Many in the industry are searching for new ways to increase productivity and efficiency with Agile approaches to software development. That’s the theme of a new article on CIO.com by Bruce Harpham, who details the many benefits of Agile methodologies in software development and examines key considerations for implementing the practice. Our very own Scott Rose spoke with Bruce on the topic and discussed the ways organizations can employ Agile practices among a global team, where face-to-face is not feasible.

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Recognizing the need to identify and validate information security professionals’ competency in securing cloud services, the two leading membership organizations focused on cloud and information security, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and (ISC)^2, joined together to develop an international cloud security credential that reflects the most current and comprehensive best practices for securing and optimizing cloud computing environments.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Avere Systems, a leading provider of enterprise storage for the hybrid cloud, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Avere delivers a more modern architectural approach to storage that doesn’t require the overprovisioning of storage capacity to achieve performance, overspending on expensive storage media for inactive data or the overbuilding of data centers to house increasing amounts of storage infrastructure.

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How is your DevOps transformation coming along? How do you measure Agility? Reliability? Efficiency? Quality? Success?! How do you optimize your processes? This morning on #c9d9 we talked about some of the metrics that matter for the different stakeholders throughout the software delivery pipeline. Our panelists shared their best practices.

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A recent business conversation led to the establishment of the fact that the data centre business is becoming more cutthroat than ever. Price wars, advanced offerings, upsells and what not are the usual tactics that have been used, but now competing forces are pressuring data centre providers to go beyond the usual and utilise something new.

Data centre businesses are now relying more and more on leveraging strategic footprints, global presence and larger capabilities to educate and work with customers at a local level – in the United States alone, there are an estimated 3 million data centres. With data centre services more abundant than grocery stores, how will the model sustain itself and what will determine the winners from the losers? My answer: granularity.

Granularity needed by MSPs

Managed service providers (MSPs) work day in and day out with end users. The core of their business revolves around providing cloud services and solutions to their customers. This may include computing power, database, hoisting, storage and many other services that are cloud based. MSPs, however, are facing a challenging time as well. For example, their relationship with data centres, where the need for granularity is evermore necessary.

Consider this: IOTA Services, a medium-scale MSP, has over 800 customers. All 800 customers are hosted on a third-party data centre owned by TrueNorth Data Centre. At the end of every month, TrueNorth Data Centre provides an invoice to IOTA Services for all their utilisation of the infrastructure within the data centre. IOTA Services then looks at what aspect of the infrastructure is used by each customer and then splits the invoice based on a homemade logic consisting of multiple Excel worksheets.

This is one of the biggest challenges faced by MSPs overall; the granularity of consumption. Data centres today can really propel into the success domain by helping MSPs deal with their challenges. Providing data and infrastructure services today is not enough and having more control over your information, infrastructure and the consumption of it is key. If data centres reply on MSPs to drive their business, it makes more sense to empower SPs with what they need to drive the business forward.

Ultimate value for end users

MSPs, on the contrary, are now able to completely view the usage of infrastructure and services at the data centre level and can easily make sense of all the services used by each of their customers. This plays a key role at the end-user level where say a small consulting company that uses IOTA Services to host some of their data and exchange server can now see exactly how much it costs from an IT aspect, assuming, of course, there are adequate margins and other business due diligence in place. End users may have proprietary software or nice software solutions they have deployed. Knowing how much in very precise terms becomes invaluable.

More reasons for granularity to be key

As software solutions have evolved, we are now at a time where the consumption of IT is a key aspect in every business. I have spoken about the need for chargeback and empowering IT to charge back the services and solutions they offer in an enterprise environment for this very reason. Unless you have such a unique offering that nobody else offers in the universe, you will face the same economic terms as everyone else.

Be it the economy, the need to lower expenses, the need to improve margins and the absolute need to scale; everyone has the same set of problems. Knowing where you spend, stopping the bleed and optimising the business are just essentials you should be doing anyway. As a business end user, I absolutely do not want to pay for anything that I do not use. This trend of consumption is growing – be it in our personal lives or the workplace. Enabling this value proposition forms the bedrock of business profitability.

Where to go from here?

We are all going to use a lot of data and IT services going forward. Data centres are amazing with the offerings they have, and so are MSPs who are providing much-needed solutions and services to millions of businesses and essentially helping organisations enable and embrace the cloud. Unless we have an element of granularity built into the billing of cloud solutions and services at every level, we are going to face the challenge of not being happy for what we pay. This is purely because human beings love granularity and businesses especially need granularity to make sense of what they are spending. Global economies are not helping either. Whether it is Canada, the United States or China, daily changing market conditions and economic conditions makes conducting business more difficult.

Let’s make 2016 the year of granularity and help bring more knowledge to what we consume. Let’s also engage in a meaningful conversation with our customers, clients, service providers and peers to know more about the consumption model, cloud, chargebacks, and of course granularity. Do you have ideas about cloud granularity? For the sake of value, let’s start a granular conversation.

More than a decade ago, the choices were few to address the needs of data gathering and recording. Water and wastewater utilities, for example, had to be able to use a ‘fits all’ unit with set parameters and make their systems adaptable to the technology of the day. Since then, many municipal water systems such as those in Southern Utah, have had to broaden the area from which they gather, use and reclaim water. Most growing areas are even facing the dilemma of higher demands on services while trying to stay within shrinking budgets and manpower cutbacks. This is because in the past, many viewed electronic data gathering as a ‘want’ instead of a ‘need’ until now.

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If we look at slow, traditional IT and jump to the conclusion that just because we found its issues intractable before, that necessarily means we will again, then it’s time for a rethink.
As a matter of fact, the world of IT has changed over the last ten years or so. We’ve been experiencing unprecedented innovation across the board – innovation in technology as well as in how people organize and accomplish tasks.

Let’s take a look at three differences between today’s modern, digital context for enterprise IT as compared to conventional wisdom – wisdom that may have applied only a handful of years ago.

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