devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Mike Vizard

  • The Linux Foundation Throws Weight Behind Secure Microkernel

    The Linux Foundation Throws Weight Behind Secure Microkernel

    The Linux Foundation announced today it will host the seL4 Foundation, the nonprofit organization established by Data61, an arm of Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Australia that has been developing the seL4 microkernel operating system.

    Gernot Heiser, who will serve as chair of the new foundation, said the seL4 is unique in that it is mathematically proven to be secure, which provides a robust foundation on which a new generation of embedded systems can be built to drive, for example, internet of things (IoT) applications.

    Founding members of the seL4 Foundation include Data61, University of New South Wales in Sydney, HENSOLDT Cyber GmbH, Ghost Locomotion Inc., Cog Systems Inc. and DornerWorks Ltd.

    The hosting of the seL4 Foundation is sure to add more fuel to an increasingly fierce debate over the future of operating systems. Advocates of microkernels contend operating systems in terms of functions and size should be kept to an absolute minimum to both ensure security and maximize flexibility.

    Rather than loading functions into the operating system, most functions should be accessed in user space above the operating system. That approach allows organizations to take advantage of a modular architecture to swap capabilities out as they best see fit.

    However, supporters of traditional operating systems such as Linux and Windows contend organizations are better served by operating systems that run the same functions consistently. Linus Torvalds, who oversees the development of the core Linux operating system, has been especially critical of microkernel-based approaches to building operating systems.

    Between those two extremes have emerged containers, which package many of the functions once handled by the operating system into a container alongside application code to make it easier to run containers on multiple variants of operating systems. That shift has subsequently led to increased reliance on lighter-weight operating systems that only provide the basic functions required to run a container.

    Microkernel-based operating systems in time most will likely lend themselves better to many emerging use cases, especially on various emerging edge computing platforms where security is a paramount concern. The smaller the operating system, the less attack surface there is to defend. One of the issues that organizations of all sizes contend with today is the stack of software that needs to be defended is a lot larger than they may absolutely require.

    Of course, it remains to be seen how much momentum The Linux Foundation can generate for the seL4 project, which currently is supported only by a relatively small number of organizations. The degree to which organizations may back seL4 or some other similar initiative may come down to the degree to which they have grown tired of ceding control over what goes into an operating system to either Microsoft or the oligarchy that currently dominates the development of Linux. Regardless of where any organization falls on that spectrum, the one thing that is clear is given the scope of all the other open source projects supported by The Linux Foundation, it’s probable a lot more organizations are about to become a lot more involved in that debate whether they want to or not.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Palo Alto Networks Advances DevSecOps in the Cloud

    Palo Alto Networks Advances DevSecOps in the Cloud

    Palo Alto Networks has updated its Prisma Cloud to make it easier to embrace best DevSecOps processes while deploying workloads in the cloud.

    New capabilities include the ability to define and apply cybersecurity policies to continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) workflows and scanning tools for discovering misconfigurations in cloud infrastructure templates, which is the most common source of cloud security issues.

    Palo Alto Networks has also added the ability to scan virtual machines native to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) before they are deployed as well as an ability to apply policies to workloads running on the AWS Lambda serverless computing framework via a single click. That capability eliminates the need to manually install wrappers in application code running on the AWS Lambda framework.

    John Morello, vice president of Product Management, Container and Serverless Security at Palo Alto Networks, said in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the rate at which workloads will move to the cloud will accelerate. Deploying applications allows organizations to retain a higher level of flexibility, which, given the current uncertainty over how long the COVID-19 pandemic may last or even return once this latest outbreak is contained, means organizations need to be able to manage workloads centrally from any location where their IT staffs are located.

    Of course, cybercriminals that have become especially adept at scanning for cloud misconfigurations realize this as well. As such, many of them will be focusing their future efforts on scanning for vulnerable workloads residing on public clouds, Morello noted.

    A recent analysis of public cloud configurations published by the Unit 42 research arm of Palo Alto Networks found more than 199,000 templates that had medium-to-high vulnerabilities. The most vulnerabilities were discovered in templates created using CloudFormation (42%), Terraform (22%) and YAML for Kubernetes (9%).

    As cloud computing environments become more complex the opportunity only increases for misconfigurations involving, for example, ports left open. IT organizations are increasingly trying to secure a wide range of application workloads running on a mix of public cloud services based on virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters and serverless computing frameworks. Public cloud computing environments assume that responsibility for cybersecurity is shared between the cloud service provider and the IT teams who employ those services. Unfortunately, developers often assume the cloud service provider is assuming more responsibility than they actually do. Most cloud service providers are really only promising to secure the infrastructure they manage. Responsibility for application security remains firmly in the hands of the IT teams deploying cloud applications.

    To rise to that challenge, many organizations have been embracing best DevSecOps processes that shift cybersecurity responsibility further left toward developers. However, to achieve that goal, developers need access to tools that are well-integrated with the CI/CD platforms that DevOps teams rely on to push code out to cloud platforms. Obviously, that shift represents a substantial cultural change that will take time to fully manifest within most organizations. However, no such change is ever likely to be attained without being armed with the tools needed to enhance application security within the context of their existing CI/CD workflows.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Copado Launches DevOps COVID-19 Initiative

    Copado Launches DevOps COVID-19 Initiative

    Copado, a provider of a DevOps platform building and deploying applications on top of Salesforce software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, will make its platform available for free to anyone working on applications to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

    In addition, Copado has launched a virtual DevOps training center and opened its DevOps community to anyone in the Salesforce ecosystem by making DevOps certifications available for free for 90 days to anyone who can pass an online examination. Previously, Copado charged $250 per certification.

    Andrew Leigh, senior vice president for marketing and alliances for Copado, said the goal of the Copado Cares program is to train more than 10,000 individuals how to implement best DevOps practices on Salesforce platforms this year.

    In terms of providing free access to its platform for building applications, Leigh said Copado is following the lead of Salesforce, which has launched its own Salesforce Cares initiative that provides free access to select cloud applications.

    Leigh said that Salesforce applications will prove more relevant in the weeks and months ahead as fledgling digital business initiatives that organizations have launched rapidly become the foundation on which business continuity plans are now based. With more individuals working from home, many businesses need to deploy additional digital marketing and customer support applications rapidly, he noted.

    The only way to achieve that goal is to embrace low-code development tools such as the ones provided by Salesforce, Leigh added. Those tools are already integrated with a suite of core applications, which Leigh said means IT organizations don’t need to write entire applications from the ground up. Instead, they can use low-code tools in combination with best DevOps practices to accelerate the development and deployment of applications.

    In the case of health care, Leigh added that a foundation of battle-tested software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications is crucial because new COVID-19 applications being rolled out need to work reliably the instant they are deployed. Beyond the reliability of the core platform, it’s more critical than ever to employ best DevOps processes to ensure those applications have been thoroughly tested, he said.

    Of course, network access to cloud applications can be uneven when everyone is working remotely, However, in time many organizations will increase the amount of bandwidth being made available to critical customers and end users alike. In fact, the economic uncertainty created by the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to accelerate the rate at which organizations have been embracing cloud applications that are consumed on a per-user basis.

    In the meantime, it remains to be seen how long the adverse economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic might be or to what degree relief measures being put in place by countries around the world might mitigate it. Regardless, it’s apparent that organizations that rely on digital processes are more resilient. In some cases, such as the online delivery of entertainment and education services, there has been dramatic growth. The degree to which that growth can be sustained, of course, depends heavily on how much money consumers are willing to allocate to these services when millions of people are unemployed. Whatever the outcome, however, it’s going to be a brave new world of application software.

    — Mike Vizard

  • GigaSpaces to Provide Free Go-Live Services

    GigaSpaces to Provide Free Go-Live Services

    GigaSpaces, a provider of a platform for processing analytics data in real-time, will be making available professional services for free during the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic as part of a Go Live initiative to reduce the total cost of acquiring and implementing its platform.

    Yoav Einav, vice president of product for GigaSpaces, said the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic shows it’s apparent organizations of all sizes will need to reduce their IT costs. At the same time, many organizations will need to keep IT projects moving forward as nascent digital business strategies now become business continuity strategies, he said. Most of those business continuity plans will be contingent on providing a better digital customer experience based on real-time analytics.

    GigaSpaces has been building up its professional services capability for the past several months and plans to tap into the expertise of third-party IT services providers to make sure there is enough available expertise in the right place to meet anticipated Go Live demand.

    GigaSpacesIt’s still unclear to what degree IT projects will be impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Undoubtedly, many IT projects are being paused or outright canceled, especially in vertical industry segments that have been among the hardest hit. Organizations that are moving IT projects forward, however, should expect to IT vendors to help reduce the total cost of implementing those projects by providing free additional services, as in the case of GigaSpaces, or at the very least much more flexible payment terms.

    There are, of course, some vertical industry segments where organizations are building new applications that are highly relevant. One GigaSpaces customer, for example, is racing to build an application that will make it easier to find critical healthcare supplies that are frequently out of stock when needed most, noted Einav. Other organizations are simply moving to reduce costs by offloading queries from traditional databases.

    In many cases, organizations will be evaluating which platforms to employ to build these applications not just on the raw performance attributes of the platform but also how quickly those platforms can be implemented. As such, the robustness of the IT services ecosystem, including its overall DevOps acumen, will become a more critical evaluation criterion.

    In the meantime, a major transition away from legacy batch-oriented applications toward applications that process data in near real-time that has been gaining momentum now for several years should continue. Most organizations are now going to require the sub-second performance of a financial services application. However, visibility into supply chains in near real-time is becoming a bigger requirement, especially when many of the organizations that make up the supply chain are potentially not as economically resilient as they once were.

    Less clear is the rate at which the transition to near real-time applications will now occur. However, at a time when competition between organizations is about to become more fierce than at any time in recent memory, many organizations are about to discover how big a difference modern applications can really make.

    — Mike Vizard

  • COVID-19 Response: Espressive Makes AI Help Desk Free for 90 Days

    COVID-19 Response: Espressive Makes AI Help Desk Free for 90 Days

    Espressive, a provider of a help desk software that makes extensive use of artificial intelligence (AI), announced this week it will provide free access to its software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for the next 90 days.

    Company CEO Pat Calhoun said the COVID-19 Rapid Assistance Program is intended to provide a way to augment existing help desks that are now being overwhelmed by requests from end users working from home.

    With a massive spike in IT incidents being seen since the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic, many help desks are now simply overwhelmed. In some cases, Calhoun said some end users are finding themselves on hold for 2.5 hours or more.

    Espressive, via its Barista virtual agents, provides a means to automatically address most routine requests using chatbots and a natural language processing (NLP) engine that the company developed specifically to address help desk use cases.
    The Espressive platform has already been trained to recognize 750 million phrases, Calhoun said, noting each time a new phrase is added to the NLP engine, the entire customer base benefits from the addition.

    Organizations that are finding it difficult to handle the volume of support calls being made by often geographically distributed remote workers can employ chatbots via a SaaS platform in a few hours, Calhoun said. In many cases, IT staff are trying to respond to help desk requests using on-premises applications that they need to access remotely, often using cumbersome virtual private network (VPN) software. A SaaS platform provides an alternative approach that is designed from the ground up to be accessed remotely, he said.

    Chatbots are already being widely employed online by customer service organizations with mixed success. Most end users, however, are at the very least familiar with interacting with them. In the case of IT support calls, the volume of requests is within a narrow range of tasks that could be handled via a chatbot, such as requesting a new password.

    Many organizations have already been gradually infusing AI into their help desk operations. The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to accelerate that transition. AI isn’t likely to completely eliminate the need for help desk staff anytime soon. However, it does provide a way to scale help desk services at a time when IT staff are trying to manage a massive transition in how and when applications are accessed by the entire organization.

    Naturally, it remains to be seen how much organizations will rely on AI to resolve support issues once the current pandemic crisis has passed. Short of being replaced altogether, there are many rote tasks that many IT professionals would just as soon not have to manually perform multiple times a day. The challenge now is defining the line between where an interface between man and machine makes the most sense for the benefit of all. In the meantime, to one form or another, chatbots are now here to stay.

    — Mike Vizard

  • GitLab Shifts 18 Features Into Core Open Source Platform

    GitLab Shifts 18 Features Into Core Open Source Platform

    GitLab this week announced it has moved 18 features that previously organizations had to pay for into the core open source version of its namesake continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform.

    Scott Williamson, executive vice president of product management for GitLab, said as a general rule the company makes available DevOps tools for teams across the four tiers of services that organizations can employ. Features now being migrated to the Core offering include:

    Plan: Synchronize collaboration with “related issues,” “export issues,” “issues board focus mode” and “Service Desk”

    Create: Build better code and branch with the “web terminal for WebIDE,” “file syncing to web terminal” and “design management”

    Verify: Improve code quality with reports on merge requests

    Package: Build and share more efficiently with a set of package managers in one place

    Release: Continuous delivery simplified with “canary deployments,” “incremental rollout,” “feature flags” and “deploy boards”

    Configure: Support for multiple Kubernetes clusters to ease deployment of different environments

    Defend: Bolster application security with network policies for container network security

    As the global economy falters in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s likely reliance on open source software will increase. Most organizations would rather throw IT labor at the ongoing management of an IT environment to manage open source software versus having to lay off IT employees that would be extremely difficult to find once the economy recovers. It remains to be seen to what degree that strategy will play out in DevOps environments, but Williamson said historically most of GitLab’s customers are organizations that first adopt the open source version of its platform.

    Less clear is the degree to which the downturn might also induce many of the organizations to employ a DevOps platform delivered as a set of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. GitLab has been for the past several years for an integrated approach to DevOps based on a single code base that is ultimately easier to deploy and manage. Many IT organizations may decide that rather than manage DevOps infrastructure, they now prefer to allocate what limited resources they have on hand to writing code.

    The number of application development projects being launched could also decline while others are suspended. At the same time, however, there are some vertical industry segments, such as digital entertainment and education services, that might see a spike in demand for additional services now that many people are staying home to help limit the scope of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Of course, many DevOps teams are among the legions of workers that now need to remotely access platforms. Williamson said supporting remote DevOps teams has long been a strength of the GitLab platform. GitLab also makes available a playbook that provides DevOps teams with guidance on how best to work remotely.

    Clearly, it will be a few months before the full impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is fully appreciated. Regardless, many IT organizations are clearly preparing for the worst of times while continuing to hope for the best outcome possible.

    — Mike Vizard

  • The Linux Foundation to Award 500 Training Scholarships

    The Linux Foundation to Award 500 Training Scholarships

    The Linux Foundation this week announced it will make up to 500 training scholarships available this year.

    Clyde Seepersad, general manager for training at the Linux Foundation, said the number of Linux Foundation Training (LiFT) Scholarships being made available is being increased because of both the demand for individuals with particular expertise such as Kubernetes and the fact that more people are spending more time at home. As such, many IT professionals have more time available to advance their skills, said Seepersad.

    Unfortunately, there are going to be many more unemployed IT professionals as the COVID-19 pandemic wreaks havoc across the global economy. Many of those individuals will need to attain additional certifications to compete in an IT job market that suddenly has much less demand and a pool of job candidates that has increased seemingly overnight.

    The scholarships being made available by The Linux Foundation are designed to encourage individuals with varying types of backgrounds to develop open source software expertise. They include:

    Open Source Newbies
    Teens-in-Training
    Women in Open Source
    Software Developer Do-Gooder
    SysAdmin Super Star
    Blockchain Blockbuster
    Cloud Captain
    Linux Kernel Guru
    Networking Notable
    Web Development Wiz

    Since 2011, more than 100 training and certification scholarships valued at more than $220,000 have been awarded by The Linux Foundation. The deadline for applying for the latest round of scholarships is April 30.

    The Linux Foundation is also making available its entire catalog of paid eLearning and certification exams available at 30% off through April 7.

    Seepersad said all the courses made available by The Linux Foundation are accessible online. Each exam administered is also recorded. Interestingly enough, Seepersad said the number of potential cheating incidents is far less online than in classrooms mainly because each individual taking an exam is recorded. There’s also more opportunity to potentially share answers in a traditional classroom setting, he noted.

    It’s unclear precisely how the COVID-19 pandemic might impact demand for IT skills going forward. While it’s clear there will be fewer IT professionals employed, there may be an actual increase in demand for individuals with open source expertise. During the last economic downturn many organizations adopted an “open source-first” philosophy to acquiring software as part of an effort to reduce IT costs. Many of those organizations determined they would rather allocate their much-reduced IT budgets to retaining IT staff than paying for commercial software, even if that meant the time and effort required to implement and manage that software was higher.

    At the same time, it’s worth noting many organizations may need to accelerate the rate at which they are modernizing their IT environments. Now that most employees and end customers are spending most of their time at home, many organizations are finding their existing portfolio of applications do not lend themselves easily to being remotely accessed. Some might even take advantage of open source container technologies to lift and shift entire existing legacy applications into the cloud because their IT staff may not be able to physically access a local data center for more than a month.

    Whatever the ultimate outcome, the one thing that is for certain is working in enterprise IT environments will never be the same again.

    — Mike Vizard

  • CircleCI Surfaces More DevOps Insights

    CircleCI Surfaces More DevOps Insights

    CircleCI today announced it is making it easier for DevOps teams to determine the amount of resources being consumed by its continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform to help make application development teams more efficient.

    Kunal Jain, senior product manager for CircleCI, said via the application programming interface (API) that CircleCI exposes DevOps teams can now determine, for example, which workflows are taking the longest to run or what tests might be creating bottlenecks into the CI/CD pipeline.

    Armed with that insight DevOps teams can also optimize how credits to employ the CircleCI platform are allocated across their DevOps teams, added Jain. That capability should make it easier for DevOps teams to predict how much they are spending per month to run their CI/CD platform, said Jain. Many more IT organizations may opt to access CI/CD platforms using a software-as-a-service (SaaS) approach that limits the need for them to invest in their own IT infrastructure or in some cases even manage the platform.

    DevOps teams have always been sensitive to efficiency but given the current economic climate, minimizing costs is becoming a higher priority for many organizations. As such, DevOps teams need more insights into, for example, how to best break up workflows to keep CI/CD platform costs to a minimum, said Jain. In fact, Jain says the total cost of operating a CI/CD platform is likely to now play a bigger role in selecting a platform as IT leaders demand more visibility into DevOps processes.

    Of course, some DevOps teams may find themselves competing for credits based on how efficient they are. Teams who are more efficient than others could also allow IT leaders to reallocate credits as they best see fit based on the progress being made. In a previous era where compute resources were largely considered to be a nominal cost, many DevOps teams may find access to IT infrastructure might no longer be taken for granted.

    CircleCI claims it runs more than 30 million independent jobs run every month. The company last year committed to exposing more API endpoints to help DevOps team better understand the languages, architectural patterns, code testing patterns, delivery success rates and team practices being employed. Like most providers of CI/CD platforms, CircleCI has made a commitment to making available a much broader range of actionable insights to DevOps teams via its API.

    At this point, it’s unclear what the impact the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic might have on DevOps adoption. Undoubtedly, many organizations will put a hold on some application development projects as they reassess their priorities. On the other hand, with more people working from home, digital business transformation initiatives that require new applications are likely to become a higher priority as organizations seek to reinvent how they engage their end customers. Those projects may even be accelerated as part of a larger business continuity strategy. Regardless of the number of application development projects being launched, the scrutiny of how IT resources are being allocated and consumed is about to increase substantially.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Compuware Shifts Mainframe App Testing Left

    Compuware Shifts Mainframe App Testing Left

    Compuware today announced it is making it easier to shift application performance testing further left on to the shoulders of developers by adding support for a REST application programming interface (API) to its application performance management (APM) platform for mainframe applications, along with a plug-in for Jenkins continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) environments.

    Sam Knutson, vice president of product management for Compuware, said during the current economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations will find it is now more imperative to shift more responsibility for managing all aspects of application development toward developers. Many organizations simply won’t be able to afford to retain IT specialists such as application testers, said Knutson.

    Instead, most organizations soon will be looking to automate as many aspects of DevOps as they possibly can with an eye toward enabling developers to achieve goals with as little intervention as possible from IT operations teams, he noted.

    In addition, Knutson said the trend of convergence between mainframe and distributed computing teams within IT organizations is about to accelerate. In fact, there may soon be no such thing as “mainframe DevOps,” he noted; rather, the mainframe will be just another mainstream platform on which applications are deployed.

    The economic downturn may limit the number of new mainframes being deployed. However, given that the total cost of computing on the mainframe tends to be lower than distributed systems, the number of workloads running on existing mainframes could increase as organizations deploy more Linux-based applications on the venerable platform.

    The API Compuware is adding to its Strobe APM platform will help accelerate the development and deployment of those applications by making application testing a more integrated element of a DevOps workflow, said Knutson. Automated tests can be run within the code delivery pipeline using Compuware Topaz for Total Test, the Topaz Utilities plugin or Compuware Hiperstation. Development teams can be notified when performance tests are completed via communications tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams.

    Knutson said Compuware decided to build a plug-in for Jenkins because it is the most widely deployed CI/CD platform in mainframe environments.

    Despite the pending merger with BMC Software, IT organizations can count on the fact that the Compuware portfolio of DevOps tools for mainframe environments will continue to be supported and updated, he said, pointing out that this latest announcement represents the 22nd consecutive quarterly update to the Compuware portfolio of DevOps tools for mainframes.

    It’s too early to say what precise impact the economic downturn may have on DevOps adoption in mainframe environments. However, it’s safe to say that doing more with less is going to be the order of the day for some time to come. As such, the rate at which IT organizations that rely on mainframes to run their mission-critical applications will be embracing best DevOps practices is likely to increase.

    In fact, rather than incurring the costs of replacing those mainframe applications the priority now is much more likely to be modernizing them as much and as soon as possible.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Logz.io Launches COVID-19 Dashboard

    Logz.io Launches COVID-19 Dashboard

    Logz.io this week launched a Community COVID-19 Dashboard Project that seeks to provide software developers and data scientists a reliable source of data to assess the global impact of the pandemic.

    Dotan Horovits, product evangelist for Logz.io, said the goal is to help organizations make sense of often conflicting data by making it accessible using a publicly available dashboard based on open source Kibana software. The data itself is stored in an ElasticSearch repository, he said.

    Logz.io also plans to make the data accessible via a dashboard based on open source Grafana software to make it easier to navigate time-series data, he added.

    Horovits acknowledges that the data concerning the COVID-19 pandemic is fluid at best. However, over time it will become easier to identify suspect data by applying analytics. Much of the COVID-19 data being made available is well-formatted, he said; the challenge is simply finding a way to aggregate that data in a way that is accessible to a broad range of potential end users.

    In the short term, Loz.io envisions organizations such as first responders using the dashboard to help optimize the deployment of limited resources. Longer-term, that data can also be employed to assess the impact the pandemic has had on everything from the environment and the economy to the mental health of individuals living in different regions. At the very least, access could go a long way to reducing the amount of COVID-19 misinformation being spread, Horovits added.

    Logz.io started with the COVID-19 data available from Johns Hopkins University. On top of that core set, the company is moving to aggregate data made available from additional public sources including media, governments and the World Health Organization (WHO). The company is also inviting any organization that has aggregated COVID-19 data to contribute to the project.

    Many organizations will, of course, use the data provided by Logz.io and similar initiatives to build a wide range of analytics applications. For example, it may be possible to avert future pandemics by identifying areas where individuals are experiencing high fevers sooner. Given the importance of those applications, it’s probable most of them will need to be built using best DevOps practices to ensure timely delivery.

    It’s not clear how the pandemic may advance data science. Organizations have been leveraging big data analytics applications for years. However, the pandemic may lead to more ambitious efforts to aggregate and analyze medical data on a global basis. Arguably, it’s been the absence of reliable data that has enabled the virus to spread so widely. Otherwise, initiatives such as social distancing might have been enforced earlier and medical facilities would have been outfitted with more equipment.

    In the meantime, there may not be much most IT professionals can do to combat the current pandemic other than working from home much like everyone else. However, in terms of preventing the next one, the level of data science expertise being applied to virus research may soon become a matter of life and death for millions of people.

    — Mike Vizard