Monthly Archives: March 2022

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Public cloud describes IaaS services like Alibaba Elastic Compute, Amazon AWS EC2, Digital Ocean Droplets, Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines and Google Compute Engine, to name a few. The providers all have multiple customers and deliver their services over the internet. Public cloud customers share the compute, storage and networking hardware with their cloud providers other customers. Its similar to the way web hosting works: Public cloud is like shared web hosting and private cloud correlates to dedicated web hosting. (In cloud, both types are managed.)

Private cloud is the cloud terminology for scenarios in which the hardware and software resources underlying the cloud services are used exclusively by one business or organization. In private cloud, the hardware may be on-premises or off-site. It may be generated by the enterprise itself or provided physically or offered over the internet by a cloud service provider. The key point is that the hardware and software required to generate a private cloud are dedicated to or owned by one business and not shared by other businesses. This provides an added level of security that may be required for sensitive data.

Hybrid cloud environments are those in which an organization uses two or more cloud types public, private or community clouds in a coordinated way, usually on a common goal. (A community cloud is a cloud resource shared by two or more organizations working together on the same concern, such as related governmental departments and agencies, industry standards working groups and joint corporate/academic efforts.) One of the chief benefits of hybrid cloud is a good deal more flexibility and agility to get things done efficiently and quickly.

Multi-cloud means nothing more than using two or more cloud services from different cloud service providers. Why would you do this as opposed to sticking with one main provider? After all, it adds complexity, including a more challenging security environment. But there are good reasons why some enterprises intentionally use two or more IaaS vendors. Not placing all your eggs in one basket makes some sense, but there are better benefits to multi-cloud.

Cloud computing providers offer unique services, capabilities and pricing that you might want to leverage, possibly for different segments of your business.Using two or more cloud providers is one way to combat vendor lock-in, too. Finally, multi-cloud is about having the flexibility to move an application to a different cloud or run it across multiple clouds to get a job done faster. The advantage is similar to the benefits of hybrid cloud, but not every organization needs to incorporate a private cloud.

At the same time, there are benefits to sticking with a single cloud service provider. For some companies, going wide and deep with one vendor may give you opportunities you wouldnt get otherwise. Bottom line?Each companys cloud migration strategy will be unique and highly dependent on their business goals, current and future tech roadmap, and industry, among other factors.

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Cloud computing explained: PwC

Microsoft Azure revenues might be lagging Amazon Web Services (AWS), but according to a new survey by enterprise IT management firm Flexera, adoption of Azure'scloud-computing options may now have overtaken AWS in some cases.

Flexera's new 2022 State of the Cloud report gathered the opinions of 753 respondents in late 2021 and found that Azure was the only public cloud provider whose adoption had grown significantly over the past year.

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Today, 80% of enterprises are using Azure, up from 73% last year, while AWS's share dropped from 79% to 77% in the period.

SEE: Cloud computing is the key to business success. But unlocking its benefits is hard work

Google Cloud is yet to become profitable, but it is a comfortable third-runner with 48% adoption, down from 49% last year, while adoption of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure dropped from 32% last year to 27% today. IBM Cloud's share was flat at 25%.

The report also looked at whether users were running significant workloads, some workloads, or just experimenting with a provider.

Azure and AWS were tied on significant workloads at 47%, while 33% of enterprises were using some workloads on Azure versus 33% in this category on AWS.

The good news for Google Cloud's ongoing push to win marketshare is that 23% of respondents are experimenting with it, which signals potential revenue growth in the future.

AWS still leads Azure among SMBs. However, even here Microsoft is closing the gap. AWS's 69% share among SMBs was down from 72% last year versus Azure's 59% share today, up from 48% last year. GCP's share rose from 39% to 43% year on year. Oracle Cloud also won more SMBs and had a 28% share, up from 15%, while IBM was up from 20% to 24%.

Today, of course, few are locked in with one cloud provider. Multicloud continues to growand is basically the norm. Flexera found that 79% of organizations are using multiple public clouds while 60% are using more than one private cloud.

Despite this, it found that 45% of apps are siloed on different clouds, so while they are using multiple clouds, each app is stuck on one provider. Some 44% are using multiple providers for failover when major cloud outages occur. That seems sensible, given that in the past two years, AWS, Azure and Google have suffered several hour-long outages.

SEE: What is cloud computing? Everything you need to know about the cloud explained

The challenge of managing security in multicloud justified Microsoft's recent move to bring Defender for Cloud to Google Cloudand AWS. It also makes projects like Cloud Security Notification Framework (CSNF) necessary. Among large enterprises with more than 10,000 employees, multicloud security tools are now, at 41%, the top tool used by organizations, followed by multicloud cost management tools at 37%. Governance tools and management tools were used by 34% and 33% of large enterprise, respectively.

Cost management tools are critical because the survey found respondents believed their organizations waste 32% of cloud spend. However, waste is likely higher, Flexera notes.

While Azure may be narrowing the gap in some areas, AWS is still the biggest cloud provider by some way: according to data from Synergy Research, Amazon, Microsoft and Google continue to account for more than half of worldwide cloud spending, with Q3 2021 market shares of 33%, 20% and 10%.

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Cloud computing: Microsoft Azure ups the pressure on AWS - ZDNet

The use of OpenStack plummeted among enterprises, dropping from 31% in 2021 to 16% in 2022 according to Flexeras 2022 State of the Cloud report.

Bare metal and Google Anthos also fell as ways companies use private clouds. Meanwhile, Microsofts Azure Stack and Systems Center, and Amazon Web Services Outposts have maintained strong positions among companies that run hybrid and multicloud architectures.

Use of multicloud architecture for disaster recovery jumped from 34% to 44%. For other reasons, multicloud may be falling out of favor. In fact, adoption of all four types of multicloud tools the survey fell, with multicloud cost management tools notably going from 42% to 25%.

If customers were using these tools, maybe they wouldnt be less likely to take advantage of discount pricing as compared to two years ago. In 2021, 52% of AWS customers got a discount on AWS reserved instances, now only 36% do. In 2021, 48% of Google Cloud customers negotiated an ad hoc discount; in 2022, only 10%.

Feature image via Pixabay.

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Bad News for Cloud Computing: OpenStack Use Plummets and Discounts Dry Up The New Stack - thenewstack.io

A third of cloud computing investments are being wasted, according to new survey of over 750 businesses. The survey, conducted by software vendor Flexera, shows that companies using cloud are struggling to make deployments work efficiently. Better management of resources could hinge on establishing multi-disciplinary teams to make decisions around cloud workloads.Oracle is among the companies investing in data centres to cater for anticipated growth in demand for cloud services. (Photo by Akos Stiller/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The Flexera report polled 753 business and tech leaders from around the world about their organisations cloud usage. Cloud adoption is still growing, the survey shows, with the proportion of respondents describing their organisations cloud use as heavy at 63% in 2022, up from 59% the year before.

The vast majority of enterprise organisations spend more than a million dollars a year on cloud computing, the survey shows. The most common level of annual cloud expenditure among companies with more than 1,000 employees is between $2.4 $6m (19%). Among SMEs, the most common spend bracket is $600k $1.2m.

But a significant proportion of this investment goes to waste. When asked how much of their cloud expenditure is being used efficiently, the average estimate was 68%. This leaves 32% of cloud spending that is wasted, up from 30% last year. Whats more, cloud projects come in at an average of 13% over budget.

The way in which cloud services are provisioned could explain this overspend and waste, says Frank Contrepois, head of FinOps consulting at Strategic Blue, a consultancy that helps businesses manage cloud deployments.

Traditionally technical teams would lay out their requirements, finance departments would set the budget and procurement would handle purchasing, he says. Cloud changes that approach completely, and everything is being handled by the IT team.

Engineers typically focus on doing the job to the highest standard, and might not know, for example, that you can do deals and get discounts with the cloud providers, he adds.

The Flexera report says FinOps, in which a multi-disciplinary technical and business team is brought together to make data-driven spending decisions around cloud deployments, is one way to combat these problems. "Numerous roles, including IT/Ops, cloud centres of excellence and FinOps teams, are seeking to keep costs down," the report says.

Elsewhere the report shows Microsoft's Azure platform is now more popular than public cloud market leader AWS among enterprises, with 80% of large companies polled using Azure compared to 77% deploying on AWS. It also surpassed AWS in the number of virtual machines (VMs) enterprises are running: 71% of enterprises are running more than 51 VMs on Azure, compared to 69% for AWS.

This reflects the impact Azure is having among enterprises, argues Dan Kirsch, managing director of Techstrong Research. "AWS is not getting the level of engagement with enterprise that Azure is," he toldTech Monitorearlier this week. "You wouldn't say they're struggling, but it's not getting the level of engagement in the enterprise that Microsoft gets in highly regulated banks, the huge airlines, the huge insurance companies, and with its governmental cloud offering."

He adds: "AWS is the defacto standard if you're a small or medium-sized business looking to get into cloud, but if you're a mature company, which already has Microsoft products in-house, there's a good chance you'll go Azure."

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure came in fourth place behind Google Cloud platform. Yesterday, the company told investors it expects its cloud division to drive higher than expected profits in the next quarter.

As it announced its third-quarter results, Oracle said it is on course to spend $4bn on cloud infrastructure this year, building out data centres and adding services to its offering as it looks to compete for business in the public cloud.

This investment should start to pay off in Q4, said CEO Safra Catz. Our overall revenue growth is being driven by both our rapidly growing cloud infrastructure and cloud applications businesses, Catz said, revealing that Oracles cloud revenue for the year is likely to top $11bn.Read more: Want more on technology leadership?

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Matthew Gooding is news editor for Tech Monitor.

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A third of business cloud spending is wasted - Tech Monitor

Are we getting ahead of our abilities in the headlong rush to cloud? Moving to cloud doesn't mean the headaches of technology management are also being handed over to a third-party provider -- if anything, the rapid push to cloud may be getting ahead of organizations' ability to keep up.

Thanks to Covid crisis, the year 2020 was a boom year for cloud adoption, and it turns out things got pushed even deeper into the cloud during 2021. There's no end in sight to the cloud boom, and with it, new challenges to technology teams.

That's the gist of a recent survey of 300 IT executives by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, underwritten by Splunk, which finds while at this moment, most organizations still have most of their technology systems in house. But get ready to start bidding farewell to on-premises IT. Things are going to shift dramatically, and within the next two years, most enterprises will be mainly running off the cloud.

Over the past year, 67% say their organizations accelerated the adoption or implementation of already planned cloud applications, services, or infrastructure -- an increase from the 56% who said their organization had done this as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic in the prior year's survey.

Cloud will just keep accelerating, the survey shows. The majority (65%) predict that more than 60% of their IT portfolio will reside in the cloud within two years. This represents a 30-percentage point jump from today. A total of 85% say at least 40% will be in the cloud by 2023, a similar 32 percentage points higher than those reporting that much is in the cloud today.

"However, the rapid acceleration and expansion of cloud has brought its own challenges -- not only in terms of integration and management, but also with regards to new cybersecurity, data privacy, ROI measurement, and cloud talent concerns," the study's authors point out. "With most respondents leveraging cloud in addition to their on-premises systems-and anticipating maintaining such a hybrid cloud infrastructure for the foreseeable future -- the difficulties of managing these complex environments effectively are evident."

For starters, 62% of IT executives say they are having difficulty keeping up with the rapidly evolving technology roles and responsibilities required to manage its increased cloud adoption. Managing data across mixed environments also creates new challenges. "As you add more cloud providers and more applications, your complexity changes a lot," according to Jay Bhat, information security officer at Franciscan Alliance, quoted in the study. "Every time you add a new environment, it increases the complexity of how you share and protect data and ensures only the appropriate data goes from one environment to another."

Educating the business is a vital piece of an effective strategy. The Harvard Business Review report describes how Chegg, an educational technology and information publisher, has been rearchitecting its cloud approach over the past year to create smaller, more flexible cloud accounts for use by its engineering teams. "We've been in cloud for so long, we've learned a lot of what's working and what isn't working," John Heasman, chief information security officer, is quoted in the study. "We ended up in a position where we needed to take a step back and look at our architecture to align with best practices in cloud infrastructure and improve our processes overall."

Heasman and his team concentrated on educating the company's leaders on the ways its cloud strategy will result in new services. "It's not just a case of saying, 'Here's a new account. It's yours,'" Heasman says. "It required a lot of planning to ensure the right level of oversight while still enabling our team to get the full benefit of cloud-native technology."

It's notable that hybrid on-premises/cloud environments will be the dominant mode for some to come. Eighty-five percent of respondents say their organization has a hybrid cloud environment today -- and 88% of those respondents anticipate that their organization will maintain a hybrid cloud approach for the foreseeable future.

In the unprecedented 2020-21 push to cloud, the dearth of talent to manage hybrid environments became the number-one hot-button issue. Here are the top issues that have arisen:

Again, many of these issues will fall to IT teams to address -- and cannot be effectively outsourced to cloud providers. The survey finds only 21% of IT executives strongly agree that their cloud vendors provide all the necessary tools and processes to manage and optimize their cloud environments, while 42% somewhat agree. "Cloud vendors will always oversell the value of cloud technology," according to Bhat -- especially when talking to non-tech business leaders. "The technology is just one piece of the puzzle," he says. "In order to get the value from it, you have to put the right people and processes in place and engage in the process of rolling out new functionality, testing it, and changing your business processes. Without that, you lose all the value of moving to the cloud."

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Rush to cloud computing is outpacing organizations' ability to adapt - ZDNet

Microsoft has fixed a bug in the Azure Automation service that could have allowed one account owner to access another customer's accounts using the same service.

Azure Automation lets customers automate cloud management tasks or jobs, update Windows and Linux systems, and automate other repetitive tasks.

According to security firm Orca, the bug, which it reported to Microsoft on December 6, allowed a potential attacker on the service to "gain full control over resources and data of a targeted account, depending on the permissions of the account."

SEE: What is cloud computing? Everything you need to know about the cloud explained

Orca researcher Yanir Tsarimi says the flaw he found allowed him to interact with an internal Azure server that manages the sandboxes of other customers.

"We managed to obtain authentication tokens for other customer accounts through that server. Someone with malicious intentions could've continuously grabbed tokens, and with each token, widen the attack to more Azure customers," explains Tasrimi.

Microsoft has clarified that only Azure Automation accounts that used Managed Identitiestokens for authorization and an Azure Sandbox for job runtime and execution were exposed.

However, Orca also notes that the Managed Identities feature in an Automation account is enabled by default.

Microsoft says it had not detected evidence that tokens had been misused and has notified customers with affected Automation accounts.

According to Orca, on December 7 it discovered several large companies were potentially at risk, including "a global telecommunications company, two car manufacturers, a banking conglomerate, big four accounting firms, and more."

Microsoft explains that an Azure automation job can acquire a Managed Identities token for access to Azure resources. The scope of the token's access is defined in Automation Account's Managed Identity.

"Due to the vulnerability, a user running an automation job in an Azure Sandbox could have acquired the Managed Identities tokens of other automation jobs, allowing access to resources within the Automation Account's Managed Identity," Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) notes.

Azure Automation accounts that use another Automation Hybrid worker for execution and/or Automation Run-As accounts for access to resources weren't impacted.

Microsoft mitigated the issue on December 10 by blocking access to Managed Identities tokens to all sandbox environments except the one that had legitimate access, MSRC explains.

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Cloud computing: Microsoft fixes Azure flaw that could have allowed access to other accounts - ZDNet

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It comes down to simple physics and cost: In cloud computing, high availability and sub-second response times are nearly impossible, or at least unfeasibly expensive.

This drawback has given rise to edge computing, which moves computing resources to the physical location of data creation, or the so-called edge of the internet. The touted results are real-time speeds and dramatically increased availability, flexibility, resiliency and consistency of the data.

According to Dave McCarthy, research vice president for cloud and edge infrastructure services at IDC, there has been a shift in mindset from anything and everything should go to the cloud, to Lets use the cloud for what its good for, and use other things when they make more sense.

Edge computing has increasingly become a priority for a growing number of organizations. According to IDC, worldwide enterprise and service provider spending on edge hardware, software and serves is expected to hit $176 billion in 2022, representing a 14.8% increase over 2021. That spend is anticipated to approach $274 billion by 2025, according to the firm. Similarly, the LF Edge arm of the Linux Foundation expects edge spending to jump to $800 billion by 2028.

This has equaled exponential growth in the number of providers. Industry giants and specialized companies alike have been expanding into the space; established providers of edge computing platforms and services include Cloudflare, Macrometa, Platform9 and Litmus Edge. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers its Lambda@Edge technology, while IBM has Watson Anywhere, and nearly all other IT vendors, from Google, to Dell, to Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) have announced plans to provide some sort of multiple edge computing platform.

Couchbase, a distributed NoSQL cloud database, has also expanded its support of edge computing with the launch of Couchbase Mobile 3. The new platform allows developers to build fully native applications in the cloud, at the edge and onmobileand IoT devicesusing their chosen languages, frameworks and platforms, according to Wayne Carter, Couchbases vice president of engineering.

The 11-year-old, Santa Clara-based public company has established itself with its two versions of an open-source, NoSQL, multimodel, document-oriented database software.

As Carter noted, modern apps need to be faster, more resilient, agile, and accessible, and have the capability to be run from anywhere. Since apps run on multiple different systems, developers need to be able to configure hundreds of locations and devices quickly and easily.

Customers increasingly require mobile and edge capabilities to meet modern application demands, and data must always be available, so apps perform at unmatched speed, Carter said.

The goal with the Couchbase platform, and with edge in general, is to move data closer to where it is being used, even when it is in motion, to ensure that apps always have access to it.

One of the reasons edge computing has become so popular is it helps address use cases that the cloud cant, IDCs McCarthy explained. Using the cloud is cost-effective and fast, but it has performance-related limitations. Apps that rely solely on centralized cloud data centers to process and store data are subject to latency and downtime whenever internet connectivity is slow or frequently interrupted. The time it takes to send a command to the cloud, have the cloud process it and send the information can be prohibitive. Whats more, top cloud providers have had significant outages lately.

How can you continue to operate if the cloud isnt available, or the network between you isnt available? McCarthy posited.

Couchbase 3 addresses this gap by providing sub millisecond response times, Carter said. Data integrity is maintained with automatic synchronization across edge and mobile infrastructure, regardless of internet connectivity.

Developers can use the platform in edge data centers, in the cloud, on 5G networks, on-premises or edge devices. This multi-tiered, hierarchical architecture support allows it to meet any speed, availability, technical or security requirements, Carter said. The result is that apps are fast and resilient and not dependent on, or impacted by, distant cloud data centers or variability in network speeds. Apps can also be developed and deployed in a way that meets increasingly restrictive governance and security requirements.

Device ubiquity means that if a device is on, data is available, and it is always synchronizing, Carter said. Given the laws of physics, you can only achieve a certain speed with cloud computing. You cant solve this problem any other way, he said.

As an example, the platform has been used by a leading airline to digitize its pre-flight check process. It has been embedded onto tables for recording inspections, synchronizing data across crew tables in real-time, even when those devices are disconnected. This has improved accuracy and safety while ensuring on-time departure, Carter explained. In similar cases, the platform has underlaid airplane meal ordering systems so that all flight attendants have visibility into inventory (say, the number of available turkey sandwiches or cans of ginger ale).

Couchbase 3 is certified on Amazon Web Systems (AWS), Verizon, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Azure. Reference architectures and deployments have been developed for AWS Local Zones, AWS Wavelength, AWS Outposts and Verizon 5G Edge.

What Couchbase has done is taken their success in cloud databases and extended those feature sets to smaller edge environments, IDCs McCarthy said. It enables this world of apps that can span from the cloud to the edge.

Due to its vastness, McCarty acknowledged that the edge is a concept that can be difficult to understand. If its so new, how can it be so big? he said.

He described it as a shift from a centralized computing model to a more distributed computing model and a market driven by the expansion of IoT and AI applications. Its a big market partially because existing things are being modernized, he said. The edge makes up a lot of different deployment scenarios.

Edge computing also fosters creativity, McCarthy said, as it enables developers to create more tools and app features and options. You can get all the benefits of cloud without being restricted to just being in the cloud, he said. Its a sort of best of both worlds scenario.

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How the shift to edge computing is impacting enterprises - VentureBeat

"We were particularly impressed with Ricoh's many layers of protection, security and monitoring for their cloud infrastructure," said Richard Geary, Judge, The Cloud Awards. "It is also telling that Ricoh not only offers cloud services to their customers but uses them extensively themselves to enhance their own operational efficiency."

"This award is a testament to the effectiveness of our approach to building the digital services our customers need, especially because we experience that effectiveness ourselves," saidBob Lamendola, Senior Vice President, Technology and Head of Digital Services Center, Ricoh North America. "Ricoh's own digital footprint is built based on our team's needs, and we take that same needs-based philosophy to our customers. We understand their challenges and provide them with the quality, resilient, scalable cloud-based systems and solutions that help secure, manage, and support the information required for their long-term business success."

Head of Operations for The Cloud Awards, James Williams, said: "The Cloud Awards has been identifying the great organizations who create world-changing technologies for a decade now. Ricoh is a worthier-than-ever winner of a Cloud Award, taking cloud technologies to new heights. It was a real pleasure to see them come top in their category and shows how much they impressed the panel with their market-leading innovations."

Hundreds of organizations entered, with entries coming from across the globe, covering the Americas, Australia, Europe and the Middle East. You can view the full list of winners here: https://www.cloud-awards.com/2021-shortlist/.

For more information on Ricoh's IT Services offerings, please visit this pageor follow the company's social media channels onFacebook,Instagram,LinkedIn,TwitterorYouTube.

About the Cloud Awards

The Cloud Awards is an international program which recognizes and honorsindustry leaders, innovators and organizational transformation in cloud computing. The awards are open to large, small, established and start-up organizations from across the entire globe, with an aim to find and celebrate the pioneers who will shape the future of the Cloud as we move into 2022 and beyond. The Cloud Awards currently offers two awards programs, the Cloud Computing Awards and the Software-as-a-Service Awards.

Categories for the Cloud Computing Awards include Most Promising Start-Up, Best SaaS, and "Best in Mobile" Cloud Solution. Finalists were selected by a judging panel of international industry experts. For more information about the Cloud Awards, please visit https://www.cloud-awards.com/.

| About Ricoh|

Ricoh is empowering digital workplaces using innovative technologies and services that enable individuals to work smarter from anywhere.

With cultivated knowledge and organizational capabilities nurtured over its 85-years history, Ricoh is a leading provider of digital services and information management, and print and imaging solutions designed to support digital transformation and optimize business performance.

Headquartered in Tokyo, Ricoh Group has major operations throughout the world and its products and services now reach customers in approximately 200 countries and regions. In the financial year ended March 2021, Ricoh Group had worldwide sales of 1,682 billion yen (approx. 15.1 billion USD).

For further information, please visit http://www.ricoh.com

2022 Ricoh USA, Inc. All rights reserved. All referenced product names are the trademarks of their respective companies.

SOURCE Ricoh USA, Inc.

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Ricoh USA, Inc. Named Winner in 2021-22 Cloud Awards - PR Newswire

On Tuesday, Google's parent company, Alphabet, said that it was acquiring Mandiant for $5.4 billion, and will make it a part of Google Cloud, the company's cloud computing platform. That's a lot of money for a company most people have never heard of.

To put that number in context, $5.4 billion is almost all of the revenue Google Cloud generated in the most recent quarter for which it reported earnings. So far, Google Cloud has yet to make a profit, despite the fact it grew 45 percent quarter over quarter. During that time, Google Cloud lost $890 million. Much of that is because building a platform that can compete with established players like Amazon and Microsoft is expensive.

For Google Cloud, which is a distant third in the cloud computing platform market, the deal makes a lot of sense. BothAmazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure arefar larger than Google Cloud. Microsoft Azure is twice the size of Google Cloud. AWS is three times as big.

As a result, Google is playing catch up. If it wants to compete with the major players, it has to act like one. It doesn't have the luxury of acting like a startup in this space if it wants to compete on a level playing field. It has to compete at the same level. To that end, Google was reportedly competing with Microsoft in its pursuit of Mandiant, though the latter is said to have dropped its bid.

That's really the point. Here's how Ruth Porat, the company's CFO, explained it:

The way we look at it is we're obviously not competing with our peers at the scale they were then, we are competing at the scale they are now in a market that is accelerating.

That one sentence explains Google Cloud's strategy. It's not acting like it's the smallest player in the game. It's not acting like it's an eight-year-old startup that just recently started to gain traction against a company that has been around for two decades. It's making the same kind of acquisitions its larger competitors would make.

This deal is a great example, despite the fact that Mandiant isn't a company most people have heard of. One reason you've probably never heard of Mandiant is that the company was--until recently--known as FireEye. Still, I'm willing to guess most people have never heard of it by that name either.

That's because it's not a company most of us ever interact with, at least, not knowingly. That's a good thing. If your company is in need of its services, it's probably because you've suffered a major cyberattack or data breach.

FireEye is probably best known as the company that detected and helped mitigate the SolarWinds hack that put millions of computers at risk, including those at government agencies, corporations, and major institutions. When it rebranded, Mandiant sold off its cloud services and retained the digital forensics and incident response part of its business.

All of that is to say that Mandiant is a major player in protecting exactly the types of customers that Google would love to win. Persuading companies to move their cloud services is a heavy lift, unless you have something your competition doesn't.

At a time when cybersecurity threats are at the top of any large corporation's risk assessment of the cloud, Mandiant gives Google Cloud better tools to protect customers and help mitigate the damage after an attack. That selling point is worth it to Google, even though the price makes it the company's second-largest deal to date.

Of course, the fact that the company's search advertising business is one of the most efficient profit-generating machines ever means that it can afford to punch above its weight. And that's the lesson--if you want to compete, you have to be willing to play at the same level as your competition.

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

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This 1 Sentence Explains Why Google Is Spending $5.4 Billion on A Company You've Never Heard Of - Inc.

Complex systems are hard to secure. As computing environments' complexity grows, they become less secure and more vulnerable over time. In this article, I will demonstrate how security is tied to complexity, why increasing complexity of cloud computing environments is inevitable, and the pitfalls of common coping strategies.

First, let's explore why complexity growth is inevitable. Here's a hint for the impatient: It's all about scale.

Scaling the World's ComputingTo better understand the challenges of scaling the world's compute systems, we must remember that computing is a collaboration of machines (hardware), applications (software), and humans (peopleware), all of which increase complexity.

Let's start with hardware. Modern computing environments are big and constantly getting bigger. Organizations with even a small number of employees often command thousands-of-server fleets that come in a variety of form factors the cloud, on-premises data centers, managed hosting, smart devices, self-driving vehicles, and so on. What drives complexity even further is that cloud environments are elastic; as managing hardware becomes more complicated, so does security.

How about scaling software? As the tech stack grows, so does the list of technologies that must be configured in a typical cloud computing environment before a cloud-native application is deployed. And here's the scary fact: Every software layer comes with its own implementation of encrypted connectivity, client authentication, authorization, and audit, putting pressure on DevOps teams to properly set up these pillars of secure remote access.

And, finally, "peopleware" comes with its own scaling pains. As companies embrace remote work, the idea of controlling employees' computers or relying on a network perimeter becomes less feasible. Moreover, as the tech talent shortage intensifies, companies are forced to operate without having sufficient security expertise on their teams.

But there's no turning back. Hardware, software, and peopleware complexity will continue to grow, ultimately making computing environments more vulnerable.

Common Coping StrategiesHow do organizations currently address the resulting security challenges? Unfortunately, most are unable to secure every single technology layer. Some of the most common coping strategies include:

None of these strategies provides sufficient levels of detail for audit purposes. For example, it becomes impossible to tell who dropped a SQL table if the access was performed via a VPN by a user named "dba." Based on the increasing frequency of reported cyber incidents, it's clear these approaches are struggling to minimize the operational overhead of infrastructure.

Zero TrustThe cybersecurity community is aware of the problem. And the industry prescription for these problems has become zero trust. Zero trust is not a true solution, but an architectural pattern. It postulates that every computing resource must distrust all clients equally, whether on the internal or external network. Essentially, zero trust declares perimeter-based, network-centric approaches to security as obsolete, and requires every server be configured as if exposed to the Internet.

Organizations built on cloud-native environments are moving toward identity-based access. In this setting, every employee must authenticate into a computing resource as themselves. When combined with a zero-trust principle, the "blast radius" of a compromised account is minimized to a single user and resource.

The scaling of hardware, software, and people has created an ever-growing complexity problem, making computing environments less secure. To combat this, the industry must prioritize the consolidation of all remote access protocols under a single-solution umbrella, so that identity-based authentication can negate the need for perimeter-based, network-centric access solutions. If we execute on these initiatives swiftly enough, government involvement may not be necessary.

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How to Combat the No. 1 Cause of Security Breaches: Complexity - DARKReading