Transformation Infrastructure

CloudCamp Federal @ FOSE

By G C Network | February 9, 2009

Sign up now CloudCamp Federal @ FOSE, March 10,2009, 3pm – 8:30pm at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, 801 Mount Vernon Place NW , Washington, DC. As a follow-up…

Thank You NVTC “Cool Tech” and TechBISNOW !!

By G C Network | February 6, 2009

Thank you to Dede Haas, Chris D’Errico and the Northern Virginia Technology Council for the opportunity to speak at yesterday’s NVTC “Cool Tech” Committee meeting! The Agilex facilities were awesome…

A Significant Event in Cloud Interoperability

By G C Network | February 6, 2009

On Jan 20th, GoGrid released it’s API specification under a Creative Commons license. “The Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license, under which the GoGrid cloudcenter API now falls, allows…

Booz|Allen|Hamilton & Dataline Sponsor 2nd Government Cloud Computing Survey

By G C Network | February 4, 2009

Dataline, Booz|Allen|Hamilton and the Government Cloud Computing Community have teamed together to sponsor the 2nd Government Cloud Computing Survey. Cloud Computing has come a long way since the first survey six months…

Gartner Lays Out 7-year Plan for Cloud Computing

By G C Network | February 3, 2009

According to Gartner’s new report, cloud computing will go through three phases over seven years before it will mature as an industry; – Phase 1: 2007 to 2011 — Pioneers…

Cloud Interoperability Magazine Launches

By G C Network | February 3, 2009

My congratulations goes out today to Reuven Cohen on the launch of Cloud Interoperability Magazine. The site will focus on Cloud Computing, standardization efforts, emerging technologies, and infrastructure API’s. As the new…

Why Can’t We Eliminate the “Technology Refresh” RFP?

By G C Network | February 2, 2009

In order to maintain life cycle and technology, the Navy is upgrading server farms at fifteen (15) sites and any future sites throughout the Far East, Europe and Middle East…

Cloud & the Government Session at Cloud Computing Expo

By G C Network | January 29, 2009

Earlier this week I announced that I will be presenting at SYS-CON’s 2nd International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo in New York City this coming March 30-April 1, 2009. During…

CSC and Terremark target US Government with Cloud Computing

By G C Network | January 27, 2009

Today’s announcement by CSC reinforced the strong wave of cloud computing towards the Federal space. Ranked by Washington Technology Magazine as 9th largest (by contract dollar value) government contractor, this…

Should my agency consider using cloud computing?

By G C Network | January 26, 2009

This is clearly the question on the minds and lips of every government IT decsionmaker in town. Why should a government agency even consider cloud computing?  In reality, the decision…

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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