IBM Cloud Automation and Data Paks

A recent article from Fierce Telecom highlights new automation and data capabilities coming to IBM’s cloud software portfolio. These IBM Cloud Pak updates “offer integrated data and AI capabilities that run on Red Hat OpenShift” starting on November 20. These updates “include industry accelerators for banking, warranty management, supply chain forecasting, and retail,” as well as Watson Machine Leraning Accellerator (WML-A) and other improvements.

Enterprise Decentralization of the World Wide Web

A recent ComputerWeekly.com article highlights the new startup Inrupt launched by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee that promises decentralized web technology with more control for customers and users over their personal data. This enterprise version of the company’s push to give customers more control over their data boasts “a handful of early-adopter clients – including NatWest Bank, the BBC, the Flanders government in Belgium and the NHS.” The company chose these four organizations to develop “explicit use cases with large organisations” in order to quickly scale and adjust their offering to market needs.

Adapting to Cyberattacks in a COVID World

A recent Forbes article suggests that as we all continue to adapt to the immediate and consequential challenges presented by COVID, cyberattacks “are going through a digital transformation of their own this year.” The article cites a McAfee Labs COVID-19 Threats Report from July that claimed “a 630% increase in cloud services cyberattacks between January and April of this year alone.” The article outlines 5 key adaptations for cloud platforms into 2021:

1. Prioritize Privileged Access Management (PAM) and Identity & Access Management (IAM) using cloud-native controls to maintain least privilege access to sensitive data starting at the PaaS level.
2. Start using customer-controlled keys to encrypt all data, migrating off legacy operating systems and controls that rely on trusted and untrusted domains across all IaaS instances.
3. Before implementing any cloud infrastructure project, design in Zero Trust Security (ZTS) and micro-segmentation first and have IaaS and PaaS structure follow. 
4. Before implementing any PaaS or IaaS infrastructure, define the best possible approach to identifying, isolating and correcting configuration mistakes or errors in infrastructure.
5. Standardize on a unified log monitoring system that ideally has AI and machine learning built to identify cloud infrastructure configuration and performance anomalies in real-time.

Continued AWS Investment in Indian Infrastructure

Reports filtering in from TechCrunch and Fierce Telecom discuss a $2.8 billion investment from AWS to build a new AWS Cloud region in Hyderabad, “which is the capital and largest city” in the Indian state of Telanga. AWS Chief evangelist Jeff Barr highlights that “this is the latest in a long series of investments” for AWS in India. Barr also posits in his blog post that the continuing investment in Indian cloud regions will support innovation and cloud transformation into the “next generation of IT leaders in India.” This new region is scheduled to join the Asia Pacific cloud in 2022.

Continued Cloud Growth Despite COVID

A recent article from SiliconANGLE discussing cloud trends at this point in 2020 and suggesting that, while cloud growth may have been better without a global pandemic, “COVID has been a benefactor to cloud.” To support their claims they cite cloud revenue estimates from AWS, Azure, and GCP, which include lower but continued increases in revenue for all three platforms. The article goes on to discuss customer spending patterns, serverless computing, and cloud platform market share as indicators of increased cloud market growth.