Some people are directors, managers, and administrators. Others are disrupters. Eddie Webb (@edwardawebb) is an IT Disrupter for Software Development Platforms at Liberty Mutual and was a presenter at the 2016 All Day DevOps conference. His talk, Organically DevOps: Building Quality and Security into the Software Supply Chain at Liberty Mutual, looked at Liberty Mutual’s transformation to Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and DevOps. For a large, heavily regulated industry, this task can not only be daunting, but viewed by many as impossible.
The Reality of AR and VR | @ExpoDX #AI #DX #IoT #DigitalTransformation
Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have been the subject of much discourse in the last several years. They were widely anticipated in the gaming and entertainment industries, but in marketing and corporate settings, the benefits were murky at best. Today, these technologies are becoming more of a reality in all areas of business.
For example, the new IKEA® shopping app leverages augmented reality to help shoppers determine how certain popular items will look in their homes – no trip to a crowded megastore necessary. Marriott® deployed virtual reality for customers to see its hotel rooms around the world without having to actually travel, and KFC® and Walmart® are using virtual reality to train employees before they begin working.
Microsoft posts more solid cloud growth with $28.9bn in overall revenue for Q218
Microsoft continues to cite the cloud as the key to its success; the company has posted revenues of $28.9 billion and operating income of $8.7bn for Q218, an increase of 12% and 10% respectively.
While the company does not give specific numbers for Azure, its ‘intelligent cloud’ bucket – which focuses on Azure and server products, saw revenues of $7.8bn, an increase of 15% year over year, while the ‘productivity and business processes’ segment, focusing more on Office 365 went up 24% to $8.95bn.
Despite the ever-improving cloudy outlook, the quarter did see an overall loss of $6.3bn, which Microsoft attributed to a ‘net charge of $13.8bn related to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.’
Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, told analysts the ‘intelligent cloud and intelligent edge platform [was] fast becoming a reality.’
“As intelligent cloud, intelligent edge becomes more predominant, our architectural advantage is increasingly clear to our customers,” said Nadella, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “You see this reflected in the latest CIO surveys, as well as in our 98% Azure revenue growth this quarter. Only Microsoft delivers hybrid consistency, developer productivity, AI capabilities, and trusted security and compliance.”
Highlights for Microsoft in the most recent quarter include a partnership with SAP to ‘provide enterprise customers with a clear roadmap to confidently drive more business innovation in the cloud’, as well as launching Azure Migrate, a free service to help organisations move over from their VMware environments.
The latter initially did not go down well with VMware, with the company saying at the time it ‘cannot endorse an unsupported and non-engineered solution that isn’t optimised for the VMware stack’. In other words, if customers took the plunge and something went wrong, they would be on their own. However, in December Microsoft posted a missive saying it was working with VMware and its cloud provider program partners for an offering made generally available later this year. VMware then updated its blog post removing the more antagonistic language, saying it was ‘in the process of engaging with the partner to ensure compliance and that the appropriate support model is in place.’
You can read the full financial report here. Watch this space however, as Amazon Web Services (AWS) posts its financials later today.
The Top 10 IoT Trends For 2018 | @ExpoDX #IoT #IIoT #SmartCities #AI #DX
The IoT Will Grow: In what might be the most obvious prediction of the decade, the IoT will continue to expand next year, with more and more devices coming online every single day. What isn’t so obvious about this prediction: where that growth will occur. The retail, healthcare, and industrial/supply chain industries will likely see the greatest growth. Forrester Research has predicted the IoT will become “the backbone” of customer value as it continues to grow. It is no surprise that retail is jumping aboard, hoping to harness the power of the IoT to connect with customers, grow their brands, and improve the customer journey in deeply personal ways. But industries like healthcare and supply are not far behind. They’re using the technology to connect with patients via wearable devices, and track products from factory to floor. In many ways, the full potential of the IoT is still being realized; we’ll likely see more of that in 2018.
Why standard web hosting is not suitable for protected health information
Web and mobile applications are a key differentiator between healthcare providers in a highly competitive industry — customers want to be able to access their healthcare records, prescriptions, and associated data in the way that is most convenient to them. Healthcare providers who aren’t online are falling behind.
In the rush to build online services, it may be tempting to take shortcuts where protected health information (PHI) hosting is concerned. After all, a standard web hosting provider is perfectly capable of storing and serving healthcare data.
But most web hosting and server hosting providers aren’t capable of offering services that comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) — in fact, they aren’t even capable of providing a platform on which a skilled developer could build HIPAA-compliant applications and services.
The risk of being non-compliant with HIPAA should not be taken lightly. Non-compliance fines are large enough to damage the viability of healthcare businesses, and for the worst breaches healthcare professionals and administrators might be jailed.
There are seven fundamental requirements for HIPAA compliance:
- Transport encryption,
- Storage encryption
- Backups,
- Authorization,
- Data integrity,
- Data disposal,
- A HIPAA Business Association agreement with third-party vendors.
A HIPAA-compliant hosting provider doesn’t automatically make an application or website compliant, but it does provide a solid foundation on which to build HIPAA-compliant services.
The authorization requirement of HIPAA stipulates that only authorized individuals are able to access PHI and that access is via audited access controls. That means no one should be able to access the data without permission, either over the network or from inside the data center. Most hosting providers do not have sufficient network or physical security to be compliant, and, without the necessary security, there is no way for an application that stores or processes PHI to be compliant.
Healthcare data must be stored in such a way that guarantees it hasn’t been tampered with or altered. The best way to protect data from tampering is to encrypt it, and encryption at rest isn’t a service the majority of web hosts are able to provide. Encryption can be managed at the application layer, but whole disk encryption is safer, reduces complexity, and should be a standard part of any HIPAA-compliant hosting plan.
When a company stores or processes Protected Health Information, it has two options: to build and manage a HIPAA-compliant hosting platform, or to use HIPAA-compliant hosting provided by a third party vendor like Liquid Web. The first option is expensive, complex, and not a core competence of most healthcare businesses.
The more economical, efficient, and secure option is to use a third-party host with HIPAA expertise. Only an expert and experienced HIPAA-compliant hosting provider is able to provide a trustworthy HIPAA Business Associate Agreement — and without such an agreement, a healthcare provider’s websites and applications can’t be HIPAA-compliant.
HIPAA-compliant hosting may look superficially similar to standard web hosting, but under-the-hood a huge amount of work goes into building a secure, reliable platform that empowers healthcare professionals to build the HIPAA-compliant services their customers expect.
The Surprising Truth About Cloud Security | @CloudExpo #DigitalTransformation
Another day, another breach. No wonder security is tied for the top barrier to cloud adoption, according to 2017 research from RightScale, with 25 percent of survey respondents naming it, alongside expertise and expense, as their greatest challenge.
In the face of security concerns, IT executives have mistakenly found comfort in private clouds over public clouds. The RightScale survey found that enterprises run about 75 percent of workloads in the cloud, with 43 percent done in a private cloud and 32 percent handled in a public cloud.
Internet of Blockchains | @ExpoDX #FinTech #Blockchain #Hyperledger #Bitcoin #Ethereum
A few years ago – in the early days of Blockchain – a lot of people were taken with the idea of a multifunctional chain on which all transactions could be handled. After Ethereum was launched in 2014, its advocates were talking themselves hoarse about the transformative opportunities the platform introduced. Decentralized applications, they predicted, along with all sorts of value transfers would be executed exclusively on Ethereum from that point on, and no other networks would ever be needed.
Competitive Landscape with #DigitalTransformation | @ExpoDX #AI #ML #DX
In a world where the internet rules all, where 94% of business buyers conduct online research, and where e-commerce sales are poised to fall between $427 billion and $443 billion by the end of this year, we think it’s safe to say that your website is a vital part of your business strategy. Whether you’re a B2B company, a local business, or an e-commerce site, digital presence is key to maintain in your drive towards success. Digital Performance will take priority in 2018 for the following reasons:
Competition is fierce – 79% of people who don’t like what they find on one site will go back and search for another site.
Technology Predictions for 2018 and Beyond | @DevOpsSummit #APM #DevOps
Every year about this time, we gaze into crystal balls to divine the future of our industry – or at least where it’s headed over the next 365 days. The result is often a triumph of incrementalism: we predict that we will get more of what we already have. The truth is, technology isn’t as revolutionary as we often think – and commenting on incremental changes alone may not help us understand what lies ahead.
Along with a few near-term predictions – so hard to resist – I’d also like to make some predictions not just about technology per se, but about related changes to organizations, processes, and the cultures around them. Here’s my main prediction: By 2030 what we’ve come to know as “IT” today will be virtually unrecognizable.
What Is Polymorphism | @CloudExpo #OOP #JVM #Java #Cloud
The word polymorphism is used in various contexts and describes situations in which something occurs in several different forms. In computer science, it describes the concept that objects of different types can be accessed through the same interface. Each type can provide its own, independent implementation of this interface. It is one of the core concepts of object-oriented programming (OOP).