In the Clouds of ANZ’s Changing Innovation Horizon

Technological innovation has improved efficiency in work operations across ANZ and is the focus of business development in the region, particularly in Australia as part of its National Innovation and Science Agenda. An Innovation Strategy survey was recently instigated by the Government of NSW, asking for suggestions on data’s role in fueling innovation, research and growth. Nationally, the Productivity Commission is conducting a 12-month study into the use of open data. Data has been the foundation of Australia’s digital movement, being shared and distributed by the use of cloud computing.

Australia is particularly focusing on discovering new ways to leverage cloud, and New Zealand is evolving a new efficiency model for government security services. Let’s take a look at two main aspects – Australia’s multi-cloud approach and New Zealand’s new Telecom-as-a-service.

Australia is evolving multi-cloud

For the last five years, Australia has increasingly been embracing the benefits of the cloud. According to the Cloud Readiness Index 2016, Australia is the fourth most nation in adopting cloud computing.Financial services industries are usually the last to utilise Cloud in most regions, but Australia has demonstrated unprecedented flexibility with its cloud-first policies. There has been an aggressive pursuit of multi-cloud strategy as well. Multi-cloud employs multiple public clouds; AWS, Google, and Azure are among the three largest. It has advantages over a simple cloud-first policy, but security isn’t one of them.

There are two main benefits of adopting multi-cloud architecture. Adaptive utility cost is the first. Different cloud providers charge different rates, and these can vary day to day, or even hour to hour. An agile architecture may take advantage of these price differences by shifting compute and storage loads to the current cheapest compute and storage providers.

Second, multi-cloud prevents a single point of failure; just because cloud is provided by a trusted vendor does not automatically prevent it from operational error. For example, Microsoft’s Azure public cloud suffered a global failure when one of its SSL certificates expired unnoticed. Customers using only Azure during the outage would have been left high and dry. But those with a multi-cloud strategy, in theory, would see their business processes increase production in the other two public clouds to compensate.

If an application was to use multiple components, each of which could be used in a different public cloud at any time there is a failsafe. The components may shift from public cloud to public cloud to take advantage of utility pricing or to avoid outage.

The difficulty here lies in securing the application components when they’re shifting from cloud to cloud. Any traffic traversing from one public cloud to another is by definition crossing the Internet and should therefore not be trusted. Each component must treat each of the others as untrusted.

The nascent cloud access security broker (CASB) industry is trying to take on this problem by wrapping each component in its own tunnel and providing layer 2 tunnels to each. This is an interesting approach, but the fact that the CASB provider has to build a virtual cloud among the public cloud reintroduces the single point of failure: the CASB provider itself.

Multi-cloud security is a difficult problem to solve- one that the Australians are fully engaged in ahead of the global curve.

New Zealand’s new Telecom-as-a-Service (TaaS)

Managed service providers and resellers in New Zealand are banding together to form a TaaS consortium. TaaS is a new concept in selling both kit and maintenance specifically to sovereign government agencies. With TaaS, the buyer chooses the components (and vendors) of a technical solution, but rents them instead of owning them. The managed service provider also runs the management and operations of the solution.

The driver for TaaS is a change in the way the New Zealand government is allocating funds: capital expenditure is almost impossible to get approved, where operating expenses get approved quite easily. Therefore, government agencies are moving toward the TaaS model, where they don’t own the kit or manage the services but still get to choose the solutions. The consortium is preparing to launch the TaaS model in Australia as well.

Mutual developments

The island nations of Australia and New Zealand could be evolutionary crucibles for new technologies. If TaaS succeeds in New Zealand and migrates to Australia, it might prove to be capable enough for worldwide adoption. Ironing out the wrinkles in the multi-cloud fabric may take longer than the development of TaaS. If Australia figures out how to smooth multi-cloud, it's easy to see the entire developed world moving toward it for the betterment of services everywhere. The state of technology is constantly evolving, and within it holds the promise of greater things; the future built upon established processes. ANZ’s direction is specialised and the possibility of depth within its field could elevate its innovation upon a global stage.