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Rye Austin, Sales and Marketing Director at Core, is used to talking to people about transitioning to cloud-based services. But over the past year or so, hes observed a significant alteration in the way that conversation is going.

Today, people dont want to put servers in their offices. Even before the very recent huge drive towards remote working, the current climate was changing. Having on-premises environments is high risk and expensive and needs more maintenance. It doesnt make sense for most customers now, so everyones looking at the cloud, Austin explained.

Indeed, for any startup the way forward is obvious.

But for complex organisations with legacy systems its not so straightforward, and preserving business continuity requires expert project management to enact the change smoothly.

Rye Austin

Every organisation has got different systems, different data and different needs. So we look to understand how an organisation would make the absolute most of the cloud. And that means looking at the systems theyve got, because there are different levels of the cloud and different ways of doing things.

So for one organisation, they might choose to have email hosted in a SaaS style solution that makes the most sense for email. Other systems like document management, they might choose a different platform, and other workloads might be set up on Azure or similar. he continued, illustrating the complexity and consultative nature of the change management process involved.

While being a Microsoft Gold partner and expert, Cores independence is a critical asset in putting together a plan which best meets the needs of each client effectively on their journey to full cloud-based operations. We see a lot of vendors that are trying a kind land grab, to get customers onto their platform, said Austin. But this isnt serving customers well, nor demonstrating the transformative potential of cloud-based working:

Just putting the same stuff in the cloud and doing things the same way, then ticking the box and saying were done, is really not the best way of doing it. Sales people have targets to meet, and might be looking to meet targets to win organisations to take that first step into the cloud.

But the skill sets required to maintain cloud services are different. The tooling you need to maintain it and be secure with data is different. Its a big transition, from how things are in the on-premises world.

When Cores consultants work with clients, they avoid the rush to roll out, and instead work through a structured process to co-create a change management plan.

We start with education, Austin explained.

We explain whats out there, what the options are, and the benefits of the different options. They all have pros and cons, we want to educate the customer first

Once the customer is in a position to make an informed choice about the possibilities, the options for transition can be further discussed. We look in detail at the business case, and how well be there to support what would be a large transformation for them. We need to examine how its going to improve their organisation and enhance the bottom line.

Only at that point, can the project itself be specified. The third stage is to actually plan and roadmap the rollout and design. To say, here is where we think you should go, and heres how to get there.

So, you start with the compass, before you unroll the map which makes a lot of sense, on a complex journey to an exciting new destination.

For nearly 30 years, Core has been working with organisations to successfully implement transformative digital technologies which deliver defined business outcomes. Cores Technology Enablement services are designed to maximise user acceptance, engagement, and ultimately, the utilisation of the technology to realise business value.

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Evolution of the Cloud Conversation - UC Today

By- Amith Singhee At the dawn of the Information Age in the 1970s, the role of Information Technology (IT) was limited to computing plumbing - to keep the networks and computers working. In the 90s and 2000s, it evolved into an enterprise shared servicesmodel that was essential for operational efficiency, cost takeout and decision support.

Today, IT is witnessing another shift that increasingly requires the Chief Information Officer organization to act as a partner in defining business strategy and driving topline growth via IT-driven business transformation. To realize this, the IT delivery platform that includes infrastructure, applications, processes and roles of people -needs to be scalable and adaptable tokeep pace with the rapidly changing business and operational needs, and, hence, transform to a hybrid cloud IT architecture.

The transformation will involve four phases: Advice for Cloud, Move to Cloud, Build for Cloud and Manage on Cloud. Artificial Intelligence (AI) will play a fundamental role across all these phases. To understand this better, consider three illustrative scenarios from the Move, Build and Manage phases that are foundational to hybrid cloud adoption across industries: application modernization, DevSecOps and incident analysis and remediation.

Modernizing applications for the hybrid cloud

However, the application today does not allow for an API-based integration and is architected as a large monolith that would not efficiently scale to support dynamic loads on the system.Since enterprises have many such monolithic applications, they would like to modernize these applications to a scalable and modularized architecture, leveraging microservices and cloud technologies like Red Hat OpenShift, SaaS and IaaS, deployed across a hybrid cloud footprint. However, such modernization can take substantial manual effort, which can easily span over one to two years.

By using AI, the retailer can substantially reduce the time and effort of modernization and achieve better outcomes. Here is how Beginning with the Discover and translate stage of the modernization process, AI can analyse all application artefacts such as source code, logs and architecture documents toestimate a topological model of the application. Next, algorithmic and AI approaches can be used to do a Biz-Ops Analysis andoverlay business and operational KPIs on the components of the topological model. Finally, at the Optimize and Re-engineer stage, AI and optimizationcan be used to generate a Biz-Ops optimized target design including architecture, refactored source code, DevOps configuration and deployment specification. The architectcan guide and orchestrate all the stages of this process in an interactive manner.

DevSecOps in a Hybrid Cloud environment

DevSecOps integrates development, IT security and IT operations in a unified approach, where high levels of automation shorten application development lifecycle, enable continuous delivery, remove agility barriers from security gates, and ensure high software quality.AI can be of tremendous value in enabling effective DevSecOps. During development, for instance, AI-enhanced static code analysis will detect security vulnerabilities and non-compliance issues in the development phase itself, as plugins within the developers favourite Integrated Development Environment. This will substantially reduce the delays that occur today from post-development security checks.

AIs role in incident analysis and remediation

In the operations domain, consider the situation when an incident has occurred, for example, a user webpage may be unresponsive, or a web service API returns a 502 error and that has triggered a ticket or alert. If a site reliability engineer (SRE) is tasked with resolving the incident, AI can assist with incident analysis and predict next best actions, understand causality to estimate root causes and recommend remediation approaches.

This is how it works - AnAI system, trained from a corpus of historical incident data, can analyse all available structured and unstructured data related to the active incident, extract important incident features in the context of deployed application topology and diagnose the issue better.

Secondly, a variety of AI techniques can be used to predict the next best actions that the SRE can leverage to further diagnose the incident in collaboration with relevant subject matter experts. Updates to the active incident data can then iteratively be used to further advance the incident analysis, diagnosis and recommendations towards resolution of the incident.

While these three scenarios are widely applicable to enterprises across industries, similarly significant application of AI is likely to be seen to most other parts of the IT delivery platform and application lifecycle.

The shift to experiential age

The dramatic improvements in AI over recent years have been driven heavily by use cases and datasets from the consumer world images, speech and text. With the emerging synergy between hybrid cloud and AI, we will witness tremendous innovation and business value in the enterprise IT world. Today, customers increasingly expect instant and seamless multi-channel engagement and data privacy, andenterprises need to meet or exceed these rapidly evolving customer expectations.

As businesses leverage technology, data and AI at an increasing scale and new business models rapidly emerge,they need toundergo business transformation at tremendous speed to stay competitive while continuously reducing costs. To conclude, AI and hybrid cloud are catalysing the journey of digital transformation by enabling a fundamental shift in the role IT plays in the business.

The author is Senior Manager Hybrid Cloud, IBM Research India.

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Galvanizing the new age of IT with AI and hybrid cloud - ETCIO.com

Working from home and want to access your PC at work? The best solution may cost thousands in additional Microsoft licensing costs.

In the scramble to migrate employees to home working, there are issues for businesses who normally have staff in an office working on desktop PCs, or accessing network file shares and intranet applications, or running applications that connect to an on-premises database.

This poses some difficult and potentially risky and expensive questions for organisations that are not already set up to have all or most of their staff working remotely. Business continuity is top of mind, but as security expert Bruce Schneier has observed: "Worrying about network security seems almost quaint in the face of the massive health risks from COVID-19, but attacks on infrastructure can have effects far greater than the infrastructure itself."

One area of concern is the risk from users on home PCs accessing corporate assets. "These systems are more likely to be out of date, unpatched, and unprotected. They are more vulnerable to attack simply because they are less secure," noted Schneier and that is before taking into account the variety of websites visited and software installed by family members, including children.

Staff working at home could use a VPN to connect to the corporate network. VPNs have many advantages, but by putting the remote machine in effect on the internal business network, it also poses risks, for example if malware on the remote machine is able to damage business assets.

Microsoft has some solutions for remote access without a VPN, including a feature of Windows Server called Remote Desktop Gateway (RDS Gateway). Users can connect to the gateway over SSL (no VPN required) and use a Remote Desktop client to access their work PC, or a desktop session on Windows server, or a desktop application running on the server.

The snag here is that using RD Gateway requires a Remote Desktop Services Client Access License (CAL), as Microsoft makes clear in this document [PDF]:

"An RDS CAL is required to use any functionality included in the Remote Desktop Services role in Windows Server. For example, if you are using RDS Gateway and/or Remote Desktop Web Access to provide access to a Windows client operating system on an individual PC, both an RDS CAL and Windows Server CAL are required."

An RDS CAL can cost over 100 per user we found a single CAL on sale from Microsoft for 186.53, though you can do better from other resellers and with bulk licensing deals.

Just the thing for a pandemic: an extra fee to have your users work remotely

In addition, some vendors have curious rules about remote access to their applications that incur additional fees. Rich Gibbons, a licensing trainer at IT Asset Management (ITAM), noted that Citrix and/or Remote Desktop Services are "the easiest way to quickly become non-compliant with a LOT of vendors."

The problem here is a fundamental one, which is that companies including Microsoft are in a hybrid world, part based on cloud concepts where everything is on the internet and easily accessed from all kinds of devices, and part based on traditional business networks with servers, locally installed software and desktop PCs. The licensing model for these two types of environment is different, with the traditional environment generally being more complex. Customers who license applications like Windows and Office on a per-user subscription are much better placed than those with perpetual per-device licenses.

Wes Miller, is a research analyst and licensing specialist at Directions on Microsoft, based in Kirkland near Seattle. He told us that Microsoft is trying to move to the cloud model, but "a lot of customers are stagnating; they don't want to pay for the subscription. It's on-premises versus cloud. It's per-device vs per-user. And it's perpetual licensing vs subscription licensing. You have to put all three of them together.

"What we've got is a lot of customers, especially regulated and institutional customers, who either for regulatory or cost reasons don't want to go into the cloud and subscriptions, they want to sit on-premises with perpetual product, and they don't have a good story of how to help their employees go remote today."

Security is one thing, but in the midst of a global pandemic, does anyone care about licensing? "You're not going to get audited right now," Gibbons told The Reg. "But in six months or whenever this is over, you need to know what you've done."

Miller concurs. "I think were going to see a grace period here. When those audits do start back up, I think businesses may well be able to ask for some sort of grace period or leeway, but the reality is, if you put something in place to meet these new work scenarios, you need to expect to pay for whatever Microsofts current licensing model is for that."

If you need Windows and Office, and are on a Microsoft 365 licence (not just Office 365), it is worth noting that Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) running Windows 10 can be used without an additional licence or RDS Cal. You still need an RDS CAL for accessing Windows Server desktops and apps, if needed. Optimising licensing costs is a specialist task but can make a big difference to costs.

Miller says a virtual desktop environment is a good answer. "Solutions like Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) or using the server-based variant of Amazon Workspaces, have been license-proven and the technology is proven, at least in the case of Amazon Workspaces, WVD being newer. The biggest thing is, approach it in context with either what you own, or what you are willing to buy, which is weird to think about given the current time were in."

For customers not on subscriptions, Microsoft's habit of treating remote access as a premium feature looks out of date, and in the current circumstances particularly unwelcome. These problems do not exist if you are using born-in-the-cloud solutions like Google's G Suite, and largely disappear if you are on a Microsoft 365 subscription. Remote access is now the norm, which means Microsoft should give up its addiction to things like RDS cals. Customers too will have to adapt, with subscription licensing now hard to avoid.

Sponsored: Webcast: Why you need managed detection and response

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Surge in home working highlights Microsoft licensing issue: If you are not on subscription, working remotely is a premium feature - The Register

Four frame IBM z15

Talk to any IT administrator about what they look for in a server platform and performance, openness, and security will top the list. Specifically, run my most demanding applications fast, enable my organization to support the range of workloads that power my modern business, secure my environment and protect my data. Ask those same IT administrators who can deliver on these and a combination of vendors will be quoted back, with a third party integrating. However, I believe these characteristics are, in essence, IBMs z15.

Dispel the outdated notion of mainframe technology. I believe IBM Z is a new class of compute platform that is open and well suited to drive the digitally transformed business. In one system, legacy back-office co-resides and integrates with cloud native. Likewise, structured and unstructured data types are integrated to deliver all of the necessary intelligence to the business in a secure, cloudified way. And the z15 is the latest generation platform.

Where the IBM Z brings it

Before getting into the workloads supported, lets cover what I think are the four features that make IBM Z a smart choice for any enterprise IT organization.

Reliability: There is a reason why IBM is the core backbone to the industries that make such large investments in the management and utility of data.Banking, financial services, and healthcare to name just a few. Its because of the confidence around the availability of systems (and the data residing on these systems). Seven 9s availability, serviceability without disruption of operations, and consistency of performance all equals SLA adherence that IBM Z can deliver.

Performance, and consistency of performance: organizations need to be able to rely on their systems to be both performant and consistent in that performance profile. In multi-tenant virtualized and cloud environments, this concept is easier to promise than to achieve. Because of the IBM Z architecture and system software, features like VM isolation deliver not just security, but protection against performance disruptions often associated with noisy neighbors.

Security: Security is more complex than locking down perimeters or user access management. Its about protecting the systems and data that make the business run. Data must be protected in all phases of its existence at rest, at work, and in flight. IBMs pervasive encryption is a hardware based crypto engine that ensure data is protected both at rest and in flight with zero impact to system performance. And Data Privacy Passports is an IBM technology that allows an organization to protect data even as it is shared cross-organization and cross cloud with partners, customers and others. Imagine being able to revoke access to sensitive customer information that was shared with a third party directly from your console? This is Data Privacy Passports and for any company that is concerned with Sensitive Personal Identifying Information (SPII), this feature alone should make the z15 from IBM worth evaluating (I detail this and more in this review of the z15).

Openness: Mainframes populate the vast majority of enterprises and house the applications and data that are considered mission critical. At the same time, these systems and the applications and data housed on them must be able to integrate with newer application and data architectures and span the on-prem to cloud compute model employed by virtually every company. Throw in the thousands of virtual servers and countless containers that drive the everyday functions of the enterprise, and IT becomes very messy.

Contrary to the outdated view some hold of mainframes, IBM Z is perhaps the most open compute platform on the market as it can support this very messy environment.Legacy? Check. Linux? Check. Containerized? Yup. Virtualized? Yup.

So, what are those workloads?

Based on what IBM Z delivers in terms of performance and security, its natural to assume that any workload would benefit. And this is pretty much true. For organizations that run a mixed environment, there are a few workloads in particular that really shine on the Z system, even if not obvious to an IT administrator. Transaction processing and analytics processing (OLTP, OLAP), real time analytics, and massive container and VM consolidation are ideal workloads for IBM Z. Lets dig into these a little bit.

On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) and On-Line Analytics Processing (OLAP): Real time responsiveness to customer orders and inquiries is critical to customer retention. And in this digital economy, real time means, in fact, real time. Because of this, the infrastructure supporting these workloads must be able to vertically scale with needs of the applications that serve customers. This is true for both long-term incremental growth and shorter term bursty and elastic requirements that are more event driven.

Further, the ability to scale appropriately must not disrupt the current application performance. The abstraction of compute from I/O in the Z system allows for this scale without disruption requirement. And Z CPU performance (up to 5.2GHz) with access to massive memory delivers on the requirement for real world performance.

Finally, the Z system tool chain enables IT organizations to better integrate the multiple data types coming from multiple sources. COBOL and Java are not mutually exclusive in the datacenter and any IT professional or data architect that has worked on a project of scale knows that the ability to seamlessly integrate across legacy and modern is an absolute necessity to successfully drive digital transformation.

Real Time Analytics: Real time is the operative element of real time analytics. In order for real time analytics engines to be effective, they must be able to access multiple data sources simultaneously. And in the age of edge and cloud computing, security is a must.

While the z15 hardware specifications are impressive, what I find most interesting about IBMs approach to enabling real time analytics across the enterprise is the tools developed for IT organizations. The company developed tools to execute real time queries against standard SQL environments and the mass of unstructured data flooding the business, and provides an environment where data scientists can quickly develop and deploy on the tools they are familiar with Java, Scala and Python with Apache Spark, Anaconda, and the like.Sounds like a win.

Enterprise VM Consolidation: Consolidation of Linux VMs on the z15? Serious? Yeah. Running Linux on IBM z15 enables organizations to literally consolidate hundreds of Linux based VMs on a single server, reducing the space requirements and management headaches enterprise IT faces on a daily basis, while at the same time cutting roughly in half the power required to run the same workloads. What is LinuxONE? Think the z15 running Linux to support your enterprise needs. Its worth checking out.

IBM makes some incredible claims around z15 supporting virtualized environments 7x better per core performance (versus x86) and 4.8x better workload performance with z/VM memory. What this adds up to is near native performance. But equally compelling to me is the way this virtualized environment is made more performant and resilient through the VM security and isolation that results from IBMs Pervasive Encryption technology, disk mirroring and overall system design.

Am I forgetting a couple workloads?

You may notice a couple of obvious workloads missing from the above list. Specifically, digital asset management (DAM) and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML). I really wanted to highlight a few of the workloads that were maybe not the obvious candidates for IBMs Z system. However, the support for DAM and AI/ML has never been stronger on the z15.

The integration of compression and pervasive encryption combined with Data Privacy Passports make the z15 the most formidable IBM Z platform for digital asset management and custody as they enable the highest levels of asset protection without compromising on performance.

Likewise, IBM has long been on the forefront of the artificial intelligence (AI) market (raise your hand if youve seen a Watson commercial). The company has built a framework and toolchain that enables enterprise IT to quickly deploy Watson machine learning (ML) on IBM Z to better enable real-time operations such as fraud detection for banking and finance.

Wrapping up

Enterprises have long viewed the mainframe as critical to the business due to its reliability, resilience, scale and performance supporting line of business applications. As IBM developed the z15 to align the evolving needs of the enterprise transformation, openness and security became key capabilities to expand. And with the z15, the company has done just that. Perhaps this is why IBM saw Z system revenue increase by 60% in its latest quarterly earnings.

The world runs on the mainframe. Whether well-established banks, healthcare providers, government organizations or the partners and customers that digitally interact with these organizations. Even more sophisticated startups and newer companies should consider deploying Z system, as I do believe all will benefit from how IBM has embraced openness and the tightest security in the z15. From a die-hard server-only guy for nearly 30 years, I hope that means something.

Note: This analysis contains contributions from server and compute analyst Matt Kimball.

Disclosure: Moor Insights & Strategy, like all research and analyst firms, provides or has provided paid research, analysis, advising, or consulting to many high-tech companies in the industry, including Amazon.com, Advanced Micro Devices,Apstra,ARM Holdings, Aruba Networks, AWS, A-10 Strategies,Bitfusion,Cisco Systems, Dell, DellEMC, Dell Technologies, Diablo Technologies, Digital Optics,Dreamchain, Echelon, Ericsson, Foxconn, Frame, Fujitsu, Gen Z Consortium, Glue Networks, GlobalFoundries,Google,HPInc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HuaweiTechnologies,IBM, Intel, Interdigital, Jabil Circuit, Konica Minolta, Lattice Semiconductor, Lenovo, Linux Foundation, MACOM (Applied Micro),MapBox,Mavenir, Mesosphere,Microsoft,National Instruments, NetApp, NOKIA, Nortek,NVIDIA, ON Semiconductor, ONUG, OpenStack Foundation, Panasas,Peraso, Pixelworks, Plume Design,Portworx, Pure Storage,Qualcomm, Rackspace, Rambus,RayvoltE-Bikes, Red Hat, Samsung Electronics, Silver Peak, SONY,Springpath, Sprint, Stratus Technologies, Symantec, Synaptics, Syniverse,TensTorrent,TobiiTechnology, Twitter, Unity Technologies, Verizon Communications,Vidyo, Wave Computing,Wellsmith, Xilinx, Zebra, which may be cited in this article.

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Running These Workloads? You Should Take A Look At The IBM Z15 - Forbes