Chevron is making Microsoft Azure its primary cloud provider as part of a seven year partnership with the Redmond giant.

The energy corporation added the move will accelerate the application of technologies such as analytics and the Internet of Things to drive performance and improve efficiencies. According to Chevron CIO Bill Braun, the company saw Microsoft as a good fit because of its global reach.

The move is especially key because of the bountiful amounts of data energy companies, among others in similar industries, are harvesting. In Chevron’s case, its ‘things’ – in this instance, production facilities, drill ships and fiber optic cables inside well casings – can generate up to one terabyte of data per day. Through the partnership with Microsoft, Chevron hopes to act upon this data in real-time and apply analytics on top of it.

“Chevron has a long history of applying advanced technologies to develop the energy that improves lives and powers the world. We also understand scale, and the cloud at hyperscale is something we intend to leverage for agility and efficiency,” said Braun in a statement. “Through this strategic partnership, we believe Chevron will have a competitive advantage.”

“With Chevron and Microsoft, intelligent energy meets intelligent cloud,” said Jason Zander, corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure. “Our global cloud infrastructure – which has more regions around the world than any other cloud provider – will enable Chevron to leverage our capabilities across areas like high performance computing and Internet of Things to become a truly digital business.”

Microsoft posted its most recent financial results last week with total revenues of $24.5 billion. In the three buckets the company places revenues, its ‘intelligent cloud’ segment – focusing on Azure and server products – saw a 13% increase year on year to $6.9bn for the quarter while ‘productivity and business processes’, where Office 365 figures are based, went up 28% to $8.2bn.

Cloud Expo | DXWorld Expo have announced the conference tracks for Cloud Expo 2018. Cloud Expo will be held June 5-7, 2018, at the Javits Center in New York City, and November 6-8, 2018, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA. Digital Transformation (DX) is a major focus with the introduction of DX Expo within the program. Successful transformation requires a laser focus on being data-driven and on using all the tools available that enable transformation if they plan to survive over the long term. A total of 88% of Fortune 500 companies from a generation ago are now out of business. Only 12% still survive. Similar percentages are found throughout enterprises of all sizes.

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22nd International Cloud Expo, taking place June 5-7, 2018, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, and co-located with the 1st DXWorld Expo will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world. Cloud computing is now being embraced by a majority of enterprises of all sizes. Yesterday’s debate about public vs. private has transformed into the reality of hybrid cloud: a recent survey shows that 74% of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy. Meanwhile, 94% of enterprises are using some form of XaaS – software, platform, and infrastructure as a service.

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A new survey released by AlgoSec sets the scene on organisational cloud deployments: almost a third of respondents say they plan to increase their public cloud usage in the next 12 to 18 months, but major security challenges remain across hybrid enterprise networks both during and after migrations.

The study, titled ‘Hybrid Cloud Environments: The State of Security’, polled 450 senior security and network professionals and found a lack of visibility and managing security policies consistently were the biggest security management challenges enterprises face in hybrid environments.

As companies ramp up their public cloud deployments, needing complete visibility across both on-premise and cloud networks is therefore essential. Almost half of respondents say their organisation runs up to 20% of its workloads in the cloud, compared to a quarter (25.7%) who run between 21% and 40% and 11.7% of respondents running between 41% and 60%.

These numbers will almost certainly rise in future reports; yet security continues to be a primary concern. The biggest issue companies say they are facing is cyberattacks, cited by 59% of respondents, while unauthorised access by outsiders (53%), downtime or outages (46%), or misconfiguration of cloud security controls (41%) were also highly cited.

When it comes to specific vendors, Microsoft Azure took the honours, cited by 57.8% of respondents, ahead of Amazon Web Services on 52.4%. A yawning gap followed to Google Cloud Platform (18.8%), Oracle (9%), Rackspace (7.3%) and Alibaba Cloud (1.5%).

“As organisations increase their public cloud deployments and migrate applications, it’s essential that they have complete visibility across both their on-premise and cloud networks, together with the ability to automatically and holistically manage their security policies,” said Joanne Godfrey, director of communications at AlgoSec.

“This enables them to better protect the business and fulfil compliance demands, while taking full advantage of the cost savings and agility offered by the hybrid cloud model.”

You can find out more about the report here.

In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Ikuo Nakagawa, Co-Founder and Board Member at Transparent Cloud Computing Consortium, will introduce the big change in economic models with leading-edge business cases for digitalization of transactions and discuss the future of monetary economy in the digital era.
Nowadays, “digital innovation” is a big wave of business transformation based on digital technologies. IoT, Big Data, AI, FinTech and various leading-edge technologies are key components of such business drivers, of course.

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Most technology leaders, contemporary and from the hardware era, are reshaping their businesses to do software. They hope to capture value from emerging technologies such as IoT, SDN, and AI. Ultimately, irrespective of the vertical, it is about deriving value from independent software applications participating in an ecosystem as one comprehensive solution. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Kausik Sridhar, founder and CTO of Pulzze Systems, will discuss how given the magnitude of today’s application ecosystem, tweaking existing software to stitch various components together leads to sub-optimal solutions. This definitely deserves a re-think, and paves the way for a new breed of lightweight application servers that are micro-services and DevOps ready!

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SYS-CON Events announced today that IBM has been named “Diamond Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 21st Cloud Expo, which will take place on October 31 through November 2nd 2017 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California.

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In today’s increasingly digitalised world, the effect of a software glitch can be dramatic. Take an example from July this year when a glitch caused the stock prices of well-known Nasdaq companies such as Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, eBay and Microsoft to be inaccurately listed on websites well after that day’s closing bell.

Even though the actual prices of the stocks were unchanged, the sites showed some had plummeted in price and others had nearly doubled. Unsurprisingly, many people were fooled and took to social media to discuss the false listings, dragging company names into a controversy over something that had never happened.

Software glitches happen every day. Recent research by Tricentis revealed that software failures in the US cost the economy $1.1 trillion in assets in 2016. In total, software failures at 363 companies affected 4.4 billion customers and caused more than three and a half years of lost time.

Ever decreasing development cycles

Software releases are the single biggest factor contributing to downtime (and glitches) across all industries. With organisations being relentlessly forced into a tradeoff between agility and risk, many of the quality checks and governance balances put in place to prevent glitches are coming under severe pressure.

With the move to more agile methodologies, long software development lifecycles are becoming a thing of the past. Timelines are frequently measured in weeks or days and projects are often in a perpetual state of release and testing. Frequently, the next version of the code is ready for testing and staging when teams are deploying the last version to production.

Developing for mobile applications is another factor driving relentless development cycles. For example, customer-facing applications may suddenly need to access a new location service or require a location service to connect them to other users. The difference between a mobile app being adopted or ignored can be down to whether it has the ability to rapidly adapt to new features. And with mobile projects targeting multiple mobile platforms simultaneously, it can be very difficult to finalise the point where a mobile app can stop responding to changes in a platform.

Timelines are also shortened because cloud computing and DevOps infrastructure-as-a-code approaches can radically reduce the set-up time for infrastructure and the effort required to configure it. Code can ship as soon as it is ready to go.

The trend away from quality assurance to quality engineering is also blurring the relationship between application development and the teams that focus on testing and certifying the software is ready for release to production. Quality engineers are often embedded with application developers so the acceptance testing begins in the first continuous integration build.

What can be done?

Short of developing a software system that requires no changes at all – an impossibility – businesses need to consider other ways to try and reduce the potential for glitches emerging at a later date and causing disruption (as well as embarrassment).

Adopting a streamlined approach utilising predictable, high-quality, automated enterprise software delivery would help cut down delivery delays and glitches. And by implementing end to end release management, organisations can manage software delivery across the entire enterprise release portfolio and throughout the complete lifecycle of each release, including planning, approval and execution.

Another integral part of the process is testing. Modern enterprise test management tools can support the complete software testing process across all types of development methodologies. They can use a single instance for all projects by consolidating testing design, planning, manual and automated execution, defect tracking and progress reporting.

Matching development and delivery

By implementing enterprise release management technology, organisations can enable existing systems to support the adaptive environment that more accelerated methodologies are creating in many Global 1000 companies. Enterprise release management tools can accelerate delivery and maintain the integrity of the software and stability without compromising the speed of production. With an enterprise release management platform, companies can scale to meet their exponentially increasing release demands.

The software development cycle is becoming increasingly agile, but for many organisations the delivery management process is struggling to achieve the continuous delivery approach that is required. Modern enterprise release management technology can help businesses to better match development to delivery. Unless enterprises take steps to try and align the two more effectively, the risk of software glitches and downtime could well increase.