10 Cloud Errors That Can Be Fatal To Your Business

If you want to ensure a cloud migration that benefits your business, avoid the most common mistakes.

The sun always shines above the clouds," say optimists. What they do not mention is that under the clouds there are high winds, torrential rain and lightning.

The same is true with cloud computing. On the sunny side, the cloud offers a variety of benefits, including the promise of increased reliability, flexibility, manageability and scalability. Look below, however, and you'll see the dark side of technology - a place where a single mistake can lead to a complete catastrophe.

If you want to ensure a cloud migration that benefits your business, avoid the following common mistakes:

1. Migrate to the cloud without governance and planning strategy

Provisioning infrastructure resources in the cloud is very simple, and it is equally easy to lose sight of the policy, security, and cost issues that may occur. Here governance and planning are essential.

"While governance and planning are the goals, they don't need to be addressed all at once," says Chris Hansen, leader of cloud infrastructure practice at technology consulting firm SPR Consulting. "Use small iterations supported by automation. That way you can address the three critical areas of governance - monitoring/management, security and finance - to quickly solve problems and fix them."

A related mistake is not fully understanding who within the organization is responsible for specific cloud-related tasks such as security, data backups, and business continuity.

"When something goes wrong and these things have not been discovered, companies can find themselves in a very difficult the situation," says Robert Wood, director of security at SourceClear, a provider of security automation platform.

2. Believe that anything can be done in the cloud.

While much progress has been made in recent years, many applications are not yet cloud-ready. An enterprise can seriously damage application performance, user experience and engagement, and results if it sends something to the cloud that is not fully ready or requires complex integration with legacy systems, notes Joe Grover, a partner with LiquidHub.

"Take the time to understand what you plan to earn by making this change [to the cloud] and then validate that you will get what you want," he says.

3. Treat the cloud as your local data centre

One costly mistake many companies make is treating their cloud environment as a local data centre. "If you follow this path, your business will eventually focus on things like total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis to make crucial migration decisions," explains Dennis Allio, president of the cloud technology services group for Workstation. . While cloud services can deliver significant cost savings, they also require a totally different resource management process.

Consider, for example, migrating a single application server from a data centre to the cloud.

"Proper analysis of TCO will take into account how many hours in a day the server will be in use," says Allio. For some companies, a server may only be used during business hours. In a data centre, leaving a server on 24x7 adds only a slightly extra cost to the facility's utility bill. But in the cloud, users usually pay by the hour. "Your cloud TCO analysis is likely to assume eight hours a day of cloud usage - which can provide an unwelcome surprise at a potentially triple cost if the cloud systems management the group does not include processes for shutting down these servers when it is not. are in use, "he adds.

4. Believe Your Cloud Service Provider Will Take Care of Everything

Top-tier cloud service providers (CSPs) provide all customers, regardless of size, with operational capabilities equal to a Fortune 50 IT staff, says Jon-Michael C. Brook, author and consultant who currently co-chairs Cloud Security Alliance Top Security Alliance.

However, based on the shared responsibility model, CSPs are responsible only for what they can control, especially the service infrastructure components. Many tasks, especially the deployment, maintenance and enforcement of security measures, are left to the customer to provide and manage.

"Take time to read best practices from the cloud you are deploying, follow cloud design standards, and understand your responsibilities," advises Brook. "Don't trust your cloud service provider will take care of everything."

5. Suppose lift and shift is the only clear path to the cloud migration

The cost advantages of the cloud can quickly evaporate when poor strategic choices are made. A lift and shift cloud transition - simply uploading images from internal systems within a CSP infrastructure - is relatively easy to manage, but potentially inefficient and risky in the long run.

"The lift and shift approach ignores scalability to increase and decrease demand," says Brook. "There may be systems within a design that is appropriate to be an exact copy, however, putting an entire enterprise architecture directly onto a CSP would be costly and inefficient. Invest the initial time to redesign your architecture for the cloud and you will benefit greatly. "

6. Failed to monitor service performance

Failure to regularly evaluate cloud service to expectations is a quick way to waste money and hamper critical business operations.

"An organization should periodically review key performance indicators and take appropriate measures to address actual and potential deviations from planned results," says Rhand Leal, information security analyst at global consulting Adviser Expert Solutions.

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How to Monitor Hybrid and Multicloud Networks

Organizations today use two or more clouds and distinct tools to monitor environments. Faced with complexity, which approach to take?

 Network monitoring in companies has never been easy. According to Enterprise Management Associates, even before organizations began migrating to the cloud, a typical company used four to ten tools just to monitor and troubleshoot its own networks.

The public cloud adds another complex obstacle to network visibility. Traditional monitoring tools focus on the performance of individual network elements. But today, the age of digital business requires a more holistic view, with the ability to gather and correlate data from diverse cloud environments, using big data analytics and machine learning .

According to a survey by Kentik, currently 40% of organizations consider themselves multicloud users , having two or more cloud service providers. Already a third of companies have a hybrid cloud environment, with at least one cloud service provider and some kind of traditional infrastructure belonging to the third party.

“There are so many different types of data that people collect and analyze on the network - from device metrics to NetFlow to packages and logs to active synthetic monitoring, and no vendor does it all very well. Most don't even try to do all this, ”says Shamus McGillicuddy, EMA Research Director.

As a result, 35% of multi-cloud users have three to five monitoring tools, including log management tools (48%), application performance management tools (40%), open source tools (34%) and performance management tools (25%).

“People tell me they just can't find tools end to end. They have a very good view of the data center, a good view of AWS, a good view of Azure, but they can't put it all together, ”adds McGillicuddy.

For Bob Laliberte, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, "the environment is getting much more complex." "Therefore, it will be critical to find very sophisticated tools that will allow this complex environment to become simple to manage."

But it's easier said than done. Network professionals often complain that centralized monitoring on existing devices does not increase or provide the visibility needed for cloud and digital age applications. Native cloud monitoring tools, such as Amazon CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, or GCP Stackdriver, are less fragmented and can observe all layers of infrastructure and applications, but some users find that cloud tools often lack sufficient resources.

So far, no vendor has come up with a “comprehensive” monitoring solution, and no solution should be expected anytime soon because of the vast differences between networks. Fortunately, however, there are ways to reduce these differences and get better performance.

Visibility islands

In a hybrid cloud environment, “you will always have islands of visibility. The important thing is to look for opportunities to integrate these islands, ”says McGillicuddy.

One of the most valuable data sources for a network monitoring tool is a management system API used to extract data from other platforms, whether from AWS, or from an IT service management platform such as ServiceNow.

“If you try to put these things together, you'll need a network monitoring vendor that has a very modern API in the tool that allows you to access things like custom data collection, tool customization, and the ability to create new dashboards that let you see the cloud. the way you want it, "explains the expert.

On the plus side, most new vendors have a good API. “Infrastructure teams can have an advantage with some of the legacy tools that are currently expanding into native cloud environments,” says Laliberte. Toolkits such as Riverbed, which integrate SNMP research, streaming, and packet capture to gain an enterprise view of the network in hybrid cloud environments, and SolarWinds advanced network monitoring for local, hybrid, and cloud infrastructure, “offer the opportunity. to link the solutions. "

Many traditional network monitoring tools, however, were slow to take a cloud approach. About 74% of network managers surveyed by EMA say a network management tool has failed to meet public cloud requirements. Among network managers, 28% said this failure was due to vendor inaction or lack of a cloud support roadmap.

“I think we'll get to where all vendors will be 'good' at incorporating some cloud tips with their tools - but I think you'll never see a time when there is true parity,” says McGillicuddy.

Cloud service providers are making progress

For native and multicloud environments, "cloud providers are starting to provide slightly more consistent access to tools to monitor networks that cross their perimeters," says Gregg Siegfried, director of research, cloud operations and IT at Gartner.

According to Kentik's survey, despite progress, many cloud users are still unaware of or taking advantage of some of the existing monitoring capabilities. For example, over half of AWS users surveyed say they are using AWS-provided cloud-specific monitoring tools, such as flow logs.

“Generally, I recommend that customers first try cloud provider tools and native cloud tools before spending time and money with others,” Siegfried adds, “but there is a delta between the visibility you get from a cloud provider. and the visibility you can get with one of these [complementary] products. ”

Multicloud Monitoring

 

New tools have emerged that combine monitoring in multi-cloud environments. The important types of features in these tools are adaptability, supporting collaboration with product development and other infrastructure teams, and integrating data from multiple sources. Some of these platforms include ThousandEyes, Kentik, and APM tools, such as New Relic and Dynatrace, to name a few pointed out by Siegfried.

In April, Kentik announced integrated support for Microsoft Azure. The company began using streaming data from AWS and Google Cloud Platform late last year. The platform also integrates with other cloud infrastructure data sources such as host-level instrumentation, virtual network devices, and container orchestration.

Last year, Internet monitoring provider ThousandEyes extended its Network Intelligence product to multi-cloud environments. The company pre-provisioned IaaS vantage points, including 15 AWS sites, 25 Azure sites, and 15 GCP sites giving them visibility into the performance of specific cloud providers across multiple regions. The solution also gives IT the ability to measure performance across sites, hybrids, inter and intra-cloud.

While Kentik monitors live traffic, ThousandEyes generates synthetic traffic and then reports what might be happening to a hypothetical network transaction. Interest in active synthetic monitoring solutions has increased over the past three years.

AIOps and Advanced Analytics Platforms

As network monitoring focuses on both data acquisition and troubleshooting, analysts see the emergence of artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) and advanced platforms that perform big data analysis and machine learning to correlate. insights between tools.

"You see some vendors like CA doing this with the large data stack they have built, called Jarvis, which connects to different parts of their tool portfolio to correlate insights between them," says McGillicuddy. “They also tried to make it easier for third parties to extract data to correlate insights. Some specialized vendors can also connect to all your tracking items and correlate everything for you in an easy to see the way. We have seen some indications in our research so far that this is really a good approach. "

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What Will Your IT Career Look Like in the Next 5 Years

Will the impact of automation be felt? What positions will be created? We hear expert bets on the new generation of IT

With all the technological transformations and changes in the workplace, the IT career is undergoing a real makeover. When thinking about IT of the future, people often imagine functions involving artificial intelligence, data science, and cloud. These topics are undoubtedly part of expectations for years to come, but experts also include new functions that do not yet exist in the market.

To gauge what the IT career will look like five years from now, analysts have been discussing what will change at work and how these changes will improve business results. In the analysis, experts also consider how these changes can help make adjustments and corrections that may benefit IT professionals in the future.

New Security Positions

Growing security threats must create new roles for professionals. For Joy Beland, senior director of cybersecurity development at Continuum, these variables will impact organizational culture, not just technology. “The internal culture of companies needs to take a new perspective around privacy and security,” he explains. “The adoption of cyber tools and solutions is completely dependent on it. I think this will lead to a new position: cybersecurity culture director. Those who focus on the human element for cybersecurity implementation will become more in demand as the integration between HR policy, corporate culture and information security merge into a single leadership role. ”

Beland also believes that the functions of CIO and CISO will be merged into small businesses, as there is a need to integrate technology supervision with privacy and security. "Budgets within smaller companies struggle to accommodate both functions," said the expert.

Offensive Security's Jim O'Gorman also sees the need to create new security roles as work demands with increasingly complex protections are increasing and requiring professionals to deepen their knowledge in specific areas.

Remote Teams

The remote work will grow increasingly creating demand for the deployment of new tools to meet deadlines and goals. "Because nearly half of US employees are already working remotely in some way, technology will allow more to do so over the next five years," said Chris McGugan, senior vice president of solutions and technology, Avaya. "And for companies to truly reap the benefits of such a workforce, project managers will be needed to ensure that the distribution of work is met."

McGugan further sees the need for IT specialists who can implement new collaborative solutions to facilitate remote work, enabling employees to contribute to business more effectively. "These specialists will be needed to choose the right technology vendors and make sure the systems work well," he says.

Park Place Technologies CIO Michael Cantor sees another aspect that will make it necessary to advance remote work. "The growth of retired workers will also make it difficult to acquire talent as the workforce shrinks, making alternative forms of work more acceptable," says the executive. Despite this, Cantor does not expect a complete change in career plan developments, but rather that new work patterns will be available to those interested.

Democratization of data and application development

Steven Hall, ISG's partner and president, expects wide adoption of tools in business divisions that can help employees develop applications and make sense of big data. “In general, we are seeing deindustrialization and decentralization of IT. The technology is accessible to everyone, with thousands of SaaS and microservices available to beginners, ”reports the expert.

For him, there is an emerging trend: the emergence of Low-Code platforms and tools that make data science and analysis more accessible to businesses.

“IT skills are changing dramatically, but in very interesting ways. Cloud and SaaS solutions with low-code or no-code capabilities have simplified software development. Organizations are moving to PaaS solutions such as ServiceNow and Force.Com to rapidly develop applications with limited IT support, ”he notes. “Rapid developments in data visualization through tools such as Microsoft BI, Tableau, Dome, etc. have moved traditional IT reporting functions to the front of the business, where professionals across the organization can easily analyze data with extremely visual aids. to understand the information better. ”

Expert Hiring

Andres Rodriguez, Nasuni CTO and former The New York Times CTO, says there is a growing need for hiring data scientists with specific skills. "We see relatively small companies that specialize in specific industries such as pharmaceuticals, transportation, logistics, etc.," reports Rodriguez. By investing in experts, data analytics can be tailored simply to customer demand.

The impact of automation

The automation is already transforming workflows and confidence in technologies demonstrates an increase in demand for trained professionals to deal with the changing roles that require scanning. Cathy Southwick, CIO of Pure Storage, sees growing automation in the future, even in small and midsize businesses. “They can automate much of what is needed from an IT perspective - from email distribution lists to application permissions,” explains the expert. "This may seem trivial, but the volume of such work really increases when it has to be done manually."

Chatbots should also help reduce the burden on IT professionals. “An employee can be serviced by a bot to do a password reset or to request a software license. This saves time for the end-user employee and the IT employee who is released to handle the most important tasks, ”says Southwick. "It also creates a better employee experience, as employees can have their requests handled in minutes using technology."

Nutenix CIO Wendy Pfeiffer says the company's machine learning tools are already solving nearly a third of its help desk requests. "In this new IT environment, which will be most in-demand is the skills surrounding IoT and high-end computing. By 2021, Cisco predicts that IoT devices will produce approximately 850 zettabytes of data per year or more than 40 times. the information generated by data centres around the world. IT teams will need the right people, tools and strategies to collect and analyze this data.

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Why Do Malware Target Many Companies, What's the Solution

Cyberthreat.id - Cases of document-based malware continue to increase, even more, 59 per cent of attacks in the first quarter of 2019 are contained in documents. The most affected victims are companies, especially small and medium enterprises (SMEs) because they do not have good protection.

In fact, being a victim of file-based malware can cause big problems. Because attacks that damage important data on an organization's computer will force companies to stop operating, resulting in financial losses. In addition, there will be legal problems due to the spread of personal data and financial data of its customers.

Certainly, SMEs still invest very little in cybersecurity. Fortunately, a new malware removal solution has emerged to deal with file-based attacks. Providers of odix security solutions even received a 2 million euro grant from the European Commission recently to increase its pace of bringing technology to SMEs.

Here are some ways how SMEs can reduce file-based attacks as written by The Hacker News.

1 - Disarming Malware

File-based attacks involve malware that is hidden in documents that appear to be legitimate. The malware activates immediately when the user opens the file. Depending on the payload, malware can destroy or steal data. Many organizations continue to rely on antivirus to deal with this attack.

However, hackers now use more sophisticated polymorphic malware that automatically changes to avoid signature-based detection used by antivirus. Companies can also use air-mapped sandbox computers to scan and test documents, but this often requires special hardware and personnel to manage.

Disarming The malware appears as the preferred way to prevent file-based attacks. Unlike conventional antivirus and sandboxes, such solutions can carry out advanced scanning that can detect sophisticated malware.

Not just scanning files, the documents are cleaned, the dangerous code is eliminated. odix, for example, uses TrueCDR (content disarm and reconstruction) technology to ensure that files can be used perfectly after cleaning.

2- Email with a Strong Spam Filter

This year, there is an average of 293 billion business and consumer emails per day. This number is predicted to rise to 347 billion by the end of 2023. So clearly spam continues to be an effective method of cyberattacks. People clicked on the link in 14.2 per cent of spam emails in 2018.

Office email is very open. Employees tend to click on spam email links and download and run potentially dangerous attachments.

Some small businesses might rely on free email accounts that come with their website hosting packages. Unfortunately, such accounts are often insecure and do not have the security and filtering features needed to filter out a malicious e-mail.

To thwart this the threat, companies can integrate more stringent spam filters that can protect all corporate inboxes by blocking spam emails.

A tougher step is to adopt solutions like odix Mail. This acts as a mail proxy for the company mail server. All attachments contained in the incoming email were intercepted. Then it is scanned and sanitized using an odix core machine. After these files are cleared, they are reconnected to the message and finally sent to the intended recipient's inbox.

3 - Alert Flash Drive

Flash drives, external webcams and other USB peripherals can be armed to infect devices or networks. However, employees tend to connect media and devices without much attention, thinking that antiviruses can easily check for malware through real-time security.

Unfortunately, hackers can cleverly disguise malware on this removable media to avoid standard scanning. Armed USB is also used to penetrate even air-conditioning systems.

SMEs can fight USB-based threats that ensure that no unauthorized personnel can connect USB peripherals to their computer systems. Network and operating system policies can be defined to hold privileges that allow the insertion of removable media on the workstation.

As an alternative, companies can use tools such as the Odix Kiosk product which is a special file sanitation workstation where users can insert removable media.

The kiosk acts as a gatekeeper for all files contained in USB and disk drives. These documents are checked and cleaned of potential threats, ensuring that no dangerous files from the media have ever been sent over the network. The sanitized file can then be sent to the user's email.

4 - Training to Avoid Phishing

Preventing file based attacks also require users to change their mindset and behaviour. Including ensuring that they do not fall into social engineering attacks such as phishing.

Phishing is a fraudulent practice of sending deceptive emails to extract personal and financial information from unsuspecting victims. The many uses of email also make it one of the preferred cybercriminal methods.

Phishing emails are carefully crafted to mimic real correspondence from reliable sources such as government offices, HR, or financial institutions.

SMEs must provide appropriate training for employees to recognize suspicious emails and links. Staff must also be trained to always check any files downloaded online or from e-mail for security and legitimacy.

Having a solution such as odix in place helps minimize the potential for company exposure because tasks such as checking attachments and working documents are automatically performed. However, paying employees with the right knowledge about how to use technology resources safely and adequately.

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What is Sd-Wan and Its Benefits For Businesses

SD-WAN  stands for software-defined wide area network (or networking). A WAN is an association between neighbourhood (LANs) isolated by a considerable separation—anything from a couple of miles to a huge number of miles. The term programming characterized infers the WAN is automatically arranged and overseen. Thus, it tends to be effectively adjusted rapidly to address evolving issues.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that data has turned every organisation on its head. Driven by a concurrent blast in distributed computing, network refinement and general availability, there has been a remarkable development in the course of recent years in both the measure of information the normal business creates and it's capacity to catch and investigate that information.

Presently, even private companies depend on mining the information they gather for knowledge and experiences. Join that with the multiplication of cloud-based and web associated devices utilized by organizations, and you're looked with an issue. The majority of that information must be sent into, out of and through your corporate network, which can prompt bottlenecks in more customarily arranged networks as organizations develop.

Networking is a notoriously inconsistent piece of big business IT, and is frequently one of the most tedious and baffling components to investigate. Designing business-wide territory network components to deal with another assistance or to address a deficiency as a rule includes physically giving directions to every switch in the network separately, which can take weeks or even months relying upon the size and land areas of the network and the multifaceted nature of the change.

One new innovation specifically has been mooted as a potential answer for this issue; programming characterized wide region networking, also called SD-WAN. SD-WAN has various points of interest over more seasoned sorts of wide zone network arrangements and ventures are beginning to move it out inside their organizations, with an investigation from network monitoring organization SevOne showing that around half of respondents had dynamic SD-WAN activities set up.

Here are the Benefits of SD-WAN Security:

Given the potential advantages, for what reason haven't SD-WAN's security abilities taken off? Moreover, for what reason haven't specialist co-ops talked up SD-WAN security? The primary explanation is most SD-WAN executions can't do what we've depicted here. Truth be told, just about 10% can, which implies that specialist co-ops that settled on SD-WAN choices without taking a gander at the procedure's remarkable security include presumably didn't get an item that supports those highlights.

The subsequent explanation is that express forwarding requires forwarding arrangements, and it requires significant investment and effort to give them. It's clearly basic to characterize what associations ought to be allowed, in case you permit something that shouldn't be or forbid legitimate associations. Additionally, exactly how clients would plan for, at that point embrace, express association approaches isn't broadly known or even examined. SD-WAN vendors - including network operators - aren't anxious to get into the instruction business.

As cloud-local applications form and go into creation, SD-WAN will have the option to interface and secure them through the entirety of their scaling and redeployment.

The third reason is SD-WAN unequivocal forwarding isn't the absolute response to security. Malware contaminating a framework authorized to associate with an asset could at present reason mischief or take information in the event that it could move beyond application or database shields. Along these lines, get to security on applications and information assets is regularly still required. A displeased or reckless worker with authorized network could do something very similar. This is the reason SD-WAN can lessen, however not wipe out, extra spending on security.

The last reason and maybe the best is the way that SD-WAN is advanced as an MPLS VPN substitution makes operator worries that jumping on the SD-WAN fleeting trend for any explanation will put VPN incomes in danger.

Be that as it may, after some time, the effect of these negative forces will decay. Rivalry unavoidably levels the component playing field in any item space thus, in the long run, SD-WAN vendors will generally support unequivocal availability and journaling. Instruments to enable purchasers to set their forwarding strategies will develop and develop, and security vendors will start to offer over SD-WAN apparatuses to enhance express association security.

Operators, at last, will perceive that an aggressive SD-WAN help takes all their VPN income, while one of their own takes just the net of VPN-to-SD-WAN valuing. A portion of that misfortune can be counterbalanced by gradual security income, as well.

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