Brent Ellis

What Is Going On? One of our less pleasant responsibilities here at Forrester is commenting on serious business, security, or technical failures in the digital and IT industry. Due to its duration and the implications for a subset of the user base, the current Atlassian outage rises to that level. Atlassian is staking its future […]

Just like with self-managed infrastructure, the key to surviving a SaaS outage is knowing the risks, implementing strategies to mitigate and control those risks, and then testing your strategy to make sure it works and that everyone knows how to execute in the case of crisis.

Our research has found that, while most enterprises use multiple public clouds or some form of hybrid cloud implementation, it isn’t done for resilience purposes. The reasons for this are many, but to summarize, building applications to use multiple clouds is hard. There can be massive inefficiencies, complexities, and redundant tasks in managing multiple versions […]

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Photo: Brent Ellis Higher education institutions are driven to improve customer experience (CX) by competitive pressures related to the future of work and an evolving understanding of what the important aspects of a formal education entail.  The student experience, however, is far more than the three E’s of customer experience — ease, effectiveness, and emotion. […]

On July 1, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) acquired Zerto for $374 million. Adding Zerto to its product portfolio increases the capabilities of HPE’s GreenLake IT-as-a-service (ITaaS) platform by adding best-of-breed, low-latency copy data management and continuous data protection functionality. Many existing managed service providers (MSPs) already bundle Zerto as their data mover for disaster recovery […]

KubeCon events can be hard to assess. Whether live or virtual, they’ve become a sprawling mix of old-school tech trade show, open source project maintainer meetup, and independent user group. KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2021 was no different. My colleague Brent Ellis led Forrester’s initial appraisal of the online event, noting greater maturity in Kubernetes […]

My colleague Naveen Chhabra wrote an excellent report in 2017, “Back Up Your SaaS Data — Because Most SaaS Providers Don’t,” that talked about how many companies have a gap in their backup strategy related to SaaS-hosted application data. As software-as-a-service (SaaS) adoption has become more pervasive, that gap is only widening. While the application […]

Kubernetes has made a huge impact on how businesses deploy applications and how they adopt cloud. This year’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2021 virtual agenda was very broad, touching almost every aspect of both developer and operations journeys. As Lee Sustar noted in his blog earlier this week, Kubernetes is being used in a variety […]

Dell is in the midst of announcing and defining its IT-as-a-service (ITaaS) platform, named APEX, at Dell Technologies World this week. This shift is a major shake-up to Dell’s business, with the company making organizationwide changes to move from a product-focused vendor to a client-outcomes-based partner. HPE has been on this journey since 2017 and […]

Disaster recovery and data resilience support for Kubernetes workloads has been a hot topic lately, with all the major backup and data resilience vendors scrambling to build more features into their Kubernetes-focused products. My colleague Lee Sustar has been tracking the maturation of Kubernetes and is currently developing advice for enterprises building a full disaster […]

Today, IBM announced its new IBM Spectrum Fusion product, first as a scale-out hardware product, but with a roadmap for a software defined storage (SDS) solution. This new product is billed as a storage solution, but it is much more. It is really a “glue-all” product poised to change the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) market. Many […]

When Dell Technologies completed its acquisition of EMC in 2016, it gained a sweetheart of an asset: VMware. More precisely, it gained 80% of VMware, making the software dynamo a mostly autonomous company in the Dell Technologies family of companies. Dell Technologies just announced the expected spinoff of that 80% ownership, making VMware a fully […]

We’ve been seeing lots of stories about the effect of the power outages in Texas, and more will come over the next few weeks. When it comes down to it, the “R” in ERCOT was overlooked. One of the lesser-covered issues in the media is the impact of that lack of reliability on the migration […]

Last week, Google announced the acquisition of Actifio and plans to integrate Actifio’s technology as a first-party data protection solution akin to Azure Site Recovery. In comparison, AWS’s CloudEndure Disaster Recovery and Azure Site Recovery are more limited in functionality and scope than the capabilities Actifio gives Google. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) plus Actifio could […]