Deloitte on Cloud Blog archives

Why hardware matters for the cloud?

September 19, 2019

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Cloud is a crucial part of the conversation for any organization committed to maintaining a modern, robust IT infrastructure. That being said, the transition to the cloud is more than turning on a simple switch. Organizations must make technical decisions driven by strategic actions, ensure that applications run securely with optimized performance, and work to achieve cost benefits.

However, hardware considerations are often overlooked when deploying a public, private, hybrid, or multicloud. Wherever an organization is in its cloud migration journey, it is crucial that organizations identify the underlying hardware infrastructure and management frameworks that will provide mission-critical capabilities at minimum....Continue reading

Recent survey shows enterprise interest in blockchain continues—is cloud the answer?

September 5, 2019

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Blockchain planning starts now—and the role of cloud and cloud providers should not be overlooked.

A recent survey from Deloitte shows that blockchain, both the standard and enabling technology, is picking up steam. Born in Bitcoin, leveraged in financial transactions, voting, and data integration, blockchain has been pushed as the do-all technology for business. 

According to the survey, “today, fintech remains a blockchain leader, but more organizations in more sectors—such as technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences and health care, and government—are expanding and diversifying their blockchain initiatives.” However, despite these advances, progress remains measured. As I see it, supply chain management is one of the most promising use cases. Much like monetary transfer, the supply chain can span thousands of touchpoints and transactions over an extended period of time.

The Deloitte survey reveals continued strong investment in blockchain.  Indeed, enterprises appear willing to invest $5 million USD or more in new blockchain initiatives over the next 12 months, holding steady at 40 percent (up a point from 2018).  At the same time, “53 percent of respondents say that blockchain technology has become a critical priority for their organizations in 2019—a 10-point increase over last year.”  Also, 83 percent see compelling use cases for blockchain, up from 74 percent.  The most positive metric, overall attitudes toward blockchain, have strengthened meaningfully, as defined by the....Continue reading

The cloud and the perfectly scalable enterprise

August 22, 2019

A blog post by , Amit Desai, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Joseph Greiner, senior manager, Deloitte Consulting LLP and Sid Seshadri, senior consultant, Deloitte Consulting LLP

How do traditional companies deal with competitors they may not even see coming? They become perfectly scalable.

Take a look at those new, ultra-successful companies that have, seemingly, come out of nowhere. They may have started on a shoestring budget, with a skeleton staff, but they have the potential to scale rapidly, and almost infinitely, and to grow exponentially. They do things that older, more traditional companies sometimes can’t. Things that traditional companies wish they could do. They tend to respond to market demands more quickly. Their customer base is growing, while those of traditional companies may be on the decline. In many cases, influencers hawk products from these new companies.

Why? Because they are what many old-guard companies are not: they’re agile. Both traditional and new companies can anticipate changes in markets, but the difference is the newer, more agile companies can change direction quickly and seize opportunities. They often operate with higher margins and shorter lead times at earlier stages in their business lifecycle. Further, they can increase or decrease their tech footprint with growth or contraction and launch platforms and systems in new markets. Finally, they can manage their support systems from a single console anywhere....Continue reading

Focus more on being agile than doing agile

August 1, 2019

A blog post Mike Kavis, managing director, chief cloud architect, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Focus more on being agile than doing agile

A framework is only as good as the people, processes, and organizational structures that use it.

Someone posted an article on LinkedIn the other day claiming “Agile is Dead”. The comments that followed were more interesting than the actual article. Many people were bashing agile frameworks. It is no secret that organizations have spend a lot of money on doing agile and many times never really achieved being agile. Right now, SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) is trending and many of my clients are implementing it. But methodologies and frameworks are nothing more than a set of guiding principles for delivering software.....Continue reading

Growth in the cloud: CyrusOne CFO Diane Morefield

July 31, 2019

A blog post by Robert FitzGerald

As cloud usage expands, data center REIT CyrusOne approaches projects more as a supply chain manager than as a real estate developer.

A veteran of the real estate investment trust sector, Diane Morefield, EVP and CFO of CyrusOne Inc., says the increasing movement to the cloud is shaping the data center REIT’s strategy, fueling its recent global expansion, and informing a high-speed culture. “We take a bricks-and-mortar supply chain model and apply it to the future, which differentiates us from many other real estate developers,” Morefield says. In this interview, Morefield discusses why the label “nontraditional REIT” doesn’t apply to CyrusOne in her view, and how finance acts as a hub to the business, with Robert FitzGerald, an Audit & Assurance partner at Deloitte & Touche LLP. She also explains what she looks for in finance talent, and describes her efforts to promote the recruitment, inclusion, and advancement of women and other groups in the REIT sector, with Carol Larson, an Audit & Assurance partner at Deloitte & Touche LLP and champion for Women in Finance for Deloitte’s CFO......Continue reading

Building internal cloud platforms: Balancing control vs. usability

July 25, 2019

A blog post Mike Kavis, managing director, chief cloud architect, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Becoming an internal cloud provider makes sense, but only if you can strike a balance between controls and usability. 

Companies are primarily embracing public cloud for three core benefits: cost reduction, business agility, and access to innovation. The combination of infrastructure as code and fully managed services, such as database as a service (DBaaS), allows application builders to focus on meeting business requirements. Most of the infrastructure and the “IT plumbing” responsibilities can be offloaded to the cloud providers.

The rate of change being introduced in the age of the cloud far exceeds anything we have ever seen, and with great speed comes great risk. Without the right controls, organizations could go down a path that might lead to large breaches, external attacks, and other significant issues. To mitigate these risks, many companies stand up a cloud platform team to build guardrails around the chosen cloud service providers (CSPs) and become the central authority for cloud access and......Continue reading

How end of support for Windows and SQL servers can jump-start cloud migration and modernization

July 11, 2019

A blog post by Scott Rodgers, Master Solutions Architect at Deloitte

Can end-of-life support translate into new beginnings for your core infrastructure?

It’s either an aggravating predicament or a prospect for future growth, depending on your outlook. Either way, if your organization uses Windows Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008, you need to make some decisions fast.

That’s because Microsoft will soon end official support for both technologies, starting with termination of SQL Server 2008 on July 9, 2019, followed by Windows Server 2008 on January 14, 2020. Addressing end of support will likely create burdensome IT projects for organizations  around the world, given that more than 37,000 global companies still rely on Windows Server 2008, according......Continue reading

Anthos: Demystifying the biggest news out of GCN

June 26, 2019

A blog post by Mike Kavis, Chief Cloud Architect, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Anthos offers a single platform on Google’s cloud that allows enterprises to run its workloads in any cloud—whether that’s hybrid, on prem, public, or multi-cloud. Can you separate the Anthos facts from fiction?

We’re two months out of Google Cloud Next, and the dust is settling around Anthos, the biggest announcement coming out of the sold-out event. Deloitte is working closely together with Google to bring Anthos to more customers and help them adopt a hybrid and multi-cloud strategy through our expanded......Continue reading

Cargill, Commonwell set sights on NoOps

June 19, 2019

When IT operations can be automated and abstracted from underlying infrastructure, there’s a world of opportunity to deliver new business value.

In their ongoing efforts to get more out of their IT investments, CIOs around the world are increasingly embracing DevOps, NoOps, and serverless computing—trends that use automation to free operations talent from numerous traditional systems administration tasks. For agricultural giant Cargill and Canadian Commonwell Mutual Insurance Group, those efforts are already delivering results, paving the way for strategic transformation......Continue reading

Are disaster recovery and cloud redundant?

June 14, 2019

Many consider disaster recovery (DR) and cloud computing as redundant investments.  Indeed, enterprises are often told by some providers that DR is built into the cloud infrastructure, and that the cloud provides all you need to keep your data safe.  Based on what I’ve seen, this turns out not to be entirely true.

It’s understandable that some business leaders want to believe that cloud could completely eliminate the need for DR safeguards. Comprehensive DR strategies with the correct enabling technology are uncommon these days.  Most businesses view DR as too costly, and even if they make the investment they may lack the staff to maintain those systems.  With the arrival of affordable cloud native DR technology, many are now rethinking the role of DR......Continue reading

Cloud accelerates AI adoption

June 12, 2019

AI’s initial benefits accrued mostly to technology giants with strong IT infrastructures and deep pockets, but those early adopters have rolled out cloud-based services to bring AI to the masses.

Advances in machine learning and deep-learning neural networks have opened up myriad ways for companies to improve their operations, develop new offerings, and provide better customer experiences. However, until recently, most organizations lacked the expertise and resources to take full advantage of AI. Only companies with access to large data sets, scarce expertise, massive data centers, and specialized processing power were able to uncover the best AI use cases, create customized solutions, and scale......Continue reading

Three signs that you need to fire your CIO

June 11, 2019

The move to cloud can expose weaknesses in your technology leadership team. Do any of these examples sound familiar?

It’s rumored that the cloud has caused many a CIO to resign or be fired.  Why? In my view, the cloud is the latest technology to expose the flawed thinking of some CIOs.  It’s not just the old school CIOs who are resistant to hand operations over to the public cloud who become cloud causalities. CIOs who are too eager to embrace “the next big thing” can also find themselves......Continue reading

Cloud Managed Services—A logical extension of cloud adoption

June 4, 2019

A blog post by Temano Shurland, Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory Accounting & Finance principal, Deloitte & Touche LLP

Cloud technologies are a catalyst for change in digital finance. Explore our insights and considerations for navigating your journey into the cloud.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) cloud computing is disrupting the digital finance landscape, transforming companies’ IT architecture and infrastructure by using scalable, elastic technology to deliver services via the internet rather than traditional on-premise architectures. Fueled in part by its flexibility to meet a wide range of diverse needs, cloud ERP systems are seeing immense growth within finance organizations and......Continue reading

Cloud Managed Services—A logical extension of cloud adoption

May 30, 2019

A blog post by Marc Kagan, Deloitte Consulting

Can Cloud Managed Services increase the already-transformative value the cloud has to offer your organization?

Why did your organization start its cloud journey? If your answer was like that of many other organizations, it was probably to increase your agility, enhance your ability to respond to threats, and instantly scale to meet market opportunities. On the less glamorous front, it may have also been to get out from under some of the technical debt you’ve accumulated over the......Continue reading

Serverless computing for CFOs

May 24, 2019

A blog post by Eric Lam, Senior Manager, Deloitte Consulting and Karthik Pallapothu, Senior Consultant, Deloitte Consulting

Serverless implementations change the way costs are calculated and how organizations are billed. What do CFOs need to know about potential capital planning and operational challenges?

The last decade of cloud computing advances have helped IT transcend old infrastructure constraints and develop and deploy software at scale¾while also driving down operational costs and improving time to market. Now, cloud computing is moving toward even greater flexibility and smaller units of scale in the form of serverless......Continue reading

The burgeoning business technology organization

May 14, 2019

A blog post by Atilla Terzioglu, principal, Suseela Kadiyala, specialist leader and Ninaad Balachandran, consultant

As business demand for specialized, customer-facing capabilities rises, many companies recognize that market competitiveness may largely hinge on their agility and speed to market. As such, leaders are increasingly identifying opportunities to embed customer-centricity into both their technology and broader business operating constructs.

In the increasingly popular Thin IT operating model, many technologists specializing in traditionally IT-centric capabilities like application development, maintenance, and operations are moving out of the IT organization and into business units......Continue reading

DevOps, NoOps: Power tools for the software era

May 9, 2019

A blog post by Gene Kim, author, researcher, and DevOps enthusiast, IT Revolution

By enabling small teams of developers to create large-scale value, DevOps—and, increasingly, NoOps—could help define the next winners and losers of the business world.

For almost 20 years I’ve had the privilege of studying high-performing technology organizations, and all our research shows decisively that high performers are massively outperforming their peers, often by orders of magnitude. They ship software to their customers more quickly and safely, which enables them to rapidly innovate and experiment, so they can win in the marketplace by outlearning the......Continue reading

Diagnosing cloud complexity: Recognize the symptoms in your organization

May 7, 2019

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Cloud promised to lower costs and increase agility. But is the growing complexity of multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, and legacy systems holding you back?

It seems to me that enterprise IT complexity is like back pain; everyone’s got it, or will have it. It’s how you manage it, how you treat it, and how you deal with it ahead of time that makes all of the......Continue reading

Is college a cloud computing pro requirement?

April 30, 2019

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Non-traditional technology training options offer students and professionals alternative ways to develop in-demand skills and enter the cloud job market, challenging the notion that four-year college is the only path to a career in cloud.College was one of the best parts of my life. I was in a fraternity, played sports, and got to leverage a real computer for the first time. Today my longest and dearest friends are people I met in college......Continue reading

From Serverless to NoOps: IT’s automation agenda

April 25, 2019

A blog post by Ken Corless, principal and cloud practice CTO, and Mike Kavis, chief cloud architect, Deloitte Consulting LLP; and Kieran Norton, principal and infrastructure security leader, Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory, Deloitte & Touche LLP

The hyperautomation of cloud computing has created the promise of a NoOps environment where software and software-defined hardware are provisioned dynamically, setting IT talent free to pursue higher-value work.

In this era of tight budgets and continual disruption, finding ways to shift resources from operations to innovation remains a top CIO goal. Automation frequently plays a key role, and today many organizations are embracing serverless computing, in which cloud vendors allocate compute, storage, and memory dynamically and automatically. That relieves enterprises of the need to handle those tasks manually, but for many, it’s just the beginning. Often, the real goal is a NoOps IT environment—one that is so automated and abstracted from underlying infrastructure that only a very small team is needed to manage it. Surplus human capacity can then focus on creating new......Continue reading

Big Data or Low Carbon?

April 22, 2019

A blog post by Richard Pone, Cloud and Infrastructure Advisor, Deloitte MCS Limited

How can IT executives balance the demands of their businesses while also adhering to their organizations’ sustainability goals? Here are three key strategies to consider.

In October 2018, a landmark international report warned of a global climate crisis as early as 2040 if drastic measures are not taken to transform the world’s economy and reduce carbon dioxide emissions. While much of the commentary surrounding this report focused on the political complexities of curbing fossil fuel consumption, one area of our economy is ripe for innovation—the Information Technology......Continue reading

Are open source and public cloud at odds?

April 19, 2019

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Public cloud providers and open source project leaders often have conflicting objectives. Should enterprise be worried?

It’s been a long debate.  As more public cloud providers offer open source systems, and public cloud providers modify them for their own purposes, the more open source communities get nervous.  Are their worries valid?  Should enterprises be nervous as well?

Let’s remember that both public cloud providers and open source project leaders have common as well as separate motivations......Continue reading

Edging out other emerging technologies, cloud takes the lead

April 16, 2019

A blog post by Omar Aguilar and John Tweardy

As the underlying enabler for advanced technologies like automation and AI, organizations are eager to put the right cloud foundation into place to expand their capabilities.

The conversation around cloud has shifted significantly in a very short time, evolving from a technical capability or possible business consideration to a strategic priority. No longer considered an emerging technology, cloud is an enabling technology that can drive innovation, improve process efficiencies, and facilitate market-focused.....Continue reading

Anaplan CEO Frank Calderoni on the future of cloud

April 12, 2019

A blog post by Andrew Marks, senior writer, Deloitte Insights

The tech industry veteran reflects on trends in cloud adoption and the challenges and opportunities of taking his company public in a rapidly changing marketplace.

While many private companies have shied away from going public in recent years, Frank Calderoni, president and CEO of Anaplan, felt his 12-year-old company was ready to go public last October. As cloud technologies have gone mainstream, Calderoni says the questions companies ask have shifted from the fundamentals of software-as-a-service (SaaS) to how the holistic, cross-functional application of cloud-based tools can drive value across the enterprise. He spoke with Kirsten Rhodes, an Advisory principal with Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory for Deloitte & Touche LLP, about the evolution of cloud-based technologies and the role his company’s IPO has played in helping it pursue its strategic.....Continue reading

Speed, governance: Yin and Yang of the Cloud world

April 10, 2019

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Operating effectively in the hybrid world means making the most of the cloud’s speed and flexibility while ensuring adequate governance is in place.

As companies around the world seek to tap the numerous benefits of the public cloud, many find themselves operating in a hybrid environment, with a mix of cloud and legacy technologies. Offering a way to rapidly access the agility, scalability, and cost-efficiency of the public cloud without giving up traditional core systems, the hybrid approach has emerged as a new norm in the enterprise world. By 2023, the hybrid cloud market is expected to grow to $97.64 billion, up from $38.27 billion.....Continue reading

Gazing into the Google Cloud: What’s new and next for Next ‘19?

April 2, 2019

A blog post by Lisa Noon, managing director

Managing director Lisa Noon looks into her Google Cloud Next crystal ball and shares her predictions for this year’s conference.

In just a few days, business leaders, cloud developers—and yes, lots of geeks(!)—will be taking over the Moscone Center in San Francisco for Google Cloud Next ’19. It’s a privilege to be part of this and difficult to believe how far this event has come in a short time.  I actually still have the badge from the Customer/Partner Advisory Board meeting on October 16, 2013, where as one of 60 participants I had the opportunity to both learn from and share insights .....Continue reading

The Google Cloud journey

April 2, 2019

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

As Google Next ’19 approaches, Deloitte Chief Cloud Officer David Linthicum reflects back on the early days of Google Cloud and its incredible journey to present day.

The year was 2009. A young(er) Dave Linthicum was busy building an application in a new cloud computing PaaS offering called Google App Engine, which was still just a preview version. It would be two more years before App Engine became a fully-supported Google product. Fast-forward to current day, and Google Cloud is one of the fastest growing cloud companies.....Continue reading

The two T’s of cloud security: Talent and technology

March 29, 2019

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP 

Deloitte recently released its latest Future of Cyber survey, bringing together the perspectives of 500 C-level executives who have visibility to and responsibility for cybersecurity in companies with at least $500 million in annual revenue. I was encouraged to see that more and more organizations are taking a proactive approach to preparing for and responding to cyber incidents. However, many of the same challenges continue to get in the way: Budgetary limitations, talent gaps, and misalignment to executive management’s digital transformation priorities to name some of the big.....Continue reading

Is cloud complexity your biggest security threat?

March 26, 2019

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

When your IT department is overwhelmed by cloud complexity, hackers can exploit vulnerabilities and find a way in. Organizations need to manage cloud complexity in order to mitigate potential security threats. 

Cloud complexity is something we’ve addressed here many times, and for good reason. The rise of cloud computing has not replaced on-premises systems as much as some people had originally anticipated. To make matters even more complicated we now leverage multicloud, which typically means the use of more than one public cloud. More and more legacy systems are mixed with private clouds and/or mixed with plural public clouds, which leads to complexity that’s overwhelming enterprise....Continue reading

Thin IT: The emerging technology operating model

March 19, 2019

A blog post by Atilla Terzioglu, principal, Suseela Kadiyala, specialist leader, and Ninaad Balachandran, consultant, Deloitte Consulting LLP

As technology plays an increasingly prominent role in customer-facing offerings, and new tools and models make technology more accessible, tomorrow’s IT organization will look very different from today’s.

The IT function has traditionally had a monopoly on enterprise technology. Lines of business have relied heavily on centralized IT departments, helmed by a CIO, to provide sought-after capabilities, and IT has been best suited to vet, select, deploy, and scale applications and infrastructure efficiently and....Continue reading

IT architecture in the cloud age: An evolution

March 15, 2019

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

In the past, architects were burdened with all-consuming tasks but lacked the power to enact meaningful change. What’s different with cloud?

The role of the IT architect has been evolving for the last 30 years. In that time there have been misstarts and missed opportunities.

In the past, architects were burdened with all-consuming tasks but lacked the power to enact meaningful change. The term “governance” has been tossed around as the responsibility of architects –they created rules and policies for how IT was to be done. This meant that they were responsible for enforcing the rules, particularly in the 80s and 90s. They attended meetings and acted as a pest, but without the power....Continue reading

Is your cloud architecture too complex?

March 12, 2019

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

We’re living in a world of “hardware hoarders,” where nothing gets pushed out the door even though the core applications have migrated. The first step is admitting you have a problem.

The growing cloud computing complexity was recently documented by the Wall Street Journal that cites a survey of 46 CIOs by KeyBanc Capital Markets. It found that 32 percent said they plan to use multiple vendors to create internal private cloud systems, while 27 percent planned hybrid cloud....Continue reading

Can you place cloud-based compliance into a domain?

March 8, 2019

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Configurable domains may help you abstract yourself from regulatory complexity and remain compliant with minimal effort.

People often ask how I deal with compliance issues that can change each year.  My answer?  The right architectural approach is to place them into a configurable domain.

What does that mean? It could cover anything that needs to change based upon configurations instead of programming, such as the rules of a governance engine.  Programming would require that changes go through testing, integration, etc., whereas rules or governance engines only require that we change policy or rule....Continue reading

Using cloud in the GDPR era

March 5, 2019

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

For many organizations, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation requires a new level of data governance. Cloud storage can make that trickier.

In industries such as health care and financial services, regulatory requirements have long shaped companies’ use of the cloud. Today, any organization with data on residents of the European Union faces similar constraints thanks to....Continue reading

Top three problems to solve around edge computing

February 28, 2019

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Edge computing offers intriguing potential benefits, but not without complex challenges. How do organizations tackle the most pressing edge computing problems? 

Edge computing is often confused with cloud computing, but they are very different and do very different jobs.  Indeed, I’m not sure edge computing would have been created were it not for issues that business found in transmitting everything back to a centralized cloud.   

As with any new technology, there are specific problems related to edge computing that are still left to be solved and the solutions....Continue reading

The societal impact of cloud

February 21, 2019

A blog post by Janet Foutty, chair of the board, and Ranjit Bawa, principal and cloud leader, Deloitte Consulting LLP 

The cloud’s effect within the business world may be relatively clear, but its impact on society is just starting to be understood. Leaders have a responsibility to recognize the implications and help ensure they are addressed.

The world today is increasingly cloud-enabled, and the implications for businesses and consumers alike are far-reaching. Not only does the cloud offer new ways to access computing capacity and data quickly and inexpensively, but it can also boost innovation and put companies on a fast track to leverage disruptive practices and technologies as they are invented and matured. DevOps, the internet of things, artificial intelligence, edge computing, cryptocurrency—all typically rely on the scalability, efficiency, and ubiquity of the cloud. In many ways, the term cloud has come to mean much more than just cloud technology, per se; rather, it’s redefined....Continue reading

Determining the value of cloud for your enterprise? Just spell C-A-T

February 19, 2019

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Back in my college professor days, I often used gimmicks to make it easier for my students to remember IT processes. While they seemed a bit hokey, they actually work.

Those who are tasked with determining the value of cloud computing have a complex job in front of them. There is much to remember, and most enterprises that get off track often forget to ask specific questions.

To make things easier, there is a simple way to remember what areas to focus on. Just remember to spell out C-A-T, cat....Continue reading

Will New Cloud Technology Save You? Almost Never

February 15, 2019

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

What do containers, serverless computing, and machine learning have in common?   They are all newer, hyped cloud computing technologies that have been the talk of the tech press and tech conferences. 

Cloud providers have an incentive to keep building new technology, to keep their services compelling, to get ahead of the hype cycle, and thus make more money.  That said, people focus on the newest thing, and we’ll focus on what’s hip and cool most of the time versus more traditional approaches ....Continue reading

Integrated health: Four ways IPaaS is revolutionizing the healthcare industry–part two

February 7, 2019

A blog post by Logan Smith and Anil Bommakanti

IPaaS provides robust solutions for each of the four areas mentioned and when implemented effectively, IPaaS could revolutionize the healthcare industry from FQHCs to federal agencies and every connection in-between.

Interoperability is one system’s ability to communicate and exchange data with disparate external systems. In the current example scenario, a federal agency needs to collect data from FQHCs from across the country. Each FQHC may have its own unique electronic health record (EHR) system. In order to achieve interoperability using IPaaS, technicians can create connections by developing an API layer that....Continue reading

Integrated health: Four ways IPaaS is revolutionizing the healthcare industry–part one

February 5, 2019

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Let’s face it, managing medical records is tedious, time-consuming, and expensive. The health care system is far from achieving a vision where individual needs are elevated, and providers have a seamless way to share health information between sources. What’s a potential solution?

Let’s face it, managing medical records is tedious, time-consuming, and expensive. The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act passed in 2009 stimulated significant health information technology (IT) adoption. While digital adoption has increased , the health care system is far from achieving a vision where individual needs are elevated, and providers have a seamless way to share health information between sources. The healthcare industry still needs data structure uniformity, interoperability and process....Continue reading

Cloud career advice: Pick a specialty

January 31, 2019

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

In cloud technology, specialty segment skills and an understanding of specific enabling technology increases your chances to be paid top dollar for having those specific skills. Review them all, pick the ones that interest you most, and then look at the salary ranges.

I love the questions I get when I speak at colleges and universities, questions such as: “What job can I get that makes the most money in cloud computing?” or, “What skills do I need to pay the bills?” Or my favorite: “How can I get paid the most....Continue reading

Are you ready for the cloud?

January 29, 2019

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

I’m always asked about enterprises’ cloud readiness and where they are in the cycle, in terms of processes, technologies, and talent they have in place to best-leverage public cloud technology. The reality is that there is really no definitive answer. Some enterprises that are successful with cloud computing came from way behind, technologically. Some enterprises that are very state-of-the-art fail due to different reasons. So, how can an enterprise increase its chances of success?....Continue reading

Leveraging the Cloud to find more meaning in data

January 17, 2019

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

What’s possible now with cloud is the ability to find meaning in data to allow businesses to make almost perfect decisions. An example would be the ability to find patterns in the sales data.

The creative use of data often takes me by surprise. I mean, raw data does not tell you much, but when you consider all the types of data and their almost limitless combinations and aggregations, it tends to boggle the mind. Finding meaning in data that is not readily apparent is where advanced analytics and machine....Continue reading

Cloud as a multiplier

January 15, 2019

A blog post by Habeeb Dihu, principal, Retail and Consumer Products Cloud Leader, Deloitte Consulting LLP

For retail developers, the cloud is a multiplier. Today an operating system and development environment are just a few clicks away. And as cloud capabilities improve, retailers can take advantage of them as soon as the provider makes them available.

Software, and more broadly technology, is increasingly a driver of business outcomes. It has opened new channels for retailers. It can automate manual processes and cut costs across the supply chain and in-store experience domains. It can deliver insights that enable better decision-making on merchandising, pricing, and other retail functions. The cloud – especially in combination with....Continue reading

Cloud native computing: The future of cloud

January 10, 2019

A blog post by Vishveshwara Vasa, Cloud Native Development Leader, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Deloitte is proud to announce that we’re becoming a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). This will allow our clients to now have access to some of the most revolutionary cloud native developments, helping them get to the future faster.

It is an oft-repeated adage across the industry that every business is a software business. In the age of cloud computing, that simple turn of phrase has become more relevant—and important—than ever, as businesses as diverse as global banking giants and consumer packaged goods....Continue reading

If you have one cloud computing 2019 resolution, this should be it

January 8, 2019

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

This is the time of the year that everyone in IT checks their list to make sure their budgets are in order. They have staffing plans for at least the first quarter, and assurances that they are making good progress with the current list of projects. However, there’s an item that seems to fall off many budget checklists in enterprise IT; the modernization of technology, including cloud enablement.

If you make one promise to yourself for 2019, you need to make the commitment to get started on your cloud journey. I’m not talking about POCs with a few systems, or doing a virtualization install to cloud. I’m talking about at least 100 systems and associated....Continue reading

Cloud security requires a second opinion

January 3, 2019

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Cloud security is like any other type of security. The higher the degree of effort you put into the planning and technology selection, the better your security will be. This holds true for any platform, including cloud computing.

That’s why it’s a good idea to get a second opinion when it’s time to firm up security, planning, architecture, and technology selection. A second opinion should confirm the following:

• Compliance to all rules and regulations. This becomes an important matter. You can have the most brilliant people work on a cloud security solution but miss the boat on compliance. This can result in fines and loss of creditability that are worse than any breach that may occur. That’s why you need a second option from a SME (Subject Matter Expert) to make certain the correct rules and regulations are applied, and work together to ensure that the resulting solution addresses this important....Continue reading

Serverless vs. containers

December 19, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Why do I think that serverless will dominate…okay, slightly dominate? It’s a matter of looking at past patterns of adoption by developers who ultimately make the calls here, and they should. These are a few things to consider:

Developers are not infrastructure people. The use of public cloud computing has forced many developers to become savvy as to what memory, CPU, and other platform capacity they need. While they are not bolting servers on racks, and never did, they make decisions that were previously left up to hardware....Continue reading

Can you take advantage of the innovation economy? Part two

December 13, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Enabling technology such as cloud computing, AI, DevOps, and other technologies that reduce friction is key. Today these enabling technologies are considered table stakes for businesses.

Many companies encourage new ideas by using rewards to employees, and even sharing in the profits that these new ideas generate. Even if ideas become products or services that don’t find a market, it’s not considered a failure. The ability to find out what doesn’t work points toward what does. Enabling technology such as cloud computing, AI, DevOps, and other technologies that reduce friction is....Continue reading

What's next for containers?

December 11, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

What’s next in cloud container orchestration programs? Here are a few trends that will likely affect how you build and containerize applications in 2019.

Here are three 3 trends that will likely affect how you build and containerize applications in 2019. Kubernetes has become the cloud container orchestration program that many want to use, with others such as Docker Swarm and Apache Methos close seconds (depending on who you talk to). However, those who contribute to the Kubernetes open source project aren't resting on their laurels. This year, less than three-months after the last significant release of Kubernetes 1.10, Kubernetes 1.11 is already on....Continue reading

Can you take advantage of the innovation economy? Part one

December 6, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Many are ill-prepared to take advantage of the emerging innovation economy because they need advanced systems driven largely by the use of emerging technology such as cloud computing and related technologies provided within the...Continue reading

Is data still a first-class citizen in the cloud?

December 4, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Worldwide revenues for big data and business analytics are likely to grow from $150.8 billion in 2017 to $210 billion in 2020. That's a compound annual growth rate of 11.9 percent, with most of this growth occurring within public cloud...Continue reading

Are you ready for the Brandpocalypse?

November 29, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Smaller companies were once no threat to the big guys. Then cloud computing allowed small companies to punch way above their weight class by leveraging technology to disrupt an...Continue reading

Three ways cloud computing enables mergers & acquisitions

November 27, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Über-mergers will be the focus of enterprises over the next three to five years. The Global 2000 wants to leverage their stock value as a currency to make key acquisitions that will take them to...Continue reading

Deloitte at AWS re:Invent 2018

November 26–30, 2018 | Las Vegas

Join Deloitte, an Emerald sponsor, at AWS re:Invent 2018—the largest user conference of the global Amazon Web Services (AWS) community. With a 40x40 booth, eight speaking sessions, exclusive sponsorship of the life sciences and financial services tracks, and more, our presence will be hard to miss. Experience how Deloitte can help you get to the future faster. We look forward to seeing you...Continue reading

Being ready for Cyber Everyday: How cloud and DevOps help you scale for the holidays and beyond

November 15, 2018

A blog post by Atilla Terzioglu, principal; Jimmy Man, principal; Kasey Lobaugh, Chief Innovation Officer; and David Wise, manager, Deloitte Consulting LLP

For consumers, Cyber Monday marks the official start of the online holiday shopping season. Behind the scenes, however, store operators will have been in full swing for some time, and additional computing capacity is being reserved to handle the expected surge in traffic. But this “all hands on deck” situation...Continue reading

The good, bad, and ugly of containers

November 13, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

A rapid rise in the use of containers has been fueled largely by the perception that containers remove us from cloud provider dependency. While this can be the case, there are many other factors to consider before leveraging containers...Continue reading

Moving to the Cloud? Get ready to deal with culture issues

November 9, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

What does corporate IT culture have to do with being successful in the cloud? Pretty much everything...Continue reading

Future-proofing: What consumer product companies can learn from Agile, DevOps, and the rise of RPA

November 6, 2018

A blog post by Habeeb Dihu, principal, Retail and Consumer Products Cloud Leader, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Continuous improvement (CI) is on the verge of a comeback. In the face of slowing growth and ever-more online competitors, the consumer products (CP) industry now finds itself searching for alternative ways to boost...Continue reading

Moving to the cloud – Do you have a choice?

November 2, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Everyone wants to look out for their own self-interest and move in that direction. This time the clear direction...Continue reading

The business of hybrid and multicloud cloud computing

October 30, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

While many are automatically moving to hybrid and multicloud computing, the business benefits should be known to you before making the move. The availability of heterogeneous cloud computing services...Continue reading

Join Deloitte at CloudExpo 2018

October 26, 2018

Discover best practices. Spark new ideas. Engage with leading minds from the world on Cloud Computing, DevOps, FinTech, Digital Transformation and all they entail. Join us at CloudExpo 2018...Continue reading

Understanding cloud platforms

October 25, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Platforms for hybrid and multicloud need to be native to the cloud platforms they are supporting, and thus you’ll choose a PaaS from the IaaS provider of choice. However, there is no reason that you can’t mix and match PaaS and IaaS players if you need to...Continue reading

DevOps and Cloud, no longer optional

October 23, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

It’s not enough to build both a DevOps organization transformation and public cloud solution. You need to do the harder work of making them work and play well together...Continue reading

Get a cloud computing college degree?

October 18, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Lately colleges and universities have been focused on cloud computing. The reasons are obvious, those with computing skills that focus on cloud computing can make a ton in the marketplace right now, and thus the training is in demand...Continue reading

Cloud growth focused on IaaS, and IaaS and PaaS combined

October 16, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Besides the fact that PaaS users tend to leverage what we can call “PaaS of convenience,” what does this mean for enterprises? Here are a few things come to mind..Continue reading

Cloud and data analytics clearly joined at the hip

October 11, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

The reality is that if analytics are in your near or long-term future of dealing with enterprise data than cloud is probably the analytics solution you’re seeking, or at least the core platform...Continue reading

How to keep up with cloud computing

October 5, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Where to go to keep up with the ever-changing cloud computing industry? As technology evolves, so do publications and information sources. Here are some ways to stay current...Continue reading

Cloud outsourcing? Let’s look at the facts.

October 2, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Cloud outsourcing could precipitate an extraordinary change in the sourcing world. With some help from the Deloitte 2018 global outsourcing survey, here are a few benefits of outsourcing and cloud computing...Continue reading

Cloud complexity management (CCM): Dealing with data

September 27, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

If you’re often frustrated due to the fact that your enterprises data is becoming very redundant, you’re not alone. Indeed, there is typically no “single source of truth” for data concepts such as customers, inventory, product, etc. Indeed, the use of redundant data often leads to erroneous data which leads to unreliability that the data used by the business is actually correct...Continue reading

Cloud complexity management (CCM): A new year, a new problem

September 25, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

I expect 2019 will be the year when both cloud complexity and cloud complexity management(CCM) starts to emerge. Why 2019? That is the year when workloads on cloud-based systems surpass 25 percent, and when most enterprises are likely to hit the tipping point in terms of dealing with the resulting complexity.

What is occurring now is that enterprises are spending most of their time and money migrating applications and data to the cloud. At the same time this is making the IT infrastructure and platforms more complex considering that the legacy stuff still has to run, and now you have public and private cloud-based systems to deal with as well. What’s a CIO to do?...Continue reading

Three cloud security problems that you can solve today

September 20, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Cloud computing security needs to be systemic, and for most enterprises, that's a bridge too far. It seems that many have lifted and shifted applications without a lot of thought around how those workloads will be secured.

But, if you're one of these enterprises you have some opportunities to solve some common problems, that like back pain, most enterprises have. Here are those common problems, and potential solutions to consider...Continue reading

How cloud can change the enterprise CIO's role in three steps

August 30, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

The role of the CIO changes each decade. Back in the 1960s and 70s they were barely known within the organization. In those days, whatever computerization existed within enterprises was rare and expensive, and typically run by the CFO. Then the 1980s came along and we saw the rise of a new strategic role within enterprises, that of the CIO.

CIOs now have responsibility for the computer systems, networks, data centers, and all supporting human resources. However, what those resources are and what those humans do has changed a great deal in the last 30 years...Continue reading

CloudOps is different than traditional ITOps

August 28, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

CloudOps, as the name suggests, refers to cloud operations. It’s a combination of network, security, performance, device management, and help desk tasks. Basically, it covers all things needed to run a set of cloud-based business applications, ongoing.

Many people look at CloudOps as a continuation of ITOps, or the next generation of ITOps. This is an incorrect assumption when you consider the different skills and technology that are a part of both...Continue reading

The case for keeping "no cloud" advocates around

August 23, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

There seems to be a culture shift wherein those who don’t aggressively push cloud computing are not working with the culture and hype—and are therefore working against it. Why is this a bad thing?

Some people who push back on cloud computing, now or in past years, have been demoted, pushed out of the inner circles of corporate IT, or have lost their jobs. Why? Their arguments against cloud computing often were and still are unfounded arguments against changes to the more familiar status quo...Continue reading

When it comes to cloud complexity, you need to focus on priorities

August 21, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Cloud architectures are getting complex as we move into multicloud configurations. Instead of having over 500 cloud services to manage, from storage to compute, we now have 1500 plus under management. Most of them are redundant to other services.

Enterprises are reaching a tipping point. This will happen when the number of cloud services under manage exceed the enterprise’s ability to manage those services. The exact tipping point will vary from company to company...Continue reading

Finding the killer cloud-based machine learning applications

August 16, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Machine learning on the cloud is all the rage these days, and for good reason. While it once could cost millions of dollars to put together an AI application, these days it's typically hundreds of dollars with access to almost unlimited amounts of computing power, databases, and mass storage.

But, now that we have it, what do we do with it? There is an ongoing push to find just the right use cases for machine learning and the cloud...Continue reading

Finding the right fit for cloud-based deep learning

August 14, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Deep learning and machine learning are part of the same AI family. Unlike machine learning’s task-specific algorithms, deep learning uses learning data representations.

First of all, deep learning and machine learning are part of the same artificial intelligence (AI) family. Unlike machine learning’s task-specific algorithms, deep learning uses learning data representations. Moreover, the knowledge model deep learning builds can be supervised, semi-supervised or even unsupervised...Continue reading

Deloitte makes its mark on Google Cloud Next ‘18

August 10, 2018

In late July, Google hosted the single largest event in the company’s history: Google Cloud Next ‘18. With over 25,000 attendees descending on downtown San Francisco, the city was transformed into a launching pad for the future of cloud.

Over 300 Deloitte practitioners from eight countries made the trip to support Deloitte’s top-tier marquee sponsorship, talk to clients, and share their knowledge of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Deloitte Consulting LLP’s executive and management committees were also in attendance for Tuesday’s opening keynote, showcasing Deloitte’s commitment to its Google Cloud practice...Continue reading

Google now provides On-Prem Kubernetes

August 9, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

As the name gives away, GKE On-Prem is an on-premises version of the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Now you can have Kubernetes running in a public cloud, and within your data center as well.

Chen Goldberg, Director of Engineering for Google Cloud, was the first On Cloud Podcast guest live from Google Next in San Francisco California. When asked about the most important Kubernetes announcements at Google Next, she did not hesitate to cite GKE On-Prem...Continue reading

A Serverless Kubernetes?

August 7, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Knative provides a set of middleware components that allow you to build container-based applications that can run anywhere: On-premises, in the cloud, or even in a third-party data center.

Just announced at Google Next: Knative1. Knative provides a set of middleware components that allow you to build container-based applications that can run anywhere: On-premises, in the cloud, or even in a third party data center...Continue reading

Four ways that cloud computing changes the role of the CIO

August 2, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Are you a CIO? Not only do you have a tough job, you also have a job that will likely change a great deal over the next five years.

Emerging technology is responsible for much of the change. In this case, cloud computing. The CIO needs to morph his or her roles and responsibilities to effectively address the different consumption model, as well as new demands from the departments...Continue reading

Are you thinking about taxes and cloud computing?

July 31, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

First, this is not a blog about taxes. I’m not a tax accountant, and that’s not my area of expertise. However, taxes affect us all, and the decisions we make in business often impact our tax responsibilities. This is a blog about the tax implications to consider when looking at the technology of cloud computing.

What seems to be most at issue, tax-wise, is the fact that we give up some depreciation deductions when using cloud computing...Continue reading

The Cloud and Disaster Recovery

July 24, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

While most people realize that disaster recovery (DR) capabilities are built into public clouds, in many cases, the reality is that it’s your responsibility. Moreover, what you think is there may not be.

Most enterprises have some DR capabilities, even if it’s just on their most critical systems. When data was on-premises, organizations had to stand up systems that were geographically different...Continue reading

Join Deloitte and Google Cloud at Google Cloud Next ’18

July 24-26, 2018

A blog post by Jacques De Villiers, National Google Cloud Practice Leader

Success is in the forecast at Google Cloud Next ’18. Consider this your formal invitation to our three-day expedition through cloud infrastructure, devices, security, and machine learning environments as we take you to the cloud and beyond. All you’ll need is your thinking cap, perspective, and possibly a light jacket—it is San Francisco after all...Continue reading

Cloud portability: Choosing your path

July 19, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Longtime techies like me are no doubt familiar with the Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX), a group of standards to maintain compatibility between operating systems. Writing programs to POSIX makes sense because by using it you can be pretty sure programs will port easily across a large family of Unix derivatives, including Linux.

The POSIX concept is fairly straightforward: Force the platforms to maintain a consistent set of APIs from platform to platform...Continue reading

Dealing with international cloud security

July 17, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Let’s face it, for most global companies, more than half of the computing systems reside outside of the continental United States. As organizations move into cloud computing, the same is true.

Cloud computing is not just about dealing with systems in a single country hosted by a single cloud computing service. It’s about many distributed systems residing on public clouds that must be managed as if they were clustered together...Continue reading

Dealing with the Cloud Computing Skills Gap

July 16, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

It’s time to deal with the cloud computing skills gap. Simply put, this gap is the difference between the skills currently on staff, and the skills needed to both stand up and maintain cloud-based systems effectively. For some enterprises, this gap is narrow. For others, it’s as wide as the Grand Canyon.

Let’s walk through the process to deal with your own cloud computing skills gap, and address ways to help close that gap altogether...Continue reading

Picking an IaaS public cloud? Look for 'good bones'

July 12, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) clouds are much the same as houses. They need a good foundation of IaaS services to provide value to your enterprise. For an IaaS cloud, this means it provides both storage and compute, in ways that make them most efficient and useful.

Today, there tends to be a focus on the higher-level platform services, such as machine learning, databases, serverless, etc. In fact, the larger IaaS players now put 5-10 services per week into their cloud services catalog and most of these services have little to do with storage or compute...Continue reading

Five questions CFOs should ask about their organization’s cloud strategy

July 10, 2018

A blog post by John Tweardy, principal and technology strategy and business transformation leader, Deloitte Consulting LLP

The move to the cloud is in full swing—and as compelling as its benefits are, cloud computing raises important issues related to financial reporting and disclosure. CFOs have the opportunity to bring their insights to bear these issues and key considerations of cloud computing.

Last month, Gartner Group released its annual forecast of the worldwide public cloud market. The research firm expects revenue to grow more than 21 percent this year, but then stabilize as cloud cements its status as an information technology services standard...Continue reading

Picking an IaaS provider? Three issues to consider

July 3, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Data centers leveraged all sorts of brands and types of hardware and software systems, which hedged your bets. With a public cloud provider, you put all of your eggs into a single basket.

The wrong decision could cost your company millions of dollars, and, perhaps worse, delay the leveraging of some very strategically important technology. Don’t worry, help is at hand. Here are three core issues to consider when picking an IaaS public cloud provider...Continue reading

Exploring the role of microservices in containerization

June 28, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

A microservice comprises small, independent processes that communicate using language-agnostic application programming interfaces (APIs). Both an architectural pattern and a mechanism, microservices are created by decomposing an application to the functional primitive and reconstructing it.

As the application is rebuilt for the cloud, it can be modified to expose services that are accessible by other applications. Functionality doesn’t have to be built from scratch because the originating and other applications can consume services from the rebuilt version...Continue reading

Bringing containers and clouds together

June 26, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP.

It’s hard to blame anyone for the platform lock-in that afflicts cloud computing. Heavy demand for public and private cloud services, including software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) deployments, has long kept portability on the backburner for platform providers. Things are heating up, though, in containers.

An old approach finding new uses, containers, together with container cluster managers, such as Google’s Kubernetes, offer a common abstraction layer. Applications can be localized within a container and then ported to other public and private cloud providers...Continue reading

Are you ready for cloud service governance?

June 21, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP.

Governance could be the most overlooked aspect of cloud computing, perhaps because it’s so complex. There is cost governance to monitor and control cloud cost usage. There is resource governance to control the cloud resources, both single and multicloud. Finally, there is cloud service governance which includes the practices and technology that deal with cloud APIs or web services that come standard with the cloud provider’s services, or perhaps from services you build and expose on the cloud.

The need is pretty clear. Services are abstracted and leveraged by application workloads. These can be infrastructure services that are part of the cloud provider’s services, such as storage and compute. Or, they may be purpose-built services, such as the calculation of a tax rate...Continue reading

Why cloud security automation is key

June 19, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP.

Dads say this all of the time, “A good offense is a good defense.” What does that mean when we talk about cloud?

To me, it means that people try to be proactive, which includes actively looking to spot minor issues and resolve them before they become real issues. Specific to the world of cloud computing, this means that we keep tabs on operations issues, such as security breaches, and address those issues as soon as we see them.

This is not the norm today. People tend to be very reactive when it comes to security, even cloud computing security. While there are typically plans in place to deal with breaches, there aren’t always plans to proactively monitor for attacks...Continue reading

Three things that could destroy your cloud migration project

June 14, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP.

1. Lack of talent

Perhaps the biggest issue with cloud migration is the lack of talent you need to get things done the right way…on schedule and on time. The truth of the matter is that existing IT staffers often don’t yet understand much about cloud. Sure, they may understand storage and compute, but the public consumption models that cloud supports require very different thinking about how the models are allocated, implemented, provisioned, and operated...Continue reading

Why go cloud-native?

June 12, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP.

The benefits of implementing cloud-native features typically include the following:

• Performance. You’ll typically be able to access native features of the public cloud services to provide better performance than is possible with non-native features. For example, you can deal with an I/O system that works with auto-scaling and load-balancing features.
• Efficiency. Cloud-native applications’ use of cloud-native features and application programming interfaces (APIs) should provide more efficient use of underlying resources. That can translate to better performance and/or lower operating costs.
• Cost. More efficient applications typically cost less to run. Most cloud providers send you a monthly bill based upon the number of resources consumed, so if you can do more with less, you save on dollars spent.
• Scalability. Because you write the application to the native cloud interfaces, you also have direct access to the auto-scaling and load-balancing features of the cloud platform.

The price you pay for these capabilities is portability. Applications that are localized for specific cloud platforms are not easily ported to other cloud platforms. Doing so tends to take a lot of... Continue reading

Clearing skies for women in cloud

June 6, 2018

A blog post by Christina Bieniek, principal, US retail & distribution consulting leader, Deloitte Consulting LLP.

Time and again, studies have shown us the business benefits of gender diversity and a culture of inclusion. Companies need both to be successful: Diversity gives women a seat at the table, and inclusion gives them a voice there.Time and again, studies have shown us the business benefits of gender diversity and a culture of inclusion. Companies need both to be successful: Diversity gives women a seat at the table, and inclusion gives them a voice there. The presence of women in leadership positions correlates with improved financial performance, team dynamics, and productivity. Technology teams that are more gender-diverse are better at solving problems, adhering to project schedules, and keeping project costs down...Continue reading

Auto scaling on AWS helps eliminate the need for SAP S/4HANA application server sizing

June 5, 2018

A blog post by Tita Venatius, senior manager, Deloitte Consulting LLP; Rahul Kabra, partner solutions architect, AWS; Naresh Pasumarthy, partner solutions architect, AWS.

Introduction

Many enterprise organizations rely heavily on SAP mission-critical applications to drive revenue and gain competitive advantage in the marketplace, but facilitating high-efficiency performance of these applications across the IT landscape is critical to achieving the expected results. Thus, organizations running SAP applications should make sure the infrastructure it runs on is elastic and can scale based on demand fluctuations to help optimize performance efficiency...Continue reading

Cloud complexity hinders some enterprise adoption

May 21, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP.

There are a few key issues that I see in the market today:

1. Most enterprise adoption takes place around an existing business problem, with a clear business case. Enterprises do not adopt cloud computing because it’s trendy, they need to solve real problems right out of the gate.
2. Most enterprise adoption involves existing application migration rather than new application development. Most enterprises that migrate applications try to do so as quickly as possible, and do not focus on “refactoring” applications to make more efficient use of native cloud services...Continue reading

Why some people don’t care about SaaS, but should

April 24, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP.

Thousands of SaaS applications are now available from providers as diverse as familiar tech giants to startups that may do something as niche-y as bail bonds management. Indeed, the SaaS segment holds nearly 69 percent of overall public cloud market share, but its year-over-year growth rate of 22.9 percent is the slowest of the three primary segments...Continue reading

Cloud security leading practices and technologies

April 19, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP.

The rise of cloud computing led us to rethink approaches to security for cloud and non-cloud systems. Because of the complex and distributed nature of cloud-based platforms, security approaches that leverage identity seem to be the best fit. This is a fundamental shift in both security planning and technology. Enterprises will likely need to ‘feel the pain’ before they can ‘understand the gain.’

Enterprises typically fall down by not understanding their own security requirements and issues before they create an approach, a design, and then select the right identity and access management (IAM) technology solution. IAM technologies, as listed below, all have their own approach to IAM. This includes those that are focused on cloud computing...Continue reading

Three emerging multicloud leading practices you can use today

April 17, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP.

Indeed, as multicloud becomes the norm, more and more enterprises struggle with the challenges that arise from the use of more than a single set of native cloud services, not to mention the management challenges of their existing on-premises systems.

People have their own ideas about how to address their requirements and those ideas often include tossing money and tools at the problem. The good news is that some emerging leading practices are showing to be effective paths to success, from both a business and technology perspective. Here are three leading practices you should consider if multicloud is in your future...Continue reading

Refactoring applications for containers and microservices

April 13, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP.

The process of containerizing an application and service-enabling it at the same time is more art than science at this point. However, certain success patterns are beginning to emerge as enterprises start to migrate legacy applications to the cloud using containers and service-orientation as the architecture.

Truth-be-told, security is all or nothing. Either you have all of the doors locked, or they might as well be unlocked. Cloud security is only as strong as the weakest link. This causes vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers to cause breaches—and subsequent negative news coverage...Continue reading

Why cloud security should be systemic, and is often not

April 10, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP.

I’m frequently reminded of the need for cloud security, but often taken aback by how many people don’t really understand exactly what it is. More troubling is how many lack an understanding of its role within cloud computing and everything else connected to the public cloud that hosts corporate workloads, including traditional systems....Continue reading

Clearing the air around cloud shared responsibility models

April 6, 2018

A blog post by Mike Kavis, chief cloud architect, Deloitte Consulting LLP.

Differences between cloud service models

It is critical to understand the differences between Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). Each service model provides a level of abstraction that comes with its own shared responsibility model. In my book, Architecting the Cloud, I use the following images to show the respective responsibilities of CSPs and customers...Continue reading

The cloud is changing IT skills

April 6, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP.

Today in the US, 3.9 million jobs are associated with cloud computing with 384,478 of them in IT, according to Forbes.¹ The median salary for IT professionals with cloud computing experience is $90,950.² Worldwide, there are currently 18,239,258 jobs associated with cloud computing...Continue reading

Understanding GDPR and cloud computing

April 5, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP.

As enterprises embrace public clouds, and thus store data in diverse environments, there is a need to understand the regulatory and legal considerations of each aspect. So, what do you need to know?...Continue reading

Does cloud complexity make us unsecure?

April 3, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP.

Multiclouds are all the rage these days. They provide the ultimate in enterprise flexibility by allowing you to mix and match cloud services to meet the exact needs of the business. Thus cloud use supports business agility and operational cost efficiency. But are there any downsides?...Continue reading

The cloud’s lock-in vs. agility trade-off

March 12, 2018

A blog post by Mike Kavis, chief cloud architect, Deloitte Consulting LLP.

Many enterprises have the proverbial bad taste in their mouths from years of vendor lock-in on mainframes and database technologies. As they look to the cloud, they don’t want to fall into the same trap. Meanwhile, some cloud service providers (CSPs) are offering a suite of proprietary application programming interfaces...Continue reading

How much do risk and compliance teams impact your cloud architecture?

March 1, 2018

A blog post by Mike Kavis, chief cloud architect, Deloitte Consulting LLP

A common pattern I see in heavily regulated industries is that the risk and compliance teams are dictating technology decisions. This ranges from determining which cloud provider (if any) can be chosen to what tools and processes must be used. This can pose challenges because technology decisions...Continue reading

DevOps–shift everything left

February 28, 2018

A blog post by Mike Kavis, chief cloud architect, Deloitte Consulting LLP

DevOps has always been about removing bottlenecks from the software development lifecycle (SDLC). In the early days of DevOps, the biggest bottleneck that attracted the most focus was infrastructure. Developers and operators worked closely together to automate infrastructure, both on-premise and cloud, and tried to address infrastructure and operational requirements earlier in the SDLC. The early days of DevOps were strongly focused on shifting infrastructure left...Continue reading

What will drive more investment firms to the cloud?

February 28, 2018

A blog post by Doug Dannemiller, Investment Management research leader, Deloitte Services LP.

Firms are now much more focused on the customer experience and the investor’s outcome, rather than investing in their proprietary infrastructure. To be sure, IM firms protect and value their core intellectual properties, such as their investment decision process. Even with protection of the secret sauce in mind, firms are starting to use cloud-based applications for differentiating processes, but there is clearly a distribution...Continue reading