This session will provide an introduction to Cloud driven quality and transformation and highlight the key features that comprise it. A perspective on the cloud transformation lifecycle, transformation levers, and transformation framework will be shared. At Cognizant, we have developed a transformation strategy to enable the migration of business critical workloads to cloud environments. The strategy encompasses a set of transformation levers across the cloud transformation lifecycle to enhance process quality, compliance with organizational policies and implementation of information security and data privacy best practices. These transformation levers cover core areas such as Cloud Assessment, Governance, Assurance, Security and Performance Management. The transformation framework presented during this session will guide corporate clients in the implementation of a successful cloud solution. Session participants will gain a deep understanding of the cloud lifecycle model, levers and framework that will enable an enterprise accelerate the digital transformation journey and reap the benefits of cloud computing.
Monthly Archives: July 2018
Walmart and Microsoft ink cloud deal in fight against Amazon
18 Jul, 2018
Walmart and Microsoft have formed a strategic partnership that will see Microsoft’s Azure cloud services power Walmart’s digital transformation drive.
Azure becomes Walmart’s “preferred and strategic cloud provider” ahead of other large cloud players like Amazon Web Services (AWS). While the retailer hasn’t categorically shunned Amazon’s cloud service, Amazon has accused Walmart in the past of badmouthing its services to other tech suppliers.
Walmart has denied doing so, but said it has advised its suppliers to use Azure. This new partnership unites Amazon’s biggest rival in the cloud space with its closest competitor in the retail sphere, giving Microsoft another big name customer as it tries to close the gap on its cloud rival.
The strategic partnership builds upon the duo’s existing alliance, tagging on Azure’s machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data platform services to its current critical application and workload management implementation.
“Walmart’s commitment to technology is centered around creating incredibly convenient ways for customers to shop and empowering associates to do their best work,” said Doug McMillon, Walmart CEO.
“Walmart is a people-led, tech-empowered company, and we’re excited about what this technology partnership will bring for our customers and associates. Whether it’s combined with our agile cloud platform or leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence to work smarter, we believe Microsoft will be a strong partner in driving our ability to innovate even further and faster.”
Microsoft will help Walmart hit its digital transformation goals, such as migrating its walmart.com and samsclub.com to Azure, developing new innovations to benefit customers and improving staff productivity and collaboration using Office 365, including Microsoft Workplace Analytics, Microsoft Stream, and Microsoft OneDrive.
“Walmart is a pioneering retailer, committed to empowering its employees and delivering the best experience for its customers wherever they are,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. “The world’s leading companies run on our cloud, and I’m thrilled to partner with Walmart to accelerate their digital transformation with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365.”
Picture: Shutterstock
Registration Opens for @LMacVittie Session | @DevOpsSUMMIT @F5Networks #DevOps #Docker #Containers #DataCenter
Lori MacVittie is a subject matter expert on emerging technology responsible for outbound evangelism across F5’s entire product suite. MacVittie has extensive development and technical architecture experience in both high-tech and enterprise organizations, in addition to network and systems administration expertise. Prior to joining F5, MacVittie was an award-winning technology editor at Network Computing Magazine where she evaluated and tested application-focused technologies including app security and encryption-related solutions. She holds a B.S. in Information and Computing Science from the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, and an M.S. in Computer Science from Nova Southeastern University, and is an O’Reilly author.
Walmart and Microsoft team up for five year strategic cloud deal
Walmart is making Microsoft its preferred cloud provider – with machine learning and artificial intelligence a key focus.
The two companies – both rivals of Amazon – have signed a five year strategic partnership deal with Walmart looking to utilise ‘the full range of Microsoft’s cloud solutions’, as the retailer put it.
A ‘significant portion’ of walmart.com and samsclub.com will be migrated to Azure, including its cloud-powered checkout, while Walmart and Microsoft engineers will collaborate on moving hundreds of existing applications to cloud-native architectures.
The press materials included an interesting paragraph focusing on Walmart’s culture and how Microsoft will play within it. “Walmart continues to foster a curious, collaborative, accountable, and agile culture to position the company for further growth,” the company notes. “To do that, it’s critical to have tools that encourage those skills and traits.
“Through this partnership, Walmart is investing in its people with a phased rollout of Microsoft 365 providing associates with the productivity tools to foster a culture of collaboration, creativity and communication,” the company added.
All very good – but it is interesting to look at this deal from the perspective of where Amazon sits. Last year, it was reported that Walmart had told technology companies and vendors that if they ran apps on Amazon Web Services (AWS), they would lose business with the retailer. AWS and Microsoft, of course, are major rivals in the cloud infrastructure space.
Writing for this publication last year, David Auslander – who since the article was written now works for Azure’s customer advisory team – argued Microsoft and Google were potentially the only clear winners from Walmart’s declaration of war on AWS. “Microsoft has recently reported steady gains in [public cloud] market share, and most of that gain has come by way of taking share away from AWS,” Auslander wrote. “While AWS is a key part of Amazon’s empire there is still much speculation about the larger effect of this move on either Amazon or Walmart.”
“Walmart is a pioneering retailer, committed to empowering its employees and delivering the best experience for its customers wherever they are,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a statement. “The world’s leading companies run on our cloud, and I’m thrilled to partner with Walmart to accelerate their digital transformation with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365.”
Orange acquires Basefarm to boost European cloud services
17 Jul, 2018
Orange has taken a huge step in the business cloud market, acquiring cloud infrastructure and critical application services firm Basefarm to help grow its Orange Business Services division.
While Orange is a strong cloud player in France, it’s looking to diversify the services it provides across Europe, strengthening its hold on the cloud sector.
Basefarm already has a strong presence within Europe, particularly Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Austria and Germany, where it offers a range of cloud-based infrastructure and services, management of critical applications and analytics to help businesses get more insight from their usage data.
“We are very proud to announce the acquisition of Basefarm, which will mark a major milestone in our international development,” Helmut Reisinger, CEO of Orange Business Services, said. “In particular, the company’s integration will enable us to significantly extend our big data and critical application management services on a rapidly consolidating market.
“In addition to our ability to offer access to public or private cloud infrastructure, it is above all our capacity to propose enriched, automated services to our customers, wherever they are in the world, that will enable us to support companies as they transform onto new, digital models based on cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence.”
The company hasn’t yet announced whether all 550 of Basearm’s staff will join the 1,600 cloud computing experts at Orange Business Services or whether there will be redundancies. But Orange did explain the acquisition will give Basearm the opportunity to develop its products under the Orange umbrella, focusing on data management, big data and multi-cloud services.
The deal is worth €350 million (£310 million) and is due to complete in the third quarter of this year.
Picture: Bigstock
Is AWS about to start selling network switches?
17 Jul, 2018
Amazon Web Services (AWS) could be about to break into the world of data centre switches, helping to boost its presence across the entire cloud infrastructure space.
The public cloud giant reportedly wants a piece of the $14 billion switches pie, taking aim at the business networking market. This would put the company up against hardware bigwigs like Cisco, Arista Networks and Juniper Networks, who currently hold the largest market shares in the sector.
A person with direct knowledge of the cloud unit’s plans, and another source briefed on the project, told The Information that what’s key about AWS’s strategy is that it plans to undercut its mainstream competitors, pricing its switches at 70%-80% less than Cisco’s products.
This could mean serious problems for the networking vendor, especially as AWS’s switches would reportedly link seamlessly with AWS’s cloud services, providing a connection between on-premise networks and the company’s cloud services, sending AWS down a hybrid cloud route – something it’s only begun to embrace.
AWS has actually been making switches for its own data centres for some time. This news, if true, just means it would sell them to provide an extra revenue stream outside of its core cloud services.
The switches would comprise open source software and unbranded hardware, although one source said AWS is working with hardware manufacturers including Celestica, Edgecore Networks and Delta Networks to mass produce its white boxes.
The company is currently testing its innovations with a handful of loyal customers and if a hybrid cloud approach works for them, then it’s likely other won’t have to wait too long until they launch onto the open market.
Anne Hungate Joins @DevOpsSUMMIT NY Faculty | @AnneHungate #DevOps #Monitoring #Microservices #ContinuousDelivery
IT organizations that don’t know their risk factors and exposure are likely to make investments in DevOps that don’t matter. After working with several teams that lost their DevOps funding after making automation investments in areas that were not business constraints, Anne Hungate’s “Know Your Numbers” model emerged. Join Anne to learn how to prioritize your DevOps improvements and demonstrate the impact and value you are delivering. After all, DevOps gets traction and funding when teams can show the business impact of doing it, so if you want your DevOps initiative to take off, be prepared to provide some metrics! You’ll discover the five key questions you need to be able to answer to show that your DevOps matters, and leave with seven actions you can start taking as soon as you get back to your desk in order to improve the results of your DevOps efforts.
Torin Sandall Joins @DevOpsSUMMIT NY Faculty | @SomeTorin @OpenPolicyAgent #DevOps #Monitoring #ContinuousDelivery
Authorization of web applications developed in the cloud is a fundamental problem for security, yet companies often build solutions from scratch, which is error prone and impedes time to market. This talk shows developers how they can (instead) build on-top of community-owned projects and frameworks for better security.Whether you build software for enterprises, mobile, or internal microservices, security is important. Standards like SAML, OIDC, and SPIFFE help you solve identity and authentication, but for them authorization is out of scope. When you need to control “who can do what” in your app, you are on your own.
Mike Kavis Joins @DevOpsSUMMIT NY Faculty | @MadGreek65 @Deloitte #AI #IoT #DevOps #Monitoring #SmartCities
Mike is managing director in Deloitte Consulting LLP’s Cloud practice, responsible for helping clients implement cloud strategy and architecture to drive digital transformation. Beyond his technology experience, Mike brings an insightful understanding of how to address the organizational change, process improvement, and talent management challenges associated with digital transformation. Mike brings more than 30 years of experience in software development and architecture to his role. Most recently, he was a principal architect with Cloud Technology Partners. A pioneer in cloud computing, Mike led a team that built the world’s first high-speed transaction network in Amazon’s public cloud and won the 2010 AWS Global Startup Challenge. He has written extensively about cloud technologies and the Internet of Things.
Seven ways to test your online security
19 Jul, 2018
You may have all the latest security tools installed, you may follow best practice and avoid suspect emails, and you may never reuse the same password twice, yet there can always be a chink in your cyber security armour.
Sometimes this can be something simple, such as failing to update software, or more intricate, like an open port on your network. Fortunately, there are free tools available online that can deep dive into your defences to see just how robust they are.
The problem is knowing exactly where to go and who to trust – so we put together a list of the some of the best tools and scanners out there to make things easier.
Check if your accounts have been breached
If you suspect you may have fallen victim to a hack, visit Have I Been Pwned? which catalogues all the email addresses and other data taken in high-profile breaches.
Search for your address, and if it’s found in the data dumps, a red warning will appear, revealing what was taken in the hack and recommending you change your password(s) immediately. You can also sign up for notifications of future breaches. At the time of writing, Have I Been Pwned? featured more than 4.7 million ‘pwned’ accounts and 232 ‘pwned’ websites, including MySpace, Adobe and LinkedIn.
Test the strength of your passwords
There are lots of online tools that test the strength of your passwords, but make sure you use one that encrypts what you enter or you could actually be risking your security.
Our favourite it the Dashlane-sponsored How Secure Is My Password, which tells you how long your password would take a hacker to crack. If the answer is only seconds or minutes, you should change the password as soon as possible.
Ensure your security software is working
Don’t let malware infection be the first sign of a security hole The Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization (AMTSO) offers a Security Features Check that exposes potential weaknesses in your system’s defences.
The check consists of six tests, four of which involve downloading files that your PC should identify as malware and block automatically. These files aren’t actually malicious but are designed to be detected as such, so if your anti-malware program lets one through, then you need to tighten your settings.
Test your firewall for weaknesses
Firewalls generally run quietly in the background, so it’s important to know that they’re working properly. To test yours, try to bypass it using the free online port scanner GRC ShieldsUP.
Ports should be closed by default aside from port 80 (or 443), which is needed for web traffic. You can choose to test either Common Ports (only the most vulnerable ports) or All Service Ports (a thorough scan of 1,056 ports). Green or blue results mean that those ports are secure, while red ones show open ports that need to be closed.
Ensure your plugins are up-to-date
Security holes in Java, Adobe Reader and Flash put your personal data at risk, so ensure your plugins are up to date using Qualys BrowserCheck. This scans your browser and its plug-ins to detect outdated versions and other security problems. Click the Fix It button next to scan results marked as ‘insecure version’ or ‘update available’ to install the required updates. The test works with all major browsers.
Check your Facebook security
Facebook now offers a Security Checkup tool that lets you review and lock down your account. Go here and Facebook will tell you whether you’re still logged into the social network in a browser or app you haven’t used for over a month. You can also set up login alerts to be notified via email when if your account is accessed from an unrecognised device or browser.
Test your own security knowledge
Avoid being the weak link in your PC’s protection by keeping your security knowledge up to scratch. There are lots of online quizzes that test your ability to spot online threats, including BT’s Security Savvy test and the OpenDNS Phishing Quiz.
Image: Shutterstock