How Unisys Enables ClearPath Mainframe Apps to Transition Seamlessly to Azure Cloud Without Code Changes

A discussion on how many organizations face a reckoning to move mainframe applications to a cloud model without degrading the venerable and essential systems of record. 

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Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Gardner

When applications are mission-critical, where they are hosted matters far less than keeping them operating smoothly -- as many of them have for decades.

Yet many organizations face a reckoning, a ticking time bomb of sorts, to move mainframe applications to a cloud model. The trick is to find a dependable, repeatable way to transition to cloud without degrading these vulnerable and essential systems of record. 

Stay with us now as we explore long-awaited means to finally solve the cloud-adoption quandary. We’re going to learn how Unisys and Microsoft can transition ClearPath Forward assets to Microsoft Azure cloud without risky code changes.

To learn more about the latest onramps to secure and agile cloud model adoption, please join me now in welcoming Chuck Lefebvre, Senior Director of Product Management for ClearPath Forward at Unisys. Welcome, Chuck.

Chuck Lefebvre: Thank you, Dana. I’m happy to be here.

Gardner: We’re glad to have you. We’re also here with Bob Ellsworth, Worldwide Director of Mainframe Transformation at Microsoft. Welcome, Bob.

Bob Ellsworth: Thank you, Dana. Nice to be here as well.

Gardner: Bob, what’s driving the demand nowadays for more organizations to run more of their legacy apps in the public cloud?

Ellsworth: We see that more and more customers are embracing digital transformation, and they are finding the cloud an integral part of their digital transformation journey. And when we think of digital transformation, at first it might begin with optimizing operations, which is a way of reducing costs by taking on-premises workloads and moving them to the cloud.

But the journey just starts there. Customers now want to further empower employees to access the applications they need to be more efficient and effective, to engage with their customers in different ways, and to find ways of using cloud technologies to transform products, such as machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and business intelligence (BI).

Gardner: And it’s not enough to just have some services or data in the cloud. It seems there’s a whole greater than the sum of the parts for organizations seeking digital transformation -- to get more of their IT assets into a cloud or digitally agile environment.

Destination of choice: Cloud

Ellsworth

Ellsworth: Yes, that’s absolutely correct. The beauty is that you don’t have to throw away what you have. You can take legacy workloads such as ClearPath workloads and move those into the cloud, but then continue the journey by embracing new digital capabilities such the advanced services such as ML, AI, or BI so you can extend the usefulness and benefits of those legacy applications.

 

Gardner: And, of course, this has been a cloud adoption journey for well over 10 years. Do you sense that something is different now? Are there more means available to get more assets into a cloud environment? Is this a tipping point?

Ellsworth: It is a tipping point. We’ve seen -- especially around the mainframe, which is what I focus on -- a huge increase in customer interest and selection of the cloud in the last 1.5 years as the preferred destination. And one of the reasons is that Azure has absolutely demonstrated its capability to run these mission- and business-critical workloads.

Gardner: Are these cloud transitions emerging differently across the globe? Is there a regional bias of some sort? Is the public sector lagging or leading? How about vertical industries? Where is this cropping up first and foremost?

Ellsworth: We’re seeing it occur in all industries; in particular, financial services. We find there are more mainframes in financial services, banking capital markets, and insurance than in any other industries.

So we see a propensity there where, again, the cloud has become a destination of choice because of its capability to run mission- and business-critical workloads. But in addition, we’re seeing this in state and local governments, and in the US Federal Government. The challenge in the government sector is the long cycle it takes to get funding for these projects. So, it’s not a lack of desire, it’s more the time it takes to move through the funding process.

Gardner: Chuck, I’m still surprised all these years into the cloud journey that there’s still such a significant portion of data and applications that are not in the cloud environment. What’s holding things back? What’s preventing enterprises from taking advantage of cloud benefits?

Lefebvre: A lot of it is inertia. And in some cases, incorrect assumptions about what would be involved in moving. That’s what’s so attractive about our Unisys ClearPath solution. We can help clients move their ClearPath workloads without change. We take that ClearPath software stack from MCP initially and move it and re-platform it on Microsoft Azure.

Learn How to Transition

ClearPath Workloads
To the Cloud

And that application and data comes across with no re-compilation, no refactoring of the data; it’s a straightforward transition. So, I think now that we have that in place, that transition is going to go a lot smoother and really enable that move to occur.

 

I also second what Bob said earlier. We see a lot of interest from our financial partners. We have a large number of banking application partners running on our ClearPath MCP environment, and those partners are ready to go and help their clients as an option to move their workloads into the Azure public cloud.

Pandemic puts focus on agility

Gardner: Has the disruption from the coronavirus and the COVID-19 disease been influencing this transition? Is it speeding it up? Slowing it down? Maybe some other form of impact?

Lefebvre

Lefebvre: I haven’t seen it affecting any, either acceleration or deceleration. In our client-base most of the people were primarily interested initially in ensuring their people could work from home with the environments they have in place.

I think now that that’s settled in, they’ve sorted out their virtual private networks (VPNs) and their always-on access, processes, that perhaps now we’ll see some initiatives evolving. I think, initially, it was just businesses supporting their employees working from home. 

My perspective is that that should be enabled equally as well, whether they are running their backend systems of record in a public cloud or on-premises. Either way would work for them.

Gardner: Bob, at Microsoft, are you seeing any impact from the pandemic in terms of how people are adopting cloud services?

Ellsworth: We’re actually seeing an increase in customer interest and adoption of cloud services because of COVID-19. We’re seeing that in particular in some of our solutions such as Teams for doing collaboration and webinars, and connecting with others remotely. We’re seeing a big increase there.

And Office 365, we’ve seen a huge increase in deployments of customers using the Office 365 technology. In addition, Azure; we’ve also seen a big increase in Azure consumption as customers are dealing with the application growth and requirements of running these applications.

As far as new customers that are considering moving to the cloud, I had thought originally, back in March when this was starting to hit, that our conversations would slow down as people dealt with more immediate needs. But, in fact, it was about a two-to-three-week slow down. But now, we’re seeing a dramatic increase in interest in having conversations about what are the right solutions and methods to move the workloads to the cloud.

So, the adoption is accelerating as customers look for ways to reduce cost, increase agility, and find new ways of running the workloads that they have today.

Gardner: Chuck, another area of impact in the market is around skills. There is often either a lack of programmers for some of these older languages or the skills needed to run your own data centers. Is there a skill factor that’s moving the transition to cloud?

As we see our clients showing interest in moving to the pubic cloud, they are now looking to do that for mainframe applications. Once they do that, no longer do they have to worry about the care and feeding of that mainframe infrastructure.

Lefebvre: Oh, there certainly is. One of the attractive elements of a public cloud is the infrastructure layer of the IT environment is managed by that cloud provider. So as we see our clients showing interest in moving to the public cloud -- first with things like, as Bob said, Office 365 and maybe file shares with SharePoint – they are now looking at doing that for mainframe applications. And when they do that, they no longer have to be worried about that talent to do the care and feeding of that infrastructure. As we move those clients in that direction, we’re going to take care of that ClearPath infrastructure, the day-to-day management of that environment, and that will be included as part of our offering.

We expect most clients – rather than managing it themselves in the cloud – will defer to us, and that will free up their staff to do other things. They will have retirements, but less risk.

Gardner: Bob, another issue that’s been top-of-mind for people is security. One of the things we found is that security can be a tough problem when you are transitioning, when you change a development environment, go from development to production, or move from on-premises to cloud. 

How are we helping people remain secure during a cloud transition, and also perhaps benefit from a better security posture once they make the transition?

Time to transition safely, securely

Ellsworth: We always recommend making security part of the planning process. When you’re thinking of transforming from a datacenter solution to the cloud, part of that planning is for the security elements. We always look to collaborate with our partners, such as Unisys, to help define that security infrastructure and deployment.

What’s great about the Azure solutions is we’ve focused on hybrid as the way of deploying customers’ workloads. Most customers aren’t ready to move everything to the cloud all at the same time. For that reason, and with the fact that we focus on hybrid, we allow a customer to deploy portions of the workload to the cloud and the other portions in their data center. Then, over time, they can transition to the cloud.

But during that process supporting your high levels of security for user access, identity management, or even controls of access to the right applications and data -- that’s all done through the planning and using technologies such as Microsoft Active Directory and synchronization with Azure Active Directory. So with that planning it’s so important to ensure successful deployments and ensure the high levels of security that customers require.

Gardner: Chuck, anything to offer on the security?

Lefebvre: Yes, we’ll be complementing everything Bob just described with our Unisys Stealth technology. It allows always-on access and isolation capabilities for deployment of any of our applications from Unisys, but in particular the ClearPath environment. And that can be completely deployed in Azure or, as Bob said, in a hybrid environment across an enterprise. So we are excited about that deployment of Stealth to complement the rigor that Microsoft applies to the security planning process.

Gardner: We’ve described what’s driving organizations to the cloud, the fact that it’s accelerating, that there’s a tipping point in what adoption can be accomplished safely and reliably. We’ve also talked about what’s held people back and their challenges.

Let’s now look at what’s different about the latest solutions for the cloud transition journey. For Unisys, Chuck, how are your customers reconciling the mainframe past with the cloud future?

No change in digital footprint

Lefebvre: We are able to transition ClearPath applications with no change. It’s been roughly 10 years since we’ve been deploying these systems on Intel platforms, and in the case of MCP hosting it on a Microsoft Windows Server kernel. That’s been in place under our Unisys Libra brand for more than 10 years now.

In the last couple of years, we’ve also been allowing clients to deploy that software stack on virtualized servers of their choice: on Microsoft Hyper-V and the VMware virtualization platforms. So it’s a natural transition for us to move that and offer that in Azure cloud. We can do that because of the layered approach in our technology. It’s allowed us to present an approach to our clients that is very risk-free, very straightforward.

Learn How to Transition

ClearPath Workloads
To the Cloud

The ClearPath software stack sits on a Windows kernel, which is also at the foundation level offered by the Azure hybrid infrastructure. The applications therefore don’t change a bit, literally. The digital footprint is the same. It’s just running in a different place, initially as platform-as-a-service (PaaS).

The cloud adoption transition is really a very low-risk, safe, and efficient journey to the public cloud for those existing solutions that our clients have on ClearPath.

Gardner: And you described this as an ongoing logical, cascading transition -- standing on the shoulders of your accomplishments -- and then continuing forward. How was that different from earlier migrations, or a lift-and-shift, approach? Why is today’s transition significantly different from past migrations?

Lefebvre: Well, a migration often involves third-parties doing a recompilation, a refactoring of the application, so taking the COBOL code, recompiling it, refactoring it into Java, and then breaking it up, and moving the data out of our data formats and into a different data structure. All of those steps have risk and disruption associated with them. I’m sure there are third-parties that have proven that. That can work. It just takes a long time and introduces risk.

For Unisys ClearPath clients who have invested years and years in those systems of record, that entire stack can now run in a public cloud using our approach -- as I said before -- with absolutely not a single bit of change to the application or the data.

Gardner: Bob, does that jibe with what you are seeing? Is the transition approach as Bob described it an advantage over a migration process as he described?

Ellsworth: Yes, Chuck described it very well. We see the very same thing. What I have found, -- and I’ve been working with Unisys clients since I joined Microsoft in 2001, early on going to the Unisys UNITE conference -- was that Unisys clients are very committed and dedicated to their platform. They like the solutions they are using. They are used to using those developer tools. They have built up the business-critical, mission-critical applications and workloads.

For those customers that continue to be committed to the platform, absolutely, this kind of what I call “re-platforming” could easily be called a “transition.” You are taking what you currently have and simply moving it onto the cloud. It is absolutely the lowest risk, the least cost, and the quickest time-to-deployment approach.

The vast majority of committed Unisys customers want to stay on the platform, and this provides the fastest way to get to the cloud -- with less risk and quickest benefits.

For those customers, just like with every platform, when you have an interest to transform to a different platform, there are other methods available. But I would say the vast majority of committed Unisys customers want to stay on the platform, and this provides the fastest way to get to the cloud -- with the less risk and the quickest benefits.

Gardner: Chuck, the process around cloud adoption has been going on for a while. For those of us advocating for cloud 10 or 12 years ago, we were hoping that it would get to the point where it would be a smooth transition. Tell me about the history and the benefits of how ClearPath Forward and Azure had come together specifically? How long have Microsoft and Unisys been at this? Why is now, as we mentioned earlier, a tipping point?

Lefebvre: We’ve been working on this for a little over a year. We did some initial work with two of our financial application partners and North America banking partners and the initial testing was very positive. Then as we were finishing our engineering work to do the validation, our internal Unisys IT organization, which operates about 25 production applications to run the business, went ahead in parallel with us and deployed half of those on MCP in Azure, using the very process that I described earlier.

Today, they are running 25 production applications. About half of them have been there for nine months and the other half for the last two months. They are supporting things like invoicing our customers, tracking our supply chain status, and so, a number of critical applications. 

We have taken that journey not just from an engineering point of view, but we’ve proven it to ourselves. We drank our own champagne, so to speak, and that’s given us a lot of confidence. It’s the right way to go, and we expect our clients will see those benefits as well.

Gardner: We haven’t talked about the economics too much. Are you finding, now that you’ve been doing this for a while, that there is a compelling economic story? A lot of people are fearful that a transition or migration would be very costly, that they won’t necessarily save anything by doing this, and so maybe are resistant. But what’s the dollars’ and cents’ impact that you have been seeing now that you’ve been doing this while transitioning ClearPath to Azure?

Rapid returns

Lefebvre: Yes, there are tangible financial benefits that our IT organization has measured. In these small isolated applications, they calculated about a half-a-million dollars in savings across three years in their return on investment (ROI) analysis. And that return was nearly immediate because the transition for them was mostly about planning the outage period to ensure a non-stop operation and make sure we always supported the business. There wasn’t actually a lot of labor, just more planning time. So that return was almost immediate.

Gardner: Bob, anything to offer on the economics of making a smooth transition to cloud?

Ellsworth: Yes, absolutely. I have found a couple of catalysts for customers as far as cost savings. If a customer is faced with a potential hardware upgrade -- perhaps the server they are running on is near end-of-life -- by moving the workload to the cloud and only paying for the consumption of what you use, it allows you to avoid the hardware upgrade costs. So you get some nice and rapid benefits in cost avoidance.

In addition, for workloads such as test and development environments, or user acceptance testing environments, in addition to production uses, the beauty of the cloud pricing is you only pay for what you are consuming.

So for those test and development systems, you don’t need to have hardware sitting in the corner waiting to be used during peak periods. You can spin up an environment in the cloud, do all of your testing, and then spin it back down. You get some very nice cost savings by not having dedicated hardware for those test and development environments.

Gardner: Let’s dig into the technology. What’s under the hood that’s allowing this seamless cloud transition, Chuck?

Secret sauce

Lefebvre: Underneath the hood is the architecture that we have transformed to over the last 10 years where we are already running our ClearPath systems on Intel-based hardware on a Microsoft Windows Server kernel. That allows that environment to be used and re-platformed in the same manner.

To accomplish that, originally, we had some very clever technology that allows the Unisys compilers generating unique instructions to be emulated on an Intel-based, Windows-based server.

That’s really the fundamental underpinning that first allowed those clients to run on Intel servers instead of on proprietary Unisys-designed chips. Once that’s been completed, we’re able to be much more flexible on where it’s deployed. The rigor to which Microsoft has ensured that Windows is Windows -- no matter if it’s running on a server you buy, whether it’s virtualized on Hyper-V, or virtualized in Azure -- really allows us to achieve that seamless operation of running in any of those three different models and environments.

Gardner: Where do you see the secret sauce, Bob? Is the capability to have Windows be pure, if you will, across the hybrid spectrum of deployment models?

Learn How to Transition

ClearPath Workloads
To the Cloud

Ellsworth: Absolutely, the secret sauce as Chuck described was that transformation from proprietary instruction sets to standard Intel instruction sets for their systems, and then the beauty of running today on-premises on Hyper-V or VMware as a virtual machine (VM). 

And then the great thing is with the technologies available, it’s very, very easy to take VMs running in the data center and migrate them to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) VMs running in the cloud. So, seamless transformation and making that migration.

You’re taking everything that’s running in your production system, or test and development systems, and simply deploying them up in the cloud’s VM instead of on-premises. So, a great process. Definitely, the earlier investment that was made allows that capability to be able to utilize the cloud.

Gardner: Do you have early adopters who have gone through this? How do they benefit?

Private- and public-sector success stories

Lefebvre: As I indicated earlier, our own Unisys IT operation has many production applications running our business on MCP. Those have all been moved from our own data center on an MCP Libra system to now running in the Microsoft Azure cloud. Our Unisys IT organization has been a long-time partner and user of Microsoft Office 365 and SharePoint in the cloud. Everything has now moved. This, in fact, was one of the last remaining Unisys IT operations that was not in the public cloud. That was part of our driver, and they are achieving the benefits that we had hoped for.

We also have two external clients, a banking partner is about to deploy a disaster recovery (DR) instance of their on-premises MCP banking application. That’s coming from our partner, Fiserv. Fiserv’s premier banking application is now available for running in Azure on our MCP systems. One of the clients is choosing to host a DR instance in Azure to support their on-premises production workload. They like that because, as Bob said, they only have to pay for it when they fire it up if they need to use that DR environment.

We have another large state government project that we’re just about to sign, where that client will be doing some of their ClearPath MCP workload and transition to and manage that in an Azure public cloud.

Once that contract is signed and we get agreement from that organization, we will be using that as one of our early use case studies.

Gardner: The public sector, with all of their mainframe apps, seems like a no-brainer to me for these transitions to the cloud. Any examples from the public sector that illustrate that opportunity?

Ellsworth: We have a number of customers, specifically on the Unisys MCP platform, that are evaluating moving their workloads from their data centers into the cloud. We don’t have a production system as far as I know yet, but they’re in the late stages of making that decision.

There are so many ways of utilizing the cloud, for things like DR, at a very low cost, instead of having to have a separate data center or failover system. Customers can even leave their production on-premises in the short-term and stand up their test and development in the cloud and run MCP system in that way.

And then, once they’re in the cloud, they gain the capability to set up a high-availability DR system or high-availability production system, either within the same Azure data center, or failover from one system to another if they have an outage, and all at a very low cost. So, there are great benefits.

One other benefit is elasticity. When I talk about customers, they say, “Well, gee, I have this end-of-month process and I need a larger mainframe then because of those occasional higher capacity requirements. Well, the beauty of the cloud is the capability to grow and shrink those VMs when you need more capacity for such end-of-month process, for example.

Again, you don’t have to pre-purchase the hardware. You really only pay for the consumption of the capacity when you need it. So, there are great advantages and that’s what we talk to customers about. They can get benefits from considering deploying new systems in the cloud. Those are some great examples of why we’re in late-stage conversations with several customers about deploying the solution.

Increased data analytics

Gardner: I supposed it’s a little bit early to address this, but are there higher-order benefits when these customers do make the cloud transition? You mentioned earlier AI, ML, and getting more of your data into an executable environment where you can take advantage of analytics across more and larger data sets.

Is there another shoe to drop when it comes to the ROI? Will they be able to do things with their data that just couldn’t have been done before, once you make a transition to cloud?

Ellsworth: Yes, that’s absolutely correct. When you move the systems up to the cloud, you’re now closer to all the new workloads and the advanced cloud services you can utilize to, for example, analyze all that data. It’s really about turning more data into intelligent action. 

In the past, when you built custom applications, you had to pretty much code everything yourself. Today, you consume services. There's no reason to build an application fro scratch. You consume services form the cloud.

Now, if you think of back to the 1980s and 1990s, or even 2000s, when you were building custom applications, you had to pretty much code everything yourselves. Today, the way you build an application is to consume services. There’s no reason for a customer to build a ML application from scratch. Instead, you consume ML services from the cloud. So, once you’re in the cloud, it opens up a world of possibilities to being able to continue that digital business transformation journey.

Lefebvre: And I can confirm that that’s a key element for our product proposition as well as from a ClearPath point of view. We have some existing technology, a particular component called Data Exchange, that does an outstanding change and data capture model. We can pump the data coming into that backend system of record and using, Kafka, for example, feed that data directly into an AI or ML application that’s already in place.

One of the key areas for future investment -- now that we have done the re-platforming to PaaS and IaaS – is extending our ePortal technology and other enabling software to ensure that these ClearPath applications really fit in well and leverage that cloud architecture. That’s the direction we see a lot of benefit in as we bring these applications into the public Azure cloud.

The cloud journey begins

Gardner: Chuck, if you are a ClearPath Forward client, you have these apps and data, what steps should you be taking now in order to put yourself in an advantageous position to make the cloud transition? Are there pre-steps before the journey? Or how should you be thinking in order to take advantage of these newer technologies?

Lefebvre: First of all, they should engage with their Unisys and Microsoft contacts that work with your organization to begin consultation on that journey. Data backup, data replication, DR, those elements around data and your policy with respect to data are the things that are likely going to change the most as you move to a different platform -- whether that’s from a Libra system to an on-premises virtualized infrastructure or to Azure.

What you’ve done for replication with a certain disk subsystem probably won’t be there any longer. It’ll be done in a different way, and likely it’ll be done in a better way. The way you do your backups will be done differently.

Now, we have partnered with Dynamic Solutions International (DSI) and they offer a virtualized virtual tape solution so that you can still use your backup scripts on MCP to do backups in exactly the same way in Azure. But you may choose to alter the way you do backups.

So, your strategy for data and how you handle that, which is so very important to these enterprise class mainframe applications, that’s probably the place where you’ll need to do the most thinking and planning, around data handling.

Gardner: For those familiar with BriefingsDirect, we like to end our discussions with a forward-looking vision, an idea of what’s coming next. So when it comes to migrating, transitioning, getting more into the cloud environments -- be that hybrid or pure public cloud -- what’s going to come next in terms of helping people make the transition but also giving them the best payoff when they get there?

The cloud journey continues

Ellsworth: It’s a great question, because you should think of the world of opportunity, of possibility. I look back at my 47 years in the industry and it’s been incredible to see the transformations that have occurred, the technology advancements that have occurred, and they are coming fast and furious. There’s nothing slowing it down.

And so, when we see the cloud today, a lot of customers are still considering the cloud for strategy and for building any new solutions. You go into the cloud first and have to justify staying on-premises, and then customers move to a cloud-only strategy where they’re able to not only deploy new solutions but migrate their existing workloads such as ClearPath up to the cloud. They get to a point where they would be able to shut down most of what they run in their data centers and get out of that business of operating IT infrastructure and having operation support provided for them as-a-service.

Learn How to Transition

ClearPath Workloads
To the Cloud

Next, they move into transforming through cultural change in their own staff. Today the people that are managing, maintaining, and running new systems will have an opportunity to learn new skills and new ways of doing things, such as cloud technology. What I see over the next two to three years is a continuation of that journey, the transformation not just of the solutions the customers use, but also the culture of the people that operate and run those solutions.

Gardner: Chuck, for your installed base across the world, why should they be optimistic about the next two or three years? What’s your vision for how their situation is only going to improve?

Lefebvre: Everything that we’ve talked about today is focused on our ClearPath MCP market and the technology that those clients use. As we go forward into 2021, we’ll be providing similar capabilities for our ClearPath OS 2200 client base, and we’ll be growing the offering.

Today, we’re starting with the low-end of the customer base: development, test, DR, and the smaller images. But as the Microsoft Azure cloud matures, as it scales up to handle our scaling needs for our larger clients, we’ll see that maturing. We’ll be offering the full range of our products in the Azure cloud, right on up to our largest systems.

That builds confidence across the board in our client base; in Microsoft and in Unisys. We want to crawl, then walk, and then run. That journey, we believe, is the safest way to go. And as I mentioned earlier, this initial workload transformation is occurring through a re-platforming approach. The real exciting work is bringing cloud-native capabilities to do better integration of those systems of record, with better systems of engagement, that the cloud-native technology is offering. And we have some really interesting pieces under development now that will make that additional transformation straightforward. Our clients will be able to leverage that – and continue to extend that backend investment in those systems. So we’re really excited about the future.

Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. You’ve been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect discussion on the latest on-ramps to secured agile cloud adoption for mainframe applications. And we’ve learned how a partnership between Unisys and Microsoft Azure allows many organizations to move their applications and data to a cloud model without degrading these vulnerable and essential systems of record.

So please join me in thanking our guests, Chuck Lefebvre, Senior Director of Product Management for ClearPath Forward at Unisys. Thank you so much, Chuck.

Lefebvre: Thank you.

Gardner: And a big thank you as well to Bob Ellsworth, Worldwide Director of Mainframe Transformation at Microsoft. Thank you, sir.

Ellsworth: Thank you.

Gardner: And a big thank you to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect cloud computing adoption best practices discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Unisys- and Microsoft-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions.

Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your IT community, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Unisys and Microsoft.

A discussion on how many organizations face a reckoning to move mainframe applications to a cloud model without degrading the venerable and essential systems of record. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2020. All rights reserved.

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How Security Designed with the Cloud Migration Process in Mind Improves an Enterprise’s Risk Posture Top to Bottom

A discussion on how cloud deployment planners need to be ever-vigilant for all types of cyber security attack vectors and make their data and processes safer and easier to recover from security incidents.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsors: Unisys and Microsoft.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you are listening to BriefingsDirect. This next data security insights discussion explores how cloud deployment planners need to be ever-vigilant for all types of cybersecurity attack vectors.

Gardner

Stay with us as we examine how those moving to and adapting to cloud deployments can make their data and processes safer and easier to recover from security incidents.

To learn more about taking the right precautions for cloud and distributed data safety, please join me now in welcoming Mark McIntyre, Senior Director of Cybersecurity Solutions Group at Microsoft. Welcome, Mark.

Mark McIntyre: Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Gardner: We are also here with Sudhir Mehta, Global Vice President of Product Management and Strategy at Unisys. Welcome, Sudhir.

Sudhir Mehta: Hey, Dana, thanks for having me.

Gardner: Mark, what’s changed in how data is being targeted for those using cloud models like Microsoft Azure? How is that different from two or three years ago?

McIntyre

McIntyre: First of all, the good news is that we see more and more organizations around the world, including the US government, but broadly more global, pursuing cloud adoption. I think that’s great. Organizations around the world recognize the business value and I think increasingly the security value.

The challenge I see is one of expectations. Who owns what, as you go to the cloud? And so we need to be crisper and clearer with our partners and customers as to who owns what responsibility in terms of monitoring and managing in a team environment as you transition from a traditional on-premises environments all the way up into a software-as-a-services (SaaS) environment.

Gardner: Sudhir, what’s changed from your perspective at Unisys as to what the cloud adoption era security requirements are?

Mehta: When organizations move data and workloads to the cloud, many of them underestimate the complexities of securing hybrid, on-premises, and cloud ecosystems. A lot of the failures, or what we would call security breaches or intrusions, you can attribute to inadequate security practices, policies, procedures, and misconfiguration errors.

Mehta

As a result, cloud security breach reports have been on the rise. Container technology adds flexibility and speed-to-market, but it is also introducing a lot of vulnerability and complexity.

A lot of customers have legacy, on-premises security methodologies and technologies, which obviously they can no longer use or leverage in the new, dynamic, elastic nature of today’s cloud environments.

Gartner estimates that through 2022 at least 95 percent of cloud security failures will be the customers’ fault. So the net effect is cloud security exposure, the attack surface, is on the rise. The exposure is growing.

Change in cloud worldwide 

Gardner: People, process, and technology all change as organizations move to the cloud. And so security best practices can fall through the cracks. What are you seeing, Mark, in how a comprehensive cloud security approach can be brought to this transition so that cloud retains its largely sterling reputation for security?

McIntyre: I completely agree with what my colleague from Unisys said. Not to crack a joke -- this is a serious topic -- but my colleagues and I meet a lot with both US government and commercial counterparts. And they ask us, “Microsoft, as a large cloud provider, what keeps you awake at night? What are you afraid of?”

It’s always a delicate conversation because we need to tactfully turn it around and say, “Well, you, the customer, you keep us awake at night. When you come into our cloud, we inherit your adversaries. We inherit your vulnerabilities and your configuration challenges.”

We need to be really clear with our customers about the technologies that they need to make themselves more secure. We need to give them awareness into their posture so it's built right into the fabric of the cloud service.

As our customers plan a cloud migration, it will invariably include a variety of resources being left on-premises, in a traditional IT infrastructure. We need to make sure that we help them understand the benefits already built into the cloud, whether they are seeking infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), or SaaS. We need to be really clear with our customers -- through our partners, in many cases – about the technologies that they need to make themselves more secure. We need to give them awareness into their posture so that it is built right into the fabric of the cloud service.

Gardner: Sudhir, it sounds as if organizations who haven’t been doing things quite as well as they should on-premises need to be even more mindful of improving on their security posture as they move to the cloud, so that they don’t take their vulnerabilities with them.

From Unisys’s perspective, how should organizations get their housecleaning in order before they move to the cloud?

Don’t bring unsafe baggage to the cloud 

Mehta: We always recommend that customers should absolutely first look at putting their house in order. Security hygiene is extremely important, whether you look at data protection, information protection, or your overall access exposure. That can be from employees working at home or through to vendors or third-parties -- wherever they have access to a lot of your information and data.

First and foremost, make sure you have the appropriate framework established. Then compliance and policy management are extremely important when you move to the cloud and to virtual and containerized frameworks. Today, many companies do their application development in the cloud because it’s a lot more dynamic. We recommend that our customers make sure they have the appropriate policy management, assessments, and compliance checks in place for both on-premises and then for your journey to the cloud.

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With Unisys Stealth

The net of it is, if you are appropriately managed when you are on-premises, chances are as you move from hybrid to more of a cloud-native deployment and/or cloud-native services, you are more likely to get it right. If you don’t have it all in place when you are on-premises, you have an uphill battle in making sure you are secured in the cloud.

Gardner: Mark, are there any related issues around identity and authentication as organizations move from on-premises to outside of their firewall into cloud deployment? What should organizations be thinking about specifically around identity and authentication?

Avoid an identity crisis

McIntyre: This is a huge area of focus right now. Even within our own company, at Microsoft, we as employees operate in essentially an identity-driven security model. And so it’s proper that you call this out on this podcast.

The idea that you can monitor and filter all traffic, and that you are going to make meaningful conclusions from that in real time -- while still running your business and pursuing your mission -- is not the best use of your time and your resources. It’s much better to switch to a more modern, identity-based model where you can actually incorporate newer concepts.

Within Microsoft, we have a term called Modern Workplace. It’s a reflection of the fact that government organizations and enterprises around the world are having to anticipate and hopefully provide a collaborative work environment where people can work in a way that reflects their personal preferences around devices and working at home or on the road at a coffee shop or restaurant -- or whatever. The concept of work has changed around enterprise and is definitely forcing this opportunity to look at creating a more modern identity framework.

Zero Trust networking and micro-segmentation initiatives recognize that we know people need to keep working and doing their jobs wherever they are. The idea is to accept the fact that people will always cause some level of risk to the organization.

If you look at some of the initiatives in the US government right now, we hear the term Zero Trust. That includes Zero Trust networking and micro-segmentation. Initiatives like these recognize that we know people need to keep working and doing their jobs wherever they are. The idea is to accept the fact that people will always cause some level of risk to the organization.

We are curious, reasonably smart, well-intentioned people, and we make mistakes, just like anybody else. Let’s create an identity-driven model that allows the organization to get better insight and control over authentications, requests for resources, end-to-end, and throughout a lifecycle.

Gardner: Sudhir, Unisys has been working with a number of public-sector organizations on technologies that support a stronger posture around authentication and other technologies. Tell us about what you have found over the past few years and how that can be applied to these challenges of moving to a cloud like Microsoft Azure.

Mehta: Dana, going back in time, one of the requests we had from the US Department of Defense (DoD) on the networking side, was a concern around access to sensitive information and data. Unisys was requested by the DoD to develop a framework and implement a solution. They were looking at more of a micro-segmentation solution, very similar to what Mark just described.

So, fast forward, since then we have deployed and released a military-grade capability called Unisys Stealth^®, wherein we are able to manage micro-segmentation, what we classify as key-based, encrypted micro-segmentation, that controls access to different hosts or endpoints based on the identity of the user. It permits only authorized users to communicate with approved endpoints and denies unauthorized communications, and so prevents the spread of east-to-west, lateral attacks.

Gardner: Mark, for those in our audience who aren’t that technology savvy, what does micro-segmentation mean? Why has it become an important foundational capability for security across a cloud-use environment?

Need-to-know access 

McIntyre: First of all, I want to call out Unisys’s great work here and their leadership in the last several years. It means a Zero-Trust environment can essentially gauge or control east-to-west behavior or activity in a distributed environment.

For example, in a traditional IT environment, devices are not really well-managed when they are centralized, corporate-issued devices. You can’t take them out of the facility, of course. You don’t authenticate once you are on a network because you are already in a physical campus environment. But it’s different in a modern, collaborative environment. Enterprises are generally ahead on this change, but it’s now coming into government requirements, too.

And so now, you essentially can parse out your subjects and your objects, your subjects trying to access objects. You can spit them out and say, “We are going to create all user accounts with a certain set of parameters.” It amounts to a privileged, need-to-know model. You can enforce strong controls with a set of certain release-privilege rights. And, of course, in an ideal world, you could go a step further and start implementing biometrics [to authenticate] to get off of password dependencies.

Learn How Unisys Stealth Security
Simplifies Zero Trust Networks

But number one, you want to verify the identity. Is this a person? Is this the subject who we think they are? Are they that subject based on a corroborating variety of different attributes, behaviors, and activities? Things like that. And then you can also apply the same controls to a device and say, “Okay, this user is using a certain device. Is this device healthy? Is it built to today’s image? Is it patched, clean, and approved to be used in this environment? And if so, to what level?”

And then you can even go a step further and say, “In this model, now that we can verify the access, should this person be able to use our resources through the public Internet and access certain corporate resources? Should we allow an unmanaged device to have a level of access to confidential documents within the company? Maybe that should only be on a managed device.”

So you can create these flexible authentication scenarios based on what you know about the subjects at hand, about the objects, and about the files that they want to access. It’s a much more flexible, modern way to interact.

Within Azure cloud, Microsoft Azure Active Directory services offer those capabilities – they are just built into the service. So micro-segmentation might sound like a lot of work for your security or identity team, but it’s a great example of a cloud service that runs in the background to help you set up the right rules and then let the service work for you.

Gardner: Sudhir, just to be clear, the Unisys Stealth(cloud) Extended Data Center for Microsoft Azure is a service that you get from the cloud? Or is that something that you would implement on-premises? Are there different models for how you would implement and deploy this?

A stealthy, healthy cloud journey 

Mehta: We have been working with Microsoft over the years on Stealth, and we have a fantastic relationship with Microsoft. If you are a customer going through a cloud journey, we deploy what we call a hybrid Stealth deployment. In other words, we help customers do what we call isolation with the help of communities of interests that we create that are basically groupings of hosts, users, and resources based on like interests.

Then, when there is a request to communicate, you create the appropriate Stealth-encrypted tunnels. If you have a scenario where you are doing the appropriate communication between an on-premises host and a cloud-based host, you do that through a secure, encrypted tunnel.

We have also implemented what we call cloaking. With cloaking, if someone is not authorized to communicate with a certain host or a certain member of a community of interest, you basically do not give a response back. So cloaking is also part of the Stealth implementation.

And in working closely with Microsoft, we have further established an automated capability through a discovery API. So when Microsoft releases new Azure services, we are able to update the overall Stealth protocol and framework with the updated Azure services. For customers who have Azure workloads protected by Stealth, there is no disruption from a productivity standpoint. They can always securely leverage whatever applications they are running on Azure cloud.

For customers leveraging Azure cloud with different workloads, we maintain the appropriate level of secure communications just as they would have in an on-premises deployment.

The net of it is being able to establish the appropriate secure journey for customers, from on-premises to the cloud, the hybrid journey. For customers leveraging Azure cloud with different workloads, we maintain the appropriate level of secure communications just as they would have in an on-premises deployment.

Gardner: Mark, when does this become readily available? What’s the timeline on how these technologies come together to make a whole greater than the sum of the parts when it comes to hybrid security and authentication?

McIntyre: Microsoft is already offering Zero Trust, identity-based security capabilities through our services. We haven’t traditionally named them as such, although we definitely are working along that path right now.

Microsoft Chief Digital Officer and Executive Vice President Kurt DelBene is on the US Defense Innovation Board and is playing a leadership role in establishing essentially a DoD or US government priority on Zero Trust. In the next several months, we will be putting more clarity around how our partners and customers can better map capabilities that they already own against emerging priorities and requirements like these. So definitely look for that.

In fact, Ignite DC is February 6 and 7, in downtown Washington, DC, and Zero Trust is certainly on the agenda there, so there will be updates at that conference.

But generally speaking, any customer can take the underlying services that we are offering and implement this now. What’s even better, we have companies that are already out there doing this. And we rely greatly on our partners like Unisys to go out and really have those deep architecture conversations with their stakeholders.

Gardner: Sudhir, when people use the combined solution of Microsoft Azure and Stealth for cloud, how can they react to attacks that may get through to prevent damage from spreading?

Contain contagion quickly 

Mehta: Good question! Internally within Unisys’s own IT organization, we have already moved on this cloud journey. Stealth is already securing our Azure cloud deployments and we are 95 percent deployed on Azure in terms of internal Unisys applications. So we like to eat our own dog food.

If there is a situation where there is an incident of compromise, we have a capability called dynamic isolation, where if you are looking at a managed security operations center (SOC) situation, we have empowered the SOC to contain a risk very quickly.

We are able to isolate a user and their device within 10 seconds. If you have a situation where someone turns nefarious, intentionally or coincidentally, we are able to isolate the user and then implement different thresholds of isolation. If a high threshold level is breached across 8 out of 10, that means we completely isolate that user.

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If there is a threshold level of 5 or 6, we may still give the user certain levels of access. So within a certain group they would continue to access or be able to communicate.

Dynamic isolation isolates a user and their device with different levels of thresholds while we have like a managed SOC go through their cycles of trying to identify what really happened as part of what we would call an advanced response. Unisys is the only solution where we can actually isolate a user or the device within the span of seconds. We can do it now within 10 seconds.

McIntyre: Getting back to your question about Microsoft’s plans, I’m very happy to share how we’ve managed Zero Trust. Essentially it relies on Intune for device management and Azure Active Directory for identity. It’s the way that we right now internally manage our own employees.

My access to corporate resources can come via my personal device and work-issued device. I’m very happy with what Unisys already has available and what we have out there. It’s a really strong reference architecture that’s already generally available.

Gardner: Our discussion began with security for the US DoD, among the largest enterprises you could conceive of. But I’m wondering if this is something that goes down market as well, to small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that are using Azure and/or are moving from an on-premises model.

Do Zero Trust and your services apply to the mom and pop shops, SMBs, and the largest enterprises?

All sizes of businesses

McIntyre: Yes, this is something that would be ideally available for an SMB because they likely do not have large logistical or infrastructure dependencies. They are probably more flexible in how they can implement solutions. It’s a great way to go into the cloud and a great way for them to save money upfront over traditional IT infrastructure. So SMBs should have a really good chance to literally, natively take an idea like this and implement it.

Gardner: Sudhir, anything to offer on that in terms of the technology and how it’s applicable both up and down market?

Mehta: Mark is spot on. Unisys Stealth resonates really well for SMBs and the enterprise. SMBs benefit, as Mark mentioned, in their capability to move quickly. And with Stealth, we have an innovative capability that can discover and visualize your users. Thereafter, you can very quickly and automatically virtualize any network into the communities of interest I mentioned earlier. SMBs can get going within a day or two.

Enterprises can define their journey depending on what you're actually trying trying to migrate or run in the cloud. The opportunities are there for both SMBs and enterprises.

If you’re a large enterprise, you can define your journey -- whether it’s from on-premises to cloud -- depending on what you’re actually trying to migrate or run in the cloud. So I would say absolutely both. And it would also depend on what you’re really looking at managing and deploying, but the opportunities are there for both SMBs and enterprises.

Gardner: As companies large and small are evaluating this and trying to discern their interest, let’s look at some of the benefits. As you pointed out, Sudhir, you’re eating your own dog food at Unisys. And Mark has described how this is also being used internally at Microsoft as well.

Do you have ways that you can look at before and after, measure quantitatively, qualitative, maybe anecdotally, why this has been beneficial? It’s always hard in security to prove something that didn’t happen and why it didn’t happen. But what do you get when you do Stealth well?

Proof is in the protection 

Mehta: There are a couple of things, Dana. So one is there is certainly a reduction in cost. When we deploy for 20,000 Unisys employees, our Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) obviously has to be a big supporter of Stealth. His read is from a cost perspective that we have seen significant reductions in costs.

Prior to having Stealth implemented, we had a certain approach as relates to network segmentation. From a network equipment perspective, we’ve seen a reduction of over 70 percent. If you look at server infrastructure, there has been a reduction of more than 50 percent. The maintenance and labor costs have had a reduction north of 60 percent. Ongoing support labor cost has also seen a significant reduction as well. So that’s one lens you could look at.

The other lens that has been interesting is the virtual private network (VPN) exposure. As many of us know, VPNs are perhaps the best breach route for hackers today. When we’ve implemented Stealth internally within Unisys, for a lot of our applications we have done away with the requirement for logging into a VPN application. That has made for easier access to a lot of applications – mainly for folks logging in from home or from a Starbucks. Now when they communicate, it is through an encrypted tunnel and it’s very secure. The VPN exposure completely goes away.

Those are the best two lenses I could give to the value proposition. Obviously there is cost reduction. And the other is the VPN exposure goes away, at least for Unisys that’s what we’ve found with implementing internally.

Gardner: For those using VPNs, should they move to something like Stealth? Does the way in which VPNs add value change when you bring something like Stealth in? How much do you reevaluate your use of VPNs in general?

Mehta: I would be remiss to say you can completely do away with VPNs. If you go back in time and see why VPNs were created, the overall framework was created for secure access for certain applications. Since then, for whatever reasons, VPNs became the only way people communicate from working at home, for example. So the way we look at this is, for applications that are not extremely limited to a few people, you should look at options wherein you don’t necessarily need a VPN. You could therefore look at a solution like Unisys Stealth.

And then if there are certain applications that are extremely sensitive, limited to only a few folks for whatever reason, that’s where potentially you could consider using an application like a VPN.

Gardner: Let’s look to the future. When you put these Zero Trust services into practice, into a hybrid cloud, then ultimately a fully cloud-native environment, what’s the next shoe to fall? Are there some things you gain when you enter into this level of micro-segmentation, by exploiting these newer technologies?

Can this value be extended to the edge, for example? Does it have a role in Internet of things (IoT)? A role in data transfers from organization to organization? What does this put us in a position to do in the future that we couldn’t have done previously?

Machining the future securely 

McIntyre: You hit on two really important points. Obviously devices, IoT devices, for example, and data. So data increasingly -- you see T-shirts out and you see slogans, “Data is the new oil,” and such. From a security point of view there is no question this is becoming the case, when there’s something like 44 to 45 zettabytes of data projected to be out there for the next few years.

You can employ traditional security monitoring practices, for example label-free detection, things like that. But it’s just not going to allow you to work quickly, especially in an environment where we’re already challenged with having enough security workforce. There are not enough people out there, it’s a global talent shortage.

It’s a fantastic opportunity forced on us to rely more on modern authentication frameworks and on machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to take on a lot of that lower-level analysis, the log analysis work, out of human hands and have machines free people up for the higher-level work.

We're trying to make sure that as we deliver new services to the marketplace that those are built in a way that you can configure and monitor them like any other device in the company.  We can make sure that it is being monitored in the same way as your traditional infrastructure.

For example, we have a really interesting situation within Microsoft. It goes around the industry as well. We have many organizations go into the cloud, but of course, as we mentioned earlier, it’s still unclear on the roles and responsibilities. We’re also seeing big gaps in use of cloud resources versus security tools built into those resources.

And so we’re really trying to make sure that as we deliver new services to marketplace, for example, IoT, that those are built in a way that you can configure and monitor them like any other device in the company. With Azure, for example, we have IoT Hub. We can literally, as you build an IoT device, make sure that it is being monitored in the same way as your traditional infrastructure monitors.

There should not be a gap there. You can still apply the same types of logical access controls around them. There shouldn’t be any tradeoffs on security for how you do security -- whether it’s IT or IoT.

Gardner: Sudhir, same question, what is use of Stealth in conjunction with cloud activities get you in the future?

Mehta: Tagging on to what Mark said, AI and ML are becoming interesting. We obviously had a very big digital workplace solutions organization. We are a market leader for services, for helpdesk services. We are looking at the introduction of a lot of what you would call as AIOps in automation as it leads to robotic process automation (RPA) and voice assistance.

So one of the things we are observing is, as you go on this AI-ML, there is a larger exposure because you are focusing more around the operationalization in automation or AI-ML and certain areas where you may not be able to manage, for instance, the way you get the training done for your bots.

So that’s where Stealth is a capability we are implementing right now with digital workplace solutions as part of a journey for AIOps automation as an example. The other area we are working very closely with some of other partners, as well as Microsoft, is around application security and hardening in the cloud.

How do you make sure that when you deploy certain applications in the cloud you ensure that it is secure and it is not being breached, or are there intrusions when you try to make changes to your applications?

Those are two areas we are currently working on, the AIOps and MLOps automation and then the application security and hardening in the cloud, working with Microsoft as well.

Gardner: If I want to be as secure as I can, and I know that I’m going to be doing more in the cloud, what should I be doing now in order to make myself in the best position to take advantage of things like micro-segmentation and the technologies behind Stealth and how they apply to a cloud like Azure? How should I get myself ready to take advantage of these things?

Plan ahead to secure success 

McIntyre: First thing is to remember how you plan and roll out your security estate. It should be no different than what you’re doing with your larger IT planning anyway, so it’s all digital transformation. First thing to do is close that gap between security teams. All the teams – business and IT -- should be working together.

Learn How Unisys Stealth Security
Simplifies Zero Trust Networks

We want to make sure that our customers go to the cloud in a secure way, without losing this ability to access their data. We continue to put more effort in very proactive services -- architecture guidance, recommendations, things that can help people get started in the cloud. It’s called Azure Blueprints, a configuration guidance and predefined templates that can help an organization launch a resource in the cloud that’s already compliant against FedRAMP or NIST or ISO or HIPAA standards.

We’ll continue to invest in the technologies that help customers securely deploy technologies or cloud resources from the get-go so that we close those gaps and configuration and close the gaps in reporting and telemetry as well. And we can’t do it without great partners that provide those customized solutions for each sector.

Gardner: Sudhir, last word to you. What’s your advice for people to prepare themselves to be ready to take advantage of things like Stealth?

Mehta: Look at a couple of things. One is focus on trusted identity in terms of who you work with, who you give access to. Even within your organization you obviously need to make sure you establish that trusted identity. And how you do it is you make sure it is simple. Second, look at an overlay network agnostic framework, which is where Stealth can help you. Make sure it is unique. One individual has one identity. Third is make sure it is refutable. So it’s undeniable in terms of how you implement it, and then the fourth is, make sure it’s got the highest level of efficacy, whether it’s related to how you deploy and it’s also the way you architect your solution.

So, the net of it is, a) trust no one, b) assume a breach can occur, and then c) respond really fast to limit damage. If you do these three things, you can get to Zero Trust for your organization.

Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. You have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect discussion on how cloud deployment planners need to be ever-vigilant for all types of cybersecurity attack vectors.

And we’ve learned how Unisys helps Microsoft Azure users take the right precautions for better cloud and distributed users’ safety.

So please join me in thanking our guests, Mark McIntyre, Senior Director of Cybersecurity Solutions Group at Microsoft, and Sudhir Mehta, Global Vice President of Product Management and Strategy at Unisys. Thank you so much.

And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect data security insights discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Unisys- and Microsoft-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions.

Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your community and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsors: Unisys and Microsoft.

A discussion on how cloud deployment planners need to be ever-vigilant for all types of cyber security attack vectors and make their data and processes safer and easier to recover from security incidents. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2020. All rights reserved.

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