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Monday, August 14th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 12:00p | Are Encrypted Lockboxes for Data Centers Worth the Usability Cost? The idea is simple. First, you encrypt all your data and put the key somewhere safe. Then you send the data off to a data center somewhere. When you need the data, you bring it back and decrypt it with your key. The people who run the data center have no way of getting to your data, and neither do hackers, foreign spies, or anyone with a court order. “There are a number of advantages,” said Diogo Monica, IEEE member and security lead at Docker. “You are not sharing the keys with anyone, so you have exclusive control of the data that leaves the organization.” There’s also a compliance benefit, he added. “You can prove to the auditor that you own the keys, the keys are local, and all the data is transformed, and all the use of these third-party clouds [is] exclusively being done on the encrypted data,” he said. Some data centers and cloud vendors offer this kind of lockbox technology to their customers, and with the looming GDPR deadline next year, more are likely to follow suit. Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation, which kicks in next May, is sure to send ripples across the entire IT infrastructure ecosystem. Read more: What Europe’s GDPR Means for Data Center Operators
Numerous vendors offer both software and hardware appliances that do the encryption and key management for you. But there are tradeoffs, and the biggest one is usability. If you’re the only one with a key, that means that employees working remotely won’t be able to get to the data. Do you give them copies of your keys? Do you keep the keys in a separate shared storage area for them to use? Do you funnel all traffic through an appliance that does the encryption and decryption for you? The cloud vendors won’t be able to get to your data either, and that’s not always a good thing. Say you have a bunch of documents stored away, and you want to search them for a specific term. It’s hard to do a search if they’re all encrypted. You also can’t work with them using online tools. As a solution, some vendors offer lockboxes lite — they keep the keys for you, but promise to keep them safe. “It is simpler to deploy if you are using vendor keys and their key management systems,” said Caio Milani, director of product management at MarkLogic, a database vendor. “However, it is a question of trust in the vendor’s internal process.” Jersey City-based software company AvePoint uses Microsoft’s Azure Key Vault so that customers have a degree of control over the keys, while still being able to use the Office 365 online platform. |
| 3:00p | Migration to Windows 10 Is Accelerating Throughout Enterprise America Anne Baker is Vice President of Marketing for Adaptiva. The 2017 Windows 10 Enterprise Impact Survey—an annual survey of more than 400 IT industry professionals across North America by Adaptiva—discovered that enterprises are migrating to Windows 10 faster than they estimated last year. The 2017 survey also found that while companies are taking more time for planning and preparation, the actual system deployments are moving quicker than expected. Migration to Windows 10 Is Picking UpWith only a few exceptions, almost every respondent said their company is moving to Windows 10 in the near future. More than 10 percent of the 2017 survey respondents stated that their enterprises had, in fact, completed the migration to Windows 10; whereas in 2016, only 12 percent of companies had migrated even 5 percent of their systems. Only a subset of those—7.2 percent of total respondents—expected to have more than half their systems migrated by this time. There is also an expectation among respondents that migration to Windows 10 will be speedy once their planning cycles conclude. Twenty-three percent expect to complete their migration to Windows 10 in three months, while 40 percent estimate they’ll be done within six months. Another 23 percent expect to complete the effort within six months to a year, while over a third are looking to finish in more than a year. On top of that, most respondents are embracing an aggressive migration schedule, with more than half planning to move 30 percent or more of their systems to Windows 10 in the coming year, and another 42 percent plan to migrate more than half their systems. Security the Major Motivator of MigrationSecurity appears to be the main driving force behind the hike in migrations among the surveyed enterprises. IT experts have found consensus that Windows 10 is the most secure client OS released by Microsoft, with 79 percent citing it as the main appeal to migration. For comparison, the runner-up, Windows 10 universal applications, garnered 23 percent. This consensus is far from unfounded. Windows 10 offers major improvements to the Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection software and improves the security of Office 365 by tracking down viruses transmitted by email. In addition, most companies utilize a wipe-and-load installation system for Windows 10 migration, which is considered good digital security hygiene practice. Automating the Migration Progress: An Exercise in Optimism?Improvements in automation software appear to be the source of the increased rush to migrate by major corporations and industries. More than half of respondents claim it will only take two to four hours to migrate a single system to Windows 10 through automation, and just under one-third think it will take an hour or less. However, this belief in automation might not be entirely warranted. Companies are still struggling to conduct migrations without touching the systems in some way, whether physically or remotely. Just under half the respondents reported that of systems migrated, less than one-tenth were completely zero-touch—requiring no manual efforts at all. About one-third reported that more than half their systems were true zero-touch deployments. Despite the obstacles to true automated migration, most respondents appear to be optimistic. Only 35 percent of the respondents feel that Windows 10 deployment requires significant manual effort. Just under half of respondents believe that advanced automation will create such efficiency for their organization to require five or fewer staff members to complete the move to Windows 10. Migration Takes Time and Requires Careful PlanningDespite both the speed and enthusiasm for Windows 10 migration that has exploded over the past year, the planning and preparing for the migration are taking longer than expected. More than half of companies estimate 4 to 12 months before they are ready to begin migrating in earnest. Fourteen percent expect it to take even longer. About one-third of companies are either already done planning or expect to be done within the next few months. The reason for this “measure twice, migrate once” approach is clear: Time is still a huge obstacle to the process. Windows 10 migration is a large, complex project, and careful planning up front could prevent significant delays and costs. While automation will make delivering Windows 10 easier, verifying migrated system data post-migration proves a far more daunting task, worrying half of the respondents. Furthermore, the Window 10 migration presents corporations with an opportunity to configure their systems to their liking—something that can’t be done rashly without great consequence. The speed at which Windows 10 is adopted shows that Windows 10 is the future for enterprises of every size. By next year, 52 percent of companies are projected to be halfway through their migrations. And much like this year, that percentage might end up being much higher. Only time will tell. Opinions expressed in the article above do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Data Center Knowledge and Informa. Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library. |
| 4:42p | Are Encrypted Lockboxes for Data Centers Worth the Usability Cost? The idea is simple. First, you encrypt all your data and put the key somewhere safe. Then you send the data off to a data center somewhere. When you need the data, you bring it back and decrypt it with your key. The people who run the data center have no way of getting to your data, and neither do hackers, foreign spies, or anyone with a court order. “There are a number of advantages,” said Diogo Monica, IEEE member and security lead at Docker. “You are not sharing the keys with anyone, so you have exclusive control of the data that leaves the organization.” There’s also a compliance benefit, he added. “You can prove to the auditor that you own the keys, the keys are local, and all the data is transformed, and all the use of these third-party clouds [is] exclusively being done on the encrypted data,” he said. Some data centers and cloud vendors offer this kind of lockbox technology to their customers, and with the looming GDPR deadline next year, more are likely to follow suit. Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation, which kicks in next May, is sure to send ripples across the entire IT infrastructure ecosystem. Read more: What Europe’s GDPR Means for Data Center Operators Numerous vendors offer both software and hardware appliances that do the encryption and key management for you. But there are tradeoffs, and the biggest one is usability. If you’re the only one with a key, that means that employees working remotely won’t be able to get to the data. Do you give them copies of your keys? Do you keep the keys in a separate shared storage area for them to use? Do you funnel all traffic through an appliance that does the encryption and decryption for you? The cloud vendors won’t be able to get to your data either, and that’s not always a good thing. Say you have a bunch of documents stored away, and you want to search them for a specific term. It’s hard to do a search if they’re all encrypted. You also can’t work with them using online tools. As a solution, some vendors offer lockboxes lite — they keep the keys for you, but promise to keep them safe. “It is simpler to deploy if you are using vendor keys and their key management systems,” said Caio Milani, director of product management at MarkLogic, a database vendor. “However, it is a question of trust in the vendor’s internal process.” Jersey City-based software company AvePoint uses Microsoft’s Azure Key Vault so that customers have a degree of control over the keys, while still being able to use the Office 365 online platform. |
| 5:38p | Oracle Supercharges Cloud Database With Bare-Metal Servers Oracle is now offering its Exadata database technology on bare-metal servers available as a cloud service. The Exadata Database Machine is an appliance that usually lives in the customer’s own data center. It integrates Oracle’s database software, servers, storage, and network connectivity, all meant to make it easier for enterprises to deploy and manage on-premises. The company initially launched Oracle Exadata Cloud two years ago, allowing its customers to take advantage of Exadata as a cloud service. But over the course of the past year or so, it has upgraded, modernized, and expanded its cloud infrastructure, building a new cloud platform to improve performance and allow it to better compete against Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and other top cloud providers. And today Oracle announced that Exadata Cloud is now available on this next-generation cloud infrastructure. Read more: Oracle Cloud, Built by Former AWS, Microsoft Engineers, Comes Online The offering is targeted at data center operators that have high-performance and high-availability needs and want to migrate their most important database applications and data warehouses to the cloud, or want to develop new high-performance cloud applications, said Kash Iftikhar, VP of product management for Oracle Cloud. “The Exadata service we’ve launched is literally giving our customers the same experience as those who have Exadata on premise,” he said. “It’s available on the cloud in an extremely seamless fashion. They get the performance, CPUs and storage they want – all of the functions are exactly the same. The only thing they have to do is jump on a console and access it.” According to Oracle, its cloud infrastructure is compatible with its databases deployed on-premises, which makes it easy for customers with data centers to transition to the cloud or to deploy a hybrid cloud strategy. See also: Oracle Wants Its Cloud to Grow Inside Your Data Centers Carl Olofson, IDC’s research VP of data management software, said Oracle has essentially fine-tuned its Exadata Cloud service to perform even better than before. Making it available on bare-metal servers improves the speed of database applications, he said. The announcement is part of the company’s longer-term strategy to help its customers consolidate their databases on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine and migrate their on-premises applications and data to the cloud, Olofson pointed out. “It reinforces the core Oracle strategy that they are trying to get as many Oracle database customers to the Oracle Cloud as quickly as possible, and this is another step along the path,” he said. Oracle has seen its cloud business take off in recent years. When it announced its quarterly earnings in late June, the company said revenue for its IaaS and Platform-as-a-Service business grew 40 percent to $397 million year-over-year during the 2017 fourth quarter. It’s overall cloud revenue, which includes software-as-a-service offerings, grew 58 percent to $1.4 billion during the 2017 fiscal year. See also: Oracle’s Hurd Bullish on Cloud Business, Says Enterprise Market Largely Untapped With today’s announcement, Oracle said its IaaS customers can now self-provision multiple bare-metal servers in less than five minutes, with each server supporting more than 4 million input/output operations per second (IOPS). Its cloud infrastructure also provides block storage that linearly scales by 60 IOPS per GB. Iftikhar said Oracle is targeting three types of customers with its Exascale cloud offering on bare-metal servers: enterprises that are already using Exadata on-premises and want to shut down their data centers and migrate to the cloud, organizations that want a hybrid solution, and new customers who have all their infrastructure in the cloud already and want to transition to Oracle’s cloud service. “The audience is all three,” he said. “It’s typically enterprise customers or large service providers who have requirements for high-performance databases. We are talking about petabytes of data, and at a minimum, more than 30 to 40TB of data.” As part of its announcement, Oracle said FICO, which provides fraud, risk management and compliance software to banks worldwide, is implementing the technology. FICO saw a boost in performance when it tested the combination of Oracle Exadata on bare-metal servers that run on Oracle’s next-generation cloud infrastructure, according to Oracle’s press release. |
| 9:50p | Cloud Migration, Security in Focus at AWS Summit New York  Brought to you by IT Pro Two weeks after posting its Q2 results, Amazon Web Services today is hosting AWS Summit New York, a free event for users designed to educate them about new features. To that end AWS announced new cloud services to boost security and ease application migration that are available now. Among the new features and services are Amazon Macie, a security service that uses machine learning to help prevent data loss, and AWS Glue, a managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service. Customers can also now use the AWS Migration Hub to manage migrations in any AWS Region. Amazon Macie recognizes sensitive data such as a personally identifiable information or intellectual property, while continuously monitoring data access activity for anomalies. Amazon Macie alerts users when it detects risk of unauthorized access, or other suspicious behavior, such as source code being downloaded. Amazon Macie currently supports Amazon S3, with support for additional AWS data stores coming later this fall. Also on the security side of things, AWS added support for encryption of data at rest for Amazon Elastic File System. It is available in all regions where EFS is supported. AWS Glue speeds the ETL phase of analytics projects, according to AWS. Customers can point AWS Glue at their data stored on AWS, so it can discover the associated metadata, classify it, generate ETL scripts for data transformation, and load the transformed data into a destination data store. AWS Glue is currently available in the US East (N. Virginia) Region, with plans to expand to other regions in the coming months. AWS Migration Hub is a central location where customers can track the progress of application migrations across multiple AWS and partner solutions. As migrations continue to be a barrier to cloud adoption, various AWS partners have launched solutions to help customers address this challenge. Most recently, Rackspace announced a strategic partnership with AWS to help ease AWS migration, including Migration Service Delivery which allows customers to tap Rackspace support and engineers. For more details on the new services and updates to existing features, check out the AWS blog. |
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