Democratizing Enterprise Cloud in Azure

Cloud is the new normal; almost, all the enterprises have been going through or at least planning their cloud adoption. Gone are the days, enterprise IT deals with big chunks of metal.

Though the cloud adoption is at its peak, I rarely see democratized cloud adoption in enterprises. Cloud is often used as a centralized IT hosting solution. In this article, let’s analyze the issues for such cases, and what are the options available in Azure to enable democratized cloud adoption with enterprise governance.

It is predicted that, 83% of the workloads will be running in some form of cloud in 2020, where 41% on public cloud.

where IT workloads will run in 2020 : aventude

https://www.logicmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/LogicMonitor-Cloud-2020-The-Future-of-the-Cloud.pdf

Cloud is not only the successor of IT assets and management, but also, it has evolved to provide agility and innovation at scale. These aspects, have been changing the way organizations deal with technology along with other techno-cultural and techno-commercial shifts like DevOps, PaaS and Opex.

public cloud drivers aventude

https://www.logicmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/LogicMonitor-Cloud-2020-The-Future-of-the-Cloud.pdf

As per the above graph, the key motives are agility, DevOps and innovative aspects.

In order to leverage the full potential of the cloud, it is mandatory for the enterprise IT to deliver cloud with its real essence. This will help the cloud adoption, without putting the key motives under threat.

If your enterprise has cloud but still require calls, emails and requests to spin up a resources or to make change, it kills the agility the cloud naturally offers. It’s like buying a Ferrari and restricting it to go in 20 kmph.

Once the agility is killed, innovation is blocked, and soon the cloud becomes a mere hosting solution.

A successful enterprise cloud adoption is not just things are in the cloud, it should be democratized with proper governance, in order to leverage the agility whilst maintaining the governance.

What makes the enterprises not to democratize their cloud adoption?

In most enterprises, the cloud adoption is strictly controlled by the IT, often tampering the autonomy of the business agility and digital transformation cadence.  There are several reasons for this.

  • Cloud Sprawl – Organizations fear cloud sprawl, cloud sprawl refers to the unwanted/uncontrolled cloud footprint, which leads to unnecessary cost.
  • Security – Concerns about security implementations, how the resources should be created, linked, managed and monitored. This knowledge mostly stays with the IT teams and often sensitive, this leads the IT to keep the management within themselves.
  • Governance and Policies – Organizational policies in terms of access levels and governance should be adhered, this is an organizational knowledge (internal) where it often remains tacit. Example – Organizational policies in firewall settings? Patch administration and etc.
  • Unified Tools and licenses – Larger enterprises, especially who have complex IT structure should leverage the maximum return of investments they have made on tools and licenses. So certain tools and licenses are commonly used and certain things are prohibited (partner relationships also play a significant role here). Historically, IT has the knowledge and the relationship management of these tools and license offerings, it creates a dependency on IT to decide on tools and licenses. Example – What license to bring to cloud? what are the available ones? Do we have any alternative tools in-house and etc.
  • Lack of cloud knowledge – Lack of knowledge about the cloud and offerings. Business stakeholders often get confused and try to compare things in wrong ways, this kind of experience often leads the IT to keep the cloud as a black box as possible and forces the IT to centrally manage the cloud.
  • Centralized culture – Enterprises have cultural problems that often create authoritative and knowledge pools, which blocks the democratization of the technology and decision making.

With all these challenges, Finding the right balance between autonomy and the governance is the key.

What Azure has in place?

Earlier, Azure subscriptions are part of a tenant, and under the subscription we have resource groups and then the resources. This hierarchy is very basic and it does not have the flexibility to govern and mange enterprise complexity.

Azure got a new hierarchical elements in structuring enterprise cloud footprint closer to the organizational structure.

The below figure shows the current new structure.

azure management group hierarchty

These management groups can have policies to ensure the governance. Policies can be set at any level. Policies by default inherit the permissions from the level above.

Policies can be very granular like which restrict resource types, SKUs and locations, policies to ensure security aspects like patch, endpoint controls and etc.

Use Cases and structuring

There’s no hard and fast rule on how do we structure the management groups and subscriptions, but it is often better to follow the organizational decision tree. Below are some common structuring approaches.

One organization with departmental separation

aventude: departmental management group structure

Global organization with geographic footprint

aventude : global management group structure

Conglomerates

aventude : conglomerate management group structure :

 

Once the right policies are in place, IT can take a relax approach, like a development team shouldn’t create that big VM, you are always afraid of.

Though, the above hierarchical approach gives lots of flexibility, in certain cases still you may find challenges to address the hierarchical management, especially in the group of companies, where each company has its own CIO office and some policies are controlled centrally. Also, when these business units use different tenants it adds more complexity to the picture.

Regardless, of the tools – the key point I want to stress out from this article is – in enterprise cloud adoption IT teams and management should focus on democratizing the IT much as possible whilst maintaining the governance policies intact.  Too much control at central place will tamper the agility of the cloud and kills the momentum of the digital transformation.

 

 

 

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Build your SaaS right with Azure

Cloud has the proven promise of great opportunities and agility for ISVs. Modern cloud platforms have low entry barriers and huge array of service offerings beyond traditional enterprise application requirements. Cloud services provide intact environment to SaaS applications with features such as cutting edge innovative services, intelligence as services, continuous integration and continuous delivery, computation and storage scale for the global reach.

The current digitized environment, device proliferation and the span of intelligent cloud services give the best mix of social, technical and business aspects for SaaS products to emerge and prevail with high success.

Cloud enables equal opportunity to every SaaS player – technical and business domain skills and expertise are vital elements in order to succeed in the SaaS playground, knowing the business and knowing the technology are two utmost important facts.

From a SaaS consumer point of view, a customer has ample number of choices available to choose from list of SaaS providers. Having the right mix of features, availability, security and business model is important. Choosing the right tools at the right time at the right cost is the skill to master.

Figure 1: What customers expect from SaaS providers.

1Source: Frost & Sullivan, 2017

In order to deliver successful SaaS application, ISVs should have attributes such as – concrete DevOps practices to deliver features and fixes seamlessly, responsible SaaS adoption models concerning Administration & Shadow IT, trust and the privacy of Data & Encryption, promising service Uptime and many more.

DevOps with Azure Tooling

Azure tools bring agile development practices and continuous integration & continuous delivery. Code changes take immediate effect in the build pipeline with VSTS build definitions and deployed to the respective environments in Azure.

Figure 2: The simple DevOps model with Azure tooling

2

Environment and resource provisioning is handled via automated ARM template deployments from VSTS build and release pipeline. The model depicted in Figure 2 vary based on the context and complexity of the project with multiple environments, workflows and different services.

Centralized Administration and Shadow IT

Customers have the concern of how the SaaS enables the centralized organizational access management can be performed. On the other hand, SaaS providers require frictionless approach in the adoption of the services and enable more users much as possible.

Azure based organizational SaaS implementations often utilize Azure Active Directory (AAD) based integration and Single Sign On (SSO).

Data Security and Encryption

Customers trust the SaaS providers with their data. It is the most valuable asset SaaS providers take responsibility of in delivering value and helping the business of the customers. Data security and encryption is a prime concern and growing rapidly with complex and fast evolving regulatory and complaince requirements.

Azure has great compliancy support, tools and services in data protection. It offers many out of the box data encryption and protection services like TDE, DDM (Dynamic Data Masking), RLS (Row Level Security), In-built blob encryption and etc.

In certain cases, built-in security features do not provide the sufficient protection and compliance. In those sensitive environments we can leverage additional Azure services which provide high degree data security.

Figure 3: Advanced data security implementation in Azure

3

Azure Key Vault based encryption with SQL Database Always Encrypted, Blob encryption (envelope encryption), AAD based access control and MFA can be implemented in such cases. Also, this provides new models of Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) in encryption where customers can provide and manage their keys.

Uptime

Service uptime should be considered not only during unexpected failures but also during updates.

Azure provides inbuilt geo replication for databases, storage and specific services. Application tier redundancy is implemented with the use of Traffic Manager. Configuring geo replication and redundancy introduces concerns like geographic regulatory concerns of data, synchronization issues and performance.

Azure tools like Application Insights for application monitoring & telemetry, auto scaling, geo replication, traffic manager and many others are mixed with architectural practices to deliver required uptime for the SaaS application.

Conclusion

Apart from the technologies and tools, SaaS application development on a cloud platform requires expertise on the platform of choice, in order to achieve cost effectiveness, business agility and innovation.

How SaaS application is bundled and sold is a crucial decision in technology strategies like cache priming, tenant isolation, security aspects, centralized security, multi-tenancy at different services and etc.

This article provides a high level of view about the considerations customers look from SaaS providers and how Azure tools and services can help in achieving them.

 

 

Low Code Development Platform (LCDP) – love, hate & rise

Last couple of weeks or so, I happened to hear about some of the ‘Low Code Development Platforms’ (LCDPs) from few project engagements in Tiqri and also from some technical discussions outside. In fact Tiqri hat its own LCDP – Compose (http://www.onctg.com/)

What is a LCDP ? according to wikipedia – Low-code development platforms represent a type of technology that allows for creating apps through configuration of functions, rather than coding those functions.

The Love

There are number of LCDPs available, where you can plug and play things and create screens. These screens are often simple web based ones or mobile apps.

If you’re an enterprise and you need some screens to read and write data from the devices of your sales team to your ERP,

  • You need it instantly
  • Don’t want to spend time in the discussions of  native/hybrid or web app/SPA
  • Want to complete this from a small developer footprint and cost

LCDPs are good at achieving this, and they are often targeted at business stakeholders.

Like a developer with little business context getting obsessed with the recent conference he attended and want to convert the systems to the great technology he saw there; the business stakeholders with little technical context love the the promise of high productivity and low cost of LCDPs

In fact, we cannot have an intrinsic argument built on the idea of LCDPs do not offer productivity. They do offer faster feature delivery compared to the typical development due to obvious reasons.

a11.png

The Hate

The general perception about LCDPs is – of course they offer quick feature delivery but when it comes to customization and granular business requirements they hit the limit at some point and then become the pain.

a2

It is hard to evaluate any technology completely before using it, after all the evaluation itself has a shelf-life as technologies often upgrade. But LCDPs have an inherent disadvantage of (not all but most of them) being coupled with certain types of systems. If your organization has different systems and conformity of the LCDPs with the different systems should be considered.

LCDPs remain mostly in internal applications. If you’re launching an app for public usage and high penetration mostly technical stakeholders do not opt for the LCDPs because they can have their own limitations and reverting from such implementations is very costly compared to reverting from an internal application developed for your sales team.  Application branding and look & feel customization is one big challenge.

Finally a psychological reason – As developers we favor the engineering feast of the solution more than the business solution. – I accept this; this does not mean we do not care the business, we do and make our fullest effort to solve the business problems but we do not like to do it at the stake of losing the passion of coding. – I know there can be many arguments on this point

The Rise

LCDPs are not new to the market, even bigger development technology providers like Microsoft, Google and Oracle have their own share of LCDPs in the market.

Few platforms which are connected to a major products (SAP, Salesforce) have their fair share and some generic LCDPs have been living in their own sweet internal world specific to few industries. – Starting at a point some LCDPs have first phase customer’s industry influence in them, which makes them not suitable for other industries. 

According to Forrester Wave Q2 2016, LCDPs are categorized under these 5 categories. Does general purpose mean anything that cannot fit in other 4 categories ?;) 

a3.png

I have marked the 2 solid green boxes, and one dashed as per my opinion and observation of the LCDPs. These categories will have a rise in the future. There are reasons for this.

  1. APIs everywhere – Most of the LCDPs rely on data pipeline for the functionality, if the data cannot be accessed from a system they cannot begin their work. But now the proliferation of APIs help LCDPs to break their initial barrier.
  2. Modern Cloud based tools – Modern services like AI, Machine Learning, Data pipelines, integrations and etc have cloud based LCDP tools. Azure, AWS or IBM Watson all have a drag & drop based or wizard based implementations of machine learning development platforms.
  3. Serverless (BaaS) – Most of the Serverless Back-end as a Service models rely on the LCDP platform model. The visual designers and cloud based tools aid this. Also, the nature of the BaaS itself relies heavily on the third party integrations and configurations which makes it a choice to be a LCDP.

Conclusion

Based on the trends in APIs, Cloud based tools and Serverless, LCDPs have more potential to grow, but that does not mean they will have the solutions for all the problems in hand. Mainly the in the areas of handling dynamic data structures and modeling, UI, data governance, performance and so on. (individual LCDPs have some solutions for these problems in certain ways)

As of now back-end based LCPDs which come under the flavor of Serverless are promising in request handling and some process flows. These platforms are often offered by cloud giants like Azure & AWS. This would be a competition for some LCDPs whose strengths are in those areas.

Overall I believe the future of LCDPs are promising in terms of Serverless, APIs and Integrations but doesn’t look much convincing in terms of frontier application development except internal collateral application screens for the enterprises.

Visual programming, Rapid Application Development (RAD), high productivity PaaS (hpa-aPaaS) are some terms closely connected to the LCPD or used to refer LCDPs.

 

Understanding GDPR and personal data

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) the law imposes new rules on companies, government agencies, non-profits, and other organizations that offer goods and services to people in the European Union (EU), or that collect and analyze data tied to EU residents. The GDPR applies no matter where you are located.

I have been reading the key aspects of the GDPR from the above official site, and thought to summarize the points I came across in order to understand what GDPR is, how we can make the systems complaint to the GDPR.

  1. GDPR is a regulation will take effect in May 2018
  2. It gives more control to the EU citizens over their personal data
  3. GDPR enforces controls over data collection, usage, storage, handling breaches, transparency, expiry and etc.
  4. GDPR puts non-technical regulations as well, in few scenarios. Ex – A must to have data security officer in organization in certain scenarios.
  5. It does not explicitly mention on encryption or end-to-end data protection but the regulatory requirements will force the applications deal with personal data to use those technologies.
  6. Strict security audits, logs and documentation should be in place in order to be complaint with the GDPR.

GDPR defines ‘personal data’ as – any information related to a natural person or ‘Data Subject’, that can be used to directly or indirectly identify the person.

According to the definition name, address, credit card number, social security number, bank account number, telephone number, license number, vehicle number and any other explicit identification information is a personal data. But the following types of data also fall under the personal data category.

  1. Calls to customer care services or any other voice based services where they record the voice of the user. Though the voice record takes place without the name and with the full anonymity, still the voice data itself should be treated as a personal data.
  2. Any video surveillance recordings (CCTV) or any other visual recordings should be treated as personal data (both in the edge and cloud storages).
  3. Any forms of biometric data should be treated personal data.
  4. Drawings which represents the state of a real image like drawing of a portrait, a family or anything which exhibits the behavior of socio cultural aspects of a family or an individual can be considered as personal data.
  5. Value of an asset – this is a number but still considered as a personal when it is linked with the a person’s profile and can be used to guestimate the economic state and the obligation of the person.
  6. Call logs and any other data usage logs.
  7. Real-time geo location monitoring and geo-location data. Ex –  Uber drivers
  8. Meeting minutes and any forms of such data for official purpose which any relatable links or traceable information to a person.
  9. Any sort of medical imagery with traceable information.
  10. Photos, videos and voice recordings of any person on any sort is a personal data.
  11. Any non-aggregated data which reveals consumer patterns on goods and services.
  12. IP addresses – including dynamic IPs

The above list is does not include all, but summarizes the personal data in short from the above link. In my opinion any data seems to be a personal data as long as it can be traced and tracked to a person.

In certain scenarios GDPR ensures the organizations to have non-technical complaints such as having a data security officer and etc.

Encrypting the personal data is a one aspect of GDPR which is covered by the clause of “pseudonymous data”. This does not make the solutions complaint to the GDPR because encrypted personal data is also considered as personal data, but this gives some relaxation on on security breaches and how the breach should be handled and notified.

In summary all the solutions should have the technical and non-technical aspects of

  1. Why we collect and store the personal data
  2. How the personal data is used
  3. Transparency of the usage and sharing policies of the personal data
  4. Store personal data as pseudonymous data
  5. Continuous security auditing and monitoring
  6. Notification to the users upon breaches and policy changes

Multi tenancy – A myth in the cloud

Multi tenancy is a popular buzzword, often heard coupled along with cloud computing terminology. This is the issue and has created a dogma and some believe that multi tenancy can only be related with the cloud and cloud based SaaS services.

Based on the definition from Wikipedia

The term “software multitenancy” refers to a software architecture in which a single instance of software runs on a server and serves multiple tenants. A tenant is a group of users who share a common access with specific privileges to the software instance….

The core concern is – Pragmatically it is hard to define what a single software instance is ?

If multi tenancy is all about handling group of users (as tenants) we’ve been doing that with our good old, role based software systems, that’s not something new.

If we consider about the single instance of a software system, then there are confusions on how to consider the scale out scenarios and replications. (do not forget the DR plans with read access). In the software instances there could be confusions in the granular levels of programmatic constructs as well, like – are we talking about application level mutexes or object level singletons.

Handling different group of users in a software is very common scenario.  We see this problem in different layers of a software solution – in terms of data partitioning, security, noisy neighbor issues and much more.

But taking a SaaS solution and pointing the whole as a multi-tenant or non multi-tenant solution is technically wrong, though it has some conceptual truth in it.

In particular it becomes really annoying when someone tells that cloud supports multi tenancy and moving to cloud will give the ability to support multiple tenants.

Let’s see how things get complicated, consider a simple scenario where organizations (for the ease of understanding the tenants) can upload and convert videos to desired formats and stream them online.  Look at the below diagram in a simple overview. (note – the connections and directions do not reflect any and only data flow)

18-01-2017-20-53-office-lens

Here, the WFE is a web application and runs in single web server (multi tenant ?), and the service layer is running on two machines with the load balancer. (multi tenant ? or not) Web application access the cache which is a single instance serving as a common cache for all tenants. (multi tenant ?)  Messaging Queue, storage and transcoding services also runs single instances (multi-tenant ?) Each tenant has a different dedicated database (single tenant ?).

So in the entire system each layer or the software infrastructure has its own number of instances – so it’s almost impossible to call an entire system as multi tenant in technical perspective.

As a business unit, the system supports group of users (organizations in the above example) and regardless of the cloud or not, it is a multi tenant system.

Hope this will clear the misunderstanding of believing or arguing a SaaS is a multi tenant or just because moving a solution to cloud would make it multi tenant.