SYS-CON Events announced today that CA Technologies has been named "Platinum Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and 21st International Cloud Expo, which will take place in November in Silicon Valley, California.
One of my favorite parts of the novel The Phoenix Project is when Bill Palmer, DevOps hero and VP of IT Operations for the fictional company “Parts Unlimited” has a light bulb moment about the central importance of IT to the business. The moment comes as the company’s CFO lays out for Bill how he strives to align the goals of his department with the goals of the business. It’s here Bill starts to realize he must take a similar approach with IT. He ultimately turns to data about his delivery process to improve IT’s effectiveness and save his team from outsourcing—and a DevOps team is born.
Cognitive Computing is becoming the foundation for a new generation of solutions that have the potential to transform business. Unlike traditional approaches to building solutions, a cognitive computing approach allows the data to help determine the way applications are designed. This contrasts with conventional software development that begins with defining logic based on the current way a business operates. In her session at 18th Cloud Expo, Judith S. Hurwitz, President and CEO of Hurwitz & Associates, Inc., put cognitive computing into perspective with its value to the business. The session detailed what it takes to build a cognitive application and the types of solutions that are the best fit for this data-driven approach.
In a recent research, analyst firm IDC found that the average cost of a critical application failure is $500,000 to $1 million per hour and the average total cost of unplanned application downtime is $1.25 billion to $2.5 billion per year for Fortune 1000 companies. In addition to the findings on the cost of the downtime, the research also highlighted best practices for development, testing, application support, infrastructure, and operations teams.
As cloud adoption continues to transform business, today's global enterprises are challenged with managing a growing amount of information living outside of the data center. The rapid adoption of IoT and increasingly mobile workforce are exacerbating the problem. Ensuring secure data sharing and efficient backup poses capacity and bandwidth considerations as well as policy and regulatory compliance issues.
DevOps is all the rage these days and with good reason as it promises to reduce the time-to-market for new applications. It also promises to improve change management, allowing teams to deploy changes to their applications quickly and efficiently. However, DevOps isn’t something you buy, install, or implement; rather it is the symptom of an appropriate organizational system. In his session at DevOps Summit, Mark Thiele, EVP, Data Center Technologies at SUPERNAP International, discussed how to get to the right organizational model that will allow DevOps practices to flourish.
SYS-CON Events announced today that LeaseWeb USA, a cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider, will exhibit at the 19th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. LeaseWeb is one of the world's largest hosting brands. The company helps customers define, develop and deploy IT infrastructure tailored to their exact business needs, by combining various kinds cloud solutions.
FinTech is the sum of financial and technology, and it’s one of the fastest growing tech industries. Total global investments in FinTech almost reached $50 billion last year, but there is still a great deal of confusion over what it is and what it means – especially as it applies to retirement. Building financial startups is not simple, but with the right team, technology and an innovative approach it can be an extremely interesting domain to disrupt. FinTech heralds a financial revolution that is for everyone. Ideally, it’s cloud-based, consumer friendly and offers education in a consumable manner with mobility and portability.
It wasn't too long ago that cloud computing had more detractors than supporters. Companies (especially in the enterprise world) just weren't ready to relinquish control of applications and business processes. And yet, the light of cloud benefits has slowly drawn the business world in as SaaS apps and cloud infrastructure become entrenched in IT. The benefits of cloud migration are great, but you have to be ready for the challenges that come along as well. Don't be blinded by the cloud migration light.
You often hear the two titles of "DevOps" and "Immutable Infrastructure" used independently. In his session at DevOps Summit, John Willis, Technical Evangelist for Docker, covered the union between the two topics and why this is important. He provided an overview of Immutable Infrastructure then showed how an Immutable Continuous Delivery pipeline can be applied as a best practice for "DevOps." He ended the session with some interesting case study examples.
Cyberthreats have become more sophisticated over the years, improving methods to take advantage of software information and even completely shut down systems to hold data ransom. As a result, developers and testers must be able to ensure that their programs have the necessary protections in place to prevent attacks and keep business information safe. Here are a few tips to help teams address security measures during testing.
More and more brands have jumped on the IoT bandwagon. We have an excess of wearables – activity trackers, smartwatches, smart glasses and sneakers, and more that track seemingly endless datapoints. However, most consumers have no idea what “IoT” means. Creating more wearables that track data shouldn't be the aim of brands; delivering meaningful, tangible relevance to their users should be. We're in a period in which the IoT pendulum is still swinging. Initially, it swung toward "smart for smart's sake," and many brands remain in that corner. But many brands are also gradually opting for more strategic approaches. They're taking a breath and stepping back to examine both existing and potential IoT experiences, asking themselves whether their products lend real value. Once we reach this goal, the implications for personalization are staggering. Consumers will expect devices they use and items they wear to be connected and add value to their lives. We'll expect scales to weigh us, assess our body fat, and sync with our mobile device for personalized recommendations. Connected devices will be just another touchpoint in our increasingly digital lives. As a result, we'll have the data, personalized touchpoints, and context to achieve great success with spot-on relevance that continues to evolve.
20th Cloud Expo, taking place June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world. Cloud computing is now being embraced by a majority of enterprises of all sizes. Yesterday's debate about public vs. private has transformed into the reality of hybrid cloud: a recent survey shows that 74% of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy.
An overall theme of Cloud computing and the specific practices within it is fundamentally one of automation. The core value of technology is to continually automate low level procedures to free up people to work on more value add activities, ultimately leading to the utopian goal of full Autonomic Computing. For example a great way to define your plan for DevOps tool chain adoption is through this lens. In this TechTarget article they outline a simple maturity model for planning this.
Make room for IoT. It’s a necessary step to moving any business forward. What can the world expect from IoT technology in the upcoming year? IoT implementations that bring in new revenue streams and deliver real-time business insights. We’ll see a rising trend in the intersect of virtualization and IoT. As the number of connected things continues to rise, it has been projected to reach 50.1 billion things in 2020, and there is estimated to be 44 trillion gigabytes of data from all those connected things—that’s equal to the number of stars in the universe. It’s incredible! As the number of connected things continues to rise, it has been projected to reach 50.1 billion things in 2020, and there is estimated to be 44 trillion gigabytes of data from all those connected things—that’s equal to the number of stars in the universe. It’s incredible!
The IoT industry is now at a crossroads, between the fast-paced innovation of technologies and the pending mass adoption by global enterprises. The complexity of combining rapidly evolving technologies and the need to establish practices for market acceleration pose a strong challenge to global enterprises as well as IoT vendors. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Clark Smith, senior product manager for Numerex, discussed how Numerex, as an experienced, established IoT provider, has embraced a new model to address this challenge – IoT as a Service
The speed of software changes in growing and large scale rapid-paced DevOps environments presents a challenge for continuous testing. Many organizations struggle to get this right. Practices that work for small scale continuous testing may not be sufficient as the requirements grow. In his session at DevOps Summit, Marc Hornbeek, Sr. Solutions Architect of DevOps continuous test solutions at Spirent Communications, explained the best practices of continuous testing at high scale, which is relevant to small scale DevOps, and if there is an expectation of growth as the number of build targets, test topologies and delivery topologies that need to be orchestrated rapidly grow.
In his General Session at 16th Cloud Expo, David Shacochis, host of The Hybrid IT Files podcast and Vice President at CenturyLink, investigated three key trends of the “gigabit economy" though the story of a Fortune 500 communications company in transformation. Narrating how multi-modal hybrid IT, service automation, and agile delivery all intersect, he will cover the role of storytelling and empathy in achieving strategic alignment between the enterprise and its information technology.
The Software Defined Data Center (SDDC), which enables organizations to seamlessly run in a hybrid cloud model (public + private cloud), is here to stay. IDC estimates that the software-defined networking market will be valued at $3.7 billion by 2016. Security is a key component and benefit of the SDDC, and offers an opportunity to build security 'from the ground up' and weave it into the environment from day one. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Reuven Harrison, CTO and Co-Founder of Tufin, will discuss the main security considerations enterprises face when rolling out SDDCs and how they can harness key functionality of a virtual environment to achieve more granular security controls across hybrid environments.
While DevOps most critically and famously fosters collaboration, communication, and integration through cultural change, culture is more of an output than an input. In order to actively drive cultural evolution, organizations must make substantial organizational and process changes, and adopt new technologies, to encourage a DevOps culture. Moderated by Andi Mann, panelists discussed how to balance these three pillars of DevOps, where to focus attention (and resources), where organizations might slip up with the wrong focus, how to manage change and risk in all three areas, what is possible and what is not, where to start, and especially how new structures, processes, and technologies can help drive a new DevOps culture.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, we are not entering a new era of technology. We’re already there. We are living in the midst of one of the most disruptive periods in enterprise IT, and cloud is the leading catalyst. There are several trends marking this dramatic transition in 2017, five of which warrant close scrutiny. Public cloud use continues to grow at hyper-scale. A global survey from Accenture of nearly 1,900 executives across 15 industries reveals massive growth in public cloud. In the study, four out of five executives indicated that they intend to move more of their operations to the cloud within the next several years.
Digital transformation is a process, not a destination. It’s a fundamental reshaping of an organization’s culture that reorients it around the customer experience, business value and constant change. It’s not about executing a ‘digital transformation project’ and finding a new normal. The essence of digital transformation is the destruction of the static state. This essence is a challenging concept to grasp, ironically, because while we talk about digital transformation, we do it through an industrial era filter. It’s difficult to imagine a change of state this fundamental, so it’s easier to put in a box we understand.
The IT industry is positioned to experience major technology shifts within the next few years as a result of the rise of cloud adoption. According to Gartner, more than $1 trillion in IT spending will be affected by the shift to the cloud by 2020 – making cloud computing “one of the most disruptive forces of IT spending since the early days of the digital age.” As enterprises prepare for, or continue to run on, the cloud, it is important for them to have a strong grasp of the cloud adoption process and the requirements for ongoing management of cloud environments. Here are five major trends that will shake up the industry in 2017.
In just the past ten or so years, consumer devices have swamped enterprises. Along with those devices have come apps and services and the expectation of ease and convenience from technology. The consumerization of IT is more than just the need to support and monitor personal devices on the enterprise network. It's a mindset shift among your employees that's silently impacted the IT department.
The rapid growth of hyperscale IaaS platforms that provide Serverless and Software management automation services is changing how enterprises can get better Cloud ROI. Heightened security concerns and enabling developer productivity are strategic issues for 2017. The emergence of hyper-scale Infrastructure as-a-Service (IaaS) platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) that offer Serverless computing, DevOps automation and large-scale data management capabilities is changing the economics of software consumption. As SaaS vendors as well as SaaS customers start to operate on the same IaaS platform, why have the enterprise data sit in someone else’ virtual cloud environment? Why pay for the data twice?