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Alexander Wallner, CEO of plusserver, believes the importance of the sovereign cloud services and solutions needed to ensure that data is protected, safe, and compliant cannot be overemphasized. He is also quick to point out that plusserver takes responsibility for the cloud-based operations of its growing customer base, which includes enterprises across industries and throughout Germany’s public and private sectors.

“Our customers, especially public institutions and leaders in industries like healthcare and financial services, have high data security and sovereignty requirements that must be met,” says Wallner. “We enable them to benefit from a robust, high-performance IT foundation – one that combines our sovereign cloud offerings with those from the major hyperscalers – to create a true managed multi-cloud platform so they can focus their time and effort on growing their businesses, not building and managing the IT infrastructure they need to accomplish their goals. At plusserver, we believe that data sovereignty is crucial for enabling digital growth and that digital growth in turn is synonymous with business growth.”

With four advanced data centers in Germany, including two facilities in Hamburg and ones in Cologne and Dusseldorf, as well as a cadre of seasoned cloud experts who are fully-vetted German nationals – plusserver offers a wide range of solutions that meet or exceed myriad certifications, including BSI C5, ISO 9001, IDW PH 9.860.1, ISO 27001, and of course the classic data protection requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation. The company’s extensive portfolio of sovereign cloud solutions addresses the needs of customers at every point in their cloud journey, whether it’s first migrating to the cloud or the development of advanced cloud-native applications.

The company also offers a number of complimentary services, including ones for data management, data lifecycle management, and security and storage. In addition, plusserver’s high-performance cloud setups and deployments ensure that customers can consume all services without restrictions or performance degradation even during peak times.

“Our company is viewed as a companion by our customers on their way to the cloud, and once there, in initiatives that realize its full potential,” he adds. “For many, this leads to pluscloud, our sovereign cloud based on trusted and proven VMware technology that features consumption-based billing and free traffic for planning and cost transparency. Now, as a result of earning the VMware Sovereign Cloud distinction, customers can enjoy even greater peace of mind and confidence in our ability to support them at every stage in their unique cloud journey.”

Notably, plusserver is a founding member of Gaia-X. The company also recently commissioned a study with IDC titled “Data Sovereignty in the Cloud – Requirements, Potential and Challenges,” to learn more about the specific needs of both public and private-sector enterprises in Germany.

The survey found that cloud computing is the most important modernization factor for IT, and that cloud services will increasingly replace legacy IT over the next two years, with 61% of companies also planning to use cloud services even more intensively in the medium and long-term because of increased cybersecurity requirements and new standards.

In addition, 82% of respondents in companies with more than 1,000 employees rated data sovereignty as very important or important. Even so, only 11% of German companies were found to have implemented data sovereignty plans or to have a strategy in place for the sovereign handling of data.

This will be important if organizations are to meet what Wallner sees as increasingly imperative requirements. These include knowing where important data resides and who has access to it, retaining the ability to quickly change service providers and avoid vendor lock-in, and enjoying the freedom to innovate that robust sovereign cloud platforms deliver.

“Clearly the market for sovereign cloud solutions will only increase as organizations in Germany take steps to address data sovereignty – an issue that is overwhelmingly acknowledged as being very important,” Wallner says. “At plusserver, our staff is well trained, highly experienced and ideally qualified to help enterprises address this reality. Importantly, our product portfolio is highly standardized for smooth and fast delivery, but we also have the proven ability to develop highly bespoke applications and solutions that surpass the most stringent data protection requirements. Data security, compliance, and data sovereignty are in plusserver’s DNA.”   

Learn more about plusserver and its partnership with VMware here. IT teams can also download a complimentary data sovereignty summary and decision matrix.

Cloud Computing, IT Leadership

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As CIO at The Hut Group (THG), the British ecommerce firm behind such brands as Lookfantastic and Myprotein, Joanna Drake has been navigating some serious headwinds.

Responsible for global operations and technology services across company and customer websites, staff technology, and THG’s direct-to-consumer Ingenuity service and hosting business, Drake has looked to support the rapid growth of the Manchester-based firm through IPO, a global pandemic, supply chain instability, and the onset of recession.

Speaking at the CIO UK 100 awards ceremony at the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel in London, Drake explained what it meant to be ranked the top CIO in the UK, how her tennis background shaped her leadership, why automation is freeing up her IT team, and how THG is supporting engineers relocating from war-stricken Ukraine.

CIO 100 winner, sports leadership and being ‘too friendly’

Having featured in the CIO 100 in 2021 and 2020 prior to topping this year’s list, Drake says the award is for her team, not just her.

“If this was about me, as an individual, I’d struggle to do a [CIO 100] submission,” she said. “So it’s about the team and I’m blessed and honoured to work with some amazing people every day, with so much grit, determination and creativity.” She also added that it was also an opportunity to stop and reflect on how far they’ve come in the last year, and how she fell into IT after a career in tennis failed to materialise, first starting out in help desk support before progressing into service management and engineering positions.

As she climbed the ranks, taking on more senior technology roles at Diageo, Accenture, Yahoo, Betfair, BBC and Skyscanner before joining The Hut Group in 2018, she realised that her sports background could shape her leadership style.

“Sports taught me about teamwork, putting players in the right positions, team formation, understanding your strengths and weaknesses, practice, hard work, discipline and how and when to apply coaching or mentoring,” she says, adding that she continually analyses the ‘ingredients’ of her team, to find details that can make big differences.

This isn’t to say that Drake’s ascension to the higher echelons of business leadership has come without difficulty. In particular, throughout her 20-year career, Drake has often been chastised for being too friendly, an unfamiliar quality perhaps in a results-driven business world.

“A lot of times in my career I’ve been told I wouldn’t make it as a senior tech person,” she said. “Actually, I think it’s about being my true authentic self because it’s exhausting if you can’t be yourself. I’ve learned through being me that actually, that’s okay.”

Digital workplace, automation and ‘IT as consultants’

Drake highlights THG’s digital workplace and automation initiatives as her team’s most notable achievements over the last year, alongside its Ingenuity Compute Engine (ICE), through which THG is hoping to build ‘hyperscaler experiences’ across more than 50 data centres.

As part of the ‘infrastructure reimagined’ programme, ICE provides a software-defined, infrastructure-as-code (IaC) platform where teams can run containerised applications on Kubernetes, ultimately speeding up infrastructure procurement and deployment. Drake says THG has built the platform in four of its data centres so far, allowing developers to build new platforms on ICE, and migrate existing THG workloads onto it.

Speed and simplicity have also been the essence behind THG’s digital workplace initiatives.

The e-commerce firm has also rolled out zero-touch device provisioning, built app stores for Microsoft and Mac-based devices, offered technology drive-through and click-and-collect services, as well as numerous enhancements to the office environment from digital signage, wayfinding screens and universal desk set-up for hot desking, to meeting room technology, video editing suites, device lockers and digital packing benches in warehouses.

Automation, meanwhile, has been introduced to free-up IT team members to become consultants to the business, removing their operational toil while empowering their line-of-business peers to focus on more strategic work.

Leveraging a combination of RPA, low-code and no-code technologies, THG has sought to streamline processes, particularly in HR such as joiners, movers, leavers and role-based access control.

“Automation has been about [IT] almost automating themselves out of the jobs they had, so they could go on to more interesting roles,” says Drake. “Where they’ve removed a lot of operational toil, we’ve had to re-skill our engineers and this is great for retaining talent.” So instead of churning or doing tickets, engineers go out as consultants in the business and speak to different departments about processes. “They follow things that hold them back, how they could do more, so they can actually remove their operational toil,” she adds.

Stalking talent and supporting Ukrainian staff

Despite such technological innovation, Drake is adamant that people remains her top priority, and she’s taking to stealthy methods to find prospective talent.

“I do a lot of stalking on LinkedIn,” she says. “I think about the sort of people and skill I want, and I go and hunt them out. I’ve got to build the team and I want the best players so I’ve got to go out there and find them. And when I’ve got them, I need to make sure they’re successful and making a difference. And if they’re successful, we’re all happy.”

Yet she recognises that the ongoing recruitment challenges, cost-of-living pressures and deepening mental health concerns mean the focus must be as on talent retention and attraction in equal measure.

To further help with the former, Drake oversees a series of stand-ups during the week to keep the team engaged. There’s a Monday session that tackles how the IT team plans to ‘win’ that week, a Tuesday one is called take-over Tuesday, Wednesday’s focuses on wellness and development, and Friday offers an opportunity for team shout-outs and general updates.

The Hut Group has also looked to help engineers get out of Ukraine at the onset of the war with Russia, helping to evacuate them and their families to Poland, paying for accommodation and providing homeware, toys and jobs at a local warehouse.

“For a lot of our staff in Ukraine, work has helped them lead as normal life as possible in these circumstances,” says Drake. “Ensuring they are very actively involved in and heard every day is a really important part of supporting them.”

Financial strife puts the CIO’s focus on efficiency

Much of last year’s progress has been about laying the technological foundations for the next 10 years, yet Drake acknowledges that the next 12 months could be a bumpy ride.

The Hut Group has seen its growth stunted in recent times by rising raw material costs, cost-of-living pressures on customers, declining shares (down 86% year-on-year), and a market valuation that recently plummeted from £5bn to £600m amid market headwinds.

In October, Japanese investor SoftBank announced it was selling its 6.4% stake to company founder Matthew Moulding and Qatari investors for just £31m, having bought the stake in the shopping group for £481m in May 2021.

Such uncertainty means Drake’s focus is now on efficiency.

“[My priority is] continuing with all of that efficiency stuff—ICE, composable compute, which means we can deliver more, more quickly.”

Drake is also spearheading THG’s ‘match-fit programmes’, looking at ways the group can improve customer service, operational efficiency and team development for when some semblance of normality returns.

She says THG is consolidating toolsets, decommissioning legacy technology and migrating customers to the latest platforms, as well as making sure the firm gets the best ‘bang for buck’ when working with suppliers.

“We thought of using it as an opportunity to get in really good shape, ready for the fight when the world turns the right way up again.”

CIO, CIO 100, IT Leadership

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

With 190 participating countries and 24 million visitors, Expo 2020 Dubai was one of the world’s largest events, connecting everyone to innovative and inspiring ideas for a brighter future. But what does it take to support an event on such a grand scale? The answer is a robust cloud and modern IT infrastructure, which would allow 1,200 employees to collaborate with one another, amidst nationwide lockdowns and supply chain disruptions.

As part of the World Expos, Expo 2020 Dubai sought to create one of the smartest and most connected places to give its participants a lasting impression beyond the event. More than just departing with the knowledge and connections gained from the Expo, the organization also wanted to impart the rich cultural heritage of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This means delivering a deeply personalized and hyper-relevant experience, from a smooth ticketing journey to chatbots that offered real-time assistance in multiple languages.

To bring this ambition to life, a robust foundation of technology was necessary, one that could support the seamless integration of systems and apps, and a myriad of digital services, and meet numerous, diverse IT requirements. It was with these in mind that Expo 2020 Dubai decided on a multi-cloud infrastructure that was hyper-flexible, scalable, secure, and reliable enough to support the event’s operations while serving as a platform to manage the build process for the event.

Behind The Winning Cloud Partnership

Expo 2020 Dubai was built from the ground up: a 4.38km² wide site comprising sprawling parks, a shopping mall, and the Expo Village. In the same vein, its cloud journey also underpinned the various stages of its development, including civil infrastructure, building construction, crowd management, smart city operations, and marketing. Key to this multi-cloud infrastructure was flexibility, scalability, and security, upon which its integrated, intelligent systems were built on. This enabled the Expo teams, vendors, suppliers, and volunteers across nations to work seamlessly together.

It is through the collaborative effort of e& and Accenture that the Etisalat OneCloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS) were successfully integrated to make Expo 2020 Dubai one of the first and largest true multi-cloud infrastructures in the region. Etisalat OneCloud provided the resilient, reliable, and secure environment the event needed for its localized business-critical apps, whereas AWS delivered the structure necessary to support global digital services and apps, such as websites, participant portals and eCommerce platforms.

But what brought both solutions together was Accenture Service Delivery Platform, which offered the interconnectivity for enabling several layers of integration at the app and security level.

As the technological groundwork of Expo 2020 Dubai consisted of over 90 applications, Accenture Service Delivery Platform delivered the integration the multi-cloud infrastructure required without any external systems while meeting the stringent app requirements around scalability, security, and hyper-reliability. This was done across six months of development and throughout the entire customer lifecycle spanning awareness, discovery, purchase, and post-sales.

Delivering An Unprecedented Experience

Through this sprawling multi-cloud infrastructure, Expo 2020 Dubai could host all the Pavilion designs, themes, and content from over 190 participating countries while integrating authorizations, supply chain management, and workforce licensing functions. At the same time, the event realized seamless and highly personalized experiences for its visitors with a suite of visitor-facing digital channels. This was inclusive of the Expo 2020 official mobile app, virtual assistant, and an official website.

Expo 2020 Dubai also incorporated a central information hub and a best-in-class ticketing journey alongside digital services tailored to a visitor’s personal preferences in real-time and in their preferred language. Then there was AMAL, a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence, instrumental in gathering critical information on the Expo shows and attractions while giving live feedback as the event took place.

It is clear that behind this global gathering of nations designed around enhancing our collective knowledge, aspirations, and progress, a large-scale digital transformation took place: one which enabled the multi-cloud environment for Expo 2020 Dubai and was instrumental to the success of this life-changing event.

The Expo’s key themes of opportunity, mobility, and sustainability were succinctly captured in its infrastructure, demonstrating the potential of cloud in unlocking intelligent operations and business agility. As evident in the successes of Expo 2020 Dubai and other businesses, such as leading transport fuels provider Ampol, cloud has become an indispensable cornerstone to succeed in today’s digital-first economy. And it’s this very cloud continuum that will continue to bring businesses one step closer to innovation, aiding them in delivering truly transformative services and experiences.

Read the full story here:  https://www.accenture.com/ae-en/case-studies/applied-intelligence/expo-2020-dubai

Hybrid Cloud, Infrastructure Management, Multi Cloud

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Since 2015, the Cloudera DataFlow team has been helping the largest enterprise organizations in the world adopt Apache NiFi as their enterprise standard data movement tool. Over the last few years, we have had a front-row seat in our customers’ hybrid cloud journey as they expand their data estate across the edge, on-premise, and multiple cloud providers. This unique perspective of helping customers move data as they traverse the hybrid cloud path has afforded Cloudera a clear line of sight to the critical requirements that are emerging as customers adopt a modern hybrid data stack. 

One of the critical requirements that has materialized is the need for companies to take control of their data flows from origination through all points of consumption both on-premise and in the cloud in a simple, secure, universal, scalable, and cost-effective way. This need has generated a market opportunity for a universal data distribution service.

Over the last two years, the Cloudera DataFlow team has been hard at work building Cloudera DataFlow for the Public Cloud (CDF-PC). CDF-PC is a cloud native universal data distribution service powered by Apache NiFi on Kubernetes, ​​allowing developers to connect to any data source anywhere with any structure, process it, and deliver to any destination.

This blog aims to answer two questions:

What is a universal data distribution service?Why does every organization need it when using a modern data stack?

In a recent customer workshop with a large retail data science media company, one of the attendees, an engineering leader, made the following observation:

“Everytime I go to your competitor website, they only care about their system. How to onboard data into their system? I don’t care about their system. I want integration between all my systems. Each system is just one of many that I’m using. That’s why we love that Cloudera uses NiFi and the way it integrates between all systems. It’s one tool looking out for the community and we really appreciate that.”

The above sentiment has been a recurring theme from many of the enterprise organizations the Cloudera DataFlow team has worked with, especially those who are adopting a modern data stack in the cloud. 

What is the modern data stack? Some of the more popular viral blogs and LinkedIn posts describe it as the following:

Ben Patterson/IDG

A few observations on the modern stack diagram:

Note the number of different boxes that are present. In the modern data stack, there is a diverse set of destinations where data needs to be delivered. This presents a unique set of challenges.The newer “extract/load” tools seem to focus primarily on cloud data sources with schemas. However, based on the 2000+ enterprise customers that Cloudera works with, more than half the data they need to source from is born outside the cloud (on-prem, edge, etc.) and don’t necessarily have schemas.Numerous “extract/load” tools need to be used to move data across the ecosystem of cloud services. 

We’ll drill into these points further.  

Companies have not treated the collection and distribution of data as a first-class problem

Over the last decade, we have often heard about the proliferation of data creating sources (mobile applications, laptops, sensors, enterprise apps) in heterogeneous environments (cloud, on-prem, edge) resulting in the exponential growth of data being created. What is less frequently mentioned is that during this same time we have also seen a rapid increase of cloud services where data needs to be delivered (data lakes, lakehouses, cloud warehouses, cloud streaming systems, cloud business processes, etc.). Use cases demand that data no longer be distributed to just a data warehouse or subset of data sources, but to a diverse set of hybrid services across cloud providers and on-prem.  

Companies have not treated the collection, distribution, and tracking of data throughout their data estate as a first-class problem requiring a first-class solution. Instead they built or purchased tools for data collection that are confined with a class of sources and destinations. If you take into account the first observation above—that customer source systems are never just limited to cloud structured sources—the problem is further compounded as described in the below diagram:

Unisys

The need for a universal data distribution service

As cloud services continue to proliferate, the current approach of using multiple point solutions becomes intractable. 

A large oil and gas company, who needed to move streaming cyber logs from over 100,000 edge devices to multiple cloud services including Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, Snowflake, and a data lake, described this need perfectly:

“Controlling the data distribution is critical to providing the freedom and flexibility to deliver the data to different services.”

Every organization on the hybrid cloud journey needs the ability to take control of their data flows from origination through all points of consumption. As I stated in the start of the blog, this need has generated a market opportunity for a universal data distribution service.

P Wei / Getty Images

What are the key capabilities that a data distribution service has to have?

Universal Data Connectivity and Application Accessibility: In other words, the service needs to support ingestion in a hybrid world, connecting to any data source anywhere in any cloud with any structure. Hybrid also means supporting ingestion from any data source born outside of the cloud and enabling these applications to easily send data to the distribution service.Universal Indiscriminate Data Delivery: The service should not discriminate where it distributes data, supporting delivery to any destination including data lakes, lakehouses, data meshes, and cloud services.Universal Data Movement Use Cases with Streaming as First-Class Citizen: The service needs to address the entire diversity of data movement use cases: continuous/streaming, batch, event-driven, edge, and microservices. Within this spectrum of use cases, streaming has to be treated as a first-class citizen with the service able to turn any data source into streaming mode and support streaming scale, reinforcing hundreds of thousands of data-generating clients.Universal Developer Accessibility: Data distribution is a data integration problem and all the complexities that come with it. Dumbed down connector wizard–based solutions cannot address the common data integration challenges (e.g: bridging protocols, data formats, routing, filtering, error handling, retries). At the same time, today’s developers demand low-code tooling with extensibility to build these data distribution pipelines.

Cloudera DataFlow for the Public Cloud, a universal data distribution service powered by Apache NiFi

Cloudera DataFlow for the Public Cloud (CDF-PC), a cloud native universal data distribution service powered by Apache NiFi, was built to solve the data collection and distribution problem with the four key capabilities: connectivity and application accessibility, indiscriminate data delivery, streaming data pipelines as a first class citizen, and developer accessibility. 

IDG

CDF-PC offers a flow-based low-code development paradigm that provides the best impedance match with how developers design, develop, and test data distribution pipelines. With over 400+ connectors and processors across the ecosystem of hybrid cloud services including data lakes, lakehouses, cloud warehouses, and sources born outside the cloud, CDF-PC provides indiscriminate data distribution. These data distribution flows can then be version controlled into a catalog where operators can self-serve deployments to different runtimes including cloud providers’ kubernetes services or function services (FaaS). 

Organizations use CDF-PC for diverse data distribution use cases ranging from cyber security analytics and SIEM optimization via streaming data collection from hundreds of thousands of edge devices, to self-service analytics workspace provisioning and hydrating data into lakehouses (e.g: Databricks, Dremio), to ingesting data into cloud providers’ data lakes backed by their cloud object storage (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) and cloud warehouses (Snowflake, Redshift, Google BigQuery).

In subsequent blogs, we’ll deep dive into some of these use cases and discuss how they are implemented using CDF-PC. 

Get Started Today

Wherever you are on your hybrid cloud journey, a first class data distribution service is critical for successfully adopting a modern hybrid data stack. Cloudera DataFlow for the Public Cloud (CDF-PC) provides a universal, hybrid, and streaming first data distribution service that enables customers to gain control of their data flows. 

Take our interactive product tour to get an impression of CDF-PC in action or sign up for a free trial.

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