SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., June 9, 2021 (SEND2PRESS NEWSWIRE) — United Private Cloud, a secure enterprise-grade multicloud hosting provider known for designing, building, and managing enterprise-class private cloud infrastructure, has been positioned as “Innovators” in MarketsandMarkets’ Infrastructure as a Service Micro Quadrant Report.

MarketsandMarkets’ report recognizes United Private Cloud as the Multicloud expert that offers its innovative IaaS to global commercial customers.

According to the report, “United Private Cloud is an established player in the global IaaS market space. The company has a robust partner ecosystem in the IaaS market. Its enriched IaaS offering helps customers to add additional storage, compute, and networking resources to meet the increasing business demands.”

United Private Cloud’s infrastructure management services help organizations maximize the benefits of a multicloud environment without compromising on availability, performance, and security. Our managed infrastructure services cover on-premises data centers, private cloud, and leading public clouds such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). United Private Cloud helps monitor, report, and interface with third-party auditors to extract data and run compliance tests on the customer’s cloud.

The software-defined infrastructure management offered by United Private Cloud enables enterprises to modernize their infrastructure and improve their responsiveness, resource utilization, scalability, and agility resulting in better customer experience and faster time to market. United Private Cloud delivers enterprise-grade private clouds, disaster recovery, security, and infrastructure managed services for leading public clouds, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Abhijit Phanse, CEO of United Private Cloud, was ecstatic on the recognition and said, “We at United Private Cloud persistently work to maximize the benefits of our customers’ multicloud environment. With our solutions leveraging enterprise-class server and fully managed bare-metal server, we provide the tailored requirement, enhance the product portfolio, and improve the revenue systems to our customers along with a true hybrid cloud and a vision for a long-term partnership, allowing them to plan for its IT infrastructure needs for today, yet helping them grow as their business evolves over time.”

“United Private Cloud’s G3 IaaS Private Cloud platform has comprehensive private cloud solutions present in the market. Serving hundreds of enterprises and government across the globe, G3 laaS delivers high performance 99.999% availability, locked-down security, software-defined agility, and scalability while delivering greater than 30% cost savings versus leading public clouds and greater than 70% cost savings versus other leading private clouds,” said Ritesh Chawrashe, Assistant Manager at MarketsandMarkets.

United Private Cloud

United Private Cloud is a leading enterprise-grade Software-Defined Private Cloud company delivering enterprise-grade private clouds across 14 data centers over 5 continents globally. United Private Cloud’s G3 IaaS provides high-performance, 99.999% availability, locked-down security, and software-defined agility and scalability while offering greater than 30-70% cost savings than any primary public cloud provider. We are one of the world’s experts at building and operating highly available, secure, and scalable private clouds.

MarketsandMarkets:

MarketsandMarkets™ is the world’s largest revenue impact company, serving over 7500 customers and providing strategic analysis services. Over ten years, MNM has identified and researched all high-growth use cases, technologies, ecosystems converging across multiple industries. 80% of the top 2000 companies globally rely on MarketsandMarkets for determining the new high growth and niche revenue opportunities.

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Vendia, a multi-party application development platform for sharing code and data in real time, has been recognized as a 2021 Gartner Cool Vendor in the “Cool Vendors in Cloud Computing” report by Arun Chandrasekaran, Sid Nag, and David Wright on May 13, 2021.

Business critical data is dispersed across both internal and external silos, making it challenging to control and share in real time. Vendia’s decentralized data platform enables the sharing and synchronizing of data or code across clouds, partners, and tech stacks with immutability and control. It is being used in production today to power multi-party distributed applications for track and trace of goods and services across complex supply chains, financial settlements and transactions, and real-time data analytics for AI/ML and IoT use cases. Vendia’s serverless implementation makes building distributed applications scalable, cost efficient, and developer friendly.

“Coming at a time when we are barely a year past our founding, this recognition by Gartner is an especially great honor,” said Tim Wagner, co-founder and CEO of Vendia. “Our mission is to simplify the challenges of building applications that span data silos and clouds by creating a single source of truth, while ensuring that each partner retains full control over its data. We’re delighted that Gartner recognizes the need for our offering in the market.”

This Gartner Cool Vendor in Cloud Computing report states “CIOs should assess these Cool Vendors that are disrupting the cloud market through robust multicloud implementation products.” The complete report can be accessed on Gartner, or read more about it on the Vendia blog.

Disclaimer

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in our research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Vendia

Vendia provides multi-cloud services that make it easy for organizations to share real time data and code across clouds, companies, and regions for data integration, financial settlement, ML training, transaction processing, supply chain solutions and more. Vendia was founded by Dr. Tim Wagner, formerly General Manager and creator of AWS Lambda at AWS, and Shruthi Rao, formerly Head of Business Development for Amazon Managed Blockchain at AWS. The company is based in San Francisco and has raised $20.6M in funding led by BMW i Ventures, Canvas Ventures, Neotribe Ventures, Sorenson Ventures, and other leading investors.

Cisco has announced new ways it is helping customers accelerate digital transformations as they move more resources to the cloud. The hyper-connected, distributed world we live in now relies on cloud more than ever, and IT teams are facing challenges to provide people with optimal digital experiences wherever and whenever they need access. As a result, businesses are migrating to a cloud-driven operational model based on speed, insight, and control to bridge the greater distribution of applications, users, and tech staff.

Enabling customers to realize better outcomes from the cloud

Cisco has made multibillion-dollar investments over the past six years to build cloud into every aspect of its business, focusing on helping customers develop complete cloud strategies with confidence across five key areas: Continuity, Insights, Security, Connectivity, and Operations.

During today’s virtual ‘Future Cloud’ event, the company will showcase how it is advancing its cloud strategy across several of these areas to help businesses connect, secure, and automate to deliver seamless digital experiences in today’s hybrid cloud world.

“User experience is key to success in a digital world,” said Todd Nightingale, SVP and GM, Enterprise Networking and Cloud, Cisco. “We are focused on empowering technology groups to securely deliver the best possible application experiences. Only Cisco can power the hybrid-cloud solutions, observability, insights and automation necessary to be truly cloud smart.”

New hybrid cloud innovations announced today include:

§ Hybrid Cloud Operations:

o Introducing the new Cisco UCS X-Series: Cisco’s Unified Computing System™ (UCS) is used in data centers by more than 50,000 customers worldwide. Fully integrated with Cisco Intersight, UCS X-Series is a first-of-its-kind system designed for hybrid operations from the cloud and across the clouds. Blending the best of rack and blade systems and featuring revolutionary UCS X-Fabric technology, it’s built for workload versatility today and comes future-ready for the next decade of industry innovation in processors, accelerators, and computing interconnects.

o Intersight Cloud Orchestrator: Provides a low-code, easy-to-use automation framework that simplifies complex workflows, so IT Ops can easily orchestrate infrastructure and workloads and accelerate delivery of services.

o Intersight Workload Engine: A powerful platform for modern, cloud native workloads. Built on an open-source Kubernetes and Kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) foundation using container-native virtualization, Intersight Workload Engine is a Cisco operating system for HyperFlex™, featuring consistent SaaS management.

o Cisco Service Mesh Manager: A new extension to the Intersight Kubernetes Service, bringing deep observability and simplified management with policy-based security and intuitive visualization of services topologies across K8s clusters on-prem and in the cloud.

o Cisco Cloud ACI: Available on AWS, Azure, and now on Google Cloud with general availability in the Fall of 2021. The Cloud ACI® common policy and operating model drastically reduces the cost and complexity of managing hybrid and multicloud deployments.
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§ Observability and Insights:

o Integration of ThousandEyes Internet and Cloud Intelligence with the Cisco Catalyst® 8000 Edge Series for SD-WAN and Cisco Nexus® 9000 switches for data centers to provide customers with valuable insights on network health and application performance by monitoring across campus, branch, data centers, and every point of the WAN network between the user and applications.

o Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator acts a single pane of glass for configuring and managing common policies across multiple on-prem ACI sites, AWS and Microsoft Azure regions, and, announcing today, coming this fall to Google Cloud.

o Intersight Cloud Orchestrator: Provides a low-code, easy-to-use framework to create and automate complex workflows, so IT Ops can easily orchestrate infrastructure and workloads and accelerate delivery of services.

§ Customer Experience (CX) Services for Cloud

o CX Business Critical Services for Cloud provide advisory services plus expertise to architect, deploy, secure, and optimize digital transformations.

o CX Intersight Workload Optimizer Services enhance the resource consumption of applications in the cloud.

o CX Advanced Services for Thousand Eyes and SD-WAN deliver the best application experience for cloud solutions, providing expert design and integration to reduce project complexity and speed transformation.

o Custom Quick Start Solutions provide expert services for end-to-end automation and infrastructure-as-code (IaC).

Software intelligence company Dynatrace announced the findings of an independent global survey of 700 CISOs, which reveals the rising adoption of cloud-native architectures, DevOps, and agile methodologies has broken traditional approaches to application security. As organizations shift more responsibility “left” to developers to accelerate innovation, increasingly complex IT ecosystems and outdated security tooling can slow releases by leaving blind spots and forcing teams to manually triage countless alerts, many of which are false positives reflecting vulnerabilities in libraries that are not used in production. Organizations are calling for a new approach that is optimized for multicloud environments, Kubernetes, and DevSecOps

This research reveals:

89% of CISOs say microservices, containers, and Kubernetes have created application security blind spots.
97% of organizations do not have real-time visibility into runtime vulnerabilities in containerized production environments.
Nearly two-thirds (63%) of CISOs say DevOps and Agile development have made it more difficult to detect and manage software vulnerabilities.
74% of CISOs say traditional security controls such as vulnerability scanners no longer fit today’s cloud-native world.
71% of CISOs admit they are not fully confident code is free of vulnerabilities before going live in production.
“The increased use of cloud-native architectures has fundamentally broken traditional approaches to application security,” said Bernd Greifeneder, Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Dynatrace. “This research confirms what we’ve long anticipated: manual vulnerability scans and impact assessments are no longer able to keep up with the pace of change in today’s dynamic cloud environments and rapid innovation cycles. Risk assessment has become nearly impossible due to the growing number of internal and external service dependencies, runtime dynamics, continuous delivery, and polyglot software development which uses an ever-growing number of third-party technologies. Already stretched teams are forced to choose between speed and security, exposing their organizations to unnecessary risk.”

Additional findings include:

On average, organizations need to react to 2,169 new alerts of potential application security vulnerabilities each month.
77% of CISOs say most security alerts and vulnerabilities are false positives that do not require actioning as they are not actual exposures.
68% of CISOs say the volume of alerts makes it very difficult to prioritize vulnerabilities based on risk and impact.
64% of CISOs say developers do not always have time to resolve vulnerabilities before code moves into production.
77% of CISOs say the only way for security to keep up with modern cloud-native application environments is to replace manual deployment, configuration, and management with automated approaches.
28% of CISOs say application teams sometimes bypass vulnerability scans to speed up software delivery.
“As organizations embrace DevSecOps, they also need to give their teams solutions that offer automatic, continuous, and real-time risk and impact analysis for every vulnerability, across both pre-production and production environments, and not based on point-in-time ‘snapshots’,” continued Greifeneder.

The report is based on a global survey of 700 CISOs in large enterprises with over 1,000 employees, conducted by Coleman Parkes and commissioned by Dynatrace in 2021. The sample included 200 respondents in the U.S., 100 in the UK, France, Germany, and Spain, and 50 in Brazil and Mexico, respectively.

Cloud identity access management company Okta Inc. today revamped its developer experience with features that include new integrations and documentation in a general release that’s free for up to 15,000 monthly active users.

The updates are part of Okta’s new Starter Developer Edition that will provide developers tools to embed the company’s Okta authentication, authorization and user management into enterprise cloud applications at scale.

The company announced the product revamps during the first day of Oktane21, the company’s three-day virtual developer conference.

“Okta’s vision is to enable everyone to safely use any technology,” said Diya Jolly, chief product officer at Okta. “Developers are foundational to bringing that vision to life, and it’s our goal to make every piece of the development process easier with Okta. Developers can ramp up at no cost with the Starter Developer Edition.”

Okta Identity Cloud plays an instrumental role in the secure deployment and use of applications in the cloud, especially when it comes to role- and permission-based management. Knowing who is accessing information, how it’s being accessed and controlling how it’s being accessed is critical for security.

“Our reimagined developer experience delivers tools that seamlessly work with developers’ toolchains across whatever hybrid, cloud, or multicloud environment they’re building on,” said Jolly. “If developers need to do something with identity, they can do it with Okta.”

With new application programming interfaces, developers will find their footing with Okta faster than before, and this can be done with a redesigned console for all Okta customers that the company says will help deliver a faster time to market and full application lifecycle support.

The company has provided what it calls “Auth For All,” secure applications support and further identity infrastructure across a multitude of popular languages so that developers can get running in their preferred code faster than ever before with enhanced documentation.

Sample applications are also included in the developer portal with highly detailed documentation including Go, Java, JavaScript, Python, VueJS, React Native and Spring Boot.

In addition, Okta has included integrations for DevOps, SecOps and API Security tooling. This means that developers can quickly prototype Okta’s identity capabilities across numerous use cases including continuous integration and delivery or roles and management when securing applications, APIs and infrastructure.

New integrations include Heroku to automate identity across CI/CD pipelines, Kong to protect APIs and an updated Okta Terraform provider, which can replicate Okta configurations across environments.

The new Okta Starter Developer Edition and integrations are generally available starting today on Okta’s developer portal page along with enhanced documentation, sample applications and implementations.

VMware is buying Mesh7. The virtualization giant’s latest acquisition secures cloud-native applications and microservices by monitoring application behavior at the API layer.
The acquisition is part of VMware‘s efforts to make modern applications more secure. Once the deal closes, the Mesh7 technology will enable VMware to bring visibility, discovery and better security to APIs.

Mesh7 API Security Mesh provides application and API layer visibility to remove any blind spots within distributed and cloud-native application environments. It does so in a frictionless manner while being agnostic to the platform, cloud, environment and workload type.

VMware isn’t disclosing financial details of the transaction.

More Value for VMware Partners
Tom Gillis is senior vice president and general manager of VMware’s networking and security business unit.
“The value partners bring to customers is in helping them drive their app and cloud transformations,” he said. “This means having access to a modern set of capabilities for connecting and protecting modern apps that span multicloud environments.”

VMware is building a set of modern application connectivity services, Gillis said. That allows partners to bring more value to customers.

In time, partners will be able to offer the combination of Tanzu Service Mesh and Mesh7 to give developers and security teams a better understanding of when, where and how APIs are communicating. That’s even across multicloud environments, enabling better DevSecOps.

“VMware is continually working to help partners capture the customer opportunity for multicloud and app modernization,” Gillis said. “This is guided by the belief that a better developer experience leads to more secure operations. After close, the tight integration of Mesh7’s contextual API behavior security solution with Tanzu Service Mesh will deliver high-fidelity understanding of which applications components are talking to which APIs.”

In time, VMware plans to roll out an overall API solution, he said. It will make the developer experience for APIs more secure by default and easy to operate.

Upon close of the acquisition, the Mesh7 team will join VMware and help deliver the overall API solution, Gillis said.

Prolifics, a global digital transformation leader is proud to announce that we now can help enterprises manage their applications across multiple cloud environments with IBM Cloud Satellite. IBM Cloud Satellite, now generally available, enables clients to run IBM Cloud services on any cloud, on premises, in multicloud environments or at the edge – all delivered as a service. This flexibility will help bring cloud capabilities to where client data resides, in the environment of their choice, while focusing on consistency, user experience, and security.

With its open architecture, IBM Cloud Satellite builds on IBM’s deep industry expertise and can help enterprises across a variety of industries including telecommunications, healthcare, banking, insurance, travel and transportation, transform into digital-first organizations. The need to modernize mission-critical workloads is intensifying. According to a recent IBM Institute for Business Value report, 74% of CEOs interviewed during the COVID-19 pandemic believe cloud computing will most help their organization deliver these results over the next 2-3 years. We see a cornerstone of this transformation is in edge computing. The continued proliferation of edge devices is expected to shift the amount of data that resides at the edge compared to within central data centers. As this transition takes place, IBM Cloud Satellite is designed to bring cloud services to where clients’ data already resides — and help them bridge to where they want to go.

Prolifics is part of IBM’s ecosystem of partners fueling hybrid cloud deployments by helping clients modernize applications and manage workloads on infrastructure ranging from bare-metal to multicloud and everything in between using Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform. IBM Cloud Satellite is engineered to give clients the flexibility to bring their applications to environments where their data resides while leveraging the security of IBM Cloud.

Satya Bolli, Prolifics Chairman & Managing Director, said, “Modernizing applications to enable our clients to become faster, more agile, and more creative is what we do. Deciding the right platform for the right application workloads is a critical part of the equation. We see IBM Cloud Satellite as a game changer for our clients who want an enterprise grade option to bring the convenience of a cloud experience into the control of their own data center.”

Greg Hodgkinson, Prolifics Chief Technology Officer, said, “In the Prolifics Innovation Center, we’ve crafted more than 20 of our solutions using OpenShift and the Cloud Paks as our solution platform, ensuring flexible deployment models and simplified operations across cloud infrastructure. These solutions span verticals such as healthcare and banking, and horizontals such as data science, Hyperautomation, data privacy, DevOps and testing. IBM Cloud Satellite can help us deliver this solution platform as a service across an infrastructure of our client’s choosing, enabling us to roll out our solutions with Cloud Paks quicker and more efficiently. We believe this will improve availability to users, free-up capacity in our client’s operations team, and lower long-term cost of ownership.”

Databricks has partnered with Google Cloud to deliver its platform to businesses around the world.

Under the partnership, organisations can now use Databricks to create a lakehouse capable of data engineering, data science, machine learning, and analytics on Google Cloud’s global, scalable, secure and elastic network.

Databricks on Google Cloud will integrate with Google BigQuery’s open platform and will leverage Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), therefore enabling customers to deploy Databricks in a fully containerised cloud environment for the first time.

According to Databricks, increasingly, Kubernetes and containers are the de facto orchestration system for enterprise workloads and applications running in the cloud.

Databricks on Google Cloud is built on GKE, Google Clouds secure, managed Kubernetes service, to support containerised deployments of Databricks in the cloud.

By adopting GKE as an operating environment, Databricks is able to leverage managed services for security, network policy, and compute and as a result, provide customers with increasing business value through Databricks analytics, AI, and ML capabilities.

Additionally, with GKE, Databricks increases its agility and the ability to accelerate the release of new features, quickly, at scale, and at lower cost.

Furthermore, Databricks states, with this integration businesses can extend their existing Databricks lakehouse capabilities, now running on Google Cloud, and can cross-leverage Google BigQuery for analytics, ultimately simplifying their data investments, increasing usage, and creating new, data-driven business models and opportunities.

According to the company, tight integration of Databricks with Google Clouds analytics solutions gives customers the ability to extend AI-driven insights across data lakes, data warehouses, and multiple business intelligence tools.

Furthermore, pre-built connectors integrate Databricks with BigQuery, Google Cloud Storage, Looker and Pub/Sub to unlock AI-driven insights, enable intelligent decision-making, and ultimately accelerate digital transformations through data-driven applications.

Under this new partnership, the two companies will continue to support the open source community, encourage open innovation and collaboration, making it easier for joint customers to build on open-source technologies.

Members of the joint ecosystem of partners have already committed to ensure integrations with Databricks on Google Cloud, including Accenture, Cognizant, Collibra, Confluent, Deloitte, Fishtown Analytics, Fivetran, Immuta, Informatica, Infoworks, Insight, MongoDB, Privacera, Qlik, SADA, SoftServe, Slalom, Tableau, TCS and Trifacta, among others.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian says, “Businesses with a strong foundation of data and analytics are well-positioned to grow and thrive in the next decade. We’re delighted to deliver Databricks lakehouse for AI and ML-driven analytics on Google Cloud.

“By combining Databricks capabilities in data engineering and analytics with Google Cloud’s global, secure network and our expertise in analytics and delivering containerised applications we can help companies transform their businesses through the power of data.”

Databricks CEO and cofounder Ali Ghodsi says, “This is a pivotal milestone that underscores our commitment to enable customer flexibility and choice with a seamless experience across cloud platforms.

“We are thrilled to partner with Google Cloud and deliver on our shared vision of a simplified, open, and unified data platform that supports all analytics and AI use-cases that will empower our customers to innovate even faster.”

Microsoft this week described a few security products that have reached “general availability” (GA) or commercial-release status, while also touting its overall security-market position.

Reaching GA are some Azure Security Center capabilities, Azure Defender for IoT and Application Guard for Office. These releases were announced on Wednesday. On Tuesday, Microsoft’s security-business prowess was highlighted in the company’s fiscal-year 2021 Q2 earning report given by Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO. He noted that Microsoft’s security solutions revenue recently surpassed $10 billion.
A transcript was needed since a near-eight-minute gap occurred during the Tuesday presentation.

Microsoft’s $10 billion security revenue figure was enough for researchers at analyst and consulting firm Forrester to declare that “Microsoft is now a cybersecurity behemoth.”
Security Stats
Microsoft security stats were touted in a Wednesday announcement by Vasu Jakkal, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for security, compliance and identity. She offered the following security highlights:

Microsoft Defender blocked “almost six billion malware threats” in 2020.
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 blocked “more than 30 billion email threats” in 2020.
Azure Active Directory processes “more than 30 billion authentications” per day.
Azure Sentinel “analyzes over 4 petabytes of data each month.”
Microsoft solutions are protecting “more than 400,000 customers across 120 countries.”
Jakkal suggested that no other software company was handing “security, compliance, identity, and management as an interdependent whole.”

“Microsoft’s security organization is an intense, massive collaboration that drives services, intelligence, technologies, and people — all coming together as one humming machine with a singular mission,” she added.

Application Guard for Office GA
Application Guard for Office is Microsoft’s more improved approach for dealing with malicious files found on Web sites and in e-mail attachments. The product reached GA status, Microsoft announced on Wednesday. It had been at the preview stage back in August.

Microsoft has long had a Protected View security mechanism that mainly just acts as a precaution when users attempt to open documents attached in e-mails. Protected View permits end users to turn on editing in the documents, which can also enable attacks. With Application Guard for Office, these files get opened in a virtual machine “sandbox” environment, namely a “Hyper-V-enabled container,” which is isolated and prevents any malware from spreading into systems.

Despite the product’s name, Application Guard for Office is just for subscribers to the Office 365 service. Additionally, organizations can only get Application Guard for Office when they subscribe to E5-type plans, a top pricing option. Microsoft’s announcement also noted that “Application Guard works in conjunction with Microsoft Defender for Office 365,” a security solution that’s part of the newly renamed Microsoft Defender product line. Other security components in Microsoft Defender for Office 365 include “Safe Attachments, Safe Links, and Safe Documents,” the announcement explained.

Microsoft’s announcement affirmed that Application Guard for Office won’t be turned on by default for licensees:

Azure Security Center Enhancements
The Azure Security Center portal now has multicloud management capabilities, with the ability to work with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) reaching GA status, Microsoft announced on Wednesday.

It seems that just some capabilities are at GA in Azure Security Center, though. Microsoft specifically pointed to the ability to show AWS and GCP misconfigurations in its “Secure Score Model and Regulatory Compliance” features as being available.

Microsoft additionally turned on “Azure Security Benchmark as the default security policy for Azure Security Center,” which is conceived as bolstering its recommended policy settings.

Also at GA is the ability to use Azure Defender for Servers with Microsoft’s Azure Arc product to “simplify the on-boarding and security of virtual machines running in AWS, GCP and hybrid clouds.” Azure Arc is Microsoft’s multicloud management portal that also supports on-premises implementations, per a Microsoft “Overview” document. Azure Defender for Servers appears to be a component of the Microsoft Defender for Endpoint security solution. It’s tersely described in this Microsoft document as adding “threat detection and advanced defenses for your Windows and Linux machines.”

In response to customer feedback, Microsoft now lets organizations “exempt resources” from Secure Score “at a subscription level and now at a management group level.” Secure Score is Microsoft’s security assessment service. Some organizations apparently requested this exemption because they are using “third-party technology” (non-Microsoft solutions) for their security-posture assessments.

Azure Defender for IoT GA
Microsoft also announced on Wednesday that Azure Defender for IoT, its agentless security solution for unmanaged “Internet of things” devices and so-called “operational technology endpoints,” has reached GA status. It had been at the public preview stage back in October. The solution is designed to work with devices that use “specialized industrial protocols such as Modbus, DNP3, and BACnet.”

Azure Defender for IoT works with Microsoft recently acquired CyberX technologies to discover devices, find vulnerabilities and perform continuous device monitoring. Governance details are handled, too, when the service is used with a security information and event management solution, such as Microsoft’s Azure Sentinel. It also works with “Splunk, IBM QRadar and ServiceNow” solutions.

Azure Defender for IoT can be used on a customer’s site, or it can be tapped as an Azure service. The latter approach lets organizations connect Azure Defender for IoT with Microsoft’s Azure Defender security services. Alternatively, there’s a “hybrid” deployment possibility, “where security monitoring is performed on-premises but selected alerts are forwarded to a cloud-based SIEM like Azure Sentinel,” the announcement explained.

The productivity of cloud computing ordinarily envisages that IT operations for a company should have as many managers as possible. Numerous public cloud players have emerged to help different necessities “as-a-service,” from a simple virtual instance. “CloudOps” is an advancing term and pattern that endeavors to guarantee that the advantages of cloud-based frameworks can be very much protected without IT operations losing control.

Cloud operations management is a process that takes care of planning, managing, controlling, and eventually redesigning cloud operational processes. This includes the management of both software and hardware as well as network infrastructures to encourage a productive and lean cloud.

IT tasks, operations and strategies usually are manual, repetitive and unbending to assure that changes are controlled and perceived to forestall unplanned blackouts. Automation of IT processes and operations becomes as crucial as any environmental shift towards agile infrastructure where speed is viewed as everything. A situation like this is especially appropriate for cloud conditions where the framework is virtual and scalable, with users requesting instant access and full control of deployed services.

Numerous organizations’ IT teams have moved to the cloud incredibly, and they currently have a blend of cloud setups—regardless of whether they call it hybrid IT, hybrid cloud, or multicloud. The approaching X-factor is the way to deal with the resulting complexity. They’re prepared to set up standard working systems for long-term cloud operations.

Cloud operations and management can be perceived through different qualities like business process management, cloud infrastructure and capacity planning, infrastructure monitoring, performance monitoring, and incident management. Cloud tasks offer huge flexibility and fabulous options compared to traditional computing or storage options.

The cloud requires less hardware than customary computing structures which give more noteworthy flexibility and a lower cost. Proper planning of capacity prevents you from paying for assets that aren’t being utilized efficiently and saves you from pointless expenses. A cloud-based process management offers a wide range of groundbreaking capabilities within the company as well as stretches out to investors, customers and partners.

Since cloud systems are out of the direct actual control of operations teams, proper consideration should be taken by the way they do tasks. Often, the operations team is reliant upon the cloud supplier for all data, and the supplier plans and executes most platform-related fixes.

This absence of control really adds to the benefit of utilizing the public cloud. You turn over a large portion of the direct control to the public cloud supplier, which ordinarily includes giving up the tedious control of platforms down to the crude metal. In uncommon situations, it’s conceivable to keep up that control with some public cloud suppliers, however very few.

With continuous monitoring and regular updates, customers can accomplish a reduction in time with the assistance of observing and provisioning of the servers managed by the actual software. With regular monitoring, proactive and managed solutions are given to assess and expand the business objectives.

Continuous infrastructure monitoring defeats service disturbances like system outages, performance bottlenecks, and application failures, which are extremely hard to recognize in the n-level modern-day application stack. Incident Management gives a solid way to address SLA episodes by covering viewpoints to service runtime in the cloud with the assistance of monitoring and analysis of occasions that may not cause SLA breaches.

A report by the Cloud Industry Forum inferred that UK companies dedicate 19% of their IT budget plans to cloud framework, only in front of the 18% spent on-premises infrastructure, and that by 2022, only 12% of IT budget plans will be spent on legacy technology, as cloud utilization increments. Yet, conventional frameworks actually comprise the majority of systems that run businesses.

The productivity of cloud computing ordinarily envisages that IT operations for a company should have as many managers as possible. Numerous public cloud players have emerged to help different necessities “as-a-service,” from a simple virtual instance. “CloudOps” is an advancing term and pattern that endeavors to guarantee that the advantages of cloud-based frameworks can be very much protected without IT operations losing control.

Cloud operations management is a process that takes care of planning, managing, controlling, and eventually redesigning cloud operational processes. This includes the management of both software and hardware as well as network infrastructures to encourage a productive and lean cloud.

IT tasks, operations and strategies usually are manual, repetitive and unbending to assure that changes are controlled and perceived to forestall unplanned blackouts. Automation of IT processes and operations becomes as crucial as any environmental shift towards agile infrastructure where speed is viewed as everything. A situation like this is especially appropriate for cloud conditions where the framework is virtual and scalable, with users requesting instant access and full control of deployed services.

Numerous organizations’ IT teams have moved to the cloud incredibly, and they currently have a blend of cloud setups—regardless of whether they call it hybrid IT, hybrid cloud, or multicloud. The approaching X-factor is the way to deal with the resulting complexity. They’re prepared to set up standard working systems for long-term cloud operations.

Cloud operations and management can be perceived through different qualities like business process management, cloud infrastructure and capacity planning, infrastructure monitoring, performance monitoring, and incident management. Cloud tasks offer huge flexibility and fabulous options compared to traditional computing or storage options.

The cloud requires less hardware than customary computing structures which give more noteworthy flexibility and a lower cost. Proper planning of capacity prevents you from paying for assets that aren’t being utilized efficiently and saves you from pointless expenses. A cloud-based process management offers a wide range of groundbreaking capabilities within the company as well as stretches out to investors, customers and partners.

Since cloud systems are out of the direct actual control of operations teams, proper consideration should be taken by the way they do tasks. Often, the operations team is reliant upon the cloud supplier for all data, and the supplier plans and executes most platform-related fixes.

This absence of control really adds to the benefit of utilizing the public cloud. You turn over a large portion of the direct control to the public cloud supplier, which ordinarily includes giving up the tedious control of platforms down to the crude metal. In uncommon situations, it’s conceivable to keep up that control with some public cloud suppliers, however very few.

With continuous monitoring and regular updates, customers can accomplish a reduction in time with the assistance of observing and provisioning of the servers managed by the actual software. With regular monitoring, proactive and managed solutions are given to assess and expand the business objectives.

Continuous infrastructure monitoring defeats service disturbances like system outages, performance bottlenecks, and application failures, which are extremely hard to recognize in the n-level modern-day application stack. Incident Management gives a solid way to address SLA episodes by covering viewpoints to service runtime in the cloud with the assistance of monitoring and analysis of occasions that may not cause SLA breaches.

A report by the Cloud Industry Forum inferred that UK companies dedicate 19% of their IT budget plans to cloud framework, only in front of the 18% spent on-premises infrastructure, and that by 2022, only 12% of IT budget plans will be spent on legacy technology, as cloud utilization increments. Yet, conventional frameworks actually comprise the majority of systems that run businesses.

A widespread Google Cloud outage that took down multiple Google services, including YouTube and Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) and its Gmail service, on Monday morning is yet another sign that public cloud computing is not invincible, partners said.

“There are going to be outages and shutdowns for public cloud,” said Bob Venero, CEO of Holbrook, N.Y.-based solution provider Future Tech, No. 96 on the CRN 2020 SP500. “Corporations that rely solely on public cloud to function and run are putting their businesses at risk for loss of revenue, security vulnerabilities and unexpected losses in productivity. Public cloud is not invincible.”

In a statement, Google said at 6:47 a.m. EST, it experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue.

“Services requiring users to log in experienced high error rates during this period,” a Google spokesperson said. “The authentication system issue was resolved at (7:32 a.m. EST). All services are now restored. We apologize to everyone affected, and we will conduct a thorough follow-up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future.”

The Google Cloud outage follows a high-profile outage at Amazon Web Services last month that affected thousands of third-party online services and dozens of AWS services. It also comes after several Microsoft cloud outages on Sept. 28, Oct. 1 and Oct. 7.

“You can’t assume the public cloud is always going to run,” Venero said. “You really need to assume there are going to be outages. It is smart for businesses to protect themselves with a hybrid approach. Applications that are mission-critical to your organization’s growth and success must be on premises.”

Many Fortune 500 organizations are adopting an all-public cloud strategy that is “risky” to their companies and could ultimately result in a “loss of revenue and a blow to their credibility and stock price,” Venero said. “No one gets fired for moving to public cloud until there is an outage. There is always a scapegoat when there is a big outage.

Future Tech, for its part, expects outages to become more and more frequent as more companies adopt public cloud services. In fact, Future Tech urges its customers to carefully calculate the cost of outages when it adopts a public cloud solution, Venero said.

Venero echoed comments from Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell that on-premise solutions are more cost-effective 85 percent to 90 percent of the time.

“Dell Technologies has done a great job putting together great solutions that protect businesses with a hybrid approach that bursts out to the cloud,” Venero said. “A lot of businesses move to the public cloud because it is easy, and there is no capital expenditure. But, in the long term, it costs them more money. That has been proven time and time again. We had one large company that had an $11 million charge over-run in a single quarter because of egress fees associated with moving data back and forth for a development environment.”

The Google outage was first posted on the Google Apps status dashboard at 6:55 a.m. EST, impacting Google Gmail and all editions of Workspace, YouTube and even the Google Nest security service, said Allen Falcon, founder and CEO of Cumulus Global, a 14-year-old Westborough, Mass.-based cloud solution provider. He said it appeared YouTube, Nest, Workspace, Google Voice and Google Analytics were back up at 7:52 a.m. EST.

Falcon suspects 100 percent of his Google Cloud customers were affected by the outage but, because it started before 7 a.m., only 10 customers reported the problem to Cumulus Global. “It was a pretty quick response by Google to get it back up and running,” he said. “I’ll have to crunch the numbers to see if this puts customers over Google’s promised 99.9 percent SLA (service level agreement).”

Given the full range of Google services that went down, Falcon suspects the cause was an account authorization issue. “It looks like there was an inability to connect to services because of an account authorization issue with one Google account for all these services,” he said. “What is common across all these services impacted is the authorization account management structure. We are still trying to confirm that.”

The Google Workspace dashboard reported at 8:31 a.m. EST that Google Cloud was still investigating reports of problems with Gmail. “The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages, high latency and/or other unexpected behavior,” a dashboard post said.

At 8:56 a.m., Google Cloud reported that “the problem with Gmail should be resolved. “We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support,” the dashboard post said. “Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.”

Hybrid-cloud and multicloud make sense for midsize and enterprise customers, but most small businesses do not have the resources to run a hybrid cloud environment or to manage multiple clouds, according to Falcon.

“For small businesses, public cloud is still more secure, reliable and cost-effective than on-premise,” he said. “Large organizations can afford backups and generator systems to remain online. Most small businesses do not have the money to spend for battery backups and generators or multiple internet connections. That is something that is typical in midmarket and enterprise customers. The economics are different in SMBs because of resource availability.”

Public cloud usage is soaring in the wake of the global pandemic, which could be causing stress on public cloud, Falcon said. “Public cloud utilization is way up, so it is possible these cloud services may be hitting some of their capacity constraints,” he said.

VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) today announced that global market research firm Forrester has named VMware a leader in both The Forrester Wave„¢: Cloud Cost Management and Optimization (CCMO), Q4 20201 and The Forrester Wave„¢: Hybrid Cloud Management, Q4 20202.

Were honored to be a leader in both of these Forrester Wave reports, said Ajay Singh, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Management Business Unit, VMware. We believe it reflects our dedication to helping customers unlock the full potential of a transformative, multi-cloud strategy. Wherever customers are on their multi-cloud journey, VMware delivers management solutions that help them address their needs.

Named a Leader in Cloud Cost Management and Optimization with CloudHealth by VMware

CloudHealth is a leader in the Forrester Cloud Cost Management and Optimization Wave and received the highest score in each of the three main categories of the eight evaluated vendors. The report analyzes and scores the top eight providers helping infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals select the right solution for their needs. For vendors with CCMO offerings, according to the Forrester report, Container support, accurate billing, and cost optimization are key differentiators. The Forrester report further states, [CloudHealth by] VMware offers a leading platform for cloud-native and traditional enterprises.

The report notes, Reference customers gave high marks for CloudHealths customer support and openness to adding new features. They also appreciated the teams quarterly business review, which provides benchmark comparisons with other customers of similar size and cloud spend ¦ CloudHealth also includes visibility support for VMware [Cloud] on AWS, Oracle (beta), and [VMware] vSphere and other VMware Cloud Provider Program (VCPP) clouds, in addition to AWS, Azure, and GCP.

The report adds: VMwares success in the enterprise data center makes the CloudHealth offering attractive for existing VMware customers and partners. Since VMware acquired CloudHealth Technologies in 2018, CloudHealth has expanded its channel and partnerships, grown its integrations to enterprise software, and has more than 10,000 customers, including some of the largest cloud consumers in the world.

A Hybrid Cloud Management Leader with VMware vRealize Cloud Management

Demand for hybrid cloud management solutions continues to grow rapidly. Organizations seek to work with vendors offering comprehensive solutions that deliver key functionality including end user consumption, automated provisioning, performance, capacity, cost, and compliance management as well as unified monitoring and troubleshooting. As stated in the report, The Forrester Wave„¢: Hybrid Cloud Management, Q4 2020, VMware offers a leading platform that extends management from private to public¦[VMware vRealize Suites] focus is on providing app-aware multicloud management. The Forrester evaluation also states, Also notable is its code and experience consistency between its classic on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based offerings.

VMware vRealize cloud management offerings help customers consistently deploy and operate applications, infrastructure and platform services across hybrid clouds so that they can modernize IT, accelerate cloud adoption and assure developer productivity. VMware vRealize includes automation, operations, log analytics and network monitoring capabilities to provide consistent operations and governance for a hybrid cloud environment.

The VMware vRealize Suite combines vRealize Automation, vRealize Operations, vRealize Log Insight, and vRealize Lifecycle Manager in a single package for on-premises deployments. VMware vRealize Cloud Universal combines SaaS and on-premises capabilities into one flexible subscription that enables customers cloud-first initiatives, with the flexibility to deploy vRealize cloud management on-premises or SaaS as needed.

VMware software powers the worlds complex digital infrastructure. The companys cloud, app modernization, networking, security, and digital workspace offerings help customers deliver any application on any cloud across any device. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, VMware is committed to being a force for good, from its breakthrough technology innovations to its global impact. For more information, please visit

Operations support systems (OSS) and business support systems (BSS) are being rewritten or refactored to cloud-native, microservices-based applications capable of running on hybrid cloud and multicloud computing and storage infrastructure. As a part of its transition, Amdocs created Microservices360 (MS360), an end-to-end carrier-grade accelerated microservices development platform for its own new generation of products, called CES 20. CSPs can use it for co-development with Amdocs or their own development purposes, as it provides a full SDK for cloud-native code development and deployment. MS360 leverages the Red Hat OpenShift container platform deployable solution architecture to optimally run on carrier-grade Intel computing and storage technology.

Introduction

This article provides a summary of the webinar, jointly sponsored by Red Hat and Intel, titled “Realize your OSS/BSS modernization vision today: Accelerating microservices development.” We describe the current movement of OSS/BSS to a hybrid cloud infrastructure and describe how one leading vendor, Amdocs, maximized use of the Red Hat solution for OSS and BSS modernization. This solution for OSS and BSS, as well as containerized network functions (CNFs), runs optimally on CSP-tuned computing and storage technology by Intel.

OSS/BSS in the Clouds

Cloud-native software technology was created by the web-scale players using modern Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), DevOps development methodology, and Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) implementation techniques. These techniques were embodied in tool sets released to the open source community and represent the current state of the art in software. Vendors and CSPs have been executing pilot programs with these technologies and have proved them out for telecommunications use cases. They are now moving OSS and BSS systems to cloud native architecture through a combination of re-coding and refactoring.

Amdocs MS360: A Comprehensive Development Platform

As Amdocs prepared to move its products to cloud technology, creating the CES 20 cloud-native OSS/BSS suite, it decided to create an accelerated development platform for containerized microservices for its own use leveraging best practices and incorporating open source tools. Amdocs MS360 was the result. It provides an environment with intrinsic security for developers to use from design to deployment of their containerized or virtualized microservices on hybrid cloud infrastructures.

Red Hat OSS/BSS Modernization Solutions

For service providers, OSS and BSS are fundamental and crucial to innovate and compete in quickly changing markets. It’s no longer only about billing and operating three or four core services. Now operators are competing in a platform-based economy where innovation is created through partner ecosystems. As digital service providers seek competitive advantage, they need an open and consistent OSS/BSS foundation to build differentiated services with speed, open to an ecosystem that maximizes choice. Red Hat helps service providers and independent software vendors (ISVs) build and run cloud native OSS/BSS solutions on premise and on any cloud with higher efficiency and flexibility.

Intel

While creating cloud native solutions can be a challenging task, Intel has a history of rising to support similar industry transitions and has already invested in 5G cloudification and network transformation efforts in partnership with Red Hat. Intel was the founder and lead contributor to the Data Plane Development Kit, which just experienced it’s 10-year publishing anniversary, making NFV adoption by Communication Service Providers (CoSPs) possible. Most recently, Red Hat and Intel released a new Reference Implementation, optimized for Cloud-Native Hybrid/Multi-cloud and built using Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. It is designed to let CSPs and the industry eco-system quickly turn innovations into deployed VNFs/CNFs and transform OSS/BSS systems. This investment in thoroughly verified reference configurations provides a scalable, cost-efficient foundation to achieve deterministic performance for most demanding use cases as well as to lower design and integration risks.

Conclusion

The movement of CSPs’ OSS and BSS systems to the cloud and cloud-native technology is underway, helped strongly by companies such as Red Hat and Intel. Amdocs, a leading vendor, created its Microservices360 solution for its CES 20 BSS offerings, making maximum use of the Red Hat and Intel solutions for BSS and OSS modernization. CSPs can use this end-to-end carrier-grade accelerated microservices development environment for co-development and their own development purposes. The time is now for digital service providers to transition to cloud native OSS and BSS solutions to stay competitive, innovate and meet increasing customer expectations.

BCS previously ran a server room with six servers and enterprise storage, to support a full software stack required for three-tier applications. The migration to a Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure has meant it now runs a single cluster.

The application, hosted on VMware, includes a web development environment, SQL server database, telephony services, Linux servers and a test environment. The BCS also hosts a number of its web services on-premise, as well as its legacy customer relationship management (CRM) system.

During the migration, BCS plans to move more than 60 virtual machines (VMs) from VMware to the Nutanix AHV hypervisor and complete the virtualisation of its remaining physical servers. This will deliver scalability and savings in terms of hypervisor licensing.

Dugal Williams, a network engineer at BCS, took advantage of Nutanix’s professional training programme to prepare for the migration. Preparation involved a week of online training. Williams will be taking the Nutanix Certification Programme exam at the end of October.

According to Nutanix, the training is designed to provide IT staff with the skills and knowledge needed to successfully implement, manage, optimise and scale Nutanix multi-product software. It has recently been expanded with an “Associate” certification (NCA), which Nutanix said provides a foundational programme for building a career in multicloud technology.

The course covers the key differences between AHV and VMware and how to manage and implement server virtualisation using Nutanix tools. “You learn about the whole environment, from the operating system to the hypervisor,” said Williams.

The Nutanix tools simplify the process of migrating away from VMware. “The good thing about Nutanix is it has a move/extract tool that supports the VMware hypervisor. The migration tool takes a VMware virtual machine and moves it to the Nutanix AHV environment,” said Williams.

BCS is also using the Nutanix Prism dashboard, which enables his team to manage the health of the AHV environment.

BCS’s Dugal said the Nutanix Prism dashboard is user-friendly and provides a knowledge base to help IT administrators identify errors.

The migration to Nutanix is part of a planned relocation of the industry association’s Swindon headquarters. BCS is also using Nutanix Xi Leap to provide secure backup and disaster recovery (DR) via the Nutanix cloud, which eliminates the need to equip and manage a second DR installation.

The Nutanix software is being deployed on HPE Proliant DX Gen10 appliances. According to BCS, this will enable it to move forward with its digital transformation plans and, at the same time, replace end-of-life servers and storage networks with a single Nutanix cluster, saving valuable rack space while also reducing power and cooling costs.

“We originally planned to look into DR options once the move to the new offices and infrastructure migration were over,” said Williams. “However, when we found we could do it so quickly and simply with Xi Leap, and without having to buy or run additional hardware, it quickly became a no-brainer and something we could also use to help with the migration itself.”

Increased speed to market is one of the biggest benefits of adopting new cloud computing technology. For most companies this means increased return on investment; but when it comes to the healthcare industry, getting drugs to market fast is about more than driving profit. It’s about saving lives and improving life quality for those affected by disease.

Today, as COVID-19 holds the world in its grip, optimizing the research and development pipeline is more critical than ever. Healthcare technology has been a beneficiary of the pandemic as a switch to telehealth creates a groundswell of investment and research into ways to diagnose and treat patients virtually. But what about creating medicines or a vaccine for the virus?

GSK multiplies ‘science x technology x culture’ to improve the R&D pipeline
Multinational pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline PLC is one of the largest drug developers in the world. With an R&D approach that multiplies science, technology and culture together, GSK aims to “deliver better medicines to more patients, faster.”

“Here at GSK, we allow science to drive the technology. This helps us to build innovative products that helps our scientists to make better and faster additions throughout the drug discovery pipeline,” said Vishnu Chelle, engineering manager of DevOps engineering, at GlaxoSmithKline.

Speaking during a live session at Mirantis Launchpad 2020, Chelle discussed how GSK has leveraged Docker Enterprise to revolutionize its internal pipeline for scientific research and development.

The basis of GSK’s R&D is the company’s data platform, which provides a centralized resource for research information that can be accessed by scientific teams across the globe. Previous to 2015, the companies 10,000+ scientists worked in siloed teams with little ability to collaborate on research.

“There wasn’t really an ability to share that information across the R&D organization and to use the power of the aggregation of that information to make better decisions,” said Mark Ramsey, the R&D chief data and analytics officer responsible for building the platform.

Based on Docker Enterprise, now part of Mirantis Inc., the platform has undergone constant evolution since its inception four years ago. Originally known as the R&D information platform, or RDIP, it was developed to centralize, curate and rationalize R&D data in order to drive strategic business value, according to Chelle, who listed standardized clinical trials, genome-wide association study analysis, and processing of real-world evidence data as some of the first use-case examples.

“Now a new set of business levels are changing our landscape,” Chelle stated. “The R&D information platform is evolving to be a hybrid multicloud solution and is known as R&D data platform.”

GSK’s container journey started in late 2017, when the company started working with Docker Enterprise. The focus for the first year was testing, making sure the platform was stable before uploading data or applications. By 2019, GSK was uploading data and deploying applications in a production environment. At the same time, Kubernetes orchestration was added to the Docker Enterprise platform as the default orchestrator, and by the beginning of 2020 the company had migrated all its microservices onto the platform.

“We have made the container-first approach as an architecture standard across R&D tech in GSK,” Chelle stated. “Our goal was to make this platform agile [and] … work at scale.” One main goal was for R&D users to be able to consume the data and services available on the platform seamlessly in a self-service fashion.

“Docker Enterprise allows GSK to support a multitude of tools and technologies and interfaces so that scientists can run data analysis at scale,” stated Ranjith Raghunath, senior director and product director of data platform and data services (R&D Tech) at GlaxoSmithKline, in a Mirantis case study examining GSK’s implementation of Docker Enterprise.
Edge Node On Demand brings agility to GSK data platform
One of the major accomplishments of the platform evolution was the creation of Edge Node On Demand for rapid prototyping and multi-cluster communication.

“Edge Node On Demand is a project where we spin up containers on demand effectively to provide an agile platform for the business,” Raghunath said.

That agility directly impacts the R&D pipeline, bringing tasks that previously would have taken from three to six months down to — in some cases — as little as a few minutes.

“We’ve seen that already happen, whether it be in clinical trials with digital devices, or the secondary use of data and clinical trials to better predict patient populations, or the precision medicine initiative, or genetics or genomics. All of this plays a factor,” Raghunath said. “Technology can enable us to get to the next horizon quickly.”

Thanks to the Docker Enterprise platform, GSK has not only created an easily accessible database for global scientific collaboration, but has hit the big data goal of “more, better, faster, cheaper” when it comes to delivering critical medicines to those who need them.

“By making Docker image as an immutable artifact in our build process, we are now able to deploy our apps or models in any container or Kubernetes based platform, either in on-prem or in a public cloud,” Chelle stated. “By migrating all our web services into containers, we not only achieve horizontal scalability for those specific services, but also save more than 50% in support costs for the applications which we have migrated.”

The Hybrid Cloud Reality

Despite more than a decade of rapid growth by hyperscale public cloud providers — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud — the majority of enterprise workloads still run in on-premises datacenters. Security requirements, compliance mandates, data gravity, and sheer organizational inertia mean that legacy infrastructure is not disappearing any time soon.

According to Brian Gracely, speaking to The Next Platform, roughly 80 percent of enterprise workloads and 80 percent of enterprise IT spending remained behind the firewall at the time of publication, with the remaining 20 percent running in the public cloud. That breakdown is shifting, but gradually — and it is why hybrid cloud and multicloud strategies have moved from aspiration to operational reality for most large organizations.

The trend line is clear: public cloud datacenters now account for more than a third of the total datacenter hardware and software market, and enterprises are becoming more comfortable moving even mission-critical workloads — ERP systems, SAP environments, financial applications — into the cloud. Meanwhile, offerings like AWS Outposts, Microsoft Azure Stack, and Google Anthos reflect public cloud providers extending their platforms into enterprise datacenters, blurring the on-premises/cloud boundary further.

Red Hat’s Hybrid Cloud Bet

Red Hat, acquired by IBM in 2019 for approximately $34 billion, has built its modern product strategy around the open hybrid cloud model. The core idea is straightforward: enterprises need consistent tooling — for security, developer workflows, operational management — regardless of where their workloads actually run. That consistency is the problem OpenShift is designed to solve.

“Everything that we announce — at least that’s not just about Red Hat Linux — tends to be in that open hybrid cloud framework. If you look at the high-level things when IBM acquired us, that was really their mantra as well. They believe the world is in early stages of overall cloud adoption. They believe in hybrid cloud and they want Red Hat to help them drive that vision.”

Brian Gracely, Senior Director of Product Strategy, Red Hat OpenShift

OpenShift: Enterprise Kubernetes at Scale

OpenShift is Red Hat’s enterprise-grade container and Kubernetes platform. Originally released approximately five years before this article’s publication date (around 2015), OpenShift ships on a release cadence of roughly every three to four months. It builds on upstream Kubernetes — the container orchestration system originally developed inside Google and later donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) — and layers on enterprise features including integrated CI/CD tooling, role-based access control, multi-tenancy, and operator-driven lifecycle management.

At the time of publication, Red Hat reported that its OpenShift customer base had grown from approximately 1,000 to more than 1,700 customers, with strong adoption among Fortune 2000 companies. Notable examples cited by Gracely included:

• BMW — using OpenShift for workloads related to autonomous vehicle development and simulation.
• Ford — using OpenShift to enable internal IT teams to deliver AI and analytics capabilities as a service.

OpenShift 4.4: What Changed

Announced at Red Hat Summit 2020 (held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic), OpenShift 4.4 was built on Kubernetes 1.17. The release focused on three areas relevant to hybrid cloud operations:

• Improved developer observability — better built-in tooling for monitoring platform health and application workload performance.
• Cost and resource management — visibility into resource consumption across hybrid cloud environments, helping teams track and optimize spending at the application level.
• Edge readiness — continued investment in supporting deployments that stretch from traditional datacenters to public cloud regions and out to edge locations.

Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes

One of the more operationally significant announcements at the same Summit was Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management (ACM) for Kubernetes, released initially as a Technology Preview. ACM addresses a real and growing pain point: enterprises running Kubernetes at scale often operate dozens — sometimes hundreds — of separate clusters spread across on-premises infrastructure and multiple public clouds. Managing these clusters individually does not scale.

ACM provides a centralized control plane for cluster lifecycle management. Key capabilities include:

• Multi-cluster visibility — a single pane of glass for the state of all clusters, regardless of where they run.
• Policy-based governance — define security and compliance policies once and propagate them across all clusters. For example, a financial services organization can apply regulatory policies to every cluster in its fleet from a single configuration.
• Application lifecycle management — deploy and update applications across multiple clusters without per-cluster manual intervention.
• Scale — designed to manage thousands of clusters spanning on-premises datacenters and public cloud providers.

“That gives us a really scalable management technology to manage thousands of clusters no matter where they run. It reduces a ton of complexity for customers. It allows them to do kind of central policy management across clusters. So if you want to apply your financial services regulatory policy, you can deploy that across all of them.”

Brian Gracely, Red Hat

Unified VM and Container Management via KubeVirt

Perhaps the most architecturally interesting announcement was OpenShift’s expanded support for running virtual machines (VMs) alongside containers and serverless workloads — all within a single Kubernetes-based platform. This capability, available as a Technology Preview at the time, is built on the KubeVirt open-source project, which allows VM workloads to be defined, scheduled, and managed using standard Kubernetes APIs.

The practical implications matter for enterprise operations:

• Fewer management platforms — organizations currently maintaining separate platforms for VMs (VMware vSphere, for example) and containers can consolidate onto a single OpenShift environment.
• Reduced licensing costs — replacing proprietary hypervisor licensing with open-source virtualization can reduce infrastructure costs for eligible workloads.
• Developer self-service for VMs — historically, requesting a VM meant opening a ticket with an infrastructure team and waiting days or weeks. With KubeVirt integration in OpenShift, developers can request VMs through the same self-service workflows they use for containers, dramatically reducing provisioning friction.
• Support for legacy software — not everything can be containerized. Some packaged enterprise software is only supported by vendors when running inside a VM. Unified management means those workloads don’t require a separate operational silo.

“What this does is brings virtual machines into a completely self-service mode for developers. The same way that they said, ‘Give me access to containers and Kubernetes resources,’ if part of that application requires something that’s a virtual machine, they now just do a self-service request. It has the potential to take a lot of friction for developers that have a mix of new parts of an application along with some existing parts of an application.”

Brian Gracely, Red Hat

Key Takeaways for DevOps and Platform Teams

The direction Red Hat is taking with OpenShift reflects broader industry realities that platform engineers and DevOps practitioners need to account for:

• Hybrid cloud is the operational default, not a transition state. Design for workloads running in multiple locations from day one.
• Kubernetes cluster sprawl is a real management burden. Multi-cluster management tooling (ACM or equivalent) should be part of any serious Kubernetes platform strategy.
• VMs are not going away. Platforms that can manage both containers and VMs coherently will reduce operational complexity more than platforms that force an all-or-nothing migration.
• Policy-as-code at scale is becoming a first-class requirement, particularly in regulated industries. Centralized governance that propagates to distributed clusters is essential for compliance.
• Developer experience matters at the infrastructure level. Reducing VM provisioning from weeks to minutes through self-service has real productivity impact.

Note: This article reflects the state of OpenShift and the broader hybrid cloud market as of April 2020. Specific product features, customer counts, and market figures may have changed substantially since publication. Consult the Red Hat OpenShift product page for current capabilities.

Overview: What Changed in NSX-T 3.0

VMware released NSX-T 3.0, a significant update to its flagship software-defined networking platform, delivering more than 100 new features focused on scalability, security, and multi-cloud management. The release targets enterprises running hybrid and multi-cloud workloads across private data centers, public clouds, and Kubernetes environments.

NSX-T is the foundation of VMware’s Virtual Cloud Networking (VCN) architecture — the company’s overarching framework for delivering consistent network connectivity and security policy from the data center, across the WAN, and into multi-cloud deployments. NSX-T supports bare-metal workloads, multi-vendor hypervisors, and integrates with major public clouds including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud, as well as leading Kubernetes container platforms.

NSX Federation: Managing Multiple Virtual Networks as One

One of the most significant additions in NSX-T 3.0 is NSX Federation, which lets organizations manage multiple geographically distributed virtual networks as a single unified entity. This capability addresses a key operational challenge in large enterprise environments: maintaining consistent network configuration, policy, and security controls across many sites.

• Fault-tolerant zones: NSX Federation allows administrators to define fault-isolation domains, containing network problems within a single zone and preventing them from cascading across the environment.
• Global policy synchronization: Configuration and security policies can be authored once and propagated consistently across all federated locations.
• Workload mobility: Security policies attach to workloads and travel with them during failover or migration between sites, ensuring compliance is never lost during movement.

“NSX Federation will provide a means of implementing fault-isolation domains and global policies synchronized across all locations. This is all about making NSX useful across a heterogeneous, hybrid, multicloud landscape.”

— Brad Casemore, IDC Research Vice President, Data Center Networks

Enhanced Security: Distributed IDS/IPS and URL Analysis

NSX-T 3.0 significantly upgrades the platform’s built-in security capabilities, extending the Service-defined Firewall with two notable enhancements:

NSX Distributed IDS/IPS

VMware introduced a distributed intrusion detection and prevention system (IDS/IPS) purpose-built for detecting lateral threat movement on east-west traffic across multi-cloud environments. Rather than routing traffic through a centralized hardware appliance — a traditional architecture that creates bottlenecks — NSX Distributed IDS/IPS pushes threat analysis out to every individual workload. It curates which threat signatures each engine evaluates based on precise knowledge of the applications running at that workload, reducing noise and improving detection accuracy.

URL Classification and Reputation Analysis

The NSX Edge Firewall gains URL Analysis for classifying and assessing the reputation of inbound and outbound URLs at the data center perimeter. This gives security teams granular visibility into external-facing traffic without requiring separate dedicated appliances.

Kubernetes and vSphere 7.0 Integration

NSX-T 3.0 extends L2–L7 container networking services to several newly released VMware platforms, reflecting the company’s broader push to unify VM and container workloads:

• VMware vSphere 7.0 with Kubernetes: By embedding Kubernetes directly into the vSphere control plane, VMware allows customers to run container and VM workloads on a single hypervisor. NSX-T provides the underlying networking fabric for this converged environment.
• VMware Cloud Foundation 4: NSX-T serves as the network layer for Cloud Foundation 4, VMware’s integrated private cloud stack.
• VMware Tanzu portfolio: NSX-T provides networking support for Tanzu, VMware’s suite of products for building, running, and managing Kubernetes-based applications.
• Non-VMware Kubernetes platforms: NSX-T 3.0 extends networking services to third-party Kubernetes environments, addressing heterogeneous infrastructure deployments.

vRealize Network Insight 5.2: Visibility and Analytics

Alongside NSX-T 3.0, VMware announced VMware vRealize Network Insight (vRNI) 5.2, its network observability and analytics platform. Key additions include:

• Flow-Based Application Discovery: Machine learning automatically groups virtual machines into applications and service tiers, giving operators a clearer picture of real traffic patterns and application dependencies without manual mapping.
• AWS Direct Connect visibility: End-to-end network path tracing now extends from on-premises VMs through VMware Cloud on AWS, including the AWS Direct Connect segment — valuable for troubleshooting hybrid connectivity.
• VMware SD-WAN (VeloCloud) statistics: Additional visibility into SD-WAN application and business policy performance metrics.
• Enhanced Kubernetes visibility: Better observability into container network traffic patterns.
• NSX-T 3.0 support: Full integration with the new NSX-T release to correlate network and security events across the overlay.

Deeper Microsoft Azure Integration

VMware also announced expanded integration with Microsoft Azure, including support for Azure Edge Zones and Azure Private Edge Zones. These integrations allow customers to deploy and run virtual network functions — including VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud — across Azure regions and on-premises Azure Edge Zone deployments, extending the reach of VMware’s networking stack further into Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure.

Market Context

At the time of the release, VMware reported that its Virtual Cloud Network customer base exceeded 15,000 organizations, including 89 of the Fortune 100 and eight of the top 10 global telecommunications providers. Tom Gillis, VMware’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of Networking and Security, stated that the VCN portfolio had grown approximately 50% each fiscal year since its introduction in May 2018.

“The driving idea enabled through NSX and the Virtual Cloud Network is to let customers have a public cloud experience and efficiencies on-premise, removing the inefficient IT ticket requests and long waits for networking and security changes.”

— Tom Gillis, SVP and GM, VMware Networking and Security

VMware also cited internal data claiming customers could experience up to a 59% reduction in capital expenditures and a 55% reduction in operational expenditures compared to traditional networking solutions when adopting VCN — figures worth validating independently against your own infrastructure costs.

Availability

VMware stated that NSX-T 3.0 was available immediately at the time of announcement (April 2020). VMware vRealize Network Insight 5.2 was expected to ship in Q1 of VMware’s FY21, which ended May 1, 2020.

Note: This article covers a product release from April 2020. Readers evaluating VMware NSX should consult current VMware documentation and release notes for the latest capabilities and supported platforms.

It’s taken just a couple of decades for humanity to develop a digital reflex. The consulting of connected devices has become second nature, and software applications are now the primary interface between a business and its customers. This means app performance has become business-critical. Customers demand speed, accuracy and accessibility. And apps are the primary source of the digital era’s most precious resource — data.

When apps don’t work, customers go elsewhere. Fast. And when customers move to a competitor’s app, that competitor gains their data value, as well as their business.

“We know, from our app retention index, that 50% of users are willing to pay more for a competitor’s product if it performs and gives them a better experience,” said Danny Winokur, general manager at AppDynamics, a Cisco company.

Even worse, 63% of users in AppDynamics’ app-retention index not only drop the app, but tell everyone else to drop it as well. And these days, it doesn’t take many influencers spreading bad reviews on social media to affect a company’s brand reputation.

Keep an eye on your apps

AppDynamics was founded in 2008 to provide digital companies with a way to monitor and optimize their real-time business performance. Its Application Intelligence Platform was unique, in that it used digital agents and bots to track the source of slow-downs across the entire application ecosystem.

The company received several successful rounds of filing, and by 2017 it had an established product portfolio underpinned by the enhanced Application Intelligence Platform. Its strategy was simple: “Applications are really becoming the foundation of the modern business, and understanding the performance of those applications, the users, the application, the business metrics themselves is critical, as this really signifies the brand for most companies,” said Thomas Wyatt, chief product officer at People.ai and previous chief strategy officer at AppDynamics.

Hopes for a rebirth in tech initial public offerings were kindled when AppDynamics filed for an IPO in 2017. Then, just one day before its market debut, Cisco Systems Inc. acquired the company at a massive $3.7 billion price tag. This was more than twice what it had been estimated to gain from its IPO. The surprise switch even had some wondering if AppDynamics had pulled a “classic M&A fake” to lure potential buyers.

It was a bold move. Cisco is known for its aggressive acquisitions policy, but at the time, the company was undergoing an internal restructuring as it prepared to take on the cloud market. Rowan Trollope, then senior vice president and general manager of internet of things and Applications at Cisco justified the strategy, saying, “We acquired AppDynamics because they are a market leader in a category that will be a cornerstone for how enterprises drive their business forward, Together, AppDynamics and Cisco will be the only company that can deliver complete visibility spanning from the infrastructure to application to end user.”

Application performance management is a growing market … and so is cloud computing
The prediction was sound. In the year after Cisco purchased AppDynamics, the Application Performance Management Software Market grew 13.4% to annual revenue of $4.3 billion. From $4.3 billion in 2018, the market grew to $5.8 billion in 2019. In addition, research firm Mordor Intelligence predicts the market will continue to grow at 12% CAGR from 2020 to 2026 to a value of $11.43 billion.

But more important than a financial investment, AppDynamics has proved to be central to Cisco’s play in the complex market of hybrid and multicloud.

The company seems to have an uncanny knack for making purchases that chart the course of enterprise computing. Competing with the cloud-native tech giants has caused many traditional tech companies to struggle, and Cisco is no different. As software increasingly replaces traditional hardware, Cisco has expanded its portfolio in a way that supports its position as a leader in infrastructure while moving toward software-centric solutions.

The AppDynamics purchase was a ground-floor investment that cemented the company’s commitment to cloud-native architecture. Since then, Cisco has purchased companies with a view to combining their cloud-native savvy with its existing expertise. Some examples are software-defined networking startup Viptela Inc. and hyperconverged infrastructure vendors Springpath Inc. and Skyport Systems Inc.

Cisco’s cloudification

With compute all but virtualized, cloud is moving to the next level in its quest to turn traditional hardware software-centric: Network virtualization.

“The public cloud itself now has become such a super-compute system that it’s like a massive computer. And, of course, a massive computer has massive networking,” said Saar Gillai, independent board director and chief executive officer adviser and former senior executive at Cisco Systems Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.

With edge computing, 5G, and WiFi 6 due to debut in 2020, next-generation networks hold the promise of fulfilling the potential of the internet of things.

“Traditional networking companies such as Cisco are hoping their strength in data centers and corporate networks along with newly developed and acquired 5G and other edge technologies can help them remain a mainstay in enterprises as they rethink their networks,” stated Wikibon’s Paul Gillin in a special report on NextGen Networks for SiliconANGLE.

Once again, AppDynamics is helping Cisco join the dots. Over the past three years, Cisco has been integrating AppDynamic’s technology throughout its portfolio.

“The whole point now is about multidomain and actually connecting the different layers of the technology stack to produce insights,” said Winokur. “The winners in an experience-driven world are those that can implement with velocity, not break things, and deliver well-designed, beautiful experiences.”

Cisco guides AppDynamics’s strategy from performance monitoring to customer journey analysis
AppDynamics has made several key changes in its offerings over the past three years. And all have the common focus of supporting Cisco as it reboots for a hybrid and multicloud world.

Rather than focusing on monitoring performance at the application level, the platform has adapted to the needs of the digital business by providing common tools across the technology stack. “As changes in the market push [teams] to work together, they need common tooling and common data sets,” Winokur said.

As part of this shift, AppDynamics updated its platform to provide Kubernetes monitoring. Integrating the machine-learning technology of Cisco acquisition Perspica Inc. led to the creation of the Cognition Engine. And Experience Journey Maps provides end-to-end visibility into the customer journey as they navigate through an app.

Strategic acquisitions are the not-so-secret game plan that have kept Cisco relevant as other tech pioneers have fallen by the wayside. And AppDynamics is a lynchpin, keeping the company in a strong position to remain top of the heap as network joins compute in the virtualized world of cloud.

“This is about Cisco setting the table,” said John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during his opening day analysis of the 2020 Cisco Live EU event. “To me, the top story so far is that Cisco is not going to yield to the big cloud guys. They are, brick by brick, rebooting their products to be cloud-enabled for hybrid and then ultimately multicloud.”

The analogy is deliberate. Airline passengers adopt the brace position during an emergency landing—alert, braced for impact, hoping for the best. Enterprises in the middle of a digital transformation often feel exactly the same way: impressive momentum, but a real risk of a hard landing. Industry observers consistently note that a large proportion of digital transformation initiatives fall short of their goals, frequently due to cultural resistance, siloed teams, and an inability to scale software delivery at pace.

DevOps is one of the most effective tools available to enterprises trying to break out of that brace position. It does not just connect development and operations—it creates a shared operating model that spans the entire organisation, aligning delivery speed with business outcomes. Below are the five ways DevOps delivers that rescue.

1. Collaboration Across the Entire Enterprise

As enterprises scale, teams naturally fragment. Each group develops its own toolchain, its own vocabulary, and its own definition of success. The result is conflicting priorities, duplicated effort, and slow handoffs between teams that should be working in concert.

DevOps addresses this at the cultural level. While it is commonly described as a bridge between development and operations, its scope is broader: it brings together security, QA, product management, business stakeholders, and operations under shared objectives—primarily, delivering value to customers reliably and quickly.

Practical collaboration mechanisms include:

• Daily stand-ups and cross-functional sprint planning — keeping all stakeholders aligned on priorities and blockers.
• Shared project-tracking tools — a single source of truth for work in progress, regardless of team.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) — perhaps the clearest example of forced collaboration. When developers write and own infrastructure definitions (using tools such as Terraform or Ansible), they develop a working understanding of network topology, server configuration, and environment parity. Operations engineers, in turn, review application code and participate in testing. The traditional handoff disappears.

This shared ownership model means that digital channel performance becomes everyone’s responsibility, not a problem that gets thrown over the wall when something breaks.

2. Agility: Responding to Change Without Chaos

Collaboration naturally produces agility—the capacity to absorb requirement changes, pivot direction, and continue delivering without everything falling apart.

In a traditional, non-DevOps delivery model, a late requirement change typically triggers a cascading set of rework across disconnected pipelines. In a DevOps model, integrated CI/CD pipelines mean that a change in requirements results in a new build, a new round of automated tests, and a deployment to the appropriate environment—often with minimal manual intervention.

Three specific agility capabilities that DevOps enables for enterprises:

1. Delivering new solutions — continuous integration and delivery pipelines allow teams to ship features incrementally rather than waiting for large, risky releases.
2. Running and evolving infrastructure alongside solutions — IaC and cloud-native tooling let teams provision, modify, and tear down infrastructure as part of the same workflow as application delivery.
3. Managing midcourse corrections — standardised communication practices (common language, shared processes, agreed toolchains) mean that when priorities shift, teams can recalibrate without lengthy re-negotiation.

Planning boards that are visible to both product owners and business stakeholders help teams prioritise features by impact and manage dependencies—eliminating the guesswork that slows agile execution at scale.

3. Speed of Delivery: Reducing Lead Time to Market

For a digitally transforming enterprise, speed of delivery is a competitive differentiator. Lead time—the elapsed time from a code commit to a production deployment—is one of the most closely watched metrics in DevOps performance research.

Research from Puppet Labs’ annual State of DevOps Reports (published mid-2010s) consistently showed that high-performing IT organisations achieved dramatically shorter lead times than their low-performing counterparts. Importantly, as low-performing organisations adopted DevOps practices, the gap between cohorts changed over time—not because high performers slowed down, but because the broader population improved. This is a healthy signal: DevOps practices genuinely raise the floor for software delivery performance across the industry.

To improve delivery speed, enterprises should build out a complete CI/CD pipeline covering:

• Planning and backlog management — Jira, Azure DevOps, Linear, or equivalent.
• Source code management — Git-based repositories (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket).
• Continuous integration — automated build and test on every commit (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, CircleCI, etc.).
• Continuous delivery and release management — automated promotion through environments with approval gates where needed.
• Infrastructure as Code — reproducible environment definitions that eliminate the “works on my machine” problem.

Once a pipeline is in place, teams should benchmark their current lead time and deployment frequency against industry baselines (such as those published in the DORA State of DevOps research) and against their own historical performance. The diagnostic exercise reliably surfaces bottlenecks in integration, test coverage, or deployment approval processes.

4. Reliability: Quality at Speed

Speed without reliability is just a faster way to break things. The classic waterfall argument—that testing at the end of the cycle ensures quality—fails at scale because it concentrates risk into a single, high-stakes event. If defects are found late, timelines slip and the brace position tightens.

DevOps distributes quality assurance throughout the delivery cycle rather than concentrating it at the end. Key practices include:

• Version control for everything — application code, infrastructure definitions, configuration, and scripts. This creates an auditable history and enables safe rollbacks.
• Standardised technology stacks and source code repositories — reducing variance in how software is built and tested, which directly improves repeatability.
• Automated test gates in the CI pipeline — every commit triggers unit tests, integration tests, and functional tests. Builds that fail quality gates are blocked from progressing to the next environment.
• Minimum acceptance criteria — teams agree in advance what “good enough to proceed” looks like, removing subjective judgement from the promotion decision.

This approach does not eliminate defects, but it catches them at the cheapest possible point in the cycle—immediately after the code is written, when the context is fresh and the fix is fastest.

5. Mean Time to Recover (MTTR): Failing Safely and Recovering Fast

Even the best-run DevOps organisations experience outages. The goal is not to achieve zero downtime—it is to recover from failure so quickly that the customer impact is minimal. This is measured as Mean Time to Recover (MTTR): the elapsed time between a system failure and full restoration of service.

High MTTR is often a symptom of manual, error-prone recovery processes and brittle, single-cloud or on-premises infrastructure. DevOps addresses this through:

• Automation of recovery procedures — runbooks codified as scripts or IaC templates that can be executed consistently and quickly under pressure.
• Hybrid and multicloud strategies — distributing workloads across cloud providers or regions so that a failure in one zone does not bring down the entire application.
• IaC-driven infrastructure replacement — rather than diagnosing and repairing a failed server, teams can destroy and redeploy it from a known-good definition in minutes.
• Observability and alerting — monitoring that detects failure early and routes alerts to the right people immediately, compressing the detection-to-response window.

Reducing MTTR is one of the four key metrics tracked in DORA research alongside deployment frequency, lead time for changes, and change failure rate. Organisations that invest in reducing MTTR consistently improve across the other three metrics as well—recovery discipline and delivery discipline reinforce each other.

Conclusion: DevOps as the Landing Gear for Digital Transformation

Enterprises in the digital transformation brace position are not doomed to crash. But surviving the turbulence requires more than good intentions and a digital strategy document. It requires a coherent operating model that connects teams, accelerates delivery, maintains quality, and recovers gracefully from failure.

DevOps provides that operating model. Collaboration breaks down silos. Agility absorbs change. Speed shortens time to market. Reliability distributes quality assurance. And fast MTTR ensures that when something does go wrong, it goes wrong briefly.

Enterprises that are stalling on their digital transformation journey should audit each of these five dimensions against their current practices. The gaps that surface are the specific areas where DevOps investment will deliver the greatest return—and provide the smoothest possible landing in the digital space.