure data reliability would emphasise the need for lifecycle management and device security solutions.

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Read more: Help Net Security

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Research by Virtustream and Dell Technologies has revealed multi-cloud businesses are on the rise, with 86% of companies using more than one vendor to help with their digital transformation efforts.

The companies questioned more than 700 businesses with at least 1,000 employees about their cloud usage and it found that the vast majority of firms are employing multiple companies to run cloud-based services because collectively, they present better performance and higher levels of innovation.

“Multi-cloud is a clear reality of the next era in cloud computing. Whether it is employed to balance risk or to leverage the advantages and use cases of various cloud platforms – enterprises are increasingly moving their workloads to multiple cloud providers.”
-Deepak Patil, senior vice president of product and technology, Virtustream

The cloud company also said that more than half of businesses have moved their business-critical applications to the cloud, demonstrating a real trust in cloud technology.

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Read more: Cloud Pro

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Almost all business use cloud in one way or another these days. And since cloud is such an important part of an organization’s operations, it’s obvious that you need to monitor it. This article gives an overview of cloud monitoring and provides examples of best practices.

Modern businesses rely on cloud computing to deliver content and applications to end users in a fast, reliable and secure way. Despite all the advantages the cloud offers, however, it’s a complex environment that requires constant monitoring in order to be optimized.

What is cloud monitoring?

Cloud computing is a term used to describe the use of hardware and software delivered via network (usually the Internet). The term comes from the use of cloud shaped symbol that represents abstraction of rather complex infrastructure that enables the work of software, hardware, computation and remote services.

Cloud monitoring assesses the elements of cloud performance for cloud systems and vendor services. Using various metrics and methodologies, organizations performing cloud monitoring try to ensure that systems are providing benchmark levels of access and desired outcomes.

Cloud monitoring is generally performed as part of an overall cloud management strategy, enabling IT administrators to review the operational status of cloud-based resources. It also provides a holistic view of cloud metrics, customer flow, log data and more.

What to monitor

There are multiple types of cloud services to monitor. Cloud monitoring is not just about monitoring servers hosted on AWS or Azure. For enterprises, they also put a lot of importance into monitoring cloud-based services that they consume, for example:

• SaaS – Services like Office 365, Salesforce and others
• PaaS – Developer friendly services like SQL databases, caching, storage and more
• IaaS – Servers hosted by cloud providers like Azure, AWS, Digital Ocean, and others
• FaaS – New serverless applications like AWS Lambda and Azure Functions
• Application Hosting – Services like Azure App Services, Heroku, etc

The cloud has many moving parts, and it’s important to ensure everything works together seamlessly to optimize performance. Cloud monitoring primarily includes functions such as:

• Website monitoring: Tracking the processes, traffic, availability and resource utilization of cloud-hosted websites
• Virtual machine monitoring: Monitoring the virtualization infrastructure and individual virtual machines
• Database monitoring: Monitoring processes, queries, availability, and consumption of cloud database resources
• Virtual network monitoring: Monitoring virtual network resources, devices, connections, and performance
• Cloud storage monitoring: Monitoring storage resources and their processes provisioned to virtual machines, services, databases, and applications

Cloud monitoring is easier if you operate in a private cloud due to increased control and visibility, since you have access to the systems and software stack. Though monitoring can be more difficult in public or hybrid clouds, application performance monitoring tools give you visibility into performance behaviors.

Monitoring a hybrid cloud environment presents more difficulties than monitoring a private cloud, since your data resides in both the private cloud and the public cloud.

Cloud monitoring best practices

Keeping a healthy and productive cloud enviroment is never an easy task. There are many approaches an organization can take to tackle this challenge, but here are some best practices every business should follow.

Monitor the end user experience

Providing a reliable, seamless and satisfying user experience should be the goal of every business. Monitoring end user experience gives you important insights about customer satisfaction and can directly lead to increased revenue.

To effectively monitor user experience, you’ll want a sophisticated monitoring platform that can accept the response time data and feed it back through the system as familiar, recognizable data. With uniform metric, flow and log data, the IT department can set alerts and act quickly if an issue arises.

Monitor metrics such as response times and frequency of use to get the complete picture of performance.

Monitor cloud and on-premises infrastructure from a single platform

Businesses control the performance of their on-premises infrastructure to deliver desired results. However, with the introduction of the cloud infrastructure, a new problem appears — they now have two systems to monitor and control. Integrating the data from both systems can seem challenging, but organizations should strive for that level of integration.

A single platform that monitors both cloud and on-premises infrastructure performance can pull third-party data from cloud services like AWS, and enable a real-time overview of all crucial cloud performance KPIs. KPIs you should monior include:

• Performance
• Cost
• Security
• Data Backup/Recovery

When your data is uniform across whatever objects and devices you’re monitoring – whether they’re in the datacenter or in the cloud – you have complete visibility into your network and applications.

Monitor security

Security is crucial in the cloud so gaining strict control over data at all endpoints helps mitigate risks. Solutions that scan, analyze, and take action on data before it leaves the network help protect against data loss. It’s also important to scan, evaluate, and classify data before it’s downloaded to the network to avoid malware and data breaches.

Monitor cloud usage and fees

The ability to scale is a feature is a key feature of cloud services, but increased use can trigger increased costs. Robust monitoring solutions should track how much organization activity is on the cloud and how much it costs.

Automate tasks

Automating tasks is standard advice for all types of technologies and the commonly discussed recommendation also applies to your AWS cloud. With highly distributed IT teams having more control over provisioning resources, automation is becoming crucial as a means of avoiding permission restrictions and other time delays which have previously plagued legacy IT environments.

Proper automation processes (often a central part of the DevOps methodology) are a great way of achieving cloud productivity and keeping up with configuration, security and compliance measures that play a key part in driving down costs and increasing productivity.

Conclusion

Cloud monitoring refers to the process of controlling and optimizing organization’s cloud infrastructure. Using various metrics and methodologies, organizations performing cloud monitoring try to ensure that systems are providing benchmark levels of access and desired outcomes.

Similar to other systems, the cloud also needs to be monitored to be used effectively and deliver expected results.

If you have any questions about how to effectively adopt the cloud for your business, or how to optimize your cloud performance and reduce costs, contact us today to help you out with your performance and security needs.

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A security researcher has discovered several critical vulnerabilities in one of the most popular embedded real-time operating systems—called FreeRTOS—and its other variants, exposing a wide range of IoT devices and critical infrastructure systems to hackers.

FreeRTOS is a leading open source real-time operating system (RTOS) for embedded systems that has been ported to over 40 microcontrollers, which are being used in IoT, aerospace, medical, automotive industries, and more.

RTOS has specifically been designed to carefully run applications with very precise timing and a high degree of reliability, every time.

Since late last year, FreeRTOS project is being managed by Amazon, who created Amazon FreeRTOS (a:FreeRTOS) IoT operating system for microcontrollers by upgrading FreeRTOS kernel and some of its components.

Ori Karliner, a security researcher at Zimperium Security Labs (zLabs), discovered a total of 13 vulnerabilities in FreeRTOS’s TCP/IP stack that also affect its variants maintained by Amazon and WHIS.

The vulnerabilities could allow attackers to crash the target device, leak information from its memory, and the most worrisome, remotely execute malicious code on it, thus taking complete control over the target device.

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Read more: The Hacker News

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Cisco Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes on Amazon allows businesses to switch apps from the cloud to on-premise and vice-versa

Amazon and Cisco have teamed up to make it easier for developers to build apps across cloud and traditional on-premise architecture, switching them from one to the other when required.

Cisco Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes on Amazon allows developers to create their apps either on AWS’s cloud service or on their traditional servers in containers.

Kip Compton, senior vice president of Cisco’s Cloud Platform and Solutions group explained that developers are often expected to work in fragmented environments, with their applications hosted either on the cloud or in traditional on-premise environments. But when switching to a hybrid model, it’s often a complicated process to get up and running, with technologies, teams, and vendors needing to work closely together to make sure apps can move from cloud to on-premise seamlessly.

When setting up apps, developers can choose to deploy them on either AWS or on their on-premise architecture running Cisco’s Container Platform. And if they want to switch the applications from one to the other, they can do so. This means businesses can take advantage of the cloud’s flexibility with the privacy and regulatory approval of traditional, on-premise architecture at the same time.

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Read more: Cloud Pro

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Enterprises plan to increase hybrid cloud usage, with 91% stating hybrid cloud as the ideal IT model, but only 18% stating they have that model today, according to Nutanix. Application mobility across any cloud is a top priority for 97% of respondents – with 88% of respondents saying it would “solve a lot of my problems.”

IT decision makers ranked matching applications to the right cloud environment as a critical capability, and 35% of organizations using public clouds overspent their annual budget. When asked to rank the primary benefits of hybrid cloud, interoperability between cloud types (23%) and the ability to move applications back and forth between clouds (16%) outranked cost (6%) and security (5%) as the primary benefits.

In roles centered on agility and digital transformation, IT teams understand that runtime environments for enterprise apps change constantly. Respondents indicated a need for greater orchestration and application mobility across cloud environments, as they seek flexibility to move apps to the “right” cloud on a more dynamic basis.

Shadow IT practices that circumvent enterprise IT teams are posing a significant challenge to forecasting and controlling public cloud spend with well over half of respondents (57%) reporting one or more incidents of shadow IT.

Read more: Help Net Security

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By 2025, businesses will be spending 22% of their budget on cloud technologies

Businesses are spending more money on cloud infrastructure compared to legacy, on-premise environments for the first time, according to the Cloud Industry Forum.

The CIF’s study, conducted by Vanson Bourne revealed that firms are more open to multi-cloud environments, with three-quarters of firms adopting the use of more than one cloud service to power their digital transformation process.

UK businesses are spending 19% of their IT budgets on cloud infrastructure, compared to 18% of budgets spent on-premise. Within four years, the CIF thinks the amount of money spent on the cloud will increase to become 22% of budgets. The firm is predicting the gap will widen as more organisations realise the benefits of cloud vs. on-premise architecture.

Although take-up is growing, there’s still a way to go until more businesses can use the cloud to power their digital transformation journey, with the CIF highlighting skills shortages as a major barrier to both cloud and cloud-powered application adoption.

Read more: Cloud Pro

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If you’re using AWS, you can now create Auto Scaling Groups that grow and shrink in response to changing conditions, while also making use of the most economical combination of EC2 instance types and pricing models. You have full control of the instance types that will be used to build your group, along with the ability to control the mix of On-Demand and Spot. You can also update your existing Auto Scaling Groups to take advantage of this new feature.

The Auto Scaling Groups that you create are optimized anew each time a scale-out or scale-in event takes place, always seeking the lowest overall cost while meeting the other requirements set by your configuration. You can modify the configuration as newer instance types become available, allowing you to create a group that evolves in step with EC2.

Creating an Auto Scaling Group

You can create an Auto Scaling Group from the EC2 Console, CLI, or API. The first step is to make sure that you have a suitable Launch Template (it should not specify the use of Spot Instances). Here’s an example:

Then you navigate to my Auto Scaling Groups and click Create Auto Scaling group:

Click Launch Template, select my ProdWebServer template, and click Next Step to proceed:

Name your group and select Combine purchase models and instances to unlock the new functionality:

Now select the instance types that you want to use. The list is prioritized: instances at the top of the list will be used in preference to those lower down when On-Demand instances are launched. For example, if your will run fine on M4 or M5 instances with 2 or more vCPUs:

You can accept the default settings for my group’s composition or you can set them myself by unchecking Use default:

Here’s what you can do:

Maximum Spot Price – Sets the maximum Spot price that you want to pay. The default setting caps this bid at the On-Demand price.

Spot Allocation Strategy – Control the amount of per-AZ diversity for the Spot Instances. A larger number adds some flexibility at times when a particular instance type is in high demand within an AZ.

Optional On-Demand Base – Controls how much of the initial capacity is made up of On-Demand Instances. Keeping this set to 0 indicates that you prefer to launch On-Demand Instances as a percentage of the total group capacity that is running at any given time.

On-Demand Percentage Above Base – Controls the percentage of the add-on to the initial group that is made up of On-Demand Instances versus the percentage that is made up of Spot Instances.

As you can see, you have full control over how your group is built. You leave them all as-is, set my group to start with 4 instances, choose my VPC subnets, and click Next to set up your scaling policies, as usual:

You can disable scale-in if you want (it’s disabled here for demo purposes):

You then click past the Configure Notifications, and indicate that you want to tag my group and the EC2 instances in it:

You can review your settings and click Create Auto Scaling Group to move ahead:

The initial group of four instances is ready to go within minutes:

You can filter by tag in the EC2 Console and display the Lifecycle column to see the mix of On-Demand and Spot Instances:

You can modify your Auto Scaling Group, reducing the On-Demand Percentage to 20% and doubling the Desired Capacity (this is a demo-mode way of showing what happens when the group scales out):

The changes take effect within minutes; new Spot Instances are launched, some of the existing On-Demand Instances are terminated, and the composition of the group reflects the new settings:

Here are a couple of things to keep in mind when you start to use this cool new feature:

Reserved Instances – AWS plans to add support for the preferential use of Reserved Instances in the near future. Today, if you own Reserved Instances, specify their instance types as early as possible in the list we showed you earlier. Your discounts will apply to any On-Demand instances that match available Reserved Instances.

Weight – All instance types have the same weight; we plan to give you the ability to specify weights in the near future. This will allow you to specify custom capacity units for each instance using either memory or vCPUs, and to specify the overall desired capacity in the same units.

Cost – The feature itself is available to you at no charge. If you switch part or all of your Auto Scaling Groups over to Spot Instances, you may be able to save up to 90% when compared to On-Demand Instances.

ECS and EKS – If you are running Amazon ECS or Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes on a cluster that makes use of an Auto Scaling Group, you can update the group to make use of multiple instance types and purchase options.

This feature is available now and you can start using today in all commercial AWS regions!

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Hardly a week goes by that we don’t hear about an organization leaving sensitive data exposed on the Internet because they failed to properly configure their Amazon S3 buckets.

Amazon Web Services, to their credit, are trying to prevent this from happening.

For one, all newly created S3 buckets and objects (files and directories in the bucket) are by default private, i.e. not publicly accesible by random people via the Internet. Secondly, changes implemented earlier this year made it possible for customers to easily identify S3 buckets that are publicly accessible due to Access Control Lists (ACLs) or policies that allow read/write access for any user.

But even that’s not enough, so the company is rolling out a new security feature: Amazon S3 Block Public Access.

This new feature allows account owners/administrators to centrally block existing public access (whether made possible via an ACL or a policy) and to make sure that newly created items aren’t inadvertently granted public access.

Read more: Help Net Security

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Report suggests businesses should embrace open-source tech and adopt cloud-native apps to stay competitive

A new report has unpackaged the elements it thinks a business needs to implement in order to take advantage of the cloud, highlighting the importance of AI, taking on a multi-cloud strategy and using open-source technologies.

Cloud firm Amido said that to have the biggest impact on their business, companies must accept that cloud-native applications will become the new norm and so should be open to the switch from legacy platforms.

They should use cloud-powered mobile apps where possible, build data lakes with the assistance of AI to help with data science projects and adopt a multi-cloud approach – implementing open-source tech where possible, according to the report.

Amido argued that the recent open source push by the largest cloud vendors means that there has never been a better time to adopt more than one cloud vendor, avoiding lock-in and ensuring better uptime as a result.

Read more: CloudPro UK

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