In large enterprises, environment provisioning and server provisioning account for a significant portion of the operations team's time. This often leaves users frustrated while they wait for these services. For instance, server provisioning can take several days and sometimes even weeks. At the same time, digital transformation means the need for server and environment provisioning is constantly growing. Organizations are adopting agile methodologies and software teams are increasing the speed of their development processes, thus requiring more and more servers and environments to be provisioned for their development and testing.
HyperConvergence came to market with the objective of being simple, flexible and to help drive down operating expenses. It reduced the footprint by bundling the compute/storage/network into one box. This brought a new set of challenges as the HyperConverged vendors are very focused on their own proprietary building blocks. If you want to scale in a certain way, let’s say you identified a need for more storage and want to add a device that is not sold by the HyperConverged vendor, forget about it. This meant that up to now the HyperConverged vendors were in charge of the requirements.
There’s no shortage of material about DevOps on the Interwebs. But as you sift through mountains of information, it appears mostly skewed toward better and faster web and mobile app development. Look for details on how the thinking can be applied to the wicked world of data science or analytics and you’ll be hard pressed to find much at all. This seems odd, because a sustainable business isn’t just carved out on the back of web and mobile apps. It’s also dependent on intimately understanding customer data and pivoting towards the opportunities revealed – with yes, web and mobile apps.
SYS-CON Events announced today that StorageCraft Technology Corp, a global leader in backup and disaster recovery, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. The StorageCraft family of companies, founded in 2003, provides award-winning backup, disaster recovery, system migration and data protection solutions for servers, desktops and laptops in addition to powerful data analytics.
The DevOps pipeline is constantly changing. Therefore relevant security controls must be applied contextually. We want to be secure, but I think all of us would rather spend our time developing and deploying software. Keeping up with server updates and all of the other security tasks is like cleaning your home - you know it has to be done, but you really just want to enjoy your clean home. The good news is you can hire a "service" to keep your application security up-to-date, giving you more time to develop. At the recent All Day DevOps conference, Akash Mahajan (@makash), a Founder/Director at Appsecco, discussed how to harden your system's security with Ansible. In addition to his role at Appsecco, Akash is also involved as a local leader with the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP).
Most companies are adopting or evaluating container technology - Docker in particular - to speed up application deployment, drive down cost, ease management and make application delivery more flexible overall. As with most new architectures, this dream takes a lot of work to become a reality. Even when you do get your application componentized enough and packaged properly, there are still challenges for DevOps teams to making the shift to continuous delivery and achieving that reduction in cost and increase in speed.
Information Technology has advanced in different areas at different speeds. This has always been true, as people found workable solutions to the problems that faced them today, most often before there was a market for those solutions. While things like virtualization and eventually cloud computing grew slowly, programming languages sat at the same point for around a decade before the current round of new languages and approaches—Python, Ruby, Node, Swift—came about. These things seem unrelated, but there is a union of the two sets of changes that we are about to see blossom.
These days attacks are becoming more sophisticated and more common. Mobile devices, cloud computing and the Internet of Things have increased the number of access points that must be secured. To complicate matters, CISOs are been directed to secure system without compromising the seamless experience that customers expect across channels, and if the organization is in a regulated industry, compliance issues likely increase the team’s workload. To best detect threats and respond to incidents quickly, many organizations decide they need a security operations center to provide proper protection and continuous prevention. Then they must decide whether to build an internal Security Operations Center (SOC) or outsource.
Digital transformation requires rapid network changes. Navigating these changes well is difficult but critical, as the function of business applications are at stake. Customers aren’t interested in what’s going on behind the scenes; they simply want the platform to work. Hosting Facts researchers found that a single-second delay in website loading time can result in a seven percent loss in conversion, and 40 percent of web users will abandon a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load.
Next month will mark the 47th anniversary of Apollo 13. The film that recounts the story is a favorite of mine, probably because it so masterfully captures the incredible suspense, fear, and hope felt by people everywhere, that I personally recall very well. I also know how an organization’s digital transformation can generate similar reactions! Apollo 13 was likely a casualty of the space program’s incredibly aggressive schedule. NASA, with U.S. political and military leaders, was motivated by competition from the U.S.S.R. and fear of the potential consequences of not being first. Urgency often overruled caution. A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.
What do Delta, United, Marriott and National Car Rental all have in common? They’re some of the most popular and highest-rated brands among business travelers, according to Certify, and companies are working hard to ensure that their business clientele – and their tourism and leisure travel guests – are having the customer experience that boosts their brand and bottom line. The same goes for travel booking companies too, and they’re increasingly turning to cloud-based services and mobile technologies to keep their customer satisfaction and brand reputation first in a competitive marketplace. What companies like TripAdvisor, HotelsCombined or AirBnb have in common is a strong online presence boosted by technology investments.
In 2016, blockchain technology came close to hitting its peak on Gartner’s annual Hype Cycle, signaling an imminent shift from an emerging, theoretical technology to widespread adoption. Like cloud, big data, and the Internet of Things (IoT) before it, blockchain is the tech industry’s latest Next Big Thing. Analysts and industry experts say it holds immense potential for organizations, but many business leaders don’t yet see a practical application for their operations. While a lot of people know blockchain is the technology behind Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies, what about enterprise applications in other industries?
According to a roundup by Gartner, the average cost of downtime for an enterprise is $5,600 per minute. While the data collected was from incredibly large companies, the cost of downtime for even small startups is no laughing matter. Let's assume, for the sake of simplicity, that your core product is a web app that relies solely on organic sales, totaling $1 million in revenue a year. This amounts to about $2 in lost revenue per minute. This doesn't sound like too much in the grand scheme of things, but revenue is only a small part of your downtime costs. We also must consider wasted operating costs.
In his session at Cloud Expo, Alan Winters, an entertainment executive/TV producer turned serial entrepreneur, will present a success story of an entrepreneur who has both suffered through and benefited from offshore development across multiple businesses: The smart choice, or how to select the right offshore development partner Warning signs, or how to minimize chances of making the wrong choice Collaboration, or how to establish the most effective work processes Budget control, or how to maximize project results within possible constraints
There was a recent tabloid piece featuring a video of a woman asking Alexa if it was connected to the CIA. At the time, the Echo Dot she was speaking to did not respond to the question. She asked a few times, and each time the Echo was silent. Conspiracy theorists weighed in. It was an amusing video, but the Daily Mail’s clickbait headline raises a legitimate question: Can Alexa lie? According to Amazon, you can “use the Alexa Voice Service (AVS) to add intelligent voice control to any connected product that has a microphone and speaker.” Alexa uses machine learning to help it recognize what you say (Automatic Speech Recognition) and understand the question (Natural Language Understanding) and then routes your information as requested.
My daughter is taking a class on entrepreneurship in her senior year of high school (yep, that’s the Silicon Valley for you). She loves the class, the energy of the teacher, and the creativity associated with the subject. As a result, we have had several conversations about what does it mean to be an entrepreneur. While I am sure there are folks more qualified than me to define what it means to be an entrepreneur, I’ve run into enough of those folks over the years to believe that I have a pretty decent perspective.
MongoDB Atlas leverages VPC peering for AWS, a service that allows multiple VPC networks to interact. This includes VPCs that belong to other AWS account holders. By performing cross account VPC peering, users ensure networks that host and communicate their data are secure. In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Jay Gordon, a Developer Advocate at MongoDB, will explain how to properly architect your VPC using existing AWS tools and then peer with your MongoDB Atlas cluster. He'll discuss the security advantages you immediately gain, easier configuration of whitelisting networks and potential cost savings on bandwidth.
Retailers are witnessing a rising trend towards customers ordering food online and requesting hybrid delivery, such as home delivery, picking up from stores or dedicated pickup points. In light of this and other emerging innovations, retailers need to develop and deploy new applications quickly to support new customer-oriented services that maximize user convenience. If they fail, customers will turn to competitors offering the service capability they want and likely never return.
By now, every company in the world is on the lookout for the digital disruption that will threaten their existence. In study after study, executives believe that technology has either already disrupted their industry, is in the process of disrupting it or will disrupt it in the near future. As a result, every organization is taking steps to prepare for or mitigate unforeseen disruptions. Yet in almost every industry, the disruption trend continues unabated.
What sort of WebRTC based applications can we expect to see over the next year and beyond? One way to predict development trends is to see what sorts of applications startups are building. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Arin Sime, founder of WebRTC.ventures, will discuss the current and likely future trends in WebRTC application development based on real requests for custom applications from real customers, as well as other public sources of information,
Special thanks for the help on this blog to the coolest, most hip group of industry experts that I have ever met: the Pathfinders. The Pathfinders is an elite forces group of master system engineers inside of Dell EMC who tackle our customers’ most difficult and inspiring challenges. I am honored to be part of that club! Suppose an autonomous vehicle learns of a more efficient route and wants sell this knowledge to other autonomous cars for a fee (using blockchain to handle machine to machine transaction). Suppose the autonomous vehicle could start to monetize itself; to self-fund its own operations and the acquisition of goods and services such as gas, repairs or vehicle upgrades (using blockchain to conduct commerce). Now suppose the autonomous vehicle could couple real-time analytics of vehicle performance and maintenance with real-time bidding for maintenance servicing and replacement parts (blockchain inserted again). Lastly, think “intelligent” vehicle depreciation and salvage value optimization where the autonomous vehicle continuously scours used car and auto parts markets for vehicles in need of older chassis, transmission and electrical components (again leveraging blockchain).
Trends as Internet of things (IoT), distributed IT, data sovereignty requirements, and pervasive security concerns are combining to challenge how IT operates. Thanks to adoption of hybrid IT, tech organizations are shifting to become strategists and internal service providers. To help us define a new ideology for hybrid IT, we're joined by Neil Thurston, Chief Technologist for the Hybrid IT Practice at Logicalis Group in the UK. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
InformationWeek recently ran an article I wrote that describes CollabNet's work with non-profit #YesWeCode. This Dream Corps initiative aims to help young adults find careers and success in the tech industry. In the article, I address the growing need for new talent in the tech industry: "The U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics estimates that there will be one million more IT jobs than computer science students in the U.S. by 2020. The software development field in particular is expected to see a much higher than average growth rate of 17 percent."
End-user experience is everything when it comes to facilitating workplace productivity. You could deploy or develop the most powerful applications anyone has ever seen-but they won't do any good if they offer a poor experience. This is a major reason why applications are moving to SaaS, PaaS and IaaS cloud computing models. The cloud simplifies applications on the back end, which translates to smoother end-user experiences. But as cloud apps integrate more services and user bases diversify, IT has to do more to streamline application platforms. Enter container technology.
Containerization is popularly viewed as the ‘virtualization of virtualization’ or ‘next generation virtualization.’ However, containers have existed long before virtualization or the advent of modern container technology like Docker and Linux Containers. Similar tech was built into mainframe systems that pervaded the IT landscape for the preceding decades. However, the implication, as the name suggests, is that modern software containerization will have the same seismic impact on the IT industry as shipping containers have had on maritime freight transport. Indeed, it is quite common now for many major online companies to run their entire infrastructure on containers.