Most modern computer languages embed a lot of metadata in their application. We show how this goldmine of data from a runtime environment like production or staging can be used to increase profits. Adi conceptualized the Crosscode platform after spending over 25 years working for large enterprise companies like HP, Cisco, IBM, UHG and personally experiencing the challenges that prevent companies from quickly making changes to their technology, due to the complexity of their enterprise. An accomplished expert in Enterprise Architecture, Adi has also served as CxO advisor to numerous Fortune executives.
Monthly Archives: January 2019
Alan Hase Keynote at @CloudEXPO New York | @BigSwitch #Cloud #DataCenter #CIO #DevOps #Serverless #Monitoring
For enterprises to maintain business competitiveness in the digital economy, IT modernization is required. And cloud, with its on-demand, elastic and scalable principles has resoundingly been identified as the infrastructure model capable of supporting fast-changing business requirements that enterprises are challenged with, as a result of our increasingly connected world. In fact, Gartner states that by 2022, 28% of enterprise IT spending will have shifted to cloud. But enterprises still must determine which clouds are best suited for each application, in order to achieve IT governance, while accounting for complex data privacy requirements. It’s safe to say that enterprises know their future looks cloudy, and that this infrastructure will soon become a mix of multi, hybrid, and on-prem enterprise clouds.
Chris Brown Keynote at @CloudEXPO New York | @Nutanix #Nutanix #DevOps #Serverless #CloudNative
In today’s always-on world, customer expectations have changed. Competitive differentiation is delivered through rapid software innovations, the ability to respond to issues quickly and by releasing high-quality code with minimal interruptions. DevOps isn’t some far off goal; it’s methodologies and practices are a response to this demand. The demand to go faster. The demand for more uptime. The demand to innovate. In this keynote, we will cover the Nutanix Developer Stack. Built from the foundation of software-defined infrastructure, Nutanix has rapidly expanded into full application lifecycle management across any infrastructure or cloud .Join us as we delve into how the Nutanix Developer Stack makes it easy to build hybrid cloud applications by weaving DBaaS, micro segmentation, event driven lifecycle operations, and both financial and cloud governance together into a single unified stack.
Power Panel: The Resurgence of Ops | @DevOpsSUMMIT @AndiMann #DevOps #SDLC #CloudNative #Serverless #DataCenter
DevOps has long focused on reinventing the SDLC (e.g. with CI/CD, ARA, pipeline automation etc.), while reinvention of IT Ops has lagged. However, new approaches like Site Reliability Engineering, Observability, Containerization, Operations Analytics, and ML/AI are driving a resurgence of IT Ops. In this session our expert panel will focus on how these new ideas are [putting the Ops back in DevOps orbringing modern IT Ops to DevOps].
Cloud Security Alliance: Cloud ERP making waves but caution persists around security
Once a major headache for organisations, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are now becoming easier to migrate to the cloud, according to a new study from the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA).
The findings, which appear in the research firm’s latest report, titled ‘The Impact of Cloud on ERP’, which surveyed almost 200 enterprise-level C-suite executives. Two thirds (64%) of organisations polled are either planning or in the middle of an ERP cloud migration initiative, while the vast majority (87%) of organisations who plan to use ERP are also looking to the cloud for other projects.
There is no doubt – if any existed previously – about how important ERP remains to large organisations. 87% of those polled said it was either ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ important to their business.
When it came to specific vendors, SAP was top of the shop, cited by 52% of respondents, ahead of Oracle (35%). This makes for interesting if not overly surprising reading. As regular readers of this publication will be aware, Oracle and SAP have committed huge resources to moving their legacy software contracts over to more quickly recurring cloudy ones.
This note shows the interest on both sides. Yet are SAP and Oracle convincing customers to use them to move over? Yes and no; while AWS (28%) and Azure (25%) remain the most popular cloud providers for data migration, SAP (13.5%) and Oracle (8%), the former in particular, have respectable figures compared with their overall cloud industry market share.
Organisations want to make the most of their ERP and they see being cloud-based as the key; yet concerns naturally remain. Companies are worried most about the moving of sensitive data (64%), as well as security (59%), compliance (54%) and disruption of business operations (46%). The benefits, however, outweigh the issues; security, cited by almost half of those polled as a boon, can be patched and updated easily by the provider, while scalability with new technologies (65%) and lower capex and opex (61%) were also seen as vital.
When it came to assessing security pre- and post-migration, however, the mood was one of caution and scepticism. One in three (34%) said there was a ‘slight’ risk increase, while 19% said the risk would be ‘significant’. 30% anticipated little change.
Writing for this publication in August, Louis Columbus noted how leading organisations were taking this a stage further, by baking machine learning and artificial intelligence into their ERP systems for greater insight. Taking manufacturing as its key example, through this integration machine-level data can be analysed, virtual agents can pick across each part of the process, and product quality can be improved.
“Legacy ERP systems were purpose-built to excel at production consistency first at the expense of flexibility and responsiveness to customers’ changing requirements,” Columbus wrote. “By taking a business case-based approach to integrating AI and machine learning into their platforms, cloud ERP providers can fill the gap legacy ERP systems can’t.”
“In any cloud migration, regardless of the provider, security must be implemented from the start and implemented in phases throughout the project,” said Juan Pablo Perez-Etchegoyen, chair of the CSA ERP Security Working Group. “Organisations are concerned about moving sensitive data across environments, then addressing the security and compliance implications that come of that migration.
“Our studies have found that implementing security in each phase of the migration could save customers over five times of their implementation costs.”
You can read the full report here (pdf, email required).
Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor 12.4 review: The perfect network monitoring tool
14 Jan, 2019
Price
From £2,245 exc VAT
Time-poor SMBs will love SolarWinds’ Network Performance Monitor (NPM) as it puts everything they need to know about network health right at their fingertips. It delivers an impressive range of network monitoring tools, all neatly integrated into SolarWinds’ Orion unified web console which can be customised to show all problem areas at a glance.
The main update in NPM 12.4 targets enterprises, as it now monitors Cisco’s software defined networks (SDNs). NPM receives a few network performance tweaks while the Orion web server centrally upgrades all polling engines and supports secure logins via SAML v2 providers.
Licensing is a little confusing as it’s based on elements, which can be monitored nodes, interfaces or logical disk volumes. We’ve shown the price of an SL100 license which enables 100 of each type and if any one element type goes over this threshold, you can either delete those you don’t require, or upgrade to the next level of license.
Installation on a Windows Server 2016 host took 90 minutes due to the new online installer downloading all the latest components. Next, a discovery wizard asked for address ranges, subnets plus credentials and 15 minutes later, furnished us with details of every SNMP- and WMI-enabled device on the lab network.
It creates a base set of alerts and thresholds for every monitored resource and you can customise these to link specific alerts with a wide range of actions. If a critical system or service goes offline, you can trigger actions such as sending messages by SMS, email and Syslog or running a program or script.
The NPM web console provides a menu bar across the top for one-click access to dashboards, alerts, reports and settings. Its summary page presents a complete rundown on network activity while colour-coded icons highlight all detected problems.
The console and all device views can be easily customised using the Pencil tool. We added new columns, resized them to fit, moved resource views around to suit and chose from a range of snazzy speedo dials to show items such as CPU utilization.
NPM goes way beyond simple network monitoring though; its Quality of Experience (QoE) feature keeps you in the loop about application activity and can now identify over 1,500 apps. One sensor license is included in the price and with this loaded on our NPM host, we chose which apps to monitor and viewed traffic volume and response time graphs along with pie charts showing business, social and potentially risky activities.
We run both VMware and Hyper-V hosts in the lab and although NPM correctly identified them, it only provided basic availability polling. To get more detail such as datastore usage, VM host resource utilization and capacity planning reports, you need the optional Virtualization Manager (VMAN) which snaps neatly into the Orion web console.
More complex network problems can be solved with NPM’s PerfStack which uses correlation projects to compare ranges of metrics from different nodes. Choose your nodes, drag selected metrics into the project and use the Performance Analysis dashboard to pinpoint exactly what the cause is.
Windows and Linux remote agents can securely monitor cloud servers or you can use Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure APIs which won’t consume any element licenses. Cloud services can also be closely monitored as NPM’s NetPath probes external locations or web sites and provides hop-by-hop maps with latency and packet loss details for each step.
SolarWinds NPM is one of the most sophisticated network monitoring products on the market and a great choice for SMBs. It neatly amalgamates a wealth of tools into a single intuitive console and takes all the guesswork out of troubleshooting network issues
How to choose the right network monitoring solution
22 Jan, 2019
IT support isn’t just about fixing printers and resetting passwords. Your technical staff should be constantly monitoring your network for emergent problems or faults, and then responding proactively to ensure that any issues don’t impact on your productivity.
In this age of growing networks and shrinking budgets, however, that’s a big ask. You need an ally in the form of network monitoring software. This will expose precisely what’s on your network, and alert you in double-quick time to problems and failures. And the good news for SMBs is that there are plenty of affordable monitoring products available, making it simple to stay on top of your network and application health.
In this buyer’s guide, we look at software solutions from four big names – Ipswitch, ManageEngine, Paessler and SolarWinds. They’re all designed to suit the needs of a typical SMB, and we put each one through its paces in the lab to help you choose the right one.
Watchdogs
Your first question might be whether this is an area where you really need to spend money at all. There certainly are free and open-source network monitoring utilities – but these have many limitations, including limited feature sets that mean you will probably need to run multiple tools in conjunction to capture all the key information. This complicates configuration and maintenance, and leaves you with multiple points of potential failure.
The WhatsUp Gold console can be customised to flag up specific critical events
When it comes to something as critical as your network, it’s best to use a single paid-for product, where all features are properly integrated and support is just a phone call away. With all devices, applications and services monitored from one console, it’s far easier to quickly spot and address problems.
On that note, it’s a good idea to look for a package that allows you to customise its main dashboard. Network monitoring software can pull together a huge amount of data, but the particular devices and services that are critical to your organisation should be front and centre.
WhatsUp Gold can analyse NetFlow data – but this is an optional upgrade
Alerting features are important too, as you might not always be sitting in front of the console. Most monitoring packages can raise the alarm when a device goes down, or when a threshold is breached (such as CPU usage or temperature). These can range from opening a pop-up window to sending an email, firing off an SMS or even automatically triggering a user-specified script.
Be prepared
Monitoring software won’t interfere with the operation of your network, but you’ll probably need to do a bit of preparatory configuration before you get started.
Infrastructure devices such as switches, routers and firewalls use SNMP to report their status, but this service is invariably disabled by default. You must enable it by hand – otherwise your monitoring software will only be able to report very limited information about what’s going on. If it’s available, use SNMPv3 as it adds extra security, requiring the monitoring software to authenticate before allowing access.
For systems that use Windows, Microsoft’s Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) service is the preferred monitoring method. This provides even more information than SNMP, such as details of services, processes and storage usage. It also allows you to monitor Hyper-V hosts.
Products will often rely on high-level device credentials to gather information, so for security’s sake it’s essential that you lock down access to their administrative consoles.
Certain platforms allow you to set up multiple users with their access restricted to specific functions, such as viewing and reporting. This is a feature worth looking for: it could prove valuable down the line, even if your current IT support team is one guy in a hoodie.
Licensing – sensor, element or device?
Perhaps the biggest headache when choosing a network monitoring solution is the confusing proliferation of licensing schemes. Almost every vendor has its own unique pricing structure (and each claims that it is the most convenient and affordable).
PRTG offers a remarkable range of sensors – and all are included as standard
Some charge per “element”, or per “sensor”. These are effectively the same thing, each one representing a single monitored item. On a server, this could be one CPU core, one Windows service or one disk volume; on an Ethernet switch, it could be one network interface.
Device licences are easier to understand: one licence allows you to monitor anything and everything that’s happening on a single device. No matter how many ports your switch has, or how many services your Windows server is running, it will only use up one licence.
The catch is that if you only want to keep an eye on one or two items, you still have to license the entire server. Sensor licences provide more flexibility, but you have to think carefully about exactly what you’re going to monitor, and how many sensors you need. If you’re going this route, be sure to choose a product that makes it easy to reassign sensors between devices.
Optional extras
As well as basic licensing costs, keep an eye out for potentially pricey add-ons. Many monitoring packages aren’t limited to basic devices and services, but can also keep an eye on business apps including Exchange, IIS and SQL Server, plus cloud services such as Dropbox, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Office 365.
However, you may find that these capabilities are offered only as paid-for extras. Some products also charge for Hyper-V and VMware monitoring, while others include it as standard.
Network discovery takes the legwork out of monitoring devices
Another potential differentiator is the ability to monitor the network from your mobile device. Some platforms provide free iOS and Android apps that connect to the monitoring host, while others are entirely lacking in such services.
Whatever features you need, you will find a great spread across the four products we’ve included in this roundup – and all of them are available as free, time-limited evaluations, so you can try them out to make sure you buy the one that best suits your needs.
Jon Thomson Presentation at @CloudEXPO New York | @Atmosera @Azure #Cloud #DevOps #CIO #DataCenter #Monitoring
Moving to Azure is the path to digital transformation, but not every journey is effective. Organizations that start with a cohesive, well-planned migration strategy can avoid common mistakes and stay a step ahead of the competition. Learn from Atmosera CEO, Jon Thomsen about the opportunities and challenges found in three pivotal phases of the journey to the cloud: Evaluation and Architecting, Migration and Management, and Optimization & Innovation. In each phase, there are distinct insights that can give a company the edge and make sure cloud adoption is closely aligned to core business goals. Keeping these in mind will make your migration to the Azure simpler and more effective.
Three key predictions for the cloud industry in 2019: Multi-cloud, governance and blurred lines
In 2019, we can expect the cloud industry to continue to thrive – with impressive cloud adoption across all industries, accompanied by an improvement in solutions and integrated data tools to best meet user needs. These advancements will substantially enhance operations in the cloud, leading it to ultimately become the preferred platform for all enterprise applications.
Looking ahead, we will see companies move beyond standard adoption, and instead begin to redefine how they use cloud as a key part of their business strategy. The cloud space has a rich history of continual improvement and is evidently getting more competitive, with three trends likely to emerge in this new year.
Multi-cloud dominance across enterprise
Cloud environments today come in many shapes and sizes, from many different providers. As such, multicloud deployment will likely continue to be used as a key strategy, bringing the ability to pick and choose solutions to the organisation as leaders seek to avoid dependence on a singular cloud provider. This flexibility means that companies can structure workloads into separate environments sorted by their different requirements.
However, as organisations look to deploy diverse clouds and operations within a single heterogeneous infrastructure, leaders will need a clear strategy and visibility into how these pieces will work together in order to avoid creating more silos.
There are multiple challenges when expanding the multicloud strategy, including security, governance, service integration and financial costs. Businesses can adhere to this by outlining the best practices for efficient management of their specific company’s culture and cloud environment. In 2019, we will see multicloud reach a tipping point and providers that are able to embrace this culture will be able to build the best custom approach that fundamentally presents the greatest offering.
Blurring of the line between public and private cloud
2019 could be the year and turning point for organisations to migrate critical workloads to public cloud as business leaders strive to stay ahead of the demands of digital transformation, including faster access to emerging technologies, on-demand capacity and unlimited scalability. And with the public cloud entering the data center through solutions like Amazon Relational Database Service, the rigid line between public and private cloud is slowly being diminished.
So with the cloud world no longer being simple black or white, how will we adjust to this new ‘grey scale’ commoditised cloud world? Fundamentally, APIs and control plans will become increasingly more important, and strategies will need to focus on when and where streams are being run and who is managing them. IT management will need to have a clear plan in determining what should be outsourced and create a contingency plan for when adjustments need to be made.
Governance and agility in opposition
IT operations is structured by a set of corporate guidelines which must be adapted and monitored within a cloud landscape, ensuring compliance with operational standards of high efficiency and security. And in the cloud and IT industry, governance is intertwined with business goals and policies, as companies strive to move forward and evolve.
However, cloud-based services are advancing at an accelerated rate and have exceeded the capabilities of traditional management solutions, creating roadblocks on the journey to innovation. New cloud technologies are continuing to change the nature of services, as today’s landscape no longer considers a single infrastructure to be sufficient. As organisations use multiple clouds simultaneously and deploy on-premise solutions, data needs to be maintained and shared across multiple different infrastructures, making IT governance increasingly more difficult to accomplish.
2019 will see governance and agility come head to head, and automation will be key in implementing a sound governance strategy that both simplifies operations and speeds up decision making. Managing large-scale cloud environments is no easy feat and automating policies will be essential in ensuring optimal operation of cloud infrastructure.
Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.
SUSE Named “Gold Sponsor” of @CloudEXPO Silicon Valley | @SUSE #Cloud #CIO #Linux #DevOps #SmartCities
SUSE is a German-based, multinational, open-source software company that develops and sells Linux products to business customers. Founded in 1992, it was the first company to market Linux for the enterprise.
Founded in 1992, SUSE is the world’s first provider of an Enterprise Linux distribution.