Governance is Essential to Cloud Success

 

Cloud governance is essential to ensure cost optimisation and cloud security is properly maintained, and yet many IT professionals do not yet understand how it works or how best to implement it. Recent research by Stacklet found 86% of IT professionals agreed cloud governance can be a key inhibitor to cloud adoption and cost optimisation and security are pivotal areas where governance approaches and tools are critical to the success of the cloud solution.

Many cloud leaders believe governance is already implemented in their deployments, whether this is right or not. However, executives also seem to believe that their governance lacks visibility and the cross-organisation collaboration required to optimise costs and improve security. Many individuals wrongly assume that governance is native to cloud-based solutions, but it is actually a separate focus that requires specific policies surrounding the resources and services that an application or API provides.

These policies should not be static, but instead dynamic logical operators that contextualise when, who, what, where, and how somebody is accessing a resource. Make use of AI to interpret and learn the behaviours of users to implement such dynamic policies. These are much more flexible and secure than static policies that cannot predict such behaviours.

HP Acquires Hybrid Work Solutions Company

 

HP is set to acquire Poly for $1.7 billion – a 53% premium over the most recent share closing price. HP hopes this purchase will strengthen its opportunity in hybrid work solutions and provide sustainable growth and value creation into the long term. Previously named Plantronics, the company had both consumer and business market interests until 2018 when it pivoted to focus on in-office gear. A recent report by HP expects 75% of office workers will invest in new hardware to improve their hybrid work setups, and currently less than 10% of meeting rooms have video capability.

Poly had also been in talks with Logitech previously, but that merger had fallen through. HP hopes this acquisition will allow the company to tap into the $110 billion peripherals market. This acquisition is also complementary to last year’s acquisition of Teradici which specialises in high-performance computing in hybrid work environments. Clearly, HP is shifting its focus to hybrid work models.

The closing date of the acquisition is expected before the end of 2022, subject to Poly stockholder approval, regulatory clearance, and other typical closing conditions. HP predicts the deal will provide $500 million in revenue synergies by 2025.

Alteryx Cloud Analytics

 

A recent Gartner report predicts two-thirds of development and production analytics will be performed in the cloud by 2023. 75% of businesses are transitioning to the cloud for their analytics, or are already there. While many enterprises look to the cloud giants such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, other cloud providers focused with on-premises solutions are making moves. One such provider, Alteryx, recently announced its Analytics Cloud earlier this month which is a unified end-to-end automation platform for business analytics.

Alteryx recently acquired Trifacta, a data engineering software company that provides integration with other cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake and also provides architecture for the 3 giant cloud providers previously mentioned. This technology allows Alteryx to offer competitive deployment solutions that can meet any business analytical needs that may arise. This acquisition also improves Alteryx’s credibility with data engineers that manage the data pipelines and analytical tools and applications for enterprises.

Their aim is to “democratise analytics” and not leave the analysis to the data scientists, as the company’s chief data and analytics officer explains how simple it is to become certified in Alteryx and how the platform can be used to improve performance in a two-mile race or determine the correct amount of nutrition and sleep a person should be obtaining.

Analytics needs to move to the cloud as businesses become more sophisticated and an increase in processor power is needed to analyse the vast amounts of data; the cloud offers the perfect scalability for this. It is also important that the analytic tools are available where the data is, and as more customer data is exported to the cloud, the capabilities to analyse that data need to migrate too. While Alteryx’s approach is “cloud first”, they are continuing their on-premises products with the possibility of deploying cloud-native technologies on-premises in the future if required.