In the ESG Research Report, “2015 IT Spending Intentions Survey,” IT professionals list improving backup and recovery, managing data growth and using cloud infrastructure services as top IT priorities over the next 12 months. So it is no surprise that cloud-based disaster recovery (DR), business continuity and backup initiatives solutions are under close examination by many companies. Hybrid cloud backup and continuity solutions, in particular, have a variety of benefits that can greatly enhance the depth and breadth of protection for businesses that need to stay up and running through all sorts of downtime challenges. It’s now possible for a single backup and recovery solution to protect data locally and have multiple backup copies stored in various cloud locations. Local protection allows firms to have backups cached near IT for rapid recovery of minor issues, such as an accidentally deleted email. Storing multiple copies in the cloud provides geo-redundant disaster protection and failsafe long-term retention. While this was possible previously, the most powerful cloud recovery solutions today do this automatically and at a cost far cheaper than most companies can do it themselves.
There's no doubt that there's a lot more "connected things" these days and that means a lot more data. Specifically, technology is moving out of the consumer's hands and into Healthcare, Oil & Gas, Transportation, Aviation and more. The spread of smart devices and sensors creates new forms of value and brings challenges for enterprises seeking to exploit this technology. However, while this boom in data has the potential to advance the industrial space in ways never before thought possible, few companies today have the right technologies in place or the right business models that can truly utilize the power of IoT.
Cloud computing is being adopted in one form or another by 94% of enterprises today. Tens of billions of new devices are being connected to The Internet of Things. And Big Data is driving this bus. An exponential increase is expected in the amount of information being processed, managed, analyzed, and acted upon by enterprise IT. This amazing is not part of some distant future - it is happening today. One report shows a 650% increase in enterprise data by 2020. Other estimates are even higher. Big Data at Cloud Expo East is the place where you can see the technologies and use cases that are delivering Big Data to enterprise IT.
With microservices, SOA and distributed architectures becoming more popular, it is becoming increasingly harder to keep track of where time is spent in a distributed application when trying to diagnose performance problems. Distributed tracing systems attempt to address this problem by following application requests across service boundaries, persisting metadata along the way that provide context for fine-grained performance monitoring.
Web performance issues and advances have been gaining a stronger presence in the headlines as people are becoming more aware of its impact on virtually every business, and 2015 was no exception. We saw a myriad of major outages this year hit some of the biggest corporations, as well as some technology integrations and other news that we IT Ops aficionados find very exciting. This past year has offered several opportunities for growth and evolution in the performance realm — even the worst failures presented valuable lessons to be carried into the New Year. So before we dive headfirst into 2016, let’s take a quick look back at Catchpoint’s top blog posts of 2015.
Most of the Java developers I know don’t like JavaScript. Initially. They would give you different reasons why, but the real one is simple: too much to learn to make it work. For many Java developers creating the front end of a Web application in JavaScript is a chore to write and a burden to maintain. Nevertheless JavaScript rules in Web development and the new version of JavaScript (ES6) will make it even more popular.
The WebRTC Summit 2016 New York, to be held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, announces that its Call for Papers is now open. Topics include all aspects of improving IT delivery by eliminating waste through automated business models leveraging cloud technologies. WebRTC Summit is co-located with 18th International Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo. WebRTC is the future of browser-to-browser communications, and continues to make inroads into the traditional, difficult, plug-in web communications world.
It seems that all we hear about these days is the move to the cloud. Certainly, it’s a top-trending technology topic for enterprise-sized organizations. But don’t let the hype mislead you into believing cloud deployment is just for large businesses. Small- to medium-sized organizations can absolutely reap the benefits of cloud. In fact if you’re an SMB, you have even more to gain from cloud deployment – and you run a real risk of missing out by not going to the cloud. According to a September 2014 study by Deloitte, SMBs using an above-average number of cloud services grow 26 percent faster on average than those that don’t use cloud tools, and are more profitable by 21 percent on average.
Are you someone who knows that the number one rule in DevOps is “Don’t Panic”? Especially when it comes to making Continuous Delivery changes inside your organization? Are you someone that theorizes that if anyone implements real automation changes, the solution will instantly become antiquated and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable?
When it comes to protecting their brand, there is little that any successful company would not do. But what if the brand is being damaged just by people being unable to find the store? If you think of the internet as a virtual network, then DNS lookup and resolution is like the 411 service. Websites are not located at text addresses, but rather IP addresses – that series of numbers and decimals that may not make any sense to you, but actually identifies the actual server that you’re trying to contact. So when you type www.catchpoint.com into your web browser or click on a link to it from a Google search page, the first thing that your browser must do is find out where exactly that is.
Most people haven’t heard the word, “gamification,” even though they probably, and perhaps unwittingly, participate in it every day. Gamification is “the process of adding games or game-like elements to something (as a task) so as to encourage participation.” Further, gamification is about bringing game mechanics – rules, constructs, processes, and methods – into the real world in an effort to engage people. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Robert Endo, owner and engagement manager of Intrepid Data, discussed how wearables, analytics, and geospatial technologies can be combined to transform the world into the ultimate game board. Organizations can grasp consumer, employee, or client intrinsic interest by setting up cool, collaborative, and rewarding systems using the IoT.
I recently spotted a five-year-old blog post by Mike Gualtieri of Forrester, where he suggests firing your quality assurance (QA) team to improve your quality. He got the idea from a client who actually tried and succeeded with this counterintuitive move. The thinking goes that without a QA team to cover for them, developers are more likely to take care of quality properly – or risk getting the dreaded Sunday morning wakeup call to fix something. Gualtieri’s post generated modest buzz at the time, but since 2011 the world has changed. DevOps has turned a corner, representing an end-to-end rethink of how organizations handle the entire software development lifecycle. Now that 2016 has finally arrived, it’s time to take a fresh look at the question. But why stop with QA? Now that we have DevOps – and digital transformation more broadly – whom else can we fire?
The web community is constantly churning out new technologies that make it easier to develop the applications that savvy users are demanding. It may be obvious, but new technologies often require new ways of thinking about testing – sometimes new tools, other times entirely new testing methods. You just can’t rely on the same old same old when things change as much as the web does.
Today on #c9d9 we talked about best practices for orchestrating enterprise software testing. Delivering software faster, but with lower quality, doesn’t help you win in the market. What are some of the challenges and proven tips and patterns used to test critical software – across all the different supported platforms – quickly and efficiently?
Fujitsu and Grid Dynamics have teamed up to create the Cloud Commerce Platform to empower retailers with best-of-breed hardware, software and services for faster digital innovation. Retailers are under immense pressure to innovate faster. Working with them over the years, we have come to intimately understand their challenges. With the explosion of digital touch points and the expectation of a unified experience throughout a shopper's journey across the channels, retailers must innovate at an unprecedented pace while performing flawlessly even as traffic peaks.
In the late 1990's Tom Standage released the first edition of a book that would sweep across the tech community because of its incredible analogies to the rise of the Internet hitting the world at that time. The "Victorian Internet", first released in 1998, was updated and re-released again in 2013. It provided a well written history and meaningful assessment of the rise of the Telegraph, and made very interesting observations about how the remarkable impact of the Telegraph could help us all think through what may happen as the Internet progressed.
Over the past couple of years IoT has become the most hyped word around the world, and rightly so because we all know IoT is here to stay. So what is IoT? IoT stands for the Internet of Things. It refers to the devices that are connected through the internet. The basic concept is connecting any device with an on and off switch to the Internet, devices such as cell phones, wearable devices, coffee machines, connected homes even your refrigerator and all those things you can think of. We have collected a list of factors that will demonstrate how rapidly this sector is growing, and some mind-boggling numbers to prove that IoT (Internet of Things) is here to stay for a very long time.
SYS-CON Events announced today that AppNeta, the leader in performance insight for business-critical web applications, will exhibit and present at SYS-CON's @DevOpsSummit at Cloud Expo New York, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. AppNeta is the only application performance monitoring (APM) company to provide solutions for all applications – applications you develop internally, business-critical SaaS applications you use and the networks that deliver them.
I have known Gartner for decades during my IBM and Oracle days. Even though I have observed how they invent new terms for stuff we already know (a bit annoying, but I guess that’s their business), they do a decent job in capturing key strategic trends. In a recent article, I saw ten strategic technology trends and this is how they are grouped: the first three address merging the physical and the virtual worlds and the emergence of the digital mesh (their new phrase); the next three trends cover the algorithmic business, where much happens in the background in which people are not directly involved; the final four trends address the new architecture and platform trends needed to support the digital and algorithmic business.
DevOps will play a major role in 2016 simply because DevOps is all about savings which is fundamentally different from the traditionally IT budgeted projects; without DevOps the dollars are anyway drained for nothing because the teams are working in silos which leads to the delay due to inter dependency, poor code quality, too much of un-warranted hand overs, post deployment issues, inconsistent environment, non-availability of infra structural resources etc as per Forrester research 60% of application failure & downtime are related to releases despite 75% of IT operation time spent on release management.
In a recent weekend edition of the #CIOChat tweetchat, the question was raised about what the CIO's role would look like in five years. The discussion focused on many different areas. One area was that the CIO would become more of a service broker, as more and more applications move to the cloud. The responsibility discussion becomes less about controlling / owning iron / hardware / space, which has been the traditional area of CIO responsibilities. This prompted a secondary question from me: Has the cloud industry reached the point where it is too big to fail? Granted none of the big players in the cloud show any signs of financial trouble, but there was a time when the auto industry and the banking industry could say the same. Have we reached that tipping point? Has the cloud industry become too big to fail and, if it has, what is the impact?
If you were too busy with things and unable to give the desired attention to planning the right steps for your business in 2016, fear not. You’re not alone, and yes welcome to the party! With too many things going on, I could completely believe if you said you don’t have time to breathe. The boss wants the reports, the customer wants the installation while the sales teams have been asking for help on some technical stuff. You can only do as much as you do. With so much going around us, it’s also sometimes hard to keep up with what really matters. Here is how to achieve planned success in this New Year and with no room for excuses.
Actifio has announced its partnership with Camouflage Software Inc., a leading provider of solutions for data masking in Test Data Management. The partnership brings a best-in-class solution to address the challenges of data access, control, security, and storage costs in the test and development space. "Software is eating the world," as Marc Andreessen famously said in 2011. Since then, more and more industries have been transformed by software, to the point where the largest distributor of films has no theaters (Netflix,) the largest provider of delivery services has no cars (Uber,) the largest renter of rooms owns no hotels (Airbnb). Software - especially the development of company-specific applications and platforms with the power to create sustainable advantage and even transform entire industries - has become a critical lever of business strategy in even the most unlikely business segments. Meanwhile, physical and technical infrastructure, the source of differentiated capability for decades, if not centuries, is increasingly seen as a commodity to be accessed at the lowest possible cost. "Software is eating the world," as Marc Andreessen famously said in 2011. Since then, more and more industries have been transformed by software, to the point where the largest distributor of films has no theaters (Netflix,) the largest provider of delivery services has no cars (Uber,) the largest renter of rooms owns no hotels (Airbnb). Software - especially the development of company-specific applications and platforms with the power to create sustainable advantage and even transform entire industries - has become a critical lever of business strategy in even the most unlikely business segments. Meanwhile, physical and technical infrastructure, the source of differentiated capability for decades, if not centuries, is increasingly seen as a commodity to be accessed at the lowest possible cost.
As 2016 has arrived, we reflect upon one of the most debated issues around DevOps in 2015 – Information Security (InfoSec) and compliance. Needless to say, both are critical to an enterprise (especially given past examples of data breaches and looming cybersecurity threats). As a result, the combination of InfoSec and DevOps practices can be viewed as counter-intuitive, since the ability to “go faster” can be seen as a potential risk to security mechanisms in place, and thus harder to ensure compliance and enable auditability.
We started our Continuous Discussions (#c9d9) video podcast in late 2014 as a way for the DevOps community to connect with each others – sharing experiences, lessons learned and tips – to accelerate our mutual success.Each #c9d9 episode focuses on a different topic relating to your software delivery process, and features different speakers from around the development and IT community. Every two weeks, we get together for a casual video chat (over Hangout) to share best practices – and war stories – relating to real-world examples of implementing Agile, DevOps and Continuous Delivery.