Major trends and emerging technologies – from virtual reality and IoT, to Big Data and algorithms – are helping organizations innovate in the digital era. However, to create real business value, IT must think beyond the ‘what’ of digital transformation to the ‘how’ to harness emerging trends, innovation and disruption. Architecture is the key that underpins and ties all these efforts together. In the digital age, it’s important to invest in architecture, extend the enterprise footprint to the cloud, and create a digital technology platform.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Mark Casey, President and CEO of CFN Services, will discuss how disruptive enterprises are enabling highly distributed, software-defined architectures that fuel innovation and growth.
Testing, #DevOps and #ContinuousDelivery| @DevOpsSummit #Monitoring
How do you balance the need to “go fast” with the need to test everything and deliver high-quality software?
With applications the driving force in today’s economy, the quality and release cadence of your software are critical to your business and your bottom line. You want to get software updated in the hands of your end users as quickly as possible. However, even the fastest release cycle wouldn’t make a difference if your product ends up being buggy or malfunctioning, resulting in a bad user experience or service interruption.
APIs Are Not Web Pages | @DevOpsSummit #API #IoT #M2M #DNS #DevOps
There’s a tendency, particularly for networkers, to classify applications by the protocols they use. If it uses HTTP, it must be a web app. The thing is that HTTP has become what it was intended to be: a transport protocol. It is not an application protocol, in the sense that it defines application messages and states. It merely transports data in a very specific way.
That’s particularly important in the age of the API and, increasingly, the age of things that might be using APIs. You see, APIs are primarily data centric constructs while web pages (think any HTML-based app) are document centric constructs.
MLB #DataLake… Play Ball!| @CloudExpo #BigData #IoT #ML #Analytics
DELL EMC’s Isilon division has been working with Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM) to create a data lake that provides a seamless process to add and maintain massive amounts of video data to serve their baseball fanatics (like me). Here is a cool 2-minute video that shows how they did it. The company operates the official web site for the league and the thirty Major League Baseball club web sites via MLB.com, which draws four million hits per day. It also provides the backend-streaming infrastructure for WWE Network, HBO NOW, NHL etc.
Microsoft and Adobe cosy up for Azure cloud partnership
(c)iStock.com/JasonDoiy
Microsoft and Adobe have announced partnership plans to make Azure the preferred cloud platform for Adobe’s marketing, creative, and document clouds, and Adobe’s Marketing Cloud the preferred option for Dynamics 365 Enterprise.
The partnership, announced in the Microsoft Ignite keynote session today, aims to help enterprise companies ‘embrace digital transformation and deliver compelling, personalised experiences through every phase of their customer relationships’.
“Together, Adobe and Microsoft are bringing the most advanced marketing capabilities on the most powerful and intelligent cloud to help companies digitally transform and engage customers in new ways,” said Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO. Shantanu Narayen, Adobe president and CEO, added: “Adobe and Microsoft will bring together the cloud horsepower and end to end capabilities brands need to design and deliver great digital experiences.”
Adobe already has a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in place, with a case study on the AWS website noting that Adobe uses the cloud infrastructure giant to “provide multi-terabyte operating environments for its customers. By integrating its systems with the AWS Cloud, Adobe can focus on deploying and operating its own software instead of infrastructure.”
Whether this continues to be the case remains to be seen, but the Microsoft/Adobe announcement contained little aside from a reference to machine learning technologies in Microsoft Cortana Intelligence Suite and SQL Server. Given Adobe’s analytics capabilities, this could be an interesting move. A recent study from Adobe Digital Insights found a clearly positive correlation between website traffic growth and forms of personalised marketing, such as social advertising.
The press materials concluded with: “The companies’ mutual customers will be able to harness their data for critical insights and predictions, connect customer touchpoints across their business, bolster relationships, and drive brand loyalty and growth.”
[video] #Blockchain Keynote at @CloudExpo | #IoT #M2M #Bitcoin #Ethereum
In his keynote at 18th Cloud Expo, Andrew Keys, Co-Founder of ConsenSys Enterprise, provided an overview of the evolution of the Internet and the Database and the future of their combination – the Blockchain.
Andrew Keys is Co-Founder of ConsenSys Enterprise. He comes to ConsenSys Enterprise with capital markets, technology and entrepreneurial experience. Previously, he worked for UBS investment bank in equities analysis. Later, he was responsible for the creation and distribution of life settlement products to hedge funds and investment banks. After, he co-founded a revenue cycle management company where he learned about Bitcoin and eventually Ethereum.
[slides] #Kubernetes Cluster and #Ansible | @DevOpsSummit #Docker #DevOps
Kubernetes is a new and revolutionary open-sourced system for managing containers across multiple hosts in a cluster. Ansible is a simple IT automation tool for just about any requirement for reproducible environments.
In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 18th Cloud Expo, Patrick Galbraith, a principal engineer at HPE, discussed how to build a fully functional Kubernetes cluster on a number of virtual machines or bare-metal hosts. Also included will be a brief demonstration of running a Galera MySQL cluster as a Kubernetes application.
Running Effective Help Desks: Focus on Financial Productivity
Many help desks focus on volume as a metric. How much volume do I have? How long does it take to get through it? How does that translate to headcount for the number of staff I need to handle the call volume? Those are important, but only half of the battle. The other half of the battle is how successful you are in resolving issues at the first level without escalating to the second level.
The reason the first call is so important:
- Cheaper – fix with one resource instead of two
- Time – focus should be on financial productivity. How do we get users up and running as quickly as possible?
Your overall key to success is establishing high first call resolutions and identifying opportunities to reduce or remove call volumes from the environment.
Watch on YouTube
Are you interested in learning more about GreenPages’ Help Desk services? Feel free to reach out!
Skyhigh Networks grabs $40 million in series D funding in profitability push
(c)iStock.com/miki1991
Cloud security services provider Skyhigh Networks has secured $40 million (£30.9m) in a series D funding round which will aim to steer the California-based firm “through to profitability.”
The round was led by Thomset Ventures, with Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners also contributing. Total venture capital to Skyhigh, launched only in February 2013, is now at $105.5m.
Skyhigh’s proposition is through being a leading ‘cloud access security broker’ (CASB), which enables a central point of control for data stored in thousands of cloud services.
“As the massive migration to cloud accelerates, security has become a major pain point for enterprise CISOs,” said Thomset venture partner Umesh Padval, who joins the Skyhigh board of directors. “We recognise in Skyhigh the rare combination of a massive market opportunity, technical product leadership, enviable list of customers, visionary management, and a world class team.
“Skyhigh helped pioneer the CASB market, and we look forward to working with their team as they continue to innovate and lead this space,” Padval added.
Rajiv Gupta, Skyhigh co-founder and CEO, added: “We are thrilled to have raised an up round from Thomvest, Greylock, and Sequoia, particularly in the current environment. It is a testament to the incredible work of our employees and will enable us to accelerate our growth and carry us to profitability.”
Skyhigh’s name will arguably be best recognised by long-time readers of this publication due to their research efforts. The company frequently collaborates with the Cloud Security Alliance on reports, with one of the most recent in June arguing that an IT skills shortage continues to pervade organisations, with many ‘false positive’ security instances – an alert which erroneously flags normal behaviour as malicious – contributing to more serious alerts being ignored.
According to recent analysis from Glassdoor ratings, 100% of employees approve of Skyhigh CEO Gupta, while 75% would recommend the company to a friend.
[session] @Venafi’s Secure Containers | @DevOpsSummit #APM #Docker
Digitization is driving a fundamental change in society that is transforming the way businesses work with their customers, their supply chains and their people. Digital transformation leverages DevOps best practices, such as Agile Parallel Development, Continuous Delivery and Agile Operations to capitalize on opportunities and create competitive differentiation in the application economy.
However, information security has been notably absent from the DevOps movement. Speed doesn’t have to negatively impact security. Container-to-container communication should not be in clear text, yet it is. So why is it so hard to implement good security practices like encryption for DevOps? The primary reason, provisioning of keys and certificates in a DevOps environment takes too long and results in bottlenecks – so people don’t use encryption unless they have to.