With the modern notion of digital transformation, enterprises are chipping away at the fundamental organizational and operational structures that have been with us since the nineteenth century or earlier.
One remarkable casualty: the business process. Business processes have become so ingrained in how we envision large organizations operating and the roles people play within them that relegating them to the scrap heap is almost unimaginable, and unquestionably transformative.

In the Digital Era, however, everything you thought you knew about business processes, and thus how human effort drives productivity and profit in the organizations we work for, is wrong.

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Born in the cloud services may be one thing – but what are the key aspects to look out for when migrating existing applications to the cloud? According to a new whitepaper from IDC, security, privacy, and compliance regulations came out on top for organisations.

The study, ‘Critical Application and Business KPIs for Successful Cloud Migration’, polled 600 enterprises and was conducted alongside application performance management provider AppDynamics. Naturally, the paper exists to point readers in the direction of the company’s platform in helping with cloud migration – but the statistics are interesting to note.

46% of respondents said they had already migrated some custom developed, browser-based applications from traditional IT infrastructure to cloud. The numbers go steadily down after that, with email and collaboration apps (42%), mainframe applications (39%), and ERP/CRM (39%).

Two thirds (65%) said security was the primary reason for migrating existing apps to the cloud, ahead of infrastructure scalability impact (57%), app performance impact (56%), total cost of development (53%) and business agility impact (52%).

Benefits, on the technical side, included reduced IT operations and infrastructure costs, cited by 55% of respondents, and on the business side saving costs for IT and development (60%). Again, greater security was cited as a primary business benefit, alongside improved employee productivity and customer experience, while other technical benefits included greater app performance, speed of app deployments, and reduced outages and security events.

This purported cost benefit appears to be working, but with a caveat, as John Rakowski, Appdynamics director of product marketing points out. “While the survey suggests that these expectations are often met, it’s important to note that this requires modernisation of application architectures, supporting technology, people, and processes,” Rakowski wrote.

As a result, containers are increasingly playing a role in successful cloud migration, Rakowski added. When it came to the role container technologies played in organisations’ strategies, only 4% said they were not currently considering their use, and more than two thirds said they were either actively planning to implement them, or containerising new and existing applications.

IDC estimates approximately 60% of enterprises worldwide currently match the profile of organisations included in the survey – the remaining 40% were less mature, in other words only limited cloud use to development or not using cloud at all.

You can read the full report here (registration required).

Microsoft has announced the launch of availability zones in Azure, giving customers more options if a localised data centre fault occurs – and catching up with its competitors in the process.

The move puts Microsoft alongside the likes of Amazon, Google, and Oracle in giving extra resiliency to customers with fault-tolerant locations within a data centre region. As an example, while Microsoft claims to have the most regions out of any major cloud provider – 36 regions, with six additional being announced – Amazon Web Services (AWS) has only 16 regions, with six more on the way, but 44 availability zones.

“Availability Zones are fault-isolated locations within an Azure region, providing redundant power, cooling, and networking,” wrote Tom Keane, head of global infrastructure at Microsoft Azure, in a blog post. “Availability Zones allow customers to run mission-critical applications with higher availability and fault tolerance to data centre failures.”

The zones are being trialled in two regions, East US 2 in Virginia and West Europe in the Netherlands, with plans to expand to additional regions in the US, Europe and Asia by the end of the year. The planned expansion includes a new data centre in Paris, first announced in October last year.

Alongside this, Microsoft announced it had completed the construction of its transatlantic subsea cable, aiming to give increased speed and lower latency.

The cable, called Marea, is a joint project between Microsoft, Facebook and Telxius, the telecommunications infrastructure arm of Telefonica.  Keane said it will “help support the growing demand for high speed, reliable connections to the US and Europe, including our newest Azure regions coming to France, and beyond.”

AWS is no stranger to this sort of investment either, with the company purchasing capacity on an upcoming cable connecting Australia and New Zealand to the US. Among the six new regions on the way for AWS customers is Bahrain, also announced today, with plans to open – with three availability zones at launch – by early 2019.

“Some of the most gratifying parts of operating AWS over the last 11 years have been helping thousands of new companies get started, empowering large enterprises to reinvent their customer experiences, and allowing governments and academic institutions to innovate for citizens again,” said Andy Jassy, AWS CEO. “We look forward to making this happen across the Middle East.”

Thanks to the plethora of communication and messaging apps available to the average user, unified communications (UC) is becoming more important than ever before. UC is a set of products and services designed to give employees a uniform communications experience, integrating different apps and channels to a singular point of interaction. For example, UC might allow a transcript of a voicemail to be delivered to a recipient’s email, enabling a central communication location that comprises multiple mediums at once.

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While some developers care passionately about how data centers and clouds are architected, for most, it is only the end result that matters. To the majority of companies, technology exists to solve a business problem, and only delivers value when it is solving that problem. 2017 brings the mainstream adoption of containers for production workloads.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Ben McCormack, VP of Operations at Evernote, will discuss how data centers of the future will be managed, how the public cloud best suits your organization, and what the future holds for operations and infrastructure engineers in a post-container world. Is a serverless world inevitable?

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SYS-CON Events announced today that SourceForge has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. SourceForge is the largest, most trusted destination for Open Source Software development, collaboration, discovery and download on the web serving over 32 million viewers, 150 million downloads and over 460,000 active development projects each and every month.

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