InformationWeek recently ran an article I wrote that describes CollabNet’s work with non-profit #YesWeCode. This Dream Corps initiative aims to help young adults find careers and success in the tech industry.
In the article, I address the growing need for new talent in the tech industry:
“The U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics estimates that there will be one million more IT jobs than computer science students in the U.S. by 2020. The software development field in particular is expected to see a much higher than average growth rate of 17 percent.”
NGA wants to speed cloud deployment
Federal government has come to embrace the cloud in a big way, and many of its departments have already started moving their data and applications to the cloud. Though this is heartening from a technology and user perspective, what is painstaking is the process of approvals. Typically, it takes a minimum of six months for a cloud provider to get security clearance for its service. In fact, six months is when the approvals run at the fastest possible pace. Otherwise, clearance to use cloud service for federal government apps and data can take years. The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) wants to change all this.
To those working in NGA this elaborate approval process feels like a super slow motion and this is why they’re doing everything they can to change it. According to Jason Hess, the cloud security head at NGA, many different processes are being put in place to reduce the time it takes for a cloud provider to get security clearance. Ideally, Hess wants all approvals to be cleared in a single day, so the cloud service can be up and running within 24 hours of its application. Currently, the NGA uses a combination of DevOps techniques to get approvals within seven days, but this hasn’t been easy by any breadth of imagination.
This is a big initiative, considering that the NGA is planning to move all of its data and applications to the cloud, in a big to “re-invent security.” The agency is looking to tap into the flexibility of cloud to break-down the IT architecture and re-build it every day, so hackers will experience a new operating environment every day. NGA believes that such a move can confuse hackers and the familiarity with the system, and in the process, will reduce the chances of an attack as well.
Though this idea is unique, its practical application is always questionable. Is it possible to build such a dynamic IT architecture that changes every day? Will there be a specific pattern that would be followed in choosing the architectural style? These are important questions that have to be answered if the NGA wants to use this strategy to prevent outside attacks on its system. If an architectural style is going to be repeated after every few days, then it becomes predictable for hackers. Also, if there is no randomization, then architectural styles can be guessed by sophisticated hackers.
Given these questions, we can say that the NGA’s approach to cyber security is not for everyone. Currently many federal departments have vast amounts of data and legacy systems that can make it almost impossible for them to tear down the IT architecture and build one from scratch each day. At the same time, simply installing cyber security measures at the edges of a network system is not going to work anymore.
So, federal departments have to strike a balance between the aggressive security approach of the NGA and its own problems of legacy systems and siloed data,
Overall, it’ll be interesting to see if NGA’s plan can be implemented across the board.
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Announcing @CollabNet “Bronze Sponsor” of @CloudExpo NY | #CD #DevOps
Keeping pace with advancements in software delivery processes and tooling is taxing even for the most proficient organizations. Point tools, platforms, open source and the increasing adoption of private and public cloud services requires strong engineering rigor – all in the face of developer demands to use the tools of choice. As Agile has settled in as a mainstream practice, now DevOps has emerged as the next wave to improve software delivery speed and output. To make DevOps work, organizations must focus on what is most relevant to deliver value, reduce IT complexity, create more repeatable agile-based processes and leverage increasingly secure and stable, cloud-based infrastructure platforms.
[session] @Docker Monitoring | @DevOpsSummit @OutlyerApp #AI #Monitoring
Everyone wants to use containers, but monitoring containers is hard. New ephemeral architecture introduces new challenges in how monitoring tools need to monitor and visualize containers, so your team can make sense of everything. In his session at @DevOpsSummit, David Gildeh, co-founder and CEO of Outlyer, will go through the challenges and show there is light at the end of the tunnel if you use the right tools and understand what you need to be monitoring to successfully use containers in your environments.
SYS-CON Events Announces @JuniperNetworks as Exhibitor at @CloudExpo NY | #Agile #Cloud
SYS-CON Events announced today that Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR), an industry leader in automated, scalable and secure networks, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Juniper Networks challenges the status quo with products, solutions and services that transform the economics of networking. The company co-innovates with customers and partners to deliver automated, scalable and secure networks with agility, performance and value.
Adobe and Microsoft expand cloud partnership and launch joint solutions
Adobe and Microsoft have announced the first set of joint solutions to ‘help enterprises transform their customer experiences’, with Adobe’s Experience Cloud combining alongside Microsoft Azure, Dynamics 365 and Power BI products.
Those with good memories will recall an announcement made last September which confirmed Azure would become the preferred cloud platform for Adobe’s marketing, creative and document clouds, with Adobe’s Marketing Cloud doing similarly for Dynamics 365 Enterprise, Microsoft’s enterprise resource planning offering.
Adobe said this latest change builds on the previous partnership. “Bringing together Adobe’s and Microsoft’s sales, marketing and customer intelligence solutions enables brands to better understand and engage with their customers across all touch points,” said Abhay Parasnis, Adobe EVP and CTO.
What this means in terms of product is a combined Adobe Analytics and Microsoft Power BI for the enterprise audience, an integration between Adobe Campaign and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for marketing teams trying to create a single customer view, and the concisely named Adobe Experience Manager Sites Managed Service – web content management, in other words – available on Azure.
“We believe the combined power of our technologies will allow enterprise businesses to harness their data in new ways, unlocking critical business insights and actionable intelligence,” said Scott Guthrie, Microsoft EVP in a statement. “Together, we are delivering compelling and personalised experiences that will drive brand loyalty and growth.”
In addition, Adobe unveiled a series of enhancements to its Cloud Platform product, including a new common data language, XDM, quicker time to market for developers with Launch, and partner integrations with Acxiom, AppDynamics, MasterCard, and more.
The press release summed it up nicely. “Advancements in cloud services have fundamentally altered the computing landscape. The next decade will bring even more disruptive changes in how brands create, immerse and engage their customers in their experiences,” it offered. “A modern experience platform that addresses these expectations needs to be designed with a common data language founded on content and data, an open ecosystem to enable others to build on and innovate, and intelligence at its core with AI, machine learning and deep learning.”
Picture credit: Adobe
IT in the Age of Digital Transformation | @CloudExpo #AI #ML #Cloud #Analytics
Next month will mark the 47th anniversary of Apollo 13. The film that recounts the story is a favorite of mine, probably because it so masterfully captures the incredible suspense, fear, and hope felt by people everywhere, that I personally recall very well. I also know how an organization’s digital transformation can generate similar reactions!
Apollo 13 was likely a casualty of the space program’s incredibly aggressive schedule. NASA, with U.S. political and military leaders, was motivated by competition from the U.S.S.R. and fear of the potential consequences of not being first. Urgency often overruled caution. A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.
Hybrid IT becoming ‘standard enterprise model’ but playbook still being worked out
The good news: enterprises are beginning to use technologies such as software defined networking (SDN) and containers in production scenarios. Yet according to a new study from Dimension Data, management of hybrid IT environments remains a key challenge with automation the key.
The report, which polled 1,500 IT decision makers across four continents, found different motivators by region for utilising hybrid IT – defined here as ‘the usage of multiple deployment models to deliver a single workload or application as part of their data centre and cloud strategies’ – from end-user demand in the UK, US and Hong Kong, to cost for respondents in France, Singapore and South Africa.
Almost half of respondents (48%) said their migration processes were manual – and labour-intensive as a result – while 38% said they use automation for quicker application migration. “Hybrid IT is a becoming a standard enterprise model, but there’s no single playbook to get there,” the company warns.
44% of respondents said they found it challenging to migrate workloads to new locations, as well as assessing which option was best for a particular workload.
“With data and processes shifting across multiple cloud and non-cloud environments, a new approach to management is called for,” said Jason Goodall, Dimension Data group CEO. “IT managers are under tremendous pressure to seek new ways to manage and secure multiple IT environments in an effective manner.
“Automation is important because it helps reduce the operating costs, as well as the pain caused by the growing complexity of business processes and management tasks,” Goodall added. “It is simply no longer appropriate or cost-effective for these tasks to be done manually.”
Speaking to this publication this time last year, Michael Allen, VP EMEA at digital performance monitoring provider Dynatrace, said “very few enterprises” were actively doing SDN and software defined data centres, but many were “looking at it.” From this research, it would appear small steps are at least being made.
IBM’s ‘enterprise strong’ cloud, blockchain and AI vision laid out at InterConnect
“You need innovations that are going to continue to come out, and you need a cloud that will keep taking them on,” Ginni Rometty, IBM CEO, told attendees at the Armonk giant’s InterConnect event in Las Vegas. “There’s a long pipeline coming, and that’s what an enterprise cloud does – it embraces that.”
Chief among this pipeline is blockchain and quantum computing, with IBM’s recent announcements playing into these trends in a serious way. Earlier this week, IBM unveiled its ‘blockchain as a service’ offering, while a new API for its Quantum Experience program – enabling developers to build interfaces between its cloud-based quantum computers and classical equivalents – arrived earlier this month.
Rometty spoke of the three key tenets of IBM’s cloud; being ‘enterprise strong’, ‘data first’, and ‘cognitive at its core’. “You’ve got to be more secure than on-prem and have a very solid roadmap and pipeline of innovation for the future,” the IBM chief exec explained. Being enterprise strong, Rometty added, was not just about geography – albeit in the same breath reiterating the recent move with Wanda to enter the Chinese cloud market – but data sovereignty and industry.
IBM’s moves in blockchain, for a technology in the midst of hype, have touched on a plethora of industries, from tackling food safety with Walmart, to the supply chain with Maersk. The total is some 400 projects. “I believe blockchain will do for trusted transactions what the internet has done for information,” Rometty said. “You can exchange anything in a safe and secure way.” As far as quantum computing was concerned, Rometty described that as going to a ‘new era of business, doing things you’ve never done, [and] solving problems you never knew you had.’
The announcements made yesterday were varied and vast; 19 in total on March 20. Among the highlights on the cloud side were collaborations with Veritas and Red Hat on data management and hybrid cloud adoption respectively, as well as additions to its Cloud Object Storage family and IBM Cloud Integration, which aims to ‘solve the integration challenge of bringing together enterprise data and applications across on-premises, private and public cloud environments’.
Naturally, friends and partners joined Rometty on stage. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce discussed the rising tide of artificial intelligence (AI); not especially surprising given IBM and Salesforce’s recent partnership to combine their Watson and Einstein systems respectively.
“Artificial intelligence is something we’ve all dreamed about, but when you look at things like machine learning, machine intelligence, things like deep learning, there’s an acceleration going on,” he said. “It’s honestly surprised me – I can’t believe how fast artificial intelligence is evolving and changing.”
Benioff used the example of elevator engineering firm KONE in how IBM and Salesforce are interacting; with every elevator and escalator being connected, Watson looks at predicted fail rates while the CRM side of Salesforce can put it all in a package and roll a service truck to fix issues in real time. “That’s a real big shift in how business operates,” said Benioff.
Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, noted Rometty’s ‘enterprise strong’ element of IBM cloud, adding that the telco was now pushing cloud technologies into the very core of its network. “I don’t believe we’re more than three or four years away from being indistinguishable from the ‘data cloud’ to the ‘network cloud’,” he said. “We’re riding off what you guys are doing.”
Above all, however, Rometty gave this piece of advice to attendees. “Our job is to really help prepare you for what you will become,” said Rometty. “I think you will become cognitive…it will be in your applications, your processes, and you will become a cognitive enterprise; and that’s what will separate the winners and losers.”
Postscript: Stephenson suffered a noteworthy slip of the tongue when mentioning the proposed acquisition of Time Warner, instead saying rival T-Mobile. “I’ll get a Trump tweet now, won’t I?” he joked.
Announcing @Cloudistics Named “Bronze Sponsor” of @CloudExpo New York | #SDN #SaaS #Cloud
SYS-CON Events announced today that Cloudistics, an on-premises cloud computing company, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Cloudistics delivers a complete public cloud experience with composable on-premises infrastructures to medium and large enterprises. Its software-defined technology natively converges network, storage, compute, virtualization, and management into a single platform to drive unprecedented simplicity in the data center. Customers can start with a base infrastructure and scale to multi-site and multi-geo infrastructures with predictable economics and performance.