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For years the benefits of the cloud have been the subject of much debate within the IT industry. In the past, sceptics claimed that the cloud wasn’t reliable or secure — although Gartner sought to dispel that myth. Now, the sceptics are harder to find and Gartner doesn’t have to dispel as many cloud myths. Our latest Businesses @ Work report shows that companies are not only enabling their employees to use their own apps and mobile devices at work, but are also utilising a range of cloud apps in order to boost connectivity with customers, contractors and partners via cloud-based portals. And 76% of IT decision-makers say digital initiatives will be very important or critical to their businesses in 2016.

And with Microsoft, Adobe, SAP and Oracle now adopting a cloud first approach, whether through internal development or via acquisition, it’s safe to say that the digital revolution is here. Look no further than Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s now famous first letter to employees, pledging that Microsoft would thrive in a cloud-first world. His big bet on cloud is paying off, as Microsoft Office 365 extended its lead as most popular cloud app this year, growing its customer base 116 per cent within Okta’s network.

SAP has also invested heavily in innovating the business, allocating $50 billion to driving digital transformation. The company is committing to a cloud-first strategy by allowing its customers to trade in on-premises software licenses in favour of new ones in the cloud, a move that 74 per cent of customers are saying has encouraged them to adopt cloud services. Our report confirms this, revealing that cloud application adoption for SAP grew 133 per cent in our network in 2015. This has enabled SAP to position itself as an industry leader and an agile partner to its customers.

The driving force behind cloud transformation

Why are the software giants investing in the cloud? Put simply, it’s because cloud is driving businesses forward and Microsoft, SAP and others want to drive their customers’ businesses forward.

Studies clearly indicate that cloud technologies allow companies to be more agile, improve cost efficiency, increase security and promote collaboration internally and externally with customers. The Exact 2015 SME Cloud Barometer report, an independent study of SME leaders across Europe and the US, found that companies embracing digital transformation are likely to grow faster and enjoy twice the profit of their non-cloud using rivals. Consequently, 47 per cent of SMEs now use at least one cloud business software tool.

Setting cloud security concerns straight

Another driving factor is security. In the past, the idea that cloud was less secure than on-prem was one of the main barriers to cloud adoption. Today, it’s clear that’s not the case. Reports from Ovum suggest that even large enterprises cannot replicate the security provided by the cloud using on-prem software. Attitudes in the industry are changing as well, as shown by a recent Cloud Security Alliance survey, whichrevealed that 65 per cent of IT leaders think the cloud is as or more secure than on-premises software.

Digital transformation starts with identity

IT leaders certainly aren’t afraid of cloud anymore. Our Businesses @ Work report shows 83 per cent of companies in our network are leveraging at least one off-the-shelf cloud app like Salesforce, Office 365 and Box. And 80 per cent of enterprises are building custom applications on their platforms. We’re now witnessing an unparalleled increase in cloud application usage globally. There are no signs of slowing as businesses continue to make efforts to enable their partners, customers and contractors to connect through cloud-based applications, websites or portals.

Now that organisations are beginning to embrace the cloud, what’s the next big hurdle? Figuring out how to manage identities. When every device and app that connects to the cloud has an individual account attached to it, the need for companies to ensure they can control the flow of data is amplified. Effective identity management can improve customer experience, maintain competiveness, generate new revenue and strengthen security. As the cloud drives traditional software companies to change their business models and put the needs of customers at the forefront, the next big priority for enterprises in the cloud is to make sure enterprises can easily and securely authenticate and manage users. 

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Samsung has agreed to acquire California-based cloud provider Joyent, adding another cloud platform to the Korean giant’s ever-increasing portfolio of mobile, cloud and IoT services.

The move came after Samsung assessed a “wide range of potential companies in the public and private cloud infrastructure space”, and saw Joyent as the standout with an “experienced management team with deep domain expertise and a robust cloud technology,” according to Samsung mobile communications CTO Injong Rhee.

From Joyent’s perspective, CEO Scott Hammond and CTO Bryan Cantrill both chipped in with their reasons for the deal. “Until today, we lacked one thing,” Hammond wrote in a blog post. “We lacked the scale required to compete effectively in the large, rapidly growing and fiercely competitive cloud computing market. Now that changes.” Naturally, Cantrill looked at the news from more of a technologist’s perspective. “As our engineering teams got to know one another, we found that beneath the exciting vision was a foundation of shared values: we both cared deeply about not only innovation but also robustness – and that we both valued complete understanding when systems misbehaved,” Cantrill wrote.

“The more we got to know one another, the clearer it became that together we could summon a level of scale, agility and innovation that would be greater than the sum of our parts – that together, our technology could create a new titan of container-native computing,” he added.

Like a lot of these deals, the original intent was not acquisition; Samsung had previously examined Manta, Joyent’s object storage system, for implementation but, as Cantrill noted, Joyent had never seen a request at such scale. When Joyent went back to Samsung and explained they did not have sufficient hardware to perform the requested test, Samsung provided it – and the rest, it appears, was history.

“We work closely with startups to bring new software and services into Samsung, and one of the ways we do this is by driving strategic acquisitions,” said David Eun, Samsung global innovation centre president. “Joyent is a great example of a leading and disruptive technology company that will make unique contributions to Samsung while benefitting from Samsung’s global scale and reach.”

Joyent will continue as a standalone brand after the acquisition, while financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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DevOps engineers are notoriously difficult to find. If you needed further proof of this fact, a new study by Indeed.com has revealed that DevOps engineer is the #1 hardest IT job to fill in North America, leading a list that includes software and mobile engineers.

An organisation’s inability to hire – and retain – systems engineers, build automation engineers, and other titles usually grouped under “DevOps” is a major roadblock to digital transformation efforts; in fact, the majority of organisations say the biggest roadblock to cloud migration is finding the right IT talent, not security, cost, or legacy systems.

There is certainly no easy answer — but here are several ways that organisations are attempting to reduce its impact.

The power of automation

Most companies hire DevOps engineers to automate deployment for frequent or continuous deployment. In reality, this means that much of a DevOps engineer’s time is spent deploying and configuring daily builds, troubleshooting failed builds, and communicating with developers and project managers — all while the long-term work of automating deployment and configuration tasks falls by the wayside.

It is possible that the term “DevOps engineer” itself contributes to this confusion and poor prioritisation; many say there is (or should be) no such thing as a DevOps engineer and they should more properly be called by their exact function in your team, like storage engineer, deployment automation engineer, and so on.

The value of deployment automation and the progress towards some variety of “push button” deployment to test environments is obvious; a survey by Puppet found that high performing IT teams deploy thirty times more frequently than low performing teams. Infrastructure automation is often lower on the priority list but of equal importance, and involves the ability of virtual machines to scale, self-heal, and configure themselves. Anecdotally, our experience is that most organisations do the bare minimum (auto scaling), while the vast majority of infrastructure maintenance tasks are still highly manual.

The fact that your DevOps engineers — or if you prefer different titles: build automation engineers, Linux administrators, Puppet engineers, etc. — do not have time to automate tasks (that could save them more time in the future) is clearly a problem. Your sluggish progress on deployment automation drains resources every day. But your lack of infrastructure automation can quickly become a punishing business problem when you find that auto scaling fails, or you forgot to update a package, or your SSL cert is not automatically renewed, or your environment is not automated to deal with your cloud provider’s infrequent outages. Slow deployment pipelines are bad, but broken infrastructure is worse.

Such events cause what we will call “reactive automation”, a sudden burst of interest in infrastructure automation that quickly fades when everything goes back to normal. Unfortunately, the templates and configuration management scripts that automate infrastructure buildout and maintenance themselves must be maintained, and if no one is paying attention, another infrastructure failure is bound to happen.

The result is a team of stressed, overworked engineers that wish they could focus on the “cool stuff”, but are instead stuck in firefighting mode: exactly the opposite of what you want to happen.

“Hire more DevOps engineers”

When faced with overworked engineers, the natural answer is: let’s hire more. But of course you are already doing that. Most companies have a standing open position for DevOps engineer. Is there another answer?

The second answer is training some of your existing systems engineers in new tools and new cultural frameworks. This certainly needs to happen, but will take some time. The other answer is outsourcing. Outsourcing can mean any number of things, but there are two flavours that best complement DevOps teams. The first is outsourcing infrastructure automation. The second is outsourcing day-to-day, boring, repetitive infrastructure maintenance tasks and around-the-clock monitoring.

Infrastructure automation is in many ways the ideal set of tasks to outsource; the line in the sand between your team’s responsibilities (the application) and the outsourced team (the infrastructure) is relatively clear for most applications, and there is often little time, initiative, or advanced experience to automate infrastructure in-house. Your in-house engineers keep doing what they are doing — managing daily builds, interfacing with developers — and the outsourced team co-manages the templates and scripts that control scalability, security, and failover. This team should also integrate this automation with your existing deployment pipeline.

This works out even better if the same team manages day-to-day patching, monitoring, alerting, log management, change management, etc., much like a traditional professional services or managed services team. These are items that distract your valuable DevOps engineers from more important tasks, and also wake them up at 3am when something goes wrong. When you outsource, you are still fulfilling “you build it, you own it” principle, but at least you have a team telling you when things break and helping you fix it faster.

Managed service providers (MSPs) are not what they used to be — in a good way. Among its many positive effects, the cloud has forced MSPs to evolve and provide more value. Now you can use it to your advantage.

The enterprise DevOps team

As DevOps makes its way to the enterprise, the nature and definition of “DevOps team” will change. Enterprises will continue to struggle to attract talent away from big tech. You will likely see more differentiation in what DevOps means, as traditional network engineers become cloud network experts and Puppet engineers become cloud configuration management masters, leading to a complex medley of “traditional” and “cloud” skills.

Adopting DevOps involves adopting a certain amount of risk, and enterprises want to control that risk. They will rely more heavily on outsourced talent to supplement growing internal teams. This will help them achieve higher deployment velocity and automation more quickly, and put guardrails in place to prevent new DevOps teams from costly mistakes.

DevOps engineers will always be hard to find. Great tech talent and great talent generally is hard to find. The key is knowing how to protect your business against the drought.

The post DevOps Engineer: #1 Hardest Job to Fill appeared first on Logicworks Gathering Clouds.

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We often hear the buzzword phrases of customer service, quality of service, customer first and net promoter score, and both the B2C and B2B markets have been constantly changing, driven by more demanding customer expectations with the bar being set ever higher by new disrupters. Take the age-old example of Blockbuster, a model and brand that was globally successful and known, quickly disrupted when newcomers set the de facto bar: download a movie anywhere, anytime to a growing number of devices, cheaper, quicker and easier, with nothing to return to the shop, and the film you want always being available.

Customers are having that bar set by these new unicorn firms, such as Uber, Airbnb, Netflix, JustEat, eBay, Amazon…the list goes on. This means of course that existing legacy firms are now dealing with companies and people that have a natural in-built expectation for things to be easy, clear, customer friendly and ‘of the new world’.

A Titanic moment on the horizon?

This is not easy to achieve for a legacy business. The phrases ‘digital transformation’ and ‘digitally agile’ abound, as if this is just a button you can click to get there. For existing firms, making this leap can be a big one and a complex, costly and painful journey to undertake. New cloud-born firms design around the new world with processes, systems, people and attitudes aligned to efficiency and customer service – very often self-serve.

Take estate agents as an example. Having engaged with Purple Bricks recently and taken benefit of their online model of estate agency, I can personally see why the existing bricks and mortar estate agents should be massively worried. This new model costs the customer roughly a quarter of the commission, and is slick and effective with self-serve portals combining with a human touch for the initial engagement, and a very slick process flow to sell your property in the most effective way for both you as a customer but also them as a cost model. We had eight offers quickly, a good percentage over what traditional estate agents said to sell for, and we had visibility of all that was happening 24×7 – a very slick process.

The only thing holding this back is the nervousness of ‘don’t we need the traditional model to tell us all what to do and handhold us’. This was done as well and there was nothing complicated, as the traditionalists would want you to think. In meeting with several traditional agents, they were fast to bad mouth these new merchants; ‘It won’t work’, ‘they won’t affect us’ and – more ridiculously – ‘but they don’t have a high street window to put the photo of your property in!’

My message to all those traditionalists thinking ‘what iceberg?’ is to open your eyes: you are heading straight for it. As those who use the new offerings prove it and tell all their friends, more and more will try it, questioning why the old model is so expensive. The Blockbuster-Netflix change will set in. It is the customer that decides, and those decisions are being made easier with a wider gap in service quality versus price attracting customers away from traditional form factors, delivery models and brands, to new ways and new brands. Add to this millennials, generation Z, whatever term you wish to coin; they expect online, self-serve, fast, low cost, slick customer experiences.

Disrupting the disrupters

What will let new entrants down of course is the service quality provided. If this is lacking, customers likewise move fast with their feet and also their bad recommendations fire off faster than good. Coming in as a disrupter or an existing provider refreshing its market offering, customer service remains key. In this new world, dynamic customer service is not simply the ‘speaking to the customer’ experience; it is far wider and far more expensive.

Take a bricks and mortar retail store – its opening hours may be six or seven days a week, 9am to 5pm perhaps, and the customer service is the touchpoints of staff, often only at the point of paying. In the new world offerings, we expect 24×7 access, from anywhere, from any device, with multiple interaction points from easy self-service and search of answers, shared service from other customers, such as provided by GiffGaff and Livechat, as well as email and phone support ideally when it is required. On top of this of course is the delivery quality of that service, its availability, is speed of (online) response, underpinned by the SLAs and processes that make the whole experience seamless and enjoyable.

For the providers and businesses providing these services there is a new dynamic, new business metrics, new approaches of development and support required in order to be operationally and cost efficient. Offering one of these new experiences is one thing – doing it at a market competitive price is another. Deliver it at twice the price of a rival and you will find how fickle the new customer breed is, and how fast you can be displaced and made irrelevant.

For the unicorn disrupters, they first need to change the market dynamic and disrupt the status quo, while second is to maintain and retain this differential – change and change again, and be willing and able to do so in technology, process and service. We will see disrupters being disrupted themselves. Take for example JustEat and Hungry House in the UK – did they see UberEats coming? Will they be able to defend against it? Uber is now reshaping not as a taxi firm, but as a logistics firm – one with a technology platform, processes and brand that it can leverage into other markets.

What’s coming next? After food delivery, why not parcel delivery, flower delivery, and so on? Can you see a time when an Uber driver taxis someone from A to B, gets alerted to pick up a parcel near B that needs to go to C and when approaching there gets alerted for a food delivery near C to deliver – thus maximising the earnings and their utilisation of their third party driver community, and giving a single brand experience to customers with the same lead they have on technology utilisation?

For the customer of new services, there are also challenges. Data privacy is a concern – who is tracking what you do, what if that data is leaked, and what if their service is unavailable, or cannot get online – am I able to operate, or have I relied on it to totality? For the business user of new world services, the issues are more complex, from service quality for the business users, security of access and data, data sovereignty and governance, supplier and SLA management, and control and mitigation of shadow IT – an increasing problem with new services being licensed and accessed by employees on work devices on network and when mobile. Of course, it’s worth noting that the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) aims to make some of these issues easier from both the consumer and business side.

What this means for IT

In the corporate environment, the service demands are often on IT to fix things when they go wrong, even if the service is externally cloud-provided and often even if the department has procured it directly without IT’s knowledge. When there’s an issue, IT is called upon to resolve and help.

Increasingly, internal IT is going to grow into a service broker, mixing in-house skills with those from external cloud, IoT and mobile providers to enable a cohesive service experience for its business users, and hence onward to the customer. This is important as one service quality often begets the other – how many times have you heard on a phone enquiry that the operator’s system is running slow, or has crashed, or could you be transferred to another advisor?

Corporate IT more than ever is going to need to have the processes and tools to manage not only the traditional environment and user requests, but to encompass those of cloud, IoT and mobile services, as well as smarter, more self-serving users and users with a higher demand expectation on response times and quality of service. Internally facing IT will have to align with external business quality of service delivery onwards to customers, to choose adaptable and empowering ITSM and ITAM tools, and ITIL best practices, to empower their agility and capability to deal with this faster changing IT environment.