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Tag: coronavirus

Coronavirus Response: Atlassian Expands Free Software

Atlassian announced today it will make cloud-based versions of Jira Software, Confluence, Jira Service Desk and Jira Core available for free as part of an effort to assist organizations whose employees are working remotely to help combat the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.

Robert Chatwani, chief marketing officer for Atlassian, said given the current unprecedented situation the company has decided to increase the number of free versions of its software, including Jira project management software, which is widely employed by software development teams.

The company already makes available free versions of its Trello, Bitbucket and Opsgenie software. Atlassian is hoping that once the current COVID-19 coronavirus crisis subsides, a much broader base of end users including ones from business units will have gained some firsthand experience employing its project management applications and collaboration tools, said Chatwani. Previously, Atlassian revealed it has a goal of having 100 million active users of its software.

Chatwani said many organizations are finding that having employees working from home is the new normal for the foreseeable future. While regions in Asia appear to be recovering from the initial COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak, that does not appear to be the case in other regions anytime soon. Once organizations re-engineer their workflows, they may discover some knowledge workers are more productive working remotely, he noted.

Less clear right now is whether having most or all employees working remotely is a temporary measure in the furtherance of a business continuity strategy or simply an inevitable future of work that, because of the current crisis, is arriving much earlier than expected.

Of course, not every employee is psychologically tempered to work from home. Software developers, for example, may be more accustomed to working in isolation than project managers. Chatwani said it will be important for organizations to establish new routines to maintain organizational cohesion, including determining when development teams should launch sprints to build elements of an application. Managers also may want to designate “office hours” during which anyone can contact them online to make sure employees feel they are accessible, he added.

Organizations should also get used to the idea that children may be both seen and heard while online meetings are occurring, given the fact that millions of children are now being schooled at home, Chatwani noted.

Many organizations to one degree or another have been relying more on remote workers. There are even some companies that don’t have physical headquarters—all the employees already work remotely. Some of those organizations have even gone so far as to define a time zone around which the organization will standardize on regardless of where employees are physically located.

Whatever the strategy employed, organizations that hope to succeed in this new climate need to go well beyond ensuring remote network connections are available and secure—they need to find a way to either maintain their existing processes and culture to make sure that whatever product or service they provide continues to be built or delivered in a way that allows the organization to survive and hopefully continue to thrive.

— Mike Vizard

March 18, 2020
Social Distancing in the Age of Automation

An unintended consequence of COVID-19 is that the practice of social distancing might remain long after the threat posed by the virus subsides.

It seems as if COVID-19 (aka the Coronavirus) has appeared out of nowhere. At the end of 2019, we were all unwrapping out holiday gifts and looking hopefully into a new decade. Now, in March of 2020, schools are closed for weeks, if not months, major tech conferences are canceled, the NBA has suspended the season and the shelves at Walmart and Costco are bare of daily essentials.

We’ve gone from zero reported cases at the end of January 2020 to over 120,000 worldwide six weeks later. (See Figure 1, below).

Figure 1: Total confirmed cases of COVID-19 as of March 12, 2020. Source: By Our World in Data – OWID, CC BY 4.0.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared that we are in a pandemic. COVID-19 is spreading around the globe and its spreading fast. People are dying from it. As of March 13, 2020, sources report that Italy had 1,016 deaths among the 15,113 cases of infection. Another source reports that in mainland China, at least 3,158 people died from the 80,778 infected. The number keeps growing. What’s amazing is that in November of 2019 there were no reports of deaths from COVID-19. To say that this is the stuff of science fiction made real is no understatement.

Social Distancing as a Tactical Response to COVID-19

COVID-19 is a contagious disease. The rate of infection is pretty high when people gather together in large groups. To address the risks, gatherings of over 250 people have been discouraged, if not banned outright by business and government. This tactic has been given a name, “social distancing.”

Social distancing means that we keep our distance from large groups of people. As with any change in social behavior, there are economic impacts. Most people go to a workplace to do work. Take away access to the workplace and work stops, the economy comes to a halt. At least that’s how it was in the old days.

Today we live in a wired world that makes online interactions as easy as a stroll down Main Street. As a result, many of us work online thus allowing commerce to continue even when access to the physical workplace is restricted. Yet, most of us—working online or not—are still tethered to a common, physical workplace, at least we were until COVID-19 kicked in. Now we’re going home and telecommuting. Once the threats posed by the virus have passed we’ll all go back to business as usual. This current episode of social distancing will be but a memory.

Or will it?

What if social distancing becomes a way of life that stays with us for the foreseeable future? What if we all just get so accustomed to social distancing—employer and employee alike—that we just stay home after this all blows over? What then? Think about it. It could very well happen and the implications are significant.

Social Distancing Is Not New

Social distancing has been a trend even before COVID-19 came along. Before the introduction of mass-produced private homes, people either lived in cities or in the rural countryside. Urban dwellers congregated in public spaces, Venice Beach, Boston Common or Central Park for example. They ran into each other walking down the street. They rideshared on mass transit.

Then the automobile came along and social distancing set in. More people started to prefer riding in the isolation of the privately-owned automobile than on a crowded city bus or subway. The interstate highway system emerged to support the millions of new cars on the road. These highways and the 30-year fixed mortgage gave birth to suburban living. Also, television reduced movie-going to a predominantly entertainment experience. Who needs to see a newsreel in a movie theater when the news is getting piped into your television set every day?

The suburban house became the castle of any man or woman who could cough up a relatively small down payment to buy one. The next thing you know the house becomes the social center: barbecues, cocktail parties, Super Bowl Sunday and legions of teenagers wreaking havoc at alcohol-fueled backyard pool-parties while their parents are out of town.

Eventually, the introduction of video streaming (neé cable-based HBO) big-screen TVs, and movies on the demand made the family entertainment center a permanent fixture in residential house design. Finally, along comes high-speed internet and dad’s den gets replaced by dad’s home office and mom’s home office.

But, we still had to go to the store to get stuff. Hence the rise of the shopping mall as a common ground in which to socialize. And, we still had to go to work to pay for it all … for a while, anyway, until Amazon comes along and brings social distancing to the shopping experience and telecommuting gizmos such as Slack, Zoom and a plethora of mobile apps make working from home a feasible way to conduct business. The only catch is that employers needed to get on board with telecommuting. Some did and some didn’t until COVID-19 started killing people. Now, they’re on board.

Living in a Social Distancing World

COVID-19 is forcing everyone to stay put. Every day an increasing number of companies are mandating that if you can work at home, you are to work at home. Late-night television shows are broadcasting empty theaters. There’s even talk of canceling the Democratic National Convention. It seems as if we’re all going home.

The risk is that we just might stay there.

Let’s face it, we’ve created a digital infrastructure that can support a situation in which most of the population of the developed world stays in a state of social distancing permanently. All the things required to make it happen are in place. Today, we can buy just about all we need online and have it delivered to our doorstep. An increasing number of the ordinary activities of daily life happens on the internet, everything from a casual chat on Skype to a game of cards with our friends on Trickster Cards, are typical. And yes, people have been having romantic interludes online since personal computers could support video conferencing.

In the not-too-distant-future, home healthcare devices will do away with most visits to the doctor’s office. Soon, if we need to get somewhere, we’ll call a driverless vehicle to get us there. Manufacturing automation will continue to improve to the point where we won’t work in factories directly anymore. We’ll just control the robots that do work in the factories from computers in our home office.

As finance and services continue to become a growing part of the economy, the work that industry requires can be done from home, too—quite easily in fact. Yes, we’ll still need human plumbers, electricians and nurses. But these workers will occupy a special place in a socially distanced world. They’ll be well vetted and well protected.

So, the long and short of it is that current events might very well be a harbinger of things to come. And, if anything, the hazards of COVID-19 are pushing forward the propensity to make social distancing the norm. When that happens the really big question to ask is this: If all of us are socially distanced by default and more of our interaction with, and understanding of, the world comes from that which we see and hear on cell phones, computers and television sets, how will we know what is real and what is well-contrived fiction? It’s an important question that deserves serious consideration. I hope we can answer it. Then, once answered, the even bigger question to ask is: Will we care?

— Bob Reselman

March 17, 2020
C or C

— ROELBOB

— ROELBOB

March 9, 2020
Zoho Offers Free SaaS Apps to Combat Coronavirus Spread

Zoho today announced it is making available for free a bundle of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications dubbed Remotely through July 1.

Raju Vegesna, chief evangelist for Zoho, said Remotely is a humanitarian gesture to help mitigate the impact of a global coronavirus epidemic. Remotely comprises a set of productivity and collaboration applications that users can access in as little as five minutes.

Included in Remotely are productivity, collaboration and project management applications as well as tools that automate the migration of data into the Zoho cloud platform.

Vergesna said Remotely also addresses cybersecurity concerns by enabling IT teams to apply security controls to the data that employees are allowed to access. Of course, IT organizations in many cases would still need to make sure the network connections being employed to access SaaS applications are secure.

Now that many local governments are recommending that organizations allow employees to work from home to help limit the spread of the coronavirus outbreak, many IT administrators are scrambling to provide remote access to applications at scale. It’s one thing to provide access to a small number of employees who might travel intermittently, but it’s quite another to support an entire remote workforce for some unknown period of time.

Vergesna, however, said that at this point the challenges associated with making that transition have a lot more to do with overcoming cultural issues than they do the technology. Much of the transition to Zoho SaaS applications has been automated, he said.

It remains to be seen to what degree the coronavirus outbreak might accelerate the transition to cloud applications. Many IT administrators are still managing local instances of Windows servers to deliver applications because the time and effort to migrate to SaaS applications have been substantial. Making those on-premises applications available remotely at scale is not only challenging from a technical perspective, but it’s also expensive.

Of course, Zoho is far from being the only provider of SaaS productivity and collaboration applications. However, it remains to be seen whether other providers will follow Zoho’s lead. The hope each of these vendors has is that once the coronavirus crisis passes many of the organizations that take advantage of their software to enable employees to work from home will start paying to use that software.

In the meantime, the economic impact of the coronavirus is likely to be staggering. Conferences are being canceled and face-to-face business meetings are being shifted online. It’s hard to say how many of those meetings are likely to stay there for good. At the very least, many more end users are about out to discover just how rich SaaS application environments have become. In many cases, IT teams will stitch together workflows across a range of SaaS applications using application programming interfaces (APIs). The challenge they will face is acquiring the programming skills required to construct those workflows.

— Mike Vizard

March 6, 2020
Coronavirus Update: A Slowdown Already Occurring

I have been watching the real-time regional situation reports about the coronavirus from the Chinese medical association site ncov.dxy.cn (the same site the John’s Hopkins outbreak dashboard sources its data from) closely now since very close to the beginning of the outbreak, and my daily routine has been to snapshot the regional outbreak tallies and compare the numbers with previous data to discern the trends.

The top-level executive summary is that while three nearby provinces have peaked now at around 3,000 cases of the coronavirus, the majority of the other provinces got up to a few hundred to a thousand cases. Cases are declining universally now as folks recover, and new case increases have slowed from the initial fast-spreading burst now down to a trickle outside of Hubei.

The percentage of overall cases has gradually increased in locality from its initial widespread that saw half of all cases in Hubei Province centered in Wuhan now steadily inching up to closer to 90% (above 83%) of cases being centralized in Hubei and Wuhan. Essentially, the outbreaks were sporadic in small clusters and contained in the other provinces, and the counts are all going down—a positive sign. The only place it ever really saw huge unrestrained growth was in the city of Wuhan, where new cases continue to be diagnosed, but as I mentioned above, even that has seemed to be under control now, with the rate of overall new cases in an almost-steady linearly decline for two weeks now, as presumably, the containment seems to be working. The quarantine that many experts said was unlikely to succeed is showing every indication of actually succeeding.

The graph above IMHO best describes the progression of the coronavirus. Ignore the big spike—that was a numeric anomaly from the redefinition of “clinically prescribed” cases situations where patients had pneumonia symptoms but test swabs indicated negative for the virus, presumably where health officials cleared the virus and only the symptoms from the induced pneumonia remains. They redefined the counting criteria and classification so that those patients could access care facilities, which is why the graph seems to spike—though this bureaucratic anomaly caused undue panic in many folks observing the numbers before the Chinese-language information about this redefinition reason percolated out and was translated as an explanation to international media. Overall, this graph illustrates what I saw from the regional counts: There was an initial rapid ramp up and then containment and a slow, steady decline in new case increases. The yellow line is suspected cases and the red line is confirmed tested cases. As you would expect, the suspected numbers led the confirmations by around a day.

The situation right now is that really the only place case counts of the coronavirus are increasing is in Wuhan itself, with the greatest density of cases. Starting one to two weeks ago the cases rates finished their rapid expansion in the other provinces and began their long, slow, steady decline as patients recover, with a small number of fatalities. New cases seem to be fairly limited small clusters of one to 10 cases and isolated, as well as declining for weeks now.

Internationally, the only trouble spot is the quarantined cruise ship in Japan, which seems to be acting as an incubator. I can tell you a lot about that ship because one of my co-workers’ parents are on board and I’ve been getting first-hand reports of what is going on. After a burst of cases last week on the ship, those in charge have fortunately decided to disembark the ship to national quarantine facilities set up by the passenger’s origin governments. This is good because conditions aboard were becoming pretty miserable, entertainment was limited and unlocking the porn and movie channels did little to appease the occupants, who were becoming frustrated with the limited food choices in particular. It was a terrible time for the staff—essentially on a jail ship forced to feed and the occupants. I’m told disembarking is due to begin over the next few days.

Outside China, excepting the cruise, there were relatively few cases of non-direct secondary infection of the coronavirus that weren’t directly linked to someone who had been in Wuhan or in contact with someone from Wuhan. There were a few clusters of infection, particularly in one Hong Kong apartment building and another one in Singapore, but pretty much all the cases were primary contact up until now, so it seems international diligence and containment is holding.

There is plenty for folks to be diligent about, but for now, there seems very little to panic about and every indication that this impossible quarantine is going to be studied as a model of how to respond in the future.

Let me also pre-empt the inevitable distrust of the Chinese government some folks have to mention that the inevitable conspiracy fear-mongering and panic you see being spread in paranoid YouTube rants and misrepresentation clickbait is completely unfounded from the data and news sources I monitor. To quote a WHO press conference, “The Chinese authorities have shown exceptional transparency and openness in this outbreak.” Another expert I heard on the radio who worked on the earlier SARS outbreak noted that one of the key lessons learned in that incident was the importance of rapid and accurate information dissemination to control and respond to infection outbreaks, and the Chinese medical association seems to have taken this lesson to heart to not repeat those missteps with the coronavirus. The fact that I was able to monitor regional situation reports over the last two months is a clear indication of that.

The folks who feel that somehow the Chinese government is sandbagging the numbers and the problem may be worse than indicated aren’t really acknowledging the stupidity of such a fiction. Misrepresenting the situation to their own medical professionals combatting the outbreak would not only be irresponsible and dangerous but also extremely unlikely and infeasible. There is little incentive to misreport, and such a fiction would need to involve concerted action from hundreds of thousands of medical professionals—and likely beyond the capabilities of even the Chinese bureaucracy; in the end, their government is as clumsy and bumbling as ours and it would require far too widespread a meddling to maintain consistency. The Chinese censors can stomp down and suppress anything that makes the bureaucrats jumpy, but it is likely incapable of producing such a coherent fiction across so many sources, sites and reports as would be required to fulfill the paranoid fantasies of wary folks. Not only is there no motive or gain, but there is also likely a huge disincentive and probably penalty for misreporting and misrepresentation, if the rapid fall from grace and dismissal of the bureaucrats who made the initial mistake and sandbagging of the numbers that led to the initial outbreak is any indication. As a matter of fact, the only indication I’ve seen with any substantive evidence of government information suppression was the blocking of the online lynch mobs for those bureaucrats who were at fault for the doctor who sounded the alarm’s arrest after that doctor tragically died. Anyone who would dare tamper with the numbers likely would face the same fate.

There is by definition underreporting as the visibility to cases of the coronavirus with very mild symptoms or test errors or any number of other anomalies in mass counts, but the numbers from a macro level look promising.

Overall, I’m relieved to see that the situation is resolving with only sporadic and isolated lapses in containment—there were only ever 85 cases internationally outside of Asia with a single fatality. That number is down to 52 now as folks recover and no recorded incidents of secondary infection without direct contact with a traveler from Wuhan. The mortality rate statistic is ever sinking as patients among the roughly 60,000 cases cumulatively diagnosed recover, and it’s proving to be primarily a threat to the elderly, though interestingly I’ve seen reports that few children seem to be affected.

Later next week we should see the results from the clinical study of the cocktail of repurposed HIV antivirals that showed such great promise in simulations and early tests that had some severe patients recover in as little as two days. The study was rolled out in amazingly rapid fashion and the medical community seems to have focused on combatting this new disease with a vengeance—supposedly vaccine trials are to begin as early as next month.

Vigilance and wariness are due, but at this time there seems to be no cause to panic, forward panic or feed conspiracy fears preying on phobias about diseases or likely even change any day-to-day activity or future plans for folks outside of China regarding the coronavirus. The estimate from current numbers is placing the potential of the quarantine lift at the beginning of April in the only forecast I have seen.

— Dragos Ruiu

February 18, 2020
ACCELERATED STRATEGIES GROUP LAUNCHES RESEARCH STUDY INTO CORONAVIRUS’ IMPACT ON IT INDUSTRY WITH ‘HEALTH EMERGENCY IT PREPAREDNESS’ SURVEY

Coronavirus Outbreak Causes IT Industry to Identify New Threat Preparation Strategies, Accelerated Strategies Group, MediaOps, JumpCloud, and DevOps Institute Commission New Study

BOCA RATON, Fla. and BOULDER, Colo. – Feb. 17, 2020 – Accelerated Strategies Group, the analyst company whose mission is to democratize access to industry expert knowledge, MediaOps’ IT as Code community platform, DevOps Institute and JumpCloud, have launched a research study and survey to better understand the IT community’s preparedness and response to the current coronavirus threat and future health emergencies.

The Health Emergency IT Preparedness Survey (HEIPS) is available at http://acceleratedsurvey.com. The survey focuses on actions in response to the coronavirus threat, its potential impacts to humanity and business, and the importance of technologies such as cloud and collaboration tools in the event the coronavirus threat has a greater impact on global, national and local businesses. Results from the survey will be widely available, embodying Accelerated Strategy Group’s tenet, “Knowledge Wants To Be Free.”

“Our goal is to connect with the IT community to identify needed preparedness before situations like the coronavirus or future events become even more serious,” said Mitchell Ashley, CEO and managing analyst at Accelerated Strategies Group. “The coronavirus is already impacting supply chains, international travel and business continuity planning. It’s vital we know: Are IT departments prepared for the impact of a substantial virus outbreak? What are IT departments doing in reaction to the current and future threats? Are technologies like the cloud a sufficient strategy to provide ongoing business continuity?”

In addition to the survey, MediaOps CEO Alan Shimel announced the Conference Disaster Plan (CDP) that leverages MediaOps’ online platform and expertise to offer a virtual, near in-person conference experience in situations where travel is restricted or not possible.

“Health crises are humanitarian crises,” said Jayne Groll, CEO of the DevOps Institute. “First and foremost, we need to understand the scope of how humans are impacted in order to understand the scope of the overall business impact.”

“The coronavirus has been devastating and is going to leave an indelible mark on the world. It very well may change this generation’s corporate leaders’ view on work,” said Rajat Bhargava, CEO of JumpCloud. “We have already seen an impact on our broad customer base, and we feel it is important for us to commission primary research on the impact of coronavirus on the IT community. The data will prove beneficial for millions of organizations worldwide as they think about how to deal with these catastrophic events.”

About MediaOps, Inc.

MediaOps is a premier global media platform for technical communities including DevOps, Security and Containerization. Its brands, which include devopsy.kinsta.cloud, Container Journal, Security Boulevard and Digital Anarchist, attract and engage a thriving online community of technology professionals around the world. Resources include award-winning editorial, creation of high-quality custom content, multimedia production and distribution. As the leaders in these emerging segments, MediaOps’ properties include powerful, integrated marketing and communication platforms to help clients maximize their campaign ROI and paid media investments. https://mediaops.io

About Accelerated Strategies Group, Inc.

Accelerated Strategies Group (AccelST) was formed with the mission of disrupting the technology analyst market by utilizing the same principles of the open source, free model now prevalent in the greater technology/software market. AccelST focuses on the areas of Digital Transformation, DevOps, Cloud-Native and Cybersecurity. https://accelst.com

About JumpCloud

JumpCloud® Directory-as-a-Service® is Active Directory® and LDAP reimagined. JumpCloud securely manages and connects users to their systems, applications, files, and networks. Try JumpCloud now.

About DevOps Institute

DevOps Institute is dedicated to advancing the human elements of DevOps success. As a global member-based association, DevOps Institute is the go-to learning hub connecting IT practitioners, education partners, consultants, talent acquisition and business executives to help pave the way to support digital transformation and the New IT. We help advance careers and support emerging practices within the DevOps community based on a human-centered SKIL framework, consisting of Skills, Knowledge, Ideas and Learning. All of our work, including accreditations, research, events and continuous learning programs, is focused on providing the “human know-how” to modernize IT and make DevOps succeed. https://devopsinstitute.com/

For more information, visit https://accelst.com and https://mediaops.io

Press Contacts:

CDP@devops.com

OR

Terri Douglas
Catapult PR-IR
303-581-7760

tdouglas@catapultpr-ir.com

###

February 17, 2020
MEDIAOPS OFFERS CONFERENCE DISASTER PLANS AMID GROWING CORONAVIRUS CONCERNS

Virtual Event Capabilities Allow Event Organizers to Afford Attendees, Speakers and Sponsors a Near Identical Experience to In-Person Physical Events

BOCA RATON, Fla. — February 17, 2020 — Amid growing concerns over the spreading coronavirus, MediaOps, the leading global media platform for technical communities, is now offering a Conference Disaster Plan (CDP) aimed at providing conference organizers with a virtual event platform and capability that is nearly identical to the experience of an in-person physical event.

MediaOps has produced more than 10 virtual events in the last 18 months that have offered dozens of concurrent sessions, multiple expo halls and thousands of attendees each. The platform can accommodate both live and recorded multi-track sessions in private virtual auditoriums, complete expo floor and booth capabilities, signage, chat, treasure hunt activities and more. The MediaOps platform provides all the capabilities of a live conference, including keynotes, panel sessions, Q&A, booths, attendee interaction, sponsorships and much more. Virtually anything possible at in-person events is available via the platform. Additionally, MediaOps has the personnel and expertise to produce events in a timely manner, which gives event organizers the ability to simulate a real-world setting without the travel.

“We take this current situation very seriously; the health and well-being of our community is essential. So, for this CDP, we want to offer options that are safe and effective,” said Alan Shimel, CEO and founder of MediaOps. “Like it or not, this virus outbreak may be a tipping point in moving from the real world to virtual events. They offer comparable experiences without the travel, expense and loss of work time that physical events impose.”

Additionally, MediaOps, through its new IT as Code community platform and along with analyst firm Accelerated Strategies Group, DevOps Institute and JumpCloud, will be conducting a survey to better understand the community’s thoughts and concerns about travel amid the current health crisis and possible implications for future events.

About MediaOps, Inc.

MediaOps is a premier global media platform for technical communities including DevOps, Security and Containerization. Its brands, which include devopsy.kinsta.cloud, Container Journal, Security Boulevard and Digital Anarchist, attract and engage a thriving online community of technology professionals around the world. Resources include award-winning editorial, creation of high-quality custom content, multimedia production and distribution. As the leaders in these emerging segments, MediaOps’ properties include powerful, integrated marketing and communication platforms to help clients maximize their campaign ROI and paid media investments.

For more information, visit https://mediaops.io

Press Contacts:

CDP@devops.com

OR

Terri Douglas
Catapult PR-IR
303-581-7760
tdouglas@catapultpr-ir.com

###

February 17, 2020
Acting Rationally Regarding Coronavirus: RSAC Conference Update

With all the hype surrounding the coronavirus, let’s take a step back, take a breath and not give in to emotional conference mob fear-mongering

We have all read the headlines: Mobile World Congress in Barcelona has been canceled. Facebook pulled the plug on a smaller conference next month in San Fransisco. IBM Security has pulled out of RSA Conference next week. Health and safety are everyone’s concerns, but are we acting rationally regarding coronavirus?

RSA Conference (RSAC) put out an update on Friday (use that link to stay up to date on RSAC) with some great metrics on some of the risk factors and attendance numbers. It is also important to note that RSAC is expected to draw a crowd of about 50,000 visitors (some of them attending the DevOps Connect: DevSecOps Days event that we produce).

Yes, eight vendors have withdrawn from exhibiting at RSAC. Six of these were from China and frankly, given current travel restrictions, probably couldn’t get here anyway. One is from Canada and one from the U.S. (presumably that is IBM).

But should we give in to emotional conference mob fear-mongering? There is some serious clickbait nonsense being bandied about, including “RSA in Doubt After IBM Pulls out of Conference.” To be fair, the clickbait headline was updated, but still, that is just fear-mongering at its worst.

Why would IBM and the Canadian company pull out? Well, two obvious reasons. One is for the safety of their employees and their potential customers. The other is economic if they feel attendance will suffer. But while I don’t have any facts to back it up, I would have to assume that unless the event is outright canceled, vendors pulling out at this late date won’t be refunded their deposits and payments. This is true not only of their fees to RSAC but also of the money they’ve ponied up for hotels, airfare, party deposits, etc. While potential liability for unnecessarily exposing people to the virus could be a legal option, reasonable precautions are being taken. So I don’t think economics play into the decision to pull out.

As of Friday, RSAC reports that including the members of the canceled vendors, only 0.79% of attendees had canceled their attendance. I would assume that the overwhelming majority of these were attendees from Asia or other impacted regions who could not get flights here anyway. Something like 82% of attendees are from the U.S. On top of this, RSAC is taking additional precautions to keep the conference as germ-free as possible.

I was in touch with RSAC management earlier last week regarding the DevSecOps event. At that point, I was informed that they were working closely with the City of San Francisco to do everything possible. They are following CDC and WHO guidelines. BTW, CDC still says the impact here in the U.S. to coronavirus is low.

So, then, are we seeing an overreaction to coronavirus? The security industry, more than the mobile application or other tech industries, is more attuned to risk management. Are we managing this risk adequately? Are we giving in to the fear-mongers among us? The flu has killed so many thousands more people (albeit with higher infection rates), but that has never caused us to shut down conferences or question gathering in groups.

Personal health and safety is everyone’s own right and responsibility, as well as the responsibility of the authorities. Of course, you should do what you think is best for you and your family. But I think times like this call for a moment of lucidity and the use of the risk management fundamentals so many of us practice in our professional lives.

Those of you who know me personally know I am a huge Pittsburgh Steelers fan. Their coach, Mike Tomlin, has a saying that I think applies to this situation: “We don’t live in our fears, we live in our hopes.” I hope the current trend of withdrawing from our community is not one that will continue. I refuse to give in to exaggerated fears.

I do want to announce two things, though, in regard to this coronavirus situation. First, for any conference organizers who have made the decision to cancel their event for this reason (it is your event, your decision), MediaOps is offering a conference disaster program (CDP) that will allow you to use our virtual conference platform and team to take your event virtual with almost all of the features of an in-person conference.

We have produced more than 10 virtual conferences in the last year or so that have drawn tens of thousands of visitors with hundreds of sessions, exhibit halls, interactive booths, signage, live chat and more. You can go to the home page of Predict 2020, our most recent virtual event, and click “Recent Events” to get an idea here, but just a caution, registration is required. Please see our press release on this for details. It is important that the tech community continues to engage in the very important exchange of ideas, learning and community that is so vital to our success and progress.

Secondly, Accelerated Strategies Group, DevOps Institute, JumpCloud and MediaOps are hosting a survey to learn about what you and your organizations are doing in light of the coronavirus outbreak and whether this is forcing you to rethink actions and behaviors going forward—not just for attending conferences, but as part of disaster recovery and business continuity. For instance, is this situation changing your views around working remotely versus working in a large office, going to customer premises or international engagements? Help us gather the information—please take moment and head over to http://acceleratedsurvey.com to answer a few questions.

As is the mission of Accelerated Strategies, all of the research and analysis will be made available to everyone to use without registration or any payment. Because “knowledge wants to be free.” I couldn’t think of a better example of why that mission is so important.

“We appreciate being invited to support the efforts of Accelerated Strategies to learn how this global situation will impact people professionally. We know that the JumpCloud community has been impacted, so we are thankful to be able to help in a small way,” said Rajat Bhargava, co-founder and CEO of JumpCloud. “Supporting primary research into the impact of coronavirus across this community is important work, and will hopefully help shape the actions that organizations can take with their teams and business to successfully navigate the future.”

“DevOps Institute’s mission is to advance the Humans of DevOps and we are obviously concerned about the impact on the thoughts and behaviors of our global community,” said Jayne Groll, CEO of DevOps Institute. “The best way to overcome the hype and adapt to changing times is to collect and share community data.”

Finally, Mitchell Ashley, CEO of managing analyst of Accelerated Strategies Group, Groll and I sat down for a video discussion of the coronavirus discussion and the reasons behind the survey. The video appears just below. For information, we recorded this just before the news of IBM Security’s withdrawal from RSAC came out.

[videopress 5RyZpLsG]

— Alan Shimel

February 17, 2020