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It’s 11 PM – Do You Know Where Your Data Is? By @EFeatherston [#Cloud]
I was recently on a business trip out to Wausau, WI. The purpose was to conduct a training session on web application development for a new batch of associates at our onshore development center. When I picked up my rental car at the airport, I was very happy to discover it had built in Bluetooth integration for my phone. I have this feature on both cars at home. I love the convenience of having the car become an accessory for my mobile device. I immediately bound my phone with the car’s Bluetooth. Then something unusual happened. My phone prompted me with a question: ‘Chevy/Malibu would like access to your contacts list, click OK to grant request.’ My first reaction was no, and canceled the request. Each time I started the car, it would persistently ask the question. My curiosity got the better of me, and I finally relinquished and said OK to see what happened next.
What Are You Waiting For? The #Cloud Era Is Here! By @Kevin_Jackson
The revolutionary business aspects of cloud excite me every day, but the business diversity is even more exciting. This fact really struck me after teaching my last Learning Tree Cloud Computing Introduction class in New York City. I’ve been in the regular rotation here for four months now and have taught three classes during that time. The chart below breaks out the students in these classes by industry.
How the Project Management Office Can Drive Business Growth with Excellence in Customer Service
Project Managers today don’t just manage projects; they are a key contributor in managing the business. So, is there a way the Project Management Office can gain the business competitive positioning and better business results? I say yes. We can do this through delivering excellence in customer service.
Aristotle said it best when he said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.” Aristotle ~384-322 BCE. To create a culture of service excellence, the PMO must first define for itself what excellence in customer service is. Involve the members of the Project Management Office in this activity (after all, we know from our experience managing projects that stakeholder involvement facilitates buy-in). Ask each member to provide their best customer service experience. From the cumulative experiences, collaboratively define what service excellence is for your team in your business. This definition should become the mission statement of the PMO.
Next, have the Project Management Office members recommend the values they will guide themselves by to obtain service excellence. Below are a few general principles to build on. I agree that many may seem obvious or cliché, but you will find that they work:
- Be available
- Treat your customer the way you would like to be treated
- Provide a personal and individual level of attention to each client
- Be an expert in your role, discipline or practice
- Be empowered to make decisions
- Ask, listen and learn
- Analyze risk to identify potential problems and implement corrective and preventive measures
- Communicate early and often
- Request feedback and use it to evolve service excellence
- Be humble, honest, frank and prepared
Once the Project Management Office defines and outlines values, PMO management should create a formal documented Customer Service policy and roll it out to the team. The upkeep of the Customer Service policy should be considered an iterative process; the needs of the customer and feedback from stakeholders are regularly analyzed and constant improvements are made to the program.
Review the policy with the PM team regularly, especially when there are any updates, or new hires added to the team. Perform team building exercises in support of the program, and share lessons learned at regular team meetings to foster continued support of the program. We want to ensure everyone adopts this behavior. After all, service excellence must become the new norm.
Great service can be used as an effective acquisition strategy, as well as a retention strategy for happy customers. Roll out a Customer Service Excellence program in your Project Management Office and you will find that the customer service approach will lead to growth and profitability.
Are you interested in learning how effective project management strategies can help your business excel? Email us at socialmedia@greenpages.com
By Erin Marandola, Business Analyst, PMP
Sixteen Tips for Moving Your Workloads to the #Cloud By @GiladPN
Got a plan for your move to the cloud? If you do, you’re in the minority. According to a recent study, a mere 31 percent of those planning a move to the cloud actually have a strategy for migrating data and applications. The rest don’t.
To avoid the complexity and cost, we recommend heeding the following advice. It’s but a fraction of the endless recommendations we received from cloud experts who offered well-seasoned tips on what to do and not do when you begin planning to move workloads to the cloud.
Forrester 2015 predictions report explains how cloud will be “the motivator”
Picture credit: iStockPhoto
Yes, it’s that time of year again. Everyone who’s got an opinion will be telling the world and his dog about their predictions for cloud computing in 2015. CloudTech will bring you the very best of these in due course, but for now analyst house Forrester has got theirs in early and proclaimed 2015 is the year when companies fighting the cloud will finally be a thing of the past.
The report, entitled “Predictions 2015: The Days of Fighting the Cloud Are Over”, examines 10 key trends for the coming year, offering two up for its non paying customers.
Microsoft’s cloudy revenues go up and up
The first point concerns big vendors and cloud revenues. In 2015, Forrester predicts Microsoft will make more profit from cloud than on-premise software.
It’s been the goal of many historically large IT vendors, from IBM, to SAP, and Oracle. These companies have taken on this mission with varying degrees of success. Yet Forrester seems to be cast under the spell of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s cloud-first, mobile-first vision.
“Under Nadella’s new mandates, its development teams are focused on driving innovation into the cloud versions of its properties first, and its sales engines are all rewarded for pushing as much cloud into each enterprise license agreement as possible,” Dave Bartoletti, infrastructure and operations analyst at Forrester, wrote in a blog. “Consequently, Microsoft itself is embracing continuous delivery development methods.”
The company’s most recent financial results shed a little light on this prediction. Commercial cloud revenue grew 128% in the quarter, while server products and services revenue increased 13%. Comparatively, SAP saw cloud subscriptions at €738 million (£584.1m), a jump of 51% year over year, with software revenues at €2.53bn, a downturn of 3% from this time last year.
If SAP’s figures are going in the right direction strategically, nevertheless it’s a very long game, and therefore a bold prediction.
A change is as good as a REST
Forrester also predicts 2015 to be the year when back end systems will use REST to communicate with one another. REST is an architecture style for designing networked applications, and is increasingly being used to drive agile development, ahead of other protocols such as SOAP.
“If you want your back-office applications to be part of this move forward, relying on traditional integration methods such as enterprise service buses, JDBC connections and SOAP is inadequate for modern applications,” the report notes. “You’ll have to evolve your integration architecture to REST in 2015.”
Other trends, according to ZDNet, include the prevalence of Docker, an open source platform to ship and run apps from anywhere. Given Amazon is the latest company to buddy up with the software, after Google and Microsoft, this may be one of the safer bets. Similarly, Forrester also predicts the death spiral of the private managed cloud.
“In 2014, cloud entered the formal IT portfolio, and technology managers stopped treating cloud as competition,” Bartoletti wrote. “In 2015, cloud technologies will mature into the driving force powering the most successful companies.”
You can find the full report here (subscription required).
Cloud Key Management vs. Hardware-Based Key Managers | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
Cloud security is a top concern for any organization migrating to the cloud. The threats are many.
For example, the fact your data resides in a shared, multi-tenant environment is a threat that has become a reality with the latest Xen virtualization bug, which allowed a malicious fully virtualized server to read data about other virtualized systems running on the same physical hardware or the hypervisor).
Other threats to cloud security include internal employees and even governments.
The consensus is that data encryption is a critical first step to migrating to the cloud; but in fact, encryption is the easy part. The real challenge lies with the management of the encryption keys. Allowing your cloud provider to encrypt your data and manage the encryption keys is as secure as parking your car in a public parking space and leaving the car keys in the ignition.
Cloud Computing Advantages and Disadvantages By @Kevin_Jackson [#Cloud]
What is Cloud Computing & what are its advantages & disadvantages. Join us for this installment of our Technical Insight series as expert Learning Tree instructor Kevin Jackson examines the following questions- How can Cloud Computing help your business and do you need to be concerned about Cloud Computing security? Learn more at http://www.LearningTree.com/WhatisCloud.
Building Clouds on VMware vSphere By @IMLlorente | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
This case study assumes you want to build a private cloud on top of an existing virtualized datacenter composed of multiple hosts running vSphere and managed by one or several instances of vCenter. It is understood that you do not want to abandon your investment in VMware by retooling the entire stack. You want to continue managing your infrastructure with already familiar and powerful VMware tools, such as vSphere and vCenter Operations Manager. Your goal is to create a self-service cloud environment on top of your vSphere infrastructure to provide your users with a simple cloud interface featuring elasticity, multi-tenancy and self-service provisioning.
‘Agile App Deployment’ Presentation Slides By @DavidKlebanov | @CloudExpo
Agility is top of mind for Cloud/Service providers and Enterprises alike. Policy Driven Data Center provides a policy model for application deployment by decoupling application needs from the underlying infrastructure primitives. In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, David Klebanov, a Technical Solutions Architect with Cisco Systems, discussed how it differentiates from the software-defined top-down control by offering a declarative approach to allow faster and simpler application deployment.
David Klebanov is a Technical Solutions Architect with Cisco Systems. In his work David influences strategic development of the industry leading Data Center switching platforms, which lay foundation for the next generation cloud fabrics. David also takes great pride in speaking at industry events, releasing publications and working on patents.