Transformation Infrastructure

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2018 AT&T Business Summit: Security “in” and “of” the Cloud

By G C Network | November 10, 2018

While public cloud is undoubtedly an outsized piece of the conversation, news headlines of the latest data breach can make this move a very frightening proposition. The question of how…

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My Brush with Royalty: Queen Latifah

By G C Network | November 9, 2018

Queen Latifah! Hip Hop Icon. Movie Star. Television Star. Fashion Model. Songwriter. Producer. Entrepreneurial Genius!? YES! Dana Elaine Owens, her given name, is co-owner of Flavor Unit Entertainment, a firm that includes…

What’s New in Puppet 5?

By G C Network | November 9, 2018

Puppet 5 is released and comes with several exciting enhancements and features that promise to make configuration management much more streamlined. This article will take a comprehensive look at these…

5 Reasons Why Ansible is the Best CM Tool Out There?

By G C Network | November 9, 2018

Amidst volatile markets, dynamic technology shifts, and ever-increasing customer demands, it is imperative for IT organizations to develop flexible, scalable and high-quality applications that exceed expectations and enhance productivity. A…

Machine learning APIs for Google Cloud Platform

By G C Network | November 9, 2018

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is considered to be one of the Big 3 cloud platforms among Microsoft Azure and AWS. GCP is widely used cloud solutions supporting AI capabilities to design and…

What Is The Most Important Part of Architecture?

By G C Network | November 9, 2018

I always find it interesting to hear what people view architecture as. A lot of people think it’s just about the design aspect, where you get to put pen to…

Cloud migration best practice Part 4: Executing the migration

By G C Network | September 16, 2018

This series has stepped through cloud migration best practices. After providing an overview, we discussed: Classifying business-critical data. Updating organizational IT governance policies. Application screening and cloud workload selection. How to…

Cloud Migration Best Practice Part 3: Application Portfolio Analysis

By G C Network | September 16, 2018

In part three of this series on cloud migration best practice, I will focus on migrating the application itself. If you haven’t had the opportunity to read our recommendations from part…

Why Use Immutable Storage?

By G C Network | September 11, 2018

Data has become a global currency, and its value has nowhere to go but up.  According to The Economist online, the world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but…

CLOUD ACT: What Does That Mean for Your Cloud Storage

By G C Network | August 31, 2018

When Congress names a law after you, it’s getting serious.  That is where we are now with cloud computing.  The Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act or CLOUD Act (H.R. 4943) is…

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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