Transformation Infrastructure

Packing My Bags For Prague and Dimension Data #Perspectives2015

By G C Network | May 15, 2015

Prague is a beautiful city!  My last time was in June 2010 when Jeremy Geelan invited me to speak at CloudExpo Europe (see my blog post and video from that…

SAP/HANA Does Big Data for National Security

By G C Network | May 13, 2015

Carmen Krueger, SAP NS2 SVP & GM While SAP is globally renowned as a provider of enterprise management software, the name is hardly ever associated with the spooky world of…

Be future ready: Selling to millennials and a marketplace of one

By G C Network | May 12, 2015

There is almost a deafening discussion going on about the self-centeredness of today’s young adults. Weather you call them Generation Y, millennials or twenty-somethings, the general refrain seems to be…

Surviving an Environment of IT Change

By G C Network | May 8, 2015

  “The Federal government today is in the midst of a revolution. The revolution is challenging the norms of government by introducing new ways of serving the people. New models…

OmniTI and GovCloud Join Forces to Provide Cloud-based Services

By G C Network | May 5, 2015

FULTON, Md.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–OmniTI, a leading provider of web infrastructures and applications for companies that require scalable, high-performance, mission critical solutions, today announced that it has partnered with GovCloud Network, LLC…

Cloud microservices make their play

By G C Network | April 29, 2015

 by Kevin L. Jackson Cloud computing seems destined to be the way enterprises will use information technology. The drastic cost reductions and impressive operational improvements make the transition an unstoppable trend.…

Tweeps Are People Too!!

By G C Network | April 25, 2015

I woke up this morning to the devastating news about the earthquake in Nepal. Sitting here in California  that destruction is literally on the other side of the world but…

The CISO role in cybersecurity: Solo or team sport?

By G C Network | April 14, 2015

The average length of time in the commercial sector between a network security breach and when the detection of that breach is more than 240 days, according to Gregory Touhill, deputy…

Setting standards for IoT can capitalize on future growth

By G C Network | March 30, 2015

by Melvin Greer Managing Director Greer Institute for Leadership and Innovation The adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) appears to be unquestioned. Advances in wearables and sensors are strategic to…

Women in tech: Meet the trailblazers of STEM equality

By G C Network | March 19, 2015

By Sandra K. Johnson CEO, SKJ Visioneering, LLC   Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) professionals are drivers of innovation,creativity and invention. STEM disciplines are significant drivers of economies worldwide,…

Hybrid IT enables a composable infrastructure which describes a framework whose physical compute, storage, and network fabric resources are treated as services.

Resources are logically pooled so that administrators need to physically configure hardware to support a specific software application, which describes the function of a composable architecture.

This type of transformative infrastructure is foundational to contemporary agile business because a hybrid IT environment, private clouds, public clouds, community clouds, traditional data centers, and services from service providers must be integrated and interconnected.

Composable infrastructures can build new revenue-generating products and services faster while simultaneously addressing the key inhibitors to change, which include the following:     

  • General concerns regarding lack of adequate hybrid infrastructure security     
  • The false impression that cloud cannot support the operational/performance requirements of critical applications (e.g., SAP and Oracle)     
  • Management challenge presented by multi-cloud environments contracts that will include varying levels of governance and service-level agreements (SLAs)     
  • The need to match employee management skills across various cloud platforms 

Composable infrastructure architectures have two major functions. They must be able to disaggregate

and aggregate resources into pools and compose consumable resources through a unified API.

Fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks will significantly enhance the current mobile network environment. These new networks will use multi-access edge computing (MEC) to extend composable enterprise infrastructures to the network edge, a capability broadly referred to as edge computing.

To support this future IT-operating environment, enterprise content and application developers need to collaborate with telecommunications network operators to gain access to edge services.

Using this architecture, “Internet of Things†(IoT) applications can respond in real time to local events and use cloud capabilities for all other data processing functions.

Edge computing application design development model has three locations:     

  • Client    
  • Near server     
  • Far server  

An end-to-end IT service designed to operate in an IoT environment follows this model also but with different reference names or components:      

  • Terminal device component     
  • Edge component(s)     
  • Remote component(s) 

The IoT architecture emphasizes the distribution of components. In this environment, network services (i.e., routers, firewalls, load balancers, XML processing, and WAN optimization devices) are replaced with software running on virtual machines.

To ensure secure operations, key cybersecurity tasks include the following:     

  • Securing the controller as the centralized decision point for access to the Software Defined Network (SDN)     
  • Protecting the controller against malware or attack     
  • Establish trust by protecting the communications throughout the network by ensuring the SDN controller, related applications, and managed devices are all trusted entities     
  • Creation of a robust policy framework that establishes a system of checks and balances across all SDN controllers     
  • Conducting forensics and remediation when an incident happens in order to determine the cause and prevent reoccurrence  

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) establishes a virtualized networking environment dedicated to providing different network services. If NFV is used, the SDN can also act as a hypervisor for NFV virtual machines.

Approaches for implementing cybersecurity protections include the following:     

  • Embed security within the virtualized network devices     
  • Embed security into the SDN servers, storage, and other computing devices 

The Zero Trust security model is centered on the belief that organizations should not trust anything inside or outside their perimeters. This model requires verification of anything and everything trying to connect to its systems before access is granted. The Zero Trust approach uses existing technologies and governance processes in securing the enterprise IT environment.

When designing and deploying transformational solutions across enterprise, cloud, 5G networks, MEC environment, and the Zero Trust paradigm must be extended to include all associated SDNs.

Read more about digital transformation and transformation infrastructure: grab a copy of my new book, Click to Transform, out today!

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