Monthly Archives: September 2021

The cloud computing market is not only changing rapidly, but also growing into new industries and use cases, as a growing number of companies move to the cloud for their digital transformation goals.

Through a pandemic and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), ethical tech, and other cloud trends, what does an experienced cloud executive have to say about the changes happening in cloud technology?

Briana Frank, the director of product management for IBM Cloud, recently shared her thoughts with Datamation about the innovations happening at IBM and in the greater cloud market.

Frank directs the product management teams within IBM Cloud Developer Services. Frank also leads the Offering Management and Design teams that built the IBM Cloud Kubernetes service in five months and now manages tens of thousands of clusters worldwide. She believes in creating exceptional experiences that enable users to build and innovate using IBM Cloud. She builds high-performance teams in order to make data-driven decisions. Frank is an entrepreneur and a problem solver who translates that energy into building great products.

More on Cloud Computing: Cloud Computing Market 2021

Datamation: How did you first start in or develop an interest in cloud computing?

Frank: My first introduction to working in technology was during a summer job while attending The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I was a receptionist for an advertising agency during my sophomore year. Clients often called with urgent changes needed for their websites. Those changes often took time, as there was no one in-house who could make the updates. I took a one-day class in HTML and was able to update client websites myself, often the same day or even immediately. Clients were pleased with the timeliness of the updates, but most importantly, the information they needed to convey was up to date and accurate, which better served their users.

Since then, technology has changed dramatically. Ive continued to evolve my career and my skills based on solving client problems. Cloud has emerged as a way to accelerate innovation. My desire to help clients has guided the technologies Ive worked on over the course of my career and led me to work in cloud computing.

Datamation: What are your primary responsibilities in your current role?

Frank: Today, I am the director of product for IBM Cloud Developer Services. I oversee a portfolio of 17 cloud services that enable clients to innovate faster. These services include Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, serverless, observability, developer tools, and IBM Cloud Satellite, our new distributed cloud offering, which allows clients to run cloud services securely in any environment. As a product director, I spend a lot of time talking to clients about the problems they are facing and brainstorming solutions. Prioritizing our road map to meet client needs is one of the most important of many responsibilities in product management.

Datamation: What makes IBM Cloud unique as a cloud computing platform? What sets your solutions or approach apart from the competition?

Frank: IBM Cloud is the industrys most secure and open public cloud for business. IBM Cloud is protected with the highest-level certified hardware security module Hyper Protect services: FIPS 140-2 Level 4. IBMs cloud platform is built on a foundation of Kubernetes, containers, and open source software.

IBM Cloud is a key part of IBMs broader hybrid cloud strategy. Our hybrid cloud offerings are built to bring secure and open cloud services anywhere a client needs to run them whether on premises, in multiple public clouds, or at the edge.

Taken together, this means that clients can run IBM Cloud services securely and in any environment of their choosing.

Datamation: What do you think makes a cloud computing company or platform successful?

Frank: Enterprises today are pushing ahead with digital transformation, deploying existing tools to fuller potential, and leveraging new ones to advance further. And cloud is leading this shift, with 64% of companies surveyed in an IBM Institute for Business Value report saying they have shifted to more cloud-based business activities during the pandemic.

Yet, only 25% of mission-critical workloads have moved to the cloud. Organizations often cite concerns about security and privacy of sensitive data, such as constituent data, medical records, or financial information.

How to help drive innovation in the cloud while ensuring data remains secure and protected? One way is by giving clients the ability to run secure cloud services in any environment whether on premises, in multiple public clouds, or even at the edge. Especially for companies in regulated industries that may be subject to data sovereignty requirements, this opens up the possibility to embrace innovation in the cloud, while ensuring data remains secure and compliant.

Datamation: How can cloud technology impact the success and/or efficiencies of an organization?

Frank: Having the right hybrid cloud architecture in place allows companies to take advantage of the flexibility, efficiency, and cost savings of cloud computing, while ensuring that their critical data stays protected.

IBM is working with clients across all industries to implement these strategies. Were also seeing even greater promise for cloud in highly regulated industries, like financial services, government, telecommunications, and health care, especially with the work we are doing to de-risk third- and fourth-party supply chains.

By reducing risk consistently, you also increase the opportunity of how fast you can innovate.

Datamation: What are some common use cases or scenarios where a hybrid cloud is the best solution for a business?

Frank: Hybrid cloud can be leveraged anywhere across a computing environment. Case in point, earlier this year, we announced that Lumen Technologies is using IBM Cloud Satellite on its Lumen Edge Compute platform to give its customers more flexibility in how they securely tap into the benefits of IBM Cloud at the edge. For example, a customer can deploy an application at a Lumen Edge location where cameras and sensors can function in near real-time to help detect the time since surfaces were cleaned or flag potential worker safety hazards.

Datamation: What is the biggest cloud development mistake that you see enterprises making?

Frank: Many clients today are dealing with cloud sprawl, meaning they are using more than one cloud and are therefore challenged with managing these different cloud environments. I wouldnt call this a mistake in fact, these days, its not uncommon for an organization to use four to five or more cloud vendors but it is a reality of leveraging many different technologies for different yet very valid reasons. This kind of multicloud environment can be challenging and costly to manage and operate, and in this scenario, each of those vendors has a different view on security wrapped around their services.

Datamation: What do you think are some of the top trends in cloud computing/hybrid cloud/multicloud right now?

Frank: Were seeing tremendous opportunity for digital transformation in the highly regulated space in particular. To help organizations successfully and safely embrace cloud, we have built industry-specific offerings for sectors such as financial services and telecommunications. With these solutions, we are able to help organizations think through how theyve created digital platforms from the outset. A key piece of this is ensuring they have the right controls in place to maintain security and compliance. Weve found that unless you build in these controls as a baseline, it stifles innovation. This is why IBM has built a hybrid cloud platform where there is consistency in cybersecurity controls across the board.

In addition, major breaches have impacted business and life and grabbed headlines in past months, making enterprises more cautious than ever when migrating workloads to the cloud. And indeed, all cloud architectures are not created equal when it comes to protecting sensitive data. I believe the key missing piece that many cloud providers lack is trust. Gaining this trust calls for new methods of protecting data, to fill in the gaps in some of the traditional methods.

With the traditional methods of securing data, youre trusting your provider not to access or otherwise share it, but the reality is that the data could be accessed such as if the provider were compelled by a court order to hand over the data, or it could more easily be accessed by malicious actors for their own nefarious purposes. But with confidential computing, the cloud provider is incapable of accessing this data. Therefore, you as the customer are ensuring privacy across the entire life cycle of data, including while its in use.

Think of confidential computing as an office in an office building. The office is a private, secure location where you can have a meeting. There are a number of other offices in that building too, but you can lock your door and have a private meeting in your office, and no one has access to your discussions, even though you are in the same building. The owners of the office building and tenants in other offices do not know what is going on in your office. In the case of confidential computing, the cloud is the office building, and the enclave is the office.

Datamation: How have you seen AI/ML impact cloud computing over the past few years, and how do you think these trends will continue to change cloud development and customer expectations?

Frank: We are generating data from more sources than ever before, and users are expecting insights from the data immediately. It isnt a question of whether AI/ML are needed, but how AI/ML can produce insights that can be leveraged instantaneously. The trend we see most commonly is the need to analyze the data where the data is generated to reduce latency, due to not needing the data to flow to another location. In addition, keeping the data in a specific location can assist with regulatory constraints.

Datamation: What do you think well see more of in the cloud computing space in the next 5-10 years? What areas will grow the most over the next decade?

Frank: When it comes to recent breaches, these are stark reminders of the reality business and governments live in today. Businesses must realize that they are only as secure as their weakest link.

Many believe that that weak link can come when outsourcing their digital infrastructure to a third-party cloud provider that this is simply the price you can pay to speed innovation. But this is not true. It is incumbent on cloud providers to lead the way in creating a culture that continues to push us to improve upon the current state of security.

So as technology leaders, we need to not only provide cloud infrastructure solutions, but take care to provide ones that the C-suite can feel comfortable with adopting in light of hackers sophisticated methods. We need to introduce the right strategies and help build the right technological foundation, enabling our clients to embrace innovation in the cloud with trust that their data will remain protected.

By adopting the right open, hybrid cloud architecture one that enables built-in controls and selecting a cloud provider that enables sophisticated encryption capabilities, like confidential computing, youre helping ensure that your data truly remains yours.

Datamation: How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected you/your colleagues/your clients approach to cloud solutions?

Frank: The pandemic has amplified how much of our lives we live online. From ordering food for delivery to completing a banking transaction to visiting a doctor, our personal data is out there. So, the natural question is, who can access it, and is it at risk of being compromised? How can we, as consumers, trust the organizations we communicate with for a frictionless experience, while safeguarding our most critical data?

And how can our cloud providers serve as stewards of their clients sensitive data? By building in cybersecurity controls from the outset, we can help more clients across industries embrace cloud.

Datamation: How do you think that cloud computing can better be leveraged as a technology for global good (i.e., slowing climate change, alleviating poverty, ethical business practices, social justice causes, etc.)?

Frank: Last year, IBM Cloud team and Santa Casa da Misericrdia de Lisboa built and launched a simple and secure telemedicine platform to meet the physical and mental health needs of underserved citizens in Lisbon, particularly the elderly and vulnerable during the accelerating pandemic. The solution is built on the IBM Cloud and incorporates a state-of-the-art cryptographic technology called Keep Your Own Key.This encryption gives the doctor and patient enterprise-level data protection over a secure platform, designed so patients can easily communicate with their medical providers and psychologists to get the assistance they need, quickly and from home. The platform schedules patient care via SMS and email, and sessions are conducted through phone, video, and chat.

SCML has been able to increase their patient support, care, and follow-up, while serving citizens from the comfort of their own homes.At scale, the platform has the potential to open up access to all underserved communities and the elderly in particular, who often have no means of transportation or who are at greater risk of serious complications from COVID-19.

Datamation: How have you seen the cloud computing market change since you first started? How have the technologies, conversations, and people changed over time?

Frank: Technology is more accessible than ever before. The ability to learn about a technology is no longer gated by a class, textbook, or employer. You can learn a great deal about how a technology works just by reading documentation, watching YouTube videos, or even enrolling in free courses. IBM Skills offers free online courses, workshops, and badge credentials created in partnership with governments, NGOs, and schools from all over the world, designed to help students and professionals alike skill up in relevant technology areas. This accessibility has allowed a more diverse group of individuals to enter the industry. In my experience, a diverse set of voices produces richer outcomes, no matter the task at hand.

Datamation: How do you stay knowledgeable about trends in the market? What resources do you like?

Frank: Its important to stay curious, but I think you also have to genuinely care about what problems are being solved and the unique ways they are being solved across the industry. I have traditional ways to learn about trends, including my favorite analyst reports, but Ive often learned about new announcements and breaking news via social media platforms. I also surround myself with interesting and curious people. Not a day goes by that someone doesnt link me an article on Slack. The resulting informal discussions are some of the most valuable to me personally.

Datamation: How do you like to help or otherwise engage less experienced tech professionals?

Frank: I mentor dozens of individuals inside and outside of IBM. IBM has amazing resources that allow me to give back, like product management boot camps, women-in-technology round tables, mentoring, management training, and so much more. I also volunteer for organizations outside of IBM helping entrepreneurs. Most recently, weve helped small businesses struggling to pivot during the pandemic. My approach is to be very transparent about my unique background and non-traditional technology education to inspire others who may not have taken the traditional path to technologist.

Datamation: What do you consider the best part of your workday or workweek?

Frank: The best part of my week is when Im solving problems. Whether Im ideating with a client on technology decisions or working with my team to brainstorm new ideas, the process of solving problems is one that I truly enjoy.

Datamation: What are you most proud of in your professional life?

Frank: I am most proud when I push myself to do something out of my comfort zone and achieve something I didnt think possible. My first patent was very special to me for that reason. The first time I stepped on a large keynote stage was very special to me. I get a lot of satisfaction when I can take an idea and make it real. When you do that enough times, you become known for that characteristic, and Im proud of that reputation.

Read Next: Top Trends in Cloud Computing 2021

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Cloud Computing: Executive Q&A with Briana Frank at IBM - Datamation

Over the last few years, technology has evolved through an acceleration of innovation across industries, bringing forth new combinations of technologies, new use cases and new business models. Technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, machine learning and big data have combined to solve business challenges that plagued industries for decades.

According to IBM, a hybrid cloud is infrastructure that connects at least one public cloud and at least one private cloud, but the definition can vary.[i] A hybrid cloud provides orchestration, management, and application portability between public and private clouds to create a single, flexible, optimal cloud infrastructure for running a companys computing workloads.

Despite the growth in public cloud computing, enterprises often need to use a combination of public and private (on-prem) clouds. Often overlooked in the hype around public cloud computing, private clouds offer greater flexibility, security and compliance.

A private cloud environment is generally accessible only through private and secure network links, rather than the public internet. Industries such as healthcare and finance have specific regulations about storing and processing data and thus favor using private clouds. A company can run a private cloud on-premises in its data center, local server room or access it as a securely hosted offering by a cloud service provider (CSP).

Crucially, hybrid cloud computing enables companies to accelerate their digital transformation efforts, primarily if they work with legacy hardware and infrastructure. They can extend their existing infrastructure by adding one or more public cloud deployments modernising applications and processes in stages rather than a complete digital transformation upheaval.

IoT technology is ubiquitous, with connected devices collecting more and more information through sensors, cameras, accelerometers, LiDAR and depth sensors. All this information requires collection, storage, processing and analysis to create data-driven insights. Some of this data comes from mission-critical applications where a split-second delay can have significant consequences. For example, factories, smart traffic consoles, an insulin pump, and smoke and noxious gas monitoring.

As a consequence, edge computing use cases have grown. Edge computing places processing (and some storage) capabilities close to the data source, enabling fast data analysis in real-time. Its particularly useful in poorly connected environments such as oil refineries, mines and wells. Companies are moving more of their compute and financial investments toward edge computing. Grand View Research predicts that companies will spend $43.4 billion on edge computing by 2027, a compound annual growth rate of 37.4%.[ii]

Despite the predictions of some analysts, this does not mean the death of cloud computing. Cloud computing and edge computing have a beneficial functional relationship. And this relationship extends the hybrid cloud concept.

According to Gartner, Edge computing augments and expands the possibilities of todays primarily centralised, hyperscale cloud model and supports the systemic evolution and deployment of the IoT and entirely new application types, enabling next-generation digital business applications.[iii]

A hybrid environment with workloads at the edge and various cloud locations offers advantages to companies seeking greater efficiency and cost savings. Running business and time-critical workloads at the edge ensures low-latency and self-sufficiency. This means transactions can occur even in rugged environments where internet connections are poor.

Take the example of industrial IoT and a factory that uses sensors to monitor machines for temperature, sound, pressure and vibration. The factory can use a locally hosted compute device from a nearby cloud provider, or even something like a Raspberry Pi, to process and filter and aggregate data from the machines in near real-time. If this edge compute instance detects an urgent anomaly, then it can generate an alert for investigation. It can send the filtered and aggregated data to a public cloud instance during regular operation to perform further analysis, machine learning processing, decision making, and storage with a service that provides better efficiency and value for such tasks.

Connected cars are another example, which are effectively data centers on wheels with hundreds of in-car sensors creating a deluge of data. Autonomous driving systems, such as those tested by Equinix customer Continental, must aggregate, analyse and distribute that data, as well as data from other sources such as traffic and weather information, in real-time with all the necessary security and privacy controls in place. And as the degree of autonomy advances (from level 1 for some driver assistance to level 5 for fully autonomous), the amount of data to aggregate and analyse will continue to soar. Current test drives for L2 autonomy are generating up to 20 terabytes (TB) of data a day, while more advanced sensor sets for higher levels of autonomy (L4 and above) may generate up to 100 TB/day.

A car needs some of this data in real-time to make split-second decisions, like whether to move lanes or whether the road is clear of pedestrians. The processing of this data could happen on the onboard computer or on any available local edge compute instances the vehicle happens to be near at the time. When the car returns to a WiFi connection, it can then upload any other less important data to a public cloud instance, receive software and machine learning model updates, a driver can review their data, or the manufacturer can download for analytical purposes.

The communication between edge computing and the rest of the hybrid cloud neednt be in one direction. Once compute services have processed, analysed and reached decisions on the data they have, they can then push relevant updates to edge compute instances.

Like many other aspects of modern infrastructure, containers and orchestrating them with Kubernetes can help standardise edge and cloud deployments. Kubernetes standard runtime layer enables you to develop, run and operate workloads consistently across computing environments and move workloads between edge and cloud.

Equinix Metal provides the foundational building blocks that give businesses the ability to create and consume interconnected infrastructure with the choice and control of physical hardware and the low overhead and developer experience of the cloud. Digital leaders use Equinix Metal to create digital advantage by activating infrastructure globally, connecting it to thousands of technology ecosystem partners, and leveraging DevOps tools to deploy, maintain and scale their applications. This means that on-demand bare metal servers with dedicated GPUs optimised for edge-type workloads such as machine learning are within your reach.

Metal integrates with a range of common hybrid cloud tooling such as Anthos, VMWare Tanzu, and RedHat OpenShift, allowing public cloud vendors and users alike to leverage any existing infrastructure and tooling.

Equinix Fabric supplements Equinix Metal by offering software-defined interconnection to connect Equinix Metal and your other infrastructure together, including all leading cloud providers. Equinix Fabric helps companies who want to take advantage of hybrid multicloud but need to reinforce privacy and security for data as it travels between edge and public cloud locations. On top of providing these security guardrails, Equinix Fabric is affordable and performant, not adding any other overheads to applications.

To learn more about how enable the hybrid cloud for your organisation today, download the Equinix Whitepaper on Enabling The Hybrid Cloud.

[i] IBM, Hybrid Cloud, October 19, 2019.

[ii] Grand View Research, Edge Computing Market Worth $43.4 Billion By 2027 | CAGR: 37.4%, March 2020.

[iii] Gartner, 2021 Strategic Roadmap for Edge Computing, Bob Gill, 3 November 2021 ID G00723410.

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Pushing to the Edge with Hybrid Cloud - Technology Decisions

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 26 (Reuters) - Microsoft (MSFT.O) on Thursday warned thousands of its cloud computing customers, including some of the world's largest companies, that intruders could have the ability to read, change or even delete their main databases, according to a copy of the email and a cyber security researcher.

The vulnerability is in Microsoft Azure's flagship Cosmos DB database. A research team at security company Wiz discovered it was able to access keys that control access to databases held by thousands of companies. Wiz Chief Technology Officer Ami Luttwak is a former chief technology officer at Microsoft's Cloud Security Group.

Because Microsoft cannot change those keys by itself, it emailed the customers Thursday telling them to create new ones. Microsoft agreed to pay Wiz $40,000 for finding the flaw and reporting it, according to an email it sent to Wiz.

"We fixed this issue immediately to keep our customers safe and protected. We thank the security researchers for working under coordinated vulnerability disclosure," Microsoft told Reuters.

Microsoft's email to customers said there was no evidence the flaw had been exploited. "We have no indication that external entities outside the researcher (Wiz) had access to the primary read-write key," the email said.

This is the worst cloud vulnerability you can imagine. It is a long-lasting secret, Luttwak told Reuters. This is the central database of Azure, and we were able to get access to any customer database that we wanted.

Luttwak's team found the problem, dubbed ChaosDB, on Aug. 9 and notified Microsoft Aug. 12, Luttwak said.

A Microsoft logo is pictured on a store in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, U.S., January 25, 2021. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri

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The flaw was in a visualization tool called Jupyter Notebook, which has been available for years but was enabled by default in Cosmos beginning in February. After Reuters reported on the flaw, Wiz detailed the issue in a blog post.

Luttwak said even customers who have not been notified by Microsoft could have had their keys swiped by attackers, giving them access until those keys are changed. Microsoft only told customers whose keys were visible this month, when Wiz was working on the issue.

Microsoft told Reuters that "customers who may have been impacted received a notification from us," without elaborating.

The disclosure comes after months of bad security news for Microsoft. The company was breached by the same suspected Russian government hackers that infiltrated SolarWinds, who stole Microsoft source code. Then a wide number of hackers broke into Exchange email servers while a patch was being developed.

A recent fix for a printer flaw that allowed computer takeovers had to be redone repeatedly. Another Exchange flaw last week prompted an urgent U.S. government warning that customers need to install patches issued months ago because ransomware gangs are now exploiting it.

Problems with Azure are especially troubling, because Microsoft and outside security experts have been pushing companies to abandon most of their own infrastructure and rely on the cloud for more security.

But though cloud attacks are more rare, they can be more devastating when they occur. What's more, some are never publicized.

A federally contracted research lab tracks all known security flaws in software and rates them by severity. But there is no equivalent system for holes in cloud architecture, so many critical vulnerabilities remain undisclosed to users, Luttwak said.

Reporting by Joseph Menn; Editing by William Mallard

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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EXCLUSIVE Microsoft warns thousands of cloud customers of exposed databases - Reuters