Enterprises can no longer avoid the cloud - the five trends in the future cloud environment

From the delivery of applications to security and monitoring, it looks as if everything is beginning to shift to the cloud environment, and the IT industry is facing an era of chaos and hardship that has never been before. The good news is that more and more tools are available on the market, and the bad news is that you can no longer solve all your problems by choosing a vendor like before. With this shift in mind, last week's Interop Assembly returned to the most basic topic of interoperability.

Large-scale exhibitions such as Interop are always dazzling, too many suppliers, people have no choice. Trying to get technical trends from proactive public relations representatives and various speeches feels like an impossible task.

Here are five key trends CIOs should take note of from the 2012 Interop conference:

Interoperability is coming back

If you've been following Interop, you might remember that Interop, formerly known as Networld + Interop, was originally focused on interoperability and networking advances. In the meantime, the key criteria have been resolved, and for proprietary products, vendor lock-in has also been tolerated.

Concern about interoperability gradually disappears.

However, as businesses move to new computing paradigms, old issues such as interoperability reappear, which is not necessarily a step backwards. For example, in a cloud environment, vendors can achieve greater security by embedding security in critical network devices rather than adding security later.

At Interop 2012, the best example of this is the partnership between Extreme Networks and Fortinet. Often, it's not exciting to announce a partnership. But at this time we are looking forward to the cooperation between the two companies, plans to launch a high-performance cloud switches (designed for multi-tenant data center), the difference is that Fortinet's security features (firewall, IPS , Anti-virus, content filtering, application control) will be built into the switch.

Such a solution addresses many of the risk issues associated with a multi-tenant environment while also enabling service providers to deliver advanced capabilities such as value-added services.

2. Security needs throughout the network

Another vendor that is trying to combine security and networking is Vyatta, whose new vPlane technology seeks to address traffic bottlenecks in virtual data centers. Application density and a multi-tenant environment create many network challenges that can not be solved by traditional tools.

Vyatta vPlane is a layer 3 router forwarding plane independent of the network controller. Using the new fast path architecture in the Intel Westmere-class system, Vyatta said that vPlane can deliver more than 8 million packets per core per second, which the company says is 10 times more than normal. In addition, because vPlane can scale linearly with additional cores, the entire Westmere system can deliver 35 million packets per second in a single rack unit in data center space.

It's impressive at this rate, but what really matters is that security is part of the underlying capabilities of Vyatta vPlane. Different Layer 3 security features (firewall, VP, web filtering, etc.) are embedded in the basic structure of the solution.

"Deploying security features at the network edge is no longer enough," said Scott Sneddon, director of cloud solutions at Vyatta. "Security must be embedded in the cloud infrastructure. In both virtualized and cloud environments, security must run through the network without Just at the edge. "

CloudPassage provides a similar cloud security assessment. "CIOs must be aware that the BYOD and cloud trends are no longer being solved by a single vendor. Innovations are everywhere and smart businesses will find the best solution," said Rand Wacker, CEO of CloudPassage, a cloud security company Said that, however, if interoperability is not one of its main functions, then no solution can be called the best solution.

Cloud infrastructure is becoming a commodity

Although many market segments are still cautious about the cloud, leaving only non-mission-critical applications in the cloud, the fact is that cloud computing is slowly becoming a mainstream trend. As cloud deployments continue to proliferate, basic cloud services, especially cloud capacity and infrastructure, are becoming more commoditized.

This means that service providers will need new sources of revenue, and these new sources of revenue will come from services that surround cloud based services. We are used to "serving up" everything from CRM applications to security to storage, but sophisticated technologies such as WAN optimization, content delivery network CDN and UC UC are being freed from hardware and delivered as services.

Of course, these services dragged down their prices in the market, but they also opened huge markets for expensive technologies, especially for small businesses and midsize markets.

"Simply put, WANs are inadequate in terms of bandwidth or latency, especially for workers and increasingly centralized data distributed worldwide (to control IT costs)," said Chief Executive, Aryaka, WAN Optimization as a Service Provider Ajit Gupta said: "Mission-critical applications, the transfer of large files and big data has become a nightmare, because downloads can take minutes or even hours, not milliseconds, and backups can take days, when a disaster occurs This can put a huge risk on the business. "

Aryaka said the company's front view addresses this issue by turning WAN optimization from costly dedicated hardware into pay-as-you-go services.

Other companies that now offer sophisticated technologies as a service include OnApp and Mitel.

OnApp is offering CDN capabilities as a pay-as-you-go service, hoping to help hosting companies and small cloud providers compete with big companies like Amazon. And Mitel has moved its UC suite to the cloud to turn it into a service, which means businesses no longer have to worry about managing complex PBXes.

4. As more and more resources are moved to the cloud, IT operations can only be forced to move forward in the darkness.

The resources in the public cloud make IT hard to manage. If an application is underperforming, what is the culprit? Is it because of overloaded routers, storage problems, or network latency?

If the IT team had to rely on traditional application performance monitoring (APM) tools, they basically equaled "blind flight."

Network visibility is a topic of much talk at Interop, where companies such as ExtraHop Networks, which promised cloud visibility, were overwhelmed by the participants.

"The old model relied heavily on resellers," said Jesse Rothstein, CEO of ExtraHop. "This is workable for a development environment, but for a production environment, especially those built on a cloud infrastructure, a complete Different methods."

To catch up with the dynamic, ever-changing virtualization infrastructure, ExtraHop believes the only way to provide real-time visibility is to rely on the information it collects from the network itself. ExtraHop's system performs full-flow reorganization and comprehensive content analysis of network traffic to extract performance and status information.

This is not the only method proposed at Interop, but it is one of the most attentive to participants.

5. DNS vulnerabilities are becoming a risk issue that can not be ignored

Relying on networks (such as e-commerce and day-to-day business processes and transactions) by businesses of all walks of life, coupled with the increasing complexity of cyber attacks, makes some old attacks, such as denial of service attacks, come back.

But they are no longer just attacks that slow down the site. As businesses continue to shift from traditional architectures to web services, they begin to spot the limitations of traditional DNS management.

Ben Petro, SVP of Network Intelligence and Availability at Verisign, said: "If DNS performance is not optimized or worsened, a DNS error can damage services, critical programs, and services may not be available, often resulting in lost revenue And reputation damage. "

Petro sees the best place for cloud-based security providers to address both cyber security and DNS management to help companies keep up with the dynamic nature of attacks while ensuring the security and availability of web-based operations.

"In the past, security professionals had relied on bandwidth over configuration and firewalls to prevent attacks, but these methods proved too expensive and ineffective," said Petro. "That's why the cloud is now the most effective solution." Cloud-based security ensures rapid detection and mitigation of attacks before an attack reaches the network, enabling businesses to stay online without spending too much money on equipment, infrastructure, etc. "

By linking DNS management and cybersecurity while moving to a cloud environment, organizations can save time and money by operating efficiencies, support costs, and economies of scale.

to sum up

If you sum up the five questions in one sentence, that is: businesses can no longer escape the cloud. Most vendors are moving to the cloud from application delivery to security and monitoring and everything seems to be moving to the cloud. This is a messy and unmanageable situation. The good news is that there are many tools available on the market. The bad news is that you can not solve every single problem by choosing a single supplier like before. Interop returned to its roots again, as interoperability has once again become a major hurdle to progress.