June 04, 2024

Should Your Organization Use a Hyperscaler Cloud Provider?

Vendor lock-in is perhaps the biggest hyperscaler pitfall. "Relying too heavily on a single hyperscaler can make it difficult to move workloads and data between clouds in the future," Inamdar warns. Proprietary services and tight integrations with a particular hyperscaler cloud provider's ecosystem can also lead to lock-in challenges. Cost management also requires close scrutiny. "Hyperscalers’ pay-as-you-go models can lead to unexpected or runaway costs if usage isn't carefully monitored and controlled," Inamdar cautions. "The massive scale of hyperscaler cloud providers also means that costs can quickly accumulate for large workloads." Security and compliance are additional concerns. "While hyperscalers invest heavily in security, the shared responsibility model means customers must still properly configure and secure their cloud environments," Inamdar says. "Compliance with regulatory requirements across regions can also be complex when using global hyperscaler cloud providers." On the positive side, hyperscaler availability and durability levels exceed almost every enterprise's requirements and capabilities, Wold says.

Innovate Through Insight

The common core of both strategy and innovation is insight. An insight results from the combination of two or more pieces of information or data in a unique way that leads to a new approach, new solution, or new value. Mark Beeman, professor of psychology at Northwestern University, describes insight in the following way: “Insight is a reorganization of known facts taking pieces of seemingly unrelated or weakly related information and seeing new connections between them to arrive at a solution.” Simply put, an insight is learning that leads to new value. ... Innovation is the continual hunt for new value; strategy is ensuring we configure resources in the best way possible to develop and deliver that value. Strategic innovation can be defined as the insight-based allocation of resources in a competitively distinct way to create new value for select customers. Too often, strategy and innovation are approached separately, even though they share a common foundation in the form of insight. As authors Campbell and Alexander write, “The fundamental building block of good strategy is insight into how to create more value than competitors can.”

Managing Architectural Tech Debt

Architectural technical debt is a design or construction approach that's expedient in the short term, but that creates a technical context in which the same work requires architectural rework and costs more to do later than it would cost to do now (including increased cost over time). ... The shift-left approach embraces the concept of moving a given aspect closer to the beginning than at the end of a lifecycle. This concept gained popularity with shift-left for testing, where the test phase was moved to a part of the development process and not a separate event to be completed after development was finished. Shift-left can be implemented in two different ways in managing ATD:Shift-left for resiliency: Identifying sources that have an impact on resiliency, and then fixing them before they manifest in performance. Shift-left for security: Detect and mitigate security issues during the development lifecycle. Just like shift-left for testing, a prioritized focus on resilience and security during the development phase will reduce the potential for unexpected incidents.

Snowflake adopts open source strategy to grab data catalog mind share

The complexity and diversity of data systems, coupled with the universal desire of organizations to leverage AI, necessitates the use of an interoperable data catalog, which is likely to be open source in nature, according to Chaurasia. “An open-source data catalog addresses interoperability and other needs, such as scalability, especially if it is built on top of a popular table format as Iceberg. This approach facilitates data management across various platforms and cloud environments,” Chaurasia said. Separately, market research firm IDC’s research vice president Stewart Bond pointed out that Polaris Catalog may have leveraged Apache Iceberg’s native Iceberg Catalogs and added enterprise-grade capabilities to it, such as managing multiple distributed instances of Iceberg repositories, providing data lineage, search capability for data utilities, and data description capabilities among others. Polaris Catalog, which Snowflake expects to open source in the next 90 days, can be either be hosted in its proprietary AI Data Cloud or can be self-hosted in an enterprise’s own infrastructure using containers such as Docker or Kubernetes.

Is it Time for a Full-Stack Network Infrastructure?

When we talk about full-stack network infrastructure management, we aren’t referring to the seven-stack protocol layers upon which networks are built, but rather to how these various protocol layers and the applications and IT assets that run on top of them are managed. ... The key to choosing between a full-stack single network management solution or just a SASE solution that focuses on security and policy enforcement in a multi-cloud environment is whether you are most concerned that your network governance and security policies are uniform and enforced or if you're seeking a solution that is above and beyond just security and governance, and that can address the entire network management continuum—from security and governance to monitoring, configuration, deployment, and mediation. Further complicating the decision of how to best grow the network is the situation of network vendors themselves. Those that offer a full-stack, multi-cloud network management solution are in evolutionary stages themselves. They have a vision of their multi-cloud full-stack network offerings, but a complete set of stack functionality is not yet in place.

The expensive and environmental risk of unused assets

While critical loads are expected to be renewed, refreshed, or replaced over the lifetime of the data center facility, older, non-energy star certified, or inefficient servers that are still turned on but no longer being used continue to use both power and cooling resources. Stranded assets also include excessive redundancy or low utilization of the redundancy options, a lack of scalable, modular design, and the use of oversized equipment or legacy lighting and controls. While many may plan for the update and evolution of the ITE, the mismatch of power and cooling resources versus the equipment requiring the respective power and cooling inevitably results in stranded assets. ... Stranded capacity is wasted energy, cooling unnecessary equipment, and lost cooling to areas that need not be cooled. Stranded cooling capacity can include bypass air (supply air from cooling units that is not contributing to cooling the ITE), too much supply air being delivered from the cooling units, lack of containment, poor rack hygiene (missing blanking panels), unsealed openings under ITE with raised floors, just to name a few.

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