With emerging ideas, innovation, and talents, the lines between DevOps, release engineering, and even security are rapidly blurring. I invite you to sit down for a moment with Principle Consultant, J. Paul Reed, and listen to his take on what the intersection between these once individualized fields entails, and may even foreshadow.

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Although it has gained significant traction in the consumer space, IoT is still in the early stages of adoption in enterprises environments. However, many companies are working on initiatives like Industry 4.0 that includes IoT as one of the key disruptive technologies expected to reshape businesses of tomorrow. The key challenges will be availability, robustness and reliability of networks that connect devices in a business environment. Software Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) is expected to play a key role in overcoming these challenges.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Mike Wood, vice president for VeloCloud Networks, will discuss how SD-WAN can offer a simple, agile, cost-effective approach for enterprise IoT networks.

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(c)iStock.com/Barcin

There has been plenty written around the disconnect between line of business and IT around cloud deployments – but what about just IT? According to the latest research from BetterCloud, there is a similar issue afoot between IT executives – CIOs and VPs – and the run of the mill employees.

“On just about every topic, entry-level admins, managers, and senior IT professionals see things through a different (perhaps more accurate) lens than IT executives (VPs and CIOs)”, the report notes.

The study argues that non-executive IT staff are more likely to say their team lacks control over their SaaS applications than the higher ups. 49% of execs polled said they did not have sufficient control, compared to 63% of non-execs. “We believe this data point shows that many non-executive IT staff have a more realistic picture of what’s going on in their own environments than the IT executives they work under,” the report says.

When it comes to visibility over their SaaS applications – in other words, how they are being used – the findings are similar, with 30% of IT execs saying their organisation lacks visibility compared to 47% of IT non-execs. It’s a similar story with budget, with non-executive IT staff 25% more likely to feel as though their IT teams lack budget when compared to their superiors.

Infact, it’s a similar story pretty much across the board; with onboarding (29% of non-execs say new hires lack access to the right SaaS apps compared with 18% of execs), offboarding (31% and 13% respectively), and staffing; 54% of non-execs believe they are understaffed compared with 38% of execs. The only issue where both sides seem to agree is over how the department is perceived; more than two thirds (74% execs, 69% non-execs) believe their IT team gives them a competitive advantage.

“Despite the major hurdles they must overcome, the majority of IT professionals believe they are making a difference,” the report concludes. “Now, the question becomes: What could IT teams do if they were on the same page? If everyone is rowing in the same direction, how much more of an impact could be made?”

You can read more here.

In his general session at 19th Cloud Expo, Manish Dixit, VP of Product and Engineering at Dice, will discuss how Dice leverages data insights and tools to help both tech professionals and recruiters better understand how skills relate to each other and which skills are in high demand using interactive visualizations and salary indicator tools to maximize earning potential.
Manish Dixit is VP of Product and Engineering at Dice. As the leader of the Product, Engineering and Data Sciences team at Dice, he takes a metrics-driven approach to management. His experience in building and managing high performance teams was built throughout his experience at Oracle, Sun Microsystems and SocialEkwity.

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In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Nick Son, Vice President of Cyber Risk & Public Sector at Coalfire, will discuss the latest information on the FedRAMP Program. Topics will cover:
FedRAMP Readiness Assessment Report (RAR). This new process is designed to streamline and accelerate the FedRAMP process from the traditional timeline by initially focusing on technical capability instead of documentation preparedness.
FedRAMP for High-impact level systems. Early in 2016 FedRAMP officially published requirements for CSPs that want to pursue FedRAMP High authorization.
Department of Defense Security Requirements Guide (DOD SRG) Impact Level 6. CSPs can leverage their work in pursuing a FedRAMP-Moderate authorization, and with a little more effort attain certification for DoD authorization.

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(c)iStock.com/photogearch

Microsoft has announced it will be increasing its prices for customers buying its enterprise software and cloud services in British pounds by up to 22% from January to “harmonise” within the EU and EFTA (European Free Trade Association) regions.

The company said on-premise enterprise software will increase by 13% to align closer to the Euro, while “most” enterprise cloud prices will rise by almost a quarter, adding that after the adjustment customers will “still find our cloud offerings highly competitive.”

For existing customers, Microsoft said the changes will not affect them. “These changes will not affect existing orders under annuity volume licensing agreements for products that are subject to price protection,” the company wrote. “For example, customers with Enterprise Agreements have price protection on previously ordered enterprise software and cloud services, and will not experience a price change during the term of their agreement.

“Similarly, business customers with cloud commitment subscriptions such as Office 365 also receive price protection during their subscription term, which is normally 12 months from the start of paid subscription,” it added.

Microsoft said it assessed its prices “periodically”, noting the move was not especially different to adjustments in pricing made for Norwegian krone and Swiss franc in April 2016 – again using the word “harmonisation”.

Yet the inferences are clear; the value of the pound has dipped considerably post-Brexit. On June 23, the day of the referendum, it was 1.4819 US dollars to the pound. At the time of publication, it is hovering at 1.22312, representing a 17.5% downturn. In a piece published yesterday, the Financial Times noted the move was to “reflect the plunging pound.”

In July, analyst firm IDC warned that its coming analyses on the European cloud infrastructure market may be downscaled following the Brexit vote, adding that it expects a “challenging transition” ahead for the UK. Taylor Rhodes, CEO of managed cloud services provider Rackspace, cited Gartner’s similarly gloomy post-Brexit forecast for IT spending growth when speaking to analysts in August, following a move by the company to sell one of its ‘non-core’ business units.

It’s not all bad news, however. Writing for this publication in August, Louis Columbus discussed how Brexit can accelerate public cloud adoption, while focusing on Amazon Web Services (AWS). “The continual pressure on CIOs to reduce the high hardware and software maintenance costs is accelerating thanks to Brexit,” he wrote. “Because no one can quantify with precision just how Brexit will impact European economies, CEOs, and senior management teams want to minimise downside risk now.”

(c)iStock.com/maxsattana

The provocative side of IT resilience is made up of all the threats that today have more and more people talking about it than ever before. Let’s face it, who isn’t intrigued (and worried, terrified or simply concerned) by headlines about IT failures that have triggered nationwide flight cancellations or data hostage situations or global service outages? 

That said, even less dramatic outages like ING Bank and Glasgow City Council still hit the headlines here in the UK last month.  ING Bank’s regional data centre went offline due to a fire drill gone wrong (reports suggest that more than one million customers were affected by the downtime), and Glasgow City Council lost its email for three days after a fire system blew in the Council’s data centre.

The stark reality is business threats are only becoming more pervasive, and whether that is because of ever-evolving cyber-attacks, or human errors being made by overworked teams, or aging hardware and systems that just keep breaking down…the list is constantly growing and goes on and on. 

In the face of these rising threats, there have been two recent and very fundamental shifts in the way C-suite and IT executives think about business continuity.

The first one is that IT resilience is no longer doomed to the proverbial backburner and only something that the IT team needs to concern itself with. This is especially true as the “powers that be” realise cloud-based backup and disaster recovery are extremely cost and resource-efficient. Near-zero downtimes are standard with the right technology and support. Implementation time can be measured in hours meaning that the path to securing executive buy-in is well paved and far easier than it might have been in the past.

That said, at a roundtable that we hosted last month in London with senior IT executives to discuss the findings from our latest survey, The State of IT Disaster Recovery Amongst UK Businesses, the group did debate whether business decision makers really understood the financial impact of downtime. Moreover, whether more education is needed about recovery times and what can be recovered, with the group concluding that clearer prioritisation around different systems needs to be implemented so the business understands what will happen when outages take place.

The second fundamental shift is that security is now a top priority for Disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) and backup. When choosing a DRaaS or Backup-as-a-service (BaaS) provider, companies are rightfully now asking more questions about security first, right along with speed of recovery and all the other questions that you might expect get asked. Here at iland, with our advanced security cloud platform as our answer, we couldn’t be happier that this is now the case.

We are thrilled to be helping more companies ensure IT resilience is faster than ever before.  In fact, these shifts in executive and business thinking have contributed to our 248% growth in DRaaS and BaaS in the first half of this year, and we’ve doubled the number of new customers we’re now working with.

So why is this? 

To my mind this comes down to a few key factors:

• Companies adopt BaaS as the natural first step to geographic diversification, sending secondary copies to a secure location with less than five minutes of setup time. With our pricing model, companies can protect themselves from data loss, compliance fines and malicious threats like ransomware at very little expense, which is of course very attractive.
• DRaaS has become the standard when every second counts, cost-efficiently enabling companies to minimise IT downtime that is often measured in the thousands of dollars per minute. 
• Security and compliance are key to our customersand our advanced security cloud platform integrates all the components our customers need to maintain security best practices in the cloud. 
• Backup and disaster recovery prove to be stepping stones to broader cloud migration. Customers increasingly fail over to the iland cloud as part of a DR effort and choose to remain there, rather than failing back.
• In a disaster, companies report exceptional phone support is critical,as it provides the last piece of assurance a failover will succeed. Therefore it is critical that cloud service providers factor this into the overall package that they offer.

As I said at the outset, IT resilience is becoming much more of a business and mainstream issue and with IT resilience now firmly on the agenda for most organisations we are excited to be able to put our customers’ worries to rest.  At the same time, we hope they are equally excited about getting some sleep and having their worries taken care of.