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IBM has announced the rollout of new cloud-based DevOps services to enable enterprises to develop software faster, as well as launching a single-tenant version of its platform as a service (PaaS) Bluemix.

The aim with DevOps is to apply agile development principles to the larger, slower-moving enterprise market. With the cloud-based offering from IBM, organisations can now utilise collaborative lifecycle management either on-premise or as a managed service, as well as reduce time and cost when testing to the cloud.

“Software success is increasingly indistinguishable from business success,” said Kristof Kloeckner, IBM software group general manager. “IBM is helping clients harness the collaborative power of the cloud to deliver business outcomes that can compete on the highest levels of agility, speed and collaboration, regardless of the current size or complexity of the organisation.”

Big Blue also described two of its clients who were utilising DevOps techniques – and increasing their output and productivity as a result. Nationwide Mutual Insurance reduced critical software defects by 80% in 18 months, resulting in 20% efficiency gains, whilst exam setting firm Pearson VUE is able to continually improve its test-taking experience through predictive analytics.

“The true value of DevOps is not just in efficiency,” said Steve Farley, vice president of application development at Nationwide. “We also need to anticipate and adapt to market changes and demands with speed, incorporating feedback more frequently to improve value to customers.”

Communications provider CenturyLink is also using DevOps in its cloud team, with CTO of their cloud division Jared Wray telling CloudTech of the new office layout, including collaborative spaces and ‘fishbowl’ rooms, so developers and operations can liaise with one another, improving efficiency.

Bluemix, announced as a developer-friendly PaaS earlier this year, is now a dedicated service, a collaborative, cloud-based platform in a single tenant environment, with available features including data caching, runtimes, to give developers flexibility to run their apps in the language of their choice, and Cloudant’s database as a service.

Bluemix is also compatible with SoftLayer’s IaaS, again solidifying the partnership between the two, which IBM snapped up last year. SoftLayer CEO Lance Crosby was profiled in a Bloomberg piece asking whether he could speed up Big Blue’s transition to the cloud. “There’s more smart people than I’ve ever met, but not necessarily cloud smart,” Crosby says of his colleagues.

IBM is also opening up a Bluemix Garage in Level39 in London, a collaboration area for developers to talk about the cloud and complementing the current one in San Francisco.

You can find out more about the new series of products here.

Infor has announced a new feature Infor CloudSuite™ Aerospace & Defense (A&D) to aid compliance with International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). The ITAR function will serve as a complementary function for new or existing Infor CloudSuite A&D customers, to facilitate compliance for Infor customers that are creating a US defense article or performing a US defense service and wish to benefit from cloud-services.

The ITAR regulation serves to manage handling and access requirements for data and physical equipment, which involves the design, manufacture and delivery of weapons systems. This law creates a vital compliance factor for any organization that is responsible for the creation, distribution and trade of weapons. However, it also creates a potential layer of difficulty for such organizations that seek to deploy cloud services, as the law may impact third-party organizations that handle ITAR-related data. For this reason, Infor has invested in the controls required to help customers demonstrate ITAR compliance for CloudSuite Aerospace & Defense as required by the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC).

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I’ve started using the phrase digital professional, in particular in my recent article dinging Amazon’s cloud division Amazon Web Services (AWS) for not having a clear digital strategy. However, I haven’t been very clear on what I mean, so it’s time to put a finer point on this terminology.

The role of digital professional begins back in the 1990s with the rise of the web professional: people who worked on web sites in some capacity. Some of them were technical, able to sling HTML or JavaScript or perhaps Perl back in the day.

Other designated as creatives, including graphic designers and the like. A third subset of the web professional community were the marketing people: hammering out web strategies, focusing on key performance indicators like conversions and churn, and figuring out how to communicate to users using this newfangled World Wide Web of ours.

And finally, there were the information architects, designing page flows and form interactions, making sure site maps made sense and navigation worked as expected.

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Cochlear Limited, the global leader in implantable hearing solutions, has selected AppZero for easy migration of its Microsoft Windows Server 2003 applications, a major priority for IT organizations before Microsoft ends support on July 14, 2015. AppZero software enables server application migration from old operating systems to new platforms or clouds and has been proven to be ten times faster, more reliable and efficient than alternative approaches.

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By Chris Chesley, Solutions Architect

Many SMBs struggle with deciding if and what to move to the cloud. Whether it’s security concerns, cost, or lack of expertise, it’s often difficult to map the best possible solution. Here are eight applications and services to consider when your organization is looking to move to the cloud and reduce their server footprint.

What to move to the cloud

1. Email

Obviously in this day and age email is a requirement in virtually every business. A lot of businesses continue to run Exchange locally. If you are thinking about moving portions of your business out to the cloud, email is a good place to start. Why should you move to the cloud?

Simple, it’s pretty easy to do and at this point it’s been well documented that mail runs very well up in the cloud. It takes a special skill set to run Exchange beyond just adding and managing users. If something goes wrong and you have an issue, it can often be very complicated to fix. It can also be pretty complicated to install. A lot of companies do not have access to high quality Exchange skills.

Moving to the cloud solves those issues.  Having Exchange in the cloud also gets your company off of the 3-5 year refresh cycle for the hardware to run Exchange as well as the upfront cost of the software.

Quick Tip – Most cloud e-mail providers offer Anti-Spam/Anti-virus functionality as part of their offering. You can also take advantage of cloud based AS/AV providers like MacAfee’s MXLogic.

2. File shares

Small to medium sized businesses have to deal with sharing files securely and easily among its users. Typically, that’s a file server running locally in your office or at multiple offices. This can present a challenge of making sure everyone has the correct access and that there is enough storage available.

Why should you move to the cloud? There are easy alternatives in the cloud to avoid dealing with those challenges. Such alternatives include Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive or using a file server in Microsoft Azure. In most cases you can use Active Directory to be the central repository of rights to manage passwords and permissions in one place.

Quick Tip – OneDrive is included with most Office 365 subscriptions. You can use Active Directory authentication to provide access through that.

3. Instant messaging/online meetings

This one is pretty self-explanatory. Instant messaging can often be a quicker and more efficient form of communication than email. There are many platforms out there that can be used including Microsoft Lync, Skype and Cisco Jabber. A lot of these can be used for online meetings as well including screen sharing. Your users are looking for these tools and there are corporate options. With a corporate tool like Lync or Jabber, you can be in control. You can make sure conversations get logged, are secure and can be tracked. Microsoft Lync is included in Office 365.

Quick Tip – If you have the option, you might as well take advantage of it!

4. Active Directory

It is still a best practice to keep an Active Directory domain controller locally at each physical location to speed the login and authentication process even when some or most of the applications are services are based in the Cloud. This still leaves most companies with an issue if their site or sites are down for any reason.  Microsoft now has provided the ability to run a domain controller in their Cloud with Azure Active Directory to provide that redundancy that many SMBs do not currently have.

Quick Tip – Azure Active Directory is pre-integrated with Salesforce, Office 365 and many other applications. Additionally, you can setup and use multi-factor authentication if needed.

5. Web servers

Web servers are another very easy workload to move to the cloud whether it’s Rackspace, Amazon, Azure, VMware etc. The information is not highly confidential so there is a much lower risk than putting extremely sensitive data up there. By moving your servers to the cloud, you can avoid all the traffic from your website going to the local connection; it can all go to the cloud instead.

Quick Tip – most cloud providers offer SQL server back-ends as part of their offerings. This makes it easy to tie in the web server to a backend database. Make sure you ask your provider about this.

6. Backup 

A lot of companies are looking for alternate locations to store backup files. It’s easy to back up locally on disk or tape and then move offsite. It’s often cheaper to store in the cloud and it helps eliminate the headache of rotating tapes.

Quick Tip – account for bandwidth needs when you start moving backups to the cloud. This can be a major factor.

7. Disaster recovery

Now that you have your backups offsite, it’s possible to have capacity to run virtual machines or servers up in the cloud in the event of a disaster. Instead of moving data to another location you can pay to run your important apps in the cloud in case of disaster. It’s usually going to cost you less to do this.

Quick Tip – Make sure you look at your bandwidth closely when backing up to the cloud. Measure how much data you need to backup, and then calculate the bandwidth that you will need.  Most enterprise class backup applications allow you to throttle the backups so they do not impact business.

8. Applications

A lot of common applications that SMBs use are offered as a cloud service. For example, Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. These companies make and host the product so that you don’t have to onsite. You can take advantage of the application for a fraction of the cost and headache.

In conclusion, don’t be afraid to move different portions of your environment to the cloud. For the most part, it’s less expensive and easier than you may think. If I was starting a business today, the only thing I would have running locally would be an AD controller or file server. The business can be faster and leaner without the IT infrastructure overhead that one needed to run a business ten years ago.

Looking for more tips? Download this whitepaper written by our CTO Chris Ward “8 Point Checklist for a Successful Data Center Move“

Fundamentally, SDN is still mostly about network plumbing. While plumbing may be useful to tinker with, what you can do with your plumbing is far more intriguing. A rigid interpretation of SDN confines it to Layers 2 and 3, and that’s reasonable. But SDN opens opportunities for novel constructions in Layers 4 to 7 that solve real operational problems in data centers. «Data center,» in fact, might become anachronistic – data is everywhere, constantly on the move, seemingly always overflowing. Networks move data, but not all networks are suitable for all data.

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Up to this point in time, cloud-base Application Performance Management (APM) vendor AppNeta has focused on the “big five” application development environments: Java, .NET, php, Python, and Ruby. Recently they added Node.js to the list. As a result, their TraceView product can now monitor well over 90% of the modern code in production today.

However, there is more to the addition of Node.js to this list than simply rounding out the monitoring capabilities of TraceView. In fact, Node.js plays an important part of today’s real-time digital world. To fully understand the importance of monitoring Node.js, therefore, we must place this tool into context.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Amazon.com cloud computing juggernaut, wrapped up its annual reInvent conference in Las Vegas last week. Host to many thousands of AWS devotees, hundreds of exhibiting partners, and dozens of press and analysts – but not myself. You see, I wasn’t invited.

Not for want of trying, mind you. It didn’t matter that I had attended last year as an analyst, or that I write about them regularly, or even that my opinion of them has generally been quite favorable. You’d think that with my new role as contributor to Forbes on the topic of digital transformation, I’d be a shoe-in for one of the coveted press/analyst passes. Didn’t happen.

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Microsoft Azure cloud storage went down for several hours overnight knocking various sites and services offline, with the tech giant blaming the fault on an undetected bug during testing.

The incident can be located on the Azure status history page, under ‘Multiple Azure Services’ and multiple regions.

 “From 19 Nov 2014, 00:52 to 05:50 UTC a subset of customers using Storage, Virtual Machines, SQL Geo-Restore, SQL Import/Export, Websites, Azure Search, Azure Cache, Management Portal, Service Bus, Event Hubs, Visual Studio, Machine Learning, HDInsights, Automation, Virtual Network, Stream Analytics, Active Directory, StorSimple and Azure Backup Services in West US and West Europe experienced connectivity issues,» it explains, adding: «This incident has now been mitigated.”

According to an Azure blog, the problem came about after an issue arose during an upgrade rollout which went unchecked during the several weeks of testing prior to release, which Microsoft calls ‘flighting’.

“During the rollout we discovered an issue that resulted in storage blob front ends going into an infinite loop, which has gone undetected during flighting,” Jason Zander, CVP at Microsoft Azure wrote. “The net result was an inability for the front ends to take on further traffic, which in turn caused other services built on top to experience issues.

“We will continue to investigate what led to this event and will drive the needed improvements to avoid similar situations in the future,” he added.

Microsoft is engaged in being the global leader in cloud and infrastructure, and has made good progress in recent months. Last month a note from Synergy Research found that while Amazon Web Services (AWS) was still the clear market leader in cloud infrastructure services, Microsoft had pulled clear of its competition, including Google and IBM, for second place.

According to Synergy, in the second quarter of this year Microsoft grew at 164%, compared to IBM at 86%, AWS at 49% and Google 47%.

The firm has also made aggressive product and partnership plays in recent months, including sealing a deal with Dropbox for enterprise storage. Analysts at the time questioned the validity of the partnership, arguing Dropbox needed an enterprise footprint, while Microsoft needed to give assurances it will ‘play nicely’ with others.

You can read more about the Azure outage here. Were you affected?

I returned from re:Invent last night after three days of what was probably one of the most memorable and impactful trade shows I’ve ever attended. Period.

More than 1500 attendee applicants were refused. The show was packed. This time with more enterprise IT leaders than one might imagine, with most fully committed to getting on Amazon AWS.

The attendee drumbeat at our booth was relentless: “We want to move to AWS.”

My comment to press and analysts at each briefing: It is clear that re:Invent 2014 is more than a typical trade show; it will be remembered as the point at which Amazon declared war (explicitly or implicitly- it doesn’t matter) on VMware.

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