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The CIO agenda changes each year, albeit not drastically. In 2015 part of their focus was on hybrid cloud spending, but this year research and analyst firm Gartner says that it’s now about how they enhance the power of digital platforms. The company’s ‘Building the Digital Platform: Insights From the 2016 Gartner CIO Agenda Report’ says: “As digitalisation moves from an innovative trend to a core competency, enterprises need to understand and exploit platform effects throughout all aspects of their businesses.”

If organisations fail to understand this agenda their companies could face a number of issues that could inevitably hold them back. For example they won’t be able to deliver, attract and retain talent; they won’t be perceived by their customers as being value-added; they might lose the opportunity to either develop new products and services or to sell them. They could potentially lose any opportunity they might otherwise have had to create a competitive advantage too.

In summarising the findings, the report adds: “The 2016 CIO Agenda Survey data shows that digitalisation is intensifying. In the next five years, CIOs expect digital revenues to grow from 16% to 37%. Similarly, public-sector CIOs predict a rise from 42% to 77% in digital processes.”

CEOs now require their CIOs to be a first amongst equals – and CIOs should consider data resilience, rapid backup and restore to maintain business continuity

Gartner also claims the “deepening of digital means that lines are becoming increasingly blurred, and boundaries semiporous — both inside and outside the enterprise — as multiple networks of stakeholders bring value to each other by exploiting and exploring platform dynamics.” To achieve this, CEOs now require their CIOs to be a first amongst equals, and to succeed, Gartner advises CIOs to “re-think and to re-tool their approach to all layers of their business’s platforms, not just the technical one.” But what about data? Without data these platforms are as good as redundant. CIOs should therefore consider data resilience, rapid back-up and restore to maintain business continuity.

Ransomware

“Forbes’ top 10 concerns for 2016 are costs, IoT, agility, time to market and perennial problem of increasing data volumes and where to store it”, says David Trossell, CEO of Bridgeworks. He explains that this issue brings the cloud into play and a whole set of new risks such as ransomware. For example a report by The Register on 23rd March 2016, ‘Your Money Or Your Life! Another Hospital Goes Down To Ransomware’, reveals that the records of the Methodist Hospital in Kentucky, USA, were scrambled by ransomware to try to extort money from the organisation.

Fortunately it called in the FBI and refused to pay, but the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center also found itself infected by ransomware recently and paid malware operators $11,900 to get their documents. Similar attacks have been reported by hospitals worldwide. “Hacking, traditional malware and viruses still offer a significant threat, but those that create it are constantly changing their tactics to develop new ways to either damage data records, to steal or prevent access to data.

Be the disruptor

“In a recent article, ‘The Three Ds of Payment’ by Peter Diamandis, there is a mind provoking quote: – ‘if you don’t disrupt your business someone else will’”, says Trossell. He therefore argues that data security should be top of the CIO agenda, and that disruptive companies have the potential to offer new solutions to old and new problems. They also have the potential to change markets, but as has happened in other high profile examples, they won’t often be initially welcomed by the existing players. Just take a look at Uber for example; it shows that technology is a key part of the equation – including the web and the cloud, and it is changing the way people order a taxi to the extent that traditional black cab taxi drivers hate it.

Technology is the heart of challenging traditional ways of operating. Trossell therefore argues that it has to be “an integral part of the revenue generation process as much as sales and marketing is – with equal budgets.” Technology isn’t just about the platforms. It’s also about how companies can protect their data, collate and manipulate it for the betterment of their customers and themselves. CIOs are now in a situation where they can play a leading role to achieve this goal – not alone, but in collaboration with chief financial officers (CFOs), chief executive officers (CEOs) and chief marketing officers (CMOs).

Drive change

“CIOs now have to drive change through the organisation, and so technology has to be part of the future strategy: Look how Amazon changed the way we buy, and how Netflix altered how we watch movies, how payment systems are driving cash out of our pockets and into our phones”, says Trossell. CIOs therefore need to ensure that they gain recognition by using technology to demonstrably drive and create value that can be added to the bottom line, enabling the organisation to expand. By demonstrating value they will gain the support of chief financial officers (CFOs) and other senior executives. If they are unable to demonstrate value their ability to innovate will be adversely affected.

CIOs now have to drive change through the organisation, and so technology has to be part of the future strategy

So why is data resilience important? Trossell explains: “In the end the traditional values and responsibilities are still there and all that data is becoming more valuable so like any asset it has to be protected. What happens if Uber dies – or loses data? The platform fails.”  Without a functioning platform, revenue can’t be generated for such companies such as these, and the value that’s intrinsically locked into the data will be rendered valueless. This problem should concern everyone within the C-Suite – and individuals need to realise that the buck stops with them.

Collective responsibility

With the growth of digitalisation, the ransomware incidents at the two hospitals show why they should all be concerned with protecting their data. It’s quite easy with fault tolerant hardware to become complacent, rather than to recognise that the risks are ever changing. Networks, for example, remain vulnerable to air gaps and distance issues that create latency and packet loss. The CIO agenda should therefore consider how data is going to be safely transmitted and received, at speed, by mitigating the effects of latency. A service continuity, business continuity and recovery plan is therefore essential.

The C-Suite as a whole should also prioritise data security and data recovery to ensure that they can retrieve data quickly whenever either a human-created disaster or a natural one threatens the ability of the organisation to continue to operate. The outcomes of failing to understand the current CIO agenda and what else should be on it can lead to lost time and lost revenue. It should also be borne in mind that Twitter offers a charter for those that wish to complain about an organisation, and it can lead to a rapid dissemination of unfavourably information that could cause reputational damage.

So at the end of the day data resilience is about protecting your organisation to access and exploit data in order to enable it to prosper. This is why CFOs, CMOs and CEOs should work with CIOs to ensure that they have technologies such as WANrockIT and PORTrockIT in place. It’s better to disrupt those that would like to disrupt you, and it’s better to act now to prevent natural disasters from costing your business its income than to potential far more money on trying to fix the problem post-datum. At now time has this been more important than today because of increasing digitalisation.

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The primary business context for cloud native case studies like Netflix is the ‘Platform Business Model‘, the conceptual design model for the particular commercial models they implement as well, one that is directly enabled by the technology.

Considering the business wealth a ‘simple’ mobile phone app has generated for Uber, this relationship is not hard to identify in action, and is often communicated through social media, highlighting that neither owns any taxis or hotels but in a few short years now command the largest fleets and room availability, vastly larger than their traditional competitors who took decades to do so.

The platform revolution

The repeatable secret sauce is the Platform Business Model, described in detail through academic literature and popular business books; for example, the MIT book ‘Platform Revolution’ sets the scene for the market trend that Cloud Foundry is addressing and is ideal for.

The Platform Business Model has emerged as the moniker for defining the hyper-scale disruptors like Netflix, Uber, Airbnb, Facebook, Twitter et al, as the book describes:

“Facebook, PayPal, Alibaba, Uber-these seemingly disparate companies have upended entire industries by harnessing a single phenomenon: the platform business model.”

The book builds on prior MIT research, such as this detailed 2007 research report on Platform Networks, this highly recommended presentation Platform Strategy and Open Business Models, and in a simpler format in this presentation, which defines:

“A “network platform” is defined by the subset of components used in common across a suite of products (Boudreau, 2006) that also exhibit network effects. Value is exchanged among a triangular set of relationships including users, component suppliers (co-developers), and platform firms.”

Throughout these materials they provide an anatomy of these business models, exploring dynamics such as “multi-sided pricing“.

Platforms are marketplace models, ranging from the people-centric services like Uber taxis and Airbnb accommodation, through to electronic distribution channels like Apple and Xbox. MIT examines the different permutations and shares those best practice insights.

The sharing economy meets elastic cloud business models

The MIT research explores the different dynamics of platform scenarios and markets, like Microsoft vs Apple across computers, portable music players and ultimately smartphones.

The trend has also been described as ‘The Sharing Economy‘, a wave that the disruptors ride through technology innovation.

The dynamism of cloud computing is a perfect match for this equally ‘organic’ approach to resource management, both scaling in real-time to actual market demand experienced.

As the new breed of hyper-scale startups like Uber, Netflix, Airbnb are demonstrating when it is combined with massive investment financing and highly scalable mobile and cloud application services, it very quickly becomes an all-dominating behemoth, unstoppable unless you compete on the same level.

Hence why the business model itself has become so important and popular. For example Dan Woods says your CDO efforts will fail unless you adopt platforms.

XaaP: Industry scenarios for platform adoption

The enabling relationship between cloud computing and the increasing maturity of the model, as demonstrated by real-world adoption successes, is characterised by how they’re described as “XaaP” initiatives, by which I mean for example:

• GaaP – Government as a Platform
• BaaP – Banking as a Platform
• TaaP – Telco as a Platform

This included the US Government showcasing their recently launched Cloud.gov, a Cloud Foundry-based PaaS for the public sector to utilise to grow their rates of software innovation.

The post XaaP! It’s the Platform Business Model appeared first on Cloud Best Practices.

Dell SecureWorks is launching Advanced Endpoint Threat Detection (AETD) Red CloakTM, a fully-managed SaaS solution that can slash the time required to detect and respond to cyber-attacks from months or weeks to hours or minutes.
Armed with strong threat detection and endpoint monitoring capabilities as well as lightweight sensors that can be provisioned in minutes, AETD Red Cloak can scale via a cloud delivery model to any size environment and meet the challenge of identifying attacks that use little or no malware.

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There are always threats out there on the big bad internet. The majority of breaches happen at the application layer and many OWASP Top 10s like SQL injection are still malicious favorites to gain entry. Add to that the availability of DDoS tools, anonymous proxies and the rise of hacktivism means networks and systems are bigger targets than ever. Threat detection today relies on a couple elements: Identifying suspicious activity among the billions of data points and refining a large set of suspicious incidents down to those that matter.

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Office 365 continues to be the most popular cloud app used by enterprises ahead of Salesforce and Box, while Slack has jumped in workplace popularity, according to the latest figures from identity management provider Okta.

Increasingly, enterprises are using both Office 365 and Google Apps, the fourth most popular service overall. Traditionally, Okta argues, industries such as finance, biotech and construction are more likely to be Microsoft houses compared to more digital businesses which prefer Google – a conclusion which mirrors research conducted by BetterCloud last year. The reason for organisations using both ranges from how different departments operate to keeping the lights on for the desktop license. In total, 82% of financial firms use Office 365 only, compared to 50% of online companies who are Google-exclusive.

The rise of communication app Slack has also been keenly noted in the research, with usage of the product rising 77% in the second half of 2015. Data visualisation provider Tableau (65%) and software analytics service New Relic (56%) also grew strongly among Okta’s customers, the latter being listed in Slack’s app directory.

Not only is Slack one of the fastest growing enterprise apps, it also pervades the vast majority of the enterprise. Not surprisingly, Office 365 and Google Apps are the leaders in this category, with Slack being used by 75% of employees on average in any one organisation. Perhaps more surprisingly, Facebook and Twitter is far lower on the list – although the prospect of these apps being not available or blacklisted to employees is a possibility. “We believe these apps still live outside of the IT realm,” comments Okta, with Facebook in particular looking to bolster their enterprise credentials with Facebook at Work.

Elsewhere, Okta argues some traditional on-prem software providers, particularly SAP, Oracle and Adobe, are making a reasonable fist of transforming its operations to a cloudy future, mostly through an acquisitive approach. This may not be a verdict which is universally agreed; when Dell’s acquisition of EMC for $67bn, the largest deal in tech history, was announced back in October, Cade Metz described the more traditional vendors as “the walking dead.”

You can read the full Okta analysis here.

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Cynics have been foretelling the imminent demise of the mainframe since the early 1990s, but all the evidence continues to point to the contrary. Today, 96% of the world’s banks and 71% of Fortune 500 companies continue to run mainframes, generating 30 billion transactions every single day. If these figures weren’t convincing enough, the latest earnings from IBM clearly show the mainframe is still booming, with sales from its zSeries growing by 21% over the year.

The resiliency of the mainframe might seem odd in the age of cloud computing, artificial intelligence and mobile. However, put simply, the mainframe has always been and remains the single most reliable, secure and scalable platform for processing the huge workloads generated in today’s digital economy. As we’re all ordering takeaways, taxis and tickets on our growing array of smart devices and apps, mainframes are powering away behind the scenes, crunching the numbers and processing the vast volume of transactions that keep these services running. With so much resting on its highly capable shoulders, why would anyone even contemplate moving off the mainframe? Rather than trying to phase it out, businesses should be asking how they can maximise on its potential to create an unbeatable competitive advantage.

Getting the mainframe to the table

The first challenge here is persuading any devout cynics that the mainframe still has its place as a major bread-winner at the table. The problem is that mainframes haven’t had a seat at the table for a very long time. Instead, they’ve been sitting in their own silo, running separate to the rest of IT. As a result, it’s always been viewed as something of a mystery to those working outside its inner circle. This is what IT teams must address if the mainframe is to be truly accepted and driven to achieve its full potential for the business. IT directors need to break down the barriers between mainframe and distributed application teams and integrate it as part of their mainstream DevOps and multi-platform IT environments.

This will become more important as the generation of experienced mainframe developers continues to retire. If things don’t change, then pretty soon we’ll reach the point where there will be nobody left to support the mainframe, except for those that are unfamiliar, disenchanted, or even afraid of it. In order to encourage their acceptance of it, the agile developers working in modern multi-platform environments need to realise that DevOps teams are only as strong as their weakest link. Since mainframe code provides a huge chunk of the digital DNA that defines how the business runs, it’s impossible to turn DevOps into a true competitive advantage if that one mainframe element sits in isolation. It’s therefore in everyone’s best interests to bring the mainframe into the fold of mainstream IT.

Breaking down the walls

To make this transition successfully, organisations must create a level-playing field that allows DevOps artisans to support the mainframe effectively. These artisans, working in agile development sprints, have to be able to bring that same approach to the mainframe in order to integrate it as part of a mainstream DevOps and multi-platform IT environment. As such, it simply won’t work if they are forced to learn esoteric mainframe development techniques and adopt outdated approaches. Distributed application and mainframe development teams should be able to use the same toolsets across the entire IT stack, whether they’re putting the finishing touches to the script of a brand new mobile app, or tweaking the underlying mainframe code-base that supports it. There are a number of ways that IT departments can create these capabilities.

Firstly, they should move away from the traditional green-screen environments associated with stuffy and outdated mainframe programming, as these are a major turn-off for distributed application developers. Overlaying these environments with Windows-like interfaces allows modern developers to work in ways they are more comfortable with, and removes the need for idiosyncratic knowledge. It’s also vital that both mainframe and non-mainframe experts understand the interdependencies between multi-platform application code and data. Without this, there’s a risk that a change introduced in the code of one application could have a derogatory impact on the functionality of another.  Five nines reliability on the mainframe isn’t an aspiration.  It’s an imperative. 

One of Europe’s largest private banks is tackling this issue with visualisation techniques that give its developers intuitive insight into the relationships between its applications, so they can identify any potential problems in programming logic. This means they are able to find and fix issues that used to take hours to identify within just minutes, or avoid problems altogether by better understanding the implications of the coding changes they’re about to make.

A new dawn in the mainframe

Measures such as these will significantly reduce the barriers that have until now held businesses back from integrating the mainframe as part of their mainstream DevOps and multi-platform IT environments. As well as enabling DevOps teams to become more agile and achieve their full potential, breaking down the silos and bringing everyone together will also foster knowledge transfer between newer developers and the more experienced generation of mainframe experts. This will significantly alleviate the risk being created by the dwindling mainframe workforce, by ensuring a smooth transition to the new generations that will be responsible for its stewardship in the future. Once these generations are able to harness the immense power of the mainframe for themselves, who knows what dreams of unbeatable competitive advantages they’ll be capable of achieving for the business?