The world’s five greatest national IT development challenges are presented by Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Cameroon, Cote D’Ivoire, and Tanzania. India takes sixth place in the world and second place in Asia, followed in Asia by Pakistan, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Iran.

Ukraine tops the list in Europe, followed by Russia, Italy, Poland, and Serbia. The greatest challenges in the Americas are offered by Bolivia, Paraguay, Peru, Honduras, and Ecuador (Brazil is sixth here).

Our Process
These findings are a function of our ongoing research at the Tau Institute. To identify the greatest challenges, we integrate our overall rankings into our rankings of current levels of technology change, then adjust for population size.

Larger nations tend to face larger challenges, just because they have more people. Combine a large population with a relatively undeveloped infrastructure and low per-person income levels, and the countries facing the greatest challenges emerge.

We encourage people to note that our research is relative, centered upon how well nation’s are doing given their current economic resources and current acceleration of technological and socioeconoic change. This point of view brings the potential of Bolivia, for example, currently a highly underveloped nation, into focus.

We don’t weigh parameters in a traditional way, ie assign certain percentages to each factor and then run a straight-line calculation. Instead, we plot all of our data on a series of exponential curves, and balancing technological development against socioeconomic issues such as poverty and corruption.

In Search of Dynamism
Further analysis is done by isolating the most currently dynamic IT environments among the nations with the greatest challenges. Poland and Ukraine fall into this category, as do Tanzania, Armenia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Bolivia. These countries are on a positive course to address their current challenges.

Poland, in fact, has one of the most dynamic current IT environments in the world on a relative basis, and ranks among our Top 20 nations (among 103 surveyed) overall.

Our research can be sliced and diced in thousands of particular ways, to identify opportunities at all levels of challenge, potential, and opportunity. Our algorithms have some built-in flex that lets them be adjusted as needed by clients who wish to emphasize, augment or diminish specific or multiple factors.

Cameroon
For those in search of a high degree of difficulty, Cameroon may represent the ultimate challenge, according to our numbers. It ranks as the third-greatest challenge overall, but also lacks the dynamic IT development environment found in Ethiopia and Bangladesh. There are good people in Cameroon working for change, and a government commission focused on IT, but this nation could use several shots of oxygen to get its IT development (and by extension, its socio-economid development) in motion.

It’s a beautiful country, with stupendous geographical and cultural diversity, and perhaps known to casual observers as a producer of good, entertaining national football (soccer) teams. Consider it to be the ultimate challenge for IT development.

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The Bridge Group is known for publishing insightful studies that aid SaaS Sales & Marketing leaders to build and optimize their inside sales strategies. They are working on the 5th round of their SaaS inside sales research and would like our help completing a 6-7 minute survey. Your answers will remain anonymous, and in return the research promises action-oriented guidance on compensation benchmarks, selling strategies, productivity and performance best practices, and more.

If you are able, please take a few moments to fill out the survey:

2014-15 Bridge Group SaaS Inside Sales Research Survey

As we saw with my own SaaS survey results published last month, when we all contribute, we can get powerful information to fuel our businesses.

To see results from a previous round of this survey, check out The Bridge Group’s 2012 Inside Sales Compensation and Metrics report.

Share and Enjoy

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For more than a decade we have heard constant warnings about the coming of “cyber war” and “cyber terrorism.” The prophets of cyber doom have promised that cyber attacks are just around the corner that will be on par with natural disasters or the use of weapons of mass destruction. With every new report of a cyber attack, the prophets exclaim that their visions have finally come to pass, and so it is with the most recent attack against Sony. But in most prior cases, after the dust has settled, the belated arrival of cyber war, terrorism, or doom has failed to live up to the initial hype. The same will be the case with the Sony hack. It is neither war nor terrorism as those terms are commonly defined. It certainly is not cyber doom.

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Picture credit: iStockPhoto

As this year comes to a close, let’s take one last look at the most pervasive cloud computing trends – including increased usage across the different cloud service models, the key business drivers and the impact of agile innovation strategies.

Cloud computing adoption has matured, with 69 percent of survey respondents stating that at least a portion of their computing infrastructure is in the cloud. However, 56 percent of companies are still identifying IT operations that could potentially move to the cloud, according to the latest market study by IDG Enterprise.

Survey respondents believe that business technology is a game changer, and cloud solutions are providing advantages from increasing IT agility (63 percent), IT innovation (61 percent) and improving the ability to access critical business data and digital service applications (58 percent).

Removing the barriers to cloud adoption

That said, IT leaders perspective on barriers to bringing these advantages to fruition differs from their Line of Business (LOB) counterparts. There is agreement, however, that a company’s biggest challenge to implementing a cloud platform is ensuring security.

But there’s a significant disconnect on the second most important barrier. IT leaders are concerned about integration (46 percent).  In contrast, LOB leaders believe measuring return-on-investment is a more important challenge (37 percent).

“As use of cloud solutions mature, more than half of companies surveyed are shifting from adoption to upgraded services,” said Brian Glynn, chief revenue officer of IDG Enterprise. “This opens the door for new and existing solution providers as businesses continue to look for ways to improve agility and innovation while balancing enterprise security and risk.”

Cloud service preferences are evolving

Three-quarters of companies are confident that the assets they have placed in the cloud are secure. To help companies have a sense of control, 80 percent have already created, or will create, a governance policy in the next year.

Also, public cloud (60 percent) and private cloud (57 percent) solutions remain the preferred environments compared to hybrid cloud (19 percent). As more workloads move into the cloud, the amount of data stored in private and public clouds will each increase to 25 percent and 21 percent, respectively, in the next 18 months.

Since 2012, cloud investments have increased by 19 percent, with large enterprises spending on average $3.3 million a year, compared to SMBs spending $400,000. Moreover, spending on cloud solutions will account for almost a quarter of IT budgets in the coming year.

Cloud deployment motivation is strategic

Current estimates show that 23 percent of spending on cloud solutions happens outside of the IT department – with marketing, sales and human resources most often investing in solutions.

Besides, even when a cloud solution is purchased by LOB leaders, the IT team can still be involved in the management of the project. And, in instances where IT does not lead the project, 45 percent of the time IT is still called upon to take over the project.

No matter who initiates the move to cloud, one thing will always be certain, CEOs and other senior executives that approve the budget are not enamored by the technology – they have a strategic imperative and they seek a meaningful competitive advantage in the marketplace.

What I thought was the best definition, had a line about how “communication was the responsibility of both Dev and Ops.” I know sounds really simple, but if you extend that definition of “communication” I thought that did a good job of showing that DevOps is absolutely both departments’ responsibility. It’s not just relying on one team to change culturally. I’d love to get your short definition of how you define DevOps today.

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Picture credit: iStockPhoto

Despite the vast majority of companies looking to expand their cloud infrastructure over time, only 14% of respondents in a NuoDB survey said they had a specific cloud strategist to oversee it.

60% of the 200 plus respondents at the Cloud Expo and AWS re:Invent events said they saw cloud as one of their companies’ top three business or IT initiatives, yet seem happy enough for their current IT team to take charge of their cloud migration projects.

This is seen as particularly interesting given other survey data which shows a mix between private, public, and hybrid cloud deployment. More than half of small to medium, mid market and enterprise businesses are using public cloud, with hybrid and private garnering more than a quarter of share. Only 4% of firms polled said they had no plans to deploy cloud solutions.

As a result, the chief technical officer (CTO) is often the primary driver in developing a cloud strategy with more than 25% of companies citing it. The CIO, IT director, and chief architect also have important roles to play, according to the report – and the researchers sound alarm bells at this perceived lack of leadership.

“Making the move [to cloud] is among the most important initiatives for most of the respondents to this survey,” the report argues. “Cloud has advanced from the cautious consideration stage to the actively planning or already arrived stages.”

So what could be driving these trends? Executives argue the ‘cloud skills gap’, of businesses searching for cloud computing talent that isn’t there, is still prevalent. Interoute CTO Matthew Finnie, speaking to CloudTech back in May, contended the gap was getting bigger.

Research from Reconnix released last month found the majority (82%) of UK IT leaders said they were not fully ready to move to IaaS providers because of a lack of in-house skills – so is a head of cloud needed?

The head of cloud, or cloud strategist role, certainly shoulders a lot of responsibility. A Salary.com job description notes the organisation who hires a director of cloud computing “will depend on this person’s vision implementation.”

Yet in other technology disciplines, a hegemonic structure is not encouraged. Cathal McGloin, the CEO of mobile backend as a service provider FeedHenry, told sister site Enterprise AppsTech in September his view that a ‘head of mobility’ doesn’t work as effectively today when organisations choose to mobilise their workforce.

“You see a trend towards mobile centres of excellence, traditional IT emerge, rather than appointing somebody to be mobile, and having that somebody separate from your head of IT, your marketing officer and so on,” he said. “So now it’s more part of the ordinary business rather than being a standalone.”

But do you think the same thing is happening with cloud computing?

The Log Shipper Poll results are in! We run Logsene here at Sematext, so we wanted to know what people like to use to ship their logs. Before we share the results, a few words about the poll:

We published it here on our blog on September 22, 2014
We automatically tweeted it and posted it to several Devops and similar LinkedIn groups
We did not post it to groups or mailing lists for various log shippers we included in the poll to avoid bias
We collected 115 votes until now
That said, let’s see how log shipper popularity breaks down.

You can tweet the results of this poll here: Top 5 Most Popular Log Shippers

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Many projected use cases for IoT won’t directly generate revenues. To achieve greater efficiency, companies are deploying IoT sensors internally throughout their organizations to optimize their use of everything from computer servers to lighting to HVAC systems to employee productivity.

“Smart cities” are doing the same, only on a much higher scale. Amsterdam is leading the way. It’s employing IoT technology in everything from improving traffic flows in real time, to emergency response, to optimizing public transit use and maintenance.

On the surface, these particular applications of IoT are primarily cost saving in nature and not revenue producing. However, they represent significant indirect revenue opportunities for savvy companies that can provide the many moving parts required to make IoT magic happen.

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When moving to cloud or deploying a new application it is important to understand the concept of a cloud enabled and cloud centric application.
Cloud computing technologies allow organizations to leverage the cloud service models (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS) and cloud deployment models (Public, Private and Hybrid) to deploy their applications.These applications can be categorized in two classes: a cloud-enabled or a cloud-centric applications.
A cloud-enabled application is an application that was moved to cloud, but it was originally developed to be deployed in a traditional data center. Some characteristics of the application had to be changed or customized to the cloud.

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