My personal view is NO.
It needs DevOps for sure, but not Devops Managers.
There is a simple explanation and a more well defined, elaborate explanation to this question though.
The simple explanation first. A manager’s role needs to be associated with some outcome. A Project Manager – is responsible for the outcome of successful project, a Business Manager – is responsible for the outcome of a growing and profitable business, a Service Manager – is responsible for delivering improved service, etc. DevOps is not an outcome. It’s a means to an end – that end being continuous delivery.
Monthly Archives: May 2016
Transferring Windows From Boot Camp Partition To a New Mac
Guest blog by Arun Raj, Parallels Support Team Transferring Windows From Boot Camp Partition To a New Mac If you’re reading this blog, chances are you are thinking to buy a new Mac (or already got one, yay!). Apple made it super easy to migrate all your files, applications and settings to the new machines […]
The post Transferring Windows From Boot Camp Partition To a New Mac appeared first on Parallels Blog.
Cloud security strategies: In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king
(c)iStock.com/Kalawin
New research released today by enterprise cloud hosting provider iland has revealed almost half (47%) of security workers “simply trust” their cloud providers to meet security agreements.
The findings, from 100 IT decision makers and security experts, appear in a study whose title – ‘Blind Trust is Not a Security Strategy: Lessons from Cloud Adopters’ – lays the problem on thick. Even though 78% of firms polled are using the cloud in some capacity, and more than half (56%) of respondents say security technology is more consistently applied in the cloud, the report insists vendors need to do more to keep things safe.
This will not come as a major surprise to regular readers of this publication, with a study released in June last year from iland saying largely the same thing. Back then, the finger was pointed at rogue vendors not sharing metadata with customers. Customers, ranging from one third to half of respondents, had various concerns over how closely their provider looks after them – the idea that they were ‘just another account number’.
Customers are not immune either however; the research also found a ‘significant’ gap in IT understanding of compliance requirements, with 96% of security professionals admitting their firms have compliance-related workloads in the cloud compared to just 69% of IT teams. David Monahan, research director of security and risk management at Enterprise Management Associates, who conducted the study with iland, argues a lack of staff and skills are holding firms back. “Companies can no longer combat security threats by simply throwing technology at perceived vulnerabilities,” he said.
On the plus side, business and IT are more likely to be on the same page with regard to cloud security, and if IT is reluctant to push a new application because of security fears. iland calls this a ‘fundamental shift in dynamics’, yet Monahan added: “While IT has made monumental progress in identifying and adopting necessary security technologies, cloud providers must do more to ensure teams can easily validate claims, manage disparate tools, anticipate threats and take action when needed.”
IoT Marketplaces By @EsmeSwartz | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #DigtalTransformation
What a difference a year makes. Organizations aren’t just talking about IoT possibilities, it is now baked into their core business strategy. With IoT, billions of devices generating data from different companies on different networks around the globe need to interact. From efficiency to better customer insights to completely new business models, IoT will turn traditional business models upside down. In the new customer-centric age, the key to success is delivering critical services and apps with a consistent quality of experience irrespective of device, app or network. Open platforms are enabling the creation of game-changing apps that fundamentally transform a company’s approach for unleashing new value from core assets and data.
Container Solutions brings production environment to the developers laptop
London-based Container Solutions has released the latest version of its minimesos project, an open source testing and experiment tool for Apache Mesos, which it claims brings production orchestration testing to the development environment.
The new offering targets the challenge of moving microservice applications from a developer’s laptop to the production environment, which can prove to be complicated as the target platform is different than the local one. The offering allows developers to bring up a containerised Apache Mesos cluster on their laptop, creating a production-like environment on their desktops for building, experimenting and testing.
“When we started building a number of Mesos frameworks, we found it hard to run and test them locally,” said Jamie Dobson, CEO of Container Solutions. “So, we ended up writing a few scripts to solve the problem. Those scripts became minimesos, which lets you do everything on your laptop. We later integrated Scope so that developers could visualise their applications. This made minimesos even more useful for exploratory testing.”
The company claims developers can now start a Mesos cluster through the command line or via the Java API, which is logically isolated as each of the processes run in separate Docker containers. Minimesos is aslo integrated: it exposes framework, state and task information to its Cluster State API.
Accenture outlines future of cloud and data analytics in sport
Although the digital age has created a wealth of opportunities for organizations to create new revenue streams and attract new audiences, maintaining engagement of these customers is becoming an increasing difficult job, according to Accenture’s Nick Millman.
The availability and ease of information in the 21st century has created a new dynamic where consumers are now becoming increasingly competent at multi-tasking and operating several devices, which has made the task of keeping a viewer’s attention throughout the course of a sporting event more challenging. Millman, who leads the Big Data & Analytics Delivery at Accenture, are using this dynamic to create new engagement opportunities for the Six Nations.
“There will be a number of people who will watch the entirety of a match, however there will be others who will be playing with their tablet or phone and enjoying the multi-screen experience,” said Millman. “To keep the level of engagement, sports need to become more digital themselves, providing more insight and data to fans who are watching the game. Ideally you want them to be on their phone looking at something which is relevant to the game as opposed to Facebook or what their friends are doing.”
Accenture first teamed up with the Six Nations as a technology partner four years ago, where the initial partnership focused on demonstrating the company’s mobility capabilities through creating the official app. What started as a basic app now acts as a delivery platform where Accenture can showcase their data analytics capabilities, processing more than 2 million rows of data per game and creating visuals in (near) real-time to tell a different story behind the sport itself.
The data itself is not necessarily the greatest use to the fans, so Accenture has brought in rugby experts year-on-year to help understand the nuances of the information. This year Nick Mallet, Ben Kay and David Flatman helped the team tell the story. This is the same in the business world. Data analysts themselves may not be able to make the right decisions when it’s comes to the application of the data, as they wouldn’t understand the market in the same way as a Managing Director who has been in the industry for 30 years. The application of data in sport and the business world will only be effective when it is merged with expertise and experience to provide context.
“One of the interesting things which we saw is that there is now an interesting dynamic between data driven decisions and gut feel,” Millman highlighted. “In some cases when you are watching the game you may think that one player would be considered the best on the park, but the data tells a different story. Seeing one hooker for example hit every line out perfectly might make him look like the most effective, but the data might suggest the opposition hooker who produced several small gains when carrying the ball had a greater impact on the game.
“This can translate into the business world also, as a marketing team may have a better feel about a product which it wants to push out to the market, but the data team have evidence which shows resource should be focused on a different area of the business,” said Millman. “I don’t think there is a right answer to what is better, data driven decision making or intuition, but it’s an interesting dynamic. The successful businesses will be the ones who are effective at blending the data and the skills to come to the right outcome.”
While the role of analytics is becoming more prominent in sport and the business world, there is still some education to be done before the concepts could be considered mainstream. Analytics may be big business in the enterprise segments, but there are still a large proportion of SMBs who do not understand the power of data analytics for their own business. The ability to cross sell, develop a stronger back story of your customer, maintain engagement or even implement artificial intelligence programs is only available once the core competencies of big data and analytics are embraced within the organization.
For Accenture, wearables and IoT are next on the horizon and potentially virtual reality in the future. This year the app was available on the Apple watch, as Millman is starting to see trends which could shift the consumption of data once again.
“It’s still early days, but some of the consumption of data is likely to shift from tablets and smartphones,” said Millman. “Like it shifted from desktops to laptops to smartphones and tablets, it may shift to wearable devices in the future.
“Also this year we build a prototype using virtual reality to immerse people into the rugby experience. I’m not sure VR will become mainstream in a sporting context in the next 12-18 months but I think increasingly VR and AR (augmented reality) will become a part of the sports viewing experience.”
Atlassian launches Bitbucket Pipelines
Atlassian has announced a number of new developments within its team collaboration software portfolio, including the launch of Bitbucket Pipelines platform.
The new platform extends its cloud-based Bitbucket code repository to provide teams with entire continuous delivery workflows from source to deployment in the cloud. The team claim the new proposition helps developers who are struggling to apply on-premises continuous integration and delivery tools as software development and production applications are shifting into the cloud.
“Atlassian is helping teams across all industries do amazing things. We’re helping developers at Cochlear build aural implants to help people hear, The Telegraph to inform millions of readers each day, and Lufthansa Systems to provide IT services for everything from aviation safety to entertainment,” said Sri Viswanath, CTO, Atlassian. “The common thread between these teams and your own is the need to work smarter and faster. We’re seeing more and more of these teams choosing to collaborate in the cloud. In fact, over half of our customers choose to collaborate in the cloud and an even higher number of new customers select our cloud offerings.”
Elsewhere, the team also launched a native mobile platform to increase connectivity between departments who are using the Confluence and JIRA tools, building on the enterprise mobility trends, as well opening up its JIRA Service Desk product, to developers to build add-ons that create and update requests or extend JIRA Service Desk’s automation capabilities to react to changes in requests.
The company has also joined the Open API Initiative and replace the company’s existing API documentation, using a custom site generator, RADAR and it has released this software as open source to be used by any Open API provider.
“Collectively, we have a lot to gain from an open, widely accepted definition language for REST APIs,” said Viswanath. “We’re committed to actively contributing to the standard and are now a member of the Open API Initiative and the Linux Foundation, alongside industry leaders like Google, Microsoft, PayPal and others.”
An update on security in the hybrid cloud: Where do we go from here?
(c)iStock.com/BrianAJackson
Even in mid-2016, very few who are serious about cloud computing will tell customers that out of the box public cloud services are as secure as their corporate data centres. At the same time no-one would suggest introducing mission critical applications and data into a brand new data centre environment without first planning and implementing proper physical, network, server, and application security controls.
Many organisations distrust moving corporate data and application assets into the public cloud. Loss of control of these assets is the most common reason stated; this is code for loss of control over the security aspects of the environment. To answer this, public cloud providers have developed some form of Shared Security Responsibility model.
For example, Amazon Web Services states that they are responsible for security of the physical plant as well as the separation between accounts or instances, while customers are responsible for building security into the solutions they deploy into their cloud account or instance. In other words, AWS is responsible for the security “of” the cloud and the customer is responsible for security “in” the cloud.
An often used solution that many organisations undertake in the separation of front end or presentation layers and the data aspects of a service into a hybrid cloud. This does not preclude any security deployment best practices that we will speak about but provides a level of comfort for organisations that their data is under their lock-and-key. While hybrid cloud does not provide as much costreduction, flexibility or elasticity as “going public”, it does help the customer organisation feel more secure, in their decision.
Given the customer’s responsibility of security “in” the cloud, the customer needs to approach security around public cloud hosted instances in a similar (if not the same) manner that they approach corporate data centre hosted applications. Virtualised software components are available for everything from firewalls, to identity management, to intrusion detection, to virus checking, and many other aspects of the security landscape. If you wouldn’t deploy an application into your corporate data centre without a perimeter firewall, why would you deploy it into a cloud environment without the same technology?
When choosing a public cloud provider, it is prudent to look into the provider’s track record when it comes to security incidents. Again the provider is responsible for security “of” the cloud, so knocking a provider for a customer’s lack of proper security controls would be unfair. Most if not all public cloud providers publish data on their ability to protect their data centres and the overall cloud provisioning environment. So, do your homework.
Another aspect of the provider’s environment that may be useful in making an appropriate choice is evaluating the tools that the provider deploys to help a customer secure the environment. Once again using AWS as the example, they provide a list of security focused tools including:
- WAF: AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect your web applications from common web exploits. WAF controls which traffic to allow or block to web applications by defining customisable web security rules.
- Security groups: A security group acts as a virtual firewall that controls the traffic for one or more instances. When an instance is launched it is associated with one or more security groups. Rules are added to each security group that allow traffic to or from its associated instances.
- Network access control lists (ACLs) – A network access control list (ACL) is an optional layer of security for your virtual private cloud (VPC) that acts as a firewall for controlling traffic in and out of one or more subnets.
- Virtual private gateway (VPG) – By default, instances launched into a virtual private cloud (VPC) can’t communicate with an external network. You can enable access to an external network from a VPC by attaching a virtual private gateway to the VPC, creating a custom route table, and updating your security group rules. IPSEC tunneling and connection to a Hardware VPN are supported.
- Inspector: An automated security assessment service that helps improve the security and compliance of applications.
- Identity and access management (IAM): Role based identity and access management for AWS account and logins.
Microsoft Azure provides many similar features to assist in securing environments in the cloud. One interesting option available from Microsoft is Azure Stack. Azure Stack is a hybrid cloud platform that allows an organisation to host a functional Azure deployment on premise, in their own corporate data centre. Not only can the on-premise environment be setup to interact (as expected) with Azure online resources, it is also managed from the same management console as the online environments.
Finally, when speaking of hybrid cloud environments, the customer has to prepare the corporate data centre environment properly with sufficient rigour to ensure security on their end. The corporate side of the VPN needs to be secured with the appropriate tools (Firewalls, IDS) and monitored as any other corporate environment.
Many organisations are struggling to balance the benefits of public cloud (lower costs, elasticity, scalability and flexibility) with concerns about security. While public cloud still does not provide the comfort level of hosting applications in the corporate data centre, it is evolving as an attractive option even for those who need a higher level of security. Hybrid cloud is one possible way to balance these needs if an organisation views the public cloud as an extension of the corporate data centre while planning for and implementing security “in” the cloud as if it were another data centre that they have access to.
Capgemini and Siemens team up to make buildings smarter
Capgemini and Siemens’ Building Technologies division have announced a new partnership to develop analytics-based services for the smart buildings space.
The new team will focus on developing the Siemens Navigator platform to produce an enhanced IoT management platform featuring asset management and analytics technology. The objective of the technology will be to increase energy efficiencies of the buildings, as well as the lifecycle potential of their customers’ real estate assets.
Siemens claims customers using their platform currently save 10.5 million tons of CO2 per year, though by incorporating Capgemini’s IoT, data analytics, and cloud capabilities, the ambition is to extend and drive this digital transformation project, in a phased approach.
The smart building industry has been gathering momentum in the last few months, though hasn’t been grabbing the same headlines as autonomous cars or the overarching smart cities projects. One estimate puts market value as high as $36 billion in 2020, highlighting that buildings can consume anywhere between 20-40% of the total energy intake of a country, creating a lucrative market for potential IoT vendors. While energy efficiency is one of the more obvious drivers for smart buildings initiatives, safety and security factors have also enhanced the growth of this market.
“The Internet of Things is a massive accelerator for digital transformation,” said Capgemini’s Olivier Sevillia. “Building a consistent strategy and providing an innovative platform for IoT services is an asset that companies can leverage for the benefit of their clients.
“This cloud based data driven services project will make the widespread benefits of connected buildings a reality for Siemens Building Technologies’ real estate customers, helping them to make more informed business decisions and realise operating efficiencies. Capgemini will support this roll-out from strategy development through to implementation and integration.”
Parallels Access 3.1: Support for iPad Pro
Parallels Access 3.1 The latest version of Parallel Access adds a much-requested feature – support for the iPad Pro. Parallels Access, which gives users a convenient and natural way to control their desktop applications from their tablet or phone, now has full support for the large screen of the 12.9” iPad Pro. Of course, this […]
The post Parallels Access 3.1: Support for iPad Pro appeared first on Parallels Blog.