The cloud adoption framework of several cloud vendors helps cloud architects, IT professionals, and decision-makers have a set of protocols, best practices, and tools for the journey to the cloud. Each cloud vendor has divided the adoption framework into different phases, and in this session, I will walk you through the high-level stages of each cloud adoption framework.
The first session on this topic is covered in session number 99 with the title “Cloud Adoption Framework“. In this session, I will cover the Cloud Adoption framework of Oracle, Google Cloud, AWS, IBM Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud.
Cloud Adoption Framework is a set of best practices, tools, and guides that most public cloud vendors publish. The idea behind these cloud adoption frameworks is to assist organizations to embrace public cloud securely, efficiently and faster. The cloud adoption framework comprises each phase of cloud acceptance, from planning to living in the cloud. It provides a very well-tested checklist and steps to choose the right path for cloud migration and the right tools to help reduce potential security, governance, and budget problems.
The good thing about the cloud adoption framework is that it covers technological, people, processes and business aspects. Therefore, it helps to align business strategies with the culture, business and technology inspirations to achieve the business benefits.
The cloud adoption framework is your guide to making the most of your cloud investment. Most organizations are adopting the cloud as per the IDG’s 2020 Cloud Computing study reveals that 92% of the organizations are somewhat in the cloud.
Organizations must adapt to the cloud with proper planning and strategy in place. However, I observe that even if they have the strategy, they have just started consuming the cloud with the migration of simple applications and don’t have any proper framework or rules to follow. Another challenge I am seeing is that organizations don’t have clear visibility to their digital estate. When you start planning about cloud migration or adoption, the first question that comes to mind is to discover or assess the current IT state, which sometimes becomes painful to complete. Sometimes, what is being observed is that relevant stakeholders don’t know where to start and the requirements or initial checklist they need to follow to migrate to the cloud.
According to Gartner, if we map to the trends impacting cloud adoption, there are four critical areas.
There is no doubt that each organization is unique with the operating model, products, services, organizational infrastructure and technology. Now adopting the cloud also depends on the business functions, services and applications are used in the organization; it will be unique to every organization. However, as we are seeing, most organizations are moving to the cloud, so we can say there is a pattern emerging. These frameworks are the results of these patterns concluded from a large number of cloud migrations journeys. Take an example of the work done by the Open Data Center Alliance Cloud Adoption Framework
Another paper was presented during the 2017 international conference on information systems and computer science with the name “Unified Cloud Computing Adoption Framework.” which describes the process in six steps framework, current situation definition, requirements definition, providers analysis, providers assessment, decision, and migration.
Another interesting and the most I like Enterprise Cloud Adoption Framework developed and shared by the MITRE and targeted areas to address are Political leadership, Organizational, Economic, Technical and Security (POETS) factors.
A deepfake refers to a specific kind of media or photo where a person in an image or video is transacted with another person however it will look like the original person in an image or video.
To make a deep fake video, a creator swaps one person’s face and replaces it with another, using a deep learning algorithm generative adversarial networks (GAN).
A formal definition as per Wikipedia:
Deepfakes are synthetic media in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone else's likeness. While the act of faking content is not new, deepfakes leverage powerful techniques from machine learning and artificial intelligence to manipulate or generate visual and audio content with a high potential to deceive. The main machine learning methods used to create deepfakes are based on deep learning and involve training generative neural network architectures, such as autoencoders or generative adversarial networks (GANs) – Source: Wikipedia
An inspirational talk with the guest speaker on a variety of topics, like
Cloud migration is challenging, cumbersome, and risky for traditional organizations relying on in-house custom-built systems to support achieving revenue from years on years. Today I will be discussing a wide variety of challenges organizations are facing while planning for cloud migration. These typical challenges are talks of every board room and the agenda of the meetings. However, there is no doubt that workloads migration to the cloud is helping organizations to reduce operating costs and build integrated, automated IT infrastructure.
You have a daunting task in hand to migrate to the cloud and do it securely and efficiently. If it is not fully optimized and performed correctly, your dream of digital transformation in an organization can hit roadblocks/pitfalls.
Now I will share some of the common challenges which I see the cloud migrations; these are based on observation, reading a wide array of articles, and discussion with fellow IT friends/colleagues in the extended & broader community of IT professionals. What I will be doing is to mention all the typical challenges, and then I will also try to share the perspective of how you can overcome or what could be the strategy to address them. These could be starting from which workloads to be moved to what should be the order of migration to how we will have reliability and performance of business-critical services on the cloud. How I will implement required levels of security controls and regulatory compliance to who is my cloud vendor and this cloud migration must not disrupt my existing IT services, so on…
Gartner, in an article published, has beautifully categorized into six ways of cloud migrations challenge
It is 2nd part of the session on CIS Benchmarks and controls for Cloud. The Center for Internet Security is a nonprofit organization with the mission to 'identify, develop, validate, promote, and sustain best practice solutions for cyber defense.’ Experts and IT professionals from different governments, institutes, and businesses across the globe are participating and finalizing the controls based on the consensus decision-making model.
Now let us link this to why it is essential for every one of us and every organization. I have got a chance to read the article on data breaches affecting millions of users and some of the biggest breaches in recent times published by CSOonline with the title “The 15 biggest data breaches of the 21st century.”
The CIS Controls consists of a recommended best practices to secure systems and devices, and CIS Benchmarks are rules for hardening specific operating systems, middleware, software applications, and network devices. The CIS Controls and the CIS Benchmarks are developed using a consensus-based approach by communities of experts.
CIS controls have been mapped to many other standards and regulatory frameworks, for example. the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF), the ISO 27000, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and many others.
The decision must consider an organization’s requirements, evaluation criteria, and architecture principles.
In CIS 8 the number of controls is reduced to 18 from 20 in CIS 7. CIS 8 contains 153 Safeguards, which were called sub-controls in CS7 and they were 171 sub-controls
In Part 1 (Session no 95)
In Part 2 (Session no 96)
The Center for Internet Security is a nonprofit organization with the mission to 'identify, develop, validate, promote, and sustain best practice solutions for cyber defense.’ Experts and IT professionals from different governments, institutes, and businesses across the globe are participating and finalizing the controls based on the consensus decision-making model.
Now let us link this to why it is essential for every one of us and every organization. I have got a chance to read the article on data breaches affecting millions of users and some of the biggest breaches in recent times published by CSOonline with the title “The 15 biggest data breaches of the 21st century.”
The CIS Controls consists of a recommended best practices to secure systems and devices, and CIS Benchmarks are rules for hardening specific operating systems, middleware, software applications, and network devices. The CIS Controls and the CIS Benchmarks are developed using a consensus-based approach by communities of experts.
CIS controls have been mapped to many other standards and regulatory frameworks, for example. the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF), the ISO 27000, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and many others.
The decision must consider an organization’s requirements, evaluation criteria, and architecture principles.
In CIS 8 the number of controls is reduced to 18 from 20 in CIS 7. CIS 8 contains 153 Safeguards, which were called sub-controls in CS7 and they were 171 sub-controls
A cloud migration strategy is a plan which any organization develops to move its systems and applications from on-premises architecture to the cloud.
Not all applications and systems benefit from running on the cloud; that’s why you must indorse the most efficient way to work on it and migrate applications. Therefore, a systematic, documented strategy is essential.
Any strategy needs to start from some barefoot, and then it builds on it. Similarly, the vital first step to creating a migration strategy is getting to know what you have? What are the collections of applications, systems, etc.? Once you have documented existing applications, you need to refer to the most common migration strategies. Gartner is calling 5R; some vendors mentioned as 6Rs or 7Rs. (These strategies are: refactor, replatform, repurchase, rehost, relocate, retain, and retire)
Your organization will fall in these options, and you need to choose based on the workload discovery/assessment.
The decision must consider an organization's requirements, evaluation criteria, and architecture principles.
Implementing cloud or migration to cloud is challenging. Organizations that have built thousands of applications over the past two to three decades require re-architecting to run efficiently, securely, and resiliently in the cloud.
Your next steps are to perform a cloud migration assessment based on your cloud strategy and business objectives. It will help identify the right migration pattern and cloud architecture required to go for the workload. Today we will talk about three vital areas
You could have different business goals to introduce digital products and services to market faster. You want to reduce your technical debt or replace on-premises infrastructure due to the end of life. All these reasons are leading you to migrate to the cloud. However, you need to decide and call which application/system is the right candidate for cloud migration. You need to have a clear understanding of the target application's only requirements and dependencies.
On the other hand, digital transformation forces you to make quick decisions, like Microsoft CEO's famous quote.
“We’ve seen two years of digital transformation in two months.” By Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
References:
Tech Talk on Cloud Security Posture Management with John Grange
Detecting and preventing the misconfigurations and threats that lead to data breaches and compliance violations in your multi-cloud environments. For organizations embarking on a multi-cloud strategy, cloud security posture management (CSPM) helps them secure multiple cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers.
Today’s Guest
John Grange, CTO of Ops Compass
How the journey so far starting from pure data center guy, who has started from hosting provider to a solution for the cloud security management. Get to know about John’s favorite books and what is essential for a beginner startup owner to focus.
Website: opscompass.com
References:
Workload migration to Cloud has become integral to IT optimization and driving business forward with the increased espousal of cloud technologies. Moving to the cloud enables firms to be more agile, remove inefficiencies and provide required customer, employee experiences. Migration of on-premise enterprise workload to the public cloud has reached the situation of being considered a ‘best practice’. These workload migrations still giving challenges to the traditionally run IT organizations as everything on-premises.
It’s no longer moving to the cloud is just selecting your favorite cloud provider, and then magic will be reviled. You and your organization have to face the challenge of making the right choices:
Some critical factors have to be kept aligned or on top of the list when deciding on the architecture. I will mention what points I keep in mind while suggesting an architecture of enterprise workload migration.
https://www.otechtalks.tv/workload-migration-to-cloud-getting-started/
How to deploy a server/instance on the newly released Arm Ampere AI compute shape in Oracle OCI. In this session, we will summarize what we have learned from the last seven sessions on the basics of OCI and you will see how those basics concepts are helping us create a new virtual machine.
Two days back, Oracle has announced the release of Arm Based computing on the OCI; with this, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) offers Ampere Altra processors with an 80-core Arm server. The Arm is at the ‘heart’ of mobile gaming, and the Arm architecture belongs to ‘reduced instruction set computing (RISC)’ architectures for computer processors. Some of the critical features of this architecture are to provide predictable performance, high scalability, and power efficiency. ARM makes 32-bit and 64-bit RISC multi-core processors. RISC processors are designed to perform a smaller number of types of computer instructions so that they can operate at a higher speed, performing more millions of instructions per second (MIPS). By stripping out unneeded instructions and optimizing pathways, RISC processors provide outstanding performance at a fraction of the power demand of CISC (complex instruction set computing) devices.
I have seen another article written on how to deploy Minecraft on the Cloud. So these two things coincided, and I thought, let me try and create my own Minecraft server on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to run an Arm-based workload. All the steps are recorded in the video below, and it took me just twenty minutes to complete the entire process. I am looking forward to deploying enterprise workload to Arm-based instances.
So I thought, let me try and create my own Minecraft server on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. All the processes is recorded in the video below, and it took me just twenty minutes to complete the entire process. I am looking forward to playing this weekend game installed on the OCI server
https://www.otechtalks.tv/deploy-a-server-on-the-oci-arm-ampere-a1-compute-part-8/
In this session part 7, we will cover three topics:
The Journey started from the first station of networking to learn the basics of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
In the second station of our journey to learn Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). We will cover different gateways available in the VCN like:
When you will arrive at the third station of our journey, to learn OCI, you will get the basics of default components of VCN, including the below three-component comes by default with the Virtual Cloud Network on OCI.
In the fourth station of our journey, we will cover the three different scenarios, public subnet, Private Subnet with a VPN, and Public and Private Subnets with a VPN.
In the fifth and sixth station of the journey to learn the basics of OC we have covered below areas:
In this session, how to secure your cloud network as part of the Networking service covers two virtual firewall features to control traffic at the packet level a-Network security groups b-Security lists and to configure VCN flow logs to get details about the traffic that passes through your VCN.
It is part 6 of our series to learn the basics of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. In part 5 & 6, we have covered key 5 areas:
Oracle OCI - How to Secure Your Network - Part 5 (otechtalks.tv)
How to secure your cloud network and compute instances in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure; you will be using private subnets, Security rules, Firewall rules, Gateways and route tables, IAM policies, and Security zones. we will also compare the Security Lists and Network Security Groups. what are the top 5 best practices to be followed for the Security Rules that are also covered in this session?