Gartner is predicting companies will spend some $332.9 billion on remote work IT in 2021 as the digital transformation continues.
The coronavirus pandemic has sparked an unprecedented digital transformation, as organizations have turned to remote work, schools have turned to remote learning and individuals have had to rely on videoconferencing to stay in touch.
That trend is expected to continue full force for the next several years. In fact, Gartner predicts businesses will have to accelerate their digital transformation by at least five years through 2024, as they continue to deal with a permanently altered workforce — one where remote work is part of the new reality.
“There are a combination of factors pushing the devices market higher,” said John-David Lovelock, distinguished research vice president at Gartner.. “As countries continue remote education through this year, there will be a demand for tablets and laptops for students. Likewise, enterprises are industrializing remote work for employees as quarantine measures keep employees at home and budget stabilization allows CIOs to reinvest in assets that were sweated in 2020.”
As a result, Gartner predicts remote work-related global IT spending will reach $332.9 billion in 2021, an increase of 4.9% from 2020.
“Digital business represents the dominant technology trend in late 2020 and early 2021 with areas such as cloud computing, core business applications, security and customer experience at the forefront. Optimization initiatives, such as hyperautomation, will continue and the focus of these projects will remain on returning cash and eliminating work from processes, not just tasks,” said Mr. Lovelock.
Gartner’s report is the latest evidence that remote work has become a permanent part of society, with workers continuing to demonstrate their preference for it.
AWS has revealed that Bottlerocket Linux is the operating system (OS) it is using for container hosting.
Containers are packages containing all the apps, code, libraries and dependencies necessary to run. Containers can be easily moved from one host to another, without worrying about the underlying OS and environment. Containers can also be managed to prevent any one app or process from hogging a system’s resources, making them the ideal way to scale cloud, hosting and IT systems.
Bottlerocket is a new Linux distribution that AWS designed and optimized specifically to work with containers.
“Bottlerocket reflects much of what we have learned over the years,” writes Jeff Barr, Chief Evangelist for AWS. “It includes only the packages that are needed to make it a great container host, and integrates with existing container orchestrators. It supports Docker image and images that conform to the Open Container Initiative (OCI) image format.
“Instead of a package update system, Bottlerocket uses a simple, image-based model that allows for a rapid & complete rollback if necessary. This removes opportunities for conflicts and breakage, and makes it easier for you to apply fleet-wide updates with confidence using orchestrators such as EKS.
“In addition to the minimal package set, Bottlerocket uses a file system that is primarily read-only, and that is integrity-checked at boot time via dm-verity. SSH access is discouraged, and is available only as part of a separate admin container that you can enable on an as-needed basis and then use for troubleshooting purposes.”
AWS is launching a public preview of the OS and inviting others to try it.
FedScoop is reporting that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives will soon close its last data center as it finishes moving its data and applications to AWS.
ATF CTO Mason McDaniel told FedScoop the goal is to completely transition users to its AWS cloud environment by the end of the year. The last remaining data center will then be converted into office space.
The transition has been a long time coming, as the agency has worked to modernize its IT after shutting down its disaster recovery data center in 2013. From that point forward, the agency was operating without a safety net, a situation it put to the test in 2016 when it had to evacuate its data center for two days as a result of weather. With no disaster recovery plan in place, the agency had to hope for the best that nothing catastrophic would happen during those two days. Moving to AWS will provide the safety and redundancy the agency needs.
McDaniel believes the upgrade to the cloud should result in significant efficiency gains as well.
“What they’re going to see soon after that, once we finish this part, is a focus back on the actual processes themselves,” McDaniel told FedScoop. “Many, many of the processes that our users and analysts and agents have to go through require them to go from system to system to system because of how we built things in projects over time. Every time something new was needed, the teams that developed the old ones were gone. And over time, we’ve got all the tiny little disconnected systems so the users have to manually go back and forth between them to do stuff.”
This, in turn, should reduce by “half or more the amount of time it takes them to do a lot of their daily activities,” McDaniel said. “That’s when they’re really going to start seeing the benefits.”
“Innovation is the key,” says Honeywell CEO Darius Adamczyk. “Anything we do in Honeywell, innovation is always the key. Whether it’s expanding into Europe, driving more robotics, a connected warehouse offering which we are bringing to customers and having a broader play, are the key technology levers for that business.”
Darius Adamczyk, CEO and Chairman at Honeywell, discusses how the company is using innovation and technology to drive growth in an interview on Bloomberg:
Honeywell Digital Makes Us a More Contemporary Digital Company
As we always said my number one priority as CEO was to drive organic growth, but we never say we’re going to give up on our margin expansion. We do it through a combination, both commercial levers, which is managing our mix, and always introducing new products, which bring more value to customers. But also not forgetting our roots, which is driving productivity. With the number of ERPs we have and the kind of complexity we have in our supply chain, Honeywell Digital, which is going to make us a much more contemporary digital company, we have plenty of levers for productivity as well.
Honeywell Digital really has three primary elements. First is data governance, which is standard across all our various businesses. We’ve done over 80 acquisitions in the last 15 years so we have a lot of disparity. Then there are common processes, which is we want to run our businesses the same way in a very consistent manner. We have some pockets of excellence, but those have some inconsistency. Finally, all integrated into a common IT platform. Just to give an example, we had well over 1,500 different software applications before we started. We had over 150 ERP systems. It’s just very difficult to run a company efficiently and enable us to really make good data-based decisions. Honeywell digital is really all about enabling that.
Anything We Do In Honeywell, Innovation is Always the Key
Warehouse automation, which we started in 2016 with our Intelligrated acquisition. It’s been just a terrific business growing strong double-digit. We also made another acquisition called Transnorm which added to that technology in Europe in Q4 last year. We were planning on growing it organically, but also we’re looking to enhance our offerings, so we’re looking for inorganic opportunities as well. Innovation is the key. Anything we do in Honeywell, innovation is always the key. Whether it’s expanding into Europe, driving more robotics, a connected warehouse offering which we are bringing to customers and having a broader play, are the key technology levers for that business.
Amazon is a big customer but we have a lot of big customers. I wouldn’t say it’s a predominant customer in that business. Just about everybody is looking into ecommerce because with a lot today’s retail you really have basically two options. One option is to enhance the in-store experience which a lot of retailers are doing. The other one is to drive ecommerce. We think that this trend is going to continue. Although I would say it’s in the middle innings in the US, it’s just beginning in Europe. We think we have a huge opportunity in Europe, India, and some of the other overseas markets.
We have a very active venture capital fund and we’ve made about six investments in the last six months which is augmenting our technology plays. So although we haven’t made any big acquisitions, other than Transnorm in Q4, we are continuing to invest through our venture fund and we’re deploying capital that way. It’s been a terrific story for us in 3D printing for instance, particularly for our aerospace business. For a lot of the slow-moving parts we’re trying to basically get a new part certified and three printing per day. That’s our objective. Our aerospace businesses have made tremendous progress in achieving that and it’s really helping both for our inventory and on-time delivery for a lot of our aftermarket customers.
It’s Important For Teachers To Be More Effective in STEM Education
Regarding the workforce, education is the key and particularly STEM education. Honeywell is a big believer in that. Not only do we develop a lot of our young people that we bring into the company but we also spend a lot of money and time on developing teachers. It’s important for teachers to be more effective in STEM education. It’s something that we’re going to be supporting going forward even on a broader scale because that’s the way to differentiate our company.
We’re always going to be differentiated by technology and we want to bring the brightest and the best. We want to make sure that it’s a competitive issue, not just here in the US, but everywhere we hire people, and we hire people just about everywhere. We have engineers in the US, China, India, everywhere around the globe. I would say lately we’ve actually been very much on the hiring string. When you grow 8% that creates a lot of opportunities to hire a lot of people particularly in the area of technology and engineering and software.
At Honeywell Innovation is Always the Key, Says CEO
“Imagine if IT had one tool to fix anything,” says the Chief Creatologist at Dell Technologies Joe Batista. “That’s nirvana. That’s not reality, because I have tool fatigue. I need to get to that simplicity. That’s public enemy number one for us. Now, today, with the influx of cash, the level of innovation cycle time and how the industry’s become more fragmented with lots of products, the complexity has increased exponentially. And the velocity around that complexity is even more accelerated. It hasn’t gotten easier, it’s gotten more difficult.”
Joe Batista, Chief Creatologist at Dell Technologies, discusses the challenges companies face with the exponential pace of changes in technology and innovation in an interview with theCube at WTGtransform 2019:
Helping IT Re-Image the Business
Literally, it (Joe’s ‘Creatologist’ job) sits at the nexus of business and technology. My job, simply, is to help IT re-image the business because now every company’s a technology company. So what does that look like? I’m involved in all sorts of really cool problems, opportunities, that customers are facing by re-imaging IT.
I’ve been around for a long time, and, in the old days, we had swim lanes. You thought about certain vendors, they were in swim lanes. Now, today, with the influx of cash, the level of innovation cycle time and how the industry’s become more fragmented with lots of products, the complexity has increased exponentially. And the velocity around that complexity is even more accelerated. It hasn’t gotten easier, it’s gotten more difficult.
You Have To Rethink the Logic
There’s a couple of thoughts (regarding keeping up with the competition as things constantly change). You have got to look at these vectors that impact a trajectory of the thinking. I love the Peter Drucker quote: If you’re using yesterday’s logic, you’re probably going to get in trouble. You have to rethink the logic, and the example I give was the high jumper and how we did high jumping before and after 1968. As in the Fosbury Flop. So the question becomes what are those vectors?
At Dell Technologies, we have a huge portfolio of technology. But how do you think about the parameter about how those things change over a depreciation cycle? During a conference talk I got a lot of post questions afterward and a lot of engagement regarding this, so it seemed to resonate with the field. The thing that they liked the most was the business conversation of IT. They’re like, we don’t do that enough.
Imagine If IT Had One Tool To Fix Anything
Imagine if IT had one tool to fix anything. That’s nirvana. That’s not reality, because I have tool fatigue. I need to get to that simplicity. It’s Glass’s Law. Every 25% increase in function is 100% increase in complexity. That’s public enemy number one for us.
I was absolutely amazed when I did my due diligence (before joining Dell) about all the innovation that happens in this company. Phenomenal. Not only about the hardware but the software. I think, actually, Jeff (Clarke) said it best. I think we have more software engineers now than we have hardware engineers. So the pivots there, we’re pivoting our talent to the software. But it’s the innovation that’s in this company. I think customers are amazed at that innovation.
The supercharger on it is, how does the innovation apply to the business mechanics of the company, and what value do you extract from that? And that’s where the whole language and conversation usually happens with us. I will tell you, though, I’m really excited that Dell Technologies is doubling down on business outcomes. They’re really trying to change the culture in helping customers understand what the technology means.
Imagine If IT Had One Tool To Fix Anything – Joe Batista, Chief Creatologist at Dell Technologies
PagerDuty began trading on the New York Stock Exchange for the first time this morning and is now trading at more than 60% above their IPO price of $24. That gives the company a market capitalization of more than $2.7 billion. PagerDuty offers a SAAS platform that monitors IT performance. The company had sales of $118 million for its last fiscal year, up close to 50% over the previous year.
The company uses machine learning to inform companies in real-time about technical issues. “Our belief is that machine learning and data should be used in the service of making people better, helping people do their jobs more effectively, and delivering those great brand experiences every time,” says PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada. “PagerDuty is really about making sure that our users understand that this could be a good thing, being woken up in the middle of the night if it’s for the right problem. It’s a way that can help you deliver a much better experience for your customers.”
It’s Gotten Harder for Human’s to Manage the Entire IT Ecosystem
If you think about the world today, it’s an always-on world. We as consumers expect every experience to be perfect. Every time you wake up in the morning, you order your coffee online, you check Slack to communicate with your team, and maybe you take a Lyft into work. Sitting behind all of that is a lot of complexity, many digital and infrastructure based platforms, that don’t always work together the way you’d expect them to. As that complexity has proliferated over the years and because developers can deploy what they like and can use the tools that they want it’s gotten harder for human beings to really manage the entire ecosystem even as your demands increase.
You want it perfect, you want it right now and you want it the way you’d like it to be. PagerDuty is the platform that brings the right problem to the right person at the right time. We use machine learning, sitting on ten years of data, data on humans behavior and data on all these signals there that are happening through the system, and it really helps the developers that sit behind these great experiences to deliver the right experience all the time.
Machine Learning Should Be Used to Deliver Great Brand Experiences
Going public is the right time for us right now because there’s an opportunity for us to deliver the power of our platform to users all over the world. We are a small company and we weren’t as well-known as we could be and this is a great opportunity to extend our brand and help developers and employees across teams and IT security and customer support to deliver better experiences for their end customers all the time.
At PagerDuty we take customer trust and user trust very seriously. We publish our data policy and we will not use data in a way other than what we describe online. We care deeply about the relationship between our users in our platform. Our belief is that machine learning and data should be used in the service of making people better, helping people do their jobs more effectively, and delivering those great brand experiences every time. PagerDuty is really about making sure that our users understand that this could be a good thing, being woken up in the middle of the night if it’s for the right problem. It’s a way that can help you deliver a much better experience for your customers.
“We recognize that a migration of any size can be a challenging project, so today we’re happy to announce the first part of a new resource to help our customers as they migrate,” said Peter-Mark Verwoerd,a Solutions Architect at Google who previously worked for Amazon Web Services. “This is a guide for customers who are looking to move to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and are coming from non-cloud environments.”
The guide focuses on the basics of running IT — Compute, Networking, Storage, and Management. “We’ve tried to write this from the point of view of someone with minimal cloud experience, so we hope you find this guide a useful starting point,” said Verwoerd.
Grab, a Singapore based Uber type service, is so popular that if their IT infrastructure didn’t remain stable during peak usage transportation would literally ground to a halt. Grab is the leading ride sharing service in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines.
“Grab is the leading ride sharing service in Southeast Asia,” says Ditesh Kumar, Director of Engineering at Grab. “We do 1.5 million bookings (a day). If we are not running basically transportation comes to a standstill.”
Kumar says that Grab has the biggest land fleet in Southeast Asia and that they are very concerned about uptime both for their passengers and their drivers, who he says depend on them for their livelihoods.
“With this comes two challenges, because of the tremendous amount of demand we need to scale, but because so many people depend on us, we need to stay stable.”
Scale and Stability are Two Opposing Forces
Kumar notes the difficulties of keeping your IT infrastructure stable while simultaneously scaling platform usage. “You can scale easily if you don’t have to be stable, and you can be very stable if you don’t have to scale.”
He says that the answer to this huge problem, after a lot of reflection, is addressing their infrastructure fundamentals.
“If we can make sure that our infrastructure is built not just for the needs of today, but also meets the needs of the future, it completely changes the types of conversations we have,” says Kumar.
That’s why Grab decided on the AWS infrastructure from the start. All of the AWS components he says are built to allow infinite scaling and are also extremely reliable.
Grab started out using a basic AWS setup but as they expanded they added the full gamut of AWS services in order to support their scaling needs. “We needed to start thinking about caching layers so we started using Amazon ElastiCache,” said Kumar.
They also started using Amazon Redshift, which is s petabyte-scale data warehouse service based in the cloud.
“It’s huge, it’s massive,” exclaimed Kumar. “Everybody in the company uses it. It’s not just the engineers, the product guys, the marketing team and the ATM team all use it.”
Real-Time Computation Requires Real-Time Data Streams
“In addition to that, we are doing real-time computation, and in order to do real-time demand and supply matching we need to have real-time data streams,” says Kumar.
“The end result is that our drivers will be told the demand is at this place right now, because with this high demand the drivers will be paid more.”
Building Predictive Models
Moving forward the company wants to build predictive models to make their service even more efficient for both passengers and drivers.
“In two hours time this area will have high demand and if you want to take advantage of that move to this area,” explains Kumar. “The way we can do that is by taking into account multiple factors, building data models around it and using the infrastructure to compute those models and come up with an actionable item.”
Why Grab is on AWS
Their are many benefits to being on the cloud,” says Kumar. “Such as not having to deal with physical issues, going down to a data center at 3am to the change a failed hard disk or deal with a server that is overheating because a fan has stopped rotating.”
He noted how companies of his size in the past had to have dedicated operational teams to deal with these sorts of issues. He sees little value in that for the organization and is not a great use for an engineering team. Grab gives every engineer an AWS account to run “full-blown experiments in their sub account” to look for potential problems.
“They would find things that might be a problem 3 months from now or six months from now, and giving engineers that ability is unparalleled,” he says. “I estimate that we have saved 30-40% of our resourcing and manpower that then went to serving our core focus, and our core focus is about serving our customers.”
He says this allowed our team to move significantly faster. “In the startup environment that is make-or-break!”
Georgia’s Department of Community Supervision has gone virtual via Google Apps and Chromebooks. With staff increases and with significant amounts of time outside of their offices, The State of Georgia was looking for a more economical and cost-efficient solution to getting things done in their offender supervision programs. They made the decision to go 100 percent virtual office and 100 percent Google.
“We decided to try something that had never been done in Georgia state government history: eliminate the majority of our offices entirely and allow hundreds of our 2,100 staff members to work remotely instead,” said Phil Sellers, Director, Information Technology Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles, writing in the Google for Work Blog. “Our existing desktop computers and office applications didn’t have the features to support remote workers, so we started looking into alternatives. I was familiar with Google’s cost-cutting, collaborative and mobile-friendly features, so my team led the switch to Google Apps for Work and Google Chromebooks.”
He says that they have saved literally millions of dollars by not paying for expensive hardware and enterprise licensing contracts, not to mention the increased productivity of employees who can now work anywhere, anytime. “We no longer have dedicated IT services for routine storage and email support, and our small IT staff of 35 doesn’t need to roll out patches and antivirus software. If an officer closes her Chromebook or loses power, she doesn’t have to worry about trying to recover lost data. If we need to replace a device, it’s inexpensive and fast to get someone back up and running.”
Many government agencies and large corporations have been leery of cloud solutions because of possible security breaches, which could include crucial data exposures. Georgia’s Department of Community Supervision believes the opposite is true. “Officers used to store their data on laptops, so if their device was lost or stolen, they’d lose sensitive information about parolees and probationers,” said Sellers. “With Chromebooks, we store everything in the cloud and can easily wipe and replace a device if needed. Officers use a 2-step authentication to enter our systems, which adds another layer of security.”
The agency is often field-based away from the office, so using Chromebooks and Android phones lets their officers work wherever they are and collaborate with colleagues via Google Docs, Google Drive and Google Hangouts. “Since we’ve adopted the policy, officers are more productive, and sick leave and employee turnover have decreased,” added Sellers.
Google is pushing the concept of Chromebooks, Google Drive Apps and Android as one enterprise level platform for businesses to operate. They are competing with established players such as Microsoft, Salesforce and to some extent Amazon. They are working to distinguish the Google approach by tying in their Android OS and phones, Chromebook tablet, the Google Cloud Platform and their many office related apps and chat tools so that businesses have a much less expensive alternative than the competitors.
Google recently touted how its platform is the most secure. “We’re talking about stuff that you’ve seen in “Mission Impossible”– biometrics, lasers, vehicle barriers, bollards. All of this is custom-built, also, to make the data center more secure,” said Neal Mueller, Security and Networking lead for Google Cloud.
Google recently conducted a roundtable of in-house experts discussing how Google uniquely provides a secure platform for businesses to store their data online. Google experts tell the story of how Google invented innovative technology allowing them to keep their customers information and data safe from digital intruders.
“Information security has become such a hot topic,” stated Eran Feigenbaum, Director of Security for Google Apps. “With the increase in cybercrime, the trends in privacy, the changes in regulations, it’s something that businesses can’t ignore. Enterprises all over the world are concerned about security.”
Companies around the world are rapidly moving toward cloud computing spurred on by the success of Amazon’s AWS platform. Google has been working hard to catch up especially in regards to large enterprise companies that require an extreme level of security.
“The move of businesses to cloud computing has really increased,” said Feigenbaum. “Companies see the benefits of lower cost, but also the ability to innovate faster for users to collaborate. But one of the big areas of hesitation is security, right? Companies are not comfortable putting their own data into the cloud.”
Should Companies be Concerned About Cloud Security?
“I think we’re seeing a real sea change right now with respect to people understanding that the cloud is more secure than on any on-premise solution,” says Suzanne Frey, Director of Security, Privacy, and Trust at Google. “If you just think about it, mathematically, you’ve
got all these different on-premise solutions and individual teams trying to do the right thing.”
Frey says that Google is extremely focused on putting their best talent and expertise on making sure that the Google Cloud solution is secure. “If you take a look at our customer base, we have some of the world’s largest banks. We have some of the most stringent government customers. We’re FedRAMP certified here in the US, and the fact that we can solve for security for all of those customers is a great testimony to our capabilities,” she adds.
She sees Google as different than other cloud providers. “In addition, we solve for something special,” said Frey. “In talking to our customers, it’s our ability to innovate and to bring new ideas to bear that help enable them to be competitive, productive, and truly novel, and focus on the things that matter to them. That’s part of our really special secret sauce.”
Frey adds, “I often say to people, at Google, security comes in two forms, it’s both traditional cybersecurity, but it’s also security against technological stagnation.
Innovation Vs. Security
Can a cloud provider be too secure at the expense of innovation? “Actually, I like the observation about being too focused on security to the exclusion of innovation,” says Adrian Ludwig, Director of Android Security, in reply to Frey’s observation. “I hadn’t seen that phrased that way. But I think one of the changes that we’ve seen in the mobile space over the last few years is companies have focused first and foremost on innovation–Android being a great example of that– but we’ve tied it to a security model that is how people actually consume applications and services.”
“So we thought about the web and sandboxing model that was used on the web, and we incorporated that in the way we built application sandboxing,” Ludwid added. “I think a consequence of that is cloud services are becoming more and more important. Most applications that are built for Android, or that are built for mobile, regardless of your mobile platform, are really cloud-based. So I think those two are tied together, because both of them, we’re thinking about innovation first and foremost, and the security has sort
of unlocked that innovation.”
The Cloud Has Security Advantages
“We have a complex set of systems that we’re dealing with today and they get more and more complex over time,” said Tim Willis, Technical Manager of Chrome Security. “We also have adversaries with increasing levels of sophistication. So you’ve got that on one side and on the other side, we’ve got IT managers having to defend their networks. The problem with defense is you need to defend everything incredibly well. Attackers only need to find one hole into your network.”
Willis adds, “I think that’s where an advantage of moving to the cloud is that you have dedicated teams with robust experience. Some of the people who I work with wrote my textbooks in university and it’s one of those things that I get to work with these experts and that’s all they do. They focus on security, and that’s one of the huge benefits, in my point of view, of moving to the cloud.”
Safety of the Data that’s Not at Google
Do cloud providers have a responsibility for data safety when the data leaves the cloud?
“Safe Browsing would be a good example of something that we can do at very, very large scale, where we actually believe that the right approach is make the entire internet safer.,” says Stephan Somogyi, a Product Manager in Google’s Security and Privacy Engineering Team. “So we build systems that hunt around and find malware and find phishing and then we go and report this.
“An individual consumer can benefit from this, because their web browser will let them know,” adds Somogyi. “In a cloud environment, enterprises can take advantage of this data as well and keep themselves protected. We take this approach through a number of different areas– certificate transparency being another example– where we’re taking a look at the internet as a whole and finding ways to keep it safe at scale.”
Google Cloud Security Innovations Moving the Needle
“For the longest time, we have been talking about sort of two-factor authentication is critically important for most organizations to implement,” said Frey. “Many customers use Google Authenticator and other apps like that to generate a one-time passcode, and those are great. They’re certainly better than nothing, right? However, a hardware-based security key is just quantum leaps ahead in terms of they’re not hackable and they really do protect our customers from phishing in a way that, basically, the one-time passwords do not.”
“One of those (not so glamorous) things is encryption for me,” said Willis. “It may not seem incredibly innovative, but we’re working really hard to make sure that all of our traffic is encrypted at rest and at transit. One example where we’re being open with that is our HTTPS Transparency Report. Now, you can go to that site and you can see our progress towards our goal of 100% encryption in transit through all of our products.”
“Again, another example would be working with TLS 1.3.,” added Willis. “That’s the next generation of Transport Layer Security. Now, it may not sound glamorous, but we’re not only
helping to implement that, we’re helping author the next version. That shows that we’re in the mix and we know what technologies are around the corner.”
Willis explained that a practical application of that would be Progressive Web Apps. “These are low friction web applications, which are designed to help increase engagement and have an app-like experience for customers and businesses,” he said. “We’ve seen studies how that increases engagement, and it’s fantastic, it’s easy across the board.”
“Why am I talking about it?” asks Willis. “TLS is actually a hard requirement for those apps. So it’s one of these things where not only are we innovating, we’re making sure that security is baked in from the get-go. I think that’s one huge advantage of Google.”
“There’s a couple of elements about that that are interesting to me,” said Ludwig. “One of them is it’s not so much that the security itself is innovative, it’s about using an innovative product to make security available.”
Ludwig says that what they did early on with Android is thinking about the platform stack. “We were like, OK, you need to have a verified boot, and you need to have encryption, and you need to have sandboxing,” he said. “Those are all sort of, I think at this point, almost commodities for an operating system. But one of the things that Google brought to bear was security services. It’s going to be a cloud-connected device and we’re going to make all of those services available, by default, on all of the devices.”
“We started thinking about, how do you bind services into the operating system itself? We added things like SafetyNet and Verify Apps, where there are effectively hooks in the operating system where we can make sure that we’re adding security dynamically over time.
And so we can innovate in security even more quickly than we can innovate in the operating system itself,” added Ludwig.
Interestingly, Ludwig says that most people don’t even realize this about the Google Cloud. “But that’s OK, because they’re safer and they’re happier as a result of it.”
Neal Mueller, Security and Networking lead for Google Cloud, recently was interviewed about security and other important aspects of using the Google Cloud Platform to host websites, online retailers and other data intensive applications.
Should I move our online applications to the cloud and is it secure?
We get that question less and less these days. There are big advantages to moving to the cloud. You get to have all of the scale that you want immediately when you want it. You don’t pay for it when you don’t use it. And you don’t have to worry about the maintenance of the underlying machines. The advantages are so big, in fact, that we seldom get the question of, should I move to the cloud? More often, the question that we get is, how can I move to the cloud safely?
Where does Google’s responsibility for security begin?
It’s simple. Google’s responsibility is to control the underlying infrastructure. Your responsibility is to secure the data on top.
Why use Google as a cloud provider?
One of the reasons that we talk about a lot is that Google is the right cloud provider for you because we’ve got over 500 security engineers. These are 500 people that are foremost in their fields. They’ve been in peer-reviewed journals, they’re experts at security.
Let me give you an example of just one team within the 500. It’s called Project Zero. These are forward-facing engineers whose job it is to discover 0-Days, that is, new vulnerabilities, never before seen or disclosed. They discovered Heartbleed, which affects anybody with a browser. It’s a TLS vulnerability. They discovered rowhammer, which affects anybody that has a computer with RAM and they discovered 15 of the last 21 KVM vulnerabilities, which is really important to Google because we use KVM as our chosen hypervisor technology. All of these vulnerabilities, as soon as we discover them, we immediately disclose them so that the world is a safer place thanks to the work of Project Zero.
Can you tell us more about this?
Let’s talk about the word provenance. It’s a word in English that means come from. It’s a fundamental tenet of how we think of secure systems. We don’t just buy hardware that’s off the shelf. We return to first principles, figure out what functionality we need from the hardware and which ones we don’t, because functionality that’s included in the hardware off the shelf might introduce vulnerabilities that we don’t want. This leads us in many cases to custom-build secure systems. So we have custom-built ASICs, custom-built servers, custom-built racks, custom-built storage arrays inside custom-built data centers. All of this leads to a much more secure data center.
Infrastructure security, doesn’t that go beyond hardware?
Sure. It extends to the people inside that data center, too. These are full-time, badged Googlers that have submitted to a background check and have an array of physical security to make their job easier. We’re talking about stuff that you’ve seen in “Mission Impossible”– biometrics, lasers, vehicle barriers, bollards. All of this is custom-built, also, to make the data center more secure.
So is this unique to just Google?
Yeah, it’s unique to Google, but not for long. Part of being Google is giving back to your community. So as part of the Open Compute Project, just last week with Facebook, we released our design for a 48-volt rack. This is a very high-density, highly efficient, highly green rack. And although Google is the only one that can build it, now that everybody has the designs, everybody can build data centers as efficient.
What other cool stuff is Google Cloud doing?
What’s next? So with 500 security engineers on staff, there’s a lot that’s up next. But let me tell you about just two things that spring to mind. The first one is BeyondCorp. Here, we have separated ourself from the traditional enterprise security model. Traditional enterprise security has a hard firewall to guard the perimeter. However, we’ve seen what happens with recent breaches– what happens when an adversary gets inside that perimeter. He has relatively unfettered access to the resources inside the internet. What Google does is device authentication which allows our applications to be accessible by the internet, but be just as secure as if they were only accessible by the intranet. We believe that this makes our public cloud more secure.
What’s the second initiative?
On Google Cloud Platform, data at rest is encrypted by default. This is a real differentiator for us. We believe it’s good practice and good business. We’ve seen what happens when adversaries get a hold of breached PII and we think that encryption by default is a good preventative measure against that.
“We’ve long dreamed of talking computers,” noted Barry Briggs, consultant and former CTO for Microsoft, where he helped lead the company’s transition to the cloud and is generally known as a pioneer in the computing industry. What Briggs is referring to is advent of talking devices and conversational interfaces which are just now beginning to reshape how we use computers, and more importantly how we interact with data.
Formerly, according to Briggs, talking computers (such as ELIZA) were more or less a trick. “After a time, because of the program’s simplicity, the novelty wears off,” he said.
However, things are advancing so fast that conversational Star Trek style computer and device interaction is foreshadowing a transformative societal shift. Briggs said in January 2014, “The limitations are really gone. We have built software for decades now thinking about what are the limitations that the hardware or the amount of storage for the network place upon us. Those limitations don’t exist anymore.”
“Because of the nearly limitless computing and storage capacity in the cloud, and because of great advances in AI, machine learning, speech recognition, and data storage and analytics, Weizenbaum’s primitive ELIZA program has evolved into something far more magical and useful,” says Briggs. “Perhaps, even, we’re at the advent of the next big shift in computing, fueled by artificial intelligence and built around a behavior that is most natural to humans: conversations.”
Briggs sees bots at the advent of this conversational shift. “Want a pizza? Just ask Domino’s chatbot. Or PizzaHut’s chatbot. Need to get somewhere? Ask Uber.”
He wonders, “Can bots become the new UI?”
“For business, the transformation of conversational computing is just beginning. As bots are connected to corporate databases, for example, they’ll simplify tasks from onsite repairs to scheduling meetings into simple conversational actions like, “What parts do I need to fix this?” or “What time is Customer X available next Monday?”
Eventually, by taking advantage of the massive data storage and mining capabilities available in the cloud, bots will get to know you, providing intelligent suggestions like, “While you’re on site with the customer, I’d suggest examining the engine gearbox, I’m seeing some early failures in other installs,” and learning from previous experiences: “Did the fix I suggested last time help?”
We’ve come a long way from Weizenbaum’s ELIZA. What started as a bit of sleight-of-hand programming has turned into an entirely new, intuitive and efficient way of interacting with computers. Conversational bots built on cloud-based artificial intelligence enable new frontiers in customer intimacy, simplify access to information, and help businesses and consumers make more informed decisions – quicker.”
BMC is sharing results from a survey of fortune 1000 company IT managers, finding that only five percent of those polled have fully implemented digital services and mobile technologies, though sixty-three percent are currently working on incorporating them.
According to the firm, the findings confirm that digital transformation is a top priority for increasing productivity as well as improving customer satisfaction and lowing costs. At the same time, however, the companies are having a hard time securing the resources they need to maintain current systems and develop new ones.
“The transformation to digital services is a top priority for every CEO and public sector leader I meet,” said BMC CEO Bob Beauchamp. “Leaders are striving to deliver better user experiences while also searching for new revenue channels and product opportunities. If this transformation isn’t effectively managed, companies run the risk of security breaches, operational shutdowns, wasted investments, and significant delays in changing the way they do business in the digital economy.”
Eighty-nine percent of respondents said becoming a digital enterprise will help their company increase employee productivity. Seventy-seven percent said it will increase customer satisfaction, and sixty-eight percent said it will lower costs, increasing profitability.
Sixty-four percent said the challenge or “roadblock” they most experience is not having enough resources to maintain current systems and develop or incorporate new digital services.
“Effective management, delivery and support of today’s unpredictable, ever-changing digital business solutions is critical for success and innovation, but it strains traditional data center management strategies and tools to the breaking point,” said Mary Johnston Turner, research vice president, Enterprise Systems Management Software at IDC. “BMC’s Digital Enterprise Management initiative updates and streamlines many of its product offerings with the goal of enabling much stronger cross-product orchestration and analytics in order to meet the dynamic, real-time needs of today’s digital enterprise transformation agendas.”
Here’s a slideshow looking more closely at the findings:
Biscom shared some results of a new IT Survey finding that although regulated industries say security is a high concern, many are still using solutions that are inadequate for protecting their data.
The survey compared attitudes and behaviors related to enterprise security across 13 industries including healthcare, financial services, retail, computer hardware, software, and manufacturing. Security concerns have only gotten higher across those mentioned.
Tools and protocols vary greatly across industries, but all sectors see security as critical, and “need it to be core features of their file synchronization products” the survey finds.
“Our survey confirmed what we were already starting to see: that security will be the key focus in all areas of business for 2015,” said Biscom CEO Bill Ho. “The data breaches within the past year have shown us that all businesses are increasingly at risk and should be actively assessing tools and processes which can help reduce their exposure.”
70% of respondents in the survey said security was the top feature they looked for in file transfer. While 60% said they use SFT to transfer files at work, 86% said they use email. 51% said they still use FTP. 72% name security as “critical” for sync and share services like Google Drive and Dropbox.
According to Biscom, the healthcare industry is one of the most polarizing in terms of security as the industry is extremely concerned about security, but it’s the least likely to use the most secure methods for storing, syncing, and sharing data.
The financial services industry is the most secure, based on the survey’s findings.
Cisco announced that it intends to acquire Neohapsis, a company which offers network, cloud, and app security, as well as IT risk and compliance services.
Cisco says it will use the acquisition to help customers build security capabilities and overcome operational and technical vulnerabilities, as well as “achieve a comprehensive view of their risks, take advantage of new business models, and define structured approaches for better protection.”
As our clients and friends in the industry know, Neohapsis has been a key player in the security, risk and compliance market. Today, we are excited to announce plans to join Cisco, who we believe will be the perfect strategic match for us, given our services and research mission.
We share with Cisco a global enterprise customer base, and a commitment to help our customers address their most challenging threats, especially in the rapidly evolving mobile and cloud arenas. Because of Neohapsis’ and Cisco’s shared focus on the Internet of Everything, the opportunity to do groundbreaking work together is enormous. Together, what we bring to enterprise customers, IoT device manufacturers, and associated service providers will be unique in the market.
“Today, businesses are looking at security in a strategic, comprehensive way to protect mission critical processes and assets,” said Hilton Romanski, who leads corporate development at Cisco. “There has never been a greater need to understand the impact that security threats can have on a company’s bottom line. For these reasons, experienced security advice is now among the table stakes required to assess and address the threat landscape that faces enterprises today. The skills and capabilities companies need to maintain a strong security posture, keep pace with rapidly evolving threats and take full advantage of new technologies that can protect their businesses are rare and difficult to retain. The right advisory service can change all of that.”
The Chicago-based Neohapsis team will join Cisco’s Security Services organization led by SVP and GM Bryan Palma. Cisco expects the deal to close in the second quarter of fiscal year 2015. Terms weren’t disclosed.
Harvey Nash recently released its 2014 CIO survey of over 3,200 chief information officers and technology leaders from across over thirty countries, with a combined tech spend of over $160 billion. It found that investment in new technology is growing at a faster rate than at any time since 2006. It also found, however, that a lack of digital skills risk holding businesses back.
Almost two thirds of companies surveyed said they lack access to the right technology talent, and that’s impeding their digital strategies. Still, tech budgets are growing, it finds, as CEOs are increasingly favoring investing for growth over cost reduction and efficiencies.
46% of CIOs and tech leaders experienced budget growth over the previous twelve months, which is up from 42% last year. That’s the highest level of budget growth since 2006, when it was 47%.
“Almost two-thirds of CEOs (63 per cent) now prioritise projects that generate cash (such as digital marketing, customer oriented systems and innovation led projects) over projects designed to deliver cost savings or improve operational performance,” Harvey Nash says in a report on the survey’s findings. “As business confidence improves, CEOs are shifting their attention away from cost saving (their top survey priority for five years between 2009 and 2013) to using technology to improve the effectiveness of their operations (top priority in 2014).”
It also found that 7% of organizations are now employing “Chief Digital Officers,” which is a position that didn’t actually exist until recently. It’s more like 16% for companies with technology budgets of $100 million and over.
Interestingly, CIOs are now less likely, the report says, to have a direct role in shaping the company’s digital strategy. 50% play an active role. That’s down from 56% last year.
“For the first time since the recession, the skills shortage is once again appearing as a major management concern,” the report says. “In Asia, for example, the problem is particularly acute. Retaining, developing and acquiring the skills to drive the growth program are now major priorities for leaders all over the world.”
60% of tech leaders are experiencing a skills shortage within their teams, which is preventing them from keeping up with competitors. That’s a significant rise form last year when it was only 45%. The concern is the highest in Asia, but it over 50% in all regions polled.
Complicating things even further, retention of talent is a rising concern with 90% of CIOs and tech leaders concerned about retaining their best people.
Marketing Charts looks at the marketing angle from the survey, visualizing the IT relationship with other business functions including operations, finance, sales, marketing, legal/compliance, and HR.
According to research from Gartner released in March, as many as 70% of CIOs intend to change their technology and sourcing relationships in the next two to three years.
Gartner has come up with five program types to help program managers categorize programs and plan for them accordingly. Correct categorization, it says, is key to IT program management.
Analysts from the firm will discuss how to use this framework at its Program and Portfolio Management & IT Governance Summits June 2-4 in National Harbor, Maryland and June 9-10 in London.
The five program types are: Bottom-up, Change-oriented, Policy-driven, Outcome-driven, and Transformational.
The ability to categorize IT programs and assign them to appropriate tactics, skills and resources, Gartner says, is “critical to the generation of positive outcomes.”
“The adage ‘the right tool for the right job’ is every bit as appropriate to IT programs as it is to carpentry or plumbing,” said Michael Hanford, research vice president at Gartner. “Understanding different program types, the characteristics, requirements and benefits involved, and how they should be applied to meet different organizational, structural or governance needs is too often neglected in the early stages of planning.”
Bottom-up is for when multiple projects are recognized after they’ve started as part of a larger set of problems, and as sharing dependencies. These are put together into one program so they can be better controlled while reducing redundancy.
Change oriented programs are described as those that are triggered by a high-level need for big change, and normally include multiple initiatives.
Policy-driven is for those unique to government and the public, including social, charitable, and nongovernmental organizations. These will usually enable provision of a law, regulation or defined service, and continue until no longer funded or outright canceled.
Outcome-driven is for programs “driven by a concept of, or a vision for, a product, service or generally identified set of results, or to address a specific need.”
Finally, Transformational is for programs that “represent an effort that transcends the organization’s current vision and its recent history and direction.”
Naturally, Gartner has a report going into all of this in much more depth, though it’s about $200.
IBM announced that it has signed a seven-year deal with NiSource to continue providing IT services, including a hybrid cloud computing environment. The deal is for $600 million.
IBM says the deal will help it accelerate business innovation, and support NiSource’s customer service, security and business app performance.
“NiSource is a powerful example of how companies today are turning to the cloud as a competitive lever for their business,” said Philip Guido, GM of IBM Global Technology Services, North America. “Embracing the cloud not only provides a better way to integrate hybrid IT systems, it enables companies to forge new pathways to innovation and improve services by applying technologies such as analytics across their enterprise,” he said.
“Our longtime partnership with IBM has been built on a shared commitment to innovation, performance and continuous improvement,” added Violet Sistovaris, SVP and CIO at NiSource. “This new agreement builds on our existing partnership and keeps us on a trajectory to further leverage IBM’s extensive capabilities, new delivery models and advanced technologies to deliver efficient, reliable service to our customers.”
Under the terms, IBM will help NiSource implement a hybrid IT model using its SoftLayer solution and a private secure cloud. This will help NiSource’s customer service performance.
NiSource will have the ability to collaborate with IBM’s Client Center for Advanced Analytics.
The two companies have worked together for about nine years. The new seven-year deal is similar to their previous deal in terms of price.
As the computer industry deals with the transition to a mobile majority, IT spending is still on-pace to grow significantly in 2014. Market research firm Gartner this week issued a new report predicting that IT revenue will grow 3.2% in 2014, hitting a massive $3.8 trillion worldwide.
This growth is coming despite the recent slowdown seen in traditional PC markets. Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets are making up the difference, but mature mobile markets such as the U.S. are already showing signs of saturation as growth prospects for the segment turn toward emerging markets such as China.
Overall the market for tech devices is set to hit $689 billion this year, up 4.4% from device revenue in 2013. However, the shift in the market toward low-end devices and emerging markets is driving down average sales prices for mobile devices.
“Globally, businesses are shaking off their malaise and returning to spending on IT to support the growth of their business,” said Richard Gordon, managing VP at Gartner. “Consumers will be purchasing many new devices in 2014; however, there is a greater substitution toward lower cost and more basic devices than we have seen in prior years.”
Much of the IT growth predicted for 2014 will come from the enterprise software and services segment. Traditional PC manufacturers have already been seen reorganizing their businesses to take advantage of this spending shift.
Gartner predicts that enterprise software revenue is set to grow nearly 7% to $320 billion while IT services spending will rise 4.6% to $964 billion. The markets for these products are expected to see continued growth in the coming years as businesses invest more heavily in online infrastructure.
“The ‘Nexus of Forces’ (the convergence of social, mobile, cloud and information) continues to drive growth across key major software markets, such as CRM, database management systems (DBMSs), data integration tools and data quality tools,” said Gordon. “In fact, organizational adoption of data management technologies to support the Nexus will cause spending on DBMSs to surpass operating systems, making the former the largest enterprise software market in 2014.”
As many as 70% of CIOs intend to change their technology and sourcing relationships in the next two to three years, according to new survey results from Gartner.
A variety of reasons were cited by CIOs from around the world. Still, there is a common theme among these reasons, and it’s basically about clients’ current providers not being able to adapt to change.
“The picture is clear for service providers as clients are struggling to keep up with change,” said Gartner managing vice president Eric Rocco. “They are strongly considering changing the providers they work with as part of responding to this change. Market share will shift to service providers able to help clients respond to the business and IT opportunities and challenges that are overwhelming more than half of organizations today. Service providers need to convert this picture into an opportunity rather than a threat.”
“Digital business is an unstoppable and irresistible catalyst for change — change that will affect the fundamental foundations and baseline assumptions of every business,” he added. “The digital business revolution is underpinned and enabled by the macro technology forces of cloud, social, analytics, mobility and the Internet of Things. Not every business fundamental will need to change to the same degree, nor will every technology driver have a role to play in every business scenario; however, businesses that decide to ‘wait and see’ are likely to become irrelevant.”
The firm projects the IT Services market to grow 4.6% this year, but notes that the entire industry won’t grow uniformly. Hardware support, for example, isn’t expected to grow as much as say, cloud-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and business process as a service (BPaaS), which are the two fastest-growing segments. This year, these two are projected to grow by 44.9% and 12.4% respectively.
The report points out that cloud-based services are cannibalizing more traditional models, but the driving factor of this is agility rather than cost.
You can find the full report here. Gartner is also hosting Sourcing & Strategic Vendor Relationships summits in June and September, where it will discuss issues facing the IT services industry.
If you want to be secure on the Web, it’s best that you keep all your extensions upgraded. Flash Player is no exception as its does occasionally fall to zero day attacks and other exploits. While continuously upgrading to the latest version is the best course of action, that’s not exactly feasible in an enterprise environment. That’s where Flash Player extend support comes in.
Adobe announced on Wednesday that Flash Player extended support will be upgrading from version 11.7 to version 13 on May 13. On that day, enterprise and IT customers who use extended support releases will find version 13 on Adobe’s distribution channel.
So, what’s the benefit of using the extended support release? Instead of having to adapt to new features with every new release, extended support versions of Flash Player don’t include any new features of bug fixes. These releases focus exclusively on security fixes so enterprise customers can ensure all the computers on their network stay secure without having to introduce new features every few weeks.
Of course, enterprise and IT managers will want to start testing Flash Player 13 now before rolling it out to everybody to ensure everything works. For that, Adobe offers a Flash Player 13 beta on their Web site. You can grab it here.
As an aside, it should be noted that the extended support release of Flash Player has finally moved to the new numbering scheme Adobe adopted back in November of last year. No more will Adobe use minor numbers, like 11.x, when referring to updates as each updated version of Flash Player will now have a nice whole number for every update. In other words, Flash Player 13 will become Flash Player 14 instead of something like 13.2.
