Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante

Black Hat 2022 was held in Las Vegas last week, at the same time as theCUBE’s supercloud event. Unlike AWS re:Inforce, where words are carefully chosen to put a positive spin on security, Black Hat exposes all the warts of cybersecurity and openly discusses its hard truths. It’s a conference attended by technical experts who proudly share some of the vulnerabilities they’ve discovered and of course by numerous vendors marketing their products and services. 

In this Breaking Analysis we summarize what we learned from discussions with several people who attended Black Hat and our analysis from reviewing dozens of keynotes, articles, videos, session talks, Dark Reading interviews and data from a recent Black Hat attendees survey conducted by Black Hat and Informa. We’ll also share data from ETR in a recent post discussing how Zscaler became the last line of defense for a manufacturing firm.

We’ll end with a discussion of what it all means for the challenges around securing the Supercloud.

At our inaugural Supercloud22 event we sought community input to evolve the concept of a supercloud by iterating on the definition, the salient attributes and examples of what is and is not a supercloud. We asked several technologists including experts from VMware, Snowflake, Databricks, HashiCorp, Confluent, Intuit, Cohesity and others to help test the supercloud definition, operational models, service models and principles. 

In this Breaking Analysis we unpack our discussions with these technology leaders and apply their input to iterate the definition of supercloud. We then go in-depth to examine Snowflake’s Data Cloud architecture as a leading example of supercloud.

The term supercloud is relatively new, but the concepts behind it have been bubbling for years. Early last decade when NIST put forth its original definition of cloud computing, it said services had to be accessible over a public network…essentially cutting the on-prem crowd out of the conversation. A guy named Chuck Hollis, a CTO at EMC and prolific blogger objected to that criterion and laid out his vision for what he termed a private cloud. In that post he showed a workload running both on premises and in a public cloud, sharing the underlying resources in an automated and seamless manner – what later became more broadly known as hybrid cloud.

That vision, as we now know, really never materialized and we were left with multi-cloud…sets of largely incompatible and disconnected cloud services running in separate silos. The point is, what Hollis put forth – i.e. the ability to abstract underlying infrastructure complexity and run workloads across multiple heterogeneous estates with an identical experience – is what supercloud is all about.

The rapid pace of cloud adoption has changed the way organizations approach cybersecurity. Specifically, the cloud is increasingly becoming the first line of cyber defense. As such, along with communicating to the board and creating a security-aware culture, the CISO must ensure that the shared responsibility model is being applied properly. The DevSecOps team has emerged as the critical link between strategy and execution, while audit becomes the “free safety” in the equation – i.e. the last line of defense. 

In this Breaking Analysis we share our puts and takes from AWS re:Inforce with an update on the latest hyperscale IaaS market shares; and insights from ETR survey data. We’ll also dig deeper into some technical aspects of AWS Nitro, a system we believe is one of AWS’ secret weapons, with a focus on confidential computing and what it means for the future of systems architecture. 

After a two year hiatus, AWS re:Inforce is back on as an in-person event in Boston next week. Like the all-star break in baseball, re:Inforce gives us an opportunity to evaluate the cybersecurity market overall, the state of cloud security and what AWS is up to in the sector. 

In this Breaking Analysis, we’ll share our view of what’s changed since our last cyber update in May, we’ll look at the macro environment, how it’s impacting cybersecurity plays in the market, what the ETR data tells us and what to expect at next week’s AWS re:Inforce.

Organizations have considerable room to improve their performance without making expensive changes to their talent, structure or fundamental business model. You don’t need a slew of consultants to tell you what to do. You already know. What you need is to immediately ratchet up expectations, energy, urgency and intensity. Fight mediocrity every step of the way. Amp it up and the results will follow. 

This is the fundamental premise of a hard hitting new book written by Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake, and published earlier this year. It’s called, Amp it Up, Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency and Elevating Intensity. 

At Snowflake Summit last month, I was invited to interview Frank on stage about his book. I’ve read it several times and if you haven’t picked it up, you should. Even if you have read it, in this Breaking Analysis we’ll dig deeper into the book and share some clarifying insights and unpublished nuances of Frank’s philosophy. You’ll hear directly from Slootman himself with excerpts from my one on one conversation with him. 

As we exited the isolation economy last year, supercloud is a term we introduced to describe something new that was happening in the world of cloud. In this Breaking Analysis we address the ten most frequently asked questions we get on supercloud. 

After a two year epic run in tech, 2022 has been an epically bad year in the market. Through yesterday, the Nasdaq composite is down 30%, the S&P 500 is off 21%, the DJIA down 16% and the poor HODLers of BTC have had to endure a nearly 60% decline year to date. 

Despite fears of inflation, supply chain issues, skyrocketing energy and home prices and global instability caused by the Ukraine crisis, CIOs and IT buyers continue to expect overall spending to increase more than 6% in 2022. While this is lower than our 8% prediction made in January of this year, it remains in line with last year’s roughly 6-7% growth and is holding firm with the expectations reported by tech executives last quarter. 

In this Breaking Analysis we update you on our latest look at tech spending with a preliminary take from ETR’s latest macro drill down survey. We’ll share some insights as to which vendors have shown the biggest change in spending trajectory and ask the technical analysts in our community to give us a read on what they think it means for technology stocks going forward. 

Much of the energy around data innovation that dispersed with the decline of Hadoop’s relevance is coalescing in a new ecosystem spawned by the ascendency of Snowflake’s Data Cloud. What was once seen as a simpler cloud data warehouse and good marketing with Data Cloud, is evolving rapidly with new workloads, a vertical industry focus, data applications, monetization and more. The question is will the promises of data be fulfilled this time around or is it same wine, new bottle?