By Jeff Smith >>

DIGITALISATION is changing everything, ushering in new business models, new economic realities, and a whirlwind pace of innovation that makes even quarterly planning cycles seem slow-footed.

Some enterprises have responded to this maelstrom of competition by going all-in on public cloud, lured by such features as pay-per-use, high resiliency, and self-service.

Many chief financial officers (CFOs) soon experienced cloud sticker shock, however, with cloud computing expenditures consuming close to a third of the company’s IT budget. 

The majority of enterprises still use on-premises infrastructure, preferring to stick with traditional three-tier infrastructures – such as Storage Area Networks (SAN) with dedicated ‘storage, compute and network' – due to concerns about control, data privacy, service level agreements, and, above all, risk.

However, the moment that gave rise to three-tier infrastructures has passed. In this new era of digital transformation, legacy infrastructure optimised for legacy applications actually increases risk – competitive, budgetary, and financial.
A true enterprise cloud – hyper-converged, on-premises, and hybrid – not only offers security, reliability, and flexibility, it accelerates innovation while significantly reducing risk.

COMPETITIVE RISKS

The speed and magnitude of digital disruption is occurring at an unprecedented scale, making rapid time-to-market and agility in the face of changing market conditions more urgent than ever.

Examples abound of well-established companies undone, seemingly out of nowhere, by insurgent upstarts employing digital technologies to redefine the rules of engagement, both for customers and competitors.

But even as digital disruption introduces new levels of volatility, it also enables first and early movers to quickly dominate their markets, putting relatively slow movers at a striking disadvantage.

“Wait and see,” once a prudent risk-management approach to innovation, now risks making companies irrelevant.

Many companies now speed up innovation by experimenting with a portfolio of product options: fail-fast, learn, and then, like venture capitalists, direct more resources toward getting the winners to market while de-funding the losers.

This process demands an agile infrastructure, one that deploys resources in minutes, rather than days, and that offers deployment optionality, enabling developers to choose the right hardware, hyper-visor, runtime, or cloud for the application at that moment. And, when conditions inevitably change, they need an infrastructure that lets them seamlessly move the applications to the new optimal location.

BUDGETARY RISKS

The procurement process for traditional infrastructures thwarts optionality, and competitiveness, by requiring companies to make a big, risky investment up front, based on forecasting demand and requirements from three to five years in advance, across a very diverse set of components.

Once the company has made this investment, it is effectively tethered to a specific vendor. Getting some return on the sunk cost of the investment takes precedence over using the most optimal deployment and configuration options, which help you grow your business.

Business cycles are shorter and less predictable, and competitors are more nimble.

Enterprise clouds, such as those from Nutanix, Dell EMC, Lenovo, and IBM, provide bite-size consumption and incremental investment, as little as a server at a time, enabling companies to change direction on demand and make purchasing decisions in a fraction of the time.

FINANCIAL RISKS

One of the key objectives of digital transformation is removing complexity from all points in the value chain, as complexity invariably increases risk.

Traditional infrastructures are highly complex, with one system layered upon the next, and each adding to the cumulative risk of service failure and cascading business costs from lost revenue, lower productivity, and damaged reputation.

Complexity permeates routine maintenance as well, such as upgrades and security patches, which devolve into costly, weeks-long ordeals, involving multiple teams, weekends, and pulling systems offline.

Many mission-critical systems can never go offline, which is why some companies choose to go years without ever upgrading or installing security patches. The needless complexity of legacy infrastructures thus locks companies into the myriad shortcomings, inefficiencies, and risks of outdated applications.

True enterprise clouds mirror the imperatives of digitalisation, eliminating complexity and risk by design.

Software-defined and self-healing, they suffer 97 percent fewer outages and enable features such as one-click rolling upgrades that can take place in the middle of a workday, without interruption to your service or your business.

WHAT CAN HAPPEN WHEN YOU DECREASE RISK?

One of our customers, a large insurance provider in Japan, now launches its new insurance offerings in one-third of the time at one-third of the cost incurred with their previous infrastructure.

Their enterprise cloud has helped the company become both more agile and innovative.

Another customer, a large New Zealand university, illustrates how enterprise cloud reduces budgetary and financial risk.

The university needed to modernise its student management system, but had no precise estimate of the amount of resources they would need over time.

So they started with a small deployment, and as the project expanded, they simply added servers, including mixing different configurations and generations of appliances, keeping up with demand from the development team and the load on the system.

As the deployment grew, they also retired some of the older appliances. The management simplicity and stability of their cloud allowed them to remove these systems during business hours while the student management system was in use.

Their enterprise cloud eliminated both the risk of making a massive IT investment based on guesswork and the risk and expense of system downtime.

While traditional infrastructures may appear less risky, their familiarity masks a whole host of risks, from disabling technical debts, to stymied innovation, to reduced competitiveness.

My advice is to make sure that your enterprise has an infrastructure designed for the digital era.

Be the disruptor, not the disrupted.

www.nutanix.com

Jeff Smith is a senior director of systems engineering across the Asia-Pacific region for enterprise cloud services company Nutanix. He helps businesses to answer the key question: How should we rethink risk and infrastructure in the era of digital disruption?

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NEW Federal Government investments in resources projects for the Bowen Basin will strengthen the region’s role as Australia’s premier mining technology hub.

That is the view Queensland Resources Council (QRC) chief executive Ian Macfarlane, who welcomed the Turnbull Government’s $500,000 investments in four projects under the METS Ignited Growth Centre Bowen Basin Cluster program.  

Combined with industry contributions, the total value of the projects is more than $1.1 million, according to the QRC.

“Mining technology is an area in which Australia is truly a world leader,” Mr Macfarlane said. “Mackay is an ideal location to invest in new projects that will maintain our international competitiveness, given its proximity to our high quality coal fields and the concentration of industry expertise.

“It’s particularly good news that one of the investments will be in an underground simulator that can get people job-ready faster so they can take advantage of the great careers in the resources sector.

“The world wants our resources, so we need the skilled workforce to make sure we can take advantage of the booming global demand.

“There are more than 1400 jobs currently on offer in the Queensland resources industry, and more than 500 of those are in the Mackay region.

“Under the Growth Centres model, Australian Government funding is matched by industry investments. It’s great to see such a strong show of confidence in the resources sector and its long-term future. The resources industry is here to stay,” Mr Macfarlane said. 

“It’s been a stellar week for Mackay, hosting the Queensland Mining Awards, a bumper Queensland Mining and Engineering Exhibition, and the announcement from the Palaszczuk Government of progress on establishing the $3.6 million Mackay Resources Centre of Excellence.

“The QRC congratulates the Mackay-based Resource Industry Network (RIN) on its role in helping secure these investments. The QRC looks forward to working with RIN and both the Federal and State Governments to make full use of Mackay’s mining strengths, and most importantly create more jobs.”

Mr Macfarlane said the resources sector contributed more than $1 billion in wages alone for the Mackay region, with a further $2.5 billion spent on local products and local community investments.

www.qrc.org.au

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MANADATORY breach notification legislation came into effect in Australia on February 22 – yet most business leaders seem to be unaware of its organisation-wide ramifications.

Recent research by Kaspersky Lab internationally revealed only 12 percent of employees know or understand their information security policy – and Australian ICT security group Aleron’s experience shows the situation may be even more acute in Australian businesses. In Australia, the main targets for cybercriminals using phishing scams, now, are C-suite executives and business leaders.

“When 88 percent of an organisation doesn’t even know what’s required of them to help keep the business secure, this indicates a significant problem,” Aleron director Alex Morkos said. 

“Even more worrisome, around a quarter of employees surveyed for the same report said they believe their organisation doesn’t even have any established security policies. This means either these organisations are trusting their continued ability to operate to luck, or their employees are simply unaware of what the organisations are doing to stay safe from cyberattacks.”

Mr Morkos said the most effective way for an organisation to comply with this new legislation was to ensure its security processes and tools were strong enough to prevent hackers from gaining unauthorised access to customers’ personal information.

“Since human error is a huge contributor to successful cyberattacks, this low level of awareness should prompt all Australian organisations to revisit their approach to the awareness of their security policies and communicate clearly to employees regarding what is expected of them,” he said.

“Employees have always been the top security risk factor in organisations. A business can have the most advanced security technology in place but if its employees don’t abide by security policies and processes, it will be easy for malicious hackers to get around the technology barriers.

“All it takes is for an employee to click on a suspicious link, provide their password to a third-party, or insert an infected USB stick into their laptop and the entire organisation could be compromised.”

Mr Morkos said cybercriminals were increasingly targeting top-level executives using social engineering schemes also known as phishing. These phishing attacks are becoming more sophisticated and hard to detect at first glance. 

For example, the CEO might receive an email that looks like it is from a reputable source, asking the CEO to re-enter their password. Once that’s done, the hacker now has all the credentials they need to enter the network and steal information, sabotage operations, or set the stage for a future attack.
 
High-ranking executives are major targets for cybercriminals because they are more likely to possess valuable information or have access to mission-critical systems and information. However, many C-level executives resist the suggestion that they need training and education to avoid such attacks. This can often be because they are busy with operational concerns or because they don’t believe they would fall victim to an attack.

“This is a risky approach because of the increasing frequency, prevalence, and sophistication of these attacks,” Mr Morkos said. “All senior business leaders must insist on receiving appropriate training to avoid the nightmare scenario of accidentally compromising their entire business.

“With the consequences of attacks being far-reaching and, potentially, expensive, security is no longer an IT-only concern. Rather, it’s now a boardroom issue that demands attention at the highest levels.

“Good corporate security culture starts from the top and trickles down. C-level executives and other business leaders must show their teams they are committed to security,” Mr Morkos said.

“They must then invest in ongoing education for themselves and their staffs to keep the organisation safe. This issue has never been more urgent as the threat landscape continues to expand and worsen. Companies must act now.”

www.aleron.com.au

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NUTANIX has launched its first software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering, Nutanix Beam, to help businesses control their ‘cloud’ spend, along with two other innovative products to boost security.

Nutanix Beam uses ‘deep visibility’ and analytics to help businesses control their cloud spend – an expense area that has caught many organisations off-guard.

The Beam SaaS system alerts businesses when they are wasting money and resources on services and applications that do not belong in the public cloud, preventing the shock of ‘runaway costs’.

With Australian public cloud spend predicted to hit $4.6 billion in 2018, according to analysts Gartner, keeping control of cloud costs and security is entering a new realm of governance. 

To deal with the evolving security challenges, Nutanix has also launched Nutanix Flow and Nutanix Era.

Flow is a software defined networking (SDN) service that provides app-centric security to protect against internal and external threats that are often not detected by traditional perimeter-based security products. Era is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) database management tool that automates database operations, freeing up staff time to concentrate on business development.

All these applications are being tested by selected customers and will be made available to Nutanix’s Australian clients, which currently include Queensland Metro North Hospital and Health Service and Queensland’s Fraser Coast Regional Council, in late 2018.

ON THE BEAM

Beam is based on Nutanix’s recently-acquired Minjar Botmetic service, which is already used to manage more than US$1 billion worth of cloud spend across Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

According to a report by Gartner researchers: “Achieving governance with cloud computing can be a daunting task. The nature of cloud services natively encourages users to go directly to the public cloud, resulting in cloud projects that IT may not even be aware exist.”

A Nutranix spokesperson said for businesses adopting hybrid cloud architectures, this creates an unenviable scenario – managing IT costs and security across third-party cloud deployments.

The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software aims to help companies reduce complexity of their multi-cloud architectures by melding private, public and distributed clouds into a common IT operating model for their end-to-end infrastructure.

Beam, the first SaaS offering from Nutanix, further reduces complexity by providing customers with deep visibility and rich analytics detailing how they are using the public cloud. It also provides one-click recommendations based on machine intelligence so IT teams can immediately optimise their cloud spend and enhance their security posture for improved compliance across clouds.

Beam helps give IT organisations a clear view into the entirety of their public cloud deployments so unexpected costs and potential security gaps can be addressed before they turn into business challenges. Beam helps organisations make better decisions when operating multi-cloud architectures.

“For us, integrity, security and compliance are of the utmost importance, especially across our multi-client, multi-technology environment with a large application landscape,” ZS Associates cloud solution architect manager Rustum Virani said.

“It was becoming a nightmare to keep track of everything. That’s when we came across Nutanix Beam.

“Beam is an excellent tool that provides single pane of glass to see the state of our infrastructure, automate tasks, provide cost-saving recommendations and also generate billing reports.”

Nutanix Beam customers better manage their multi-cloud deployments with:

• Cost optimisation and cloud visibility – IT teams get full visibility into their overall cloud costs. They can then optimise their spending by identifying unused and underutilised resources, and select more size and cost appropriate cloud resources for each application.
• Centralised financial governance – businesses get streamlined visibility into the entire cloud footprint so IT departments can track the consumption of cloud resources by department and group, make data-driven decisions balancing IT needs and cost constraints, and enforce policies based on allocated budgets.
• Continuous cloud security and regulatory compliance – customers can define custom health check policies for compliance audits, and proactively analyse cloud security operations, while real-time scans for cloud compliance identify risks and violations.

“In the multi-cloud era, IT organisations need a unified, real-time view of all of their private, public and distributed clouds,” Nutanix general manager for engineering, Vijay Rayapati said.

“Beam services help our customers optimise their cloud spend and manage compliance, putting them back in control of their IT assets.

“We’re so pleased to be a part of the Nutanix family and bring our ‘botmetric’ technology to Nutanix customers as Nutanix Beam.” 

ERA BOOSTS DATABASE LIFECYCLES

Nutanix announced the development of its PaaS offering, Era, at its recent .NEXT Conference in New Orleans.

Era is designed to to streamline and automate database operations so database administrators (DBAs) can focus on initiatives to drive business.

“Nutanix Era should save our organisation time and money by replacing our complex and costly copy data processes, which are impacting IT productivity and slowing down our app developers,” said Mark Maplethorpe, EMEA hosting manager at Nasdaq-listed Bottomline Technologies, whose Asia Pacific headquarters is in Sydney.

“We are actively working with Nutanix to validate that Era will streamline the provisioning and lifecycle management of our databases, allowing our teams to devote more time to strategic IT projects.”

Era extends the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software stack beyond core infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) capabilities for private cloud environments to platform-layer services that bring Nutanix one-click simplicity to database operations.

The initial release of Nutanix Era aims to provide rich copy data management services to address the increasing complexity and burdensome cost of managing multiple copies of databases across organisations.

With Era, Nutanix is targeting one of the most prodigious consumers of enterprise storage capacity. According to International Data Corporation (IDC), 60 percent of total storage capacity is dedicated to simply storing copies of data, with the total cost for copy data storage estimated to reach about US$55 billion by 2020.

Nutanix Era’s copy data management service will initially support Oracle and Postgres database engines, with planned support for other popular databases.

Building on Nutanix’s snapshot technology, Era will also incorporate new ‘time-machine’ capabilities, along with application-specific APIs, for creating point-in-time database copies. This enables application developers to quickly select the exact database copy they need, and empowers database administrators to restore or refresh any database instance with the confidence that every recorded transaction is captured.

Key capabilities of Nutanix Era include:

• One-click time machine – leveraging integrated Nutanix snapshot technology, Era creates space-efficient database snapshots to lower capital expenditure (CapEx) costs, and enable databases running on Nutanix to be cloned or recovered to any specific point in time – up to the last recorded transaction.
• One-click clone/refresh – Nutanix Era lowers OpEx costs with one-click clone/restore database operations that take just minutes to complete, and include all targeted database transactions. Automating database cloning eliminates the complex and time-consuming process of locating a specific snapshot, finding the right database logs and then initiating a database recovery operation.

Era plans to later extend this technology to include full database provisioning, delivering a lifecycle management solution for all databases in an organisation.

FLOW OFFERS ONE-CLICK SECURITY

Nutanix Flow was also presented at the .NEXT Conference in New Orleans.

Flow utilises Nutanix’s newly-acquired Netsil technology to add non-intrusive application visibility across multiple clouds.

Nutanix Flow is described as a ‘software-defined networking (SDN) solution built for the multi-cloud era’.

Flow capabilities are fully integrated into Nutanix’s Acropolis software for easy deployment and will be enhanced with real-time application visibility and discovery technology from the company’s recent acquisition of Netsil.

Nutranix senior director for product and engineering, based in San Francisco, Harjot Gill said Enterprise IT teams were turning to cloud-based infrastructure to deliver today’s modern business applications, many of which are built from discrete but interconnected services.  

He said protecting these applications requires the micro-segmentation capabilities of software like Nutanix Flow, which enforces app-centric policies that govern communications between individual application services. Nutanix will also leverage Netsil’s advanced stream processing, application discovery and mapping technology to simplify security policy definition for applications running in both public and private clouds.

Mr Gill said IT teams and business owners gained confidence that their business applications were protected from both internal and external security threats.

“The next frontier of networking is about providing customers with visibility into their networks so they can track and analyse data, improve cloud application performance and optimise their resources,” Mr Gill said.

“We have worked hard to integrate Netsil’s advanced functionality into Nutanix Flow and we’re proud our customers will soon be able to take advantage of the visibility and discovery technology we pioneered.”

Nutanix Flow is built into the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS, and now provides:

• Network visualisation – giving application owners an at-a-glance view of network performance and availability per application.
• Application-centric micro-segmentation – providing granular control and governance for all application traffic to protect sensitive workloads and data.
• Service insertion and chaining – integrating additional network functions from multiple Nutanix Ready ecosystem partners into a single networking policy.
• Network automation – streamlining and automating common network configuration changes, like VLAN configuration or load balancer policy modifications, based on application lifecycle events for VMs running on Nutanix AHV

To accelerate infrastructure innovation and agility, Gartner research recommends that infrastructure and operations leaders “make network automation, visualisation and optimisation capabilities an integral part of their selection process by prioritising vendors that provide an application-specific view of cluster performance”.

“Nutanix Flow completes Nutanix’s mission to make IT infrastructure invisible,” Nutranix chief product and development officer, Sunil Potti said.

“As we looked to simplify networking, we took a modern approach to enable visibility and control for both enterprise apps and next-generation cloud-native services. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS now converges the compute, storage, virtualisation and networking resources to power nearly any application, at any scale.”

Nutanix had more than 5000 people participate in its recent .NEXT Conference, including more than 35 customer speakers and more than 40 partner sponsors. Keynote addresses were delivered by industry leaders including Anthony Bourdain and renowned TED talk speaker Brené Brown; partners including Jason Lochhead, CTO for infrastructure at Cyxtera; customers including Vijay Luthra, senior vice president and global head of Northern Trust’s Technology Infrastructure Services, Chicago; and strategic alliances including Brian Stevens, Google Cloud’s chief technology officer.

www.nutanix.com

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