Looking ahead to 2020, Rackspace CTO Joel Friedman offers his predictions

As the New Year 2020 begins, hybrid and multi-cloud will continue to gain traction, as will software as a service (SaaS). Security remains a tough nut to crack, and edge computing will gain ground, but Joel Friedman, Rackspace CTO, predicts more modestly than the current hype may suggest.

PREDICTION 1: HYBRID/MULTI-CLOUD REMAINS ASCENDANT

Smart organizations have locked onto the benefits of running apps and data in the places that make the most sense, whether that’s public or private cloud, colocation or, most commonly, a bespoke combination of these that can evolve as business needs and resources dictate. However, the complexity of managing multiple clouds across the dimensions of cost, security, governance, identity and DevOps patterns will continue to grow in 2020.

This complexity is related to the forced reliance upon a multitude of platforms, the rate of technological change, disruptions to traditional service delivery models and a real shortage of skill sets required to bring it all together. Due to these factors, it is likely that multi-cloud solutions will prevail, while the search for qualified external help will intensify.

Finding external help may prove difficult, as not only will managed service providers need to maintain a multi- or hybrid cloud instance, but internal and external vendors will need to work together to manage a multitude of issues around cost governance, security and tagging, to name a few. Fortunately, 451 Research has found these growing pains can be alleviated with clear communication and flexibility on each partner’s part.

PREDICTION 2: SAAS = PROBLEM SOLVED

On top of infrastructure, one of the cloud strategies I hear on repeat when working with customers is that “cloud first” starts with SaaS. They don’t want to reinvent the (inferior) wheel by developing applications for ‘solved’ problems. Mature SaaS offerings are a culmination of many iterations of customer mandated features, user experience analysis, and just as important, industry best practices around process workflows.

In many cases, organizations choosing to fit their internal process to best match their SaaS vendor’s implementation – as opposed to always opting for customizing the platform to suit legacy workflows. Furthermore, SaaS has a compounding effect with data; once data is in the system, other ecosystem players can offer turn-key integration and add-on services, further enhancing the value proposition of SaaS. 

While this isn’t necessarily a new trend, Friedman predicts this will be the norm in 2020 and expects to see more and more niche, and vertically-focused applications developing a SaaS model.

PREDICTION 3: SECURITY REMAINS A STRUGGLE

When it comes to security, many organizations remain burdened with legacy systems riddled with technical debt and corresponding security vulnerabilities. They understand the need to harness cloud-compatible security frameworks, operating models and tools to operate securely in cloud-native environments, but it can be slow and rough going.

Most industries simply have not reached the place where mature cloud security practices are being implemented, and this creates fertile ground for breaches. Too many are still attempting to apply traditional security controls and methodologies to cloud-native environments and deployments. 

This generally does not work well; not only is the security implementation likely to be ill fit, it also creates drag on the organization’s desired benefits of agility. This sometimes leads to fragmentation, where business units go around central security and implement on their own shadow security. The risks of this should be obvious.

In 2020, Friedman thinks that the cloud continues to present some growing pains to even the most digital-native and forward-thinking organizations. These organizations understand how the cloud can aid their business in moving fast, but they don’t yet have the maturity to implement real-time or just-in-time posture management and ‘least privilege’ protocols in the ephemeral, complex and constantly changing world of multi-cloud. 

While security teams straddle the old world of insecure legacy applications and platforms (those which cannot or should not be modernized), and the relative newness of cloud operating models, I unfortunately expect to see the breach headlines continue in 2020 along with all of the free credit monitoring can handle.

Even when the security teams agree in concept that it’s possible to be more secure in the cloud, many do not have cloud compatible security frameworks, operating models and tools to aid the business in operating in cloud-native environments securely.

PREDICTION 4: CLOUD CONTROL PLANE WILL BECOME THE NORM

There has been a trend over the past few years in which the management plane has been reversing from the datacenter to the cloud. For early cloud adopters, the datacenter was still the central control point. Organizations burst into the cloud or had back-end projects with no internet accessibility. As cloud grew in popularity, more and more greenfield projects became cloud-native.

Granted, many still integrate with on-premises or hosted private clouds for identity, business intelligence or other data enrichment requirements, but the hyperscalers have now moved past denying that hybrid cloud is real (in attempts to capture all workloads), and pivoted their strategy to capture those datacenter workloads where they stand and bring them into their ecosystem. 

This includes Snowball Edge, AWS RDS of VMware, Azure Stack/Azure Arc and Google Anthos. Expect to see more such services in 2020. And why shouldn’t we? Cloud providers have proven their effectiveness of securely operating at scale, and API-enabling everything.

PREDICTION 5: EDGE WILL GAIN MODERATE GROUND

Edge computing is a new frontier — no player is currently dominating this space, as it is a naturally fragmented market. When choosing locations over platforms to address local markets, data sovereignty, and other use case specific needs, I believe organizations may want to align in a technology-neutral and consistent manner. And based on the trends over the past year, containers and serverless seem like a natural beneficiary for edge.

As Kubernetes dominates in the container orchestration arena, serverless is another story in which, as of yet, there are no victors. AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform all have their own flavors of Function-as-a-Service (FaaS), which are embedded within their respective cloud ecosystems. Will OpenFaaS with kNative gain some ground based on open standards, addressing the often spoken lock-in avoidance and mobility potential? We shall see. 

Either way, Friedman predicts that 2020 will see lots of innovation and exploration in the edge space, but he suspects this is the year of gaining momentum and the floodgates won’t open until 2021.

Rackspace strengthens professional and managed services to boost user cloud adoption with AWS

Rackspace accelerates its growth as a full stack service provider by expanding its portfolio of Rackspace Service Blocks and its position in providing professional and managed services for Amazon Web Services (AWS). With the expansion of the Service Blocks portfolio, Rackspace further empowers customers to keep pace with innovation and capitalize on new services and features like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Internet of Things (IoT), and Serverless Computing. 

Rackspace Service Blocks is the modular cloud services portfolio comprised of discrete, customizable services provided on a flexible consumption model, which allows customers to only pay for the cloud services they need, optimizing IT economics.  

The Rackspace Service Block patterns are designed to streamline the adoption of AWS by consolidating broad expertise across infrastructure, applications, data, strategy and integration. 

This capability is distilled into solution roadmaps designed to help customers deploy three key types of solutions. A combination of professional services, managed cloud and advanced Kubernetes management service blocks, this offering helps customers outline their container strategy, build containerized applications and transition them into ongoing management.

It delivers a grouping of managed and professional services designed to provide customers with the tools and expertise needed to make a smooth transition to hybrid cloud with VMware Cloud on AWS. This configuration helps customers streamline analytics processes, uncover deficiencies within processes and derive meaning from data to enable better data-driven business decisions and serve their customers with accurate and timely data. 

“Our customers need deep AWS expertise that helps them develop, deploy, and integrate the latest applications, improve and secure their infrastructure, and ultimately make the most of what AWS has to offer so that they can move their businesses forward,” said Matt Stoyka, chief relationship officer, Rackspace. “Our enhancement of Rackspace Service Blocks bridges the skills gap faced by customers who are quickly maturing on AWS.” 

“For 15 years, we’ve trusted Rackspace to hear and understand our challenges, diagnose our problems, and quickly develop solutions that fit our evolving needs as a company,” said Bill Dalton, vice president of Firefly Digital. “Today, bringing their expertise to manage our entire container services journey, Rackspace ensures we’re getting the most from AWS so we can focus on innovating and staying competitive.” 

Rackspace gives boost to its managed cloud services segment with Onica acquisition

Rackspace announced that it has agreed to acquire Onica, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) Premier Consulting Partner and AWS Managed Service Provider. This acquisition brings Onica’s professional services capabilities – including strategic advisory, architecture and engineering and application development – to the Rackspace portfolio, complementing its existing managed cloud services capabilities. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Santa Monica, California, Onica has rapidly grown to more than 350 highly-skilled consultants across North America. 

The company holds nine AWS competencies across Data and Analytics, DevOps, Education, Healthcare, Industrial Software, IoT, Microsoft Workloads, Migration and Storage. Onica has been a regular on Inc. Magazine’s Best Workplaces list and ranked fifth on the CRN® Fast Growth 150 list. 

As a cloud-native services company, Onica helps customers build new revenue streams, increase efficiency and deliver incredible experiences by bringing the innovative capabilities of the cloud to some of the most complex technology projects in the world.

“As a cloud pioneer, Onica has established itself as one of the largest pure-play AWS consultancies, with an unmatched reputation for true capability leadership with AWS and customers,” said Kevin Jones, CEO of Rackspace. “This acquisition will strengthen our ability to meet all of our customer needs on AWS, and together, we will have the most complete set of professional services and managed service capabilities in the industry. Rackspace is known for providing Fanatical Experience™ to its customers and Onica’s customer-first mindset is a natural culture fit. We are thrilled to welcome Stephen, Tolga and the talented Onica team to the Racker family.”

The demand for professional services for public cloud is rapidly growing and customers are continuing to adopt advanced cloud solutions. The acquisition of Onica will enhance and extend Rackspace’s offering to customers who are quickly maturing on AWS and seeking high-end professional services spanning the full spectrum of expertise in the cloud.

“By combining our capabilities with Rackspace’s global presence, resources and scale, we will be better positioned to achieve our mission of helping customers innovate using AWS,” said Stephen Garden, CEO of Onica. “We pride ourselves on delivering results for customers, and in Rackspace we have found a partner that shares our passion for providing a customer-obsessed experience.”

The transaction is expected to close in late fourth quarter of 2019. Garden and Onica chief technology officer Tolga Tarhan will continue to lead the Onica team, reporting to Sid Nair, general manager of Americas at Rackspace.

Both companies are privately held, with Rackspace owned by affiliates of certain funds of Apollo Global Management LLC and certain co-investors. Onica is a portfolio company of Sunstone Partners. Evercore acted as sole financial advisor to Rackspace on the transaction. Barclays acted as sole financial advisor to Onica.

Rackspace chooses Armor to deliver improved security for hybrid cloud environments

Rackspace announced that it has selected Armor, provider of cloud security-as-a-service solutions, to deliver security for hybrid cloud environments to customers worldwide. Armor’s next-generation cloud security platform, Armor Anywhere, will be integrated into Rackspace’s comprehensive portfolio of security services for all major private and hyperscale public clouds, creating complete hybrid cloud security solution on the market.

The Armor Anywhere service uses an agent installed across on-premise, cloud, or hybrid environments. The Armor Anywhere agent uses ideal security capabilities to secure the environment. 

Once installed, the Armor Anywhere agent defends the environment at the host level, monitoring inbound and outbound traffic, gathering logs, monitoring changes to critical les, and providing customers with patch status and updates. The Armor Anywhere agent is lightweight and can be deployed in under 2 minutes.

Security results from the Armor Anywhere agent provide valuable data to Armor’s SOC, where experts manage and secure systems and workloads—monitoring both inbound and outbound traffic at the host—and identify malicious threats in real-time to enable quick response and containment before larger issues occur.

Armor Anywhere is made up of multiple detection tools which are deployed into a customer’s IT environment via a lightweight software component. The platform collects, correlates and analyzes millions of events and logs from various network and cloud native tools to produce enriched, correlated event data, which is ready for triage and action from Rackspace’s security experts.

Rackspace offers a comprehensive portfolio of security and compliance services for all major private and hyperscale public clouds – including 24x7x365 proactive threat detection and response services from Rackspace’s global Security Operations Center (SOC), with locations in San Antonio and London. 

Rackspace integrates with all of the hyperscale cloud control planes to offer customers hybrid cloud security capabilities, including, but not limited to, host and network protection, threat intelligence and security analytics, log management, vulnerability scanning, and compliance assistance services.

“To handle threats effectively, enterprises need a platform that consolidates threat intelligence, security analytics, alerts and response,” said Vikas Gurugunti, EVP and GM, Rackspace Solutions and Services. “Rackspace’s security services, coupled with the powerful detection and analysis capabilities of Armor Anywhere, will give our customers a high-quality security solution focused on hybrid cloud security outcomes. This new collaboration ensures that we accelerate the value of the cloud and deliver Fanatical Experience during every phase of our customers’ digital transformation.” 

“Armor is honored to be working with Rackspace,” said Armor CEO Mark Woodward. “Rackspace goes beyond simply helping organizations manage their IT infrastructure and migration to the cloud. They are a proven leader in helping customers securely transform their entire organization across every phase of their digital journey. Armor’s market-leading cloud security solutions have successfully helped to protect organizations’ sensitive data for 10 years. By working together, I am confident that Rackspace will have the most comprehensive, secure and business-enabling managed cloud security services in the market.”

The integration of Armor’s technology and capabilities into Rackspace’s security service offerings will be made available to customers in 2020.