Author: Pavel Shkilionak

Finally yet importantly, the clients that are obsessed with data security can sleep safely, as their data are under their full control.

Market Leaders

Before launching our cloud project, we studied the most popular cloud solutions, weighing their strengths and weaknesses. The leading hybrid cloud solutions that are currently present on the market are AWS Outposts, Azure Stack, and Google Anthos. The most mature is AWS Outposts because it has a clearly defined delivery model and pricing policy.

AWS offers Outposts as a rack-based box with a whitebox on the front and a blackbox inside. The blackbox is delivered on-premise to the customer’s data center where AWS manages, monitors, and updates Outposts infrastructure and AWS services just like in the cloud. The customer’s technical support team has no access to the blackbox. AWS monitors it as a part of the public region monitoring, automatically upgrading software and applying patches.

Outposts provides only a few core cloud services of the huge number of well-known AWS public services. These core services are compute EC2 instances and EBS block storage. Additionally, Outposts provides Amazon ECS to orchestrate Docker containers, Amazon EKS to manage and run Kubernetes, and Amazon RDS to support MySQL and PostgreSQL database engines. Regardless of the configuration, the pricing model is pretty clear.

Returning to the IBA cloud platform, we concluded that a cloud-native rack-based approach is the best way to address the needs of our customers. However, our solution MUST be open source.

ICDC Model 2020 Open Source Alternative 

IBA Group developed its own  ready-to-use hybrid cloud solution, ICDC Model 2020 that represents a fully managed service to deliver pre-configured hardware and software to the customer’s on-premise data center or co-location space. We designed Model 2020 to run applications in a cloud-native manner, where companies don’t need to use any public data centers.

Like AWS Outposts, Model 2020 offers a rack-based box that looks like a blackbox from the outside, and is totally clear and transparent inside.

This rack-based box is also delivered on premise to the customer’s data center and connected to the local customer infrastructure to provide the best IT-as-a-Service, applying DevOps and ITSM practices in accordance with ITIL V4.

Similarly to AWS Outposts, the basic ICDC Model 2020 configuration provides core cloud services, including the following features.

ICDC Model 2020 Features

ICDC Compute offers self-service provisioning of virtual CPU, memory, and graphic resources, as well as Marketplace, network management, and load balancing. It supports both x86-based and IBM Power architecture.

ICDC Openshift is designed for management and orchestration of Kubernetes containers.

ICDC Storage provides a full range of object, block, and elastic file system capabilities. It runs on all-flash NVMe SSD drives and is used in ICDC Compute and Openshift services.

In addition to the basic configuration, Model 2020 provides an extended edition with major team productivity and collaboration cloud services. The extensions include the following.

ICDC Disk brings new possibilities for team collaboration, enabling file and document exchange across any organization, while ICDC DevOps offers groupware that enables organization’s teams to work agile, as well as securely and faster, bringing more value to corporate customers and providing IT services in accordance with ITIL V4.

What Do I Get from ICDC Model 2020?

Model 2020 is a High Performance Computing (HPC) solution built on Lenovo ThinkSystem with NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU and IBM Power 9 servers, as well as Cisco Nexus 10/25/100G network uplink options.

Given these characteristics, ICDC Model 2020 is a great ready-to-use solution for developing products and providing services for AI, ML, RPA, IoT, and Blockchain technology stacks.

How Does ICDC Secure My Data?

The content of your VMs and projects are yours to own and secure. That means that as an account holder, you are in charge of securing the data, interfaces, applications, middleware, and operating systems. ICDC Model 2020 secures the infrastructure that includes the software, hardware, networking, and facilities that keep the cloud alive for our customers. Therefore, we use the shared responsibility model.

What Can I Achieve with ICDC Model 2020?

With ICDC Model 2020, companies in the healthcare sector achieve rapid retrieval of medical information by storing data locally. In manufacturing, SCADA systems and applications run closely to the factory floor equipment. Media and entertainment sectors get a quick access the latest GPU innovations for graphic processing, audio and video rendering, and running media applications.

The Open Source Hybrid Cloud Model 2020 is beneficial for customers that are looking for low latency, local data processing, or local data storage.

From a financial perspective, ICDC Model 2020 significantly increases savings on operational expenditure (OpEx) by moving cloud services back from public data centers to customer’s sites. In addition, it reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) for IT service and infrastructure management, as its completely open source architecture helps avoid vendor lock-in and limited IT agility.

Getting Started

Both configurations enable Compliance, Help Desk, and Monitoring services that come with our basic subscription plan. This plan also includes regular updates for all ICDC cloud services as soon as the original open source software releases new versions. To find out more about our pricing policy and to start using ICDC Model 2020, visit the

Author: Mark Hillary

Most people working in IT today know about the cloud and how cloud-based systems can offer immediate access to storage or computing power easily. Many companies now use a cloud strategy to ensure they can ramp up and down on available systems or storage – it’s a common theme of discussion when planning an IT strategy.

But what is a Cloud Management Platform and in particular how can one be useful to service providers offering IT services to their clients?

Cloud Management Platform (CMP) is a term coined by the industry analyst Gartner. The analyst firm wanted a way to describe products or tools that help companies to optimize and manage their cloud infrastructure for cost, security, and operations. A good CMP strategy should allow users to maintain control over dynamic and scalable cloud environments.

So it is really just a control system that allows the user to maintain dynamic control over their cloud system. Instead of frantically calling a service provider and asking them to quickly scale up storage capacity in their contracted cloud, the customer should be able to use a CMP to just scale their cloud – it should be as easy as sliding a bar on a control panel.

The major CMPs on the market today will all offer these different aspects of cloud management:

• Cost
• Security
• Performance

These are the three main areas where the customer can manage their cloud and cover more specific areas such as budgeting, rightsizing the cloud, compliance and monitoring, and creating alerts and other analytics.

CMPs are still quite new tools and so there are still different types of tool available. Some are very focused on specific issues, such as controlling security risk or optimising costs. Some allow the option to manage multiple clouds, so if you are using both Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS then you can manage both clouds from a single tool. Some CMPs even allow the tool to manage a cloud and systems you have on site simultaneously.

Clearly this is an emerging area. There are many new tools solving problems that have only recently become apparent. It was only a few years back that companies started taking cloud-based services seriously and it has become clear that it can be difficult to control the various aspects of a cloud-based system – such as cost control and security. In addition, if a service provider is delivering services on a cloud that is owned and managed by the client then the client needs an easy way to manage areas such as security in partnership with their service provider.

CMPs are still new and it is therefore difficult to advise on which one is perfect for each client, but there is a clear need to work on CMP selection with your service provider as any chosen solution must work for both client and service provider. I’ll explore this question next time here on the IBA Group blog.

You can also read about the IBA Cloud Platform

Author: Mark Hillary

In my last couple of articles here I explored Cloud Management Platforms (CMP), both to define what they are and to give some ideas on how to choose the best one for a particular business. It was therefore interesting to see that a recent article in ITPro Today explores the top ten CMPs available today, assessing all their strengths and weaknesses.

All CMPs need to provide lifecycle management – this is the ability to track cloud resources over a period of time – and data protection, in addition to the main functionality of controlling and automating cloud-based processes. John Webster, a senior partner and analyst at the Evaluator Group, managed the research published in ITPro Today. One of his main concerns when comparing the different CMPs was that not all of them are keenly focused on data protection – they are focusing mainly on basic functionality.

John explained: “Data protection and disaster recovery is an IT responsibility, a bedrock function, and I think that the vendors in this space have to really start looking at that seriously.” He added: “Vendors will likely provide these capabilities through extensions to data protection and disaster recovery applications that are already available in the market.”

The top ten list of CMPs was created by weighing up several factors, including:

• The quality of the user interface
• Ability to manage various groups of users
• Complexity of the service

Cost control is an important area of functionality that most customers want to use, but many CMP vendors find it very difficult to offer because they are constantly updating their products. The ability to create efficiency is much easier to plan when the software is stable. If the CMP is constantly being improved then there is an almost constant need to explore efficiencies.

John explained that support for Artificial Intelligence (AI) is likely to be an important capability in the near future. He said: “Support for cloud-native including Kubernetes, and application migration will be key functions in cloud management platform tools. AI assistance, or the assistance of artificial intelligence, will become more and more important as time goes on.”

Some of the CMPs on the market at present have been built from trusted and tested systems that were essentially managing IT estates – they have been converted to managing cloud-based systems, but others are built from scratch. It’s important to be aware of this when selecting a supplier. The start-ups might move faster and add more features all the time, but their platforms may be less stable and less tested in real-life situations.

The ten CMPs are not listed with the best in position one; they are just grouped as the ten best CMPs. This is because ultimately the right choice of CMP will be based on the different priorities and needs of each company. Follow the link to the article and you can read the top ten free, providing you submit your contact details to the magazine.

Author: Mark Hillary

Cloud computing has transformed how the enterprise uses both storage and applications. Local storage is no longer a requirement with remote server farms immediately managing any requirements and applications using cloud resources to cope with heavy loads – such as online retailers on particularly busy shopping days. All these benefits of the cloud have become normalised, but could we be achieving more with cloud-based services?

A recent feature in ZDNet suggests that we can – digital transformation. Most enterprises view digital transformation through the lens of a change in business model, for example a retailer with a focus on in-store sales shifting their attention to apps. However, the ZDNet research shows that enterprises with a requirement to quickly change business model or offer an improved digital service could be more effectively exploring cloud-based services.

The research group IDC claims that spending on digital transformation in 2017 topped $1.3 trillion, so this is a market where a lot of enterprises are spending, but are they getting the best value and results from that investment?

The problem in many cases is that the technology makes the problem look simple. The cloud, Big Data, the Internet of Things (IoT) – on the surface all these technologies are easy to understand. Executives can sit in the boardroom and proclaim that we need a business strategy that builds on the IoT, yet it is one thing to declare that you want to use a certain type of technology and another to figure out how to make that an integral part of your business in a way that delights your customers.

This is where ZDNet believes that a focus on the cloud can pay dividends. Too many enterprises do not have an efficient or well-structured IT department. There are disparate apps spread across different storage facilities and no easy way to share and analyse data across all the business applications being used. Rather than focusing on technology-led solutions, such as what can we do with AI or the IoT, it makes more sense to fix this central core of the organisation by using cloud-based services. Fix the platform and your applications and data use will naturally transform.

Secure cloud access is a proven technology and it is simple to deploy if you hire a good partner with cloud expertise. The initial focus can be on storage, but you can build out from there to centrally manage business applications and data.

This approach can drive digital transformation in your business, not because it is a radical change to manage storage or apps in this way, but because once you organise your systems around this central core, with strong business application support and the ability to share data across systems, you will be able to quickly design new solutions that could only ever work in this environment.

Sometimes it is better to build the platform and let the solutions arrive through innovation, rather than trying to build the solution on day one. Once you have a platform in place that allows data sharing, then the ideas will flow and your teams will automatically start exploring digital transformation options that are driven by business needs – not just technology.

IBA Group has been exploiting the capabilities of cloud computing, as well as other CAMSS technologies (cloud, analytics, enterprise mobility, social media, and security) to provide end–to–end business transformation services to our customers. In 2015, IBA Group opened its data center that offers various types of cloud services, including IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and SaaS (Software as a Service).

Challenges

1. Merging data from diverse HR platforms
2. Navigating multiple disparate HR systems, which had created data redundancies and inconsistencies, making it hard to extract a single source of truth
3. Development of data flow mappings
4. Data quality management implementation
5. Data masking for personally identifiable data based on access level
6. ETL design and implementation data integration into the global DWH solution
7. Making sure that the cloud-based HR solution was compatible with other business tools and systems used in different departments, which was crucial for holistic business operations

Goal

Build SaaS for offices all over the world to manage the administrative processes required to track and support employees

Results

1. HR teams, managers, and employees have secure access to necessary data from anywhere and real-time analytics
2. Migration for 39 countries implemented successfully, taking into account all regulations
3. Developed, reinvented, and modernized the HR system for all HR-related tasks and procedures
4. Advanced encryption and security protocols ensured sensitive HR data is protected
5. Collaboration and self-service capabilities make employees more engaged in teamwork. Satisfaction has increased by 50%
6. Various HR tools and applications were easily integrated, breaking data silos

Challenges

The biggest challenge was using on-premises infrastructure, which brought with it the constant need to support the hardware in the face of increasing data volumes. The bank required new approaches to working with data that the current infrastructure could not support. In light of this, it turned to IBA Group in search of a solution to the several competing challenges it faced.

Background

А huge global company with a strong technology focus turned to IBA Group with the task of transferring their client’s infrastructure to cloud services. At the time of the beginning of cooperation, the end customer of our client used a lot of data storage for the following internal service tasks:

• production cost tracking;
• dialer’s information;
• providing information to dealers,
• information about clients, employees.

The main part of the infrastructure was based on the Oracle database and the Informatica Power Center ETL tool, as well as many other tools such as Cron, Shell Script, Java, JS.

Several years ago, the company’s management decided to migrate the entire infrastructure to the cloud. During modernization, the company brought production processes to a single standard, increasing its structure, including a unified approach to development, implementing an approved technology stack, and ensuring quality control of development.

Business Challenges

During the modernization process, the end client encountered the following difficulties:

1. The existing services of the company were slow, which impacted all processes — from data analysis to hiring employees.
2. Frequent failures due to errors within the services led to a partial loss of data and the inability to make management decisions, prepare accounting reports, prepare data on the movement of warehouse resources, and more.
3. Permanent delays in providing new services due to the slowdown in development or the impossibility of their implementation, led to a decrease in the company’s attractiveness among customers.
4. Scaling within the framework of the old infrastructure could not be carried out without extra payments, due to the low flexibility of vendor licensing offers.
5. Recruitment of the necessary employees such as full-stack developers presented difficulties due to the huge variety of technologies used; cheaper resources were not of the right quality or up to the high standards of the company.

Key Objective #1

Migrate company services to new infrastructure in the cloud.

Key Objective #2

Tailor AWS vendor migration offerings to company services.

Solution Highlights

The customer formed a separate team that was responsible for the innovation and unification of disparate systems into a single infrastructure. IBA Group provided engineers and architects to form custom teams to participate in the adaptation of infrastructure modernization solutions, developing the top-level structure of the entire ecosystem, as well as general approaches and rules for each system separately.

After giving recommendations for the development and auditing of the process, the IBA Group team directly implemented this migration. To improve the quality of decisions made at the architecture design stage, an AWS vendor was involved.

Due to the business’s specific features, each area had its own architecture, for which separate teams were created that were responsible for its adaption and improvement. They were also involved in the transfer of existing services for their area to cloud technologies — AWS Glue, PySpark, ECS, Kubernetes, EMR + PySpark.

One of the important conditions was a “seamless” transition — teams during the migration process ensured that access to existing services remained uninterrupted.

Project Results

Benefits the client received by moving data management to a cloud service:

1. Increased fault tolerance by fixing bugs and using ready-made cloud-platform services for interaction between different customer services.
2. Continuity of current services during the migration process was maintained.
3. Cost reduction in the form of refusal of some server capacities due to the transition to the cloud service.
4. Flexible planning of financial expenses for scaling due to the pay-as-you-go system provided by the cloud solution.
5. Reduced time for recruiting specialists in the IT department by unifying the requirements for them, defining clear rules, and specifying the technology stack.
6. Reduction of the number of narrowly focused specialists without full-time employment due to their retraining in the technology stack adopted by the company.

Business Challenge

Development and support of Enterprise Data Warehouse, ETL processes and web application to process data.

Solution

IBA Group develops a financial planning and forecasting system for customer projects. A web application has been created for project managers to build financial forecasts. They also complete questionnaires and feedback forms used to assign statuses to the projects depending on their possible profitability/loss-making capability. After this data is processed, key performance indicators are generated. The reports generated by the system are submitted for verification to the company management.

A team of 30 developers and 10 technical support specialists is working on the project. They monitor ETL downloads around the clock and respond to user requests.

The system operates in five regions: USA, Asia, Europe, Japan and Latin America. Each region has individual ETL processes configured.

Result

The system generates reports for the company management to determine financial forecasts for the next quarter.