Your business relies on your applications and your employees to stay in business. Whether you develop apps or manage business critical apps that help fuel your business, what happens when users experience sluggish performance? You and all technical teams across the organization – application, network, operations, among others, as well as, those outside the organization, like ISPs and third-party providers – are called in to solve the problem.

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Fog Computing is being touted as the data communication solution our Internet of Things (IoT) devices are asking for by bringing the power of cloud computing closer to the end user. The fact is, the number of connected devices is going to continue to grow exponentionally. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2020 IoT will include 26 billion connected things. Consider the impact that amount of data collected and processed will have.

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IaaS adoption usually begins in isolated pockets — one project here, one there. Then a few months (or years) later, IT decides to expand AWS usage and realises that they don’t know the status of current AWS projects; they don’t know if they ‘did it right’ when they built the first couple of projects; and they don’t know what it looks like to ‘do it right’ in AWS in general.

This last point is the crux of the issue, and the #1 reason we see AWS migration projects stall is not because of a lack of talent or even lack of planning, it is simply that there is no clear vision for what a “good” AWS environment looks like for their specific complex workloads. There is no common yardstick for assessing current environments and no template for building new ones — and this uncertainty is the true root cause of downstream security or performance concerns.

What is a good AWS environment?

Several security organisations have developed a set of common standards for the cloud. AWS themselves have developed extensive documentation and even a service, AWS Trusted Advisor, to help you implement best practices.

But what IT teams really need is a single, simple set of guidelines that mees both internal and external standards — and they need those guidelines to cover everything from server configurations to monitoring and management.

This is where IT meets its first obstacle: they must develop a common baseline for security, availability, and auditability that everyone agrees to. They need to develop “minimum viable cloud configurations”. For instance: MFA on root, everything in a VPC, CloudTrail enabled everywhere.

Example of Logicworks 89-Point Assessment, part of our Cloud Migration Service

The effort to create a single set of standards may seem like a direct push-back against the self-service IT approach, where product teams use whichever technologies they need to get the job done. However, as we will discuss below, developing these common standards is actually the bedrock of a safe self-service IT approach.

Moving from standards to live systems

It is one thing to develop standards, and another to implement those standards on new and existing AWS projects. And then another effort entirely to enforce those standards on an ongoing basis.

In the old world, enforcing configuration was largely manual. IT could afford to manually update and maintain systems that changed very rarely. In the cloud, when your resources change every day and many developers and engineers can touch the environment, a manual approach is not an option.

The key is that these standards need to be built into templates and enforced with configuration management. In other words, build a standard “template” for what your security configurations should look like, and then maintain that template rather than creating a hundred custom configurations for each new cloud project. The template gets changed, not individual virtual instances or networks.

Logicworks build process

For central IT teams, this is revolutionary. Rather than spending months testing and reviewing each new cloud environment, the security team spends time upfront collaborating with systems teams to build a common standard, and then only needs to be involved when that standard changes and at other key points. You know exactly how every system is configured for security at any point in time, and you reduce the time and cost of deploying future systems; you do not have to rebuild security configurations or get them approved by security teams.

What to do now

If you are planning for an AWS migration, the #1 thing you should do right now is implement configuration management (CM) in your current systems. As outlined above, implementing CM means you have to a) come up with the right standards and b) “code” them into a centralised place. This is the hard part. Once you do this, migrating to AWS is much easier because you know what “good” looks like.

The main question is whether or not enterprises will have the time to set up these processes as they migrate to the public cloud. CM requires training, a team of advanced DevOps engineers and Puppet/Chef experts, and months of work. By far the easiest way to do this is to hire a consulting company that already has a common set of standards and a well-developed CM framework, who can assess your current AWS deployments and/or build a solid foundation for future deployments based on those standards.

IT leaders struggle with cloud migration when they do not have expertise in defining and maintaining ideal state. When you migrate to the cloud, any weakness in this area quickly becomes a major handicap. Configuration management can set you on a faster and more stable road to success.

The post The #1 Reason IT Struggles with Cloud Migration appeared first on Logicworks Gathering Clouds.

Digital transformation is too big and important for our future success to not understand the rules that apply to it. The first three rules for winning in this age of hyper-digital transformation are:
Advantages in speed, analytics and operational tempos must be captured by implementing an optimized information logistics system (OILS)
Real-time operational tempos (IT, people and business processes) must be achieved
Businesses that can «analyze data and act and with speed» will dominate those that are slower.

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The newer Windows 10 devices with the Hello extensions are definitely going to have a cost implication, but in today’s context in our own consumer world where every individual has access to Smartphones with advanced biometric features, why should the enterprise user continue to use the old PCs that are managed by traditional passwords? I think the cost of transformation to these devices will be worth the efficiencies in the ITIL operations as well as improved security to enterprise data. It would be useful to collect data about OEMs who have Windows 10 PCs with Biometric Hello features and the same list can be utilized by enterprises. I will write a separate article on Windows 10 devices for enterprises.

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Video experiences should be unique and exciting! But that doesn’t mean you need to patch all the pieces yourself.
Users demand rich and engaging experiences and new ways to connect with you. But creating robust video applications at scale can be complicated, time-consuming and expensive.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Zohar Babin, Vice President of Platform, Ecosystem and Community at Kaltura, will discuss how VPaaS enables you to move fast, creating scalable video experiences that reach your audience anywhere, in an enterprise grade secured environment, low-level video ingestion, processing, management, distribution, and playback. And experience microservices, the Big Data analytics to answer all your end-user consumption and behavior questions.

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Almost two-thirds of companies either have or soon will have IoT as the backbone of their business in 2016. However, IoT is far more complex than most firms expected. How can you not get trapped in the pitfalls?
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Tony Shan, a renowned visionary and thought leader, will introduce a holistic method of IoTification, which is the process of IoTifying the existing technology and business models to adopt and leverage IoT. He will drill down to the components in this framework: Anatomy, Ramp-up, Use case, Business case, Architecture, Technology selection, Implementation, and Platform (ARUBA TIP). The interdisciplinary techniques and anti-patterns of this method will be discussed, along with best practices and lessons learned, to help organizations transform to and enable IoT effectively.

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There’s been a seismic shift in monitoring earthquakes via the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) with advanced Machine-to-Machine (M2M) technology having reshaped the industrial communication industry. Every device or machine along the network, even at the outermost edge, now has the opportunity to be fully-connected for automated collection and delivery of information. As Sensor-2-Server (S2S) communication technology evolves to keep up with the demand for this connectivity paradigm, new efficiencies are created and Big Data is available to drive actionable intelligence.

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