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We're in a golden age for chip R&D activity, and that makes it a pretty good time to be one of the companies providing the software, intellectual property and/or manufacturing plants needed by chip engineers to bring new products to market.

That thought came to mind as I read an Axios report about how Alphabet/Google (GOOGL) is working on a processor that could power its 2021 Pixel phones, along with future Chromebooks. The processor, codenamed Whitechapel, is said to feature 8 ARM CPU cores, rely on Samsung's next-gen, 5-nanometer, manufacturing process and contain dedicated circuitry for improving Google Assistant's performance.

To date, Google has relied on Qualcomm's (QCOM) processors to power its Pixel phones. And on the whole, Qualcomm has done a pretty good job of addressing the needs of the high-end and mid-range Android phone markets.

Nonetheless, Google feels that it's worth its while to develop its own smartphone processor. Just as Google has felt it's worth developing an image-processing chip for Pixel phones, and to develop proprietary silicon (its Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs) for accelerating AI/deep learning workloads within its data centers.

Apple (AAPL) , meanwhile, now relies on its own processors to power nearly its entire product line -- Macs are the exception, but perhaps not for long -- and has also developed a number of other chips for its hardware.

Amazon.com (AMZN) has designed a slew of chips that can be found inside of AWS data centers; Microsoft (MSFT) has created chip designs for both Azure data centers and its HoloLens headsets; Tesla (TSLA) is using a home-grown processor to power its third-gen Autopilot system; and Huawei's HiSilicon unit now develops chips for everything from phones to IoT devices to cloud servers.

The list goes on and on. In many cases, this surge in chip design activity among companies that aren't first and foremost chip developers simply stems from a wish to use chips that are cheaper and/or can deliver better performance/power efficiency than what third-party offerings can provide.

But other factors can also be at play. These include an explosion in the number of workloads -- in everything from smartphones and IoT devices to cars and cloud data centers -- for which no off-the-shelf silicon optimized for that particular workload happens to exist. Some of the custom ASICs developed by AWS and Azure to help underpin their data center infrastructures arguably fit this description.

In other cases, a company might be motivated by a wish for greater independence from and/or negotiating leverage with third-party suppliers. A lot of Huawei/HiSilicon's chip design work falls into this category, particularly in the wake of U.S. export restrictions, and so might some of the attempts by cloud giants to develop their own server CPUs and AI accelerators.

Regardless of a company's motivation, this uptick in chip design activity among the likes of hardware makers and cloud giants, together with attempts by independent chip developers to address a wider variety of workloads, is a positive for electronic design automation (EDA) software giants Cadence Design Systems (CDNS) and Synopsys (SNPS) . It also spells more licensing opportunities for chip IP giant ARM, which is owned by Japan's SoftBank and eying a 2023 IPO, as well as more business forindependent chip developers that work with others on custom ASICs, such as Broadcom (AVGO) .

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TSMC, Cadence and Others Benefit as Chip Design Activity Surges - TheStreet

Demand for online collaboration tools and video conferencing software has boomed in recent weeks, with big players like Microsoft and Google chasing market share from the likes of Zoom and WebEx.

While Zoom customers grew from 10 million to 200 million in a few months, Microsoft Teams and Google Hangouts relaxed the rules to aid first responders, schools and enterprises with a view to on-board them to their respective platforms.

The latest to join the bandwagon is Twilio, which has announced three months of free access to its video platform for those working in healthcare, education and nonprofit organisations that are involved in the Covid-19 crisis response.

Twilio aims to offer a solution for front line health workers by letting them screen people for Covid-19 online, as well as assist other patients remotely. It also aims to offer an alternative solution to schools offering remote education to students and NGO workers fighting the pandemic.

The company has further limited the free offer to new signups before June 30 and for existing users who require additional video services.

While there are quite a few video conferencing solutions available, there seems to be a stretch on the bandwidth across several countries. Microsoft has already reported that its cloud servers are facing a lot of stress due to the unexpected increase in the usage of Teams applications.

Zoom, on the other hand, had been a preferred choice among the adopters because of its easy to use interface and free offerings to various sectors. However, reports about security vulnerabilities, lack of end to end encryption of video calls, and its Chinese connections with regards to routing calls through offshore locations has raised questions about the platform's security.

Even though the company has publicly apologized for these issues and has announced various steps to control the damage, it still faces a class-action lawsuit.

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There's a free alternative to Zoom, but it has a catch - TechRadar

Robert Graham, Technical Team Lead at Obsidian Systems.

The need to save on day-to-day operational expenses and minimise physical and carbon footprints are driving the move to virtual data centres.

And even more so now with the COVID-19 pandemic, this shows Africas cloud services space is evolving and that business leaders recognise the need to move their workloads to the cloud as on-premises data centres give way to automated or virtual options either on-premises or in the cloud.

This is according to Robert Graham, Technical Team Lead at leading open source technology and services provider Obsidian Systems.

Today, the discussion around cloud and data centre strategy is tailored around automation.

The question of why would one then want to automate your data centre arises, if it is so easy to deploy a server with the click of a button. It is not like the old days where you physically had to rack-and-stack a server room, lay the network cables and configure network switches and only after a few days or even months you were able to utilise these servers within your physical data centre. For data centre automation, one has to look at ways to enable the developers and operations engineers to easily deploy, configure and maintain an application or service within your data centre whether this is an on-premises or cloud data centre, Graham adds.

Automation means freeing your human resource to focus on building solutions instead of wasting time on troubleshooting and manually building an environment, says Graham.

You would want to be able to do this in a trusted and predictable way, utilising tools that will allow you to define your infrastructure as code. With infrastructure as code, you can continuously test your environment before it is deployed or upgraded. Without infrastructure-as-code one stands the risk of creating a snowflake environment - that requires a great number of person-hours to do manual tasks which can lead to human error and fatigue, he continues.

Graham believes generally, physical data centres are unlikely to disappear soon. However, the idea of a data centre has certainly changed.

A great number of organisations around the world are moving towards the concept of a virtual data centre. This allows companies to focus more on the product and service they want to deliver than on maintaining an on-premises data centre. A question that does come to mind is whether increased automation in the data centre will result in job losses. One should rather look at this challenge from another angle, and ask how can we utilise the skills of the engineers that spent countless hours in physical data centres in a more productive way? It mostly depends on the willingness of a person to learn new ways of doing things.

Graham raises operating systems as an example. A couple of years ago it required a lot of skill to deploy a server properly, today anyone can deploy a server with a choice of an operating system with little to no skill. Where the skill comes into play is to configure this particular server to perform the task it was deployed for the best way it can. With this knowledge, an engineer should be able to make use of an automation tool that will give them the ability to configure this server as required. With any form of automation, you will always need someone to maintain the automation tool.

Advantages to automation

Obsidian says that among the main benefits of automation in the data centre are that systems perform the boring repetitive tasks which in the end will give you predictability and minimise human error.

This will give your engineers and developers more time to focus on building exciting new systems and services and not waste unnecessary time on getting things to work as on the developer's machine.

With automation in place especially in the area of infrastructure-as-code, the engineers can be empowered to easily recover or replicate an environment somewhere else, which at the end of the day will save the company money with reduced downtime of their services. Another way to automate the data centre is to build your systems in such a way that they can automatic failover to another site or cloud environment. This will also reduce alert fatigue for your engineers on call," Graham adds.

But Obsidian underlines the main aim of automation should always be to make the engineers life easier.

Graham continues: Saying this, some engineers are not for automation as they feel they are losing control. This dichotomy brings us to the point where one has to decide what is better for the organisation. When we look at the modern data centre and compare them with the ones from a decade or two ago, some of the old data centres already had some form of automation by the means of robotic arms swapping backup tapes in and out during the daily backup process. Even this form of automation has become redundant due to today's fast network and Internet capabilities and more affordable storage. This just shows us that automation within the data centre will be an ever-evolving process, and as technology will evolve so will our data centres.

The best approach to automation

Obsidian says there are a few steps that must be taken to help an organisation begin its automation journey.

First, a business has to identify a few people to form part of the automation team. Then, identify a small component that can be automated to ensure a quick win.

This will build confidence in the team and the rest of the organisation that automation is an achievable option. This can be anything from automating the deployment of infrastructure for a small project utilising a tool like Terraform by Hashicorp, or deploying one piece of software such as the backup tool to your development environment with a tool like CHEF, Ansible, Puppet or Saltstack, says Graham.

It is of utmost importance that the automation team work closely along with the existing infrastructure and development team to identify other tasks and processes that can be automated within your data centre. Slowly but surely more people will start to see the success of automation. From a development point of view look at DevOps tools that will give your team the ability to continuously test and deploy their code. Tools like Gitlab, Jenkins and Bamboo are great for this.

Automation will keep on improving as technology improves, according to Graham.

He believes the future data centre will strongly rely on automation to continuously improve the service a company delivers, whether this is for an on-premises or cloud-based data centre.

The important thing is to start your automation journey as soon as possible, for this will allow you to clear out some technical debt, he adds.

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Data centre evolution the time for automation is here - ITWeb

Stealthbits Technologies, a customer-driven cybersecurity software company focused on protecting an organizations sensitive data and the credentials attackers use to steal that data, announced the release of StealthAUDIT 10.0, their flagship platform for auditing, governance, and access management across dozens of IT and data resources.

Security professionals struggle to keep up with and defend against the wide variety of tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) attackers can use to infiltrate networks, elude detection, compromise credentials, and escalate privileges on their way to compromising enterprise data repositories.

Correspondingly, there is an ever-increasing number of storage platforms and repositories available to house the data security professionals need to protect, both on-premises and in the cloud.

With the launch of StealthAUDIT 10.0, Stealthbits continues to broaden their security and threat protection capabilities, as well as expand cloud platform coverage to ensure data is protected wherever it lives.

Headlining StealthAUDIT 10.0s impressive list of enhancements is the addition of Shadow Access Rights analysis, which enables users to proactively and explicitly identify attack paths bad actors can take to move laterally, escalate privileges, compromise entire domains, and gain access to sensitive data.

While some risks are simple to identify, others lurk beneath the surface and exist due to the right albeit toxic combination of permissions and conditions, explained Stealthbits Field CTO Gerrit Lansing.

The correlation of highly detailed and comprehensive views into object-level permissions within Active Directory, as well as environmental conditions such as the location of sensitive information and open administrative sessions across desktop and server infrastructure, allows for visualization of real and viable attack paths bad actors look to exploit, helping to simplify an administrators understanding of threats and how to remediate them, Lansing continued.

StealthAUDIT 10.0 provides expanded support for two of the clouds most widely-used object storage and database platforms with solutions for Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Azure SQL.

Our goal is to protect data wherever it may reside, said Stealthbits GM of Products Jeff Warren. Amazon S3 and Azure SQL are among the most popular places for organizations to store data in the cloud, serving the needs of thousands of enterprises globally, Warren continued.

StealthAUDIT 10.0 has been enhanced to provide comprehensive platform support for AWS S3 Buckets and Azure SQL databases, providing an aggregated, normalized, single pane of glass view of user access, activity, and sensitive data across their entire environment.

Among the more noticeable enhancements in StealthAUDIT 10.0 is an overhaul of the products web reporting, governance, and console interfaces in an effort to provide greater ease of use and leverage a more modern aesthetic.

While these interfaces will feel fresh and new, they will still be instantly familiar to users, eliminating any learning curve that often comes with these sorts of enhancements. The redesign also brings the added benefit of a consistent look and feel across all web-based interfaces within Stealthbits portfolio, which users will enjoy and appreciate as they navigate across products, said Adam Laub, Stealthbits CMO.

Other important enhancements in StealthAUDIT 10.0 include speed optimizations for faster scanning of sensitive data, improved reporting, and streamlined query-building for ease of use and increased user satisfaction.

Excerpt from:
Stealthbits enhances security and threat protection, expands cloud platform coverage - Help Net Security

Darren Bak, Synthesis Technologies.

There is no question that cloud computing is the way of the future, and that having access to the cloud can benefit organisations of every type and size. But how many businesses have really considered the true costs associated with doing business in the cloud? And with uncertain economic times and a slew of different cloud and on-prem options available, it has become critical for organisations embarking on a cloud journey, to thoroughly examine the total cost of ownership of cloud versus their existing infrastructure before making a move.

The public cloud isnt the silver bullet that everyone is saying it is, says Joshua Grunewald, cloud hosting manager at Saicom. It has a purpose for specific systems or applications, which are very specific to any particular business. It may be a 95% fit for one business, 5% fit for another, or a 50/50. IT leaders need to know what they need and how to make use of what's available.

When it comes to auditing your current costs, it is about making sure that you have factored absolutely everything in - from infrastructure to shared costs and day-to-day operational costs, he adds. A lot of people forget the support contracts and agreements that you have to renew on an annual basis. This is generally a capex cost and will have to be depreciated over a certain period of time. This means there's opportunity costs lost. A good checklist would include hardware, support and maintenance agreements, software and licensing, staff resources to manage the infrastructure (including shared resource time from other teams). It would also include overheads such as power, cooling, security, fire suppression and environment control, and any associated support contracts.

The easiest way to conduct an audit is to use a software tool, of which there are a variety of different tools on the market to choose from, says Barry Kemp, head of IaaS at Vox. A key aspect is to have all the right information from the business to input into the tool, for example the costs of electricity consumption, HR in terms of the IT team, rent, the hardware currently being used by the business, and where it is in its depreciation cycle to be able to build a holistic picture of the business infrastructure cost.

Laggard organisations are now forced to go to cloud as the threat of disruption becomes a reality.

Darren Bak

Darren Bak, head solutionist at Synthesis technologies says most organisations do not have an up to date inventory management data store and therefore the best approach to data collection is an automated approach. TSO Logic (now part of AWS) can automatically gather the infrastructure information and generate a business case for you. However, gathering infrastructure costs alone does not give you a full picture. Application, people, third party, and migration costs all need to be gathered in order to produce a well round cloud business case.

It is surprising how many businesses under-estimate their costs for owned infrastructure, says Andrew Cruise, MD of Routed. The main reasons are firstly their inability to apportion shared costs correctly, and secondly their inability to value risk and business agility. It is trivial to cost infrastructure initially by looking at the capital expense of purchasing or financing the hardware and often software. These are usually individual line items in an income statement or ledgers on a balance sheet, easy to audit and ascertain.

But digging deeper, these costs are augmented by costs of the server room estate, power, cooling, security, and operating expenses such as human resources. Often these items are bulk line items in a business' income statement, such as power, cooling, rent. Or for human capital, invariably the resources have multiple responsibilities including infrastructure administration and management and its difficult to separate out the infrastructure costs. To audit these costs, businesses need to identify all contributing costs to the infrastructure and separate out the shared costs in a reasonable manner.

Alternately, its possible that some costs are just not borne by the business, which in this case increases the operational risk, such as lack of security, or understaffing. This too is difficult to value.

The public cloud isnt the silver bullet that everyone is saying it is. It has a purpose for specific systems or applications, which are very specific to any particular business.

Grunewald

Once you have your infrastructure cost it is fairly easy to determine the total cost of ownership, which will include HR costs, says Kemp. "Free software tools such as an Azure tool can be used and there are some paid ones that do a deeper dive into what the companys current hardware looks like. Once again it is important to have the right data to put into the model to receive an accurate set of outputs.

For Grunewald it isnt so simple. If you browse the internet for five minutes around TCO, you will come across multiple articles talking about calculating total cost of ownership in many different ways. Is there really one correct way or all encompassing way to calculate this? I dont believe there is. What will work for one business will possibly not work for another. Calculating the total cost of ownership is really about assessing the long term value of IT investments within an organisation, and infrastructure, whether on premise, or in the cloud, is no different.

An effective cloud business case is made up of migration costs, TCO, cost optimisations and value benefits, says Bak. Analysing the intangible benefits will provide a more rounded business case to justify a cloud migration and create urgency to get ready for cloud. The majority of a cloud business cases focus on cost savings, however, this is not the most compelling benefit. Business agility, productivity and resilience are far more so, however, they are intangible and therefore complex to calculate, and are often just ignored. Business strategy and objectives should drive any cloud strategy. Cloud adoption tends to be far more successful when executive sponsors see cloud as an enabler of business agility, productivity and resilience; not just cost savings.

The majority of a cloud business cases focus on cost savings, however, this is not the most compelling benefit.

Darren Bak

Speaking of the hyperscale cloud providers, Cruise says there are plenty of online calculators available to assist with assessing the costs of running infrastructure in their respective clouds. However, traditional IT workloads are often not suitable to these hyperscale clouds as they demand high resource usage such as storage IOPS and network data transfers. Its non-trivial to measure these on-premise and then input these into calculators to determine the overall cost. Migration costs need to be taken into account and tend to be grossly underestimated. Many businesses make a sweeping decision to migrate to hyperscale cloud without assessing how much time it will take to convert their workloads into native virtualisation format, let alone think about rearchitecting the applications in a cloud native fashion.

Then there's the question of shadow IT, and how to get handle on its true cost. According to Cruise, shadow or stealth IT usually refers to departments utilising hyperscale cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) without central management.Costing this is relatively simple. For these services there must be invoices, which need to be discovered and aggregated. Of course, its the discovery that is tricky, its not called stealth IT for nothing. However, if a cloud migration is formally undertaken, the need for shadow IT recedes and all of these costs should be folded into the whole project.

Cost savings forecasted in a business case are not always realised in reality mainly due to development teams not having a culture of cost transparency and accountability, adds Bak. The shift when migrating to cloud means application teams are now responsible for their spend and have the control and ability to optimise on costs. The culture shift is not a priority in most organisations and this leads to bill shock at the end of the month. The unintended consequence is that developers have free reign to use whatever cloud service they want without consideration of cost and most importantly how the design of the solution impacts cost.

In a world where services are quite easy to consume, costing shadow IT can be very difficult unless one has the right processes in place. There are a few ways that this can be controlled, all of which should be employed to successfully get a handle on shadow IT, comments Grunewald. IT should be sitting with each department of the business and discussing their needs - understanding how to deliver services to each part of the business and successfully doing this will go along way into controlling shadow IT. Educating the business on how resources or services are consumed is also key to empowering the business, which will deter from trying to find alternatives and introduce unknowns and risks into the IT environment.

Quantifying is tricky, but not impossible. Less understood is the cost of stickiness", or being captive in any one particular cloud.

Andrew Cruise

Kemp believes shadow IT is another problem that can also be solved with software. Most of the cloud vendors have some sort of cost management ability built in that can show businesses if they have unused resources in the cloud or have spun up a virtual machine (VM) and that it is sitting idle. Robust governance policies are very important. These policies provide guidelines in terms of who has permission to spin up VMs or turn on services, and combined with an approval process ensure the business has a handle on its cloud costs. In the days of capex, the IT team would have to motivate for a hardware expense, which meant they had to do an analysis as to whether they really needed that particular piece of kit. With cloud, because it is so easy, IT teams may spin up a server and give it very little thought, which leads to a bill shock at the end of the month. The IT director is aware of the extra server, but doesnt necessarily conduct the analysis to find out if it is the right option and whether there is a better, more cost-effective way.

Over and above shadow IT, there are other hidden costs, which are hard to uncover and quantify, says Kemp. It is usually the small things that add up to big costs. An example is storage - in Azure it is charged according to the amount of storage a business takes, but it is also charged according to the number of transactions and it is very difficult to work out how many transactions there will be beforehand. Cloud providers also charge for data coming out of their cloud, which makes it difficult to budget as it depends on the application being used. Some applications may only push data into the cloud once, while others may need to send it out multiple times and then the business has to budget for the extra bandwidth cost.

Month end bill shock from the hyperscale cloud providers has been well documented so many of the hidden costs are now known, adds Cruise. However, quantifying is tricky, but not impossible. Less understood is the cost of "stickiness" - being captive in any one particular cloud. The hyperscale cloud providers differentiate by offering specialist functions and services, which businesses begin to rely on and can hold them hostage in the long run. Businesses should bear in mind that there are alternatives when it comes to infrastructure.

If you take like-for-like and move what you have on-prem into the cloud it is generally going to be more expensive, adds Kemp. An assessment of the on-prem infrastructure is crucial so that the servers can be resized for the cloud. Most of the assessment tools would recommend that a smaller sized VM can be moved into the cloud, which means the business ends up saving money. With cloud the business can budget for what it needs tomorrow and if it needs more resources later in the week it can just increase its requirements. The cloud requires a different mindset and although you budget for a year in advance you definitely dont have to budget three years in advance on your spending. Another aspect to consider is managing costs across the different clouds. With more multinational datacentres set to arrive this year costs management across different clouds can be a challenge.

For Bak, the most challenging aspect of cloud adoption in terms of hidden costs is, unsurprisingly, non-technical in nature. Upskilling your current IT teams on the new technology, creating new job roles and families, driving the change in culture and communicating this across the organisation is often underestimated and realised too late. From a technical perspective, your networking costs can become expensive however this can be mitigated by having experienced solution architects and cloud engineers with a deep and broad understanding of all the cloud services, how they work and in particular the cost metrics associated. Another hidden cost is the guardrails enabled to secure your AWS Account like AWS Config for asset management, Amazon Guard Duty for threat detection, KMS for managing encryption keys, AWS CloudTrail for monitoring and alerting and VPC Flow Logs for monitoring network traffic. These costs are often overlooked when designing applications in Cloud and therefore not contained in the estimate costs.

So do the costs of cloud outweigh the benefits of keeping everything on-prem? Definitely, says Kemp. Simply put, there is less that the business has to worry about such as load shedding that is a massive challenge for companies as well as connectivity. Headaches such as these go out the window. However, companies have to guard against thinking that they will save on their HR costs when they take their servers off-site. Moving to the cloud means that the business still requires people to run those services even though they are delivering more high-value tasks.

Not always, says Grunewald. A company needs to properly consider what their needs are and deploy their environments accordingly. This is why, with a greater knowledge of what is out there, many companies are employing a hybrid or multi-cloud strategies Companies can deploy into the hyperscalers, only what needs to be in public cloud, keeping everything else on-prem or in a private cloud.

Most cultural changes such as Agile, DevOps and similar are impractical and realistically not achievable without cloud, says Bak. Similarly cloud is the enabler for initiatives such as digital transformation, AI and big data. Without cloud all these initiatives are slow, expensive and hinder innovative thinking. Time to market in a highly competitive sectors isthe difference between customer attrition and true increases in market capitalisation. And while the cost of implementing cloud has meant that CIOs prefer to stick with the status quo, laggard organisations are now forced to go to cloud as the threat of disruption becomes a reality especially in the fintech space where start-ups are far more agile and productive.

In the beginning of your journey, you need to answer the core reasons for going to cloud, ends Bak. The easiest way to stimulate conversation with technical executives is by asking this simple question: What would happen if you did nothing? For financial areas, use the term opportunity costs; for marketing, sales and business areas call them intangible benefits. These mutually agreed reasons should drive all decisions about technology, process, tools and priority.

See more here:
Calculating the true cost of cloud - ITWeb