Author: devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Powerful Enhancements and Seamless Integration with CA Automic’s One Automation Platform Accelerates Transformation in Today’s Modern Software Factory

NEW YORK — March 6, 2018 — CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) a leader in business automation software today announced a new release of CA Workload Automation AE (AutoSys™), the de facto standard workload engine for complex workloads. The new release includes major new features designed for ease-of-use and enhanced performance, together with direct integration with the CA Automic One Automation platform.

CA Workload Automation AE is a scalable, open automation solution that empowers IT developers with a rich, advanced and easy environment to work in – without extra coding. The new release makes the solution easier to own and manage to help users provide that critical applications and businesses processes run smoothly and continuously.

New features announced today include:

• Cloud enabled automation:provides out-of-the-box support for AWS and Azure Database Services, to enable an easier and more reliable connection to remote database services. Users can pay on consumption, and benefit from cost savings on infrastructure and licenses.
• Centralized Agent Management: offers a comprehensive view across the agent landscape for improved audit reporting, diagnosis and resolution. Benefits include powerful search capabilities, access to log and report files for easier debugging, and access to parameters for synchronous start and stop capabilities — all from a single interface, thereby eliminating the need to log into remote servers giving better control execution to the user.   
• Enhanced load balancing: reduces overhead and gives customers improved scalability and performance without added complexity for more consistent and reliable service delivery.
• Enhanced email notification:using custom templates, operators or administrators are proactively alerted to resolve problems with exception reporting, differentiated by job statuses. Log files can be included in emails to enable immediate access to optimize exception processing to save time, effort and reduce the cost of managing errors.
• Integration with CA Automic One Automation platform, to extend beyond just CA Workload Automation AE with release automation and service orchestration across the full Dev/Ops environments seamlessly by using a single toolset.

“CA Workload Automation remains a key pillar in our overall automation strategy to support the Modern Software Factory,” said Todd DeLaughter, General Manager, CA Automation. “This new release is designed to support customers in automating their top businesses imperatives to achieve digital transformation. The new integration with CA Automic One Automation platform provides our customers with the seamless ability to automate beyond core mission-critical workloads into new Cloud, Big Data and DevOps initiatives with Release Automation and Service Orchestration capabilities.”

Aligned with bringing the Modern Software Factory to life for accelerated business transformation, CA Technologies brings together the full line of automation products from across the company to empower modern application delivery.

The new CA Workload Automation AE is available for download. For more information visit: https://support.ca.com/us/download-center.html.

Supporting quotes

“We are thrilled to see CA Technologies bringing together these two phenomenal technologies; CA Automic One Automation Platform is a key enabling and integrating technology which will empower CA Workload Automation AE users to move to true, future-proof Intelligent Automation. What excites us is the ability to combine best-of-breed features from both technology sets to assist our CA Workload Automation AE customers in driving towards a fully automated innovative enterprise.” – John Masters, chief marketing officer, Extra Technology

“Millions of people rely on our public service every day. Any interruption of service not only affects us as a utility provider, but also more importantly affects the people living in the communities we serve. We rely on CA Workload Automation AE to ensure our service is not only up and running optimally, but also to make certain our internal software releases as it should. Specifically, this latest version of CA Workload Automation AE empowers our team to eliminate administration tasks by offering streamlined directory management, pre-defined email notifications and enhanced load balancing, and more.” – Clark Ammons, Consultant for a large US energy company

“Automate Everything” is a new mantra many CIOs are adopting as they realize that to stay competitive, their teams must automate (i.e., eliminate scripting) traditionally manual infrastructure, operations, and development processes to drive scale, speed, quality, and improved security.  Automation frees up staff time to focus on strategic, critical tasks.” – Stephen Elliot Analyst, IDC.

Tweet this: New @CAinc @CAAutomation Workload Automation AE Release Empowers Enterprises to Easily Automate Top Business Imperatives  http://bit.ly/2HOFZHX

Resources

To learn more about CA Workload Automation AE, visit:  https://www.ca.com/us/products/ca-workload-automation-ae.html

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About CA Technologies

CA Technologies (NASDAQ:CA) creates software that fuels transformation for companies and enables them to seize the opportunities of the application economy. Software is at the heart of every business in every industry. From planning, to development, to management and security, CA is working with companies worldwide to change the way we live, transact, and communicate – across mobile, private and public cloud, distributed and mainframe environments. Learn more at www.ca.com.

Gene Kim, Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble share groundbreaking research-based solutions to help organizations drive higher performance and gain a competitive advantage

PORTLAND, Ore., March 6, 2018 – IT Revolution (http://itrevolution.com), the industry leader for advancing DevOps, today announced the publication of Accelerate: The Science of DevOps – Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations (https://itrevolution.com/book/accelerate/). The book, co-authored by industry thought leaders Gene Kim, Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble, offers research and scientific-based solutions for measuring software delivery performance in order to drive successful digital transformation.

 

The print edition will be released March 27, but can be pre-ordered for a discounted price now: (https://itrevolution.com/book/accelerate/). An audio book version will be available on March 27 as well.

 

“I’m so excited that Accelerate is finally here. It is the culmination of years of research, as myself, Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble sought metrics to effectively measure software delivery performance,” said Gene Kim, founder of IT Revolution and co-author of The Phoenix Project and The DevOps Handbook. “It will resonate with any technology leader focused on achieving DevOps outcomes. Readers also will be able to see what the science says is driving these high performing organizations to thrive in the midst of transformation.”

“The methods and metrics that we share in Accelerate validate the important role that software development and delivery teams play in organizational performance and productivity,” added Dr. Nicole Forsgren CEO and Chief Scientist at DevOps Research and Assessment, “The research helps business leaders understand which metrics truly matter to high performing teams. I’m thrilled to share this work with my fellow DevOps practitioners.”

 

About The Book

For years, it’s been said that the performance of software delivery teams doesn’t matter—that it can’t provide a competitive advantage. Accelerate, encompasses four years of research for methods to measure software delivery performance – and what drives it – through rigorous statistical methods. The book presents both the findings and the science behind that research. Readers will discover how to measure the performance of their teams, and what capabilities they should invest in to drive higher results. It makes the information accessible for readers to apply in their own organizations and is ideal for management at every level.

“Our goal with Accelerate is to provide an evidence-based framework to organizations grappling with the challenges of digital transformation. Readers will discover how to measure their progress on delivering software products and services with speed and stability, and the capabilities that drive these outcomes,” said Jez Humble, co-author of The DevOps Handbook, Lean Enterprise, and the Jolt Award-winning Continuous Delivery.

About the Authors:

Dr. Nicole Forsgren is CEO and Chief Scientist at DevOps Research and Assessment. She is best known as the lead investigator on the largest DevOps studies to date. She has been a professor and performance engineer and her work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals.

Jez Humble is co-author of The DevOps Handbook, Lean Enterprise, and the Jolt Award-winning Continuous Delivery. He is currently researching how to build high performing teams at his startup, DevOps Research and Assessment LLC and teaching at UC Berkeley.

Gene Kim is a multiple award-winning CTO, researcher, and author of

The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook, and The Visible Ops Handbook. He is founder of IT Revolution and hosts the DevOps Enterprise Summit conferences.

Share This: Pre-sale now open for: Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations – a new book from @RealGeneKim, @nicolefv & @jezhumble. Order now: (https://itrevolution.com/book/accelerate/)

About IT Revolution

IT Revolution assembles technology leaders and practitioners through publishing, events, and research. Our goal is to elevate the state of technology work, quantify the economic and human costs associated with suboptimal IT performance, and to improve the lives of IT professionals.

 

Cambridge UK, Wednesday, February 28, 2018 – In another move to ease the burden of remaining compliant with the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Redgate has enhanced its SQL Provision solution to make the masking of data even easier.

SQL Provision allows users to create copies of SQL Server databases using just MB of storage and mask any sensitive data. The virtual cloning technology of SQL Clone is used to create the copies, while Data Masker replaces sensitive data with realistic, anonymized data that preserves semantic integrity. The sanitized copies can then be used by development teams and testers to speed up development, accurately test code, and fix issues faster.

With legislation such as the GDPR and HIPAA requiring organizations to de-identify, pseudonymize or anonymize personally identifiable information used in the development process, the masking element is crucial.

The upgrade to SQL Provision enables a data masking set created in Data Masker to be selected during the provisioning process within SQL Clone in, literally, two clicks. This makes the process far quicker, shortens the workflow, and means provisioning is consistent, repeatable, and auditable.

The entire process can also be scheduled and automated using PowerShell so that, for example, the sanitized copies can be created overnight and instantly made available in the morning. Using this method, developers are always working with the latest version of the database, and compliance and privacy is built in by design.

The new feature was introduced because, while databases change over time, the nature of the data within them is fairly consistent. A column of credit card numbers, for example, will remain the same, as will a column with dates of birth. This is the kind of data that needs to be masked and, unless another column of sensitive data is added to a database, the masking set will still apply.

As Richard Macaskill, Redgate Product Manager, explains. “Once you’ve established which data needs to be masked and how, that won’t change unless you introduce a new subset of data, or make a major change to the database structure. So the requirement to be compliant with the GDPR actually brings with it the opportunity to introduce consistency and repeatability into the database provisioning process. And that, in turn, meets the demand to be auditable.”

With increasing legal requirements suggesting organizations should be building data privacy and protection into processes and systems by design and default, the latest release of SQL Provision is a big step in the right direction. It supports both the DevOps approach to working, while keeping compliance central to the process, creating a consented boundary between production and non-production environments.

The development team behind SQL Provision are now looking into aligning SQL Clone and Data Masker yet further to make the provisioning and masking of SQL Server databases even easier.

Companies can catch product and infrastructure vulnerabilities faster and earlier in the DevOps cycle

MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS, Barcelona, and Santa Clara, California — February 27, 2018 — Aricent, a leading global design and engineering company, today announced the launch of its Highly Automated Vulnerability Assessment Orchestration Containers (HAVOC) framework that manages cyber risk by catching significant security vulnerabilities before they are exploited.

Companies are under pressure to launch products and services faster without exposing themselves to cyber risk. However, shorter time to market lifecycles and latent vulnerabilities raises the likelihood of more successful denial of service attacks and data breaches. Aricent’s HAVOC solution addresses the need to understand the nature of vulnerability risk through a combination of precision coverage, superior probability and statistics, and speed of decision making.

According to researchers, the costs of ransomware in 2015 was $325m and rose to $5bn in 2017. In the next five years, the cost could reach $8 trillion. Conventional security management of products is based upon monolithic risk models with infrequent pre-release tests and random post-deployment assessments. These methods are unable to keep up with the advancing threat levels to product security and are not evolved to accommodate the speed and rigor of Agile or DevOps processes.

While latent software defects will always exist, the challenge is remediating vulnerabilities that can be readily exploited. Through a high-performance graph database, the tool reduces the time to prioritize and correlate thousands of findings that can span software source code, run-times, protocols stack, application interfaces and cloud-native implementations. HAVOC increases speed, verification and frequency of build, test and deployments lifecycles.  This results in safer, more secure applications and safeguards businesses from legal, business and economic problems.

“The idea is to create as much deliberate “havoc” on a network or product so when they get hacked, and they will, the hurdle for compromise is extremely high or hopefully non-existent. For example, we worked with a large cloud provider to shift security testing of OpenStack services much earlier in the lifecycle. We orchestrated best of breed vulnerability scanners from static code analysis, penetrating testing and quality assurance, to generate detained findings to fix what matters most.” said Walid Negm, Chief Technology Officer at Aricent.

About Aricent

Aricent is a global design and engineering company innovating for customers in the digital era. We help our clients lead into the future by solving their most complex and mission critical issues through customized solutions. For decades, we have helped companies do new things and scale with intention. We bring differentiated value and capability in focused industries to help transform products, brands and companies. Based in San Francisco, frog, the global leader in innovation and design, is a part of Aricent. Learn more about Aricent at https://www.aricent.com/

Media Contacts

Aricent media and analysts contact:
Juhie.gorwara@aricent.com

Early Bird rates are now available for the premier DevOps conference in Europe, featuring presentations by renowned DevOps leaders from Disney, AWS, Hiscox, Barclays and more

PORTLAND, Ore., February 26, 2018 – IT Revolution (http://itrevolution.com), the industry leader for advancing DevOps, today announced the first round of speakers for DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2018 (https://events.itrevolution.com/eur/). The event takes place 25-26 June, 2018 at the Intercontinental London – The O2. Attendees are encouraged to take advantage of Early Bird registration rates as the event sold out in 2017.

To receive more than 10 percent off tickets for DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2018, register before 19 March at (https://events.itrevolution.com/eur/register/).

The first round of speakers includes:

• Tom Clark, Head of Common Platform, ITV
• Jason Cox, Director, Systems Engineering, The Walt Disney Company
• Margo Cronin, Solution Architect, Amazon Web Services
• Mieke Deenen, Project Manager, UWV Netherlands
• Jonathan Fletcher, Chief Technology Officer, Hiscox
• Erica Morrison, Executive Director of Software Development, CSG
• Scott Prugh, Chief Architect & VP Software Development, CSG
• Jonathan Smart, Head of Ways of Working, Barclays
• Jim Vanns, Senior Production Engineer, Industrial Light & Magic

“The DevOps Enterprise Summit speaker lineup continues to grow in depth and expertise – we are on the path to delivering the most exciting and immersive talks that our European audience has seen to-date,” said Gene Kim, founder of IT Revolution and co-author of The Phoenix Project and The DevOps Handbook. “These experience reports offer business and technology leaders, wherever they are at in their IT transformation journey, an opportunity to witness powerful insights that will inspire, educate and cultivate winning practices.”

Conference programming will continue to be announced leading up to the event in June. While the call for presentations is now closed for London, those interested in sharing their IT transformation journey still have the opportunity to apply to speak at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2018 (https://events.itrevolution.com/us/) in the coming months.

About the DevOps Enterprise Summit
The DevOps Enterprise Summit is a vendor-neutral conference for technology and business leaders who are transforming how large, complex organizations deliver and operate software to help their organizations win in the marketplace.

Entering its third year in Europe and fifth year in the US, its goal is to accelerate DevOps adoption and increase the likelihood of those initiatives succeeding, enabling the cultural norms, technical practices and architectures that help organizations achieve the highest levels of performance.

The event features experience report and subject matter expert talks from technology leaders at top global brands that leverage DevOps to thrive within an increasingly software-driven economy. Through keynotes, breakout sessions, collaborative workshops and space to interact within an expo hall, attendees gain insights into the evolving technical and architectural practices and the methods needed to lead widespread change efforts in large organizations.

Share This: #DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2018 announces Early Bird registration & first round of speakers https://events.itrevolution.com/eur/ @DOES_EUR #DOES18

About IT Revolution

IT Revolution assembles technology leaders and practitioners through publishing, events, and research. Our goal is to elevate the state of technology work, quantify the economic and human costs associated with suboptimal IT performance, and to improve the lives of IT professionals.

Atlassian Marketplace Vendors Collaborate to Extend Efficiency of Atlassian Environments

ATLANTA, Feb. 21, 2018 — Forty8Fifty Labs, the DevOps and software development subsidiary of Veristor Systems, today announced a partnership with SoftwarePlant, provider of advanced project portfolio management solutions for Atlassian JIRA. Both Atlassian Marketplacevendors, Forty8Fifty Labs and SoftwarePlant deliver solutions to enhance the agility, efficiency and value of Atlassian JIRA.

“By partnering with other advanced Atlassian ecosystem providers such as SoftwarePlant, we are enhancing the time to value for our mutual customers,” said Rashad Neloms, Vice President Technology and Strategy, Forty8Fifty Labs. “SoftwarePlant’s innovative project portfolio management solutions, combined with our custom services and productivity enhancing apps such as SmartHandler for Mail, can powerfully enhance the power and efficiency of Atlassian JIRA.”

“Our partnership with Forty8Fifty Labs furthers our mission to enhance the productivity of teams that use Atlassian JIRA,” said Tom Kucharski, CEO, SoftwarePlant. “We are pleased to be offered as a preferred Atlassian Marketplace solution in the Forty8Fifty Labs portfolio of solutions.”

SoftwarePlant delivers advanced project portfolio management systems and tools for Atlassian JIRA. BigPicture and BigPicture Enterprise are project portfolio management solutions that organize teams’ work and plan a cadence-based roadmap. BigGantt allows users to create, schedule and analyze tasks and search and embed epics and stories from other JIRA projects. BigTemplate offers advanced exporting capabilities for JIRA. The company also offers Metrics to easily define and see project-level custom fields and Role Extensions for personalized roles for JIRA components. For more information visit www.softwareplant.com.

The SoftwarePlant suite of products joins Forty8Fifty Labs’ DevOps product portfolio of solutions for Atlassian environments. This portfolio also includes the Forty8Fifty Labs’ SmartHandler for Mail, an advanced email decisioning and automation solution for JIRA and JIRA Service Desk. For more information visit http://www.forty8fiftylabs.com/products/smarthandler.

About Forty8Fifty Labs

Forty8Fifty Labs is the DevOps and Agile Consulting, Services and Software Development subsidiary of Veristor Systems, Inc.  With decades of field-proven experience in solving the toughest challenges for today’s CIOs and the Development/Operations teams they lead, the Forty8Fifty Labs team unlocks the secrets to bringing your IT tools and your people together; accelerating your DevOps journey, improving collaboration, streamlining development, and reducing time to revenue.  Let us help you supercharge your business with our team’s unparalleled expertise, extensive partnerships, and custom tools and integrations. Learn more at www.forty8fiftylabs.com.

Atlantic Bridge Leads Series D Funding Round

to Drive Product Innovation and Accelerate Go-to-Market Growth

SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb. 21, 2018 – Vectra, the leader in automating the hunt for in-progress cyberattacks, today announced it closed a $36 million Series D funding round led by Atlantic Bridge, a global growth equity fund focused on technology investments. Vectra will leverage this investment to expand sales and marketing globally and accelerate the development of its artificial intelligence (AI)-based threat hunting platform, Cognito.

The Ireland Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF) and Nissho Electronics Corp. also participated in this funding round along with returning investors Khosla Ventures, Accel Partners, IA Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, DAG Ventures and Wipro Ventures, bringing Vectra’s total funding to date to $123 million.

“We have been impressed by the remarkable growth of Vectra in this fast-moving cybersecurity market,” said Kevin Dillon, managing partner at Atlantic Bridge. “The increasing volume, creativity and effectiveness of cyberattacks means that enterprises must adopt AI to automate cybersecurity operations. We look forward to helping the company expand its global enterprise footprint.”

Building on its momentum, Vectra is opening a new research-and-development center in Dublin, Ireland. This center will enable the company to rapidly expand its product portfolio, provide global reach to serve Fortune 500 customers, and create up to 100 jobs in Ireland over the next five years. In addition to the Dublin R&D center, Vectra has R&D facilities in San Jose, Calif., Austin, Texas and Cambridge, Mass.

“This is an exciting investment for ISIF that promises significant economic impact for Ireland,” said Fergal McAleavey, head of private equity at ISIF. “It is encouraging to see Ireland leverage its emerging expertise in artificial intelligence by attracting businesses such as Vectra that are on the leading edge of technology. With cybersecurity becoming critical for all organizations, we are confident Vectra will deliver a strong economic return on our investment while creating high-value R&D employment here in Ireland.”

“Vectra had an incredible year in 2017, during which we achieved record revenue growth of 181% over the previous year and delivered further product innovations to our customers,” said Hitesh Sheth, president and CEO of Vectra. “We’re excited to add Atlantic Bridge, ISIF and Nissho as investors. This investment will accelerate our mission to transform cybersecurity with AI, including delivering additional innovations through our new Dublin R&D center.”

Vectra was recently named the only Visionary by Gartner in its 2018 Magic Quadrant for Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems.¹ The Cognito platform from Vectra enables enterprises to detect and respond to cyberattacks in real time. Cognito uses AI to perform non-stop, automated threat hunting with always-learning behavioral models to quickly and efficiently find hidden and unknown attackers before they do damage. Cognito provides full visibility into cyberattacker behaviors from cloud and data center workloads to user and internet-of-things devices, ensuring attackers have nowhere to hide.

¹ Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems, by Craig Lawson and Claudio Neiva, 10 January 2018. Subscribers may view the report at: https://www.gartner.com/document/3844163.

Please visit the Vectra Series D funding resources web page for more information about this announcement.

About Vectra

Vectra^® is transforming cybersecurity with AI. Its Cognito™ platform automates cyberattack detection and response from data center and cloud workloads to user and IoT devices. Cognito correlates threats, prioritizes hosts based on risk and provides rich context to empower response with existing security systems, reducing security operations workload by 168x. Vectra was named a “Visionary” by Gartner in the 2018 Magic Quadrant for Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems and the “Most Innovative Emerging Company” in the Dark Reading Best of Black Hat Awards. InformationWeek also named Vectra one of the Top 125 companies to watch in 2016. Vectra has been issued five U.S. patents with 14 additional patents pending for cybersecurity applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Vectra is headquartered in San Jose, Calif. For more information, visit vectra.ai.

Media Contact:

John Kreuzer

Lumina Communications for Vectra

vectra@luminapr.com

(408) 896-3307

Open source compliance automation reduces assessment and remediation time by up to 95 percent when compared to manual processes

SEATTLE — February 20, 2018 — Chef, the leader in Continuous Automation, today announced InSpec 2.0, a compliance automation solution that accelerates DevSecOps by allowing cross-functional application, infrastructure and security teams to assess and remediate compliance issues from development through the entire software delivery lifecycle. InSpec 2.0 provides cloud configuration testing (including Microsoft Azure and AWS), more than 30 new conformance capabilities (including Docker, IIS, NGINX and PostgreSQL), enhanced integration with third-party tools and improved ease-of-use and customizability.

InSpec is the first step in Chef’s ‘Detect, Correct, Automate’ approach to cloud migration and continuous automation. It helps organizations maintain an up-to-date view of compliance status in production, detect security issues long before they reach production and reduce risk while delivering applications faster. An open-source framework for describing security and compliance rules that can be shared between software engineers, operations and security engineers, InSpec enables compliance at velocity at all stages of the software delivery process, from the developer’s workstation all the way to production, with no performance impact or side-effects. InSpec’s readability means it is easy to use and understand for all team members, including those whose roles involve minimal coding.  

New Capabilities

• Cloud configuration compliance: InSpec 2.0 gives users the ability to write compliance rules against cloud resources, including AWS and Microsoft Azure, with user-defined custom compliance policies.
• Improved user experience: InSpec 2.0 contains more than 30 new resources, allowing users to write compliance rules for many common applications and configuration files without requiring any programming knowledge. These include Docker, security keys (RSA/DSA/x509), webserver (IIS/nginx/Apache) configurations, packages (both system as well as Perl/R/etc.), PostgreSQL and MySQL database configurations, XPath matching in XML config files, ZFS storage pool configurations and many more.
• New integrations: InSpec results can now be exported as JUnit format for integration into continuous delivery tools such as Jenkins and can pull compliance profiles from Chef Automate. Previously-announced integration with Amazon Systems Manager (SSM) provides a frictionless on-ramp to InSpec in the cloud.
• Improved performance: InSpec 2.0 runs 90 percent faster than InSpec 1.0 on Windows and 30 percent faster on Linux.

Supporting Quotes

• “InSpec has helped us unify our compliance, security and DevOps teams and streamlined audits, reducing the thousands of staff hours usually required by as much as 95 percent and eliminating duplication of effort and data throughout the process,” said Jon Williams, CTO of niu Solutions. “It has given these teams more control over compliance policies and enabled business units to be more active in maintaining their own environments. Most critically, it allows us to continually monitor for audit compliance, ensuring desired state and eliminating change drift between nodes.”
• “InSpec 2.0 builds on our commitment to build the essential tools and services needed for modern application teams to truly deliver on the promise of DevSecOps, fully integrating security with development and deployment for  traditional and cloud-native software delivery,” said Marc Holmes, VP of marketing at Chef. “InSpec provides an easy-to-learn, open-source path to incorporating security and compliance requirements as code directly with the delivery process, ensuring that applications and infrastructure are compliant every step of the way — not just at the end of the process.”

Supporting Data

• Industry and government regulations are increasing in number, complexity and impact. With notable efforts ranging from PCI in retail, to HIPAA in healthcare, to GDPR for personal data in EU, their reach is broad and the costs for non-compliance high. PCI-related fines range from $5,000 to $100,000 per-incident, per-month1; fines of up to $1.5 million can be applied for HIPAA violations2 and GDPR-related fines can rise as high as 20 million EUR, or four percent of a company’s annual revenues, whichever is higher3. Still, processes and procedures for assessment and compliance remain ad-hoc, arbitrary and manual, in most cases.
• As a recent report from Gartner4 notes, “Manual processes are complex and tedious… Human error threatens not only regulatory compliance obligations, but business outcomes. Auditors favor the consistency and traceability of automated systems that have strong logging capabilities and transparent auditable controls… With increased automation, management oversight, including detection and incident response, is simpler, faster and can be tested on demand by auditors with less stress for I&O.”
• A recent survey of more than 1,500 users conducted by Chef found that 74 percent of cross-functional application, infrastructure and security teams assess software for compliance manually prior to production. Once violations and vulnerabilities are discovered, half remediate manually instead of automating the process. Manual processes result in teams’ detecting and remediating security issues in days (31 percent) or weeks (19 percent), instead of hours (18 percent).
• As a recent paper5 from SANS Institute notes, “To scale in a large hybrid or public cloud, security will need to embrace automation, a concept that many security practitioners have been loath to embrace. For true DevSecOps to take hold, security teams will need to embed automated tests and validation of controls into the deployment cycle and monitor applications continuously in production with triggered responses that can roll controls back to a known good state, among other outcomes.”

1 http://www.focusonpci.com/site/index.php/pci-101/pci-noncompliant-consequences.html

2 https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/hipaa-violations-enforcement

3https://www.eugdpr.org/key-changes.html

4Gartner, How [H1] to Avoid Compliance and Audit Concerns When Using DevOps Published: 17 November 2017 ID: G00337518  

5 https://www.sans.org/reading-room/whitepapers/analyst/devsecops-playbook-36792

About Chef
Chef is the leader in Continuous Automation software, an innovator in cloud native operations and one of the founders of the DevOps movement. Chef works with more than a thousand of the most innovative companies around the world to deliver their vision of digital transformation, providing the practices and platform to deliver software at speed. Chef Automate is Chef’s Continuous Automation Platform which is powered by an awesome community and open source software engines: Chef for infrastructure, Habitat for cloud native operations , and InSpec for compliance. For more visit http://www.chef.io

First open source tool to auto-convert freestyle Jenkins jobs to coded DevOps pipelines

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – February 14, 2018 – Enterprise digital solutions provider, Infostretch today launched a free open source plugin and service for Jenkins to help enterprises streamline their DevOps pipeline development. The plugin dramatically reduces the time and effort associated with coding DevOps pipelines and migrating to Jenkins 2.x. The plugin auto-converts approximately 90 percent of freestyle Jenkins jobs while auto-generating coded pipeline scripts, assuring adherence to proper coding standards and manageability of the pipeline. Jenkins is the most widely-used open source continuous delivery automation server in the world, with approximately 1.6 million users.

Organizations using Jenkins 1.0 to orchestrate application releases currently face a time-intensive task migrating jobs manually into their continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines. When migrating to Jenkins 2.x, converting freestyle jobs requires DevOps engineers to drill down on each one of the hundreds, or thousands, of jobs to understand tools, configurations, URLs, parameters and more before rewriting them in pipeline syntax. Infostretch’s Jenkins plugin for DevOps teams auto-generates the script to convert freestyle Jenkins jobs to a coded pipeline. With Jenkins 2.x, users gain support for continuous delivery transformations, with first-class support for continuous delivery (CD) pipelines, clear visibility of delivery stages and other usability enhancements to help users get started more quickly.

In addition to the Jenkins plugin, Infostretch can further accelerate DevOps pipelines by customizing the plugin for cases where freestyle Jenkins jobs have additional dependencies. Once jobs are in the DevOps pipeline, Infostretch’s proven testing and QA support can work to ensure converted pipelines function correctly and efficiently. Infostretch also provides Jenkins 2.0 training on pipeline-as-code to help accelerate Jenkins migration, leading to considerable reductions in support and maintenance issues.

Now with the Infostretch plugin and expert services to convert freestyle Jenkins jobs to coded pipelines, organizations can:
•    Reduce the manual effort of DevOps engineers by as much as 60 percent
•    Enforce coding standards
•    Enable a seamless and systematic transition for any new set of applications being on-boarded to the DevOps pipeline
•    Reduce the cost of application maintenance by 40 percent.

“Jenkins is a powerful, open source automation tool used to power the software development pipelines of many industry-leading companies. Infostretch’s Jenkins plugin will aid enterprises in migrating to Jenkins 2.x as well as in accelerating their DevOps initiatives,” said Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the creator of Jenkins.

The Jenkins.io blog shows how to save the time and effort of precious DevOps resources.

“Jenkins jobs can pile up. Converting freestyle jobs can be time-intensive, and that can slow down DevOps teams. We created the Jenkins plugin to simplify the process, dramatically reduce the manual effort required and bring down costs to do with application maintenance,” said Rutesh Shah, Infostretch Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder.

According to the Forrester report, The Forrester Wave™: Continuous Integration Tools, Q3 2017, modern CI tools “integrate with DevOps tools to create an automated code delivery pipeline commonly referred to as CI/CD. When fully automated, this can deliver applications from developers’ desktops to production servers in minutes, rather than months, by automating and integrating all of the manual processes that comprise the software development life cycle. The drive to automation and continuous delivery is happening at a scale and pace that would have been unthinkable only 10 years ago.”

The plugin can be downloaded for free at
https://plugins.jenkins.io/convert-to-pipeline

About Infostretch
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New category focuses on visually perfect user experiences in the era of digital transformation

SAN MATEO, Calif., February 13, 2018 – Applitools (https://applitools.com) the leader in AI-powered Visual Testing and Monitoring, today introduced Application Visual Management (AVM), a new category framework that focuses on automating all the visual aspects of application delivery. AVM represents a new class of technology that is expanding Visual AI to the User Interface (UI) and end-user experience. It outlines industry mega-trends that underpin the convergence of digital transformation, CI-CD, shift left QA. It also outlines how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being used to ensure applications look visually correct when released – across all devices, platforms and browsers in real-time. The emerging Application Visual Management (AVM) category expands automated visual testing and monitoring to additional visual delivery components like accessibility, security, collaboration, bug tracking, source control, and more.

Today, only the functional aspects of application delivery are automated: testing, monitoring, CI, security, bug tracking, collaboration, source control, and more. At the same time, all of the visual aspects of application delivery are done manually by inspection of customer-facing applications, resulting in slow and error-prone processes that cannot support the speed of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI-CD).

AVM represents a new Visual AI based approach that automates visual production, testing, delivery and monitoring. It provides the conceptual framework for how an emerging class of tools now integrate and support functional software development tools, including UI development tools, CI, bug tracking, collaboration, version control, monitoring and security. The result is shorter application delivery cycles and improved software quality, as “what customers see” is automatically monitored 24/7 to prevent visual flaws that frequently result from browser and microservices updates, and the introduction of new mobile devices, operating system updates and the effects of dynamic content.

To learn more about Application Visual Management, download a free whitepaper at: (https://goo.gl/6vMNHR).

“As a member of the automated testing community, we have outlined a new industry category that extends the scope and reach beyond automated testing and monitoring to the very front door of the digital transformation – what customers first see when new or modified software is released,” said Gil Sever, CEO of Applitools. “Application Visual Management represents the evolution of Visual AI, and builds upon the established Application Performance Management market, to automate the massive task of monitoring the visual appearance of what customers see and interact with every day across all their devices.”

DevOps teams, test automation engineers, front-end developers, QA teams and designers all experience the difficulty of managing the visual aspects of the applications they develop in a fully automated and reliable way that allows better and faster control on the customer’s digital experience.

The core characteristics of Application Visual Management are:

1. Addresses the emerging need to use Visual Artificial Intelligence to automate the way organizations manage the visual aspects of applications, including testing, monitoring, CI, bug tracking, collaboration, version control, security, and more.
2. Is driven by global trends like Continuous Delivery, Shift Left, microservices architecture, and the proliferation of browsers and devices that are all critical for application delivery and updates, in the era of digital transformation.
3. Aims to level the automated management of the visual and functional aspects of the software application, to remove bottlenecks that hinder high-quality delivery processes that encompass all aspects of an application.
4. AVM also supports pre-production detection and faster production resolution of visual bugs in the face of continuous change, rapid technological advancements and new, disruptive business threats. It aims to organize and automate visual testing and monitoring to help organizations deliver an exceptional digital experience for all customers with the utmost confidence.

Jonathan Lipps, founding principal at Cloud Grey and project lead on Appium comments: “The cutting-edge apps of today and tomorrow have components that are increasingly challenging to manage in an automated fashion. From the inclusion of novel UI components to the need for flawless rendering across a variety of form factors and platforms, the requirements for automated application delivery are growing at the same rate as the difficulty to do so. There is a great need in the industry for accurate and fast feedback on all application delivery elements, functional and visual) to support the increasingly high expectation for rapid and holistic CI/CD cycles.”

Share this: .@ApplitoolsEyes outlines Application Visual Management category as industry moves to improve visual testing and monitoring https://goo.gl/6vMNHR #TestAutomation #DevOps #appdev

 

About Applitools

Applitools is on a mission to help test automation, DevOps and development teams release and monitor flawless mobile, web and native apps in a fully automated way that enables Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI-CD). Founded in 2013, Applitools uses sophisticated AI-powered image processing technology to ensure that an application appears correctly and functions properly on all mobile devices, browsers, operating systems and screen sizes. Applitools has more than 300 customers from a range of verticals, including Fortune-100 companies in software, banking, online retail, insurance, pharmaceuticals, and more. Applitools is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with an R&D center in Tel Aviv, Israel. For more information, please visit applitools.com.