The 4th International DevOps Summit, co-located with16th International Cloud Expo – being held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY – announces that its Call for Papers is open until February 28, 2015.
Born out of proven success in agile development, cloud computing, and process automation, DevOps is a macro trend you cannot afford to miss. From showcase success stories from early adopters and web-scale businesses, DevOps is expanding to organizations of all sizes, including the world’s largest enterprises – and delivering real results. Among the proven benefits, DevOps is correlated with 20% faster time-to-market, 22% improvement in quality, and 18% reduction in dev and ops costs, according to research firm Vanson-Bourne. It is changing the way IT works, how businesses interact with customers, and how organizations are buying, building, and delivering software.
Internet of Things ‘Call for Papers’ Deadline Feb 28 | @ThingsExpo [#IoT]
The 3rd International Internet of @ThingsExpo, co-located with the 16th International Cloud Expo – to be held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY – announces that its Call for Papers is open until February 28, 2015.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is the biggest idea since the creation of the Worldwide Web more than 20 years ago.
5 Ways to Understand Your Applications and IT Services
How do you view your organization’s applications and IT services? At GreenPages, we often suggest that organizations begin to conceptualize IT services as corporate IT evolves from a technology provider to an innovation center. Now, there are ways to establish and maintain a service portfolio through ITBM (IT Business Management or IT Financial Management) systems, but these are often out of reach for customers less than enterprise level. However, you can conceptualize IT services by looking at your applications from five different perspectives. Let’s use Microsoft Exchange as an example.
Exchange is an enterprise application that provides email and calendaring. If you’re reading this, there is a good chance that you own servers that host the various components that comprise Exchange. One way to think about cloud is to identify the Exchange servers, their operating systems, the application version, performance requirements, etc. and identify a “place in the cloud” where you can procure servers of similar specifications and migrate the instances. I consider this as the infrastructure perspective. When it comes to cloud computing, this is perhaps the least important.
To take full advantage of cloud computing, understand your applications and IT services from a few additional perspectives:
- Functional
- Financial
- Operational (including lifecycle)
- Organizational
- Use-case
Hopefully, after looking at these different perspectives, you’ll see Exchange as part of an IT service that fits this description:
“In operation for over 20 years, E-Communications is a business service that allows each of our 1,200 employees to communicate through email, coordinate meetings, find coworkers’ contact information, and organize tasks using their PC, Mac, mobile device, or home computer 24x7x365. The service is supported by Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory, which both run under VMware vSphere. The service requires 1 full-time administrator who added 12 new users and logged 157 support tickets in 2014. In 2014, charges for software maintenance, personnel, infrastructure depreciation, and outside support services totaled $87,456. A software upgrade is planned for 2015. Users do not generally complain about the performance of the service, other than the size of their mailbox quotas (which are limited to 10GB per user). The company as a whole plans to offer telecommuting packages to more than 250 employees in 2015.”
Armed with this understanding of your IT service that includes Exchange, you might take the following action:
- Fund an Office365 migration with capital you had allocated for the Exchange upgrade project
- Provide copies of Office applications to telecommuters (without additional charge)
- Expand the mailbox quota from 10GB to 50GB
- Repurpose your Exchange admin to help telecommuters establish their home offices in 2015
- Reduce your spend on E-Communications by more than 50% (from $72.88/user to $35.00/user)
Of course, not every application is easily identifiable as belonging to an IT service. The functionality or financial aspects of IT services are often difficult to quantify. However, at GreenPages, especially when looking at cloud computing options, we recommend examining all of your applications through these five perspectives. For this reason, GreenPages has embedded this process in a piece of software that can quickly build your services portfolio and recommend optimizations based on current offerings available – such as Microsoft Office 365.
What are your thoughts?
You can hear more from John in his eBook, “The Evolution of Your Corporate IT Department“
By John Dixon, Director of Cloud Services
Cloud Expo NY ‘Call for Papers’ Deadline Feb 28 | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
The 16th International Cloud Expo has announced that its Call for Papers is open until February 28, 2015. 16th International Cloud Expo, to be held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City brings together Cloud Computing, APM, APIs, Security, Big Data, Internet of Things, DevOps and WebRTC to one location.
With cloud computing driving a higher percentage of enterprise IT budgets every year, it becomes increasingly important to plant your flag in this fast-expanding business opportunity. Submit your speaking proposal today!
Most enterprise cloud app usage falls under shadow IT, but could this be a positive for the CIO?
(c)iStock.com/MilosJokic
86% of cloud apps used by enterprises fall under the category of shadow IT, while nearly three quarters aren’t ‘Safe Harbour’ approved, according to an industry report from CipherCloud.
The research findings, coming amidst worries of more sophisticated mobile malware and vulnerabilities, suggest organisations need to do more to assess what’s going on in their internal IT. One major US enterprise polled estimated it had 10 to 15 file sharing applications in use; the real number was almost 70.
More than half (52%) of publishing apps were considered high risk, while 42% of social apps and 40% of career-based apps were also considered risky.
Enterprises in both North America and Europe are leveraging cloud applications extensively. An average global enterprises uses more than 1000 apps, and though North American businesses (1245) predictably use more than European firms (981), the gap is closing. Not surprisingly, social was the most popular class of cloud app, followed by collaboration, marketing, IT infrastructure and media.
Yet the majority of this usage is through unapproved applications.
One major US enterprise polled estimated it had 10 to 15 file sharing applications in use; the real number was almost 70.
“Our findings suggest that organisations vastly underestimate the level of shadow IT when it comes to cloud adoption”, the report notes. “As a result, hundreds of high-risk cloud applications are in common use across North American and European enterprises.”
The report adds: “To achieve governance, it is imperative that organisations build the necessary legal and technological infrastructure to address cloud risks.”
But is shadow IT such a bugbear? The vast majority of articles and thought pieces paints it as a complete no-no; however, recent opinion assesses it in the context of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’. Rather than stamp out shadow IT completely – which is practically impossible as employees will find a way to get around the system – it should be taken as constructive criticism.
As EMM provider MobileIron writes on sister site Enterprise AppsTech: “CIOs should see shadow IT as an opportunity. It’s an opportunity in the sense that it highlights, often very clearly, where something isn’t working for people.
“Instead of trying to wage war against people who are trying to do their jobs as best they can – something that will appear as punitive and unjustified to those people – a more forward thinking and long term approach is to engage them, understand their needs, and work to resolve the issue in a way that works for them and for IT.”
Then again, this point of view might not be the easiest to run by the CIO if corporate data is leaked through an employee’s personal Dropbox account.
You can find the full CipherCloud report here (registration required).
AWS hits five year high in cloud infrastructure market share
(c)iStock.com/ewg3D
Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) market share in cloud infrastructure services has hit a five year high despite competition from Microsoft, according to latest figures from Synergy Research.
The research, which examines infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), private and hybrid cloud, sees AWS’ overall share at 28%, compared to Microsoft’s 10%, IBM at 7%, Google at 5%, Salesforce 4%, and Rackspace 3%. Year on year growth saw Microsoft (96%) and Google (88%) the biggest climbers, with Amazon (51%) and IBM (48%) holding steady.
Synergy estimates quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues are now approaching the $5 billion (£3.32bn) mark. Total revenues for 2014 grew by almost half from the previous year.
“The momentum that has been built up at AWS and Microsoft is particularly impressive,” commented John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy. “They have an ever-broadening portfolio of services and they are also benefitting from a slowdown in the super-aggressive price competition that was a feature of the first half of 2014.”
AWS and Microsoft’s uptime figures were recently put under scrutiny by CloudEndure. Microsoft Azure saw 28 full service interruptions in Q2 last year, compared to 16 in Q3 and none in Q4. The vast majority of the 259 service errors in the first quarter of 2014 were advisory. In comparison, AWS in 2014 saw 46 service errors in EC2, 24 in scalable DNS provider Route 53, and 20 in network monitoring service CloudWatch.
In December last year AWS dramatically cut its rates for several types of data transfers, as well as changing how it priced reserved EC2 instances.
Comparative figures from Synergy in previous quarters have shown Microsoft strive to claim second position in the cloud infrastructure market, with AWS way out in front. “Many actual or perceived barriers to cloud adoption have now been removed, and the worldwide market is on a strong growth trajectory,” Dinsdale added.
Win Server 2003 Migration, Up-Level Migrations
At AppZero we spend much of our days advising our customers on how to remediate their risk of running Windows Server 2003 servers after it reaches the end of extended support this summer. To help, we have compiled some of our best thinking into a whitepaper to help you plan your migration project.
Mobile Device Security: A New Frontier for Hackers | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
Recent security breaches have heightened our awareness of cybersecurity issues. The hack and other security breaches have resulted in unprecedented damages. However, the majority of mobile device users have yet to be sensitized to their personal and corporate security risks.
For example, a security study found that 69 percent of users store sensitive personal information on their mobile devices. Examples include banking information, confidential work-related items and provocative videos and photos. In addition, 51 percent of mobile device consumers share usernames and passwords with family, friends and colleagues. This in spite of the fact that 80 percent of such devices are unprotected by security software.
While mobile device security attacks are relatively small, they are the new frontier for hackers. Listed below are highlights from several mobile device surveys:
Manage Your ‘Internet of Things’ Mesh By @SOASoftwareInc | @ThingsExpo [#IoT]
The Internet of Things is a misnomer. That implies that everything is on the Internet, and that simply should not be – especially for things that are blurring the line between medical devices that stimulate like a pacemaker and quantified self-sensors like a pedometer or pulse tracker. The mesh of things that we manage must be segmented into zones of trust for sensing data, transmitting data, receiving command and control administrative changes, and peer-to-peer mesh messaging.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Ryan Bagnulo, Solution Architect / Software Engineer at SOA Software, focused on design patterns for segmentation, policy enforcement and administration.
Process Metrics on the Windows Agent By @TrevParsons | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]
Log data provides the most granular view into what is happening across your systems, applications, and end users. Logs can show you where the issues are in real-time, and provide a historical trending view over time. Logs give you the whole picture.
As we continue to expand Logentries’ powerful search and metric capabilities, we are also looking for new ways to allow our Users to send us critical data. In the newest version of the Windows Agent users can now follow process metrics and send them to Logentries. This feature enables even more insight into your application by allowing you to monitor your processes resource allocation in Logentries. Additionally, with Logentries powerful real-time alerting capabilities you will be instantly alerted when your process stops logging.