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Tag: digital transformation

  • A Developer’s Task: Minimizing Challenges Created by Fragmentation

    A Developer’s Task: Minimizing Challenges Created by Fragmentation

    Over the past decade, there has been a wellspring of apps, services and platforms to help developers build custom solutions for businesses. Some are great, some not so much. Regardless of quality, the quantity of options and each one’s varying level of sophistication has made it difficult for developers to separate the wheat from the chaff.

    A recent survey from IDC supports this notion. It contends that the current landscape of software development languages and frameworks is highly fragmented. Having too many options—as opposed to a single, unified environment—leads to holes and disconnects in the development process, not to mention the potential for significant complications in the long-term support of today’s apps.

    Here are some ways developers can navigate the challenges created by this high level of fragmentation. 

    Don’t Be Afraid of Low-Code (or No-Code) Solutions

    The IDC survey found that less than half of developers—44%—have used low-code development tools professionally at one point or another. As one would surmise, low-code programming brings with it a host of advantages, such as easy-to-use and intuitive interfaces, and the ability to deliver applications faster. 

    Some low-code platforms also enable developers to build applications that can be used on any device while also reducing dependency on outsourced IT. A built-in script builder can allow even relatively inexperienced developers to turn complex business logic into functional workflows—such as automating a repetitive task—within a matter of minutes. Even after apps are launched, workflows can be updated and customized to fit specific business needs nearly instantly.

    Achieve Scale with Serverless Applications

    When building on a serverless platform, developers prevent infrastructure maintenance from inhibiting applications from scaling globally. This also allows developers to build mobile apps without managing the backend infrastructure. Cloud computing using public clouds typically involves renting virtualized servers across the technology stack. But when looking to scale, the onus is on developers to deal with the operating system and database while also managing necessary updates. This can lead to a work-intensive process on the app infrastructure level.

    A serverless infrastructure, on the other hand, abstracts databases and file servers, shifting focus to the app logic level. This allows developers to build and manage microservice-based apps that integrate with other services, making it easy to scale applications.

    Make Things Easy on Your Team

    According to the IDC survey, just 20% of developers claim they are “extremely familiar” with containers and microservices. With such expertise hard to find, using flexible tools that allow teams to quickly deploy code in scalable, compartmentalized components is vital.

    Organizations should aim to help their developers focus more on designing top-class user experiences of serverless applications, rather than spending (or wasting) time and resources on setting up and maintaining components on the server side. This gives developers the ability to focus on doing what they love—developing—as opposed to other tedious and mundane activities such as manually managing servers and storage solutions, or tweaking the underlying infrastructure of their microservices.

    Of course, making things easier for developers means deploying a powerful tool built on a stable foundation that can offer SDKs and APIs for both mobile and web apps, the ability to test early and often in a sandbox environment and analytics that monitor and report performance in real-time.

    Developers know just how challenging their jobs can be, and the fragmentation that can occur due to the vast number of options on the market can make it even worse. There is nothing wrong with using multiple solutions, of course, but having a sturdy and unified underlying infrastructure goes a long way toward avoiding unnecessary headaches.

    Finally, organizations should look to those who know best when deciding which company-wide tools to implement: the developers themselves. As the IDC study states, developers should be viewed as key stakeholders in IT purchasing within any organization moving to the cloud accompanied by an internal digital transformation.

    — Raju Vegesna

  • The 2020 Digital Leader Priorities

    The 2020 Digital Leader Priorities

    When it comes to digital transformation, 2020 promises to be full steam ahead as many of the trends are already well underway. However, it’ll be those businesses that can execute at the quickening rate of technological change that will set the leaders and laggards apart for the years ahead.

    A survey conducted earlier last year by market research firm Vanson Bourne found that 50% of technology leaders have a challenging time managing their digital operations, and nearly 50% of respondents also said it’s their customers that identify problems before their technology and quality control teams do.

    Which brings us to our priority: Digital laggards need to step it up.

    Digital Transformation: Laggards Versus Leaders Packs Separate

    When enterprises shifted from their focus on e-commerce to a broader focus on their digital transformation efforts a few years ago, those who have been successful with their transformations are starting to reap results.

    Still, while the vast majority of enterprises do have digital transformation strategies that they are implementing, a Tech Pro Research report found 70% of respondent companies either had a digital transformation strategy in place or were developing such a strategy. While a separate study, the Kony Digital Experience Index Survey found a strong indication that those efforts aren’t paying off as well as many businesses may like—at least when it comes to their customers.

    According to Kony’s survey, customers are more satisfied when their digital experiences are effortless, and 63% said they would spend more money when their digital experiences are, in fact, effortless. That study concluded that businesses are not listening to the needs of their customers because only 28% of enterprise digital transformation initiatives are explicitly started with customer needs as the priority.

    The 2020 Priority: CIOs and chief digital officers are going to have to ensure that their organizations can execute against their digital transformation strategies. Those that create superior digital experiences are going to start to set themselves further apart from their laggard rivals dramatically. Those CIOs and CDOs at laggard companies are going to have to focus on turning themselves around as quickly as they can.

    The Continued Rise of Robotic Process Automation

    To advance their digital transformation efforts, most enterprises are increasingly turning to robotic process automation (RPA) and software bots to automate any cumbersome and costly manual processes they have in place. While the benefits of RPA and software bots are high, they don’t come without potential danger. These bots, if not managed properly, can open enterprises to increased security and regulatory compliance risks.

    The 2020 Priority: Effectively govern the security of their software bots so the associated risks are mitigated, and they can reap the most significant benefits from RPA.

    Low-Code Development Continues to Help Clear App Backlogs

    The demand for software is relentless, while the availability of professional developers isn’t limitless. And most enterprises have a backlog of application requests they can’t clear. According to a report from OutSystems, currently, 41% of enterprises use low code platforms, with an additional 10% about to start. That was up from 34% in the prior year report.

    Low code development platforms are popular because they help to make software development more accessible to non-developers by creating development more graphical. The low code development platform market is expected to grow to $27.2 billion by 2022.

    The 2020 Priority: focus on low code platforms for business users where it makes sense for them to be able to create their applications and capabilities. Not as a way to displace the development team, but to augment until those applications that warrant development and require professional developers can be built.

    AIOps Starts to Meet Its Promise

    As enterprises increasingly run their business-technology systems on a mix of clouds (both public and private) as well as on-premises systems, managing this infrastructure has grown more complex. The embracing of microservices, continuous delivery and DevOps has enabled organizations to deliver application enhancements more rapidly, automate testing and deliver their software with increased agility. However, interdependencies and the complexity of systems have also increased. This increased complexity shortened the amount of allowable time necessary to resolve system issues.

    When it comes to effective operations management, operations teams need to become as effective as possible since a breakdown anywhere in the environment can initiate thousands, and alerts can create multiple application and service disruptions.

    The 2020 Priority: This increased complexity will prove a catalyst for more enterprises to turn to AIOps. By using data gathered from operations management tasks with machine learning, organizations can become more effective at managing performance and availability and service management. AIOps has remained a buzzword for several years now, with very few actual deployments. That’s set to change.

    Optimizing Microservices Architectures

    Enterprises face a seemingly limitless demand for applications–customer-facing apps, back-office applications, APIs and digital services–and this demand has been a significant catalyst behind the popularity of microservices architectures.

    Microservices also help to ease budget constraints. Almost every survey shows microservices architectures are now in use by the majority of organizations, with benefits being cited, such as improved employee efficiency and customer experience, as well as infrastructure management. Microservices architectures also help enterprises to improve application scalability and bring new digital products and services to market more quickly.

    The 2020 Priority: Identify where microservices architectures can have the most significant impact on revenue-generating processes and prioritize the deployment of microservices to these areas first. It’s these areas where workflow improvement and application agility can have the greatest business impact.

    Looking out at a new year and imagining the possibilities is always exciting, but with the accelerated change in enterprise technologies and the level of digital transformation underway, this year is setting itself up to be more interesting than most.

    — George V. Hulme

  • Best of 2019: The Time Has Come for an Engineering Approach to DevOps

    Best of 2019: The Time Has Come for an Engineering Approach to DevOps

    As we close out 2019, we at devopsy.kinsta.cloud wanted to highlight the five most popular articles of the year. Following is the third in our weeklong series of the Best of 2019.

    Do you want to know how to do DevOps? Are you doing DevOps but not satisfied with the results you are getting? DevOps is complex. It does not come with a prescription, installation guide, user’s manual or maintenance manual. It doesn’t even have a standard definition. How can anyone expect to get good results with DevOps without clear and definitive guidance? There are plenty of books that describe different aspects of DevOps and customer user stories, but up until now there has not been a book that frames DevOps as an engineering problem with a step-by-step engineering solution and a clear list of recommended engineering practices to guide implementers.

    My book, Engineering DevOps: From Chaos to Continuous Improvement … and Beyond, provides a step-by-step engineering prescription that can be followed by leaders and practitioners to understand, assess, define, implement, operationalize and evolve DevOps for their organization. It provides a unique collection of engineering practices and solutions for DevOps. By confining the scope of the content of the book to the level of engineering practices, the content is applicable to the widest possible range of implementations.

    This book was born out of my desire to help others to do DevOps, combined with a burning personal frustration. The frustration comes from hearing leaders and practitioners say, “We think we are doing DevOps, but we are not getting the business results we had expected.”

    There are many documented references, courses and other sources of information that explain a multitude of different aspects of DevOps, but there is not a comprehensive step-by-step prescriptive guide that details how to engineer a DevOps solution for any organization given any starting point.

    Engineering DevOps takes a strategic approach, applies engineering implementation discipline and focuses operational expertise to define and accomplish specific goals for each leg of your DevOps journey. This book guides the reader through a journey from defining an engineering strategy for DevOps to implementing The Three Ways of DevOps maturity using engineering practices: The First Way (called “Continuous Flow”) to The Second Way (called “Continuous Feedback”) and finally The Third Way (called “Continuous Improvement”). This book is deliberately intended to be a guide that will continue to be relevant over time as your specific DevOps, and DevOps more generally, evolves.

    Structure of this book

    This book is organized as an engineering reference guide presented in five parts as follows:

    Part I: What Is Engineering DevOps and Why Is It Important? is organized into three chapters. Chapter one, “What is Engineering DevOps?,” explains engineering concepts and terms used in this book that have proven to work with many clients I have encountered during my consulting experiences. My depiction of a DevOps Engineering Blueprint is presented for as a useful, practical “big-picture” reference for discussing engineering the major parts of DevOps. Chapter two, “Nine Pillars of DevOps,” describes a classification of DevOps practices that I have found to be useful characterization of DevOps engineering practices readily applied when engineering DevOps implementations. Chapter three, “Why Is Engineering DevOps Important?,” explains the benefits of taking an engineering approach to engineering DevOps.

    Part II: Engineering People, Processes and Technologies for DevOps provides a comprehensive explanation of recommended engineering practices for the higher levels of the DevOps Engineering Blueprint. DevOps transformations are not normally understood or applied using strict engineering principles. Engineering practices are presented in nine chapters. “How Should DevOps Be Engineered?” includes a discussion of DevOps Engineering Maturity Levels for each of the Three Dimensions (People, Process, and Technology), Twenty-Seven DevOps Engineering Critical Success Factors and Lean DevOps Value-Stream Pipeline Engineering.

    I describe recommended engineering practices for the top layers of the DevOps Engineering Blueprint in the next chapters, which include “Value-Stream Management (VSM),” “Application Release Automation (ARA),” “Version Management,” “Continuous Security (a.k.a. DevSecOps),” “Service Catalog,” “Governance,” “Site Reliability Engineering (SRE),” “Disaster Mitigation” and “Recovery.”

    Part III: Engineering Applications, Pipelines, and Infrastructures Engineered for DevOps provides a comprehensive explanation of recommended engineering practices for the lower levels of the DevOps Engineering Blueprint, presented in six chapters as follows: “DevOps Applications Engineering,” “CI/CD Pipelines Engineering,” “Elastic Infrastructure Engineering,” “Continuous Test Engineering,” “Continuous Monitoring Engineering” and “Continuous Delivery and Deployment Engineering.”

    Part IV: DevOps Seven-Step Transformation Engineering Blueprint provides a description and tools for my approach to realize and evolve DevOps. The seven steps are Visioning, Alignment, Assessment, Solution Engineering, Realization, Operationalize and Expansion. By using these tools, DevOps leaders and practitioners can create, implement, operate and expand their DevOps across the organization. The chapter goes further to explain how to evolve DevOps from a successful First Way DevOps (Continuous Flow) toward realizing more advanced Second Way (Continuous Feedback) and Third Way (Continuous Improvement) DevOps implementations. This part includes a discussion of “Beyond Continuous Improvement”—a look at emerging technologies shaping DevOps in the future, and how you can prepare your DevOps and yourself for the future. This part includes a discussion of how to set up an effective DevOps engineering training program that supports continuous learning of DevOps engineering skills needed to maintain and enhance DevOps.

    Part V: Appendices, Continuous Learning, and References includes materials and sources I have found most useful for engineering DevOps.

    To get a copy of my book “Engineering DevOps: From Chaos to Continuous Improvement … and Beyond,” or start reading for free, click here.

    — Marc Hornbeek

  • Predictions 2020: Application Trends, Opportunities and Challenges

    Predictions 2020: Application Trends, Opportunities and Challenges

    Without wheeling out all the usual clichés, 2019 has been another whirlwind of disruptive innovation and opportunity–with plenty of challenges to tackle and circumvent along the way.

    The threat landscape mutated with predictable unpredictability, multi-cloud app deployments are becoming mainstream fixtures and DevOps methodologies started exerting a newfound influence on business plans.

    The big question is what happens next? What anticipated app-centric trends will change the game and tear up the rule book (again)?

    Digital Transformation Takes Shape

    In 2020, we will see more organizations shift away from aspirational sloganeering to substantively embrace what can, and should be, a seismic step-change.

    Inevitably, business leaders will get more involved in application decisions designed to differentiate or provide unique customer experiences.

    Expect a new generation of applications that support the scaling and expansion of business’ digital models to emerge. This will include taking advantage of cloud-native infrastructures and driving automation through software development.

    Further down the line, digital transformation efforts will likely be AI-assisted, particularly as they leverage more advanced capabilities in application platforms, telemetry, data analytics and ML/AI technologies.

    End-to-end instrumentation will enable application services to emit telemetry and act on insights produced through AI-driven analytics. We anticipate that these distributed application services will improve performance, security, operability and adaptability, without significant development effort.

    The Rise of Application Capital

    Applications are now firmly established as the main conduit for companies to develop and deliver goods and services. They have become modern enterprises’ important assets.

    Even so, most still only have an approximate sense of how many applications they have, where they’re running or whether they’re under threat.

    This will soon change.

    To manage Application Capital effectively, it is essential to establish a company-wide strategy that sets policy and ensures compliance. This includes addressing how applications are built, acquired, deployed, managed, secured and retired. At a high level, there are six distinct and unavoidable steps that need to take place: build an inventory, assess the cyber risks, define application categories, identify the application services needed for specific activities, define deployment parameters and clarify roles and responsibilities.

    The primary aim of an application strategy should always be to enhance and secure all digital capabilities–even as their reach and influence shift and expand.

    DevOps’ Culture Club

    The technical minutiae DevOps methodologies and associated tools got a lot of publicity this year. 

    2020 will be all about getting the culture right, marrying theory with best practice and unlocking new levels of productivity without upsetting the operational apple cart.

    Culture is not optional. Team structure alone dramatically changes pipeline automation, with traditional single-function teams often falling behind their contemporary, DevOps-driven counterparts. 

    Consequently, we will see more collaborative team structures and alignment on key metrics that give NetOps additional means to focus on what the business requires: faster and more frequent deployments.

    DevOps has a 10-year head start on NetOps in navigating and overcoming obstacles around certain types of integration, tools and skillsets. Collaborative teams can explode the status quo by promoting standardization on tools that span from delivery to deployment (such as Jenkins and GitHub/GitLab).

    DevOps should not–and cannot–end with delivery. That means deployment functions–along with a complex pipeline of devices and application services–must be automated. This won’t happen without effective cultural realignment.

    The Data Center Is Alive and Kicking

    Conflating the adoption of SaaS with IaaS caused speculation that cloud was cannibalizing IT. Pundits warned that data centers would disappear. 

    The rumors were exaggerated. Data centers are still being built, expanded and run around the globe. The cloud hasn’t managed to–and likely never will–kill the data center.

    Early in 2019, an IDC executive told channel partners at the IGEL Disrupt conference that over 80% of companies they surveyed anticipated repatriating public cloud workloads. Security, visibility and performance remain common concerns.

    Repatriation-related opportunities include improving availability of multi-cloud operational tools and a push toward application architectures that rely on more portable technologies such as containers. 

    The data center is not dead. It’s just evolving. 

    Application Protection Challenges

    According to F5 Labs, the server-side language PHP–used for at least 80% of websites since 2013–will continue to supply rich, soft targets for hackers. Situational awareness is critical to mitigate both vulnerabilities and threats.

    Businesses are also realizing that applications encompass more than just the code they execute. Attention needs to be paid to everything that makes them tick, including architecture, configurations, other connectable assets and users. The prevalence of access attacks, such as phishing, are an obvious case in point.

    F5 Labs analysis of 2019 breach data confirms the need for risk-based security programs instead of perfunctory best practice poses or checklists. Organizations need to tailor controls to reflect the threats they actually face. The first step in any risk assessment is a substantive (and ongoing) inventory process.

    As ever, the industry will gradually incorporate emerging risks into business models. For example, cloud computing has gradually shifted from a bleeding-edge risk to a cornerstone of modern infrastructure. The risks associated with the cloud have either been mitigated or displaced to contractual risk in the form of service level agreements and audits. 

    API and You Know It

    The word is out. Application programming interfaces (APIs) can transform business models and directly generate revenue. Cybercriminals know this.

    More than ever, organizations need to focus on the API layer, particularly in terms of securing access to the business functions they represent.

    One of the biggest issues is overly broad permissions, which means attacks through the API can give bad actors visibility into everything within the application infrastructure. API calls are also prone to the usual web request pitfalls such as injections, credential brute force, parameter tampering and session snooping.

    Visibility is another major and pervasive problem. Organizations of every stripe–including IT vendors–have a notoriously poor track record of maintaining situational API awareness. 

    API security can be implemented directly in an application or, even better, in an API gateway. An API gateway can further protect APIs with capabilities such as rate limiting (to prevent denial of service attacks) and authorization. Authorization narrows access to APIs by allowing access to specific API calls to only specified clients, usually identified by tokens or API keys. An API gateway can also limit the HTTP methods used and log attempts to abuse other methods so you’re aware of attempted attacks.

    Appy New Year!

    All this is of course the tip of an increasingly interconnected iceberg. Any New Year’s resolution worth its salt should include a commitment to comprehensively master the development, deployment, operation and governance of application portfolio. The best way to do this, and to get visibility into the code-to-customer pathways for all applications, is to leverage a consistent set of multi-cloud application services. Here’s to a safe, innovative and transformational 2020!

    Want to learn more about what to expect in 2020? Join us Jan. 23 for our Predict 2020 Virtual Summit  featuring discussions from some of the industry’s best and brightest offering up their visions for the future. Sign up today for this free daylong virtual event.

    — Vincent Lavergne

  • App Mobility Is the New Use Case

    App Mobility Is the New Use Case

    Selling increased investment in DevOps is not always easy. It takes time to implement, resource away from other projects and inevitably there is cash outlay. If not done carefully, it also appears to introduce chaos, something most of us in IT strive to avoid.

    But the benefits, at this point, are easy to document. Plenty of companies have tried and succeeded in moving to a more agile/DevOps approach to deployment. Yes, companies have failed, but the publicly acknowledged failures have also been dissected for lessons learned, which can help in your transformation.

    Every advice site suggests tying DevOps/digital transformation to business goals, which is a good idea, but is harder to do most of the time.

    Not any more. The truth is the future is mobile. Not as in mobile phones or cross platform (though both have a place in the future), but in the ability to run an app where it makes the most sense today with the knowledge that tomorrow there might be a better place to run it.

    Historically, the architectural choices of yesterday’s teams become a burden on today’s teams. I’ve worked at a major insurer where a mainframe flat file DB system was keeping an application from moving. I’ve worked at a power company where we were not allowed to modify a system running on OS/2 because no one quite knew how to maintain it. I’ve worked at an energy services company where I spent a year trying to re-create Novell IPX solutions in an Ethernet environment…The list goes on.

    What if we could avoid leaving such a legacy to future teams, and be more responsive to business needs/profitability in the future? That is, in a nutshell, what containers offer you. Today, you are running your app internally in a container management system. Tomorrow you’re running it on AWS in a container management system.

    There are things to watch out for–most vendor-sponsored container management makes it very easy to use containers on their platform of choice, but difficult to move containers. IBM, as one of the least intrusive examples, offers integration with their proprietary tools. Once you’ve taken those integrations, your mobility/options are more limited. As I mentioned, IBM is one of the more open companies out there. They offer value for tying you down, but if you don’t need those services, it’s better not to use them so you can move the application at will.

    Situations change, and containers allow for those changes. You may have a huge budget for external cloud apps today, but reasons ranging from internal cost decisions to regulatory changes could force your organization to reconsider options in just a few short months.

    That makes mobility important to business. So does cost management. No matter what the cheapest architecture to deploy on tomorrow is, wherever makes the most sense is going to be a hit.

    But how portable are they? Depends upon the app, and the implementation. An application that is developed as a group, able to run in a single pod (or multiple exact copies in multiple pods) is an easy thing to move about. One with containers spread across a variety of platforms, each doing what it is best at, will be more difficult to move. Persistent storage kind of guarantees that most enterprise apps have limited mobility–at least for the time being.

    Any app that can be moved to the cloud can be containerized first, granting mobility that means no need for massive conversion efforts if the cloud doesn’t work out. Any app pulled back from the cloud to the DC has the same potential, the issue of where the data lives is real no matter what architecture is chosen for implementation. But for any app that can be moved, it can be put into containers and moved far more easily in the future. For many apps, it is simply dropping it into the new environment and configuring networking to route traffic to the new location.

    We’re already going to leave future teams with a hodge-podge of databases, programming languages and networking tools such as WAF/load balancing. Let’s make life a little easier on them, and help increase the use of DevOps, by deploying with containers and targeting whatever makes sense for the org today, secure that tomorrow that can change and our burden will be less than it might have been.

    — Don Macvittie

  • Chief Digital Officers Driving Digital Transformation

    Chief Digital Officers Driving Digital Transformation

    The chief digital officer has always been a position that has struck me as a bit awkward as part chief marketing officer and part chief information officer. Since the CDO position started gaining traction about five years ago, most industry watchers have pegged it as a temporary role that would be displaced after the urgency of the early digital transformation efforts were complete.

    The CDO being a transient position is still the prevailing view, but history has shown the popular opinion at any given time is not often the correct opinion. A survey released this week by digital services provider Mindtree found that the CDO may have more staying power than conventional wisdom suggests.

    The survey, conducted among 323 global businesses and IT professionals in the U.S. and U.K. who work under a CDO, found that 76% of respondents believe the CDO position is becoming more relevant since the role was created. Only 7% believe the CDO role is less relevant today.

    Eighty-one percent of respondents agreed that their organization likely needs a CDO. Mindtree’s survey also found that respondents believe their CDO has been effective at championing business-driving digital initiatives, including providing seamless digital experiences to customers (27%) and creating new business models (20%).

    The survey found, not so surprisingly, that at 70% of respondent organizations, their chief digital officer comes from an IT background. And of those organizations, 84% claim to have made significant digital progress since their chief digital officer took their reins. Somewhat fewer organizations (73%) whose chief digital officer came from a non-IT background cited that they have made significant digital progress.

    Still, challenges remain for CDOs if they are going to continue with their success. The survey found that about a third of organizations’ resistance to change is the largest obstacle in the way of chief digital officers, and 38% said they need to collaborate better across business units and find new digital talent in order to succeed.

    The number of enterprises with a chief digital officer has grown significantly. According to the most recent annual Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey, the percentage of enterprises with a CDO rose to 48% in 2018, up from only 25% in 2017. Still, the survey showed that most of those positions (about 90%) had chief digital officers in temporary positions, with one in five choosing instead to have their CIOs perform chief digital officer duties.

    Whether or not the chief digital officer becomes a permanent corporate fixture or proves to be a bridge position, as enterprises play catch up with their digital transformation efforts, remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: the work they are doing today is vital for the long-term success of the enterprises their working for.

    — George V. Hulme

  • Survey Sees Massive Adoption of Microservices

    Survey Sees Massive Adoption of Microservices

    Under increasing pressure to innovate faster, a majority (84%) of organizations taking part in a recent survey have already embraced microservices.

    The survey, conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of API management platform provider Kong, polled 200 senior IT leaders in organizations with more than 1,000 employees. Among the results, 89% of technology leaders agree that companies that are not able to effectively support microservices will be less able to compete in the future.

    The report also finds on average organizations are running 184 microservices, with 60% of respondents running 50 or more. The primary reasons cited for adopting microservices are improvements to security (56%), increased development speed (55%), increased speed of integrating new technologies (53%), improved infrastructure flexibility (53%) and improved collaboration across teams (46%).

    Kong CTO Marco Palladino said the report makes it clear that just about every organization is on a journey to making a transition to microservices as part of an effort to reduce reliance on inflexible monolithic applications. Initially, that transition involves lifting and shifting monolithic applications in the cloud before decoupling functions using microservices, he said.

    As part of that journey, Palladino noted, the survey also finds significant microservices challenges remain, including ensuring security (36%), integration with legacy applications (32%), the complexity of management (31%) and updating API documentation (31%).

    Despite these concerns, however, more than 80% of survey respondents who have adopted microservices report that their organization performs well against metrics for development efficiency, the ability to use new platforms, collaboration across teams and sharing of services across applications.

    Overall, a full 90% of respondents said securely connecting applications and ensuring performance at scale collectively represent one of the greatest technical challenges of the 21st century. Also, 71% said they believe that organizations would be out of business within six years if they fail to keep pace with innovation in their industry. For public companies, the urgency is even greater, with 39% reporting they believe organizations will be out of business in less than three years if they fail to keep pace with innovation. Overall, 57% of technology leaders feel organizations are concerned that they are at risk of competitive displacement.

    Pressure on IT leaders is high as a result. Nearly three-quarters of respondents (74%) agree that a failed digital transformation effort will result in a missed promotion, lost bonus or even termination. The report identifies the top three priorities for IT leaders as improving efficiency (47%), reducing cost (41%) and increasing security (40%).

    Technology leaders, however, continue to place the highest importance on the availability (75%), security (74%), performance (65%) and scalability (64%). At the same time, technology leaders are focused on faster development speeds (95%), increased collaboration (94%) and reduced deployment risks (93%) as key desired outcomes for adopting any new technologies.

    The challenges most cited in terms of achieving those agility goals are the complexity of using multiple technologies (35%), lack of automation (32%) and reliance on legacy technologies (29%).

    The survey also notes 83% of organizations are relying on open source software to become more agile. The most commonly used open source technologies are databases (64%), containers (48%), API gateways (41%), infrastructure automation (40%), container orchestration (37%) and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools (36%).

    In terms of cloud adoption, Microsoft Azure (43%) narrowly beat Amazon Web Services (AWS) (42%), with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) coming in third at 27%.

    On the plus side, 78% of respondents said their organizations are increasing IT budgets in the coming year, with 27% of public companies expecting their budgets to grow 26% or more. Nearly 90% of companies will also be increasing headcount, with 56% hiring internally and 31% relying on more freelancers and/or outsourcing to meet hiring goals.

    Hopefully, with that increased funding more organizations will be able to strike that elusive balance between stability and innovation.

    — Mike Vizard

  • The Next Frontier for Enterprises: Moving to a Product IT Operating Model

    The Next Frontier for Enterprises: Moving to a Product IT Operating Model

    In the world of technology, there are few things as dramatic and impactful as enterprise IT’s recent ascent from an enabler to a strategic business driver. Tasked with powering next-gen digital business models, IT teams today are fast realizing the harsh truth that they must make a pervasive strategic shift from traditional project-based operating model to a product-centric one. 

    Traditional project-based operating models focus resources on a specific application or project, leading to fragmented experiences and a disconnect with the rest of the IT organization or company. For instance, in many cases, one team may be working on a back-end system, while entirely different teams work on the front-end application or updating databases. A product-based operating model takes a more holistic approach to ensure projects are integrated and teams work concurrently toward a uniform goal. 

    The days of plan/build/run are numbered as digitization forces IT leaders to act fast, think outside the norm and embrace the blurring boundaries between the digital and physical worlds. A product-centric operating model, sometimes also referred to as a DevOps operating model, accelerates organization-wide digital transformation and consolidates a business’ competitive standing. Companies must transition to a product-centric model to scale-up their agile programs to support end-to-end innovation and reduce siloed operations and projects. 

    The companies that have embraced a product-centric operating model are quickly realizing the benefits, but for many IT departments, they have yet to experience or fully understand why the shift is imperative.

    What’s Driving the Shift to Product IT Operating Model?

    As digitization takes hold and becomes more and more pervasive, CIOs are realizing that intertwining IT and business objectives is quintessential to respond to market changes quickly and remain competitive. Since 2018, volatility has returned to global equity markets in a big way. With the economy in a constant state of flux, coupled with rapid globalization and unprecedented disruption from technology, the average lifespan of a company is 20 years, compared to 60 years in the 1950s, according to Credit Suisse. Overall, the changing business environment makes few things as abundantly clear as this–agility, an appetite for new markets, new products, bias for action and a fail-fast approach will be the new mandates for IT leaders going forward. 

    To this end, most CIOs are replacing portfolios of discrete, siloed projects with product lines that enable a specific business capability. The key factors driving the shift toward a product IT operating model include:

    • Need for Holistic Transformation: Siloed functions have no place in the digital business world that thrives on integration of data and information across structure, culture, processes and technologies. To enable holistic transformation, organizations must draw a balance and establish cross-collaboration between organizational guidelines versus autonomy of teams for process, architecture, technology, tools, etc.
    • Lack of Alignment in Traditional IT Operating Models: Lack of alignment across large teams and multiple organizational groups (such as IT, finance and business) prevents organizations from executing an end-to-end digital strategy. Shifting to a product IT operating model can help steer organizational units toward a common goal. It can facilitate greater collaboration between different DevOps teams that support different products and domains. Recognizing the failure of existing IT governance and the pressing need for a shared digital transformation vision, IDC predicts 40% of CIOs will adopt new digital governance models.
    • Need for Speed: Most companies cited that their digitization efforts were hindered by inflexible or slow processes with a traditional IT operating model. Adopting a product-oriented management approach for IT can help organizations define and agree on a pace of change congruent with their readiness and appetite. According to IDC, 65% of CIOs will expand Agile/DevOps practices into the wider business to achieve the velocity necessary for innovation, execution and change by 2021.
    • Lack of Integration Between Old and New Technologies: Lack of integration between new and existing technologies is a key factor that keeps organizations from realizing the full potential of digitization. Modern companies need to balance innovation, experimentation, adoption of new technologies and tools with the enterprise’s need for business results, cooperation, risk management and compliance. Because a product-centric model takes a holistic, end-to-end approach, it is ideal for integrating technologies, processes and teams at scale.

    Embracing a Next-Gen Operating Model

    To compete with newer, nimbler companies such as Facebook, Uber, Spotify and others, traditional companies that are serious about continued growth are leaving no stone unturned and embracing a product IT operating model. From being providers of reliable IT services, CIOs have emerged as strategic partners in driving business transformation. Modern day CIOs are driving business innovation and identifying opportunities for competitive differentiation, not delivering ad-hoc, siloed services. As cloud-first and AI-first become the new mandates for organizations, re-engineering the IT operating model is quickly becoming central to creating value, competitive advantage and growth.

    — Rohit Nand

  • SMBs Struggle with Digital Transformation

    SMBs Struggle with Digital Transformation

    It’s a cliché, but it’s as true now as ever: The only constant in business is change. Digital transformation efforts are as essential for small and mid-sized businesses as they are for large enterprises—and SMBs are engaged in their transformative efforts for largely the same reasons as large enterprises: to engage more effectively with customers, streamline business processes and improve productivity.

    What is surprising, however, is many of the challenges small and mid-sized businesses face when it comes to their digital transformation efforts are also similar to those of larger companies.

    According to Insight 2020 Technology Report: IT Trends for Midmarket and Small Business, a survey-based report from IT services provider Insight, even as 95% of IT professionals who work at SMBs have implemented, or plan to implement within the next year, digital transformation initiatives, 49% said integrating new technology with legacy systems is very challenging to extremely challenging.

    Understandably, when survey respondents cited their top challenges when deploying the best available technology 52% said information security concerns, while 46% pointed to their ability to find the tools that best fit with their existing technology. Surprisingly, all three of those concerns surpassed budget constraints in importance.

    Respondents also cited cloud computing as the most important technology when it comes to the growth of their organization. Next up were data analytics, artificial intelligence and IoT.

    Fifty-six percent of small and mid-sized businesses said comparing cloud costs to current costs is their biggest barrier to cloud migration. That was followed by security requirements (50%). When it comes specifically to cloud, 65% of respondents said security and compliance are their primary challenges.

    The survey also highlighted that small and mid-sized businesses may need to focus on improving how they engage with IT services providers. The survey found 41% of respondents said they use from six to 10 IT vendors, with another 24% saying they use more than 10—not all is rosy in these relationships. Many respondents cited hurdles when it came to working with their service providers, and they rated the following as “very” to “extremely” challenging when working with their vendors:

    • Customizing solutions to business needs and objectives (44%).
    • Coordinating internal and external resources on complex IT projects (43%).
    • Vendors cater more to larger enterprises (43%).
    • Asset managing and juggling licenses from multiple providers (40%).
    • Vendors do not understand small business needs (40%).

    The survey did find that 64% of respondents believe their IT program is very flexible at adapting to organizational changes and growth, while 57% of respondents believe their IT program is well-equipped to implement new technologies.

    These challenges echo the challenges faced by large enterprises, such as those we covered in our post, Legacy Systems Prove to be Digital Transformation Headwind. And, of course, large enterprises have challenges with budget, security and talent constraints.

    The research was conducted online by M/A/R/C Research among 408 IT decision-makers at small and mid-sized organizations with 10 to 1,000 employees in the U.S. and Canada. The Data was collect from Aug. 29 through Sept. 6, 2019.

    — George V. Hulme

  • Predict 2020: What Will the New Year Bring?

    Predict 2020: What Will the New Year Bring?

    With the holiday season upon us, our thoughts naturally turn to the next year and what it has in store for us. Will we come into more money? Will we find true happiness? Will there be better integration between DevOps and security? Will there be more Kubernetes instances? The first two may be a little hazy, but it’s a good bet the second two will be discussed during Predict 2020 Virtual Summit, Jan. 23, 2020, where an all-star lineup of industry luminaries will offer up their visions for the future.

    Crystal ball? Check. Swami hat? Check. Insight relevant to the industry? Check. Very smart people who know what they’re talking about? Double check.

    Similar to last year’s event, Predict 2020 will feature a virtual environment with a conference lobby, presentation theater, expo hall and more. More than a series of YouTube live presentations, it is truly a conference experience from the comfort of your desk.

    Speakers

    Our keynote speakers for this daylong event include analysts, practitioners, venture capitalists and thought leaders from the realms of DevOps, cloud native, cybersecurity, digital transformation and IT. Each will share their best predictions for the year 2020 and beyond.

    Among those slated to speak are:

    There will also be an exhibit hall where you can interact with other attendees and sponsors, watch videos and download more information.

    It should be a great day of learning and networking right from the comfort of your own chair.

    Registration and Sponsor Info

    You can register now at https://predict2020.io. Attendance is free.

    If you are curious about what the experts, pundits and luminaries think will be the big trends and stories of the coming year, mark your calendar and attend Predict 2020.

    Save Your Virtual Spot

    — Alan Shimel