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.
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.
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.
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?”
Developers generally like to share their code, and many of them do so by open sourcing it on GitHub, a social code hosting and collaboration service. Many companies also use GitHub as a convenient place to host both private and public code repositories by creating GitHub organizations where employees can be joined. Sometimes Employee might publish things that might be sensitive in nature and these things might lead to compromise of a system.
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.
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.
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.
For the last 15 years, companies operating in the United States and Europe have benefited from Safe Harbor - a streamlined process that allowed U.S. companies to transfer and store European citizens' data in the U.S. provided a level of privacy protections were adhered to according to outlined European standards. Recently, however, an Irish court has ruled, in a case brought by an Austrian citizen concerned about how Facebook was handling his private data, that the Safe Harbor agreement is inconsistent with European privacy law, as it did not require all organizations entitled to work with EU privacy-related data to comply with it. The court’s decision means Ireland’s Data Privacy Commissioner must review the merits of the case and make a final determination about whether Facebook is allowed to transfer private data from its European users to the United States. In the mean time, companies that had relied on the Safe Harbor process can no longer do so. In today's data-centric business world, the ruling comes as a blow to thousands of companies operating at the global scale that are now faced with navigating new, complicated individual standards – across multiple regions.
If you think of automated provisioning as a formal written language definition, it does have some value in illuminating issues with partial automation or portions of the overall data center that are not automated. The path to automation is not a straight one at most organizations. It takes time, it takes resources, and even though there is a definable ROI, the press of business needs wins every time there is a conflict – because meeting business needs is pretty much the purpose of IT. But taking the staggered approach has costs too, and it’s good on occasion to look at them. I’ve admittedly created this view, but it is a way to consider your automation efforts and how well they’re working with regard to the end goal.
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.
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.
Developers generally like to share their code, and many of them do so by open sourcing it on GitHub, a social code hosting and collaboration service. Many companies also use GitHub as a convenient place to host both private and public code repositories by creating GitHub organizations where employees can be joined. Sometimes Employee might publish things that might be sensitive in nature and these things might lead to compromise of a system.
Put the word continuous in front of many things and we help define DevOps: continuous delivery, continuous testing, continuous assessment, and there is more. The next BriefingsDirect DevOps thought leadership discussion explores the concept of continuous processes around the development and deployment of applications and systems. Put the word continuous in front of many things and we help define DevOps: continuous delivery, continuous testing, continuous assessment, and there is more.
Enterprises with internally sourced IT operations typically struggle with typical tensions associated with siloed application and infrastructure organizations. They are characterized by finger pointing and an inability to restore operational capabilities under complex conditions that span both application and infrastructure configurations. These tensions often are used to characterize the need for a DevOps movement, which focuses on organizational, process and cultural changes needed to bring about a more fluid IT delivery that embodies higher quality and greater overall agility.
In 1854 Cholera broke out in the Soho neighborhood of London. Hundreds of people were struck down and died within days. No one at the time understood where the disease came from, how to treat it, or how it was transmitted. A local physician, Dr. John Snow spent every possible moment of his day studying the victims and data in an attempt to understand the disease. His biggest challenge was a lack of data. He had only the list of the dead and a blank map of the neighborhood. What he needed was more data. This was solved when he met the local priest, Henry Whitehouse. Whitehouse had recorded the time of death, and the location where all the families lived and died. When these sources of data where combined, and then overlaid on a map, visual patterns emerged which ultimately led the two to see the common denominator for all the victims was drinking contaminated water from the Broad Street water pump.
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.
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.
Every day, every hour, every minute, devices are becoming connected. The Internet of Things (or Iot) has gone from a buzzword floating through the echoes of Silicon Valley to a tangible and quickly advancing movement in the world of hardware. But, like a stone tossed into a pond, the effects of the Internet of Things are quickly rippling outward, causing immense changes to the environment surrounding it. And, as it turns out, the IoT is a rather big stone and it's making a large splash. The IoT revolution is necessitating enormous changes to companies who want to play in this brave new world - and those companies are not few in number.
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.
PubNub has announced the release of BLOCKS, a set of customizable microservices that give developers a simple way to add code and deploy features for realtime apps.PubNub BLOCKS executes business logic directly on the data streaming through PubNub’s network without splitting it off to an intermediary server controlled by the customer. This revolutionary approach streamlines app development, reduces endpoint-to-endpoint latency, and allows apps to better leverage the enormous scalability of PubNub’s Data Stream Network.