At the keynote this morning we spoke about the value proposition of Nutanix, of having a DevOps culture and a mindset, and the business outcomes of achieving agility and scale, which everybody here is trying to accomplish,” noted Mark Lavi, DevOps Solution Architect at Nutanix, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @DevOpsSummit at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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Clare Hopping

Traditional retailers have had plenty of time to get their act together, as Amazon is a survivor of the dot-com frenzy of the 1990s. To be sure, they have each implemented one online strategy or another, but as they soon realized, simply selling goods online barely accounts for a blip on Amazon’s inexorable growth trajectory.

As the Digital Era dawned with the rise of smartphones, retailers realized they had to reinvent the sales channel or face extinction. The multichannel strategies of the late 1990s and early 2000s – adding ‘web’ to ‘in-store,’ ‘phone orders,’ and ‘mail order’ – wasn’t going to turn their fortunes around.

And so, omnichannel was born.

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The next BriefingsDirect digital transformation success story examines how local governments in Norway benefit from a common platform approach for safe and efficient public data distribution. We’ll now learn how Norway’s 18 counties are gaining a common shared pool for data on young people’s health and other sensitive information thanks to streamlined benefits of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), containers, and microservices.

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Chris Matthieu is the President & CEO of Computes, inc. He brings 30 years of experience in development and launches of disruptive technologies to create new market opportunities as well as enhance enterprise product portfolios with emerging technologies. His most recent venture was Octoblu, a cross-protocol Internet of Things (IoT) mesh network platform, acquired by Citrix. Prior to co-founding Octoblu, Chris was founder of Nodester, an open-source Node.JS PaaS which was acquired by AppFog and the founder of Teleku, a communications-as-a-service cloud platform which was acquired by Voxeo. Chris was also the founder of Digital Voice Technologies, the creator of the first VoiceXML-powered voice browser, which was acquired by Ideas & Associates.

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Bill Schmarzo, author of “Big Data: Understanding How Data Powers Big Business” and “Big Data MBA: Driving Business Strategies with Data Science” is responsible for guiding the technology strategy within Hitachi Vantara for IoT and Analytics. Bill brings a balanced business-technology approach that focuses on business outcomes to drive data, analytics and technology decisions that underpin an organization’s digital transformation strategy.

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HubSpot, SendGrid, and Nutanix are among the top publicly traded cloud companies to work for, with Algolia, Asana and Canopy taking the honours for private firms, according to new research.

The study comes from workplace ranker Glassdoor alongside Battery Ventures, and puts the analysis together based on CEO approval rating as well as ‘positive business outlook.’  

The report is the second from the companies, after 2016’s analysis. Since then, several companies have swapped over from private to public, including AppDynamics, Coupa, Dropbox, and Okta. Companies who made the private lists twice include Chef, Demandbase, and Smartsheet.

With a CEO approval rating of 96% and a positive business outlook of 89%, HubSpot took the top level for public cloud computing companies, ahead of Ultimate Software and Guidewire Software. The private sphere saw higher scores. Algolia took top spot with 100% approval in CEO Nicolas Dessaigne, as well as a 100% positive business outlook, with the company given a score of 4.9 out of 5.0 in the report. To even make the top 50, companies had to achieve a score of 4.4.  

The report’s ultimate goal is to show how important company culture and employee happiness is in an increasingly competitive tech and software as a service (SaaS) economy.

As this publication reported earlier this week, one potential path for ensuring a happy workforce is to enlist machine learning capabilities, using the example of Eightfold.ai, which claims to be the first AI-based talent intelligence platform combining analysis of publicly available data as well as internal data repositories.

According to research from PayScale last year, AT&T, General Electric and Oracle provide the best remuneration for top performers, with the role of enterprise IT architect, at a median salary of more than $138,000, the most valued. The average employee tenure at a Silicon Valley cloud-based enterprise software company is 14 months, down from 19 months elsewhere.

 “Since we first partnered with Glassdoor to compile these lists, the cloud has only grown in influence and market power, and some of the private companies we previously featured have now gone public or been acquired,” said Neeraj Agrawal, Battery general partner. “We view these rankings as a key indicator of company health and potential growth.”

You can find out more about the report here.

The many IoT deployments around the world are busy integrating smart devices and sensors into their enterprise IT infrastructures. Yet all of this technology – and there are an amazing number of choices – is of no use without the software to gather, communicate, and analyze the new data flows. Without software, there is no IT. In this power panel at @ThingsExpo, moderated by Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff, Dave McCarthy, Director of Products at Bsquare Corporation; Alan Williamson, Principal at ParkerGale Capital; Chris Matthieu, Director IoT Engineering at Citrix; and Peter Vanderminden, Principal Industry Analyst at Flatiron Strategies looked at the protocols that communicate data and the emerging data analytics that bring its full value to the enterprise. The era of Big Data and “Little Big Data” has arrived, and will soon be eating an enterprise near you!

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If public cloud services are in your IT mix, the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) is a great way to evaluate security needs and develop a robust security strategy. The NIST CSF identifies five key cybersecurity functions – “Identify,” “Protect,” “Detect,” “Respond,” and “Recover” – to organise recommended security controls into actionable work streams. AWS users can use the CSF to plan security strategies and investments for optimal protection and coverage.

To get you started, let’s look at the five top-level CSF functions and identify some of the unique issues you’ll face when applying them to your public cloud implementation. Visibility (or the lack of it) is a common theme for each area, and it’s a problem that needs to be addressed.

Here are the five CSF functions (descriptive quotes directly from NIST):

Identify

"Develop the organisational understanding to manage cybersecurity risk to systems, assets, data, and capabilities.” – NIST

Understanding your specific cloud implementation is, of course, necessary before you can plan and implement an effective security strategy. It’s tougher than you might think: the cloud is far harder to get your arms around than a captive data centre (where servers can be physically counted and institutional controls are more mature).

Clouds are completely virtual, they change incredibly fast, and relationships between cloud entities can be very tough to see and visualise. If you can’t see the core elements of your cloud, you can’t identify what needs to be done to secure them. What is needed is a platform that can clarify your cloud so you can visualise exactly what’s going on.

Protect

"Develop and implement the appropriate safeguards to ensure delivery of critical infrastructure services." – NIST

Choosing security tools and services to protect your infrastructure is a familiar task. But the cloud’s different: recent data breaches attributed to S3 configuration errors show how easily things can go wrong. Need to share some data with a third party? A quick and easy bucket permissions change gets it done instantly – but it can also instantly create a huge vulnerability.

Continuous automation is the answer and should be one of the most powerful capabilities of your platform. Monitoring the security posture of thousands of ephemeral cloud entities is a task well beyond human reach – so your platform should do it for you.

Detect

"Develop and implement the appropriate activities to identify the occurrence of a cybersecurity event." – NIST

The final three CSF functions change the focus from “planning and preparing” to “responding.” NIST’s “detect” function includes controls for improving coverage, reducing time-to-detection, and assessing event severity.

If you’re familiar with AWS CloudTrail, you know you have plenty of data about your cloud’s operations. A lack of data isn’t the problem – but making sense of what you have is another matter. By automatically analysing AWS CloudTrail data to eliminate spurious alerts, you can zero in on the incidents that really matter – quickly and decisively.

Respond

"Develop and implement the appropriate activities to take action regarding a detected cybersecurity event." – NIST

Responding to a cybersecurity incident is a bit like organising a battlefield counterattack. It’s chaotic, stressful and confusing – and if you don’t understand your adversary’s original attack, your odds of success are low. On AWS, understanding incidents is a challenge: you’ll have plenty of data (AWS logs everything) but analysing that data to understand the attack takes skill and time.

You need a platform that excels at correlating data from across AWS to clarify the who, what and how of every incident. That way, you’ll have a clear map to guide your response, develop mitigation strategies, assess impacts and provide definitive updates to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Recover

"Develop and implement the appropriate activities to maintain plans for resilience and to restore any capabilities or services that were impaired due to a cybersecurity event." – NIST

The last CSF function deals with two imperatives: restoring systems to normal (yours and any third-party systems affected by the attack) and integrating what you’ve learned back into your security framework. Your platform must have the ability to deliver a complete and accurate picture of the attack pays dividends. Without it, recovery efforts are likely to be incomplete and coordination with other affected parties will be a challenge.

Organise and guide cloud security efforts

Applying NIST’s CSF framework to your AWS implementation is great way to organise and guide your cloud cybersecurity efforts. Use it to identify gaps, organise your teams and guide security investments with an eye on the unique demands of AWS. Having a platform that has the ability to capitalise on the extensive data available from AWS will go a long way towards meeting the goals set out in the NIST CSF.