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Azure Landing Zone – Integration Of Governance For Enterprise-Scale Security And Compliance

The more business-oriented part of CAF addresses strategy and planning, which are frequently conducted independently by a variety of firms. The problems frequently revolve around how to operationalize the cloud platform, or how to implement the “Ready,” “Adopt,” “Govern,” and “Manage” phases. It is necessary to develop concrete “guardrails” and governance standards for how the cloud should be utilised – who may do what and how. For instance, how to build, what services may be supplied, how expenses are handled, are all security concerns addressed adequately, and so forth.

While there is no one implementation standard, we at Platingnum have extensive hands-on expertise with the Enterprise Scale Architecture and Azure Landing Zones.

Numerous businesses see that their traditional IT governance procedures are incapable of adapting to the more dynamic environment of a public cloud and are thus asking themselves, “How can we meet the governance requirements for public cloud inside our organisation”?

If you’re wondering the same thing, this blog provides an overview of Azure cloud governance, security, and compliance.

This article describes encryption and key management, assists in governance planning, defines security monitoring and auditing, and assists in platform security planning.

Encryption and Key Management

Using encryption to protect data privacy, ensure compliance, and maintain data residency in Microsoft Azure is a critical element in the process. It’s also one of the most pressing security problems for many businesses nowadays, as well.

Data Encryption at-rest

Encryption is the process of securely encoding data in order to safeguard its secrecy. The Azure Encryption at Rest designs leverage symmetric encryption to rapidly encrypt and decode huge quantities of data, following a straightforward conceptual model:

Data is encrypted as it is written to storage using the asymmetric encryption key.

The same encryption key is used to decode data when it is prepared for memory access.

Data can be partitioned and assigned unique keys for each partition.

Keys should be safely stored with access control and audit standards based on identification. Outside-of-secure-location data encryption keys are encrypted using a key-encryption key stored in a safe place.

Azure Key Vault

The placement of the encryption keys and their access control are critical components of the encryption at rest scheme. The keys must be very secure but controllable by authorised users and accessible to authorised services. Azure Key Vault is the recommended key storage option for Azure services, as it provides a consistent administration experience across services. Keys are kept and maintained in key vaults, and people or services can be granted access to a key vault. Azure Key Vault enables the generation of customer-managed encryption keys or the import of customer-managed encryption keys for usage in customer-managed encryption key scenarios.

Azure Active Directory

Azure Active Directory accounts can be granted permissions to utilise the keys stored in Azure Key Vault, either to manage them or to use them for Encryption at Rest encryption and decryption.

Data Encryption in transit

Protecting data in transit is a critical component of any data protection strategy. Due to the fact that data is being sent across several sites, Platingnum usually recommends that you always utilise SSL/TLS protocols when exchanging data between them. In some cases, you may choose to use a VPN to completely isolate the communication route between your on-premises and cloud infrastructures.

Consider suitable protections such as HTTPS or VPN for data moving between your on-premises system and Azure. Use Azure VPN Gateway to transport encrypted communication between an Azure virtual network and an on-premises site over the public internet.

Planning for Cloud Governance

Governance enables you to retain control over your Azure applications and resources through procedures and processes. Azure Policy is critical for ensuring business technical estates are secure and compliant. It is capable of enforcing critical management and security standards throughout the Azure platform’s services. Additionally, it may be used to complement Azure’s role-based access control, which restricts the tasks that authorised users can perform.

Cloud governance, in a nutshell, is a collection of carefully established rules and regulations used by organisations that operate in a cloud environment to improve data security, manage risks, and keep operations operating smoothly. The cloud’s ease is a wonderful thing for businesses and consumers alike. However, it also implies that employees may create their own systems and send them to the cloud with a single click (or the swipe of a finger). Sometimes, even within the same organisation, systems do not always play well together.

Cloud governance enables the appropriate planning, consideration, and management of asset deployment, system integration, data security, and other elements of cloud computing. It is very dynamic, as cloud systems can be built and managed by many departments within an organisation, rely on third-party providers, and undergo daily changes.

Cloud governance initiatives guarantee that this dynamic environment complies with business rules, security best practises, and regulatory requirements.

Audit Policy and Security Monitoring

Compliance audits should be conducted on a regular basis using well-defined methods. Knowing if your cloud services adhere to government- or industry-mandated standards (such as GDPR) is critical in today’s globalised environment. This involves continuous engagement of the cloud governance team and interested business and IT stakeholders in reviewing and updating policies, as well as ensuring policy compliance via various procedures. Additionally, several continuous monitoring and enforcement procedures may be automated or enhanced with technology to decrease governance overhead and enable quicker reaction to policy deviations. Continuous monitoring and assessment of your workload in Azure improves its overall security and compliance.

A business must have visibility into the activities occurring inside its technical cloud estate. A scalable framework’s security monitoring and audit logging of Azure platform services are critical.

Internal and External Audits

Compliance is critical for a variety of reasons. Auditing security-related actions performed by IT employees and detecting any unresolved compliance concerns should be included in continuous monitoring and enforcement processes. The audit produces a report for the cloud strategy team and each cloud adoption team to convey the overall level of policy adherence. Additionally, the report is archived for auditing and legal purposes. Failure to adhere to regulatory requirements may result in fines and penalties.

Azure Security Center

With improved visibility and control over the security of your Azure resources, Security Center enables you to avoid, detect, and respond to attacks. It integrates security monitoring and policy management across your Azure subscriptions, assists in detecting risks that would go unreported otherwise, and integrates with a diverse ecosystem of security solutions.

Additionally, Security Center assists with security operations by offering a centralised dashboard that displays actionable warnings and suggestions. Often, you can resolve issues within the Security Center interface with a single click.

Azure Security Benchmark

Utilizing security benchmarks can assist you in securing cloud installations more rapidly. Benchmark recommendations from your cloud service provider provide a starting point for configuring particular security settings in your environment, allowing you to rapidly mitigate risk to your company.

Implementation of Azure Security benchmarks

Plan: Design your Azure Security Benchmark implementation by studying the guidelines for enterprise controls and service-specific baselines. This will help you plan your control architecture and how it aligns with industry standards.

Monitor: Utilize the Azure Security Center regulatory compliance dashboard to monitor your compliance with Azure Security Benchmark status (and other control sets).

Establish Guardrails: With Azure Blueprints and Azure Policy, create guardrails to automate safe setups and enforce compliance with the Azure Security Benchmark (and other standards in your company).

Streamline your Cloud Workloads with Azure Security, Governance, and Compliance

Evaluate the security posture of all your cloud resources, including servers, storage, SQL, networks, apps, and workloads running on Azure, on-premises, or in other clouds. Through the use of rules and automation, Platingnum enables you to quickly install and configure Security Center in large-scale settings. Rapidly detect risks, expedite threat research, and assist in automating remediation using AI and automation. Empower your team to prioritise business objectives regardless of how the threat landscape develops.

https://platingnum.com/cloud-computing/azure-landing-zone-integration-of-governance-for-enterprise-scale-security-and-compliance/

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https://platingnum.com/cloud-computing/success-in-devsecops-requires-manpower-not-just-technology/Success In DevSecOps Requires Manpower, Not Just Technology

What is Development Security Operations (DevSecOps)?

DevSecOps, a relatively new phrase in the application security (AppSec) community, is about incorporating security early in the software development life cycle (SDLC) by expanding the DevOps movement’s close collaboration between development and operations teams to include security teams. It entails a transformation of the culture, processes, and tools used by the key functional teams of development, security, testing, and operations. DevSecOps essentially implies that security is a shared responsibility and that everyone participating in the SDLC has a role to play in integrating security into the DevOps continuous integration and delivery workflow.

As the speed and frequency of releases rise, traditional application security teams are unable to keep up with the release pace and assure the security of each release.

To solve this, businesses must include security consistently across the SDLC, enabling DevOps teams to produce safe apps quickly and with high quality. The sooner security is integrated into the process, the sooner security flaws and vulnerabilities may be identified and remedied. This notion is part of the “shifting left” movement, which pushes security testing closer to developers, allowing them to address security concerns in their code in near real time rather of waiting until the end of the SDLC, as security was traditionally tacked on.

Organizations may effortlessly incorporate security into their existing continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) practises using DevSecOps. DevSecOps encompasses the whole software development lifecycle, from planning and design to coding, building, testing, and release, with continuous feedback loops and insights in real-time.

What precisely is DevOps?

DevOps is a philosophy built on three pillars—organizational culture, methodology, and technology and tools—that enables development and IT operations teams to collaborate on software creation, testing, and delivery in a more flexible and iterative way than traditional software development methods.

Developers receive rapid, continuous feedback on their work in the DevOps ideal, enabling them to independently implement, integrate, and validate their code, as well as having the code pushed into the production environment.

In a nutshell, DevOps is about dismantling the walls that have historically separated development and operations. Development and operations teams collaborate across the full software application life cycle, from development and testing to deployment and operations, under a DevOps paradigm.

DevOps vs. DevSecOps

Almost all modern software firms today employ an agile-based software development lifecycle (SDLC) to expedite the creation and delivery of software releases, including upgrades and fixes. Different development techniques, such as DevOps and DevSecOps, make use of the agile foundation. DevOps focuses on application delivery speed, whereas DevSecOps combines speed and security by delivering as secure an application as feasible as fast as possible. DevSecOps’ objective is to accelerate the creation of a secure codebase.

According to the DevSecOps philosophy, businesses should include security in all phases of the DevOps life cycle, including conception, design, build, test, release, support, and maintenance. Security is a shared responsibility throughout the whole DevOps value chain in DevSecOps. DevSecOps is a term that refers to the continual, flexible collaboration of development, release management (or operations), and security teams. In summary, DevSecOps enables you to sustain a high rate of development without jeopardising security.

Why do we think that “DevSecOps requires People, not just Technology”?

DevSecOps is fundamentally a technology-driven discipline: tools, automation, and procedures.

However, it is also a matter of people. After all, it is humans that build and operate the technology that creates and executes software.

Additionally, it is individuals who must interact if DevSecOps is to succeed. They are dispersed among three teams that have previously operated separately and frequently viewed one another with suspicion.

Numerous practitioners have noted that the cultural change toward DevSecOps is still occurring. Certain businesses are already doing this more successfully than others, cultivating a culture in which development, security, and operations are not truly distinct teams. Rather than that, they are all working together toward a same goal: producing secure, high-quality software faster. They simply have distinct responsibilities to play in doing that.

While this is not a clear analogy, nobody would argue that in football, the offence, defence, and special teams units are on “separate” teams. They just have distinct responsibilities to play in order to attain a common objective: win the game.

While Development may have historically prioritised speed, Security has historically prioritised security, and Operations has prioritised quality, the objective now is for those responsibilities to overlap in an atmosphere of collaboration, coordination, agility, and shared accountability.

As previously said, certain companies are more mature than others in terms of enjoying the advantages of DevSecOps without the drawbacks associated with frequent team conflict. How are they able to accomplish this? Here are a few critical success factors:

Peace, love, and understanding

To be fair, you could extract the word “love” from that old ’70s hippy phrase. DevSecOps does not have to be cosy. And you should definitely start with “understanding,” as understanding promotes both peace and productivity.

It’s also an excellent place to start because the most frequent complaint from any of these teams is that the other team “doesn’t understand it.”

Security teams frequently lament that developers lack an understanding of security. Developers say that security professionals are unfamiliar with their work and the difficulties they encounter.

They are both true.

“Security learns to sprint: DevSecOps,” Thus, soft skills, or interpersonal abilities, are equally as critical as technical abilities.

“Modify the way we develop software such that the simplest method to do a task is also the most secure approach.”

“Dev, Sec, and Ops despise one another because they don’t understand or communicate with one another,” the leaders of the teams should bring individuals to the table and create a “psychologically safe” environment for them to speak, which will provide their teams with a “chance to succeed.”

Automate everything!

To solve the (perceived) lack of communication between development, security, and operations teams, the security team should automate.

Security testing performed manually is incapable of keeping up with the current rate of software development. However, security teams that look for automated testing solutions demonstrate a grasp of current development techniques.

For instance, the majority of code in modern applications—often more than 90%—is not authored but rather built from third-party and open-source components, APIs, and libraries, some of which have numerous dependencies. It’s tough to track these components manually; cross-referencing them with vulnerability databases is much more challenging. However, a competent software composition analysis (SCA) tool can automatically identify known vulnerabilities in all open source components, their dependents, and their dependencies’ dependencies, and so on, revealing security flaws that may exist many layers deep in a codebase.

Three new activities that demonstrate how businesses are attempting to align the pace of software security with the rate at which they bring functionality to market:

Integrate software-defined lifecycle governance, which automates conventional human- and document-driven procedures.

Monitoring automated asset generation enables engineering teams to retain awareness of the virtual assets they are creating.

Automated security verification of operational infrastructure helps guarantee that virtual assets meet security standards not just when they are produced, but over time.

We are the conquerors

Security teams cannot accomplish everything. They are overwhelmingly outnumbered. According to some projections, there is only one security team member for every ten employees in operations and 100 in development in a DevSecOps setting.

Therefore, what better approach to increase security’s numerical strength and close the knowledge gap between Dev and Sec than to establish “security champions” inside the development team? Who better than a developer to understand development?

Creating a security champions programme is a rising and beneficial trend, all the more so because it is not intended to be forced on anybody. Champions are volunteers who want to improve their skillset and marketability. It is a stride forward in one’s profession.

As a result, they volunteer for sophisticated software security training to assist their teammates—developers, testers, and architects. Security advocates are typically more successful in communicating with them than a security “outsider.”

When a team member has a question or is having difficulty resolving a vulnerability, a champion can act as both a mentor and a peer.

What are the best practises for DevSecOps?

Collaboration between security and development teams

The aim of DevSecOps is to improve collaboration between development and security teams. DevSecOps entails incorporating security checks into the DevOps pipeline, which results in bottlenecks when teams are unable to convey the correct information. That is why fostering a culture of openness and cooperation across teams is critical to the success of many businesses’ DevSecOps initiatives.

Emphasis on observability and quantifiability

When you have insight into the continuous integration and delivery stages of deployment, DevOps becomes more dependable. This visibility may be achieved by integrating logs and metrics with security event data, which reveals critical information about the impact on application performance and simplifies security solutions.

Utilise artificial intelligence to your advantage

Automation is a key component of the most advanced DevSecOps systems. Automating security tests, for example, helps accelerate the development process and increases developer efficiency by making it easier to discover possible vulnerabilities in code. (Static application security testing [SAST] is one of four methods of application security testing that assists in identifying these holes by examining the program’s source files for the root cause.) Educate developers on the fundamentals of coding — and enforce a coding standard.

Utilize threat modelling to determine where gaps exist.

Teams that take on the role of an attacker are better able to detect code flaws. This is where dynamic application security testing (DAST) comes into play – scanners can be rapidly and simply implemented into a development pipeline to provide an additional layer of protection for your apps.

https://platingnum.com/cloud-computing/success-in-devsecops-requires-manpower-not-just-technology/

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What Is Azure Identity And Access Management? Why Do Companies Need IAM?

To thrive in the digital age, businesses must make prudent technological investments. The workforce is utilising an increasing variety of workplace apps, necessitating the need for enterprises to control access appropriately across these platforms. This is where Identity and Access Management (IAM) enters the picture—but many businesses may be unsure where to begin. To start, we first need to understand about Identity and Access Management.

What is IAM and Why is it important?

Identity is the foundation for a major portion of security assurance. It provides access to cloud services based on identity verification and authorization rules, allowing for the protection of data and resources, as well as the determination of which requests should be authorised.

Identity and access management (IAM) is the public cloud’s perimeter security. It must be considered the bedrock of any secure and completely compliant public cloud architecture. Azure provides a complete collection of services, tools, and reference designs that enable companies to create highly secure, operationally efficient environments.

Identity and access management (IAM) enables the appropriate individuals and job responsibilities (identities) in your company to have access to the tools they require to do their tasks. Your organisation’s identity management and access management solutions enable you to control employee applications without checking in as an administrator to each app. Your organisation’s identity and access management systems enable it to handle a variety of identities, including those of people, software, and hardware such as robotics and Internet of Things devices.

The enterprise’s technology landscape is getting increasingly complicated and heterogeneous. IAM enables the appropriate persons to access the right resources at the right time and for the right reasons in order to manage compliance and security in this environment.

What IAM entails in terms of compliance?

IAM systems may help organisations maintain regulatory compliance by enabling the implementation of complete security, audit, and access controls. Numerous technologies now include elements that help assure an organization’s compliance.

Numerous countries compel businesses to take an interest in identity management. Organizations are held accountable for restricting access to consumer and employee information by regulations such as GDPR, and HIPAA. Organizations can use identity management systems to ensure compliance with such requirements.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposes stringent security and access control requirements. GDPR requires enterprises to preserve the personal data and privacy of individuals and businesses in the European Union.  To comply with these rules, you must automate several parts of IAM and guarantee the compliance of your workflows, procedures, access permissions, and apps.

Which IAM terminology should you be familiar with?

While buzzwords come and go, the following concepts are critical to understand in the identity management space:

Access management: The methods and techniques used to regulate and monitor network access are referred to as access management. Access management capabilities like authentication, authorisation, trust, and security auditing are built-in to the best identity management systems for both on-premises and cloud-based deployments.

Microsoft developed Active Directory (AD) as a user-identity directory service for Windows domain networks. While AD is proprietary, it is included in Microsoft’s Windows Server operating system and therefore extensively used.

Biometric authentication is a secure method of user identification that is based on the person’s unique features. Fingerprint sensors, iris and retina scanning, and face recognition are all examples of biometric authentication technology.

Context-aware network access control is a policy-based approach to allowing access to network resources depending on the present context of the person requesting access. For instance, a user trying authentication from an IP address that has not been whitelisted will be denied.

A credential is a unique identification that a user uses to acquire network access, such as a password, a public key infrastructure (PKI) certificate, or biometric information (fingerprint, iris scan).

De-provisioning is the process of deleting an identity from an identity repository and revoking access entitlements.

The digital identification, which includes information about the user and his/her/its access credentials. (“Its” refers to the fact that an endpoint, such as a laptop or smartphone, may have its own digital identity.)

Entitlement: A collection of properties that define an authenticated security principal’s access rights and privileges.

Identity as a Service (IDaaS): A cloud-based IDaaS solution provides identity and access management capabilities to an organization’s on-premises and/or cloud-based systems.

Similar to access lifecycle management, the phrase “identity lifecycle management” refers to the whole set of procedures and techniques used to preserve and update digital identities. Identity lifecycle management includes the synchronisation, providing, and de-provisioning of identities, as well as the continuous management of user characteristics, credentials, and entitlements.

Synchronization of identities is the process of ensuring that various identity stores—for example, those acquired—contain consistent data for a particular digital ID.

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol LDAP is an open standards-based protocol for maintaining and accessing a distributed directory service, such as Microsoft’s Active Directory.

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is used when more than a single factor, such as a user name and password, is required for network or system authentication. At least one extra step is necessary, such as getting an SMS code on a smartphone, inserting a smart card or USB stick, or completing a biometric authentication requirement, such as a fingerprint scan.

Password Reset refers to a feature of an identity management system that enables users to re-establish their own passwords, relieving administrators of their duties and reducing support calls. The reset application is frequently used via a browser. To authenticate the user’s identity, the programme requests a secret word or a series of questions.

Privileged account management refers to the process of administering and auditing accounts and data access depending on the user’s privileges. In general, a privileged user has been allowed administrative access to systems as a result of his or her employment or role. For example, a privileged user would be able to create and delete user accounts and roles. Provisioning is the process of generating identities, specifying their access permissions, and registering them in an identity repository.

Risk-based authentication (RBA): Risk-based authentication dynamically modifies authentication criteria in response to the user’s current condition. For instance, when users seek to authenticate from a geographic area or IP address with which they are not previously linked, they may be subject to extra authentication procedures.

A security principal is a digital identity that consists of one or more credentials that may be used to authenticate and authorise network interactions.

Single sign-on (SSO): A method of controlling access to several linked but distinct systems. A user can log in to a system or systems with a single username and password.

User behaviour analytics (UBA): UBA systems evaluate user activity patterns and use algorithms and analysis automatically to identify significant abnormalities that may signal possible security concerns. UBA is distinct from other security systems that are primarily concerned with tracking devices or security incidents. UBA is occasionally combined with entity behaviour analytics and referred to as UEBA.

Platingnum’s Azure Identity and Access Management Approach

Azure Identity Access Management from Platingnum is a cloud-based solution based on Microsoft Active Directory that stores and maintains user identities while authenticating and authorising access to business resources. We’ve paired the service with our own consulting experience to give our clients a smooth on-ramp to cloud-based IAM.

Significant characteristics

Identity is critical in the cloud, much more so when employees access data remotely. Platingnum’s Azure identity management services leverage Microsoft’s industry-leading Active Directory service to store and reference identity information, ensuring that only the appropriate individuals have access.

Amplification of authentication Azure IAM offers a number of cloud-based authentication techniques. includes the use of hardware security keys, Microsoft Authenticator, and Windows Hello biometrics.

Extremely scalable Cloud-based identity and access management is scalable to meet any demand, from a few small company users to thousands of workers.

Integration with Office 365 Numerous Azure customers store sensitive data and communications in Office 365. Due to the fact that Microsoft developed the Azure cloud infrastructure, the identity and access management solution, and Office 365, everything functions in unison.

Authenticate at all times

With Azure Identity and Access Management’s hybrid support, Azure clients can secure their users while they access apps in the cloud or on-premises.

Competence in consultation

Platingnum’s specialists will conduct a session with you to assist you in selecting the optimal setup and features for their business.

Hybrid capable

Platingnum assists clients in synchronising their on-premises Active Directory deployments with the Azure directory, resulting in a seamless integration of cloud and on-premises security.

Your advantages

Platingnum‘s Azure Identity and Access Management protects its clients from account hijacking, one of the most serious current cybersecurity threats. An attacker who gets access to critical cloud-based apps has the potential to cause significant harm to a business. Microsoft’s technology protects employee identities and manages their access, ensuring that only the appropriate individuals have access. It provides several significant benefits to organisations:

Secured SSO

You don’t need to memorise an extensive array of usernames and passwords. Single sign-on refers to the concept of granting users access to all the apps they require with a single login. We will provide you with the finest consultation and help possible.

Consistent protection

A single user directory enables businesses to systematically implement regulations for their workers, eliminating security and access gaps caused by human error.

Multiple layers of protection

Microsoft access controls give an additional layer of security in addition to passwords. MFA utilises additional information like hardware devices or biometrics.

Contact us to get the best consulting services with Platingnum’s experts.

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What Is Cloud Competence Center? Why Teams Must Work On The Cloud Platform?

IT businesses must continuously adapt to the market’s complicated and ever-changing requirements. This is especially true when it comes to cloud-related concerns. As a result, we propose that you establish a Cloud Competence Center to provide technical and methodological assistance for upcoming cloud initiatives. It assists you in overcoming hurdles associated with the creation and usage of cloud solutions. Additionally, it fosters confidence and establishes the circumstances essential for the secure processing of data across all cloud services.

A flexible, cost-effective, and inventive business is a common objective for businesses and organisations today, and migrating to the cloud is a practical approach to accomplish that goal. Often, businesses develop a cloud strategy in order to achieve their corporate goals. However, with several providers and different options available, it’s sometimes difficult for businesses to decide on the “what and how,” leading to over-provisioned cloud resources and financial leaks.

This is where a Cloud Competence Center (CCC) comes into the picture. You may be wondering what a CCC is and why it matters to you.

Cloud Competence Center (CCC)

A Cloud Competence Center is a support function that enables developers to work more efficiently while also ensuring a consistent and safe cloud platform. Cloud Platform Development and Cloud Customer Onboarding are the two critical procedures. Cloud Platform development entails establishing and managing a Landing Zone. There is a need for shared services, security components, best practise architectures, and template solutions from development teams, the Cloud Steering Group, and the Cloud Competence Centre itself. The Cloud Competence Centre implements and maintains all of these.

Cloud Customer Onboarding is the process of familiarising a development team with the Cloud Platform and ensuring they adhere to best practices in design, security, and cost management. Additionally, the Cloud Competence Centre configures all necessary accounts, networking, and access for the team to rapidly begin development.

CCC assembles a cross-functional team comprised of Enterprise Architects, DevOps, CloudOps, Infrastructure, and Business to manage and lead the cloud transformation process. The Cloud Center of Excellence guarantees that all stakeholders comprehend not only cloud technology but also the cultural shifts required for cloud adoption.

Cloud Competence Center (CCC) Model

It brings together a broad and skilled group of experts from throughout the company to define cloud best practices that the rest of the organisation may adopt. The CCC serves as a support role, assisting the business in increasing productivity while also ensuring a consistent and secure cloud platform. It is built on Microsoft agile principles and a delivery architecture that enables a programmatic approach to implementing, managing, and operating the Microsoft Azure platform for the purpose of successfully onboarding projects and Azure workloads.

A CCC model necessitates coordination between the following:

Cloud adoption

Cloud strategy

Cloud governance

Cloud platform

Cloud automation

By addressing these issues, participants may expedite innovation and migration while lowering total change costs and boosting company agility. When properly implemented, a CCC will also result in a substantial cultural shift in information technology. Without the CCC paradigm, IT is prone to focus only on control and central accountability. A successful CCC model places a premium on autonomy and delegated authority. This is most effective in conjunction with a technology plan that incorporates a self-service model that empowers business units to make their own decisions. The CCC offers the firm a set of standards and defined and repeatable controls.

The Cloud Competence Center’s key objectives (CCC)

The CCC team’s major objective is to accelerate cloud adoption by leveraging cloud-native and hybrid solutions. The CCC’s aims are as follows:

Build a contemporary IT organization by collecting and implementing business needs using agile methodologies.

Build reusable deployment packages that adhere to all applicable security, compliance, and service management standards.

Maintain a working Azure platform in accordance with established policies and procedures

Conduct a review and approval process for the usage of cloud-native tools.

Standardise and automate widely used platform components and solutions over time.

Giving your team support and visibility will help to empower it.

Giving a Cloud Center of Excellence team support and visibility is the greatest approach to empower it. Platingnum claims that executive support is required for the team to plan, execute, and govern a company’s cloud transformation, whereas our post emphasises that the Cloud Center of Excellence team cannot achieve its goals without complete visibility of the infrastructure in order to assess spend and efficiency.

Setting up Standards, policies, and guidelines

In collaboration with cross-functional teams, CCC develops cloud policies and standards, assists in the planning of technological initiatives, and selects centralised governance solutions to handle financial and risk management.

Govern, Manage, and Report

An important goal of the Cloud competence center CCC streamline cloud utilisation is to select an effective approach to manage, control, and cost optimise heterogeneous cloud infrastructures and their expenses. This is crucial not just during the planning process, but also when running a hybrid IT landscape after the transition. The important phrase here is “right-sizing” all services based on actual use. The Cloud competence center CCC should always have a comprehensive understanding of the current application and IT infrastructure ecosystem, as well as its dependencies. Specifically, with so many changing elements during the transition, it is critical that the Cloud competence center delivers reliable data on the status of the cloud transformation. The Cloud competence center also describes the application landscape’s cloud readiness, identifies optimum cloud providers, cloud target designs, and compute projected migration efforts and costs during the first assessment phase.

What are the most common hurdles in establishing a Cloud Competence Center?

There is a lack of awareness about public cloud platforms and how to use them in the workplace.

Because the cloud is a novel idea, it is difficult to determine who in the organisation owns it.

The new role needs a budget, which might be difficult to get.

Some development teams believe they can administer the platform without the assistance of a Cloud Competence Centre.

Many projects are already being run on the cloud without an appropriate governance mechanism.

How can you overcome these obstacles?

Develop a Cloud Governance Model early in the Cloud Journey,

Ascertain that all stakeholders appreciate the significance of administering the cloud platform and assisting development teams.

People should be educated on the benefits and new concepts of public cloud platforms.

Obtain assistance from a qualified partner in establishing the Cloud Competence Centre in collaboration with your own team.

The most important thing to remember when establishing a Cloud Competence Centre is that it must give value to its clients (the development teams). The Cloud Competence Centre must be highly knowledgeable in the cloud platform of choice, as well as be able to convey and record how to utilise the cloud. There will be less Shadow IT and more uniform, safe, and automated environments across all business units if you offer the teams a solution that speeds up their work and eases their migration to the cloud.

Implementation of a Cloud Competence Center

When determining how to implement CCC, the concept of one size does not fit all genuinely applies. There might be various methods to taking the road, but the fundamental premise for those approaches is driven by:

Ideation: Based on your cloud strategy, the first stage should be to analyse your present situation and create a gap analysis of where you want to go. This will assist identify the responsibilities and talents that are now available in your business and will be necessary to accomplish those strategic goals. The planner should be able to respond to the following questions:

Who should be a part of the CCC?

What are the strategic goals we hope to achieve with our CCC?

Where are we now in terms of maturity, and where do we aspire to be?

Realization: Once you’ve answered the preceding questions, the apparent next step is to establish duties. The build should be centred on: –

Governance: Policy formulation and implementation

Security: Determining and enforcing legal and organisational compliance requirements

Platform: including architectural design and the adaptation of new developing services

People: Ensuring working methods and promoting higher adoption through cultural transformation

All of the preceding should be guided by the organisation’s cloud strategy.

The journey: The final but not least consideration is how you operate. With new ways of working, Cloud Competence Center must assure a distinct technique to function, focusing on: –

Collaborate: Because cloud adoption requires a cross-organizational effort encompassing many streams such as finance, business, and security, the Cloud Competence Center must function as a bridge connecting all the dots.

Define KPIs: Each firm may use various KPIs, but in general, they should be able to answer one question. “How can we assess the outcome of this change and the efficiency with which we use the cloud?”

Monitor: Is it really feasible to attain the goals if you are functioning without enough visibility?

Empower: The Cloud Competence Center will be given executive support so that it may bring in fresh and creative ideas without fear of failure. This innovative strategy has the potential to pave the way to success.

An excellent way to begin your cloud journey.

This article will assist businesses who are in the early stages of their cloud journey and are beginning to restructure their IT department to be ready for creativity, speed, and control. The Cloud Center of Excellence concept is an excellent choice for accelerating your cloud adoption effort.

We have a lot of expertise and best practices in executing IT transformations and Cloud Centers of Excellence for our business customers at Platingnum. To learn more about our experiences and what a CCC can accomplish for your company, please contact us at sagar@platingnum.com

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Data Pipeline Design: From Ingestion To Analytics

Using data pipelines, raw data is transported from software-as-a-service platforms and database sources to data warehouses, where it may be used by analytics and business intelligence (BI) tools to make decisions. It is possible for developers to create their own data pipelines by writing code and manually connecting with source databases; however, it is preferable to avoid reinventing the wheel and instead use a SaaS data pipeline.

Let’s take a look at the core components and phases of data pipelines, as well as the technologies available for duplicating data, to get a sense of how big of a revolution data pipeline-as-a-service is, and how much work goes into building an old-school data pipeline.

The architecture of the data pipeline

A data pipeline architecture is the design and structure of code and systems that copy, cleanse, and modify source data as needed, and then route it to destination systems such as data warehouses and data lakes, among other things.

A data pipeline’s processing speed is influenced by three factors: the amount of data being processed, the amount of data being moved, and how much data is being moved.

The rate, also known as throughput, of a pipeline, refers to how much data it can handle in a given length of time.

Reliability: Individual systems within a data pipeline must be fault-tolerant in order for the data pipeline to function reliably. It is possible to assure data quality by using a dependable data pipeline that includes built-in auditing, logging, and validation procedures.

Latency is defined as the amount of time it takes for a single unit of data to transit through a data pipeline. While latency is related to reaction time, it is less related to volume or throughput. When it comes to both pricing and processing resources, maintaining low latency may be a costly endeavour, and a company should find a balance in order to optimise the value it derives from analytics.

Data engineers should strive to make these elements of the pipeline more efficient in order to meet the demands of the company. When designing a pipeline, an enterprise must take into account its business objectives, the cost of the pipeline, as well as the type and availability of computational resources.

Building a data pipeline is a challenging task.

The architecture of the data pipeline is tiered. After that, each subsystem feeds data into the one before it reaches its target.

Sources of information

Considering that we’re talking about pipelines, we may think of data sources as the wells, lakes, and streams from which companies get their initial batch of information. Thousands of possible data sources are supported by SaaS providers, and every business maintains dozens of others on its own systems. Data sources are critical to the design of a data pipeline since they are the initial layer in the pipeline. There is nothing to ingest and move through the pipeline if the data is not of high quality.

Ingestion

As illustrated by our plumbing metaphor, the data pipeline’s ingestion components consist of operations that read data from data sources (i.e., the pumps and aqueducts). Extractions are performed on each data source using application programming interfaces (API) that are supplied by the data source. Before you can develop code that uses APIs, however, you must first determine what data you want to extract through a process known as data profiling. Data profiling is the process of assessing data for its features and structure, as well as evaluating how well it meets a business objective.

After the data has been profiled, it is ingested into the system, either in batches or in real time.

Batch ingestion and streaming ingestion

Batch processing is the process of extracting and operating on groups of records at the same time. Batch processing is sequential, and the ingestion mechanism reads, processes, and outputs groups of information based on criteria established in advance by developers and analysts. Batch processing is also known as sequential processing. The process does not continuously monitor for new records and move them forward in real-time, but rather operates on a timetable or responds in response to external events instead.

Streaming is an alternate data ingestion paradigm in which data sources automatically send individual records or units of information one at a time to the receiving system. Batch ingestion is used by all organisations for a wide variety of data types, but streaming ingestion is only used by businesses when they want near-real-time data for usage with applications or analytics that require the least amount of delay at the lowest feasible cost.

Depending on the data transformation requirements of a business, the data is either transferred into a staging area or delivered immediately along the flow path.

Transformation

Once data has been retrieved from source systems, it may be necessary to modify the data’s structure or format. Desalination stations, treatment plants, and personal water filters are the desalination stations, treatment plants, and personal water filters of the data pipeline.

Mapped values to more descriptive ones, filtering, and aggregation are all examples of transformations in data management. Combination is a particularly significant sort of transformation since it allows for more complex transformations. Included in this category are database joins, which take use of the relationships inherent in relational data models to bring together linked multiple tables, columns, and records in a single place.

Whether a company uses ETL (extract, transform, load) or ELT (extract, load, transform) as its data replication method in its data pipeline determines the time of any transformations (extract, load, transform). Early transactional load (ETL), an older technique that is still employed with on-premises data warehouses, can modify data before it is put into its intended destination. ELT is a data loading technique that may be used with contemporary cloud-based data warehouses to import data without doing any transformations. Users of data warehouses and data lakes can then perform their own transformations on the data contained within the warehouse or data lake.

Destinations

The data pipeline’s water towers and storage tanks serve as destinations. The primary destination for data repeated via the pipeline is a data warehouse. These specialist databases house all of an enterprise’s cleansed, mastered data in a single location for analysts and executives to utilise in analytics, reporting, and business intelligence.

Less-structured data may be fed into data lakes, where data analysts and data scientists can access massive amounts of rich and mineable information.

Finally, an organisation may input data into an analytics application or service that takes data feeds directly.

Monitoring

Data pipelines are complicated systems made up of software, hardware, and networking components, any of which might fail. Developers must build monitoring, logging, and alerting code to enable data engineers to maintain performance and fix any problems that emerge in order to keep the pipeline operational and capable of extracting and loading data.

Technologies and strategies for data pipelines

Businesses have two options when it comes to data pipelines: create their own or utilise a SaaS pipeline.

Organizations can delegate to their developers the responsibility of creating, testing, and maintaining the code necessary for a data pipeline. Several toolkits and frameworks may be used throughout the process:

Workflow management solutions can make it easier to create a data pipeline. Open-source technologies like Airflow and Luigi structure the pipeline’s operations, automatically resolve dependencies and allow developers to analyse and organise data workflows.

Event and messaging frameworks such as Apache Kafka and RabbitMQ enable organisations to create more timely and accurate data from their current systems. These frameworks gather events from business applications and make them available as high-throughput streams, allowing disparate systems to communicate using their own protocols.

Process scheduling is also important in any data pipeline. Many technologies, ranging from the basic cron utility to full specialised task automation systems, allow users to define comprehensive schedules regulating data intake, transformation, and loading to destinations.

Forget about building your own data pipeline; use Platingnum now. Platingnum transmits all of your data directly to your analytics warehouse.

https://platingnum.com/cloud-computing/data-pipeline-design-from-ingestion-to-analytics/

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