DevOps at Cloud Expo, taking place Nov 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, is co-located with 19th Cloud Expo and will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world.
The widespread success of cloud computing is driving the DevOps revolution in enterprise IT. Now as never before, development teams must communicate and collaborate in a dynamic, 24/7/365 environment. There is no time to wait for long development cycles that produce software that is obsolete at launch. DevOps may be disruptive, but it is essential.
Monthly Archives: August 2016
Public cloud and the global economy: Digging further into the opportunities
(c)iStock.com/Zakokor
Editor’s note: This article is a follow-up to the July piece ‘How the public cloud can benefit the global economy’, which drills down into two of the four areas outlined in that piece – how the public cloud enables new business models, and data sharing and collaboration between entities. The below is an image created by Chef Software which outlines the four towers.
Picture credit: Chef
New business models
Large organisations worldwide are looking for new ways to conduct business more efficiently, more effectively, and at lower cost. Many of these companies are looking to new technologies as the catalyst of these efforts. Use of the public cloud, as part of a hybrid cloud solution, has grown and continues to grow as the basis for these new technologies.
Innovation around new business models will depend on the business type and technical maturity of a new organisation. While many possibilities exist, the models that seem to have the most potential are those that utilise the data gathering and distribution, and service distribution, aspects of the cloud.
One example of a potential new business model could be in the insurance industry. Efficiencies in the insurance industry are based on the quality of the data gathered, the speed at which this data is assimilated and analysed, the speed at which the data can be distributed, and the ability to effectively present that data to users and customers.
Using cloud technologies, information can be gathered from many sources, assimilated either in the public cloud or transferred securely to an on-premise private cloud implementation via microservices. The information, once analysed, can be distributed globally using public cloud regionalisation services, and presented using globalised applications through public cloud-based content distribution.
Data sharing and collaboration between entities
In recent years, companies and organisations within the same industry have begun to co-operate on specific initiatives, even while competing in other circumstances. IT industry-wide initiatives, such as open source, have transformed the way software is developed and the way platforms are created and managed. This ‘coop-etition’ has led to the need for easy collaboration between organisations and common platforms through which to share data without having to develop a portfolio of services that may only be used for a single initiative.
The answer, in my opinion, is data sharing through the public cloud. Once the data, files and documents have been loaded into a content distribution system – for example, AWS CloudFront – they can be accessed globally using whatever tools the user currently has. While access controls must be set up to ensure that data does not become corrupted, this process of creating a shared data repository can be accomplished in a matter of hours as opposed to weeks to build out new collaborative services.
Here’s an example. Two software companies decide to co-develop a set of services for a common customer. Architecture and design documents, libraries, and code elements (AWS CodeCommit for example) can be shared via a common repository, created in a few hours, and populated as the project progresses. The fact that one company is in New York and the other in India makes no difference.
Conclusion
The global nature of the cloud, the ease of distributing content and data, and the ability to gather information from multiple points in the globe and assimilate them as if they came from one source, can be of great benefit to global entities and the global economy as a whole.
Editor’s note: Part two will aim to discuss the final two pillars – better co-ordination of efforts between international entities, and increased speed of international transactions. Look out for this on CloudTech in the coming weeks.
These companies have been ranked the best private cloud firms to work for
(c)iStock.com/PeskyMonkey
Asana, Greenhouse Software and WalkMe have been ranked as the three best private cloud computing companies to work for, according to a new study from Glassdoor and Battery Ventures.
The study focused on larger, privately held firms, with 200 or more employees, and ranked CEO approval, as well as a ‘positive business outlook’. Participants were asked to rank on a scale between one and five, with 1.0 meaning they were ‘very dissatisfied’, 3.0 signalling ‘okay’, and 5.0 marking ‘very satisfied’.
Productivity app firm Asana came out on top with an overall company rating of 4.9, a 100% approval of CEO Dustin Moskowitz, co-founder of Facebook, and a 99% positive business outlook rating. Enterprise software providers Greenhouse and WalkMe picked up the silver and bronze medals respectively. In total, seven companies polled rated 4.9 out of 5.0 overall – Chef Software, Sprout Social, Grovo, and Procore Technologies – while the former, a Battery client, polled only fourth despite getting 100% in both CEO approval and business outlook.
All of the top 50 companies scored above 4.0 overall, with bigger names at the outside the top seven including Couchbase (4.5, #22), DocuSign (4.4, #24), MongoDB (4.3, #34), and Dropbox (4.1, #47). The latter saw 77% confidence in CEO Drew Houston, with 71% – the lowest in the top 50 poll – for positive business outlook.
“This list provides a window into which private, business-focused cloud companies are generating the most excitement among employees – one key proxy for company health, and part of the broader business trend we see today around transparency on the Internet,” said Neeraj Agrawal, a Battery general partner specialising in cloud investing in a statement. “We look forward to tracking these standouts as they mature, and to watching smaller, up-and-coming cloud startups make the list in future years.”
The report also noted key tenets of employees wanting to work at the highest rated firms; the need to work for ‘mission-driven companies with strong and unique company cultures’, as well as embracing transparency, and teams who regularly and clearly communicate with their employees.
Back in March, this publication posted a list of the top 100 cloud companies and CEOs to work for based again on Glassdoor as well as the latest figures from Computer Reseller News. Including companies across the spectrum, the top performer was Zerto; 95% of employees said they would recommend the disaster recovery and virtual data replication company to a friend.
The full Glassdoor/Battery table can be seen below (companies with asterisks after their name indicate a Battery investment):
Cloud Is Now Seen as a Way to Better Security | @CloudExpo #Cloud #Security #DigitalTransformation
A cybersecurity transformation discussion on how cloud security is rapidly advancing, and how enterprises can begin to prevail over digital disruption by increasingly using cloud-defined security.
We’ll examine how a secure content collaboration services provider removes the notion of organizational boundaries so that businesses can better extend processes. And we’ll hear how less boundaries and cloud-based security together support transformative business benefits.
EOL Announcement – Parallels Mobile Device Management
Parallels®, a global leader in cross-platform solutions announces the End-of-Life (EOL) for Parallels Mobile Device Management (MDM). This announcement applies to Parallels Mobile Device Management, Hosted and On-premise Editions. Parallels will be discontinuing product development for MDM and re-focusing engineering and developmental resources on core product lines. Effective immediately Parallels® will remove the product from our website and […]
The post EOL Announcement – Parallels Mobile Device Management appeared first on Parallels Blog.
[report] Improve Data Center Agility Without Getting Fired | @CloudExpo @Gartner_Inc #Cloud #Agile #DataCenter
Is the ongoing quest for agility in the data center forcing you to evaluate how to be a part of infrastructure automation efforts?
As organizations evolve toward bimodal IT operations, they are embracing new service delivery models and leveraging virtualization to increase infrastructure agility. Therefore, the network must evolve in parallel to become equally agile. Read this essential piece of Gartner research for recommendations on achieving greater agility.
Storage Insanity | @CloudExpo #Cloud #Storage #DataCenter
To paraphrase someone famous, “The definition of insanity is to do something the same way over and over again and expect a different result”.
Humans are creatures of habit and when it comes to storage, old habits die hard.
Why do we continue to put our faith in legacy storage providers when they haven’t invented anything new in decades. Sure, they re-badge their products every couple of years to make their messaging look modern, but ultimately, it’s the same old stuff with a new coat of lipstick.
Asides from becoming smaller, faster and cheaper to acquire, but much more expensive and complex to run, storage technology is exactly as it was when it was released 60 or 70 years ago.
A Reality Check on ‘Everyone’s Moving Everything to the Cloud’ | @CloudExpo #SaaS #Cloud #Agile
A recent CIO editorial by Bernard Golden regarding the future of private cloud spurred some interesting commentary in my network. The pushback seemed to focus around the viability of the term “private cloud”. These individuals are well-respected thought-leaders in cloud with significant experience guiding senior IT executives transition to modern architectures, so I decided I’d engage them in a discussion regarding the future of self-managed infrastructure as a whole.
When Compliance Comes Down to Security | @CloudExpo #Cloud #Security
In the business world, it’s hard to throw a rock without hitting a compliance requirement. All must be obeyed, but some call for a high level of control and auditability. Governing bodies are exerting their authority like never before, increasing the number of auditors and handing out heavy fines – sometimes as much as $1 million.
This has become the new norm, and it isn’t likely to turn around any time soon. It’s important, then, to be aware of the primary threats that could undermine compliance efforts. The top three such issues are discussed below.
Is Data Classification a Bridge Too Far? | @CloudExpo #API #Cloud #BigData
Today data has replaced money as the global currency for trade.
“McKinsey estimates that about 75 percent of the value added by data flows on the Internet accrues to “traditional” industries, especially via increases in global growth, productivity, and employment. Furthermore, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) estimates that about 50 percent of all traded services are enabled by the technology sector, including by cross-border data flows.”