It is ironic, but perhaps not unexpected, that many organizations who want the benefits of using an Agile approach to deliver software use a waterfall approach to adopting Agile practices: they form plans, they set milestones, and they measure progress by how many teams they have engaged. Old habits die hard, but like most waterfall software projects, most waterfall-style Agile adoption efforts fail to produce the results desired. The problem is that to get the results they want, they have to change their culture and cultures are very hard to change. To paraphrase Peter Drucker, “culture eats Agile for breakfast.” Successful approaches are opportunistic and leverage the power of self-organization to achieve lasting change. This talk will share stories of success and failure and will talk about why different approaches succeed and fail.

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(c)iStock.com/john shepherd

Organisations in the UK are among the least likely globally to have a cloud-first strategy, according to a new report from Intel Security.

The study, which polled more than 2,000 senior IT professionals, found the UK had pretty miserable scores across the board compared to their international brethren. The UK’s score of 70% for businesses who are cloud-first – whilst still a reasonable number – lagged behind the global average of more than 80%, while only 7% of UK firms said they stored all of their data in the public cloud, compared with 25% on average globally.

Similarly, the UK lags behind when it comes to having a DevSecOps – development, security, and operations – function in the business, with 28% compared to the 44% global average. As a result, shadow IT practices are likely to be more prevalent; almost three quarters (74%) of UK respondents said their organisation had public cloud services in use which were commissioned outside of the IT department, above the global average of 66%.

“Despite the majority belief that shadow IT is putting the organisation at risk, security technologies such as data loss prevention, encryption, and cloud access security brokers remain underutilised,” Intel noted in an executive summary. “Integrating these tools with an existing security system increases visibility, enables discovery of shadow services, and provides options for automatic protection of sensitive data at rest and in motion throughout any type of environment.”

One of the primary reasons for UK firms being tentative is that old favourite, the skills gap. Almost a quarter (24%) of respondents said that having skilled staff who understand cloud architecture will boost adoption rates. This rings true with similar research from Robert Half Technology earlier this month, which found that three quarters of UK-based CIOs and IT directors regularly encounter IT professionals who they believe are not up to the task.

In terms of global statistics, hybrid cloud usage increased from 19% to 57% of respondents year on year, while organisations using only private cloud dropped from 51% to 24%.

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

(c)iStock.com/john shepherd

Organisations in the UK are among the least likely globally to have a cloud-first strategy, according to a new report from Intel Security.

The study, which polled more than 2,000 senior IT professionals, found the UK had pretty miserable scores across the board compared to their international brethren. The UK’s score of 70% for businesses who are cloud-first – whilst still a reasonable number – lagged behind the global average of more than 80%, while only 7% of UK firms said they stored all of their data in the public cloud, compared with 25% on average globally.

Similarly, the UK lags behind when it comes to having a DevSecOps – development, security, and operations – function in the business, with 28% compared to the 44% global average. As a result, shadow IT practices are likely to be more prevalent; almost three quarters (74%) of UK respondents said their organisation had public cloud services in use which were commissioned outside of the IT department, above the global average of 66%.

“Despite the majority belief that shadow IT is putting the organisation at risk, security technologies such as data loss prevention, encryption, and cloud access security brokers remain underutilised,” Intel noted in an executive summary. “Integrating these tools with an existing security system increases visibility, enables discovery of shadow services, and provides options for automatic protection of sensitive data at rest and in motion throughout any type of environment.”

One of the primary reasons for UK firms being tentative is that old favourite, the skills gap. Almost a quarter (24%) of respondents said that having skilled staff who understand cloud architecture will boost adoption rates. This rings true with similar research from Robert Half Technology earlier this month, which found that three quarters of UK-based CIOs and IT directors regularly encounter IT professionals who they believe are not up to the task.

In terms of global statistics, hybrid cloud usage increased from 19% to 57% of respondents year on year, while organisations using only private cloud dropped from 51% to 24%.

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

I recently read something – a blog, a tweet, a LinkedIn article perhaps – describing the use of wire data to analyze application performance. I remember that the author’s use of the term “APM” in this context caused one reader to comment, complaining that “you can’t call wire data APM.” This was around the same time I referred casually to Dynatrace’s wire data offering (Data Center Real User Monitoring, or DC RUM) as both “APM for IT Operations” and “probe-based APM.” So that complaint has stuck with me, prompting me to ask – and offer an answer to – the question.

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Ed was demoralized. He had just heard a speaker who would change his life. He knew he needed to change, and he knew what the end goal was. He just didn’t know how to get there. He needed fresh air. He needed endorphins. What better way to do that than go on a 6-hour run through some of the seedier neighborhoods of Vegas to the edge of the desert.

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With billions of sensors deployed worldwide, the amount of machine-generated data will soon exceed what our networks can handle. But consumers and businesses will expect seamless experiences and real-time responsiveness. What does this mean for IoT devices and the infrastructure that supports them? More of the data will need to be handled at – or closer to – the devices themselves.

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Automating AWS environments is important for all businesses as it simplifies creation and setup of cloud resources, facilitates otherwise complex processes, and streamlines management. The benefits of automation are clear: accelerate execution, reduce human error and unwanted consequences, and increase the enterprise’s ability to rapidly adapt, all while reducing the overall cost of IT operations. In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Patrick McClory, Director of Automation and DevOps at Datapipe, delved deep into the technical specifics of automation for AWS including a discussion of best practices and real world use cases for PCI compliance, application management, continuous integration, CloudFormation and auto-scaling.

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Your homes and cars can be automated and self-serviced. Why can’t your storage? From simply asking questions to analyze and troubleshoot your infrastructure, to provisioning storage with snapshots, recovery and replication, your wildest sci-fi dream has come true.
In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 20th Cloud Expo, Dan Florea, Director of Product Management at Tintri, will provide a ChatOps demo where you can talk to your storage and manage it from anywhere, through Slack and similar services with Tintri’s web services architecture and APIs. Impress your DevOps team with smart and autonomous infrastructure.

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As businesses adopt functionalities in cloud computing, it’s imperative that IT operations consistently ensure cloud systems work correctly – all of the time, and to their best capabilities. In his session at @BigDataExpo, Bernd Harzog, CEO and founder of OpsDataStore, will present an industry answer to the common question, “Are you running IT operations as efficiently and as cost effectively as you need to?” He will expound on the industry issues he frequently came up against as an analyst, and how this led him to found OpsDataStore. He’ll discuss how data-driven IT operations will save money, and detect trends and patterns that precede actual problems by allowing never-before-seen transparency into the IT stack.

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Cyberthreats have become more sophisticated over the years, improving methods to take advantage of software information and even completely shut down systems to hold data ransom. As a result, developers and testers must be able to ensure that their programs have the necessary protections in place to prevent attacks and keep business information safe. Here are a few tips to help teams address security measures during testing.

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