So you want to centralize your enterprise? Smart choice – but it’s important to take some factors into consideration if you want to have success. Developers need to ensure representation from each geographic location; understand current development processes and tools; and comprehend the biggest challenges. Furthermore, you need to be aware of, and sensitive to, your project teams' preferences for existing tools and aversion to change.
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.
In his General Session at DevOps Summit, Asaf Yigal, Co-Founder & VP of Product at Logz.io, explored the value of Kibana 4 for log analysis and provided a hands-on tutorial on how to set up Kibana 4 and get the most out of Apache log files. He examined three use cases: IT operations, business intelligence, and security and compliance. Asaf Yigal is co-founder and VP of Product at log analytics software company Logz.io. In the past, he was co-founder of social-trading platform Currensee, which was later acquired by OANDA. He was also an early employee of server performance-monitoring company Akorri and storage resource-management startup Onaro, both of which were acquired by NetApp (NTAP). He graduated from the Techion - the Israeli version of MIT - and he later created an AI algorithm on naval warfare for the Israeli military.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Wi-Fi has become a necessity of the digital age, and like everything, everyone loves it even more when it is free. Whether it’s used to access a presentation at a new client meeting, to host a video conference call, or edit and email important documents, public Wi-Fi means nearly anywhere can become an office. Couple this with the fact that there are as many mobile devices on the planet as there are people, and businesses now have the most flexible and tech-saturated workforce in history. However, public Wi-Fi networks, by their very nature, are a hotbed for silent cyber attacks, as a business’s sophisticated security systems won’t have any affect on them to protect users.
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?”
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.
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.
People want to get going with DevOps or Continuous Delivery, but need a place to start. Others are already on their way, but need some validation of their choices. A few months ago, I published the first volume of DevOps and Continuous Delivery reference architectures which has now been viewed over 50,000 times on SlideShare (it's free to download...no registration required). Three things helped people in the deck: (1) the reference architectures, (2) links to the sources for each architecture attached to each slide, and (3) no marketing fluff.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Intuit uses deep-data analytics to gain a 360-degree view of its TurboTax application's users’ behavior and preferences for rapid applications improvements. The next BriefingsDirect big-data innovation case study highlights how Intuit uses deep-data analytics to gain a 360-degree view of its TurboTax application's users’ behavior and preferences. Such visibility allows for rapid applications improvements and enables the TurboTax user experience to be tailored to a highly detailed degree.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.