I recently spent the weekend up in the lakes region of New Hampshire, and made the rounds of all the various country stores and craft shops that are a staple of the area. In one shop, I noticed something I hadn’t seen in a long time: a large set of Russian nesting dolls. The quality, craftsmanship, and level of detail were impressive. As I removed the cover on the first intricately painted doll, nestled inside was the next, slightly smaller one, a duplicate of the outer doll, with all of the same detail on a slightly smaller scale. As I continued opening each successive doll, revealing the next smaller duplicate, I started looking for discrepancies, loss of detail in the duplication as I dove recursively into smaller and smaller dolls. The quality and attention to detail, even at the smallest level, remained for each of the dolls. Each doll was a representation of information, just on different levels and scales.
Microservices are a very exciting architectural approach that many organizations are looking to as a way to accelerate innovation. Microservices promise to allow teams to move away from monolithic "ball of mud" systems, but the reality is that, in the vast majority of organizations, different projects and technologies will continue to be developed at different speeds. How to handle the dependencies between these disparate systems with different iteration cycles? Consider the "canoncial problem" in this scenario: microservice A (releases daily) depends on a couple of additions to backend B (releases quarterly).
It’s a given that employee access to corporate systems should be both as secure and simple as possible. Up until recently however, time-strapped CIOs, under pressure from demanding staff and challenged with authenticating users all over the world on multiple devices, have been torn between relying on the fatally flawed password or hard token two-factor authentication (2FA) to keep their systems secure.
In today’s pharmaceutical supply chain, counterfeit activity is thriving. As pharma companies have expanded target markets and outsourced production over the last decade, the supply chain has become increasingly global, virtual, and vulnerable. Illicit activity has thrived, and patients have suffered, with hundreds of thousands dying each year from counterfeit and contaminated drugs. More than 40 countries have responded with new laws that regulate prescription medications as they travel through the supply chain. While this is a quantum leap forward for patient health, the implications for supply chain stakeholders, from pharmaceutical companies and their contract manufacturing partners to the pharmacies that serve patients are daunting: they must master each country’s disparate track and trace requirements; create a system architecture capable of generating, managing, and storing what will be unprecedented volumes of regulated data; and figure out how to efficiently exchange that data with hundreds to tens of thousands of direct and indirect supply chain partners.
Container technology is shaping the future of DevOps and it’s also changing the way organizations think about application development. With the rise of mobile applications in the enterprise, businesses are abandoning year-long development cycles and embracing technologies that enable rapid development and continuous deployment of apps. In his session at DevOps Summit, Kurt Collins, Developer Evangelist at Built.io, examined how Docker has evolved into a highly effective tool for application delivery by allowing increasingly popular Mobile Backend-as-a-Service (mBaaS) platforms to quickly create and scale enterprise apps across mobile, web and IoT.
Culture is the most important ingredient of DevOps. The challenge for most organizations is defining and communicating a vision of beneficial DevOps culture for their organizations, and then facilitating the changes needed to achieve that. Often this comes down to an ability to provide true leadership. As a CIO, are your direct reports IT managers or are they IT leaders? The hard truth is that many IT managers have risen through the ranks based on their technical skills, not their leadership ability. Many are unable to effectively engage and inspire, creating forward momentum in the direction of desired change. Renowned for its approach to leadership and emphasis on their people, organizations increasingly look to our military for insight into these challenges.
The Internet of Everything is re-shaping technology trends–moving away from “request/response” architecture to an “always-on” Streaming Web where data is in constant motion and secure, reliable communication is an absolute necessity. As more and more THINGS go online, the challenges that developers will need to address will only increase exponentially. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Todd Greene, Founder & CEO of PubNub, exploreed the current state of IoT connectivity and review key trends and technology requirements that will drive the Internet of Things from hype to reality.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Alert Logic, Inc., the leading provider of Security-as-a-Service solutions for the cloud, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Alert Logic, Inc., provides Security-as-a-Service for on-premises, cloud, and hybrid infrastructures, delivering deep security insight and continuous protection for customers at a lower cost than traditional security solutions. Fully managed by a team of experts, the Alert Logic Security-as-a-Service solution provides network, system and web application protection immediately, wherever your IT infrastructure resides.
I recently attended and was a speaker at the 4th International Internet of @ThingsExpo at the Santa Clara Convention Center. I also had the opportunity to attend this event last year and I wrote a blog from that show talking about how the “Enterprise Impact of IoT” was a key theme of last year’s show. I was curious to see if the same theme would still resonate 365 days later and what, if any, changes I would see in the content presented.
In his General Session at 17th Cloud Expo, Bruce Swann, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Adobe Campaign, explored the key ingredients of cross-channel marketing in a digital world. Learn how the Adobe Marketing Cloud can help marketers embrace opportunities for personalized, relevant and real-time customer engagement across offline (direct mail, point of sale, call center) and digital (email, website, SMS, mobile apps, social networks, connected objects).
With major technology companies and startups seriously embracing IoT strategies, now is the perfect time to attend @ThingsExpo 2016 in New York and Silicon Valley. Learn what is going on, contribute to the discussions, and ensure that your enterprise is as "IoT-Ready" as it can be! Internet of @ThingsExpo, taking place Nov 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, is co-located with 17th Cloud Expo and will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world. The Internet of Things (IoT) is the most profound change in personal and enterprise IT since the creation of the Worldwide Web more than 20 years ago. All major researchers estimate there will be tens of billions devices - computers, smartphones, tablets, and sensors - connected to the Internet by 2020. This number will continue to grow at a rapid pace for the next several decades.
The pervasiveness of software is driving the dynamics of business transactions everywhere. We live in a time of a highly competitive and truly global economy where the question being answered among businesses now is “who can innovate the fastest?” To keep pace with the increasing velocity of software updated being introduced to the market, enterprises embrace DevOps and Continuous Delivery practices, along with implementing a fully-automated software delivery process, in order to keep up with the demand to go faster.
It is no surprise that OpenStack has evolved into a widely adopted cloud management framework. As it hurtles on a trajectory of rapid growth, a new breed of demands are making themselves felt – demands that a mature platform of this nature and scope must satisfy. One such requirement is the ability to monitor traffic flowing in the myriad of virtual networks found in an OpenStack datacenter. Conceptually speaking, the monitoring process involves placing tap devices at appropriate locations within the network infrastructure and attaching traffic analyzers to them. These analyzers can then see the same packets passing through those network segments, as if they were also in-line. A logical tap device can be easily constructed using the port-mirroring function of a network switching element, which makes it possible to have a copy of the packets traversing one or more switch ports delivered to another port on the same switch. This capability is supported by almost all modern physical and virtual switches. So, why is it [still] not possible to monitor the activity in OpenStack virtual networks?
Telecommunications giant Sprint places an emphasis on orchestration and automation to bring IT culture and infrastructure into readiness for cloud, software-defined data center and DevOps. Learn how Sprint has made IT infrastructure orchestration and automation a pillar of its strategic IT architecture future from Chris Saunderson, Program Manager and Lead Architect for Data Center Automation at Sprint in Kansas City, Missouri. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
My father used to tell me that the key to success in life was to look people in the eye and give them a firm handshake. But the art of the handshake seems to have died in my generation. I grew up in the era of high fives, forearm smashes and fist pumps. I played baseball, so there were also a lot of butt pats, (but let’s not go into that). It seems like the importance of handshakes and eye-to-eye contact have diminished even further in my daughter’s generation. Every day I watch her friends look down at their smartphones while texting each other “omg hi bff” as they greet each other at school or at the mall.
The combined notions of open source and the ‘community contribution’ model of collaborative software application development are, of course, not new. The history of open source is actually traced back to early software exchanges between universities driven by academic principles of knowledge sharing in the 1960s. Sometime afterwards (August 25, 1991), Finnish computer scientist Linus Torvalds created Linux… and the rest is history.
The cloud. Like a comic book superhero, there seems to be no problem it can’t fix or cost it can’t slash. Yet making the transition is not always easy and production environments are still largely on premise. Taking some practical and sensible steps to reduce risk can also help provide a basis for a successful cloud transition. A plethora of surveys from the likes of IDG and Gartner show that more than 70 percent of enterprises have deployed at least one or more cloud application or workload. Yet a closer inspection at the data reveals less than half of these cloud projects involve production workloads, which suggests there is still apprehension in moving towards utilizing cloud for critical core infrastructure.
Regardless of perspective, everyone agrees that ensuring high-quality software isn’t solely the job of a “QA department.” It requires the collaboration of every discipline in the software development and delivery lifecycle from the inception of business requirements to the administration of the application in production -- and every point in between. Sure, testers test, developers build, business analysts develop requirements and the service desk helps users overcome issues, but it’s the interaction of these groups that drives quality into the application. And interestingly, the interaction of these groups tends to center on development artifacts such as defects and requirements.
NetBeans 6.0 Beta 2 is now available for download. Beta 2 comes bundled with MySQL and PostgreSQL drivers, and improvements to Ruby code completion and Woodstock 4.1 Build 14. The focus of NetBeans 6.0 is superior developer productivity with a smarter, faster editor, and the integration of all NetBeans products into one IDE.
NetBeans 6.0 Beta 2 is now available for download. Beta 2 comes bundled with MySQL and PostgreSQL drivers, and improvements to Ruby code completion and Woodstock 4.1 Build 14. The focus of NetBeans 6.0 is superior developer productivity with a smarter, faster editor, and the integration of all NetBeans products into one IDE.
Today air travel is a minefield of delays, hassles and customer disappointment. Airlines struggle to revitalize the experience. GE and M2Mi will demonstrate practical examples of how IoT solutions are helping airlines bring back personalization, reduce trip time and improve reliability. In their session at @ThingsExpo, Shyam Varan Nath, Principal Architect with GE, and Dr. Sarah Cooper, M2Mi’s VP Business Development and Engineering, explored the IoT cloud-based platform technologies driving this change including privacy controls, data transparency and integration of real time context with predictive analytics. They concluded with a look forward to tomorrow’s Smart Airports where airlines use connected baggage to predict plane fuel levels, security is ubiquitous and your seat remembers you.
As cloud computing continues to grow in importance, enterprises are now facing a new realization. In their almost rampant embrace of cost savings associated with public cloud, many are just now understanding the information technology governance challenge posed by vastly different traditional and cloud computing operational models. Often referred to as hybrid IT, supporting both models has left many executives trying to cope with a lack of hybrid IT operational experience. Challenges can also include security concerns, financial management changes and even dramatic cultural changes. This myriad of challenges translate into enterprise risk across multiple levels, namely:
The quickest way to understand Big Data is to visualize it. Big Data is the billions of call detail records that surround every phone call you make or data message you send. It is the masses and masses of DNA sequencing analyzed to discover biomedical breakthroughs. It is the millions of individual transactions that pass through a retailer's point of sale platforms every day. And it is the billions of financial transactions that personal, commercial and corporate customers execute through financial services systems.
Cloud computing delivers on-demand resources that provide businesses with flexibility and cost-savings. The challenge in moving workloads to the cloud has been the cost and complexity of ensuring the initial and ongoing security and regulatory (PCI, HIPAA, FFIEC) compliance across private and public clouds. Manual security compliance is slow, prone to human error, and represents over 50% of the cost of managing cloud applications. Determining how to automate cloud security compliance is critical to maintaining positive ROI. Raxak Protect is an automated security compliance SaaS platform and managed service, that enables cloud apps to be deployed securely, quickly, cost-effectively, and without human error.
As we’ve seen, each team required to deliver on an IoT product is inherently different from the others. Because of this, friction naturally occurs when the three teams must coordinate their integration and system test. If this friction – and possible failure points between the separate processes – is not minimized, releases would inevitably get delayed, and the product’s quality will suffer.