Monday, November 13, 2017

Globalization Risks and Data Complexity Demand New Breed of Hybrid IT Management, Says Wikibon’s Burris

Transcript of a discussion on how international cloud distribution models and global business ecosystems factor into hybrid cloud management challenges and solutions.

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Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of the Analyst podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator.

Join us as we hear from leading IT industry analysts and consultants on how to best make the hybrid IT journey to successful digital business transformation. Our next interview examines how globalization and distributed business ecosystems factor into hybrid cloud challenges and solutions.

We’ll explore how mounting complexity and the lack of multi-cloud services management maturity must be solved in order for businesses to grow and thrive as global digital enterprises.

Burris
Here to report on how international companies must factor localization, data sovereignty and other regional factors into any transition to sustainable hybrid IT is Peter Burris, Head of Research at Wikibon, and he’s based in Palo Alto, California. Welcome, Peter.

Peter Burris: Hi, Dana. Thank you very much for having me.

Gardner: Peter, companies doing business or software development just in North America can have an American-centric view of things. They may lack an appreciation for the global aspects of cloud computing models. We want to explore that today. How much more complex is doing cloud -- especially hybrid cloud -- when you’re straddling global regions?

Global cloud challenges

Burris: There are advantages and disadvantages to thinking cloud-first when you are thinking globalization first. The biggest advantage is that you are able to work in locations that don’t currently have the broad-based infrastructure that’s typically associated with a lot of traditional computing modes and models.

The downside of it is, at the end of the day, that the value in any computing system is not so much in the hardware per se; it’s in the data that’s the basis of how the system works. And because of the realities of working with data in a distributed way, globalization that is intended to more fully enfranchise data wherever it might be introduces a range of architectural implementation and legal complexities that can’t be discounted.

So, cloud and globalization can go together -- but it dramatically increases the need for smart and forward-thinking approaches to imagining, and then ultimately realizing, how those two go together, and what hybrid architecture is going to be required to make it work.

Gardner: If you need to then focus more on the data issues -- such as compliance, regulation, and data sovereignty -- how is that different from taking an applications-centric view of things?


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Burris: Most companies have historically taken an infrastructure-centric approach to things. They start by saying, “Where do I have infrastructure, where do I have servers and storage, do I have the capacity for this group of resources, and can I bring the applications up here?” And if the answer is yes, then you try to ultimately economize on those assets and build the application there.

That runs into problems when we start thinking about privacy, and in ensuring that local markets and local approaches to intellectual property management can be accommodated.

But the issue is more than just things like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, which is a series of regulations in the European Union (EU) that are intended to protect consumers from what the EU would regard as inappropriate leveraging and derivative use of their data.

It can be extremely expensive and sometimes impossible to even conceive of a global cloud strategy where the service is being consumed a few thousand miles away from where the data resides, if there is any dependency on time and how that works.
Ultimately, the globe is a big place. It’s 12,000 miles or so from point A to the farthest point B, and physics still matters. So, the first thing we have to worry about when we think about globalization is the cost of latency and the cost of bandwidth of moving data -- either small or very large -- across different regions. It can be extremely expensive and sometimes impossible to even conceive of a global cloud strategy where the service is being consumed a few thousand miles away from where the data resides, if there is any dependency on time and how that works.

So, the issues of privacy, the issues of local control of data are also very important, but the first and most important consideration for every business needs to be: Can I actually run the application where I want to, given the realities of latency? And number two: Can I run the application where I want to given the realities of bandwidth? This issue can completely overwhelm all other costs for data-rich, data-intensive applications over distance.

Gardner: As you are factoring your architecture, you need to take these local considerations into account, particularly when you are factoring costs. If you have to do some heavy lifting and make your bandwidth capable, it might be better to have a local closet-sized data center, because they are small and efficient these days, and you can stick with a private cloud or on-premises approach. At the least, you should factor the economic basis for comparison, with all these other variables you brought up.

Edge centers

Burris: That’s correct. In fact, we call them “edge centers.” For example, if the application features any familiarity with Internet of Things (IoT), then there will likely be some degree of latency considerations obtained, and the cost of doing a round trip message over a few thousand miles can be pretty significant when we consider the total cost of how fast computing can be done these days.

The first consideration is what are the impacts of latency for an application workload like IoT and is that intending to drive more automation into the system? Imagine, if you will, the businessperson who says, “I would like to enter into a new market expand my presence in the market in a cost-effective way. And to do that, I want to have the system be more fully automated as it serves that particular market or that particular group of customers. And perhaps it’s something that looks more process manufacturing-oriented or something along those lines that has IoT capabilities.”

The goal is to bring in the technology in a way that does not explode the administration, management, and labor cost associated with the implementation.
The goal, therefore, is to bring in the technology in a way that does not explode the administration, managements, and labor cost associated with the implementation.

The other way you are going to do that is if you do introduce a fair amount of automation and if, in fact, that automation is capable of operating within the time constraints required by those automated moments, as we call them.

If the round-trip cost of moving the data from a remote global location back to somewhere in North America -- independent of whether it’s legal or not – comes at a cost that exceeds the automation moment, then you just flat out can’t do it. Now, that is the most obvious and stringent consideration.

On top of that, these moments of automation necessitate significant amounts of data being generated and captured. We have done model studies where, for example, the cost of moving data out of a small wind farm can be 10 times as expensive. It can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to do relatively simple and straightforward types of data analysis on the performance of that wind farm.

Process locally, act globally

It’s a lot better to have a local presence that can handle local processing requirements against models that are operating against locally derived data or locally generated data, and let that work be automated with only periodic visibility into how the overall system is working closely. And that’s where a lot of this kind of on-premise hybrid cloud thinking is starting.

It gets more complex than in a relatively simple environment like a wind farm, but nonetheless, the amount of processing power that’s necessary to run some of those kinds of models can get pretty significant. We are going to see a lot more of this kind of analytic work be pushed directly down to the devices themselves. So, the Sense, Infer, and Act loop will occur very, very closely in some of those devices. We will try to keep as much of that data as we can local.

But there are always going to be circumstances when we have to generate visibility across devices, we have to do local training of the data, we have to test the data or the models that we are developing locally, and all those things start to argue for sometimes much larger classes of systems.

Gardner: It’s a fascinating subject as to what to push down the edge given that the storage cost and processing costs are down and footprint is down and what to then use the public cloud environment or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) environment for.

But before we go into any further, Peter, tell us about yourself, and your organization, Wikibon.

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Burris: Wikibon is a research firm that’s affiliated with something known as TheCUBE. TheCUBE conducts about 5,000 interviews per year with thought leaders at various locations, often on-site at large conferences.

I came to Wikibon from Forrester Research, and before that I had been a part of META Group, which was purchased by Gartner. I have a longstanding history in this business. I have also worked with IT organizations, and also worked inside technology marketing in a couple of different places. So, I have been around.

Wikibon's objective is to help mid-sized to large enterprises traverse the challenges of digital transformation. Our opinion is that digital transformation actually does mean something. It's not just a set of bromides about multichannel or omnichannel or being “uberized,” or anything along those lines.

The difference between a business and a digital business is the degree to which data is used as an asset. 
The difference between a business and a digital business is the degree to which data is used as an asset. In a digital business, data absolutely is used as a differentiating asset for creating and keeping customers.

We look at the challenges of what does it mean to use data differently, how to capture it differently, which is a lot of what IoT is about. We look at how to turn it into business value, which is a lot of what big data and these advanced analytics like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and deep learning are all about. And then finally, how to create the next generation of applications that actually act on behalf of the brand with a fair degree of autonomy, which is what we call “systems of agency” are all about. And then ultimately how cloud and historical infrastructure are going to come together and be optimized to support all those requirements.

We are looking at digital business transformation as a relatively holistic thing that includes IT leadership, business leadership, and, crucially, new classes of partnerships to ensure that the services that are required are appropriately contracted for and can be sustained as it becomes an increasing feature of any company’s value proposition. That's what we do.

Global risk and reward

Gardner: We have talked about the tension between public and private cloud in a global environment through speeds and feeds, and technology. I would like to elevate it to the issues of culture, politics and perception. Because in recent years, with offshoring and looking at intellectual property concerns in other countries, the fact is that all the major hyperscale cloud providers are US-based corporations. There is a wide ecosystem of other second tier providers, but certainly in the top tier.

Is that something that should concern people when it comes to risk to companies that are based outside of the US? What’s the level of risk when it comes to putting all your eggs in the basket of a company that's US-based?

Burris: There are two perspectives on that, but let me add one more just check on this. Alibaba clearly is one of the top-tier, and they are not based in the US and that may be one of the advantages that they have. So, I think we are starting to see some new hyperscalers emerge, and we will see whether or not one will emerge in Europe.

I had gotten into a significant argument with a group of people not too long ago on this, and I tend to think that the political environment almost guarantees that we will get some kind of scale in Europe for a major cloud provider.

If you are a US company, are you concerned about how intellectual property is treated elsewhere? Similarly, if you are a non-US company, are you concerned that the US companies are typically operating under US law, which increasingly is demanding that some of these hyperscale firms be relatively liberal, shall we say, in how they share their data with the government? This is going to be one of the key issues that influence choices of technology over the course of the next few years.

Cross-border compute concerns

We think there are three fundamental concerns that every firm is going to have to worry about.

I mentioned one, the physics of cloud computing. That includes latency and bandwidth. One computer science professor told me years ago, “Latency is the domain of God, and bandwidth is the domain of man.” We may see bandwidth costs come down over the next few years, but let's just lump those two things together because they are physical realities.

The second one, as we talked about, is the idea of privacy and the legal implications.

The third one is intellectual property control and concerns, and this is going to be an area that faces enormous change over the course of the next few years. It’s in conjunction with legal questions on contracting and business practices.


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From our perspective, a US firm that wants to operate in a location that features a more relaxed regime for intellectual property absolutely needs to be concerned. And the reason why they need to be concerned is data is unlike any other asset that businesses work with. Virtually every asset follows the laws of scarcity. 

Money, you can put it here or you can put it there. Time, people, you can put here or you can put there. That machine can be dedicated to this kind of wire or that kind of wire.

Data is weird, because data can be copied, data can be shared. The value of data appreciates as we us it more successfully, as we integrate it and share it across multiple applications.
Scarcity is a dominant feature of how we think about generating returns on assets. Data is weird, though, because data can be copied, data can be shared. Indeed, the value of data appreciates as we use it more successfully, as we use it more completely, as we integrate it and share it across multiple applications.

And that is where the concern is, because if I have data in one location, two things could possibly happen. One is if it gets copied and stolen, and there are a lot of implications to that. And two, if there are rules and regulations in place that restrict how I can combine that data with other sources of data. That means if, for example, my customer data in Germany may not appreciate, or may not be able to generate the same types of returns as my customer data in the US.

Now, that sets aside any moral question of whether or not Germany or the US has better privacy laws and protects the consumers better. But if you are basing investments on how you can use data in the US, and presuming a similar type of approach in most other places, you are absolutely right. On the one hand, you probably aren’t going to be able to generate the total value of your data because of restrictions on its use; and number two, you have to be very careful about concerns related to data leakage and the appropriation of your data by unintended third parties.

Gardner: There is the concern about the appropriation of the data by governments, including the United States with the PATRIOT Act. And there are ways in which governments can access hyperscalers’ infrastructure, assets, and data under certain circumstances. I suppose there’s a whole other topic there, but at least we should recognize that there's some added risk when it comes to governments and their access to this data.

Burris: It’s a double-edged sword that US companies may be worried about hyperscalers elsewhere, but companies that aren't necessarily located in the US may be concerned about using those hyperscalers because of the relationship between those hyperscalers and the US government.

These concerns have been suppressed in the grand regime of decision-making in a lot of businesses, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a low-intensity concern that could bubble up, and perhaps, it’s one of the reasons why Alibaba is growing so fast right now.

All hyperscalers are going to have to be able to demonstrate that they can protect their clients, their customers’ data, utilizing the regime that is in place wherever the business is being operated.  
All hyperscalers are going to have to be able to demonstrate that they can, in fact, protect their clients, their customers’ data, utilizing the regime that is in place wherever the business is being operated. [The rationale] for basing your business in these types of services is really immature. We have made enormous progress, but there’s a long way yet to go here, and that’s something that businesses must factor as they make decisions about how they want to incorporate a cloud strategy.

Gardner: It’s difficult enough given the variables and complexity of deciding a hybrid cloud strategy when you’re only factoring the technical issues. But, of course, now there are legal issues around data sovereignty, privacy, and intellectual property concerns. It’s complex, and it’s something that an IT organization, on its own, cannot juggle. This is something that cuts across all the different parts of a global enterprise -- their legal, marketing, security, risk avoidance and governance units -- right up to the board of directors. It’s not just a willy-nilly decision to get out a credit card and start doing cloud computing on any sustainable basis.

Burris: Well, you’re right, and too frequently it is a willy-nilly decision where a developer or a business person says, “Oh, no sweat, I am just going to grab some resources and start building something in the cloud.”

I can remember back in the mid-1990s when I would go into large media companies to meet with IT people to talk about the web, and what it would mean technically to build applications on the web. I would encounter 30 people, and five of them would be in IT and 25 of them would be in legal. They were very concerned about what it meant to put intellectual property in a digital format up on the web, because of how it could be misappropriated or how it could lose value. So, that class of concern -- or that type of concern -- is minuscule relative to the broader questions of cloud computing, of the grabbing of your data and holding it a hostage, for example.

There are a lot of considerations that are not within the traditional purview of IT, but CIOs need to start thinking about them on their own and in conjunction with their peers within the business.

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Gardner: We’ve certainly underlined a lot of the challenges. What about solutions? What can organizations do to prevent going too far down an alley that’s dark and misunderstood, and therefore have a difficult time adjusting?

How do we better rationalize for cloud computing decisions? Do we need better management? Do we need better visibility into what our organizations are doing or not doing? How do we architect with foresight into the larger picture, the strategic situation? What do we need to start thinking about in terms of the solutions side of some of these issues?

Cloud to business, not business to cloud

Burris: That’s a huge question, Dana. I can go on for the next six hours, but let’s start here. The first thing we tell senior executives is, don’t think about bringing your business to the cloud -- think about bringing the cloud to your business. That’s the most important thing. A lot of companies start by saying, “Oh, I want to get rid of IT, I want to move my business to the cloud.”

It’s like many of the mistakes that were made in the 1990s regarding outsourcing. When I would go back and do research on outsourcing, I discovered that a lot of the outsourcing was not driven by business needs, but driven by executive compensation schemes, literally. So, where executives were told that they would be paid on the basis of return in net assets, there was a high likelihood that the business was going to go to outsourcers to get rid of the assets, so the executives could pay themselves an enormous amount of money.

Think about how to bring the cloud to your business, and to better manage your data assets, and don't automatically default to the notion that you're going to take your business to the cloud.
The same type of thinking pertains here -- the goal is not to get rid of IT assets since those assets, generally speaking, are becoming less important features of the overall proposition of digital businesses.

Think instead about how to bring the cloud to your business, and to better manage your data assets, and don’t automatically default to the notion that you’re going to take your business to the cloud.

Every decision-maker needs to ask himself or herself, “How can I get the cloud experience wherever the data demands?” The goal of the cloud experience, which is a very, very powerful concept, ultimately needs to be able to get access to a very rich set of services associated with automation. We need visible pricing and metering, self-sufficiency, and self-service. These are all the experiences that we want out of cloud.

What we want, however, are those experiences wherever the data requires it, and that’s what’s driving hybrid cloud. We call it “true private cloud,” and the idea is of having a technology stack that provides a consistent cloud experience wherever the data has to run -- whether that’s because of IoT or because of privacy issues or because of intellectual property concerns. True private cloud is our concept for describing how the cloud experience is going to be enacted where the data requires, so that you don’t just have to move the data to get to the cloud experience.

Weaving IT all together

The third thing to note here is that ultimately this is going to lead to the most complex integration regime we’ve ever envisioned for IT. By that I mean, we are going to have applications that span Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), public cloud, IaaS services, true private cloud, legacy applications, and many other types of services that we haven’t even conceived of right now.

And understanding how to weave all of those different data sources, and all those different service sources, into coherent application framework that runs reliably and providers a continuous ongoing service to the business is essential. It must involve a degree of distribution that completely breaks most models. We’re thinking about infrastructure, architecture, but also, data management, system management, security management, and as I said earlier, all the way out to even contractual management, and vendor management.

The arrangement of resources for the classes of applications that we are going to be building in the future are going to require deep, deep, deep thinking.

That leads to the fourth thing, and that is defining the metric we’re going to use increasingly from a cost standpoint. And it is time. As the costs of computing and bandwidth continue to drop -- and they will continue to drop -- it means ultimately that the fundamental cost determinant will be, How long does it take an application to complete? How long does it take this transaction to complete? And that’s not so much a throughput question, as it is a question of, “I have all these multiple sources that each on their own are contributing some degree of time to how this piece of work finishes, and can I do that piece of work in less time if I bring some of the work, for example, in-house, and run it close to the event?”

This relationship between increasing distribution of work, increasing distribution of data, and the role that time is going to play when we think about the event that we need to manage is going to become a significant architectural concern.

The fifth issue, that really places an enormous strain on IT is how we think about backing up and restoring data. Backup/restore has been an afterthought for most of the history of the computing industry.

As we start to build these more complex applications that have more complex data sources and more complex services -- and as these applications increasingly are the basis for the business and the end-value that we’re creating -- we are not thinking about backing up devices or infrastructure or even subsystems.

We are thinking about what does it mean to backup, even more importantly, applications and even businesses. The issue becomes associated more with restoring. How do we restore applications in business across this incredibly complex arrangement of services and data locations and sources?

There's a new data regime that's emerging to support application development. How's that going to work -- the role the data scientists and analytics are going to play in working with application developers?
I listed five areas that are going to be very important. We haven’t even talked about the new regime that’s emerging to support application development and how that’s going to work. The role the data scientists and analytics are going to play in working with application developers – again, we could go on and on and on. There is a wide array of considerations, but I think all of them are going to come back to the five that I mentioned.

Gardner: That’s an excellent overview. One of the common themes that I keep hearing from you, Peter, is that there is a great unknown about the degree of complexity, the degree of risk, and a lack of maturity. We really are venturing into unknown territory in creating applications that draw on these resources, assets and data from these different clouds and deployment models.

When you have that degree of unknowns, that lack of maturity, there is a huge opportunity for a party to come in to bring in new types of management with maturity and with visibility. Who are some of the players that might fill that role? One that I am familiar with, and I think I have seen them on theCUBE is Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) with what they call Project New Hybrid IT Stack. We still don’t know too much about it. I have also talked about Cloud28+, which is an ecosystem of global cloud environments that helps mitigate some of the concerns about a single hyperscaler or a handful of hyperscale providers. What’s the opportunity for a business to come in to this problem set and start to solve it? What do you think from what you’ve heard so far about Project New Hybrid IT Stack at HPE?

Key cloud players

Burris: That’s a great question, and I’m going to answer it in three parts. Part number one is, if we look back historically at the emergence of TCP/IP, TCP/IP killed the mini-computers. A lot of people like to claim it was microprocessors, and there is an element of truth to that, but many computer companies had their own proprietary networks. When companies wanted to put those networks together to build more distributed applications, the mini-computer companies said, “Yeah, just bridge our network.” That was an unsatisfyingly bad answer for the users. So along came Cisco, TCP/IP, and they flattened out all those mini-computer networks, and in the process flattened the mini-computer companies.

HPE was one of the few survivors because they embraced TCP/IP much earlier than anybody else.

We are going to need the infrastructure itself to use deep learning, machine learning, and advanced technology for determining how the infrastructure is managed, optimized, and economized.
The second thing is that to build the next generations of more complex applications -- and especially applications that involve capabilities like deep learning or machine learning with increased automation -- we are going to need the infrastructure itself to use deep learning, machine learning, and advanced technology for determining how the infrastructure is managed, optimized, and economized. That is an absolute requirement. We are not going to make progress by adding new levels of complexity and building increasingly rich applications if we don’t take full advantage of the technologies that we want to use in the applications -- inside how we run our infrastructures and run our subsystems, and do all the things we need to do from a hybrid cloud standpoint.

Ultimately, the companies are going to step up and start to flatten out some of these cloud options that are emerging. We will need companies that have significant experience with infrastructure, that really understand the problem. They need a lot of experience with a lot of different environments, not just one operating system or one cloud platform. They will need a lot of experience with these advanced applications, and have both the brainpower and the inclination to appropriately invest in those capabilities so they can build the type of platforms that we are talking about. There are not a lot of companies out there that can.

There are few out there, and certainly HPE with its New Stack initiative is one of them, and we at Wikibon are especially excited about it. It’s new, it’s immature, but HPE has a lot of piece parts that will be required to make a go of this technology. It’s going to be one of the most exciting areas of invention over the next few years. We really look forward to working with our user clients to introduce some of these technologies and innovate with them. It’s crucial to solve the next generation of problems that the world faces; we can’t move forward without some of these new classes of hybrid technologies that weave together fabrics that are capable of running any number of different application forms.

Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We have been exploring how mounting complexity and a lack of multi-cloud services management maturity must be solved so businesses can grow and thrive as digital enterprises. And we have learned how global companies must factor localization, data sovereignty, and issues around data control -- and even intellectual property control -- if they are going to translate into a sustainable hybrid IT future.

So please join me in thanking our guest, Peter Burris, Head of Research at Wikibon. So good to have you with us, Peter, I appreciate all your great thoughts.

Burris: You bet. Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: And Peter, if our listeners and readers want to follow you and gain more excellent insights, where can they find you online?

Burris: I am on Twitter, @plburris. You can always send me an email to peter@siliconangle.com. SiliconANGLE is a parent company of Wikibon, and those are the two best ways to reach me.

Gardner: And I am sure we will be looking forward to see you on theCUBE as well.

Burris: Absolutely!

Gardner: Okay, also thank you to our audience for joining us for this BriefingsDirect Voice of the Analyst discussion on how to best manage the hybrid IT journey to digital business transformation. I’m Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of Hewlett Packard Enterprise-sponsored interviews.

Follow me on Twitter @Dana_Gardner and find more hybrid-focused podcasts at briefingsdirect.com. Lastly, please pass this content along to your IT community, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.


Transcript of a discussion on how international cloud models and distributed business ecosystems factor into hybrid cloud management challenges and solutions. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2017. All rights reserved.


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Wednesday, November 08, 2017

How Cloud Architects Transform the Messy Mix of Hybrid Cloud Factors into a Consistent Force Multiplier

Transcript of a discussion on how IT architecture and new breeds of service providers are helping enterprises manage complex cloud scenarios.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on digital transformation success stories. Stay with us now to learn how agile businesses are fending off disruption -- in favor of innovation.

Our next cloud strategies insights interview focuses on how IT architecture and new breeds of service providers are helping enterprises manage complex cloud scenarios. We’ll now learn how composable infrastructure and auto-scaling help improve client services, operations, and business goals attainment for a New York cloud support provider.

Here to help us learn what's needed to reach the potential of multiple -- and often overlapping -- cloud models is Arthur Reyenger, Cloud Practice Lead and Chief Cloud Architect at International Integrated Solutions (IIS) Ltd. in New York. Welcome, Arthur.

Arthur Reyenger: Thank you so much, I really appreciate being on the show.

Gardner: How are IT architecture and new breeds of service providers coming together? What’s different now from just a few years ago for architecture when we have cloud, multi-cloud, and hybrid cloud services? 

Reyenger
Reyenger: Like the technology trends themselves, everything is accelerating. Before, you would have three-year or even five-year plans that were developed by the business. They were designed to reach certain business outcomes, they would design the technology to support that and it was then heads-down to build my rocket ship.

It’s changed now to where it’s a 12-month strategy that needs to be modular enough to be reevaluated at the end of those 12 months, and be re-architected -- almost as if it were made of Lego blocks.

Gardner: More moving parts, less time.

Reyenger: Absolutely.

Gardner: How do you accomplish that? 

Reyenger: You leverage different cloud service providers, different managed services providers, and traditional value-added resellers, like International Integrated Solutions (IIS), in order to meet those business demands. We see a large push around automation, orchestration and auto-scaling. It’s becoming a way to achieve those business initiatives at that higher speed.

Gardner: There is a cloud continuum. You are choosing which workloads and what data should be on-premises, and what should be in a cloud, or multi-clouds. Trying to do this as a regular IT shop -- buying it, specifying, integrating it -- seems like it demands more than the traditional IT skills. How is the culture of IT adjusting? 

Reyenger: Every organization, including ours, has its own business transformation that they have to undergo. We think that we are extremely proactive. I see some companies that are developing in-house skill sets, and trying to add additional departments that would be more cloud-aware in order to meet those demands.

On the other side, you have folks that are leveraging partners like IIS, which has acumen within those spaces to supplement their bench, or they are building out a completely separate organization that will hopefully take them to the new frontier.

Gardner: Tell us about your company. What have you done to transform?

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Reyenger: IIS has spent 26 years building out an amazing book of business with amazing relationships with a lot of enterprise customers. But as times change, you need to be able to add additional practices like our cloud practice and our managed services practice. We have taken the knowledge we have around traditional IT services and then added in our internal developers and delivery consultants. They are very well-versed and aware of the new architecture. So we can marry the two together and help organizations reach that new end-state.

It's very easy for startups to go 100 percent to the cloud and just run with it. It’s different when you have 2,000 existing applications and you want to move to the future as well. It’s nice to have someone who understands both of those worlds -- and the appropriate way to integrate them. 

Gardner: I suppose there is no typical cloud engagement, but what is a common hurdle that organizations are facing as they go from that traditional IT mindset to the more cloud-centric thinking and hybrid deployment models? 

The cloud answer

Reyenger: The concept of auto-scaling or bursting has become very, very prevalent. You see that within different lines of business. Ultimately, they are all asking for essentially the same thing -- and the cloud is a pretty good answer.

At the same time, you really need to understand your business and the triggers. You need to be able to put the necessary intelligence together around those capabilities in order to make it really beneficial and align to the ebbs and flows of your business. So that's been one of the very, very common requests across the board.

We've built out solutions that include intellectual property from IIS and our developers, as well as cloud management tools built around backup to the cloud to eliminate tape and modernize backup for customers. This builds out a dedicated object store that customers can own that also tiers to the different public cloud providers out there.

And we’ve done this in a repeatable fashion so that our customers get the cloud consumption look and feel, and we’ve leveraged innovative contractual arrangements to allow customers to consume against the scope of work rather than on lease. We’ve been able to marry that with the different standardized offerings out there to give someone the head start that they need in order to achieve their objectives. 

Gardner: You brought up the cloud consumption model. Organizations want the benefit of a public cloud environment and user experience for bursting, auto-scaling, and price efficiency. They might want to have workloads on-premises, to use a managed service, or take advantage of public clouds under certain circumstances.

How are you working with companies like Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), for example, to provide composable auto-scaling capabilities with the look and feel of public cloud on their private cloud?

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Reyenger: Now it’s becoming a multi-cloud strategy. It’s one thing to say only on-premises and using one cloud. But using just one cloud has risk, and this is a problem.

We try to standardize everything through a single cloud management stack for our customers. We’re agnostic to a whole slew of toolsets around both orchestration and automation. We want to help them achieve that.

Intelligent platform performance

We looked at some of the very unique things that HPE has done, specifically around their Synergy platform, to allow for cloud management and cloud automation to deliver true composable infrastructure. That has huge value around energizing a company’s goals, strengthening their profitability, boosting productivity, and enhancing innovation. We've been able to extend that into the public cloud. So now we have customers that truly are getting the best of both worlds.
Composable infrastructure is having true infrastructure that you can deploy as code. It’s being able to standardize on a single RESTful API set. 

Gardner: How do you define composable infrastructure? 

Reyenger: It’s having true infrastructure that you can deploy as code. You’ll hear a lot of folks say that and what it really means is being able to standardize on a single RESTful API set.

That allows your platform to have intelligence when you look at infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and then delivering things as either platform (PaaS) or software as a service (SaaS) -- from either a DevOps approach, or from the lines of business directly to consumers. So it’s the ability to bridge those two worlds.

Traditionally, you may have underlying infrastructure that doesn't have the intelligence or doesn't have the visibility into the cloud automation. So I may be scaling, but I can't scale into infinity. I really need an underlying infrastructure to be able to mold and adapt in order to meet those needs.

We’re finally reaching the point where we have that visibility and we have that capability, thanks to software-defined data center (SDDC) and a platform to ultimately be able to execute on. 

Gardner: When I think about composable infrastructure, I often wonder, “Who is the composer?” I know who composes the apps, that’s the developer -- but who composes the infrastructure?  

Reyenger: This gets to a lot of the digital transformation that we talked about in seeking different resources, or cultivating your existing resources to gain more of a developer’s view.

But now you have IT operations and DevOps both able to come under a single management console. They are able to communicate effectively and then script on either side in order to compose based on the code requirements. Or they can put guardrails on different segments of their workloads in order to dictate importance or assign guidelines. The developers can ultimately make those requests or modify the environment. 

Gardner: When you get to composable infrastructure in a data center or private cloud, that’s fine. But that’s sort of like 2D Chess. When I think about multi-cloud or hybrid cloud -- it’s more like 3D Chess. So how do I compose infrastructure, and who is the composer, when it comes to deciding where to support a workload in a certain way, and at what cost?

Consult before composing

Reyenger: We offer a series of consulting services around the delivery of managed services and the actual development to take an existing cloud management stack -- whether that is Red Hat CloudForms, vRealize from VMware, or Terraform -- it really doesn't matter.

We are ultimately allowing that to be the single pane of glass, the single console. And then because it’s RESTful API integrations into those public cloud providers, we’re able to provide that transparency from that management interface, which mitigates risk and gives you control.

Then we deploy things like Puppet, Chef, and Ansible within those different virtual private clouds and within those public cloud fabrics. Then, using that cloud management stack, you can have uniformity and you can take that composition and that intelligence and bring it wherever you like -- whether that's based on geography or a particular cloud service provider preference.

There are many different ways to ultimately achieve that end-state. We just want to make sure that that standardization, to your point, doesn’t get lost the second you leave that firewall.

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Gardner: We are in the early days of composability of infrastructure in a multi-cloud world. But as the complexity and scale increases, it seems likely to me that we are going to need to bring things like machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) because humans doing this manually will run out of runway.

Projecting into the future, do you see a role for an algorithmic, programmatic approach putting in certain variables, certain thresholds, and contextual learning to then make this composable infrastructure capability part of a machine process? 

Reyenger: The things that companies like HPE have done, and their new acquisition, Nimble, as well as at Red Hat, and several others in the industry, to leverage the intelligence they have from all of their different support calls and lifecycle management across applications allows them to provide feedback to the customer.

And in some cases, if you are tying it back from an automation engine that will actually give you the information as to how to solve your problem. A lot of the precursors to what you are talking about are already in the works and everyone is trying to be that data-cloud management company.
We will see more of that single pane of glass that they will leverage across multiple cloud providers. 

It's really early to ultimately pick favorites, but you are going to see more standardization. Rather than having 50 different RESTful APIs that everyone is standardizing on and that are constantly changing, so that I have to provide custom integrations. What we will see is more of that single pane of glass they will leverage across multiple cloud providers. That will leverage a lot of the same automation and orchestration toolsets that we talked about. 

Gardner: And HPE has their sights set on this with Project New Hybrid IT Stack? 

Reyenger: 100 percent. 

Gardner: Looking at composable infrastructure, auto-scaling, using things like HPE Synergy, if you’re an enterprise and you do this right, how do you take this up to the C-Suite and say, “Aha, we told you so. Now give us more so we can do more”? In other words, how does this improve business outcomes? 

Fulfilling the promise

Reyenger: Every organization is different. I’ve spent a good chunk of my career being tactically deployed within very large organizations that are trying to achieve certain goals.
For me, I like to go to a customer’s 10-K SEC filing and look at the promises they’ve made to their investors. We want to ultimately be able to marry back what this IT investment will do for the short-term goals that they are all being judged against, as well as from both the key performance indicators (KPI) standpoint and from the health of the company.

It means meeting DevOps challenges and timelines, ruling out new green space workload issues, and taking data that sits within traditional business intelligence (BI) relational databases and giving access to some of that data to different departments. They should be able to run big data analytics against that data from those departments in real-time.

These are the types of testing methodologies that we like to set up so that we can help a customer actually rationalize what this means today in terms of dollars and cents and what it could mean in terms of that perceived value. 

Gardner: When you do this well, you get agility, and you get to choose your deployment models. It seems to me that there's going to be a concept that arises of minimal viable cloud, or hybrid cloud.
Are we going to see IT costs at an operating level adjusted favorably? Is this something that ultimately will be so optimized -- with higher utilization, leveraging the competitive market for cloud services -- that meaningful decreases will occur in the total operating costs of IT in an organization?

An uphill road to lower IT costs

Reyenger: I definitely think that it’s quite possible. The way that most organizations are set up today, IT operations rolls back into finance. So if you sit underneath the CFO, like most organizations do, and a request gets made by marketing or sales or another line of business -- it has to go up the chain, get translated, and then come back down.

A lot of times it's difficult to push a rock up a hill. You don’t have all the visibility unless you can get back up to finance or back over to that line of business. If you are able to break down those silos, then I believe that your statement is 100 percent true.

But changing all of those internal controls for a lot of these organizations is very difficult, which is why some are deploying net-new teams to be ultimately the future of their internal IT service provider operations.

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Gardner: Arthur, I have been in this business long enough to know that every time we’ve gotten into the point where we think we are going to meaningfully decrease IT costs, some other new paradigm of IT comes up that requires a whole new round of investment. But it seems to me that this could be different this time, that we actually are getting to a standardized approach for supporting workloads and that traditional economics that impact any procurement service will become in effect here, too.

Mining to minimize risk

Reyenger: Absolutely. One of our big pushes has been around object storage. This still allows for traditional file- and block-level support. We are trying to help customers achieve that new economic view -- of which cloud approach ultimately provides them that best price point, but still gives them low risk, visibility, and control over their data.

I will give you an example. There is a very large financial exchange that had a lot of intellectual property (IP) data that they traditionally mined internally, and then they provided it back to different, smaller financial institutions as a service, as financial reports. A few years back, they came to us and said, “I really want to leverage the agility of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in terms of being able to spin up a huge Hadoop form and mine this data very, very quickly -- and leverage that without having to increase my overall cost. But I don’t feel comfortable providing that data into S3 within AWS, where now they have two extra copies of my data as part of the service level agreement. So what do I do?”

And we ultimately stood up the same object storage service next to AWS, so you wouldn’t have to pay any data eviction fees, and you could mine everything right there, leveraging the AWS Redshift, or Hadoop-as-a-service. 

Then once these artifacts, or these reports, were created, they no longer had the IP. The reports came from the IP, but these are all roll-ups and comparisons, and now they are not sensitive to the company. We went ahead and put those into S3 and allowed Amazon to manage all of their customers’ identity and access management to go ahead and get access to that -- and that all minimized risk for this exchange. We are able to prevent anyone outside of the organization to get behind the firewall to get at their data. You don’t have to worry about the SLAs associated with keeping this stuff up and available and it became a really nice hybrid story.
We help customers gain all the benefits associated with cloud – without taking on any of the additional risk.

These are the types of projects that we really like to work on with customers, to be able to help them gain all the benefits associated with cloud – without taking on any of the additional risk, or the negatives, associated with jumping into cloud with both feet. 

Gardner: You heard your customers, you saw a niche opportunity for object storage as a service, and you have put that together. I assume that you want a composable infrastructure to do that. So is this something on a HPE Synergy a future foundation? 

Reyenger: HPE Synergy doesn’t really have the disk density to get to the public cloud price point, but it does support object storage natively. So it's great from a DevOps standpoint for object storage. We definitely think that as time progresses and HPE continues down the Synergy roadmap that that cloud role will eventually fix itself.

A lot of the cloud role is centered on hyper-converged infrastructure. And in this kind of mantra, I don’t see compute and storage growing at the same rates. I see storage growing considerably faster than the need for compute. So this is a way for us to be able to help supplement a Synergy deployment, or we can help our customers get the true ROI/TCO they are looking for out of the hyper-converged. 

Gardner: So maybe the question I should ask is what storage providers are you using in order to make this economically viable?

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Reyenger:  We are absolutely using the HPE Apollo storage line, and the different flavors of solid-state disks (SSD) down to SATA physical drives. And we are leveraging best-in-breed object storage software from Red Hat. We also have an OpenStack flavor as well.

We leverage things like automation and orchestration technologies, and our ServiceNow capabilities -- all married with our RIP in order to give customers the choice of buying this, deploying it, and having us layer services on top if you want or if you want to consume a fully managed service for something that’s on-premises. I have a per-GB price and the same SLAs as those public cloud providers. So all of it’s coming together to allow customers to really have the true choice and flexibility that everyone claimed you could years ago.

Gardner: I’m afraid we will have to leave it there. We have been exploring how IT architecture and new breeds of service providers are helping enterprises better manage their complex cloud requirements. And we learned how a composable infrastructure and auto-scaling capability have helped a New York cloud services company put together innovative object storage as a service offerings.

So please join me in thanking our guest, Arthur Reyenger, Cloud Practice Lead and Chief Cloud Architect at International Integrated Solutions (IIS) in New York. Thank you, Arthur. 

Reyenger: Thank you, Dana. I really appreciate being part of your program.

Gardner: And thanks to our audience as well for joining this BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer digital transformation success story. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of Hewlett Packard Enterprise-sponsored interviews.

Thanks again for listening. Please pass this content along to your IT community, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Transcript of a discussion on how IT architecture and new breeds of service providers are helping enterprises manage complex cloud scenarios. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2017. All rights reserved.

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