It seems like everyone today makes a branded phone accessory, and way too many of them generate that “This device is not supported” error when you plug them into your phone. Looking for some good accessories for the magic-computer-that-also-happens-to-make-phone-calls that’s always in your pocket? Here’s a list of some of my favorites that have all somehow […]
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A survey from Puppet Labs shows DevOps engineers earn “noticeably higher” salaries than the majority of other job titles.
More than half (55%) of those polled in the 2015 DevOps Salary Report earn $100,000 per year or more, according to the research. The only job role which is more likely to provide greater remuneration is architect, which includes cloud or infrastructure architect and systems architect.
“Now that organisations are learning the benefits of DevOps, we’re seeing additional salary data that reveals just how much demand there is around the world for highly qualified IT and DevOps practitioners,” said Nigel Kersten, CIO at Puppet Labs. “It’s encouraging to see these positions continue to grow, and we look forward to watching the market evolve and adapt to the growing urgency around making IT a competitive advantage.”
The research also revealed a divide between the sexes which still exists, but is not a chasm; even though more men (47%) reported earning $100,000 or more than women (36%), the situation was reversed with regard to the $50,000 to $100,000 bracket (59% of women, 47% of men).
Previous Puppet Labs research, on the state of DevOps implementations, found a ‘pathological, power-oriented culture’ makes employees burn out faster. Managers should be encouraged to incorporate a culture of ‘continuous learning’, as well as implement a blame-free environment, such as post-mortems following outages which don’t exist to point the finger at someone.
Back in October a study from Appvance, conducted by Vanson Bourne, found 91% of CIOs agreeing that executing a DevOps strategy was a top priority for their organisation. Almost nine in 10 (89%) said ensuring confidence in the quality of their releases was key to success, while 87% advocated increasing velocity and productivity as their main priorities.
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Identity management in the cloud? What does this actually mean to us? We don’t yet have an established definition of cloud identity management – and there is not even a Wikipedia page yet, although identity management is well founded. That says it all. I’m going to attempt to draw up a definition.
Using cloud applications has now become commonplace for many organisations. Certainly in education, cloud applications have been used for years, such as Office 365 and various electronic learning environments. Educational institutions are far ahead of other organisations when it comes to using cloud applications.
To stay within the context of identity management, these are mainly target systems that run in the cloud. Just to be clear, an identity management process encompasses one or more source systems – often the HR system or school information system, where the identity is registered, personal and contract details are maintained – the identity manager, and the target systems. The target systems are those where the identity must be ascertained and access must be granted.
When the target systems are mainly cloud-based but the source systems are still not, I don’t believe we can yet speak of cloud identity management. In fact, this is a hybrid situation where a number of applications are running in the cloud, but the most critical business applications are still running on-premises.
Why don’t the critical business applications move to the cloud? Quite simply, they are just too critical. Consider the electronic health record, for instance. This is packed with confidential information and patients would feel uncomfortable knowing that their medical details are in the cloud. At the same time, many organisations, particularly those involved in corporate service provision, have heavy legacy business applications that were developed for them years before, and which would involve too much effort and expense if they were to be made cloud-based. New arrangements would have to be made with suppliers, and this is often not the suppliers’ priority.
When these target systems are probably not going to be offered as cloud-based in the near future, there’s also no necessity for organizations to nevertheless move their source systems to the cloud. Yet there are a few suppliers of source systems (HR systems) that are introducing the step to the cloud. They are now offering their applications either for the cloud or on-premises, but in the future will probably only offer a cloud version.
Alongside the source and target systems, there is the identity manager, the system which has to ensure that the digital identity is revealed in the various target systems, so that the authentication and authorisation for the identity is managed easily and uniformly. There are not yet many suppliers offering identity management in the cloud. In general, totally in the cloud is also not fully attainable. To be able to perform the processes, a small agent always needs to run on-premises. The business logic does then run centrally, and is thus outsourced.
But what then is total identity management? Unfortunately, we still don’t have an answer for this. I believe that total identity management is only possible when alongside the source and target systems and the identity manager, the primary log in (authentication) for and by the user is also done in the cloud.
This means that the source against which the user is being authenticated, the Active Directory, must be in the cloud. An Azure Active Directory is generally also associated with outsourcing the entire management duties for the Active Directory to a third, outsourced party. This party could then also be responsible for ‘having control’ over the data, in other words managing the data and delivering the required reports for audits. SLAs would have to be agreed with such a party, involving the logical access security standards.
For now, complete identity management, where the source and target systems and the identity management system are partly in the cloud, along with the Active Directory, is only achievable for educational institutions and the SME sector. Using an Azure Active Directory has now become very common in these sectors. Complete cloud identity management offers many possibilities. For instance, it would be easier to offer users single sign-on. With a one-time registration, from any device they could gain access to thousands of cloud applications. With WebSSO, users could employ their company credentials to launch applications from a portal or a mobile app. This means users would not have to remember the log-in details for all the different cloud applications.
Unfortunately total cloud identity management including a cloud Active Directory is not going to be the way ahead for every organisation – but the possibilities are certainly coming steadily closer.
It’s been a busy time for tech’s ongoing infatuation with containers. Amazon just announced EC2 Container Registry to simply container management. The new Azure container service taps into Microsoft’s partnership with Docker and Mesosphere. You know when there’s a standard for containers on the table there’s money on the table, too.
Everyone is talking containers because they reduce a ton of development-related challenges and make it much easier to move across production and testing environments and clouds. Containers are the technology that, many believe, deliver on the long-promised portability in the cloud to avoid vendor lock-in, and put developers, system administrators and their enterprises in the driver’s seat.
Enterprise storage vendor Avere Systems is to work with Microsoft so that its Virtual FXT Edge filers can be used with Microsoft Azure.
The hardware maker, which specialises in creating storage devices that caters for hybrid cloud set ups, says the two vendors are collaborating to make it easier and cheaper to get the qualities of the cloud from IT infrastructure that is situated ‘on premise’.
The system aims to simplify the task of creating a system for providing computing power, memory and storage on demand for enterprise IT staff who are not specialists in running cloud services. The Avere technology is designed to make data that is held on network attached storage (NAS) more readily accessible to Azure, so that users don’t experience any latency.
The rationale is that many companies want the liquidity of cloud computing but are not allowed to move their data off the company premises, according to Avere. Its solution was to invent a ‘virtual NAS’ system that is easy for an enterprise IT department employee to install and manage. Meanwhile the system is sophisticated enough to provide multi-protocol file access (including NFS and SMB) and clusters, making it powerful enough to deliver high availability, scalable performance and capacity.
As hybrid cloud systems become the de facto standard for enterprises, it’s important that they are easy enough for IT department employees to manage, according to Nicole Herskowitz, Microsoft Azure’s Senior Director of Product Marketing, Microsoft Azure.
By adapting the system to work smoothly with Azure, enterprise IT department managers can deploy thousands of Azure HPC instances on-demand to crunch data with low latency and no data migration. This means businesses can tap into hyper-converged infrastructure of Azure with ease, without breaking the bank, Avere claims.
“At Avere, we’ve been dedicated to shattering the myth that organizations can’t have enterprise NAS performance in the public cloud,” said Rebecca Thompson, VP Marketing of Avere Systems, “with Microsoft we’re helping enterprises harness the computing power of Microsoft Azure, which is used by 57% of Fortune 500 companies for big data applications.”
IT services provider The Getronics Group has bought Colt’s Managed Cloud business to add it to a portfolio that includes Getronics, GWA and Connectis. Service provider Getronics said it will now extend the range of offering to a client based it previously serviced on behalf of Colt.
The deal includes the acquisition of Colt’s cloud technologies and support services across the UK, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, India, Romania and Switzerland. The Getronics family of companies will now run the managed cloud services supplied to Colt’s customer base, using Colt’s own network, voice and data centre capabilities.
Colt Managed Cloud has 600 customers across multiple verticals including financial services, media and government. It employs staff working across operations, transition and engagement, presales, service management and support functions.
The Getronics Group, owned by Aurelius since its acquisition in 2012, has previously acquired the Spanish application services divisions of Thales, Telvent and Steria Iberica and NEC’s unified communications direct sales and services divisions in four countries. The Colt Managed Cloud was named as a market leader in Cloud enabled Hosting for three consecutive years by analyst Gartner, in its Magic Quadrant reports.
The Getronics Group has 6,000 employees in 18 countries across Europe, Asia Pacific & Latin America. The IT service provider division of the group has had a long running arrangement with Colt to run its services to its clients and the deal represents a formal transfer of ownership, according to Getronics CEO Mark Cook. “Today’s announcement demonstrates our commitment to offering the latest, best of breed IT services to our customers. We are looking forward to welcoming the transferring customers and employees into the Getronics family in the new year,” said Cook.
The financial terms of the deal are undisclosed. The completion of this transaction is subject to regulatory and competition clearances and compliance with local labour laws.
Cloud technology is rapidly becoming the new normal, replacing traditional IT solutions. The revenues of top cloud service providers are doubling each year, at the start of a predicted period of sustained growth in cloud services. The private sector is leading this growth in workloads migrating to the cloud. Governments, however, are bringing up the rear, with under 5 percent of a given country’s public sector IT budget being dedicated to cloud spending. Once the public sector tackle the blockers that are preventing uptake, spending looks likely to rapidly increase.
The classic NIST definition of the Cloud specifies Software (SaaS), Platform (PaaS) and Infrastructure (IaaS) as the main Cloud services (see figure 1 below), where each is supplied via network access on a self-service, on-demand, one-to-many, scalable and metered basis, from a private (dedicated), community (group), public (multi-tenant) or hybrid (load balancing) Cloud data centre.
Figure 1: Customer Managed to Cloud Service Provider Managed: The Continuum of Cloud Services
The Continuum of Cloud Services
The benefits of the Cloud are real and evidenced, especially between the private and public cloud where public cloud economies of scale, demand diversification and multi-tenancy are estimated to drive down the costs of an equivalent private cloud by up to ninety percent.
Also equally real are the blockers to public sector cloud adoption, where studies consistently show that management of security risk is at the centre of practical, front-line worries about cloud take-up, and that removing them will be indispensable to unlocking the potential for growth. Demonstrating effective management of cloud security to and for all stakeholders is therefore central to cloud adoption by the public sector and a key driver of government cloud policy.
A number of governments have been at the forefront of developing an effective approach to cloud security management, especially the UK which has published a full suite of documentation covering the essentials. (A list of the UK government documentation – which serves as an accessible ‘how to’ for countries who do not want to reinvent this particular wheel – is set out in the Annex to our white paper, Seeding the Public Cloud: Part II – the UK’s approach as a pathfinder for other countries). The key elements for effective cloud security management have emerged as:
Data classification enables a cloud security framework to be developed and mapped to the different kinds of data. Here, the UK government has published a full set of cloud security principles, guidance and implementation dealing with the range of relevant issues from data in transit protection through to security of supply chain, personnel, service operations and consumer management. These cloud security principles have been taken up by the supplier community, and tier one providers like Amazon and Microsoft have published documentation based on them in order to assist UK public sector customers in making cloud service buying decisions consistently with the mandated requirements.
Data classification is the real key to unlocking the cloud. This allows organisations to categorise the data they possess by sensitivity and business impact in order to assess risk. The UK has recently moved to a three tier classification model (OFFICIAL → SECRET → TOP SECRET) and has indicated that the OFFICIAL category ‘covers up to ninety percent of public sector business’ like most policy development, service delivery, legal advice, personal data, contracts, statistics, case files, and administrative data. OFFICIAL data in the UK ‘must be secured against a threat model that is broadly similar to that faced by a large UK private company’ with levels of security controls that ‘are based on good, commercially available products in the same way that the best-run businesses manage their sensitive information’.
Compliance with the published security framework, in turn based on the data classification, can then be evidenced through procedures designed to assess and certify achievement of the cloud security standards. The UK’s cloud security guidance on standards references ISO 27001 as a standard to assess implementation of its cloud security principles. ISO 27001 sets out for managing information security certain control objectives and the controls themselves against which an organisation can be certified, audited and benchmarked. Organisations can request third party certification assurance and this certification can then be provided to the organisation’s customers. ISO 27001 certification is generally expected for approved providers of UK G-Cloud services.
Allowing the public sector cloud to achieve its potential will take a combination of comprehensive data classification, effective cloud security frameworks, and the pragmatic assurance provided by evidenced adherence to generally accepted international standards. These will remove the blockers on the public sector cloud, unlocking the clear benefits.
Written by Richard Kemp, Founder of Kemp IT Law
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has launched new flash storage devices which it claims will bring the day of the all flash data centre and lighting fast cloud services closer.
The HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage systems will be the data storage blocks in the flash data centres of the future, its claims. When all the memory, storage and processing of data is run on flash technology, data centres will create the most competitive environment possible for cloud services, according to HPE.
HPE has also integrated 3PAR StoreServ with its new HPE StoreOnce and HPE StoreEver product lines to ensure protection and retention keep pace with demand. It is this integration which will speed the progress of modernising data centres, according to HPE, because it means that new and mixed media types can work together in the same array while maintaining performance and enterprise-class resiliency.
Earlier in November the Storage Performance Council testified that a new world record speed was achieved by the 3PAR StoreServ 20850 all-flash array. HPE claims it produced better performance levels than the rival EMC VMAX 400K, but at half the price.
Among the new HPE offerings are a 3PAR Flash Acceleration system for Oracle, 3PAR Online Import software and support for 3d NAND drives.
The Flash Acceleration drive could makes databases perform 75% quicker while enabling legacy systems like EMC VMAX to remain in place, claims HPE. This, it says, is half the price of upgrading the legacy storage system.
3PAR Online Import software makes it easier to move off hard disk drive (HDD)-bound legacy storage, such as EMC, HDS and IBM XIV, and onto flash. Support for 3D NAND drives means that solid state drive (SSD) technology can be installed cheaply.
HPE claims it can save the massive expense involved in buying pure flash systems by creating a flash-optimised design that supports both file and block storage as well as a secondary tier of HDDs.
HPE also announced new systems to help customers as they move away from traditional backup silos in favour of integrated flash array and application data protection.
“Organisations want game-changers like flash without introducing risk,” said Manish Goel, HPE’s general manager for storage, “to meet those demands, Hewlett Packard Enterprise simplifies flash storage from the entry to enterprise.”
There are many benefits to implementing Microsoft Office 365 including reducing capital expenditures, the ability to scale your business quickly, and simplified licensing. There have also been increased features and functionality such as Yammer, Delve and Skype for Business. Keep in mind, however, there can be some challenges associated with Office 365 implementations. Organizations need to take the proper measures to prepare for quality migration and management of this critical suite of end user productivity services.
I’ll be hosting a webinar on 11/18, with my colleagues Jay Keating and Geoff Smith, to cover strategies for migrating and supporting mobile workforces. If you’re considering implementation, I highly recommend you register. Below are some of the topics Jay, Geoff and I will be covering:
Register now for David’s upcoming webinar, “Microsoft Office 365: Expectations vs. Reality.” Bring your questions, as there will be a Q&A session at the end of the webinar!
By David Barter, Practice Manager, Microsoft Technologies
Does your API suck? Okay, that one needs a little explanation.
If you’ve developed an API, it exposes some functionality to users. It might suck to learn. The documentation might be unclear and the function signatures counter-intuitive. It might suck to use, doing a lot of things, but never particularly what you really need, right now.
After a great deal of working with companies developing new API functionality, and also building out demo material from publicly available APIs (starting with the thought “this should be easy …”) I have developed some opinions on the subject. Just like a restaurant that doesn’t pay attention to detail, an awkward API can have a dozen small things that add up to a big problem. Misplaced silverware, a long wait time, a slow waiter, details wrong on the order … no one of these will make you want to stand up and leave, but put together, they’ll make sure you never come back.