Born out of proven success in agile development, cloud computing, and process automation, DevOps is a macro trend you cannot afford to miss. In this DevOps Summit Power Panel on June 9 at our New York City studio, moderated by Andi Mann, DevOps Summit conference chair and VP of Strategic Solutions at CA Technologies, JP Morgenthal, Director of Cloud Computing Practice at Perficient, Inc., Gordon Haff, Cloud Evangelist at Red Hat; Larry Carvalho, Cloud Expo Tech Chair and Research Manager & Lead Analyst, Platform as a Service at IDC; and John Willis, VP of Customer Enablement for Stateless Networks; discussed how DevOps is changing the way IT works, how businesses interact with customers, and how organizations are buying, building, and delivering software.

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Read more about how AppDynamics helps foster DevOps and take five minutes to get complete visibility into the performance of your production applications with AppDynamics Pro today!

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The OIX (Open Identity Exchange) is a new Internet standards organization that provides the framework to implement Assured Identity.

An example of this in practice is explained in this case study published by the new UK chapter of the OIX, for South Yorkshire’s Digital By Default project.

Bridging the Digital Divide

This is an excellent, leading edge case study (featuring SecureKey) that explains this technical field, and it is also notable for its pioneering work with regards to the concept known as ‘Bridging the Digital Divide’.

For example in the South Yorkshire case study, they describe:

• Enabling new financial e-services for the “unbanked”.
• Overcome two-way distrust: The person of the system, and the system of the person. Identity proofing issues were too demanding of this group, and they themselves did not feel their money was safe virtually.
• The goal is to enable more use of virtual money, via changing payments to be via an O2 Money prepaid VISA card, however this group would fail the required Identity proofing procedures or they would be too onerous.
• The solution is achieved through a combination of Identity federation and ‘trust networks’ – The financial sector trusts the Credit Union process to implement a suitably robust enough procedure, and they in turn make better use of their on-premise relationship to make it simpler for the customer.

Driving Business Value

We can see the critical role Identity systems will play in helping governments realize the business benefits of Digital Government.

As the SOCITM report identifies the cost to government to perform customer interaction activities drops dramatically the more the process moves online.

This case study is so important because not only does it identify how this cost reduction can be achieved but also does so for a group who are the least connected and have no ‘digital footprint’ at all. Helping this group move online not only validates that the service is universally accessible but also how it can play the critical ‘bridge’ role needed to actually cross the Digital Divide.

In this scenario the project targeted those with no ‘digital footprint’, ie no online use of any kind, and who experienced poverty, social exclusion etc.

In particular the project identified:

“The project aimed to test the hypothesis that if Credit Union customers had a familiar authentication mechanism they would be more inclined to access services digitally, and less inclined to use telephone and face-to-face access channels.”

The initial pilot scope proved successful, where the the CU could perform the Identity ‘enrollment‘ process, creating a one time link between an in-store visit by a customer, their payment card ID and also an online identity entry that includes the same photo. SecureKey created a mechanism where the photo and authorization tokens were linked via a unique identifier.

This means any one who accepts the card can also use it for their own identity proofing procedure, for example the local pharmacy accepted the card in this case, with others such as GPs expressing interest to do so too. So in short the answer is yes, these improved tools do indeed make service access easier and more inviting.

It also helped with adoption too. For example a concern was virtual money would be harder to manage, more easily spent and uncontrolled, when actually features like receiving a balance update via text alert after each purchase, helped improve this too.

A key trend noticed was that while there was little existing use of the Internet or email, there was a high usage of smartphones, so these features could be exploited for this reason, better empowering each individual as well as smoothing some of the many corners they face each day.

As is:
$14 per person per identity proof process
Duplicated ID checking procedures – manual paper-based

To be:
$0 – Cash sent straight to money card
Eliminated visits

I’ve been writing recently about the dimensions of Big Data in the IoT: urgency, importance, frequency, consequences, remedy, cost. You can find my stories on IoT Journal or at my personal website.

The big item missing from this list is, of course, size. How big are individual messages or files? A couple of kilobytes? Many megabytes? And are there still a lot of people who think of Big Data as massive, petabyte-size repositories of epidemiological, meteorological, or particle acceleration data?

I didn’t originally include it, because I saw it as twinned with frequency. In the IoT, most message & file sizes are going to be small. Big Data in the IoT has more to do with sensors and less to do with massive scientific apps.

Frequency might mean a real-time sampling rate of 10 times per second, 100 times per second, or more. Or it may be tethered to a passive device that reports in a timeframe we can call “every once in awhile.” So the frequency dimension might vary by several million times from one application to another. Even if expressed logarithmically, that’s a lot of variance.

Nevertheless, I think I’ll combine the two, and change one of the six categories to size/frequency.

Pay to Play
I go through all this because, in the end, someone has to pay for the dataflow and all tha supports it. Most analyses seem to focus on the amount of data being consumed and stores, ie the size/frequency dimension.

But urgency and importance are mission-critical in setting up proper IoT monitoring, analysis, and the speed of that analysis. Furthermore, the consequences of something gone bad can vary from “there’s a lightbulb out on the bridge” to “a section of the bridge just collapsed.”

The dimensions of consequence and remedy are therefore potentially much more important to cost than the dataflow.

Designing and deploying an IoT project, whether something fun like installing a smart public bench or something grave like monitoring traffic flow, is thus far more than an IT project.

As we get involved in analyzing the cloud computing infrastructures that will no doubt underpin and serve most of the IoT, it’s time to focus not only on cost-per-whateverbyte—the size/frequency dimension–but also the other dimensions, which tell us what this IoT thing is supposed to do and what happens when things go wrong.

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It feels as if we can’t even go a week anymore without hearing about a new breach or outage. For years, IT departments were always on stand-by should the unimaginable happen and were judged by how quickly they could curb a bad situation. These days, however, it’s not good enough to fix a problem – even if it’s taken care of within a few minutes. Questions start to arise the minute something bad happens, and to really show strength IT departments have to stop the problem before it happens. Magic? No, it’s just being proactive and it’s imperative more than ever that IT closely monitor the health of their infrastructure to keep the business running.

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“The Internet of Things is the next wave of cloud. As these distributed devices become more prolific they can really start to gain a lot more insight and gather more date from the environment,” explained Chris Gray, Director of Embedded Intelligence Systems at Red Hat, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at the Internet of @ThingsExpo, held June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Internet of @ThingsExpo 2014 Silicon Valley, November 4-6, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading IoT industry players in the world.

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NNIT uses HP Cloud Service Automation to improve their deployment of IT applications and data, and to provide higher overall service delivery speed and efficiency.
As a provider of both application development management and infrastructure outsourcing, Denmark-based NNIT needed a better way to track, manage and govern the more than 10,000 services across its global data centers.
Beginning in 2010, the journey to better overall services automation paved the way to far stronger cloud services delivery, too. NNIT uses HP Cloud Service Automation (CSA) to improve their deployment of IT applications and data, and to provide higher overall service delivery speed and efficiency.
To learn more about how services standardization leads to improved cloud automation, BriefingsDirect spoke with Jesper Bagh, IT Architect and cloud expert at NNIT, based in Copenhagen. The discussion, at the HP Discover conference in Barcelona, is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

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Over the last few years the healthcare ecosystem has revolved around innovations in Electronic Health Record (HER) based systems. This evolution has helped us achieve much desired interoperability. Now the focus is shifting to other equally important aspects – scalability and performance. While applying cloud computing environments to the EHR systems, a special consideration needs to be given to the cloud enablement of Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA), i.e., the largest single medical system in the United States.

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It’s become clear that the impacts and implications of cloud commerce are much broader and much more of a benefit to the business as a whole as an innovation engine, even across whole industries.
Over the past five years, the impetus for cloud adoption has been primarily about advancing the IT infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) fabric or utility model, and increasingly seeking both applications and discrete IT workload support services from Internet-based providers.
But as adoption of these models has unfolded, it’s become clear that the impacts and implications of cloud commerce are much broader and much more of a benefit to the business as a whole as an innovation engine, even across whole industries.
Recent research shows us that business leaders are now eager to move beyond cost and efficiency gains from cloud to reap far greater rewards, to in essence rewrite the rules of commerce.

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By Jeramiah Dooley, Cloud Architect at SolidFire

Public cloud services have put huge pressures on enterprise IT to compete in a more agile way. When it can take days or even weeks for IT departments to procure and manually set-up necessary networking and storage hardware to support new applications, why wouldn’t employees turn to providers who can meet their needs within minutes?

To meet these demands, the hardware infrastructure needs to be more than fast; it needs to be flexible and scalable with rapid automation to meet the needs of its users. Storage has a key role to play here, with a sophisticated management layer that can separate performance and capacity – independently controlling access speeds and available drive space on an app-by-app basis – it has now become possible to virtualise performance independent of capacity.

Indeed, data centre storage is going through an interesting time, with $1.2bn of publicly disclosed funding pouring into storage start-ups in the last year alone. However, it’s not just flash storage that’s responsible for the flurry of activity. It’s the functionality that storage vendors are wrapping around flash technology that is enabling true next generation data centres that are getting people excited.

Across the industry we can see a perfect storm of other data centre technology forming, with virtualisation and software-defined networking both reaching maturity. But storage is the one area still dominated by legacy technology and thinking.

Beyond performance

With IDC predicting that the global market for flash storage will continue its growth to $4.5bn in 2015, flash becoming the de facto standard is almost inevitable. But merely retrofitting complex legacy storage systems to incorporate flash is insufficient in the face of current market dynamics that require rapid application deployment, dramatic system scalability, and the ease of use of end-user self service.

Of course, the performance of flash has become table stakes in the storage race. Next generation enterprise storage arrays will instead be measured on simplicity of operation, deep API automation and thoughtful integrations with cloud management platforms like VMware and OpenStack, rich data services, broad protocol support and fine-grain Quality of Service (QoS) controls. Any array using flash is expected to be fast; it’s the rest of the services that will differentiate them.  

So, the impending storage battle that will lay waste to the legacy data centre won’t be won by raw performance alone. Instead, it will be the rich features and functions over and above the flash layer, tailored for specific use cases or workloads that will drive significant capital and operational cost savings.

Storage for the next generation data centre

A world that relies increasingly on cloud services, or cloud-like internal IT services, is one that thrives on guaranteed performance. Cloud contracts are underpinned by all manner of “availability” SLAs. As cloud computing continues to gain in enterprise popularity, cloud providers are coming under increasing pressure to supply cast-iron guarantees that focus on application performance and predictability.

This level of “performance reliability” underpins the next generation data centre and is enabled by robust Quality of Service tools. It is the combination of Quality of Service, agile management and performance virtualisation capabilities that will define storage architectures within next generation data centres – to demand less will be to accept siloed computing and legacy IT thinking as the status quo.

As the IT industry shifts away from the classic monolithic and static operational models into the new era of dynamic, agile workflows of cloud computing, it’s time to up the ante and look beyond traditional storage hardware architectures and consider products that are built from the ground up for the next generation of applications and operations.