ScriptRock makes GuardRail, a DevOps-ready platform for configuration monitoring.

Realizing we were spending way too much time digging up, cataloguing, and tracking machine configurations, we began writing our own scripts and tools to handle what is normally an enormous chore. Then we took the concept a step further, giving it a beautiful interface and making it simple enough for our bosses to understand. We named it GuardRail after its function – to allow businesses to move fast and stay safe.

GuardRail scans and tracks much more than just servers in a datacenter. It works with network hardware, Cloud service providers, CloudFlare, Android devices, infrastructure, and more.

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​This is part two in a three part series. To read Part One, click here.

Firms also have the moral duty to be honest with the customers regarding security policies, and at times, even system architecture. Many years ago I once found myself in the unfortunate circumstance where a company I was working with had poorly designed network architecture with a massive single point of failure. Eventually, this single point of failure failed in a spectacular way.

This failure brought down the entire system and impacted several customers in significant ways. After the mad scramble to get the system back up and running, it was important for me to visit affected customers to discuss 1) what happened, 2) why it happened and 3) what our plans were to prevent such a failure in the future. 

I recall some internal conversations about how to present this information to customers and some were in favor of, not exactly lying, but certainly being misleading so as to obscure the fact our system had such a gaping design flaw to begin with.  I opposed this approach because not only did I feel it was important to be completely honest with customers as a matter of course, but also because our customers were not stupid. While they may not have known specifics, they knew that such a massive failure had to be result of poor design. So any misleading “spin” would not only be immoral in itself, it would also erode trust with customers because they would know we were obfuscating.

The situation I describe above also highlights another ethical principle essential to IT operations. When service providers offer a service that is business-critical for their customers, they have a moral duty to design a system based on IT best practices so as to minimize disruptions and enable fast recovery. Firms who fail to do this are betraying the trust of their customers. Of course, some services are intentionally not built as business-critical with guaranteed uptime of five nines. At times, redundancy, backups, etc., are actually a hindrance to the performance of a system and are not essential. In such cases, service providers must clearly communicate this to customers and outline, precisely, what responsibilities the customer is assuming in terms of backup, redundancy, etc.

Broadly speaking, cloud services providers have a moral duty, similar to, but somewhat distinct from members of the customer IT operations team. That duty is to be responsive.  It is easy for service providers to fall into the trap of thinking that since they provide a self-service product wherein customers can generally manage and resolve many challenges unaided. In such situations it is tempting to focus primarily, if not solely, on the needs of the biggest accounts. There is sense to this as most often, larger accounts pay for certain levels of support and responsiveness; something smaller accounts often forego. However, service providers must not forget that while a major outage impacts larger customers, so also do outages impact the one-person IT consultancy shop who’s sole-proprietor may be working to support a family, pay into a college fund, or plan for retirement. Outages impact everyone, bit or small; regardless of the nature of the business.

Of course, it would be impossible to large service providers to have 1:1 contact with all customers at all times. Therefore, meeting the needs of all customers is not just a matter of having a responsive customer service or support department. Proper customer support begins with proper product design. And this is a never-ending challenge; to design a product that is easy to use and easy to troubleshoot. This, specifically, is where documentation becomes vitally important for a firm seeking to ensure customer success. There is no such thing as a “perfect” product or an ideal service. All products have “undocumented features” and odd quirks. Their existence is to be expected.  However, service providers have it within their power to properly document system or product oddities and to highlight workarounds to aid in getting around existing product or service deficiencies.  

In short, service providers have a responsibility to make their customers—big or small—successful. There are a myriad of ways this can be accomplished through proper communication, effective product design, and documentation. No customer, due to their size, should feel less important or less valued than larger customers. Taking care of all customers is not just a moral good, it’s also good for business. Small customers often become large customers and if a service provider has established trust and credibility with these customers, they can expect long-term, and mutually-beneficial relationships with their customers.

This is part two in a three-part series. Stay tuned for a deeper dive into ethical and moral philosophy, and then how to put these ethics into practice.

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As this year comes to a close, let’s take one last look at the most pervasive cloud computing trends — including increased usage across the different cloud service models, the key business drivers and the impact of agile innovation strategies.

Cloud computing adoption has matured, with 69 percent of survey respondents stating that at least a portion of their computing infrastructure is in the cloud. However, 56 percent of companies are still identifying IT operations that could potentially move to the cloud, according to the latest market study by IDG Enterprise.

Survey respondents believe that business technology is a game changer, and cloud solutions are providing advantages from increasing IT agility (63 percent), IT innovation (61 percent) and improving the ability to access critical business data and digital service applications (58 percent).

Removing the Barriers to Cloud Adoption

That said, IT leaders perspective on barriers to bringing these advantages to fruition differs from their Line of Business (LOB) counterparts. There is agreement, however, that a company’s biggest challenge to implementing a cloud platform is ensuring security.

But there’s a significant disconnect on the second most important barrier. IT leaders are concerned about integration (46 percent).  In contrast, LOB leaders believe measuring return-on-investment is a more important challenge (37 percent).

«As use of cloud solutions mature, more than half of companies surveyed are shifting from adoption to upgraded services,» said Brian Glynn, chief revenue officer of IDG Enterprise. «This opens the door for new and existing solution providers as businesses continue to look for ways to improve agility and innovation while balancing enterprise security and risk.»

Cloud Service Preferences are Evolving

Three-quarters of companies are confident that the assets they have placed in the cloud are secure. To help companies have a sense of control, 80 percent have already created, or will create, a governance policy in the next year.

Also, public cloud (60 percent) and private cloud (57 percent) solutions remain the preferred environments compared to hybrid cloud (19 percent). As more workloads move into the cloud, the amount of data stored in private and public clouds will each increase to 25 percent and 21 percent, respectively, in the next 18 months.

Since 2012, cloud investments have increased by 19 percent, with large enterprises spending on average $3.3 million a year, compared to SMBs spending $400,000. Moreover, spending on cloud solutions will account for almost a quarter of IT budgets in the coming year.

Cloud Deployment Motivation is Strategic

Current estimates show that 23 percent of spending on cloud solutions happens outside of the IT department — with marketing, sales and human resources most often investing in solutions.

Besides, even when a cloud solution is purchased by LOB leaders, the IT team can still be involved in the management of the project. And, in instances where IT does not lead the project, 45 percent of the time IT is still called upon to take over the project.

No matter who initiates the move to cloud, one thing will always be certain, CEOs and other senior executives that approve the budget are not enamored by the technology — they have a strategic imperative and they seek a meaningful competitive advantage in the marketplace.

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While many SPM Performance Monitoring users quickly see the benefits of SPM and adopt it in their organizations for monitoring — not just for Elasticsearch, but for their complete application stack — some Elasticsearch users evaluate SPM and compare it to Marvel from Elasticsearch. We’ve been asked about SPM vs. Marvel enough times that we decided to put together this focused comparison to show some of the key differences and help individuals and organizations pick the right tool for their needs.

Marvel is a relatively young product that provides a detailed visualization of Elasticsearch metrics in a Kibana-based UI. It installs as an Elasticsearch plug-in and includes ‘Sense’ (a developer console), plus a replay functionality for shard allocation history.

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The world’s five greatest national IT development challenges are presented by Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Cameroon, Cote D’Ivoire, and Tanzania. India takes sixth place in the world and second place in Asia, followed in Asia by Pakistan, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Iran.

Ukraine tops the list in Europe, followed by Russia, Italy, Poland, and Serbia. The greatest challenges in the Americas are offered by Bolivia, Paraguay, Peru, Honduras, and Ecuador (Brazil is sixth here).

Our Process
These findings are a function of our ongoing research at the Tau Institute. To identify the greatest challenges, we integrate our overall rankings into our rankings of current levels of technology change, then adjust for population size.

Larger nations tend to face larger challenges, just because they have more people. Combine a large population with a relatively undeveloped infrastructure and low per-person income levels, and the countries facing the greatest challenges emerge.

We encourage people to note that our research is relative, centered upon how well nation’s are doing given their current economic resources and current acceleration of technological and socioeconoic change. This point of view brings the potential of Bolivia, for example, currently a highly underveloped nation, into focus.

We don’t weigh parameters in a traditional way, ie assign certain percentages to each factor and then run a straight-line calculation. Instead, we plot all of our data on a series of exponential curves, and balancing technological development against socioeconomic issues such as poverty and corruption.

In Search of Dynamism
Further analysis is done by isolating the most currently dynamic IT environments among the nations with the greatest challenges. Poland and Ukraine fall into this category, as do Tanzania, Armenia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Bolivia. These countries are on a positive course to address their current challenges.

Poland, in fact, has one of the most dynamic current IT environments in the world on a relative basis, and ranks among our Top 20 nations (among 103 surveyed) overall.

Our research can be sliced and diced in thousands of particular ways, to identify opportunities at all levels of challenge, potential, and opportunity. Our algorithms have some built-in flex that lets them be adjusted as needed by clients who wish to emphasize, augment or diminish specific or multiple factors.

Cameroon
For those in search of a high degree of difficulty, Cameroon may represent the ultimate challenge, according to our numbers. It ranks as the third-greatest challenge overall, but also lacks the dynamic IT development environment found in Ethiopia and Bangladesh. There are good people in Cameroon working for change, and a government commission focused on IT, but this nation could use several shots of oxygen to get its IT development (and by extension, its socio-economid development) in motion.

It’s a beautiful country, with stupendous geographical and cultural diversity, and perhaps known to casual observers as a producer of good, entertaining national football (soccer) teams. Consider it to be the ultimate challenge for IT development.

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The Bridge Group is known for publishing insightful studies that aid SaaS Sales & Marketing leaders to build and optimize their inside sales strategies. They are working on the 5th round of their SaaS inside sales research and would like our help completing a 6-7 minute survey. Your answers will remain anonymous, and in return the research promises action-oriented guidance on compensation benchmarks, selling strategies, productivity and performance best practices, and more.

If you are able, please take a few moments to fill out the survey:

2014-15 Bridge Group SaaS Inside Sales Research Survey

As we saw with my own SaaS survey results published last month, when we all contribute, we can get powerful information to fuel our businesses.

To see results from a previous round of this survey, check out The Bridge Group’s 2012 Inside Sales Compensation and Metrics report.

Share and Enjoy

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For more than a decade we have heard constant warnings about the coming of “cyber war” and “cyber terrorism.” The prophets of cyber doom have promised that cyber attacks are just around the corner that will be on par with natural disasters or the use of weapons of mass destruction. With every new report of a cyber attack, the prophets exclaim that their visions have finally come to pass, and so it is with the most recent attack against Sony. But in most prior cases, after the dust has settled, the belated arrival of cyber war, terrorism, or doom has failed to live up to the initial hype. The same will be the case with the Sony hack. It is neither war nor terrorism as those terms are commonly defined. It certainly is not cyber doom.

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Picture credit: iStockPhoto

As this year comes to a close, let’s take one last look at the most pervasive cloud computing trends – including increased usage across the different cloud service models, the key business drivers and the impact of agile innovation strategies.

Cloud computing adoption has matured, with 69 percent of survey respondents stating that at least a portion of their computing infrastructure is in the cloud. However, 56 percent of companies are still identifying IT operations that could potentially move to the cloud, according to the latest market study by IDG Enterprise.

Survey respondents believe that business technology is a game changer, and cloud solutions are providing advantages from increasing IT agility (63 percent), IT innovation (61 percent) and improving the ability to access critical business data and digital service applications (58 percent).

Removing the barriers to cloud adoption

That said, IT leaders perspective on barriers to bringing these advantages to fruition differs from their Line of Business (LOB) counterparts. There is agreement, however, that a company’s biggest challenge to implementing a cloud platform is ensuring security.

But there’s a significant disconnect on the second most important barrier. IT leaders are concerned about integration (46 percent).  In contrast, LOB leaders believe measuring return-on-investment is a more important challenge (37 percent).

«As use of cloud solutions mature, more than half of companies surveyed are shifting from adoption to upgraded services,» said Brian Glynn, chief revenue officer of IDG Enterprise. «This opens the door for new and existing solution providers as businesses continue to look for ways to improve agility and innovation while balancing enterprise security and risk.»

Cloud service preferences are evolving

Three-quarters of companies are confident that the assets they have placed in the cloud are secure. To help companies have a sense of control, 80 percent have already created, or will create, a governance policy in the next year.

Also, public cloud (60 percent) and private cloud (57 percent) solutions remain the preferred environments compared to hybrid cloud (19 percent). As more workloads move into the cloud, the amount of data stored in private and public clouds will each increase to 25 percent and 21 percent, respectively, in the next 18 months.

Since 2012, cloud investments have increased by 19 percent, with large enterprises spending on average $3.3 million a year, compared to SMBs spending $400,000. Moreover, spending on cloud solutions will account for almost a quarter of IT budgets in the coming year.

Cloud deployment motivation is strategic

Current estimates show that 23 percent of spending on cloud solutions happens outside of the IT department – with marketing, sales and human resources most often investing in solutions.

Besides, even when a cloud solution is purchased by LOB leaders, the IT team can still be involved in the management of the project. And, in instances where IT does not lead the project, 45 percent of the time IT is still called upon to take over the project.

No matter who initiates the move to cloud, one thing will always be certain, CEOs and other senior executives that approve the budget are not enamored by the technology – they have a strategic imperative and they seek a meaningful competitive advantage in the marketplace.

What I thought was the best definition, had a line about how “communication was the responsibility of both Dev and Ops.” I know sounds really simple, but if you extend that definition of “communication” I thought that did a good job of showing that DevOps is absolutely both departments’ responsibility. It’s not just relying on one team to change culturally. I’d love to get your short definition of how you define DevOps today.

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