Everyone wants their device of choice right there next to them 24/7. To an employer, however, that smart device is nothing more than a dagger posed to rip apart every shred of corporate security. This reality of modern business was highlighted by the Information Security Community on LinkedIn through their 2016 Spotlight Report on “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD).
Server Provisioning | @DevOpsSummit @Automic @CAinc #DevOps #APM
In large enterprises, environment provisioning and server provisioning account for a significant portion of the operations team’s time. This often leaves users frustrated while they wait for these services. For instance, server provisioning can take several days and sometimes even weeks.
At the same time, digital transformation means the need for server and environment provisioning is constantly growing. Organizations are adopting agile methodologies and software teams are increasing the speed of their development processes, thus requiring more and more servers and environments to be provisioned for their development and testing.
How Seattle City Light is leveraging the power of cloud?
Companies across all sectors are embracing cloud computing to leverage the many benefits it offers. Since cloud offers increased productivity and efficiency, almost every major company in the world, including semi-government ones like utility companies, are taking to the cloud in a big way. The latest utility company to implement cloud is the Seattle City Light.
This public utility company provides electrical power through its grid network to the city of Seattle and its surrounding areas such as Shoreline, Lake Forest Park, Normandy Park and Tukwila. Seattle City Light is the tenth largest utility company in the U.S.
Now, this company wants to tap into the power of cloud to increase its efficiency. Specifically, it wants to use high-powered computing, storage and data analysis to improve the efficiency of its power distribution. Given the changing demands of all businesses and the emergence of different clean energy sources, it makes sense for the company to shift to the cloud now than ever before.
In addition, it wants to get a deeper insight into its customers’ behavior, so that they can tailor solutions that meet their unique needs. For example, some customers may prefer to give back solar power to the grid while others may completely depend on the utility company to power their home. Since the needs of each of these customers vary, Seattle City Light wants to be in a position to give them just the tailored solution they want. This is possible only with the cloud as it can analyze vast amounts of real-time data quickly to give the insights that can help this company to make better decisions.
As a first step, Seattle City Light has partnered with a Cincinnati-based company called Integral Analytics to host its flagship LoadSEER solution on AWS. According to the CEO of Integral Analytics, Kevin Kushman, AWS was one of the top choices given the complex nature of this application and the varying storage it entails. Also, he opined that AWS has many market tested apps and process that essentially meant Seattle City Light did not have to reinvent the wheel.
Just to give you a brief idea, LoadSEER is a distribution and DER integration application that is built on a distribution load database updated with data in real-time. As a result, the distribution can be dynamic and will be based on the current needs of customers. Such a distribution plan will greatly optimize distribution and can make the overall usage of power more efficient.
Over time, this move is expected to pave way for this utility company to adopt smartgrids and maybe even smart meters that can make power distribution and efficiency even more efficient.
It’s noteworthy that Seattle City Light is the first municipal authority in the US to own and operate a hydroelectric plant. It also uses other sources of power such as wind and solar to meet its demands. Given this, it’s not surprise that this utility company wants to embrace cloud and set an example for other public utility companies in the U.S to follow suit.
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Security monitoring remains ‘complex and chaotic’ – and cloud and IoT will only make it worse
One in three respondents in a survey conducted by AlienVault said the state of security monitoring in their organisation was ‘complex and chaotic’, adding a ‘major disconnect’ was still in place between beliefs and actions in cloud security.
The survey, conducted at the RSA conference in San Francisco back in February, polled 974 attendees. One in five (21%) admit they don’t know how many cloud applications are being used in their organisation, while 39% say it is more than 10. 42% of respondents say lack of visibility into their cloud activities is a ‘significant’ concern.
Almost two thirds (62%) said they were worried about Internet of Things (IoT) devices in their environment – yet 45% added that they saw the benefits of IoT outweigh the risks. 43% of respondents said their company does not monitor IoT traffic at all – a finding which was described as ‘frightening’ by AlienVault – while 20% said they didn’t know what traffic was monitored.
“The driving force behind cloud and IoT is the availability and analysis of information, but they must be managed and monitored in the right way,” said Javvad Malik, AlienVault security advocate. “If data is misused, or inadequately protected, the consequences can be severe.”
Writing for this publication earlier this month, iland director of EMEA marketing Monica Brink argued that this was the year when IoT ‘moved up the agenda’ for business investment in cloud technologies. “IoT data tends to be heterogeneous and stored across multiple systems; as such, the market is calling for analytical tools that seamlessly connect to and combine all those cloud-hosted data sources, enabling businesses to explore and visualise any type of data stored anywhere in order to maximise the value of their IoT investment,” she wrote.
“It’s time for organisations to focus on what they do have control over – threat detection and incident response – and implement a unified solution that can monitor on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments,” added Malik. “Simplifying security in this way enables companies to immediately identify and respond to threats, and in today’s cybersecurity landscape, this is the best strategy to mitigate risk.”
Guest Blog: Is Your VM Celebrating World Backup Day?
Guest blog article from Peter Hale, Content Manager (Consumer), Acronis! Is Your VM Celebrating World Backup Day? Despite what you may have heard, you need to back up your virtual machines Everyone knows that April 1 is April Fools’ Day. But did you know that the day before that (March 31) is World Backup Day? It was […]
The post Guest Blog: Is Your VM Celebrating World Backup Day? appeared first on Parallels Blog.
A Cloud Solution-Level Approach to SMBs | @CloudExpo #Cloud #DigitalTransformation
The next BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer cloud adoption patterns discussion explores how integration of the latest cloud tools and methods help smooth out the difficult task of creating and maintaining cloud-infrastructure services contracts. The results are more flexible digital services that both save cloud consumers money and provide the proper service levels and performance characteristics for each unique enterprise and small business.
Enabling #DevOps | @DevOpsSummit @GlueNetworks #NFV #SDN #SDNO
Digital transformation requires rapid network changes. Navigating these changes well is difficult but critical, as the function of business applications are at stake. Customers aren’t interested in what’s going on behind the scenes; they simply want the platform to work. Hosting Facts researchers found that a single-second delay in website loading time can result in a seven percent loss in conversion, and 40 percent of web users will abandon a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load.
System Hardening with @Ansible | @DevOpsSummit @AppseccoUK #DevOps
The DevOps pipeline is constantly changing. Therefore relevant security controls must be applied contextually. We want to be secure, but I think all of us would rather spend our time developing and deploying software. Keeping up with server updates and all of the other security tasks is like cleaning your home – you know it has to be done, but you really just want to enjoy your clean home. The good news is you can hire a “service” to keep your application security up-to-date, giving you more time to develop.
At the recent All Day DevOps conference, Akash Mahajan (@makash), a Founder/Director at Appsecco, discussed how to harden your system’s security with Ansible. In addition to his role at Appsecco, Akash is also involved as a local leader with the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP).
IT Companies Continue to Fuel Cloud Growth
There’s no question any more about cloud growth. The many advantages that come with cloud have made it a preferred option for storing and accessing applications, and companies world over have begun to embrace it in a big way.
The SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2017 that was released on Wednesday shows the magnitude of cloud growth. It reports that 95% of IT professionals surveyed have said that their organization has migrated critical applications and data to the cloud.
This is significant in many ways. Firstly, it gives us an insight into the depth of cloud market. Though most of us knew that companies were adopting cloud in a big way, it’s still a surprise to see that 95% have some kind of critical application in it. This number signifies the growing trust that companies have in the cloud now.
Secondly, it shows how far cloud security has come over the last few years. Many reports released a few years ago show the reluctance of companies to migrate their critical applications to the cloud because of security concerns. Though these concerns are not fully gone, the fact that companies are considering a hybrid model to overcome these insecurities is heartening. This way they can leverage the power of cloud and at the same time, protect their assets.
That said, there is more room for cloud growth based on the statistics presented in this report. It states that IT budgets are not moving towards cloud technologies, as 69% of respondents said that companies spend less than 40% of their annual IT budget on cloud technologies. Another 45% of respondents said that their respective organizations are spending around 70% of their budget on traditional and on-premise applications.
These numbers mean that there is room for cloud growth, and also that hybrid infrastructure is emerging as the preferred model of operations, as businesses prefer to use both cloud platforms and on-premise datacenters to store their data and applications. The choice of moving to the cloud is believed to be based on factors such as the priority of applications, perceptions about cloud security and ROI
The report further states that 74% of respondents said that their organization had moved applications to the cloud, 50% had said that they moved storage and 35% said they moved databases. The decision to choose these migrations was based on return on investment (ROI). In fact, ROI is seen as the driving factor for deciding what and when should be migrated to the cloud.
What does this report mean to customers and client industry at large? First off, it’s a ton of positive news that can entice more customers to move their operations to the cloud. Another aspect that it reflects is the changing role of IT professionals within the industry. With such a rapid rate of cloud growth, there is going to be a greater focus on management and integration than pure development. It’ll be interesting to see how IT professionals take to this change.
Lastly, it shows the vast opportunities that continue to exist for cloud-based companies.
In all, there’s much to cheer from this report.
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AWS turns its contact centre into a service with Amazon Connect
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the launch of Amazon Connect, a self-service cloud-based contact centre service which aims to make customer service easier and cheaper for businesses.
The service is an extension of the cloud infrastructure giant’s own customer contact centre technology – going back 10 years – put together as a service; think of the launch of Lex, the technology that powers Alexa, as a general service for a similar example.
Indeed, Lex is part of the package. Customers can build natural language contact flows and organisations can adapt the customer experience; in other words, callers can simply state their commands instead of having to listen to never-ending lists of menu options.
Crucially, many other players in the contact centre space are on board with AWS, including Freshdesk, Salesforce, and Zendesk. “An Amazon Connect and Zendesk integration provides our many shared customers with a seamless experience,” said Sam Boonin, Zendesk VP product strategy in a statement. “These companies are placing customer relationships at the forefront of their business and, in return, creating loyal customers.”
The press materials give a quick rundown of how Connect works. “With Amazon Connect, customers can set up and configure a ‘virtual contact centre’ in minutes,” AWS notes. “There is no infrastructure to deploy or manage, so customers can scale their Amazon Connect Virtual Contact Centre up or down, onboarding up to tens of thousands of agents in response to business cycles and paying only for the time callers are interacting with Amazon Connect plus any associated telephony charges.
“Amazon Connect’s self-service graphical interface makes it easy for non-technical users to design contact flows, manage agents, and track performance metrics – no specialised skills required.”
Connect integrates with a variety of current AWS tools, including Amazon S3, Redshift, and QuickSight for data visualisation and analytics. “We’re excited to offer this technology to customers as an AWS service – with all of the simplicity, flexibility, reliability, and cost-effectiveness of the cloud,” said Tom Weiland, Amazon vice president of worldwide customer service.
The product is currently available in the US and the majority of Europe, with more countries being rolled out ‘in the coming months’. You can find out more about it here.