Why You Should Build Your Supply Chain from the Customer Up | @CloudExpo #SaaS #Cloud #Agile

Satisfying customers and winning their loyalty is the foundation that every successful business is built upon. Delivering a consistently excellent experience builds a level of customer intimacy that will set your business apart from the competition. Consider that 80% of your company’s future revenue will come from just 20% of your existing customers, according to Gartner.
The supply chain landscape is shifting, as customer expectations soar and new services and software bring greater complexity. There’s a great deal of pressure to maintain operational excellence, integrate disruptive new technologies, and innovate for a superior customer experience. Tying these disparate threads together requires responsive Supply Chain Orchestration (SCO).

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Marketing in the Digital Age | @CloudExpo #Cloud #Analytics #DigitalTransformation

In 2017, word-of-mouth marketing will be a lucrative strategy and should allow small businesses and startups to carve out powerful niches in a marketplace that’s noisier than ever.
When was the last time you paused to consider the noise on the internet? If you really take a look, it’s astonishing.
Data shows that every single day, 500 million tweets are sent out, 4 million hours of content is uploaded to YouTube, and 205 billion emails are sent. On top of that, roughly 3 million Facebook posts are shared every single minute. Then you have to consider that millions of new blog posts are published on a weekly basis.
In other words, the internet is anything but quiet. It’s loud – obnoxiously loud. For brands that want to stand out, the challenge of getting noticed is becoming more and more difficult.

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Is #Blockchain Enabler of Data Monetization? | @CloudExpo #BigData #FinTech

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).

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Blockchain: Byzantine Generals and Achieving Consensus | @CloudExpo #Cloud #FinTech #Blockchain

When discussing disruptive technologies, the topic of blockchain inevitably enters the conversation. Gartner recently listed blockchain as one of the ‘Key platform-enabling technologies to track.’ Approximately $1.4B has been invested in blockchain just this year, according to PwC executive Seamus Cushley. IBM announced this week a Blockchain-as-a-Service Enterprise offering at their Interconnect Conference. While there is a lot of ‘hype vs reality’ discussions going on, there is no arguing that blockchain is being taken very seriously across industries and cannot be ignored.

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CA “Platinum Sponsor” of @CloudExpo NY & Silicon Valley | @CAinc #DevOps

SYS-CON Events announced today that CA Technologies has been named “Platinum Sponsor” of 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, and the 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place October 31-November 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. CA Technologies helps customers succeed in a future where every business – from apparel to energy – is being rewritten by software. From planning to development to management to security, CA creates software that fuels transformation for companies in the application economy.

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Is Your IT Career Ready for the Cloud? | @CloudExpo #API #Cloud #Azure

The IT industry is undergoing a significant evolution to keep up with cloud application demand. We see this happening as a mindset shift, from traditional IT teams to more well-rounded, cloud-focused job roles. The IT industry has become so cloud-minded that Gartner predicts that by 2020, this cloud shift will impact more than $1 trillion of global IT spending. This shift, however, has left some IT professionals feeling a little anxious about what lies ahead. The good news is that cloud computing is relatively new by IT’s standards, which means it’s constantly expanding to encompass new career paths.

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Making a Difference in Tech: #YesWeCode | @DevOpsSummit @CollabNet

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.»

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NGA wants to speed cloud deployment

Federal government has come to embrace the cloud in a big way, and many of its departments have already started moving their data and applications to the cloud. Though this is heartening from a technology and user perspective, what is painstaking is the process of approvals. Typically, it takes a minimum of six months for a cloud provider to get security clearance for its service. In fact, six months is when the approvals run at the fastest possible pace. Otherwise, clearance to use cloud service for federal government apps and data can take years. The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) wants to change all this.

To those working in NGA this elaborate approval process feels like a super slow motion and this is why they’re doing everything they can to change it. According to Jason Hess, the cloud security head at NGA, many different processes are being put in place to reduce the time it takes for a cloud provider to get security clearance. Ideally, Hess wants all approvals to be cleared in a single day, so the cloud service can be up and running within 24 hours of its application. Currently, the NGA uses a combination of DevOps techniques to get approvals within seven days, but this hasn’t been easy by any breadth of imagination.

This is a big initiative, considering that the NGA is planning to move all of its data and applications to the cloud, in a big to “re-invent security.” The agency is looking to tap into the flexibility of cloud to break-down the IT architecture and re-build it every day, so hackers will experience a new operating environment every day. NGA believes that such a move can confuse hackers and the familiarity with the system, and in the process, will reduce the chances of an attack as well.

Though this idea is unique, its practical application is always questionable. Is it possible to build such a dynamic IT architecture that changes every day? Will there be a specific pattern that would be followed in choosing the architectural style? These are important questions that have to be answered if the NGA wants to use this strategy to prevent outside attacks on its system. If an architectural style is going to be repeated after every few days, then it becomes predictable for hackers. Also, if there is no randomization, then architectural styles can be guessed by sophisticated hackers.

Given these questions, we can say that the NGA’s approach to cyber security is not for everyone. Currently many federal departments have vast amounts of data and legacy systems that can make it almost impossible for them to tear down the IT architecture and build one from scratch each day. At the same time, simply installing cyber security measures at the edges of a network system is not going to work anymore.

So, federal departments have to strike a balance between the aggressive security approach of the NGA and its own problems of legacy systems and siloed data,

Overall, it’ll be interesting to see if NGA’s plan can be implemented across the board.

The post NGA wants to speed cloud deployment appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Announcing @CollabNet «Bronze Sponsor» of @CloudExpo NY | #CD #DevOps

Keeping pace with advancements in software delivery processes and tooling is taxing even for the most proficient organizations. Point tools, platforms, open source and the increasing adoption of private and public cloud services requires strong engineering rigor – all in the face of developer demands to use the tools of choice. As Agile has settled in as a mainstream practice, now DevOps has emerged as the next wave to improve software delivery speed and output. To make DevOps work, organizations must focus on what is most relevant to deliver value, reduce IT complexity, create more repeatable agile-based processes and leverage increasingly secure and stable, cloud-based infrastructure platforms.

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[session] @Docker Monitoring | @DevOpsSummit @OutlyerApp #AI #Monitoring

Everyone wants to use containers, but monitoring containers is hard. New ephemeral architecture introduces new challenges in how monitoring tools need to monitor and visualize containers, so your team can make sense of everything. In his session at @DevOpsSummit, David Gildeh, co-founder and CEO of Outlyer, will go through the challenges and show there is light at the end of the tunnel if you use the right tools and understand what you need to be monitoring to successfully use containers in your environments.

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