Event Recording

Multi-Cloud Multi-Hybrid IT: How to Make your Digital Business Fly

Martin Kuppinger

Principal Analyst

KuppingerCole

Posted on Sep 13, 2021

IT has changed fundamentally in the past years. Multi-cloud environments mixed with private clouds and on-premises infrastructures (multi-hybrid) are the new normal.
The high pace in transformation, modernization, and innovation required for success in the digital age requires these environments to work smooth and secure.
In his talk, Martin Kuppinger will discuss where and how IT, IT Security, and IAM need to evolve to make the digital business fly.

Video Description

Show Transcript

Thank you. And welcome also from my end, it's a long time since I've been on that stage the last time. And it's really great.

I have to, to say, to talk in front of a larger audience, probably the same feeling actors had sometimes over the past couple of months to my opening keynote, I'll touch a number of topics. And so the one thing I'd like to, to hint on a little is that there will be a series of videos and block posts going way more into detail around some of the concepts I'll talk about today. And the theme for today is multi-cloud multi hybrid.

It, how to make your digital business fly. And this starts with, in, in fact with the notion and the, the challenge we are facing that our business is changing.

And our, it seems to get more complex than more simple. So what we do around that, so let's have a quick look at digital business.

And what, what we have experienced over the past years is for digital services. Software is the differentiator. So there's this, every business is a software business, and we always can argue about such phrases and claims, but I think there's really something in, because it is the service, the digital service we provide, you deliver the software we have in the vehicle we have in things, in other things that help us differentiate and success in the digital age builds on this differentiation.

So our digital journey, which means, and I I'd like, I like this term journey, way more than digital transformation. It's not a transformation transformation would say we are a, and we go to B and we are done.

No, we are going from a to B to C and so on and endless series because our competition, the innovation will not stop. So it's really a digital journey, not a digital transformation. And this is about changing business models. I think many of you have experienced this. If you're from the software industry, moving from packages to subscriptions is one of these samples. It's new products, new services shift from product revenue to service revenue. It's all this competition, many organizations right now have competitors they've never experienced to have.

So it's about compete, but to do so, if we want to compete successfully, we need a digital services. This is where our intellectual property our USP is in. This is what helps us differentiate. And we need to develop, deliver and operate these services. This is about agility. On one hand, this is about availability. So it's the delivery. And it's about digital identity and security identity. Not only from a security perspective, but everything in the customer journey is around digital identity. So it's the customer journey. It's the attack resilience, which makes us secure.

And this is at the end, when we can deliver all that, then we can deliver digital experience, which is differentiating us in the competition, which makes us succeed. And it is important. And what it needs to do is to deliver to the time to, well, you demand of the business to deliver to the business, actual it for delivering secure digital services on time. And that leads us to our challenge. That is this multi-cloud multi hybrid. It complexity really will not Inc decrease its attempts to increase.

So, so when we look at, at all these things, so we had servers and then we had vans and then we had public clouds and private clouds and the edge came. So it wasn't that we said, okay, right now we did it on premise. And now we do it in the cloud.

No, we added private clouds. We added public clouds. We added edge computing. It gets more and more and more. The reality is we are in a multi-cloud multi hybrid world today. And the same is happening with devices.

Yes, there was the PC and smartphone and we don't know what will be next. It's the same with the complexity of application storage. It tends more to sprawl. My colleague Alexei had just wrote another block posts around, around databases. And if you remember the days where you did everything with relational databases, yeah, it's very different today. You have many varies to choose wrong. So this will grow. This will not go away. And we need to, to address this.

And I believe the only way to do so is by unification, by treating things that are, that we can treat in some ways similar, in a consistent manner and by automate, powered by policies. Clearly, there's also some AI touch this in a second. This is what we need to do. This is my basic perspective here. So how can we achieve this? How can we do this? And this deliver agility at cost, combine it with the need from control and compliance for security. This is the big question as I've said.

And so how to deliver something which is secure to run it, to deploy it, all the services, the business needs. Can we, can we handle that world with manual administration? Probably not. So for the next thing I say, probably some people will bash me. Can we handle it with an everything as a code approach? Probably not. Administrators, not always are the best programmers. So as a code implied, and by the way, we all know from our day life. That's why we always have to deal with patches and updates code is error, bro.

So everything as a code is from my perspective, not right directory policy based automation. Yes. That's something I strongly believe if we know what we have there. If we apply policies and policies are easy, policies are what we use with our children. Don't touch the hot oven. Subject action object policies are, have always the same structure. We can derive lower level policy from higher level policies. We can automate a lot. We can do a lot of things in a very, very elaborated manner. What we need to do is we need to take this, all this information about this complex it environment.

We need to know what we have. And I think this is one of the biggest challenges we have in it. We usually don't know what we have. I talk trust in our ransomware resilience workshop in the morning about that when you first spend the first one or two days looking at which service do we have that might be affected by an attack, then this is the typically indicator. We have a challenge in understanding what we have in services and resources, et cetera, in identities and everything. We need to know that we need to collect that. Then we can work on that.

And clearly there is AI ML, how much AI and ML is, but there's technology that helps. And this is something where we can then use to, to optimize policies, to made and to configure these environments. And we need to do that, not for every single piece. So like this cloud and that cloud and that edge, etcetera, we need to do it in a more, in a broader manner.

We, we need to unify it across the environments. And two things I believe help us very much because there are some common denominators here, which from my perspective, our identities and resources. So we have identities. And at the end, when we look at security and, and who can do what as aspect, when we look at a lot of things, it is about who or what is allowed to access what we have a crib on the identity, because there's some form of authentication. The broader sense, for instance, there's some management identities are way more than humans.

These days to keep it in mind services, have their identities. It's more difficult with the device because the challenge with the device at the end of the day is it's not always ours. It's even more difficult with the network, but Hey, we can encrypt. And then we have at least done a good step towards security. And on the other hand, we hopefully know the resources, not always easy with shadow it, but at the end of the day, and I said, this is one of the broad, the untold things in many it departments that you not know, really know what you have, but we need to work on that. This is a premise.

And, and when we put this into a bigger picture and, and trust, look at how important is, are certain technologies to achieve a certain demand, a certain need within the digital transformation. So we have to dynamic competition, dynamic partnerships, all these things, which depict the digital journey. I used the term transformation, sorry. And we have tech technologies such as digital identity, cybersecurity, or agile development operations. Then there, there are three columns that stand out a little, and these are cybersecurity identity and it's agile development and operations. Oh yes.

We also need this operations stuff, etcetera. This is, I put it together. And how do we get these services on board? This is a picture. And so what do we need to, to, to change our it for the digital age on the next few slides?

I, I bring up three approaches us three concept, three models I believe can help us to do the next step. And as I've said, there will be videos. There will be block posts, which go more into detail. So I will not read out all these slides. So I have, in fact, I have maybe basically one per per thing. The first concept I I talk about is what we defined as basis. It's about one, it it's about an approach, a paradigm for how can we deliver it service as unified manner as we can to the business demand based on automation, based on policies.

So, or working with the unification at the end, it's in our environment, we deliver services from. So why don't we treat environments that deliver services as similar as we can, clearly the level of administration will differ a little, depending on what the talent the provider does, but there's a lot of similarity we can achieve. And that means we need to change our it more towards acting as a cloud than trying to change the cloud. That will not work. So it's at our end where we need to do the work.

So the target is factually to, to have this business business driven, agile, secure it as a service. This is the acronym behind, or the, the, the long text behind the acronym where it's about business requests. It's about setting our strategy in our organization for the procurement of services for that can be development that can be purchasing services and to deliver them to ensure that the infrastructure is there. You need to run that. That is well managed, that you have a group on the applications and service, and that you have all the identity and security in place.

This requires to, to unify the, the operations across the hybrid cloud and the data center, ideally, and to work on these other areas. So there are various elements, and by the way, enterprise service management is a very important one on that there's policy automation, there's cybersecurity operations management, and this must be seen in an integrated manner, but this is very important.

We, we need to align the departments. We shouldn't try to squeeze everything in it because developers are developers. Operators are operators. They can do one thing. Very good. Don't try to overload. If you need to care about everything, it'll fail, ensure that you can use the specialists the best manner. This requires interfaces on a technical level, such as APIs on an organization level that you have, it requires then that you work with the policies.

As I've said, policies are something you, which are sort of unifying, which you can treat pretty much the same across many, many different domains. So this is really the, the approach at a very high level. Think about not, oh, I have so many different areas. Think about where you can unify, where you can automate. This is described in this approach. It's very high level here. As I've said, there will be further readings around that, following this talk very soon. And so have a look at what we publish around this. The second is the service delivery.

So, so we need basis. We need framework, which allows us to understand how can we really create an it that works across a multicloud, multi hardware environment here. It's about how to deliver, how do we deliver these services? How do we ensure that all these new things are delivered fast, secure operations and development of agile services is the term behind another paradigm, this, but what that really looks at not only development and operations, it's really more it's delivered infrastructure, but it's the set about management operations with identity and security analytics.

Again, I strongly believe this is very much about policies and automating and knowing what happens. So if there's something new and new service, if there are new resources we have in our cloud, if there's anything we need to know, we need to collect. We need to gather that data to make use of it. Only what we know we can manage, we can automate. And so we have the agile development business driven, modern architectures, the infrastructure, the operations, which so to speak follows. And this automated based on what is changing.

And we have the security and identity services that are consumed the same elements here. No surprise, because it's the same thing we at the end want to achieve. So here it's really them saying, okay, what do developers do? What do the others do? How do they interface? What is the way they work together? And how can we then automate this entire process across these various stages, from the development procurement of it, to what we finally deliver. So we need to go more in detail. And so does, in fact is then how do we do it?

Specif, how do we arrange this entire some call it Def ops. I believe it's more than defs this entire process. So it's in fact, a little bit beyond defs ops and last, not least it's about security identity. Have you heard, maybe some of you heard about cloud infrastructure entitlement recently, going back to what I said at the beginning, I think we need to unify. We uni need to unify the entitlement across our multi-cloud multi-hybrid world. And that's maybe it's because it's a dream. That's my third paradigm, dynamic resource entitlement and access management. So it's security for all of it.

We need to understand our resources. We need to, and I think there's a, there's a challenge we need to solve. We need to tackle. We need to address soon. How do we get a CRI on all the entitlements and these complex multicloud, multi hybrid environments. We must act on that, but it's, unfortunately it's not trust multi-cloud, it's, multi-cloud multi hybridy. And interestingly, many of the vendors in that space support, VMware environments support services, cetera. So we need to think broader and we need to align it with all the other entitlement management syncs.

It must work across everything on premise at private cloud. And this is really at the core of identity and access management. Where is it heading? How can we consistently manage resources across everything? The interesting point I brought it up, we have all these identities and at the end, it's always about which identity and if it's the identity of a resource or a resource as an identity, it's allowed to do what we can unify. It. It's always about an identity and the access and the governance of those things. So let's unify not create more technology. Let's try to reduce complexity.

So these are three paradigms and they are not standing isolated from everything else you heard in the past. So, so basis is the business perspective. So does this really the secure operations development perspective. And then we have really more the, the infrastructure, the security perspective, and all this is guided by the principles of zero trust. So zero trust is a very well at concept in contrast to some other approaches.

I would dare to say, when I look at SASI, then our thinking is probably for, for soda, which is bit the same level, more driven by a service by a resource, by an identity perspective. Then by a network perspective, when you look at CI, em, I dare to say, so our perspective is more on unification, on covering everything. So it's in some way, a superset of that. So let's make it fly. Let's make it fly. And when we go back to this picture for the beginning, then there are some, some fundamentals we should look at business demand drives it. Multi-cloud multi hybrid is new normal.

It's built your stuff on policy based automation, gas at the status of everything, know what you have. You can't protect it. You can't also utilize it. If you don't know about it, entities and resources are in the core focus because at the end, it's about protecting this unified views in some way, everything is a service. If you try to treat your own world more in a service thinking you're better on that air trial development, integrated delivery, that operations, this is really bigger thing than dev ops, automate everything across everything, identities and resources again.

So shift left your it thinking to make your digital business fly. Thanks.

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Multi-Cloud Multi-Hybrid IT: How to Make your Digital Business Fly