Certain CIOs for incomprehensible reasons keep off their cloud transformation projects several key IT disciplines including Enterprise Architecture (EA), IT Service Management (ITSM) and most importantly Project Management. Do they consider them obsolete? useless? irrelevant? ITaaS Strategist Philippe Abdoulaye provides 7 keys that will boost PMOs and make them pivotal to any ITaaS (or cloud-related) transformation projects.
As organizations shift towards IT-as-a-service models, the need for managing & protecting data residing across physical, virtual, and now cloud environments grows with it. CommVault can ensure protection & E-Discovery of your data - whether in a private cloud, a Service Provider delivered public cloud, or a hybrid cloud environment – across the heterogeneous enterprise.
There’s a common understanding about what it means for a coding task to be “done.” Yet, often this “doneness” is only a measure of functionality – not necessarily usability. Today, user experience is crucial to an application’s success, and that goes well beyond what color your button is or how prominently a call-to-action is placed. Users leave your site if pages don’t load fast enough or if the site simply feels sluggish when compared with your competitors’ sites.
We all know that data growth is exploding and storage budgets are shrinking. Instead of showing you charts on about how much data there is, in his General Session at 17th Cloud Expo, Scott Cleland, Senior Director of Product Marketing at HGST, showed how to capture all of your data in one place. After you have your data under control, you can then analyze it in one place, saving time and resources.
The Internet of Things is here. In the coming years, billions of devices like sensors, meters or actuators will be connected to the network, sharing information and taking instructions. These connected devices will sense and deliver more data, respond to control inputs and provide more information to help people and machines make decisions. Examples of “things”’ include IPTV cameras in major metropolitan areas, crop-growing water detection systems, smart meters that communicate energy consumption and smart transportation systems that adapt to traffic conditions. These are all computing systems that are Internet-connected and operate with no human intervention.
Test-driven development (TDD) has been around for a while now. Behavior-driven development (BDD), a comparably recent methodology, emerged from the practice of TDD and could reasonably be called a narrower application of TDD. The TDD process allows a developer to use a failing unit test to express a shortcoming of the system. The next step is to modify the production code to get the failing test to pass without making existing tests fail. BDD more or less takes this same concept and adds the idea that the tests should be written in easy-to-understand language describing the problem domain, and that tests should express user acceptance criteria.
Here’s the thing: as sure as we’ll have another record-setting year for NFL streaming, you can also be sure that apps will fail and streaming services will go down. Whether you are dabbling in streaming or diving in whole-hog, you need to know what to do to give your users the most reliable experience possible. Here are a few tips.
Two weeks ago (November 3-5), I attended the Cloud Expo Silicon Valley as a speaker, where I presented on the security and privacy due diligence requirements for cloud solutions. Cloud security is a topical issue for every CIO, CISO, and technology buyer. Decision-makers are always looking for insights on how to mitigate the security risks of implementing and using cloud solutions. Based on the presentation topics covered at the conference, as well as the general discussions heard between sessions, I wanted to share some of my observations on emerging trends. As cyber security serves as a foundation and necessary defense for customer and cloud solutions, cyber becomes more and more commoditized. The real impact is how do we deliver a confidence or trust to customers and their customer journey with our organizations.
Too often with compelling new technologies market participants become overly enamored with that attractiveness of the technology and neglect underlying business drivers. This tendency, what some call the “newest shiny object syndrome” is understandable given that virtually all of us are heavily engaged in technology. But it is also mistaken. Without concrete business cases driving its deployment, IoT, like many other technologies before it, will fade into obscurity.
Earlier this year Forbes published an article titled “Why Do Managers Hate Agile?” The author, Steve Denning, builds a case for managers hating Agile due to “management” and “Agile” being defined as two different worlds. It’s like Men are From Mars and Women are from Venus, only we’re talking about the IT world and management and developers, instead of men and women. The article caught my attention for the obvious reason that CollabNet sells products and services to help support Agile development efforts, sparking the question, “Why would managers hate Agile?”
Developers generally like to share their code, and many of them do so by open sourcing it on GitHub, a social code hosting and collaboration service. Many companies also use GitHub as a convenient place to host both private and public code repositories by creating GitHub organizations where employees can be joined. Sometimes Employee might publish things that might be sensitive in nature and these things might lead to compromise of a system.
Anonymous’s self-organization gives it power, resilience, and above all, agility – in fact, far more than traditional organizations with vastly superior resources. On the other hand, its efforts are often capricious, and once a particular target loses its appeal, Anonymous’s attention tends to wander elsewhere. As the war against Daesh (formerly ISIS or ISIL) heats up following the terrorist attacks in Paris, the hacker group Anonymous has taken a leadership position in the global effort. Its battleground isn't in Europe, the Middle East, or any other location on earth. Anonymous is battling Daesh in cyberspace. Enterprises, in contrast, generally have clear, long-term goals – profitability, growth, customer satisfaction and the like, while Anonymous is deeply anarchic. Understanding how the members of Anonymous choose their goals, however, provides a measure of insight into self-organization for enterprises.
Here's a bold claim: Cloud computing has the potential to be as transformative as the advent of the automobile. Before the age of cars and buses, everything was undertaken at a fraction of the pace it is now-transport, distribution, socializing. The automobile revolutionized all of that, changing forever the way we moved, made friends and worked. Make no mistake, cloud computing is the 21st Century equivalent of the automobile. In case you've just returned from several years orbiting Mars, let me just explain what we mean by cloud computing. It refers to storing and accessing data, programs and services over the Internet instead of your computer hard drive. Working off your hard drive is how the computer industry functioned for decades-all your data lived somewhere inside that desktop PC. With cloud computing, you divest of the hard drive and enjoy the freedom of working anywhere, anytime, on any device. Your data, however much there is of it, is stored in huge data centers and storage farms often in places people have never heard of.
For the last 15 years, companies operating in the United States and Europe have benefited from Safe Harbor - a streamlined process that allowed U.S. companies to transfer and store European citizens' data in the U.S. provided a level of privacy protections were adhered to according to outlined European standards. Recently, however, an Irish court has ruled, in a case brought by an Austrian citizen concerned about how Facebook was handling his private data, that the Safe Harbor agreement is inconsistent with European privacy law, as it did not require all organizations entitled to work with EU privacy-related data to comply with it. The court’s decision means Ireland’s Data Privacy Commissioner must review the merits of the case and make a final determination about whether Facebook is allowed to transfer private data from its European users to the United States. In the mean time, companies that had relied on the Safe Harbor process can no longer do so. In today's data-centric business world, the ruling comes as a blow to thousands of companies operating at the global scale that are now faced with navigating new, complicated individual standards – across multiple regions.
If you think of automated provisioning as a formal written language definition, it does have some value in illuminating issues with partial automation or portions of the overall data center that are not automated. The path to automation is not a straight one at most organizations. It takes time, it takes resources, and even though there is a definable ROI, the press of business needs wins every time there is a conflict – because meeting business needs is pretty much the purpose of IT. But taking the staggered approach has costs too, and it’s good on occasion to look at them. I’ve admittedly created this view, but it is a way to consider your automation efforts and how well they’re working with regard to the end goal.
Just over a week ago I received a long and loud sustained applause for a presentation I delivered at this year’s Cloud Expo in Santa Clara. I was extremely pleased with the turnout and had some very good conversations with many of the attendees. Over the next few days I had many more meaningful conversations and was not only happy with the results but also learned a few new things. Here is everything I learned in those three days distilled into three short points.
Put the word continuous in front of many things and we help define DevOps: continuous delivery, continuous testing, continuous assessment, and there is more. The next BriefingsDirect DevOps thought leadership discussion explores the concept of continuous processes around the development and deployment of applications and systems. Put the word continuous in front of many things and we help define DevOps: continuous delivery, continuous testing, continuous assessment, and there is more.
DevOps is about increasing efficiency, but nothing is more inefficient than building the same application twice. However, this is a routine occurrence with enterprise applications that need both a rich desktop web interface and strong mobile support. With recent technological advances from Isomorphic Software and others, rich desktop and tuned mobile experiences can now be created with a single codebase – without compromising functionality, performance or usability. In his session at DevOps Summit, Charles Kendrick, CTO and Chief Architect at Isomorphic Software, demonstrated examples of complex UI widgets that behave differently in desktop vs. mobile context, and described the API and code structures that enable these capabilities.
Every day, every hour, every minute, devices are becoming connected. The Internet of Things (or Iot) has gone from a buzzword floating through the echoes of Silicon Valley to a tangible and quickly advancing movement in the world of hardware. But, like a stone tossed into a pond, the effects of the Internet of Things are quickly rippling outward, causing immense changes to the environment surrounding it. And, as it turns out, the IoT is a rather big stone and it's making a large splash. The IoT revolution is necessitating enormous changes to companies who want to play in this brave new world - and those companies are not few in number.
With all the incredible momentum behind the Internet of Things (IoT) industry, it is easy to forget that not a single CEO wakes up and wonders if “my IoT is broken.” What they wonder is if they are making the right decisions to do all they can to increase revenue, decrease costs, and improve customer experience – effectively the same challenges they have always had in growing their business. The exciting thing about the IoT industry is now these decisions can be better, faster, and smarter. Now all corporate assets – people, objects, and spaces – can share information about themselves and their surroundings. And this data can help make better decisions through improved insights.
PubNub has announced the release of BLOCKS, a set of customizable microservices that give developers a simple way to add code and deploy features for realtime apps.PubNub BLOCKS executes business logic directly on the data streaming through PubNub’s network without splitting it off to an intermediary server controlled by the customer. This revolutionary approach streamlines app development, reduces endpoint-to-endpoint latency, and allows apps to better leverage the enormous scalability of PubNub’s Data Stream Network.
Apps and devices shouldn't stop working when there's limited or no network connectivity. Learn how to bring data stored in a cloud database to the edge of the network (and back again) whenever an Internet connection is available. In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Ben Perlmutter, a Sales Engineer with IBM Cloudant, demonstrated techniques for replicating cloud databases with devices in order to build offline-first mobile or Internet of Things (IoT) apps that can provide a better, faster user experience, both offline and online. The focus of this talk was on IBM Cloudant, Apache CouchDB, and related open source tools and open standards.
In today's enterprise, digital transformation represents organizational change even more so than technology change, as customer preferences and behavior drive end-to-end transformation across lines of business as well as IT. To capitalize on the ubiquitous disruption driving this transformation, companies must be able to innovate at an increasingly rapid pace. Traditional approaches for driving innovation are now woefully inadequate for keeping up with the breadth of disruption and change facing today's increasingly digital enterprise. It's time to rethink how we innovate, leveraging the very turbulence that drives the business to change. In his Opening Keynote at 17th Cloud Expo, Jason Bloomberg, leading expert on architecting agility for the enterprise and president of Intellyx, provided a thought-provoking look at how modern digital practices, including self-organization and DevOps, can provide a template for rethinking how innovation processes can continue to drive strategic value.
In 1854 Cholera broke out in the Soho neighborhood of London. Hundreds of people were struck down and died within days. No one at the time understood where the disease came from, how to treat it, or how it was transmitted. A local physician, Dr. John Snow spent every possible moment of his day studying the victims and data in an attempt to understand the disease. His biggest challenge was a lack of data. He had only the list of the dead and a blank map of the neighborhood. What he needed was more data. This was solved when he met the local priest, Henry Whitehouse. Whitehouse had recorded the time of death, and the location where all the families lived and died. When these sources of data where combined, and then overlaid on a map, visual patterns emerged which ultimately led the two to see the common denominator for all the victims was drinking contaminated water from the Broad Street water pump.
Wearable technology has come a long way since the calculator watch. In the past whenever I thought of the term “wearable technology” the first things I would like of were always calculator watches and pedometers, but boy have things changed! Even if you’re a skeptic, this blogger thinks that pretty much everyone will be using some type of wearable tech by 2020. It seems like wearable technology is everywhere. Whether it is Google Glass, or the Samsung Galaxy Gear, there seems to be nothing that you can't tech out. There is Colour Change Couture, fabric that changes color when wet, The Programmable T-shirt, which, when combined with the smartphone app, allows the wearer to display tweets, Facebook statuses, and pictures. Celebs are even getting on the wearable tech bandwagon; Nicole Scherzinger wore a dress made of silk, Swarovski crystals, and 2,000 LED lights that displayed tweets in real time when the hashtag #tweetthedress was used. For more on the future of fashion, check out this slideshow (you really should, there's some pretty cool stuff in there).