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It is no secret that it is difficult to recruit and retain IT talent. Millennial disloyalty, boredom, stressful workplaces, and the ubiquitous advice that job-switching leads to higher salaries are some of the many reasons employee tenure is reaching all-time lows across multiple industries. Low employee retention in the enterprise always means expense and disruption.

Turnover among cloud engineers and in DevOps teams is especially painful. According to a recent survey of IT executives, 43% of polled companies report being understaffed in IT. Furthermore, 41% of large firms pursued cloud expertise in 2015, greater than the number that pursued security, network, or data analytics expertise. Replacing lost cloud engineers can take months and delay projects making it particularly challenging for companies beginning DevOps transformations or establishing small, efficient pockets of cloud-based teams.

Volumes have been written on how to retain tech talent. Improving working conditions and higher pay might help, but what enterprises really need is an insurance policyagainst turnover. They need to create conditions such that when a cloud engineer leaves, projects stay on track.

Replacing lost cloud engineers can take months and delay projects making it particularly challenging for companies beginning DevOps transformations or establishing small, efficient pockets of cloud-based teams

To create those conditions, you need to create a team of cloud engineers that is protected from turnover: an outsourced cloud team. To be clear, this would absolutely not be to the exclusion of creating an internal cloud team. But as more enterprises undergo cloud transformations, many are realising that a combination of internal DevOps teams plus an external team is a highly effective strategy.

Your internal DevOps team should be laser focused on product delivery. Their goal should be cloud-enabling your applications, creating automated deployment and testing pipelines, and making sense out of the complexity of your existing monoliths. They should be building new applications that deliver immediate business value.

To achieve these product transformations most efficiently, your internal team should have pre-configured cloud computing resources on hand. These cloud resources should “just work.” Your (expensive, valuable, but easily bored) DevOps engineers should not be responsible for spinning up cloud instances and manually configuring cloud networks, installing anti-virus, and managing backups.

Despite the marketing speak, no cloud platform automatically supports your applications out of the box. Cloud platforms like AWS and Google abstract away your physical interaction with machines, but someone still needs to maintain the services your applications run on top of, set up Auto Scaling, establish security groups, etc. and monitor your environment 24x7x365. And most importantly, someone needs to templatise your cloud resources so that your DevOps team has a library of cloud resources to support new projects. Outsource this. Make your cloud a stable, repeatable, secure foundation for your internal DevOps team to use. Focus your DevOps engineers on what matters to your business.

As more enterprises undergo cloud transformations, many are realising that a combination of internal DevOps teams plus an external team is a highly effective strategy

Why not build this technical cloud platform knowledge in-house? Because outsourced engineers do not quit. For several long-term clients, Logicworks is the highest tenure engineering team. For some clients, we have seen multiple executive teams and nearly 80% turnover over the course of our engagement. We frequently train new staff and when issues arise in their applications, we offer historical context. When a new engineer makes an error, we let them know that 18-months ago their ex-colleague tried the same thing — and here is why it did not work.

This is the kind of continuity that is extremely valuable for a rapidly growing team. For a company in the middle of a DevOps transformation that is relying heavily on the experience of a very small group of highly skilled engineers, this is crucial.

As you create your 2016 budget, it is worth considering whether or not you have an insurance policy for your cloud transformations. The outsource/in-house debate has never truly been a strict dichotomy; in cloud projects, both are necessary to create efficient, fully-functional, and stable teams. You cannot control who quits, but you can control what remains behind.

As more intelligent IoT applications shift into gear, they’re merging into the ever-increasing traffic flow of the Internet. It won’t be long before we experience bottlenecks, as IoT traffic peaks during rush hours. Organizations that are unprepared will find themselves by the side of the road unable to cross back into the fast lane. As billions of new devices begin to communicate and exchange data – will your infrastructure be scalable enough to handle this new interconnected world?

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Cloud computing is already cited by CIOs as one of the biggest contributors to IT complexity – now new research released by Trustmarque shows more than four in five CIOs struggle to identify and implement cloud services must suitable for their business.

The complexity of existing IT infrastructure is a problem for moving to the cloud, according to two thirds (66%) of CIOs, while almost three quarters (74%) admitting interdependencies between different IT environments are another barrier for moving IT services to the cloud. (73%) see cloud services as making data governance more complicated.

A similar number (78%) say integrating different cloud services is a challenge, while two thirds (68%) say admit modernising or rearchitecting certain applications will slow their journey to the cloud, according to the research.

It is not just integrating different cloud services which is an issue- the needs of employees also leaves CIOs with headaches. A majority of those polled (79%) said they found a challenge to balance the productivity needs of employees against security threats, particularly with regard to cloud storage tools.

“Selecting and implementing the right cloud services remains a challenge for CIOs,” said James Butler, CTO at Trustmarque. “Many CIOs struggle to understand the differences between the many  cloud options, what these offer them and how to choose – often because of vendor hype and a lack of clarity around the solutions on offer.”

He added: “By assessing the functions that can be moved to the cloud with the least disruption, CIOs can identify the ‘quick cloud wins’ and clearly demonstrate the business value needed to justify more complicated moves that involve transformation. The hybrid approach can be a way of delivering the benefits of cloud to business rapidly, with reduced risk.”

Previous research from Trustmarque, released in October, found that simplifying IT is a priority for  four in five (79%) CIOs, while two thirds (66%) claim cloud was a primary reason for IT complexity, ahead of legacy technology (51%) and software licensing (51%).

ThoughtWorks has issued the latest Technology Radar, an assessment of trends significantly impacting software development and business strategy. The Technology Radar sets out the current changes in software development – things in motion to pay attention to based upon ThoughtWorks’ day-to-day work and experience solving their clients’ toughest challenges.

“With the threat landscape still evolving, our latest edition of Technology Radar continues to focus on security and innovative approaches,” said Dr. Rebecca Parsons, CTO of ThoughtWorks. “In addition, we are seeing exciting growth and investment around microservices, opening up new opportunities for developers to create more maneuverable architectures. And the explosion in container ecosystems is helping reduce the friction of reliably building and deploying applications to the cloud.”

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“What we see what happens when you have a completely networked society and the potential to now drive the value creation and the collaboration and the ecosystems that are possible when you start to be able to connect people and industries together in ways that have never been possible before,” explained Esmeralda Swartz, VP of Marketing Enterprise & Cloud at Ericsson, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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We talk a lot about what it means to do DevOps here at VictorOps, and a lot of what we talk about comes out of real practice. In some organizations, there’s a wall between developers and ops — developers make requests of ops like they’re throwing tasks over the wall.
Here at VictorOps, that wall isn’t there. When us developers need to do something that’s traditionally in the ops domain like provisioning resources or pushing out deployments, we work closely with ops. And it works the other way too — when things change in the infrastructure that need application changes, they work closely with us. Sometimes, we will just pair on the problem together at one or the other’s desk.

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Our resident Cognizant digital/mobile expert, Peter Rogers, asked me to recommend a digital strategies topic to share, and I suggested Beacons for this week. I confess to reading about them daily without knowing much about them, so I want to thank Peter for this article! Enjoy!
Beacons do not push out notifications. They broadcast an advertisement of themselves (traditionally their UUID, major and minor values) and can be detected by Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices.

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It’s a given that employee access to corporate systems should be both as secure and simple as possible. Up until recently however, time-strapped CIOs, under pressure from demanding staff and challenged with authenticating users all over the world on multiple devices, have been torn between relying on the fatally flawed password or hard token two-factor authentication (2FA) to keep their systems secure.

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