The concept of speed as an advantage is not new. Over the course of 700 years, the Romans built and maintained a system of roads extending over 55,000 miles to enable speedy communications and the quick movement of troops across the vast expanse of the empire.
What’s different today is that digital technologies have warped our perception of time. As an example, a person might say they live five minutes from town, but that can have widely different meanings based on whether they were referring to walking or driving a car. Digital technologies compress our perception of time and space while expanding our expectations of what can be accomplished in a given time. We expect to complete the equivalent of one hour of shopping in a supermarket in one minute online. These changes significantly impact the way businesses must operate in a digital era to compete and remain relevant.
Chatbots and AI – the FinTech Trends to Watch | @CloudExpo #AI #ML #Cloud #FinTech
Fintech is a lucrative, yet quite saturated market. In order to stay competitive, businesses should keep track of the emerging trends and be able to capitalize on them before their competitors do.
Artificial Intelligence is currently among the most promising fintech trends. Leading financial brands such as Capital One, MasterCard, as well as hundreds of startups have set the pace for the adoption of virtual financial advisors. If you want to stay ahead of your competition or simply explore the opportunities for AI in fintech, this article is for you.
Passwords: What If Everything You Know Is Wrong? | @CloudExpo #Cloud #Cybersecurity
Every time there’s a notable cybersecurity breach, someone (even me) writes a comprehensive primer on the proper way to create “secure” passwords. Lather, rinse, repeat. Until a few years ago, everyone (including me) based their password advice on a 2003 paper from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), with the catchy title “NIST Special Publication 800-63.” The paper recommended that passwords be cryptic, contain special characters, and be as close to nonsense as possible.
Cloud Monitoring Lessons Learned from Outages | @CloudExpo #Cloud #APM #Monitoring
According to this year’s Internet Trends Report, the cloud is steadily expanding and companies are spending more on these services. Businesses are opting to use these third-party services rather than build their own internal tool because they are often easier and less expensive to deploy. There’s no need to assign IT resources and purchase necessary hardware to deploy a new software solution, so the business unit can sign a contract and start using a solution almost immediately.
This interactive map from Automic helps make the continuous delivery landscape clearer
Confused about the extent of the DevOps landscape? Fear not – a new map issued by business automation software provider categorises more than 150 products to help organisations compose a ‘coherent continuous delivery (CD) toolchain’.
The interactive map, as becomes clear on first glance, takes its cue from various subway systems around the world, which makes for a clearer look than the classic marketing technology landscape supergraphic, the most recent of which came in at a mind-boggling 5,381 solutions.
From cloud infrastructure and platform as a service, to NoSQL database providers, to messaging and collaboration, 19 ‘lines’ are provided, with a link to their website and a short description of what they do.
If the product is one Automic supports, such as VMware’s vCloud Air, there is a link to the marketplace page – you didn’t think this was truly altruistic, did you? – but as the company explains, there is a need to simply what is an ever-expanding market.
“Making sense of the huge variety and number of tools available for the modern software development process can be confusing,” said Chris Boorman, CMO of Automic in a statement. “The Continuous Delivery Map clarifies the role each of these tools plays within a CD context, and demonstrates how orchestration, which is at the heart of this guide, is critical to a successful modern software delivery practice.”
Plenty of research has reached this publication around how the benefits of DevOps are alluring to organisations, but not being fully acted upon. ‘More of the same’ was the headline of a piece back in March, when automation software provider Quali trawled around AWS re:Invent, Cisco Live, VMWorld, and more to discuss strategy with delegates. More than half (54%) of those polled said they had no access to self-service infrastructure, with the most cited tools being Jenkins, on the continuous integration line, and Docker, on the ‘containerology’ line.
Automic was acquired by CA Technologies in December last year for €600 million, with the latter’s various products, from Flowdock, to TDM, to Agile Central, pervading the map.
You can explore and take a look at the map here.
What Is Java #DevOps? | @DevOpsSummit #CloudNative #Serverless #AI #DX
DevOps sees the coming together of practices, philosophies, and tools that allow you to create services and applications very quickly. This means that you can improve on your apps and evolve them at a much faster rate than those developers who are using traditional software development processes. We’ve talked about DevOps, in general, a great deal, but today, we’re going to dig a little deeper and take a look at Java DevOps specifically.
Demystifying Machine Learning | @CloudExpo #AI #ML #Analytics
Are machines really intelligent? Learn the answer and how it can affect your business. It’s machine-learning 101 for curious business leaders out there.
Autonomous cars taking us on our favorite and most efficient routes, virtual assistants serving up the exact data a doctor needs to diagnose an illness or that an engineer needs to identify a faulty part, customer support bots that are always available to answer your questions and book your appointments accurately and quickly. All of these use-cases are either here or will be soon, and they all rely on Machine Learning to be successful. But how do the machines learn? There’s a lot of market confusion out there, and it’s important to take a step back and understand what we’re talking about and why.
Mark Troester
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When “IoC” Meets “SoC” | @DevOpsSummit @Cavirin #DevOps #DevSecOps
Not very long ago, in my IT consulting career, I used to be responsible for the launch of mission-critical applications that help enterprises leap into the cutting edge of the digital business revolution. There were a lot of hard skills required for leading such a mission that involved getting the system architecture and software design right early, mentoring and managing the engineering resources, and tracking the progress to the satisfaction of the business analysts who put together the requirements and the stakeholders who funded the projects. Those skills, while hard, were largely deterministic and manageable vs another set of skills required to ensure that the built applications come alive in production environments, and run reliably and securely thereafter. This other set of skills often pit the application developers against the infrastructure administrators and InfoSec professionals.
Is Wall Street Moving to Cloud?
The benefits of cloud are there for everyone to see. Right from improving productivity to reducing costs, cloud has been providing a ton of advantages to companies. With so many benefits, it’s only right that companies want to make the most of them. Wall Street is no exception to this rule.
Many large financial institutions that are a part of Wall Street have started thinking of using the cloud to get a competitive advantage in a fairly tough market. They want to make the most of cloud to drive innovation and to stand out as a preferred institution among customers.
Some companies like CapitalOne have been using cloud services for some time now, while others like JP Morgan and ANZ Bank have announced that they will be moving to a cloud platform fairly soon. Other smaller companies are likely to follow suit too.
Reliable sources confirm that these financial institutions are considering the top three players, namely, Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft, for this shift to the cloud. Long years of effort in laying an extensive and strong infrastructure is touted to be the reason to consider only these three providers.
All the three companies have an expansive network and have all the necessary tools and services in place to cater to Wall Street. Using this infrastructure, JP Morgan and other financial institutions are improve their technical capabilities and in the process, drive up efficiency and bring down costs.
In many ways, it’s a surprise that the larger financial institutions haven’t turned to the cloud yet. Small organizations like credit unions moved their operations to the cloud a few years ago, but the larger organizations have started this move just now.
Why?
Security was one of the major concerns that held back these companies from making a shift because even the smallest of breaches can prove to be an expensive affair. But now, cloud security has improved and there’s more confidence in the cloud than ever before.
Also, the fact that hackers were able to breach into the so-called “secure” systems of these companies led them to reconsider their choices, and soon they found that cloud is a tenable option. They not only get other benefits such as improved productivity and lesser costs, but also the security is at least on par with what they have, if not better.
To top it, regulators are also going easy on the idea of moving data to the cloud because they also understand that this is the future and it’s only right for banks to make this transition too.
This is why asset managers, insurance companies and large banks are running different tests, talking to vendors and even modifying their existing policies to ensure that their transition to the cloud is smooth and easy.
Overall, wall street is moving to the cloud soon and it won’t be long before customers can enjoy more services while banks stand to gain financially and from an operational standpoint through this transition.
The post Is Wall Street Moving to Cloud? appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
British Medical Journal expands to China with help of Alibaba Cloud and Datapipe
More and more companies are trying to get a foothold in China as part of their international expansion – and the British Medical Journal (BMJ) is one, having worked with managed cloud services provider Datapipe to enter the Chinese market using Alibaba Cloud.
Datapipe has been working with Alibaba as a global managed service provider of its cloud arm since 2016, and was also named the leading Asia Pacific managed cloud company by Frost & Sullivan. For BMJ, the concept was straightforward, needing a partner on the ground in China with knowledge of the market to take advantage of Alibaba’s local public cloud infrastructure.
“We have now fully realised the strategy that we first mapped out two years ago, when we started our cloud journey,” said Alex Hooper, BMJ head of operations. “In the first year, we were able to fully virtualise our infrastructure using Datapipe’s private cloud, and in the process, move to a new, agile way of working. In this second year, we have embraced public cloud and taken our services over to China.”
This is not the BMJ’s first dalliance with Datapipe; the company had previously used the managed service provider to help refresh its legacy technology stack, moving from one release a month on average to up to four times a day, with Sharon Cooper, chief digital officer, describing the working relationships between dev, ops, test and business needs as ‘unrecognisable’ from before.
As regular readers of this publication will be aware, Alibaba is making concerted cloud strides. Last month, with the publication of its financial results, CEO Daniel Zhang said its cloud business “continues to enjoy high growth at scale” and the recent passing of the one million customer mark is “merely a starting point.”
Writing for this publication last month, Alibaba Cloud noted the importance of not falling into various traps when moving into the Chinese market. “China is a highly competitive market, and consumers expect a smooth and secure online experience,” the company wrote. “The flexibility, scalability and security offered by the cloud provides an optimal solution to boost your website in China’s competitive online space.”
You can find out more about Datapipe’s integration with Alibaba Cloud here.