Author: devopsy.kinsta.cloud

BOCA RATON, Fla. – November 8, 2017 – The DevOps Institute (DOI), the Continuous Learning Community around emerging DevOps practices, education and certification, is proud to announce the launch of a new non- certification course: Value Stream Mapping for DevOps (VSM). Value Stream Mapping is a key practice for increasing flow, eliminating waste and understanding how IT delivers value to its customers. VSM for DevOps is the first in a series of  non-certification “Drilldown” course offered by the DevOps Institute and is a complement to its line of DevOps Practitioner® certification series courses. All courses are delivered by DOI’s global channel of Registered Education Partners.

 

The Value Stream Mapping for DevOps course provides a practical understanding and hands-on experience with value stream mapping. The course was authored by Mike Orzen (@MikeOrzen), a prominent Lean IT thought leader and author of two publications: Lean IT and the Lean IT Field Guide.

“DevOps is the next step in creating flow across and beyond the IT value stream,” says Mike Orzen. “The value stream is all of the steps that are currently performed to deliver products and services to end-users and customers – whether they add value or not. Value stream mapping has been identified as a critical skill for organizations adopting a DevOps approach.”

Developers and operational staff, IT managers, project managers, continuous delivery architects, security professionals, business stakeholders, and anyone involved in defining a DevOps strategy and program will find this course particularly helpful as they explore key Value Stream Mapping for DevOps topics, including:

 

• Value stream mapping methods
• Understanding how value stream mapping applies to DevOps
• Learning to value stream map by doing
• Common mistakes when using value stream mapping
• Tools to apply now

“We are delighted to announce that our first Drilldown course is Value Stream Mapping for DevOps,” says Jayne Groll, CEO of the DevOps Institute. “To better understand DevOps, you need to first understand Lean principles in order to understand flow. Lean helps organizations manage and improve how we create and flow customer value with the least amount of effort.”  

 

The DevOps Institute will be developing other Drilldown courses in the near future. This series of non-certification workshops “drills down” more deeply into a topic or practice that may have been introduced in another course. Drilldown courses are very focused and provide more prescriptive guidance and practical experience for the learner. Since these courses are designed as complementary “plugins” to its existing certification portfolio, DOI’s global network of education partners will offer the Drilldown courses as bundles or as stand-alone offerings.

About the Course Author
With a consulting and coaching career spanning more than 20 years, Mike Orzen has gathered a unique blend of lean, IT, healthcare, and operations experience that he uses to coach organizations pursuing enterprise excellence. His personable approach and people-first philosophy have inspired leaders and empowered workforces to successfully apply conscious awareness, lean management, and enterprise excellence practices in many complex work environments.

He is the co-author of Lean IT: Enabling and Sustaining Your Lean Transformation winner of a Shingo Research Award, and The Lean IT Field Guide. He holds degrees from Stanford University, the University of Oregon, and is certified in management accounting, production and inventory control, project management, Agile, and Lean IT. Mike teaches with LEI, the Shingo Institute, and The Ohio State University Fisher School of Business. He helps companies on lean journeys through Mike Orzen & Associates.

 

About the DevOps Institute
The DevOps Institute is the global continuous learning community for emerging DevOps practices. DevOps Institute’s vision is to facilitate a community where members have access to the most innovative, inspirational and transformational DevOps content, courses and certifications around emerging DevOps practices and principles. We strive to provide content that inspires discussion, collaboration, and transformation.

Web | http://devopsinstitute.com/
Twitter | @DEVOPSINST
LinkedIn | /devops-institute
Facebook | /DevOpsInstitute/
YouTube | DevOps Institute

Instagram | /devopsinstitute/

 

Contact
for DevOps Institute
Manny Varela, 561-325-8101
manny(at)devopsinstitute(dot)com

New No-Code Solution Bridges Application Development Gap Between IT and Citizen Developers

 

NOVEMBER 7, 2017 – SAN JOSE, CA – Metavine today announced the availability of Metavine GO, a no-code point and click application builder for business users. This solution bridges the gap between the growing ranks of citizen developers and the IT organizations tasked with ensuring corporate security and compliance. Facing rising demands for digital agility, citizen developers are increasingly using development tools to design their own custom applications, often without oversight from IT. With Metavine GO, citizen developers can create no-code applications quickly, and collaboratively with IT, to meet their critical business needs.

 

A recent report by Gartner finds that “more than 80% of top global enterprises have significant business unit development underway, much of it unseen and unsanctioned by IT, but less than 20% have a collaborative citizen development strategy in place.” (Citizen Development is Fundamental to Digital Transformation, Oct 13, 2017, Driver, Wong, Baker). Metavine GO delivers an accelerated application lifecycle to drive a strategic approach to application development by combining the efforts and expertise of both corporate IT and business line developers.

 

“A collaborative relationship between IT and business leaders is critical to the overall health of a business,” said Stephen Terlizzi, VP of Strategy and Markets for Metavine. “While some other tools allow citizen developers to create apps on their own, too often the results are opportunistic, with little thought to scalability or longevity and missing adherence to the corporate standards or compliance. Metavine GO is the only solution available today to bridge this gap, enabling companies to gain real opportunity and value from their citizen developers while driving an effective partnership between IT and citizen developers.”

 

Metavine GO Enables Secure, Powerful, No-Code App Development

The Metavine GO step-by-step app builder allows citizen developers to easily build apps to solve the business problems they face daily. The cloud-based solution offers complete flexibility in how information is visually displayed, and can contain interactive charts and images, information panels and lists, data entry forms, videos, live stream feeds and a host of other user interfaces.

 

The resulting applications are visually compelling, feature-rich, and secure. Databases can be created from the ground up by importing spreadsheets or optionally connecting to existing legacy system databases. Metavine is fully HIPAA-compliant and has been penetration tested by numerous third parties ensuring the strictest security standards. Metavine GO includes built-in workflows, allowing developers to share forms, attach documents and manage approvals with team members, while also providing a console for viewing and status management of workflow processes. A free beta version of Metavine GO is available for users starting today.

 

 

Metavine GO Extends the Metavine Platform

Additionally, by leveraging the Metavine platform with Metavine GO, IT organizations can create a self-serve marketplace of functionality – allowing and supporting users to create IT-compliant applications on demand. Using this platform, IT can create a valuable suite of custom micro-services called Gadgets.

 

Business line users then apply their domain knowledge to build their own apps using these Gadgets, which can be monitored by IT against performance, security and compliance requirements. By enabling business users to develop the exclusive tools they need for their specific role, organizations are supporting better data-driven decision making, leading to higher productivity and increased digital agility.

 

Metavine GO, and the Metavine Platform, allow corporate IT organizations to transform legacy applications into nimble and compliant services, giving users the ability to address their immediate application needs quickly, while removing project backlog from IT.

 

 

Pricing and Availability

Standalone Metavine GO is free and is currently in a public beta phase, available for registration here. Metavine GO can be used as a standalone solution, or with the Metavine platform for more powerful data integration and microservices.  Companies can use Metavine GO on their own, or contact Metavine for assistance with initial implementations. Users can also watch video tutorials for Metavine GO andMetavine GO for IT.

 

 

About Metavine

Metavine, headquartered in San Jose, CA, delivers the world’s first zero-code digital agility platform and has successfully acquired enterprise customers in a range of industries, including Internet of Things (IoT), banking, healthcare, telematics, and sales and marketing. Metavine’s no-code, natural language, logic-based development approach enables the quick development of applications, shortening project delivery time by as much as 90 percent, significantly reducing and even eliminating project backlog. Metavine delivers an innovative approach to the application lifecycle that enables companies to achieve cloud-first digital agility, thereby reducing time to market, optimizing utilization of resources, and rapidly innovating and delivering disruptive business solutions.

 

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Putting agile analytics to work delivers competitive edge, reduced costs

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – November 6, 2017 – Enterprise digital solutions provider Infostretch today launched a new suite of Data Engineering Services to help organizations turn their disparate data into actionable intelligence. Using the latest agile analytics techniques, Infostretch’s Data Engineering Services enable enterprises to harness the full potential of their data to transform their business, streamline enterprise data, gain competitive edge and reduce costs.

Organizations are drowning in data – no matter the size or the sector. Yet, according to recent studies by Forrester, a hefty majority (67 percent) goes unused. Infostretch’s Data Engineering Services allow enterprises to respond to the growing need for a holistic view of all data wherever it is and whatever form it takes, whether customer-related SaaS data, operational data, social media or unstructured data such as contacts, emails and web logs.

Driven by the rising costs and complexity of storing and maintaining data, data engineering capabilities are needed that follow proven processes to capitalize on enterprise data. By deploying Big Data initiatives architected by Infostretch’s experienced team of data engineering experts, enterprises can unlock innovation in the form of new business models and faster response times to gain competitive market advantage. Enterprises that develop and operationalize Big Data deployments also stand to gain from simplifying and streamlining data systems, helping to reduce complexity and total cost of ownership (TCO).

“Enterprises operating in Agile environments demand a different approach to data. Data engineering is a game-changer,” said Rutesh Shah, Infostretch Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder. “Infostretch’s Data Engineering Services enable organizations to turn all the disparate information they store into valuable business insights.”

“It was important for Comtech to have a single view of the metrics that relate to service providers. Infostretch delivered a high throughput multi-tenant data aggregation billing and reporting framework that provides key insights in real-time,” said Kambiz Ghozati, Senior Development Director, Comtech Telecommunications Corp. “Their platform-agnostic approach means we can deploy the system across different cloud providers and it can be updated by our developers quickly and seamlessly.”

“To cope with the volume and complexity of data today, organizations require data engineering and analytics to go beyond traditional reporting, providing insights into customer intent and predicting behavior. Enterprises that can harness the power of their data will win at optimizing engagement throughout the customer life cycle,” said Katy Ring, 451 Research.

Infostretch participates in the Amazon Web Services Partner Network (APN) on both a consulting and technology basis. We leverage our expertise on the AWS platform to help customers take full advantage of all its capabilities to optimize data analytics. To learn more about Infostretch’s Data Engineering Services, visit www.infostretch.com/data-engineering/.

About Infostretch

Infostretch is a digital-first professional services firm. By combining in-depth experience with ready-made tools, frameworks, technologies and partnerships, Infostretch helps enterprises get digital right, the first time. With an experienced team of digital technologists, Infostretch offers Digital Strategy, Digital Development, DevOps, Quality Engineering, Cloud, IoT, Data Analytics and Mobility services. The company is trusted by leading Fortune 100 companies as well as emerging innovators to deliver solutions that work seamlessly across channels, leverage predictive analytics to optimize the software lifecycle, and support continuous innovation. For more information on how solutions and services from Infostretch accelerate digital transformation, visit http://www.infostretch.com/.

To find out more about our Data Engineering Services visit https://www.infostretch.com/data-engineering/ or contact us.

About Comtech Telecommunications Corp.

Comtech Telecommunications Corp. (Nasdaq: CMTL) designs, develops, produces and markets innovative products, systems and services for advanced communications solutions. The Company sells products to a diverse customer base in the global commercial and government communications markets.

Leading Application Security Requirements and Threat Management (ASRTM) Solution Now Features OpSec Requirements

TORONTO, Ontario – Oct. 31, 2017 – Security Compass, providing organizations with the knowledge, training and technology to make software secure, today announced that it has added support for software operational security to its SD Elements platform. The leading ASRTM platform used to automate and integrate security requirements management into the software development process now features operational security requirements in its robust knowledge library. The new content enables engineering teams to use SD Elements as a holistic solution for managing software security requirements in a DevOps environment – eliminating potential threats and known vulnerabilities before code is written, and maintaining a safe production environment.

As the practice of DevOps unifies development and operations to release and maintain software with greater efficiency, AppSec and OpSec unite in SD Elements to inject security earlier into the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Where AppSec protects applications from attack and privacy breaches, OpSec protects operations using monitoring, ongoing management, security analysis and risk assessment. Together, organizations can leverage the efficiencies of DevOps without sacrificing security.

Key features and functionality of the SD Elements OpSec extension include:

·         SD Elements now secures the production environments of applications, also known as the “configure and deploy” stage of the DevOps cycle.

·         SD Elements can be used to manage the security requirements of the deployment configuration settings alongside the requirements for the application itself to achieve DevSecOps.

·         The SD Elements platform will immediately feature industry-standard benchmarks for securing application deployments on Amazon Web Services from the Center for Internet Security®.

·         OpSec content is available for a limited time at no extra charge for Security Compass customers who licensed SD Elements before the end of 2017.

“Agile development teams embrace DevOps to bring products to market faster – often skipping important security measures,” said Rohit Sethi, COO of Security Compass. “SD Elements makes it easy for DevOps teams to manage the security considerations of the entire technology stack – both the software itself, as well as the operational security requirements of the Web server, application server, database server, and operating system that hosts the application. These production-environment capabilities, combined with our existing AppSec and just-in-time application security training, enables agile organizations to achieve a continuous and holistic software security program to better manage risk and protect sensitive data.”

About Security Compass
Security Compass is a leader in helping businesses proactively make their software secure and reduce the risk of cyber security breaches. Offering advisory services, training, and SD Elements, the leading Application Security Requirements and Threat Modeling (ASRTM) platform, Security Compass enables development teams to rapidly and efficiently deliver software that’s secure by default. Security Compass serves some of the world’s largest businesses including seven of the 15 largest financial institutions and four of the 10 largest technology companies in North America. The privately held company is headquartered in Toronto, Canada with global offices in the United States and India. Follow Security Compass on Twitter @securitycompass or visit https://www.securitycompass.com/

Enterprises embracing hybrid cloud, but need better visibility and security management processes to accelerate cloud application deployment, and prevent cyberattacks and compliance violations

Tuesday October 31, 2017 – Most enterprises face major challenges when managing security across their hybrid enterprise networks both during and after cloud migrations, according to the new ‘Hybrid Cloud Environments: The State of Security’ survey from AlgoSec, the security policy management vendor.

The international survey of 450 senior security and network professionals reveals the insecurities around enterprises’ hybrid cloud strategies. While nearly a third (32%) plan to increase their public cloud usage in the next 12 to 18 months, the majority harbor significant concerns about cyberattacks and breaches in their hybrid environments, and encounter problems with their visibility and security management processes.

Key findings from AlgoSec’s ‘Hybrid Cloud Environments: The State of Security survey include:

• Security concerns front and center:  respondents’ greatest concerns about their applications in the cloud are cyberattacks (58%) and unauthorized access (53%), followed by application outages and misconfigured cloud security controls.  These concerns are hampering wider use of public clouds, with nearly 40% of respondents saying security is inhibiting further adoption of cloud platforms.
• Cloud obscures security visibility, hampers security management:  the biggest security management challenges enterprises face in hybrid environments are a lack of visibility (63%) and managing security policies consistently (61%).  Demonstrating compliance and managing a mix of traditional and virtual firewalls and cloud security controls were also cited as major issues. These challenges highlight the need for solutions that can manage and automate security processes holistically across both cloud and on premise networks.
• Manual cloud migration mishaps:  respondents reported a range of problems when migrating applications to public clouds.  44% had difficulty managing security policies post migration, 32% had difficulty mapping application traffic flows before starting a migration project, and 30% reported their applications did not work after the cloud migration:  emphasizing the need for automation solutions that can manage this highly complex process end-to-end to ensure migrations proceed smoothly.
• Automation benefits in hybrid clouds:  26% of respondents said they use automation to manage security in their hybrid environments, with 20% using manual processes.  Enterprises that used automation said the top reasons for doing so were speed and accuracy of security changes, ability to speed up migrations to the cloud, providing audit reports and enforcing compliance, and helping to overcome staffing limitations – highlighting the security and operational benefits of automation.

 

“The survey clearly shows that most enterprises are driving their business transformation strategies by expanding their usage of public cloud infrastructure. But they also have significant security concerns about how they will secure and manage their increasingly hybrid environments,” said Joanne Godfrey, director of communications at AlgoSec. “As organizations increase their public cloud deployments and migrate applications, it’s essential that they have complete visibility across both their on premise and cloud networks, together with the ability to automatically and holistically manage their security policies.  This enables them to better protect the business and fulfil compliance demands, while taking full advantage of the cost savings and agility offered by the hybrid cloud model.”

 

Conducted in Summer 2017, the survey polled 450 C-level executives, and senior security and network professionals in organizations worldwide, from a range of industry sectors. All the companies that participated in the survey were required to have at least some of their business workloads in the cloud.

 

Changing the Way People Think about Business Performance from the Packet Flow to the Customer Experience

 

This morning, Cisco announced the intent to acquire Perspica. First and foremost, I’d like to extend a warm welcome to Perspica’s employees joining the Cisco and the AppDynamics team.

 

It’s crazy to think that our last talk around acquisitions was when Cisco announced its intent to acquire AppDynamics earlier this year. And now, just months later, we’re in the process of bringing Perspica’s world-class team of data scientists and machine learning pioneers on board.

 

Cisco has accelerated many areas of what we do at AppDynamics – from boosting R&D resources to accelerating our product releases and giving us additional support for our go to market strategy. And now we see Cisco underline its commitment once more with the addition of Perspica.

 

From a technology perspective, Perspica brings a lot to the table. Perspica is known for its stream-based processing with the unique ability to apply machine learning to data as it comes in instead of waiting until it’s neatly stored. They also have expertise in domain-specific machine learning at scale, which means they can ingest and process enormous volumes of data. Couple these characteristics with AppDynamics’ core data model for Business Transactions and it opens up a world of possibilities for the scale and speed of our product. Ultimately, it will enable us to deliver our vision for the future of performance that is infinitely scalable and ridiculously fast to keep pace with developments in the enterprise.

 

If we hold a mirror to the state of enterprise technology today, you’ll see programs running in multiple clouds and servers and on countless containers and devices. Fast forward into the not-so-distant future and the complexity of everything grows exponentially as businesses continue to fight to differentiate themselves in digital. However, the highly distributed nature of modern technology makes it incredibly difficult for any company to make sense of what is actually helping or hurting them in this fight.

 

In order to bolster our technology for the highly complex, data-drenched enterprise of the not-so-distant future, Perspica will further our leading capabilities in application intelligence through:

 

• Collaboration with Perspica’s engineering talent who specialize in data science and highly scalable data platforms. Our teams will work side by side to transform enterprises’ complex systems into their biggest competitive advantages.

 

• Stream-based processing that can derive inferences from data and find anomalies without needing to wait until data is stored, which will enable our customers to accelerate their paths to business-driving insights; and

 

• Domain-specific machine learning that will strengthen our root cause analysis capabilities and core APM solution by allowing our agents to massively increase the amount of data points we can ingest

 

And we believe this is only the tip of the iceberg of possibilities.

 

I’m personally very excited to see the strides we’ll make toward a new era of computing, one that is business aware and free from any limitations.

 

The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2018. So, keep a look out for big things to come…

Earlier this year, Cisco announced the acquisition of AppDynamics – uniquely positioning Cisco to enable enterprises to accelerate their digital transformations by actively monitoring, analyzing and optimizing complex application environments at scale. Today, we are excited to announce the intent to acquire Perspica, the first acquisition to support and accelerate the AppDynamics vision.

 

In our experience working with the world’s largest companies, we know that machine learning is only as good as the data it ingests; only as relevant as the data’s timeliness; and only as valuable as the data’s business context. Cisco’s AppDynamics data sets span wherever the application components are deployed, and there is a massive opportunity to correlate this with user experience and business context.

 

With the addition of Perspica to our AppDynamics capabilities, customers will be able to further take advantage of machine learning capabilities to analyze large amounts of application-related data, in real time and with business context, including when an application is deployed in a company’s public, private and multiple cloud environments. Together, AppDynamics and Perspica can provide enterprises with a way to filter crucial signals from the noise and drive their growth based on the digital streaming insights of their businesses.

 

Since the AppDynamics acquisition, our teams have been focused on accelerating the core AppDynamics business. The broader architecture and value proposition has received tremendous reception by customers. The teams are working on several joint offers involving Cisco and AppDynamics products, and we are starting to see some positive synergies on the go-to-market side as well.

 

The Perspica acquisition is another example of bringing the power of Cisco to accelerate AppDynamics’ vision. AppDynamics can now benefit from the same approach to innovation – build, buy, partner, invest and co-develop – that has helped accelerate so many of Cisco’s other businesses.

 

Today’s announcement is an exciting step in our machine learning capabilities, and allows us to continue to deliver our vision for helping companies with the future of digital business. The Perspica team will join Cisco’s AppDynamics group led by Senior Vice President and General Manager David Wadhwani within the Applications Group. We anticipate the acquisition will close in the second quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2018, following the customary closing conditions. You can learn more about how the technology will integrate with AppDynamics in this blog by Bhaskar Sunkara, VP Engineering.

Following its acquisition of Codebashing in July, Checkmarx continues to address the developer security skills challenge

October 18, 2017 09:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Checkmarx, a global leader in application security testing solutions, today announced it is launching new mobile security courses for developers. The interactive courses include secure coding for Android Java, Android Kotlin, iOS Objective C and iOS Swift.

The importance of integrating security tests in the software development life cycle is commonly discussed and widely agreed upon, yet getting developers to write secure code to begin with is known to be a challenge. According to the SANS 2016 State of Application Security survey, the lack of application security (AppSec) skills, tools and methods are top challenges organizations face when implementing AppSec solutions.

This is due to the fact that security courses are sporadic or otherwise interfere with the developer’s work routine. They oftentimes fail to address the precise challenge and provide an overload of information. As a result, many training sessions and classes are ineffective, lack real-time impact, and are quickly forgotten.

Checkmarx addresses this challenge by offering developers contextual and digestible bite-size training modules, at the exact moment they are needed when encountering a vulnerability. Furthermore, the training is dynamic and interactive, prompting developers to deliver secure code in just a few minutes of training.

“In a development ecosystem where secure development is required by many regulatory compliances, it is crucial to ensure developer adoption. This is why we came up with a gamified solution that developers will actually use. By getting developers to deliver code which is secure to begin with, we see faster time to market and a significant reduction in costs,” John Yeo, Co-Founder Codebashing, a Checkmarx company.

Checkmarx’s Codebashing offering for mobile solves an ever growing need in secure mobile applications that are often highly vulnerable. The new mobile courses, available today, join Checkmarx’s many on-the-spot, short and interactive secure development modules available for a large variety of coding languages.

 

About Checkmarx

Checkmarx is an Application Security software company, whose mission is to provide Commercial enterprise, Federal, State and education organizations with application security testing products and services that empower developers to deliver secure applications. Amongst the company’s 1,000 customers are five of the world’s top 10 software vendors, four of the top American banks, and many Fortune 500 and government organizations, including SAP, Samsung and Salesforce.com.