Cloud, Infrastructure & Management Archives - Gigaom

GigaOm Radar for Managed Kubernetes

Chester Conforte — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 16:00:27 +0000

Managed Kubernetes has evolved from a simple container orchestration platform to become a comprehensive compute management solution. By automating critical processes like configuration, updates, and scaling, these services significantly reduce the complexity and operational overhead associated with traditional infrastructure management. This automation allows organizations to focus on core business activities while benefiting from enhanced security, scalability, and high availability.

The value proposition of managed Kubernetes now extends far beyond its original container-centric roots. While it continues to excel at traditional use cases like microservices and web applications, the platform has expanded to address broader computing needs, including virtualization and serverless functions. This evolution makes it an increasingly versatile solution for modern infrastructure management, appealing to organizations of all sizes and technical capabilities.

The market for managed Kubernetes is experiencing rapid growth, driven by increasing adoption rates and the growing complexity of cloud-native applications. As the technology matures, vendors are enhancing their offerings with advanced features such as hybrid cloud capabilities, automated monitoring, and improved security measures. Customer requirements are shifting toward comprehensive, integrated solutions that offer seamless multicloud support, DevOps tool integration, and self-service capabilities.

This year’s report expands in scope, offering a more comprehensive analysis of the managed Kubernetes market. We’ve concentrated our evaluation on vendors providing service-backed products, which combine bespoke Kubernetes solutions with managed service components. Our assessment covers a wide range of providers operating across diverse shared responsibility models, giving readers a broader perspective on the available options in the market.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) establishment of Kubernetes interoperability standards has played a crucial role in market development. These standards have prevented the fragmentation seen in earlier technologies, such as the virtualization stacks of the early private cloud era, ensuring core functionality remains consistent across vendors while allowing differentiation through value-added features. This standardization has created a robust ecosystem where vendors compete on innovation and service quality rather than proprietary implementations.

The CNCF-certified Kubernetes implementation—referered to widely as “pure play upstream Kubernetes”–-provides this assurance. Forked versions of the Kubernetes core code—known as opinionated Kubernetes—can offer augmented functionality at the expense of compatibility.

As the market continues to evolve, managed Kubernetes providers are focusing on enhancing their capabilities to meet diverse organizational needs across industries. The emphasis is on delivering comprehensive solutions that include advanced tooling, prepackaged workflow, and hybrid cloud support while maintaining the simplicity and efficiency that made managed Kubernetes attractive in the first place.

This is our fifth year evaluating the managed Kubernetes space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines 19 of the top managed Kubernetes solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading managed Kubernetes offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

The GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a detailed decision framework for IT and executive leadership assessing enterprise technologies. Each report defines relevant functional and nonfunctional aspects of solutions in a sector. The Key Criteria report informs the GigaOm Radar report, which provides a forward-looking assessment of vendor solutions in the sector.

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2025 Predictions: Cloud Architectures, Cost Management and Hybrid By Design

Whit Walters — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 14:32:31 +0000

In this episode of our predictions series, we consider the evolving nature of Cloud, across architecture, cost management, and, indeed, the lower levels of infrastructure. We asked our analysts Dana Hernandez, Ivan McPhee, Jon Collins, Whit Walters, and William McKnight for their thoughts.

Jon: We’re seeing a maturing of thinking around architecture, not just with cloud computing but across technology provision. Keep in mind that what we know as Cloud is still only 25% of the overall space – the other three quarters are on-premise or hosted in private data centers. It’s all got to work together as a single notional platform, or at least, the more accurate we can make this, the more efficient we can be.

Whilst the keyword may be ‘hybrid’, I expect to see a shift from hybrid environments by accident, towards hybrid by design – actively making decisions based on performance, cost, and indeed governance areas such as sovereignty. Cost management will continue to catalyze this trend, as illustrated by FinOps.

Dana: FinOps is evolving, with many companies considering on-prem or moving workloads back from the Cloud. At FinOpsX, companies were looking at blended costs of on-prem and Cloud. Oracle has now joined the big three, Microsoft, Google, and AWS, and it’ll be interesting to see who else will jump in.

Jon: Another illustration is repatriation, moving workloads away from the Cloud and back on-premise.

William: Yes, repatriation is accelerating, but Cloud providers might respond by 2025, likely through more competitive pricing and technical advancements that offer greater flexibility and security. We’re still heavily moving to the Cloud, and repatriation might take a few years to slow down.

Whit: The vendor response to repatriation has been interesting. Oracle with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), for example, is undercutting competitors with their pricing model, but there’s skepticism—clients worry Oracle might increase costs later through licensing issues.

Jon: We’re also seeing historically pure-play Cloud providers move to an acceptance of hybrid models, even though they probably wouldn’t say that out loud. AWS’ Outposts on-premise cloud offering, for example, can now work with local storage from NetApp, and it’s likely this type of partnership will accelerate. I maintain that “Cloud” should be seen primarily as an architectural construct around dynamic provisioning and elastic scaling, and secondarily around who the provider – recognizing that hosting companies can do a better job of resilience. Organizations need to put architecture first.

Ivan: We’ll also see more cloud-native tools to manage those workloads. For instance, on the SASE/SSE side, companies like Cato Networks are seeing success because people don’t want to install physical devices across the network. We also see this trend in NDR with companies like Lumu Technologies, where security solutions are cloud-native rather than on-premises.

Cloud-native solutions like Cato Networks and Lumu Technologies have more pricing flexibility than those tied to hardware components. They will be better positioned to adjust pricing to drive adoption and growth than traditional on-premises solutions. Some vendors are exploring value-based pricing, considering factors like customer business value to get into strategic accounts. This could be an exciting shift as we move into the future.

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GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Application Performance Management (APM) Solutions

Lisa Erickson-Harris — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 18:33:11 +0000

Applications provide an entry point for those seeking products and services from government, businesses, and non-profits worldwide. Yet, growing application complexity is a primary operational challenge for application performance management (APM) staff and operations teams across the enterprise. GigaOm’s recent application user research shows that the majority expressed application complexity as among the biggest operational challenges for operations teams. To address application environment complexity, foundational APM tools are needed with an awareness of applications that run within and across all of these environments.

Application and operations management within complex environments places pressure on IT Operations Management (ITOM) teams to ensure the applications and services meet the needs of quality user experiences. Similarly, an additional load and responsibility rests with developers who must handle the application code complexity and infrastructure use. With DevOps practices having risen in acceptance, developers and R&D teams are essential to the operations landscape and must have the tools and knowledge to not only build efficiently performing code but also to anticipate future impacts on the complex environment.

The discipline of security operations (SecOps) is also crucial to application performance in protecting sensitive and ensuring security vulnerabilities are not introduced within the environment.

APM aims to ensure applications deliver optimal speed, reliability, scalability, and end-user experience to support key business services and objectives. APM solutions help organizations to ensure that applications and services remain performant and available, providing a tangible benefit to any business IT environment, regardless of size. APM also helps to predict anomalies and potential degradation of service using a host of different techniques.

Business Imperative

The C-suite will be interested in this tool to the extent the APM tool and associated processes can avert customer, client, and constituent impacts. Application failures lead to missed business transactions and disrupt the delivery of essential services to those seeking to do business. APM tools can foresee degradation within the environment and provide an opportunity to resolve issues quickly and, in some cases, before users are impacted.

Other stakeholders include technical ITOM teams, service management teams, developers, security teams, department heads, and business users. APM is critical for avoiding revenue-impacting downtime and provides a way to plan ahead to avoid operational challenges.

Sector Adoption Score

This GigaOm Key Criteria report offers a structured assessment to help executives and decision-makers evaluate the potential impact and value of deploying an APM solution, examining the sector across five key factors: benefit, maturity, urgency, impact, and effort. By scoring each factor based on how strongly it compels or deters the adoption of an APM solution, we provide an overall Sector Adoption Score (Figure 1) of 4.2 out of 5, with 5 indicating the strongest possible recommendation to adopt. This indicates that an APM solution is a credible candidate for deployment and worthy of thoughtful consideration.

The factors contributing to the Sector Adoption Score for an APM are explained in more detail in the Sector Brief section that follows.

Key Criteria for APM Solutions

Sector Adoption Score

Deters
Adoption

Discourages
Adoption

Merits
Consideration

Encourages
Adoption

Compels
Adoption

Source: GigaOm 2024

Figure 1. Sector Adoption Score for APM

This is the third year that GigaOm has reported on the APM space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Key Criteria report highlights the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) for selecting an effective APM solution. The companion GigaOm Radar report identifies vendors and products that excel in those decision criteria. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading APM offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions to make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

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GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Cloud Management Platform (CMPs) Solutions

Dana Hernandez — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 21:25:39 +0000

Cloud management platforms (CMPs) are suites of integrated tools that help organizations manage and monitor hybrid and multicloud environments. These solutions are typically not used to manage single cloud implementations, but they are key to centralizing the control and governance of complex cloud environments.

In response to digital transformation and evolving business needs, multicloud and hybrid cloud infrastructures are now the norm. However, data centers and legacy applications haven’t disappeared, and organizations must contend with disparate systems and users around the world, all of which leads to complex and hard-to-manage infrastructure. CMPs help organizations to manage these complex environments and control costs more effectively.

As a discipline, cloud management encompasses three functional areas, often implemented with separate tools that are integrated to some degree:

CMP: Automation and deployment
Cloud resource optimization: Performance and capacity management (report link)
Cloud FinOps: Forecasting and value management (report link)

Figure 1 shows how these functions relate to each other. This report covers CMPs; GigaOm offers separate reports on the other two topics.

Figure 1: Three Focus Areas of Cloud Management

This is the third year GigaOm has reported on CMPs, and the need to use them to manage complex environments and control costs more effectively has only continued to grow. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

Business Imperative
A CMP enables organizations to efficiently manage and optimize their cloud resources, leading to significant cost savings and operational efficiencies. It provides centralized visibility and control over multicloud environments, allowing businesses to monitor usage, manage costs, and ensure compliance with security and regulatory standards. This centralized approach reduces the complexity of managing disparate cloud services and enhances decision-making by providing actionable insights. Additionally, a CMP supports automation of routine tasks, freeing up IT staff to focus on strategic initiatives. By streamlining cloud operations and improving resource utilization, a CMP helps organizations achieve greater agility, scalability, and resilience, ultimately driving business growth and innovation.

Sector Adoption Score
To help executives and decision-makers assess the potential impact and value of a CMP solution deployment to the business, this GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a structured assessment of the sector across five factors: benefit, maturity, urgency, impact, and effort. By scoring each factor based on how strongly it compels or deters adoption of a CMP solution, we provide an overall Sector Adoption Score (Figure 2) of 4.6 out of 5, with 5 indicating the strongest possible recommendation to adopt. This indicates that a CMP solution is a compelling candidate for deployment and worthy of thoughtful consideration.

The factors contributing to the Sector Adoption Score for CMP solutions are explained in more detail in the Sector Brief section that follows.

Key Criteria for Evaluating CMPs Solutions

Sector Adoption Score

Deters
Adoption

Discourages
Adoption

Merits
Consideration

Encourages
Adoption

Compels
Adoption

Figure 2. Sector Adoption Score for Cloud Management Platforms (CMP)

This is the third year that GigaOm has reported on the CMP space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis (“2023 GigaOm Key Criteria and Radar Report for CMP) and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Key Criteria report highlights the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) for selecting an effective CMP solution. The companion GigaOm Radar report identifies vendors and products that excel in those decision criteria. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading CMP offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

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GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Scale-Out Storage Solutions

Whit Walters — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 14:08:21 +0000

The digital universe is expanding at an astonishing pace and, with it, the volume of unstructured data that organizations must manage and harness. From scientific research to media production, from healthcare records to financial transactions, unstructured data fuels innovation and drives business value. Scale-out storage has emerged as the linchpin of modern data infrastructure, providing the flexibility, scalability, and performance required to address the challenges of this data deluge.

Traditional storage architectures, with their inherent limitations in terms of capacity and performance, are ill-equipped to handle the exponential growth of unstructured data. Scale-out storage, in contrast, allows organizations to seamlessly add storage nodes as needed, expanding capacity and performance in lockstep with data growth. This ensures that data remains readily accessible and available, even as it reaches petabyte or exabyte scale.

Scale-out storage is not merely about capacity. It’s about empowering organizations to extract maximum value from their data. By leveraging advanced technologies like object storage, distributed file systems, and software-defined storage, scale-out solutions enable efficient data management, streamlined workflows, and improved collaboration.

Any organization grappling with the challenges of managing large volumes of unstructured data stands to benefit from scale-out storage. This includes industries such as media and entertainment, healthcare, life sciences, financial services, government, and education. From high-performance computing clusters to cloud-native applications, scale-out storage is a versatile solution that can be tailored to meet diverse needs.

Business Imperative
For C-level executives, scale-out storage is a strategic imperative. The ability to manage and leverage data effectively is a key competitive differentiator in today’s data-driven economy. Scale-out storage enables organizations to unlock new business opportunities, accelerate innovation, and improve operational efficiency.

The scale-out storage landscape is constantly evolving, with vendors pushing the boundaries of innovation. As organizations continue to grapple with the challenges of data growth, complexity, and security, scale-out storage will play an increasingly critical role in ensuring data accessibility, resilience, and value. This report delves into the key criteria for evaluating scale-out storage solutions, empowering IT leaders to make informed decisions that align with their organization’s unique needs and long-term data management strategies.

Sector Adoption Score
To help executives and decision-makers assess the potential impact and value of a scale-out storage solution deployment to the business, this GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a structured assessment of the sector across five factors: benefit, maturity, urgency, impact, and effort. By scoring each factor based on how strongly it compels or deters adoption of a scale-out storage solution, we provide an overall Sector Adoption Score (Figure 1) of 4.3 out of 5, with 5 indicating the strongest possible recommendation to adopt. This indicates that a scale-out storage solution is a credible candidate for deployment and worthy of thoughtful consideration.

The factors contributing to the Sector Adoption Score for scale-out storage are explained in more detail in the Sector Brief section that follows.

Key Criteria for Evaluating Scale-Out Storage Solutions

Sector Adoption Score

Deters
Adoption

Discourages
Adoption

Merits
Consideration

Encourages
Adoption

Compels
Adoption

Figure 1. Sector Adoption Score for Scale-Out Storage

This is the fifth year that GigaOm has reported on the scale-out storage space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Key Criteria report highlights the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) for selecting an effective scale-out storage solution. The companion GigaOm Radar report identifies vendors and products that excel in those decision criteria. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading scale-out storage offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

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GigaOm Radar for Primary Storage

Whit Walters — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 16:00:22 +0000

Primary storage remains a cornerstone of enterprise IT infrastructure, providing the foundation for mission-critical applications, databases, and a growing range of workloads, including artificial intelligence and machine learning. As organizations navigate digital transformation and evolving technological landscapes, the demands on primary storage systems have expanded beyond traditional performance and capacity metrics to include broader strategic objectives.

This report examines primary storage solutions that deliver high performance, reliability, and advanced data services. These capabilities are critical for organizations of all sizes seeking to maintain competitive advantages through optimized data management and infrastructure efficiency. The primary storage market has reached a new level of maturity, with vendors offering sophisticated features such as AI-driven analytics, ransomware protection, and seamless cloud integration alongside traditional storage functionalities.

This year’s evaluation focuses on solutions that provide enterprise-grade primary storage requirements, including both traditional storage arrays and software-defined storage options. Our assessment offers an analysis of comprehensive primary storage platforms and their associated data services, emphasizing their role as the backbone for mission-critical enterprise workloads.

This is our fifth year evaluating the primary storage space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis of large enterprise and mid-size solutions and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines 21 of the top primary storage solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading primary storage offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

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GigaOm Radar for Kubernetes Data Protection

Joep Piscaer — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 16:00:22 +0000

Kubernetes has become the standard for cloud-native applications, including those with stateful data. It is also gaining a foothold as the platform for traditional enterprise applications running both in the cloud and on-premises.

Given that applications and their stateful data are inseparable, organizations must implement data protection solutions for applications running on Kubernetes to safeguard against losing that data. These solutions go beyond traditional backup and recovery, leveraging incremental snapshot technologies and policy-based management. They also support disaster recovery workflows, ransomware and other cyberthreat protection, data integrity features, and–increasingly–data copy and migration management to aid in copying data across a multicloud landscape.

Data protection solutions for Kubernetes-based workloads are essential for any organization running applications with valuable stateful data on Kubernetes-based platforms. These solutions are typically deployed and managed by central IT teams responsible for an application’s RTO and RPO. However, some solutions take a more distributed approach, with developers and application operators as their target audience.

As Kubernetes matures as a platform to run applications, so too do data protection solutions. In years past, many solutions focused on supporting just Kubernetes. Today, Kubernetes is just one of many source platforms that modern data protection solutions support. Customers now expect solutions to provide comprehensive protection regardless of where or how applications are run, or the cause of data loss.

This shift has driven data protection solutions to support a broad range of environments, including bare metal, virtualization, and Kubernetes on both on-premises infrastructure and cloud platforms. They also extend support to specific SaaS services, databases, and other critical workloads. These solutions have a mature feature set that offers some combination of backup/recovery, disaster recovery, data copy management, ransomware, and other cyberthreat protection, and enterprise features for compliance and auditing. In fact, as the market and its solutions mature, the distinctions between data protection, cybersecurity, business continuity, and data copy and migration management are becoming increasingly blurred.

This is our fifth year evaluating the Kubernetes data protection space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines five of the top Kubernetes data protection solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading Kubernetes data protection offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

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GigaOm Radar for Scale-Out Storage

Whit Walters — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 16:00:41 +0000

In today’s data-driven landscape, organizations face an unprecedented surge in volumes of unstructured data. From scientific research to financial transactions, this data explosion demands robust, flexible storage solutions. Scale-out storage has emerged as a critical technology for addressing these challenges, offering a compelling combination of scalability, performance, and adaptability.

What, Why, and Who

Scale-out storage allows organizations to expand their storage infrastructure seamlessly by adding nodes, increasing both capacity and performance as needed. This approach is crucial for several reasons:

Data growth: It accommodates the exponential growth of unstructured data without compromising accessibility or performance.
Flexibility: It supports a wide range of workloads, from high-performance computing to cloud-native applications.
Efficiency: It enables better resource utilization and simplifies management compared to traditional scale-up architectures.

This technology is particularly vital for industries dealing with massive data volumes, including healthcare, media and entertainment, financial services, and research institutions. However, its relevance extends to any organization seeking to future-proof its data infrastructure.

Business Imperative

For C-level executives, scale-out storage represents more than a technical solution; it’s a strategic asset. In an era when data is a key differentiator, the ability to store, access, and analyze vast amounts of information efficiently can significantly impact an organization’s competitiveness and innovation capacity.

Adopting scale-out storage solutions can lead to:

Improved operational efficiency through simplified management and reduced infrastructure complexity.
Enhanced agility in responding to changing data needs and business requirements.
Better support for data-intensive applications and analytics, driving innovation and insight.
Reduced total cost of ownership over time, especially for organizations with rapidly growing data volumes.

As data continues to grow in volume and importance, the choice of storage infrastructure becomes increasingly critical. Scale-out storage provides the foundation upon which organizations can not only manage their current data challenges but also leverage future opportunities in data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML).

Given the evolving nature of data management challenges and the continuous advancements in storage technologies, organizations should regularly reassess their storage strategies to ensure they remain aligned with business objectives and technological capabilities.

This is our fifth year evaluating the scale-out storage space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines 19 of the top scale-out storage solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading scale-out storage offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

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GigaOm Radar for Application Performance Management (APM)

Lisa Erickson-Harris — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 16:00:14 +0000

Applications today provide a technological means to deliver a host of business, entertainment, and social services, and to provide access to an ever-increasing range of products and information. These applications serve academia, government, businesses, mission-driven organizations, and individuals. Many are developed for broad off-the-shelf use, while others are customized solutions for organizational needs. They may execute in on-premises infrastructure or public or private cloud environments, as a SaaS application, in low-code/no-code environments, and in various combinations.

In all cases, applications are becoming increasingly complex, and the growing reliance on them places mounting pressure on IT operations monitoring teams to ensure these applications are running properly. The business imperative is to keep applications performing at peak levels to support a range of causes and purposes.

Moreover, with the additional emphasis on DevOps and SecOps, developers are now part of the operations landscape and must have the tools they need to help ensure the future performance and reliability of applications. Developers must handle application code complexity and the use of virtualized and as-code infrastructure. Application performance management (APM) solutions are able to respond to this need, offering insights to IT operations and to development and security teams. These tools must handle a much more complex environment that now includes both operations personnel and developers. The benefit of such tools is preemption of degraded application performance and security vulnerabilities and guaranteed availability.

Current APM solutions often interact with the code via code injection or an application agent. These full-stack solutions provide detailed insights in the actual code responsible for generating metrics and other observations. Use cases include the full stack that involves all supporting components of the application delivery model and faults at any layer in the stack illustrating errors, anomalies, or degradation.

Many APM solutions have been folded into observability tools, moving the needle from monitoring to observability and, eventually, to awareness. Operational and organizational awareness requires monitoring and observing IT systems and applications. The relationships among monitoring, observability, and awareness (MOA) are shown in Figure 1. MOA refers to the process by which data about operations (IT) and business (people and processes) is tracked and evaluated to enable a company to develop organizational awareness.

Figure 1. Monitoring, Observability, and Awareness Relationship

Monitoring provides the state of a single system (or service) and metrics about it (performance or a break/fix condition).

Observability looks at the state of multiple systems and asks additional questions about the health of these systems as a whole, such as why devices, systems, or applications are behaving a certain way within the context of IT.

Awareness brings together all information about the company to evaluate whether operations (IT) and business (people and processes) are performing in an acceptable way, what is likely to break next, and how to prevent problems before they are monitored or observed.

APM solutions are now situated squarely within the observability space, with some vendors moving toward awareness resulting from the addition of more analytical tooling using AI.

This is our third year evaluating the APM space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines twelve of the top APM solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading APM offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

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Navigating Technological Sovereignty in the Digital Age

Jon Collins — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 17:15:57 +0000

Depending on who you speak to, technological sovereignty is either a hot topic, or something that other organizations need to deal with. So, should it matter to you and your organization? Let’s first consider what’s driving it, not least the crystal in the solute of the US Cloud Act, which ostensibly gives the US government access to any data managed by a US provider. This spooked EU authorities and nations, as well as others who saw it as a step too far.

Whilst this accelerated activity across Europe, Africa and other continents, moves were already afoot to preserve a level of sovereignty across three axes: data movement, local control, and what is increasingly seen as the big one – a desire for countries to develop and retain skills and innovate, rather than being passive participants in a cloud-based brain drain.

This is impacting not just government departments and their contractors, but also suppliers to in-country companies. A couple of years ago, I spoke to a manufacturing materials organization in France that provided goods to companies in Nigeria. “What’s your biggest headache,” I asked the CIO as a conversation starter. “Sovereignty,” he said. “If I can’t show my clients how I will keep data in-country, I can’t supply my goods.”

Legislative themes like the US Cloud Act have made cross-border data management tricky. With different countries enforcing different laws, navigating where and how your data is stored can become a significant challenge. If it matters to you, it really matters. In principle, technological sovereignty solves this, but there’s no single, clear definition. It’s a concept that’s easy to understand at a high level, but tricky to pin down.

Technological sovereignty is all about ensuring you have control over your digital assets—your data, infrastructure, and the systems that run your business. But it’s not just about knowing where your data is stored. It’s about making sure that data is handled in a way that aligns with the country’s regulations and your business strategy and values.

For organizations in Europe, the rules and regs are quite specific. The upcoming EU Data Act focuses on data sharing and access across different sectors, whilst the AI Act introduces rules around artificial intelligence systems. Together, these evolving regulations are pushing organizations to rethink their technology architectures and data management strategies.

As ever, this means changing the wheels on a moving train. Hybrid/multi-cloud environments and complex data architectures add layers of complexity, whilst artificial intelligence is transforming how we interact with and manage data. AI is a sovereignty blessing and a curse – it can both enable data to be handled more effectively, but as AI models become more sophisticated, organizations need to be even more careful about how they process data from a compliance perspective.

So, where does this leave organizations that want the flexibility of cloud services but need to maintain control over their data? Organizations have several options:

Sovereign Hyper-Scalers: Over the next year, cloud giants like AWS and Azure will be rolling out sovereign cloud offerings tailored to the needs of organizations that require stricter data controls.
Localized Providers: Working with local managed service providers (MSPs) can give organizations more control within their own country or region, helping them keep data close to home.
On-premise Solutions: This is the go-to option if you want full control. However, on-premise solutions can be costly and come with their own set of complexities. It’s about balancing control with practicality.

The likelihood is a combination of all three will be required, at least in the short-medium term. Inertia will play its part: given that it’s already a challenge to move existing workloads beyond the lower-hanging fruit into the cloud, sovereignty creates yet another series of reasons to leave them where they are, for better or worse.

There’s a way forward for sovereignty as both a goal and a burden, centered on the word governance. Good governance is about setting clear policies for how your data and systems are managed, who has access, and how you stay compliant with regulations for both your organization and your customers. This is a business-wide responsibility: every level of your organization should be aligned on what sovereignty means for your company and how you will enforce it.

This may sound onerous to the point of impossibility, but that is the nature of governance, compliance and risk (GRC) – the trick is to assess, prioritize and plan, building sovereignty criteria into the way the business is designed. Want to do business in certain jurisdictions? If so, you need to bake their requirements into your business policies, which can then be rolled out into your application, data and operational policies.

Get this the other way around, and it will always be harder than necessary. However, done right, technological sovereignty can also offer a competitive advantage. Organizations with a handle on their data and systems can offer their customers more security and transparency, building trust. By embedding sovereignty into your digital strategy, you’re not just protecting your organization—you’re positioning yourself as a leader in responsible business, and building a stronger foundation for growth and innovation.

Technological sovereignty should be a strategic priority for any organization that wants to stay ahead in today’s complex digital landscape. It’s not just about choosing the right cloud provider or investing in the latest security tools—it’s about building a long-term, business-driven strategy that ensures you stay in control of your data, wherever in the world it is.

The future of sovereignty is about balance. Balancing cloud and on-premise solutions, innovation and control, and security with flexibility. If you can get that balance right, you’ll be in a strong position to navigate whatever the digital world throws at you next.

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Cloud, Infrastructure & Management Archives - Gigaom

GigaOm Radar for Managed Kubernetes

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

2025 Predictions: Cloud Architectures, Cost Management and Hybrid By Design

GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Application Performance Management (APM) Solutions

Key Criteria for APM Solutions

Sector Adoption Score

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DiscouragesAdoption

MeritsConsideration

EncouragesAdoption

CompelsAdoption

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Cloud Management Platform (CMPs) Solutions

Key Criteria for Evaluating CMPs Solutions

Sector Adoption Score

DetersAdoption

DiscouragesAdoption

MeritsConsideration

EncouragesAdoption

CompelsAdoption

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Scale-Out Storage Solutions

Key Criteria for Evaluating Scale-Out Storage Solutions

Sector Adoption Score

DetersAdoption

DiscouragesAdoption

MeritsConsideration

EncouragesAdoption

CompelsAdoption

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

GigaOm Radar for Primary Storage

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

GigaOm Radar for Kubernetes Data Protection

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

GigaOm Radar for Scale-Out Storage

What, Why, and Who

Business Imperative

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

GigaOm Radar for Application Performance Management (APM)

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

Navigating Technological Sovereignty in the Digital Age

Deters
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Adoption

Merits
Consideration

Encourages
Adoption

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Adoption

Deters
Adoption

Discourages
Adoption

Merits
Consideration

Encourages
Adoption

Compels
Adoption

Deters
Adoption

Discourages
Adoption

Merits
Consideration

Encourages
Adoption

Compels
Adoption