In a digital world that moves as fast as ours, programmers are applying new, creative ways of thinking to the software development process in a non-stop push for ever-faster turnaround times. In DevOps, Continuous Integration (CI) is increasingly the integration method of choice, in large part because of the speed at which it enables the release of new features, bug fixes, and product updates.
President Trump Signs An Order for Cloud Cybersecurity
President Trump signed an executive order to put an end to the federal government’s cybersecurity woes.
This order mandates a single set of rules for all departments and puts the head of the department as accountable for that agency’s security. The obvious idea behind this accountability is to avoid department heads from passing the blame to the IT department, every time there’s a breach. By doing this, agency heads were caught passing the buck without taking any steps whatsoever to correct them.
To put an end to this blame games, this order was drafted quite some time ago and was supposed to have been signed on January 31 of this year, but was postponed without any reason or explanation. But, finally it was signed and would come into force right away.
An unexpected surprise that came to light in this order was an initiative to move as much of the government’s cyber-defense programs to the cloud. This means, the government wants departments to move their data and applications to the cloud to leverage its many benefits.
This is a significant and sensible move considering that there are roughly 190 departments today. If each department tries to develop its own defenses, then it’ll simply be a duplication of efforts and a waste of resources. A better way would be to share services and resources, so that efforts are more streamlined and departments can follow similar standards.
The Trump administration believes that historically a lot of time and effort went into creating and protecting legacy IT systems in federal departments and this spending did not yield any result. To top it, there are a number of security vulnerabilities as is evident from the many hacking incidents that have taken place over the last few years.
This is critical considering that U.S system’s store a lot of sensitive information about its residents such as their Social Security Number and date of birth, which can cause a lot of problems, when it falls in the wrong markets. There are already many criminals prowling in cyberspace to get such sensitive information, so they can sell it in the black market for a substantial amount of money.
When government systems don’t follow security best practices and use legacy systems, they make it that much more easier for these criminals to get the information they want. So, this move to move to the cloud could enforce better security standards and hopefully, will keep the criminals at bay.
Besides these important strategies, the order signed by President Trump also gives directives on reviewing the general vulnerabilities of the U.S government and its systems, zero in on the main culprits and adversaries of U.S cybersecurity and provide training to the next generation of cybersecurity professionals, so they can handle the future cyber needs of the country.
In all, this is an excellent and much-awaited move that’s needed to beef up the cybersecurity of U.S and also to protect the assets of its citizens.
The post President Trump Signs An Order for Cloud Cybersecurity appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
Puppet on a string of successes: New products, partners and customers announced
The DevOps landscape got something of a timely boost with a couple of recent pieces of news; open source software provider Puppet announced figures indicating ‘global momentum’ as well as product updates, while CyberArk secured the acquisition of Conjur for $42 million (£32.7m).
Puppet said Thursday that it had added more than 250 new enterprise customers over the past 12 months. The company added that more than 37,000 companies – including more than three quarters of the Fortune 100 – use its product in some capacity. New offices have also been opened in Singapore and Seattle, the latter as an R&D centre, as well as an updated facility in Sydney.
Product news includes updates to Puppet Enterprise, a new version of Open Source Puppet, as well as entirely new products which mark the first the company has brought to market since 2011. The two new products are Lumogon and Puppet Cloud Discovery, which aims to give enterprise IT teams greater insight into the services running across containerised applications and cloud infrastructure.
The company also revealed a series of new partner offerings for Enterprise. The cast list is pretty stellar, with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cisco, Nutanix and VMware among the companies involved.
“Puppet’s momentum underscores the continued demand that we are experiencing from customers and organisations that need to improve agility, efficiency and reliability to support them through their DevOps and digital transformation journeys,” said Sanjay Mirchandani, president and CEO of Puppet in a statement.
According to research on DevOps salaries published by the company in August, IT manager salaries in the US had gone ‘off the chart’, with more than half of those respondents earning more than $100,000 per year. A report from Rackspace in June found practically all vacancies for cloud and DevOps skills – including Puppet – increasing in number over the past year.
Elsewhere, with the acquisition of Conjur, a provider of DevOps security software, CyberArk “uniquely empowers CIOs and CISOs to accelerate modern software development securely with the industry’s only enterprise class security solution that delivers comprehensive privileged account management and secrets protection”, in the words of the press materials.
Conjur was recently named as a ‘cool vendor’ in DevOps by analyst firm Gartner, in part due to its focus on protecting organisations from cyber attacks which have found their way through the network perimeter.
“While empowering organisations with more efficiency and speed, the DevOps process is also dramatically expanding the attack surface across the entire enterprise,” said Udi Mokady, CyberArk chairman and CEO in a statement. “CyberArk’s acquisition of Conjur further strengthens our market leadership position – providing the industry’s only enterprise-class solution for privileged account security and secrets management on premises, in the cloud and across the DevOps pipeline.”
Progress “Bronze Sponsor” of @CloudExpo NY | @ProgressSW #DX #Serverless
SYS-CON Events announced today that Progress, a global leader in application development, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Enterprises today are rapidly adopting the cloud, while continuing to retain business-critical/sensitive data inside the firewall. This is creating two separate data silos – one inside the firewall and the other outside the firewall. Cloud ISVs often get requests to connect these silos using technologies such as VPN; however, these tend to be difficult to manage and are not engineered for accessing business data from the cloud.
Seven Essentials for a Top-Performing IT Help Desk | @CloudExpo #Cloud #DataCenter
The help desk forms the backbone of IT operations for many federal, state and local government agencies. In fact, the cross-functional nature of its operation means the help desk directly impacts productivity and is an essential part of what enables an agency to meet its stakeholder needs.
However, owing to increasingly complex IT environments, managers struggle to ensure that their help desks are operating at optimum efficiency. This seven-point guide will help IT managers ensure their help desks deliver exceptional service while maximizing productivity.
The Simple Checklist for Solving Ghost Issues at Remote Offices | @CloudExpo #Cloud #APM #Monitoring
IT leaders have always had their hands full with ghost issues on-premises. But for businesses that rely on remote and branch offices, monitoring a sprawling network of on-premises equipment introduces even more challenges.
That’s why we move to the cloud, right? To help us eliminate truck rolls, improve cost efficiency and centralize management of applications across all locations.
When you’ve migrated to the cloud (even if it’s just for something like office applications like Office 365 or G Suite), you’ve already considered compliance, licensing, budget concerns. But what happens when your remote users start experiencing classic ghost issues?
SaaS Adoption: Before You Sign on the Dotted Line | @CloudExpo #API #SaaS #Cloud
The purpose of this article is draw attention to key SaaS services that are commonly overlooked during contact signing that are essential to ensuring they meet the expectations and requirements of the organization and provide guidance and recommendations for process and controls necessary for achieving quality SaaS contractual agreements.
[session] #Serverless Applications | @CloudExpo @IBMcloud #AI #OpenWhisk
Apache OpenWhisk on IBM Bluemix provides a powerful and flexible environment for deploying cloud-native applications driven by data, message, and API call events. In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Daniel Krook, Software Architect, IBM Watson and Cloud Platform, and Distinguished IT Specialist, will discuss why serverless architectures are attractive for many emerging cloud workloads and when you should consider OpenWhisk for your next project. Then get started on Bluemix with three sample applications covering how the OpenWhisk programming model enables you both to implement REST APIs and process non-HTTP events at scale.
Is Middle East Moving to the Cloud?
When we think of cloud, we often think of advanced countries like the U.S, Canada, Australia, Germany, and Scandinavian countries. Or we think of emerging economies like India and China. We rarely associated cloud technology with the Middle East and that’s probably what needs to change.
A report by Gartner shows that companies in the Middle East are all set to spend more than two billion dollars over the next three years as they want to move their data and applications to the cloud. This represents a 22 percent growth as the revenue figures stood at $956 million in 2016.
So, what’s driving the cloud here?
The report further states that platform as a service (PaaS) is recording the highest growth rate at 28.8 percent closely followed by software as a service (SaaS) at 28.5 percent. Growth in both these areas indicate that companies are looking to migrate their applications and workloads from an on-premises data center to the cloud.
As with the rest of the world, companies operating in the Middle East also understand the benefits that come from cloud, and they want to make the most of it. Contrary to popular opinion, Middle East is no longer about oil. Falling oil prices and the growing demand for alternate sources of energy has forced oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia to look at development of other industries.
Already Dubai and Abu Dhabi are leading the way as one of the best cities in the world for travel and living. There are many companies that have a presence in these two cities, thanks to their advanced infrastructure and friendly corporate policies. Other cities too such as Cairo are looking to follow suit, and it won’t be long before these countries become attractive destinations for companies of all sizes and sectors.
With such a trend, it’s no surprise that cloud will boom here too, as many companies will depend on the cloud one way or the other. In fact, keeping this trend in mind, companies like Alibaba have already started setting up cloud data centers in this part of the world.
This is a smart move considering that data center traffic will reach 366 exabytes per year, up from 68 exabytes in 2013. Such an explosive growth needs a ton of facilities and this is exactly what major cloud companies are vying to setup.
In addition to data center traffic, consumer adoption of cloud storage is also expected to grow astronomically. It is expected to represent 61 percent of total cloud transactions in 2018, up from 26 percent in 2013, according to a report by Cisco. To top it, Cisco predicts that this region will rank second in the world, just behind the Asia Pacific region when it comes to growth.
All these numbers and trends point yet again to the growing might of cloud and its overarching reach to almost every part of the world. Let’s hope that soon African and Asian countries also join the bandwagon, so every individual in every part of the world can leverage the benefits of cloud technology.
The post Is Middle East Moving to the Cloud? appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
Enterprise-owned data centres still ‘essential’ despite cloud growth, research notes
Enterprises may be starting to move workloads to the cloud, but enterprise-owned data centres remain the ‘primary compute venue’ with workloads staying consistent over the past three years, according to new research from the Uptime Institute.
The study, which polled more than 1,000 data centre and IT professionals globally, argues that enterprises continue to see the data centre as ‘essential’ to their digital-centric strategies with the majority of budgets increasing or staying consistent through 2017.
Respondents reported that nearly two thirds of their IT assets were currently deployed in their own data centres. 22% were deployed in colocation or multi-tenant data centre providers, with only 13% deployed in the cloud.
Despite this, more than two thirds (68%) of companies polled say they rely on IT-based resiliency, relying on live application failover in case of an outage due to multiple, geographically distributed data centres. An overwhelming majority (90%) said their company’s management was more concerned around outages compared to this time last year.
“The survey findings reflect several key trends that are acting together as a powerful catalyst for change within the industry,” said Matt Stansberry, senior director of content and publications at Uptime Institute. “Increased performance at the processor level, further expansion of server virtualisation, and the adoption of cloud computing have all created an IT foundation that differs greatly from those seen just five years ago. Through this change, enterprise-owned data centres have remained a central component.
“We urge data centre and IT professionals to focus on the business aspects of running their IT foundation, creating sets of repeatable processes to make it work efficiently and adopting new technologies and solutions when the business demands it,” added Stansberry.
You can find out more about the results here.