‘C’ What Your IAM System Lacks in a Customer-Centric World | @CloudExpo #Cloud

The age of mobile applications, pervasive use of social media and growing demand for accurate consumer data are converging to drive significant changes in how organizations connect with and market to their respective customer bases — as well as the technologies they use to do so. It’s becoming increasingly clear that legacy technologies that weren’t purpose-built for consumer-facing use cases will no longer suffice.
Take, for instance, identity and access management (IAM) systems. Historically used to manage a business’s internal employee records, many brands leverage modified IAM systems to manage their customer identity records as well. These brands are finding, however, that there are significant differences between managing corporate data resources and managing exabytes of consumer-generated data, and these differences simply can’t be addressed effectively with IAM systems.

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3 approaches to a successful enterprise IT platform rollout strategy

enterprise IT rolloutExecuting a successful enterprise IT platform rollout is as much about earning widespread support as it is about proper pacing. It’s necessary to sell the rollout within the organization, both to win budget approval and to gain general acceptance so that adoption of the new platform goes smoothly.

Each group being asked to change their ways and learn this new platform must have the value of the rollout identified and demonstrated for them. The goal of the rollout process is to see the platform solution become successfully adopted, self-sustaining, efficient in assisting users, and, ultimately, seamlessly embedded into the organization’s way of doing business.

Deploying a new solution for use across an organization boils down to three approaches, each with their advantages and drawbacks: rolling out slowly (to one department at a time), rolling out all at once (across the entire organization), or a cleverly targeted mix of the two.

Vertical Rollouts (taking departments one at a time, slow and steady)

This strategy applies when selecting a single department or business function within the organization (ex: customer support, HR, etc.), for an initial targeted rollout and deploying the new platform in phases to each vertical, one at a time. The benefit here is a greater focus on the specific needs and usage models within the department that is receiving full attention during their phase of the rollout implementation, yielding advantages in the customization of training and tools to best fit those users.

For example, the tools and interfaces used daily by customer service personnel may be entirely irrelevant to HR staff or to engineers, who will appreciate that their own solutions are being streamlined and that their time is being respected, rather than needing to accept a crude one-size-fits-all treatment and have to work to discover what components apply to them. It’s then more obvious to each vertical audience what the value added is for them personally, better garnering support and fast platform adoption. Because this type of rollout is incremental, it’s ripe for iterative improvements and evolution based on user feedback.

Where vertical, phased rollouts are less effective is in gaining visibility within the organization, and in lacking the rallying cry of an all-in effort. This can make it difficult to win over those in departments that aren’t offered the same immediate advantages, and to achieve the critical mass of adoption necessary to launch a platform into a self-sustaining orbit (even for those tools that could benefit any user regardless of their department).

Horizontal Rollouts (deploying to everyone at the same time)

Delivering components of a new platform across all departments at once comes with the power of an official company decree: “get on board because this is what we’re doing now.” This kind of large-scale rollout makes everyone take notice, and often makes it easier not only to get budget approval (for one large scale project and platform rather than a slew of small ones), but also to fold the effort into an overall company roadmap and present it as part of a cohesive strategy. Similar organizational roles in the company can connect and benefit from each other with a horizontal rollout, pooling their knowledge and best practices for using certain relevant tools and templates.

This strategy of reaching widely with the rollout helps to ensure continuity within the organization. However, big rollouts come with big stakes: the organization only gets one try to get the messaging and the execution correct – there aren’t opportunities to learn from missteps on a smaller scale and work out the kinks. Users in each department won’t receive special attention to ensure that they receive and recognize value from the rollout. In the worst-case scenario, a user may log in to the new platform for the first time, not see anything that speaks to them and their needs in a compelling way, and not return, at least not until the organization wages a costly revitalization campaign to try and win them over properly.  Even in this revitalization effort, a company may find users jaded by the loss of their investment in the previous platform rollout.

The Hybrid Approach to Rollouts

For many, the best rollout strategy will borrow a little from both of the approaches above. An organization can control the horizontal and the vertical aspects of a rollout to produce a two-dimensional, targeted deployment, with all the strengths of the approaches detailed above and less of the weaknesses. With this approach, each phase of a rollout can engage more closely with specific vertical groups that the tools being deployed most affect, while simultaneously casting a wide horizontal net to increase visibility and convey the rollouts as company initiatives key to overall strategy and demanding of attention across departments. Smartly targeting hybrid rollouts to introduce tools valuable across verticals – while focusing on the most valuable use case within each vertical – is essential to success with them. In short, hybrid rollouts offer something for many, and a lot specifically for the target user being introduced to the new platform.

In executing a hybrid rollout of your enterprise IT platform, begin with a foundational phase that addresses horizontal use cases, while enticing users with the knowledge that more is coming. Solicit and utilize user feedback, and put this information to work in serving more advanced use cases as the platform iterates and improves. Next, start making the case for why the vertical group with the most horizontally applicable use cases should embrace the platform. With that initial group of supporters won over, you have a staging area to approach other verticals with specific hybrid rollouts, putting together the puzzle of how best to approach each while showcasing a wide scope and specific value added for each type of user. Importantly, don’t try to sell the platform as immediately being all things to all people. Instead, define and convey a solid vision for the platform, identify the purpose of the existing release, and let these hybrid rollouts take hold at a natural pace. This allows the separate phases to win their target constituents and act as segments to a cohesive overall strategy.

If properly planned and executed, your enterprise IT platform rollout will look not like a patchwork quilt with benefits for some and not others, but rather a rich tapestry of solutions inviting to everyone, and beneficial to the organization as a whole.

 

roguen kellerWritten by Roguen Keller, Director of Global Services at Liferay, an enterprise open source portal and collaboration software company.

Opinion divided on impact of CISA ruling on Safe Harbour

Open DataThe new US Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), passed in the US Senate on Tuesday, has made it even harder for data sharing between the US and EU, according to critics.

However, attitudes to data sovereignty and the institution of a new Safe Harbour agreement seem to be polarising across both sides of the Atlantic.

Former White House cyber security advisor French Caldwell, chief evangelist at GRC software company MetricStream, said he recognised the ‘libertarian’ argument but that those at the front line in the IT industry have a more realistic grasp of the immediate issues. “Libertarians are strongly opposed and it’s easy to sympathise with that position. Once the door opens to information sharing, the arrangement might go from voluntary to mandatory over time,” said Caldwell.

However, security people on the ‘front lines’, at banks, electrical utilities, energy companies and hospitals, are fighting a war, he said. “Well financed gangs of criminal hackers are attacking businesses and government agencies daily. And as we’ve seen over the last few years, nation-states are probing for weakness. These cyberattacks amount to cyberwar,” said Caldwell.

The significant privacy protections in the CISA legislation will provide protections from anti-trust rules. Better still, it would bring data holders into a protective information sharing culture with federal agencies, he argued.

However, a UK counterpart saw the CISA ruling differently. “This is bad news. Just as the EU makes it clear that it’s a serious problem if security agencies get easy access to personal data, the US Government makes it even easier for this snooping to happen,” said Mike Weston, CEO of data science consultancy Profusion.

The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act will make it significantly harder for the US and Europe to agree a replacement for the collapsed Safe Harbour provisions, according to Weston. “Without assurances that European citizens’ personal data is protected, it’s hard to see how such an agreement might be reached. The biggest stumbling block is that while US citizens are afforded some protection by the USA Freedom Act, none applies to citizens of other nations.”

In a Microsoft blog posting its chief legal office Brad Smith called on the US government to respect European Union privacy laws for transatlantic personal data in the post-Safe Harbour era.

The note describes privacy as a ‘fundamental human right’ and urges the US government to commit to only accessing private information stored in the United States about EU citizens in a manner that ‘conforms with EU law, and vice versa’.

Webair to Give Presentation at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | @WebairInc #Cloud

Webair, a leading provider of Cloud Hosting, Colocation and Managed solutions, today announces that its Chief Technology Officer, Sagi Brody, will speak at Cloud Expo 2015 Silicon Valley, to be held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. Cloud Expo 2015 Silicon Valley is a world-class conference that brings together thought-leaders and cutting edge practitioners in the cloud / utility computing, Big Data, Internet of Things (IoT), Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC), DevOps and Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) space, which, in addition to prestigious industry keynotes and informative general sessions and panels, features a busy exhibition floor.

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AutoTrader to Present at @DevOpsSummit | #DevOps #API #Microservices

IT is often cast in a dichotomy where things are either viewed as traditional, stable, and safe or innovative, impermanent, and vulnerable. There have been multiple attempts to organize these classifications in a fashion that make IT budget and planning more predictable such as various agile methodologies, DevOps, and the bimodal model.
What qualifies as success depends on the customer and producer involved in a project. A survey conducted by Scott Ambler in 2013 suggests that being on schedule is valued more than being on budget, and coding to specification is of the least concern among the three.

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Jason Bloomberg to Keynote at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | #IoT #Cloud #DevOps

In today’s enterprise, digital transformation represents organizational change even more so than technology change, as customer preferences and behavior drive end-to-end transformation across lines of business as well as IT. To capitalize on the ubiquitous disruption driving this transformation, companies must be able to innovate at an increasingly rapid pace.

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IZO Private Cloud will snatch back IT assets from the public cloud, says Tata

Money cloudTata Communications claims its new IZO Private Cloud service will help CIOs wrestle back control of their IT from the public cloud. It could reunite CIOs with their IT and give them unprecedented access to their public and private clouds after half a decade of having their entire data centre estate wrenched from their grasp in a painful breakup.

The new service, unveiled at Cloud Expo Asia, is described as a ‘game-changing’ cloud enablement platform that, by seamlessly integrating hybrids with public clouds, extends the control of the CIO over all the IT assets affecting their employer. Tata claims it will empower enterprises to connect to the world’s biggest clouds and build high-performance IT infrastructures. It will achieve this by creating a union of different cloud, colocation and managed hosting environments and making this hybrid work together as one unit.

The new service will eventually be available in 12 locations worldwide but is currently installed in India, Singapore, Hong Kong, the US and UK. The multi platform integration will be tempered with enterprise-grade security, says Tata, and offers its CIO administrators ‘unparalleled visibility’ and control via a single-pane-of-glass management, claims Tata.

Tata Communications’ ecosystem comprises 20 service providers and includes Microsoft Azure, Office365, Amazon Web Service, Google Cloud Platform and Salesforce, with over 50 data centres across the globe. Currently 24% of the world’s Internet routes travel over Tata’s network, which is the largest wholly-owned subsea cable network in the world. Its Tier 1 IP network provides backbone connectivity to over 240 countries and territories across 400 points-of-presence.

The IZO Private Cloud breaks down the final barriers blocking enterprise cloud adoption, claimed Tata Communications’ president Genius Wong. “This is the next step on our mission to harness our partners and data centre infrastructure so CIOs can be put back in control of their cloud and data centre estate.”

Veritas warns of ‘databerg’ hidden dangers

Deep WebBackup specialist Veritas Technologies claims European businesses waste billions of euros on huge stories of useless information which are growing every year. By 2020 it claims the damage caused by this excessive data will cost over half a trillion pounds (£576bn) a year.

According to the Veritas Databerg Report 2015, 59% of data stored and processed by UK organisations is invisible and could contain hidden dangers. From this it has estimated that the average mid-sized UK organisation holding 1000 Terabytes of information spends £435k annually on Redundant, Obsolete or Trivial (ROT) data. According to its estimate just 12% of the cost of data storage is justifiably spent on business-critical intelligence.

The report blames employees and management for the waste. The first group treats corporate IT systems as their own personal infrastructure, while management are too reliant on cloud storage, which leaves them open to compliance violations and a higher risk of data loss.

The survey identified three major causes for Databerg growth, which stem from volume, vendor hype and the values of modern users. These root causes create problems in which IT strategies are based on data volumes not business value. Vendor hype, in turn, has convinced users to become increasingly reliant on free storage in the cloud and this consumerisation has led to a growing disregard for corporate data policies, according to the report’s authors.

As a result, big data and cloud computing could lead corporations to hit the databerg and incur massive losses. They could also sink under a prosecution for compliance failing, according to the key findings of the Databerg Report 2015.

It’s time to stop the waste, said Matthew Ellard, Senior VP for EMEA at Veritas. “Companies invest a significant amount of resources to maintain data that is totally redundant, obsolete and trivial.” This ‘ROT’ costs a typical midsize UK company, which can expect to hold 500 Terabytes of data, nearly a million pounds a year on photos, personal ID doc, music and videos.

The study was based on a survey answered by 1,475 respondents in 14 countries, including 200 in the UK.

Harbinger Systems to Speak and Exhibit at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | @HarbingerSys #IoT #Cloud

Harbinger Systems, a global company providing software technology services, today announced that it is participating as a Speaker and an Exhibitor at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley from November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, CA. Managed by SYS-CON Events, the 17th International Cloud Expo brings the world of Cloud Computing, Big Data/analytics, Internet of Things and DevOps on one platform.
“Participating as a speaker and an exhibitor for the third consecutive year makes this event special for us. This is an excellent platform to meet with industry veterans and exchange views on Cloud, Data Science and IoT. We are making investments in R&D and incubation initiatives in this realm; helping our customers stay ahead of the industry. We are thrilled to be taking part in Cloud Expo event,” said Suhas Joshi, Vice President – Technology, Harbinger Systems.

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Agema to Introduce Next-Gen Open Networking Platforms at @CloudExpo | @AgemaSystems #Cloud

Agema Systems, a provider of high performance Next-Gen Open Networking platform, invites network and virtualization professionals to attend Agema portfolio of 1G/10G/25G/40G and 100G product introduction at Cloud Expo® 2015, November 3-5 at the Santa Clara Convention Center.
Agema will introduce high-speed, high-performance open networking white box switching platforms that enable networking professionals to transform legacy packet networks, reducing CAPEX and OPEX. While at Agema exhibit booth #317, attendees can obtain Agema product portfolio information for network virtualization and SDN implementation, learn about Agema’s extensible modular NOS (Network Operating System), “Agema OS” and participate in a raffle drawing for Apple® iPad. The Agema OS integrates traditional L2/L3 protocol suites and restful APIs/flow agent in hybrid box providing seamless arbitration for controller base network flow and protocol base flow control.

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