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Tag: digital transformation

  • Digital Transformation: Measuring What Matters

    Digital Transformation: Measuring What Matters

    As enterprises strive to digitize their organizations, whether it’s digitally transforming aspects of sales and marketing, customer interactions or supply chain, they’re undergoing a wholesale revamp of traditional businesses into digital business models. While some companies are just getting started, as we covered earlier this month in Digital Transformation: Coming from Behind, the bulk of those enterprises that have already embarked on digital transformation efforts—70% according to some findings—fail to meet their objectives.

    How do enterprises flip such statistics around? We reached out to a group of experts to find out, and collected their thoughts on how organizations can attain better digital transformation results through better quantification of their efforts.

    It sounds simple enough, as Cyril Attia, CEO at BeMyApp puts it: Success should be measured in alignment with the key performance indicators (KPIs) of the business. He said, when advising his customers, he makes certain “one of the main focuses is to identify if these efforts are directly related to bringing in or maintaining clients which ultimately have an impact on the bottom line.”

    Stay Focused on Core Business Objectives

    Not staying focused on core business goals is at the essence of the challenge. “One of the reasons that digital business transformation is so ambiguous, and in an overall sorry state, is that the objectives are not clear,” said AgilePoint CEO Jesse Shiah. Organizations should make themselves clear about their desired outcomes and what it is they specifically seek to improve, he said, adding this is best achieved by tying digital transformation initiatives to key performance indicators that can best determine the health of the business.

    “Through your efforts, are you making progress against those goals, do you need to adjust course? Once you’ve found a successful formula, think about how that success can be replicated in other areas of the business,” he said.

    Kyle Hutchins, a senior director at business and technology consulting firm West Monroe Partners, agreed. The key to initial success is identifying the right KPIs, starting small, and proving out the viability of the idea, he said.

    “Success metrics should be tied to your overall business strategy and not live as a standalone set of KPIs. Once you have a short list identified, ensure you are tracking the progress and able to measure the impact,” Hutchens noted. “When you have a win, share the success broadly within the organization, tie (it) back to your digital vision and use that as an entry point into other areas of the business.”

    Shift to Value-Based Measures

    Dave West, CEO and product owner at Scrum.org contended that, when it comes to measuring digital transformation success, traditional motion metrics such as velocity, as well as efficiency on time and budget measurements, should be replaced with external value-based measures that will establish the baseline that the effectiveness of change will be measured against. “For each value stream or customer aligned team, the measures will be unique. For instance, value for one customer might be a net promoter score; for another, it might be direct revenue. However you measure value, there are three types of things that should be considered: current value, time to value and innovation,” he said.

    West defines current value as to how one directly measures the current value of your product and can include measures such as numbers of users, revenue, profitability and brand. While time to value ratios, how long it takes to deliver from an idea to its implementation? When it comes to measuring innovation, West says, innovation should be measured as the percentage of new stuff versus fixes/infrastructure being changed when a release is made.

    Attia added that such effective KPIs will indicate if outputs are being achieved faster or cheaper, ultimately decreasing overall costs and improving profits.

    Hutchins said there isn’t a single list of magical KPIs, and points to a set of questions (suggested by Gartner firm) designed to help create digital KPIs:

    • What is being measured?
    • Where are we today?
    • What is our target goal?
    • What is the desired business outcome or benefit?
    • What is our balance point?

    Craig Besnoy, program director and digital strategy consultant at Mindtree, has a straightforward way he suggests companies look to track their success. That’s by the internal popularity of the program. “Companies should track their success based on the number (of) departments in the organization that are requesting access to the digital transformation program,” he said. “Once the organization experiences the increased efficiencies and revenue that digital transformation can bring, managing the requests will be the biggest challenge.”

    — George V. Hulme

  • HybridOps: Driving Better Collaboration and Productivity in IT

    HybridOps: Driving Better Collaboration and Productivity in IT

    Over the past 10 years, enterprise technology has experienced an enormous amount of upheaval. Developers started self-servicing, leading to “shadow IT.” The DevOps movement and alignment with Agile methods started gaining popularity, and thought leaders started making statements about how DevOps is the future and ITIL/ITSM and other traditional practices are the past.

    With all these changes, it’s no wonder that the words “digital transformation” have become highly charged and central IT teams feel—not entirely without justification—that their budgets and influence are on the wane. As a result (and partly due to misplaced self-preservation and wanting to stay relevant), these IT teams push back against any kind of cooperation with more developer-centric teams, leading to low levels of digital sophistication and decreased productivity.

    Introducing HybridOps

    This is where HybridOps comes in. We at PagerDuty coined the term HybridOps following feedback from customers to describe the reality of digital transformation in large enterprises—which is one in which technology teams will have a variety of operating models, velocities, tools and practices.

    Rather than a dogmatic focus on velocity and stack-ranking teams according to how “mature” they are, HybridOps focuses on three principles:

    1. Learning culture: It doesn’t matter what operating model (DevOps, ITIL or something in between) teams are using, as long as they can meet the needs of the business and have a culture of continuous learning and improvement.
    2. Communication and empathy: Open communication, constant sharing of operational data between teams and empathy for colleagues are much bigger drivers of digital operations productivity than rigorous adherence to a methodology handed down from executive management.
    3. Autonomy: Teams should have the autonomy to choose and use the tools they prefer—as long as those tools allow for open data exchange with other teams. Instead of forcing teams to use tools they don’t need or want, a better approach is to implement technologies that can bridge data and written communication gaps between teams that need to collaborate.

    HybridOps is ultimately a pragmatic, incremental, big-tent approach to digital transformation. Our most successful enterprise customers use this approach to roll out their digital transformation efforts, as opposed to the top-down, “Send everyone to Agile training,” enforced-compliance approach. In our experience, using the forced approach typically means teams end up using the language and processes of Agile development practices but actually fail to collaborate with others or make a meaningful impact on becoming more customer-centric.

    Measuring HybridOps Success

    All this talk about HybridOps is well and good, but how can organizations measure success in a HybridOps world? It’s actually very similar to other areas of a mature business: Leaders need to establish behavioral norms and measure outcomes (instead of outputs) relative to business needs.

    For example, it’s unnecessary to benchmark the mainframe team against the web team with metrics such as the number of deploys per day, tickets resolved per month or even system throughput. After all, a mainframe batch process that runs twice a week isn’t necessarily less operationally mature than a serverless function that can return an instant response.

    In short, when it comes to measuring performance, it all depends on the operational context and needs of the business—and it’s best to establish some common metrics that prevent overwork and burnout and use them across all teams.

    Culture, Culture, Culture

    Finally, one last word on culture. HybridOps can only succeed when senior leadership creates a high-trust culture. Blamelessness and fostering a learning culture are key here. Open communication and empathy for colleagues are important cultural values underpinning HybridOps that leaders need to establish and reinforce continuously. If leaders use ownership and control of data as a way to name and shame others when something goes wrong, a HybridOps approach won’t work.

    Ultimately, HybridOps is fundamentally a kinder, gentler route to digital transformation—one that’s focused on meeting people where they are and how they’re used to work. It encourages data-driven process improvements free of blame, avoids shaming people who aren’t “DevOps enough,” and creates high levels of empathy between technical professionals within an organization. It puts the focus on outcomes instead of outputs and favors collaboration and productivity over arguments about tools.

    — Julian Dunn

  • Digital Transformation: Coming from Behind

    Digital Transformation: Coming from Behind

    For many years, enterprises have been in a race to digitally transform how they work through the digitization of all areas of their business, to reduce costs and business frictions through creating efficiencies and delivering increased value to their customers. While many organizations have attempted a transformation, few have been successful.

    Research from the consultancy McKinsey & Company finds that less than one-third of transformations are successful.

    How do organizations that find themselves today, perhaps after several failed transformations starts or having procrastinated getting started, get themselves back on track before they find themselves too far behind the competition to ever hope to catch up? We reached out to several experts to find out.

    First, many of those advised organizations that currently find themselves digital laggards should not rush into a digital transformation out of fear of missing out. “Don’t pursue digital transformation with a FOMO mindset,” said Andy Lin, senior vice president of strategy and consulting at Nexient, a software services provider. “Approach it with clear, measurable business results in mind, such as increased market share or increased revenue. Focus on how the end state of your transformation—business capabilities, technical capabilities, digital experience capabilities and similar—will make the biggest impact, and prioritize accordingly,” he said.

    Research from business consultancy West Monroe Partners, which ranked respondents by maturity, found 21% of respondents are digitally mature and 17.9% as very digitally mature. There remains a sizable percentage, 35.9%, who are either not digitally mature at all or slightly digitally mature.

    Trailing in digital maturity likely means those organizations find themselves feeling the pressure from some constituents: shareholders, customers, competitors and others, said Justin Rodenbostel, vice president of delivery services at digital transformation agency SPR. “If pressure is coming from lagging customer engagement, then one should become more familiar with customer desires through research or analyze how other industries are innovating and transforming,” he said. “Pressure from competition might require competitive analysis, market research or research into applications of potentially disruptive technologies,” Rodenbostel advises those who are trying to identify where they should focus on their catch-up efforts.

    Scrum.org CEO and product owner Dave West agreed: “Enterprises embarking on a digital transformation should look at their business strategy, their customer base and start with that; building teams that align to the customer, empowering them to drive technology and business decisions to make that customer successful.”

    Also, when they set a course, enterprises need to be sure to set goals to be set to such business outcomes as well, said Nick Polachek, senior principal strategy for Maven Wave. Instead of prioritizing technical results, such as building an enterprise DevOps pipeline, it’s better to focus on results associated with business-driven outcomes, such as improved customer experience. “To prioritize effectively, you need to understand business drivers and divide technology initiatives into attainable slices that create real business value and quick wins,” he said.

    West Monroe found many attributes—from the use of digital in sales to leveraging data—that organizations should prioritize based on their digital maturity. “An organization can fast-track its maturity by prioritizing certain characteristics over others, regardless of industry. For instance, those with the lowest maturity should prioritize innovation that addresses customer pain points and those with the highest maturity should prioritize best-in-class cybersecurity. More accelerators can be found in our research,” said Kyle Hutchins, senior director at West Monroe Partners.

    Finally, as the organization attempts to increase its digital transformation maturity, others advise organizations prioritize their digital transformation efforts that will get widespread support throughout the enterprise—which usually translates to initiatives that will increase sales. “Since most organizations are designed to support sales efforts, prioritizing transformation within the sales organization is an effective way to motivate the organization to transform,” said Craig Besnoy, program director and digital strategy consultant at Mindtree, IT services provider.

    Still, and this could be why so many digital transformations fail, a sizable percentage of organizations—41%, according to research and strategic consulting firm Altimeter—make investments in digital transformation without ever seeking the guidance from thorough customer research.

    — George V. Hulme

  • 5 Practices That Will Help Drive Successful Robotic Process Automation Deployments

    5 Practices That Will Help Drive Successful Robotic Process Automation Deployments

    Enterprises have begun to invest considerably in robotic process automation (RPA) in recent years. RPA is one of the critical technologies that enterprises now are leveraging to automate their business processes to make their businesses more agile and efficient. When properly deployed and managed, RPAs can automate everything from mundane tasks (such as organizing files) to more significant functions, such as user provisioning to resources and more.

    While RPAs do promise to help businesses move more quickly and with more agility, a company’s RPA strategy needs to be executed effectively across the organization. In my recent discussions with CIOs and others implementing RPA, the following practices repeatedly were mentioned as essential to RPA success.

    Understand the Process Being Automated and How RPA Impacts Other Operations

    One of the most common mistakes made is not thoroughly understanding the process being automated and the potential implications of automating the process. An example would include a business process that is time-sensitive and automated, which throws off the workflow timing. It’s possible the automation moves things along too quickly.

    Another example would be not taking into consideration the nature of the data being accessed. If it’s regulated or sensitive data, there are security implications that must be managed. If the bot potentially will process sensitive or regulated information, the bot should be controlled appropriately. RPA technology is an IT function, and at the very least IT and security should be made aware of and potentially involved in the oversight of the bot. It’s much better to inform them and bring them in early than them finding out later about an army of bots managing and manipulating information.

    Consider Refining the Process Before Automating

    After the process being automated is understood, evaluate the process for potential optimization. Sometimes processes that have been underway in organizations for years are more than just inefficient; they’re actually antiquated. Look for ways the process can be made more effective; consult all stakeholders when necessary or warranted; and consider refining the process if possible. There’s no sense in automating an inefficient process.

    Document, Test and Catalog Your RPAs

    After the RPA is built, make sure to document its functionality and how its code works and examine its functionality. The RPA is now ready to be used. It’s important to continually monitor the RPA for potential abuse or something gone wonky. Send all the documentation relating to the bot to the IT department.

    As the Bot Owner, Know You’re Responsible for Your Bot

    Should the bot do something unexpected or unwanted, prepare to answer for it as the bot, or business process, owner. Make sure the bot is managing risk within its acceptable scope and that it’s not given too high a level of access. While you as process owner may have administrative rights to an application, does it make sense for those rights to be transferred to the bot? Perhaps it does, and perhaps it doesn’t. It’s a risk management call and will vary from situation to situation. Just be aware that, as the owner, you also own the risk.

    Remember Your Bot May Live Beyond Your Tenure

    In one, two or five years from now you may not be in your current job position. It’s essential that the bot is constructed for this eventuality. Beyond the proper documentation and cataloging of the bot mentioned previously, put into place the appropriate identity and entitlement management of the bot. Down the road, someone may want to enhance the bot with machine learning or AI capabilities. For when this happens, it’ll be essential to have the bot well-documented as well as its entitlements well-defined.

    Consider Centralizing the RPA Deployment Process

    While some enterprises have chosen to undergo organizationwide automation efforts, others are dipping their toes in tepidly with small RPA pilots. Others still haven’t decided on how to incorporate bots within their organization, so it’s happening organically and haphazardly as individuals and departments decide to make a go of it on their own.

    If an organization is large enough, it may make good sense to put into place an RPA center of excellence. It will provide a repository of policies and strategies for RPA deployment, help catalog bot capabilities and dependencies and help drive overall RPA efficiency as the organization becomes more and more automated.

    These bots are here to stay—in fact, they are going to grow in numbers. Technology research and advisory firm Gartner expects global spending for RPA to reach $2.4 billion in 2022, up from $680 million last year. That’s an increase of 57 percent annually. RPAs help drive efficiencies and remove mundane, low-risk tasks and workflows so that humans can focus on higher value and higher cognitive tasks.

    — George V. Hulme

  • Digital Transformation Technology and Process: More Similar Than You Think

    Digital Transformation Technology and Process: More Similar Than You Think

    Right around this time of the year, the gym starts to get a little less crowded. Throughout January, it’s packed to the gills with folks freshly motivated by their New Year’s resolutions to get in shape. But by mid-February, the commitment seems to have all but dissipated.

    Why is it so hard to just commit?

    During my last workout, it occurred to me that the set of vacant treadmills next to mine was eerily reminiscent of the state of enterprise DevOps. According to Forrester, 50 percent of digital transformation efforts stalled in 2018. It seems commitment and follow-through are difficult in both personal and professional arenas. Admittedly, adopting and scaling DevOps is no easy feat. While reflecting on what does work, I found some parallels between the transformation process and DevOps itself.

    What Success Looks Like

    According to DORA’s “2018 State of DevOps report,” organizations with the highest level of DevOps execution, as measured by throughput and stability, also achieved the highest level of business performance in terms of profitability, market share and customer satisfaction. In a true case of going fast without breaking things, elite performers realized impressive performance gains:

    • 46 times more frequent deployments (throughput)
    • 2,555 times shorter lead times (throughput)
    • 7 times lower change failure rate (stability)
    • 2,604 times shorter time to recovery (stability)

    These metrics underlie a key tenet of DevOps transformation, which is breaking up large chunks of work into many small pieces.

    Shrinking the Change

    Smaller changes mean getting work out faster, with less risk. They take less time to plan, less effort to execute and are easier to troubleshoot. But, smaller code changes alone aren’t meaningful unless they are coupled with shorter release cycles. In essence, agile without CD doesn’t work.

    Stockpiling a few months worth of agile code iterations into a single monolithic release reintroduces an enormous amount of risk and negates much of the work done to adopt agile software development in the first place. Big queued-up releases often mean someone is stuck working the weekend to iron out all of the things that inevitably go wrong and no one should be stuck with weekend release duty. As Jez Humble put it, “The most important metric for continuous delivery is the number of person hours spent outside of business hours doing releases… and the goal for that is zero.”

    In practice, CD is what brings agile development to fruition; it’s why Gartner finds that 40 percent of IT departments have already invested in CI/CD with a full third planning to invest in 2019. CD is all about small pieces. In the same way agile enables smaller code changes, CD enables smaller releases.

    Not Just Smaller, but Iterative

    At GitLab we use the phrase, “just commit” as a shorthand for continuous delivery and deployment. The idea is that when you have a completely automated CI/CD pipeline, all a developer needs to do is commit code to their branch, and everything else needed to get that code running live in a production-like environment—from containerization to security testing—is automated. Similarly, getting code to production is as easy as merging the feature branch back into trunk with the entire production deployment automated. The message to the developer is, “Just commit your code and let your DevOps tooling do the rest.” This is CD in a nutshell.

    With this type of automation in place, the cost of making a change significantly decreases. This means the cost of getting started is very low, but so is the cost to keep going. Instead of spending a massive effort to map an entire path to your solution, you simply need to figure out your next step and keep iterating. According to GitLab’s “2018 Global Developer Report,” 67 percent of developers report the top challenge to getting work done is unclear direction. By shrinking the change, business leaders will find it easier to set direction for the next step without having to map the entire path. This brings us back to digital transformation.

    Commit to Digital Transformation

    Just like a monolith being decomposed into microservices, the practice of breaking large chunks into small pieces applies to driving digital transformation as well. Like Creighton Abrams said, “When eating an elephant, take one bite at a time.”

    How can enterprises shrink the change?

    For most organizations that achieve successful digital transformation, the initiative usually starts with a single team or innovation unit. This group proves the success for the rest of the organization. It develops that culture, tools and processes that other parts of the organization can then adopt. One example of this principle in practice is the transformation that Chris Hill, Head of Systems Engineering, Infotainment, led at Jaguar Land Rover. When Chris came on board, only three build engineers had the ability to release to production and it took four to six weeks to complete each release. Chris gradually scaled a CI/CD platform, step-by-step over two years, until every team across the organization was able to complete a release in less than 30 minutes. Today, the Jaguar Land Rover completes 50 to 70 deployments per day. This iterative pattern is seen over and over again with enterprise digital transformation. It’s encouraging because it means successful digital transformation can be driven by either executives top-down or engineers bottom-up.

    Keep the Fuel Burning

    According to Argyle, “91 percent of companies have at least started on digital transformation, but only half have created an organization-wide strategy.” This seems to align with Forrester’s metrics on half of the organizations that stall.

    So, how can organizations keep going and avoid the stall out?

    If I can make a confession, I am also one of those New Year’s resolution makers who just started working out in January. How it is that I’m still hitting the gym while others have dropped off? I have found that taking a “DevOps” approach is a key to my success. Instead of broad sweeping changes, I make small incremental improvements one day at a time.

    It turns out the strategy for getting started—“just commit”—is the same strategy to keep going.

    By starting small with a single project and gradually expanding scope in iterative steps, an organization can continue to improve over time at a rapid pace. Small, single-commit code changes coupled with CD increase throughput and stability. In the same way, small, incremental process improvements bring about the greatest success with digital transformation.

    — William Chia

  • How Software Outsourcing Can Empower Digital Transformation

    How Software Outsourcing Can Empower Digital Transformation

    Businesses are constantly readjusting themselves to become more agile and innovative while maximizing their opportunity in today’s digital economy. This is especially true for up-and-coming businesses with limited budgets that need to think ahead of the curve to find additional resources to fuel their digital transformation. Software outsourcing is no longer perceived as a choice or a strategic decision to be made, but rather an operational duty of the IT leaders trying to transform their organizations.

    Software outsourcing businesses often adapt better to the evolving digital landscape. Why? Because they aren’t afraid to look outside an organization to fulfill all the requirements needed to run a thriving business and cater to customer’s needs. Software outsourcing is seen by business leaders as an effective means of finding a balance between constant budgetary constraints and the need for a digital transformation. But what are some of the more prevalent outsourcing trends and how can they help empower your business’ digital transformation?

    Emerging Technologies

    The widespread adoption of emerging technologies adds another dimension to our everyday lives—artificial intelligence and machine learning, blockchain and IoT, automated SIEM software and the advancements in cloud computing capabilities. These technologies are skewing the already-blurred lines between our digital and physical worlds and are helping companies bring highly advanced solutions to the fields of business automation, customer management, risk and security orchestration, to name a few.

    Keeping an eye on such trends is one thing, but incorporating them into an existing business structure often requires outside expertise. Software outsourcing companies are, by definition, businesses that help other businesses with the development, design, maintenance and testing of their software application and solutions. As such, leading providers in software outsourcing are constantly looking out for the latest tech advancements the market has to offer and craft their much-needed expertise accordingly.

    Outsourcing providers represent the important link between the customer’s growing demand for technologically driven solutions and services and the companies trying to provide them. It seems that every business nowadays wants and AI or machine learning-powered answers to their problems. Instead of having to hire a full-time specialist to help them execute a specific task, companies can simply outsource the needed expertise and use their resources on core competencies.

    Data Privacy and Security

    Advanced software solutions such as AI and machine learning require massive amounts of user data to prove effective. Collecting user data is one thing, but guaranteeing data privacy and security is a whole different ballgame. As the number of cybersecurity breaches increases over time, so does the demand for data loss prevention, data security automation and advanced threat intelligence. The only way for software outsourcing companies to satisfy this demand is to fully comply with security regulations and industry standards.

    The General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, has standardized the data protection law in the EU, imposing strict rules in regards to the collection, control and processing of personally identifiable information. Outsourcing vendors are now obligated to conduct their security audits regularly and use that information to update their security strategies and meet the new security requirements.

    Doing this allows them to determine the most effective policies for data protection and guarantee availability, responsibility and quality of their service-level agreements.

    A successful outsourcing agreement cannot be made if your potential partner doesn’t follow the latest security standards or doesn’t have a clearly defined security policy. The best way to protect your business against potentially hazardous data breaches is as simple as looking for outsourcing providers that have security testing in their service offerings. Agency listings and repositories are an excellent place to start, as they tend to provide the much-needed reviews and rankings of potential providers.

    Increasing Talent Shortage

    Labor markets are having a hard time keeping up with the rapid pace of tech development. Talent shortage continues to be the No. 1 challenge even in the booming areas of the world such as the UK and the United States. A large number of tech-oriented startups enter the market each and every day and staying above the competition requires expert help with highly specialized skill sets.

    To combat the increasing difficulties of finding expert help locally, businesses are turning toward less dynamic regions for their software outsourcing needs. Eastern Europe, for example, is far less saturated with tech startups when compared to the United States, yet manages to provide a sizable talent pool, as well as a large number of outsourcing providers to choose from.

    Digital Transformation and the Benefits of Software Outsourcing

    Businesses outsource expert help when dealing with parts of the digital transformation process for which they have little to no expertise whatsoever. This allows them to close any gap they might have had regarding their digital capabilities and focus their efforts on core transformation objectives. Collaboration is a vital part of outsourcing and, as such, provides valuable information regarding the latest business insights and disruptive technologies.

    Outsourcing software leads to a successful DevOps journey. It allows businesses to find providers specialized in the digital transformation process. Some providers offer a multidisciplinary expertise that encompasses AI and machine learning, big data tools, digital mobility applications, scalable cloud solutions and more. Working with distributed engineering teams who already have the necessary domain-specific expertise can result in a faster time-to-market and increased customer satisfaction.

    Digital transformation comes with many challenges and software development outsourcing should not be viewed as the go-to solution for every problem. It is one of many crucial parts found in the larger digital transformation framework. Business automation, emerging technologies, the latest security practices and value-added services—these are the cogs in the software outsourcing-fueled machine that is digital transformation.

    — Natasha Lane

  • Applying DevSecOps to Address Cloud Security Challenges

    Applying DevSecOps to Address Cloud Security Challenges

    Driven by the encouragement from 2018 progress, cloud technology is poised to be even bigger in 2019. However, one major hurdle continues to haunt the cloud trend: security.

    An overwhelming number of firms in the IT industry are preparing for cloud adoption, yet security continues to be a big question for many of them. Early DevOps adopters faced a similar challenge in their early stages of DevOps implementation. They relied on a wide variety of DevOps tools to address their issue completely.

    Today, however, DevSecOps is making a big difference in the IT industry, including security and ensuring a seamless software development life cycle (SDLC).

    Breaking the regular trend of having security as a separate process, DevSecOps calls for security integration across all stages of the software process chain, addressing security concerns at the very first instance of every stage.

    The same DevSecOps now comes as a savior for cloud, too.

    Applying DevSecOps to Cloud

    Last year saw the cloud market taking a new position in the IT industry, driven by the wide penetration of leading cloud computing service providers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Oracle Cloud and IBM Cloud, among others.

    To stay relevant in today’s market, many IT firms have begun their efforts to achieve high and highly scalable performance with all-round digital transformation.

    Yet, security limitations associated with cloud continues to be a concern many of these organizations. DevSecOps principles can help. Many research reports show that the majority of firms working on the cloud have high reliability on DevSecOps tools and principles for improved agility and high reliability.

    DevSecOps approach to cloud security requires detailed planning that might even demand cultural change in an IT environment, especially for security automation and configuration of cloud assets.

    The planning requires security teams to:

    • Collaborate with development teams as they move code to cloud alongside close monitoring of quality in the production cycle.
    • Work with the quality analysis and development teams in deciding qualifier and parameter aspects required for code promotion.

    Overall, DevSecOps principles offer security advantage along with software agility and high reliability across the life cycle.

    Implementing DevSecOps in Cloud

    Following six factors decide the success of DevSecOps implementation in a cloud environment:

    DevSecOps implementation in Cloud environment

    1. Code Analysis – Continuous improvements to software mean revisiting code, which also reflects in code analysis, quality assurance and delivery cycles.
    2. Automated Testing – Automated testing minimizes efforts and also saves time. As a key aspect of DevSecOps process, automated testing makes the testing process easier through easy execution of repeatable cases.
    3. Change Management – Linking teams and making them aware of each other’s operations, wherever required, is an important aspect of change management. Keeping developers informed about security-related activities helps in timely address of existing and possible vulnerabilities.
    4. Compliance Monitoring – Compliance continues to play a key role in an organization’s growth path as part of corporate governance. Regulations help in the creation of code and also in modifying the source code. This helps in real time at times of audit.
    5. Threat Investigation –  Threat investigation is important to defining the security readiness of any organization. It’s important for organizations to have a close and continuous watch on discovering possible threats, regular security scans and code reviews to address security challenges.
    6. Personnel Training – Holding hands-on training sessions and certification courses build the company’s strength, equipping teams with appropriate domain knowledge.

    The above-mentioned six steps act as building blocks for implementing DevSecOps strategy in cloud. What’s next? The implementation part: Get DevSecOps to cloud.

    — Veritis

  • 5 Trends Transforming Digital and IT Operations Management

    5 Trends Transforming Digital and IT Operations Management

    In 2018, digital transformation ushered in a radical shift in how enterprises harness customer insights, technology capabilities and rapid experimentation to drive revenue growth, profitability and market leadership. Enterprises spent $1.3 trillion in 2018 on digital transformation technologies such as public cloud platforms, microservices and containers, edge computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve customer experiences, business agility and employee engagement.

    Heading into 2019, digitalization will accelerate business model innovation and drive the adoption of these emerging technologies for sustainable competitive advantage. Here’s a closer look at five technology trends that will change the way enterprises approach digital operations management in 2019:

    Multi-Cloud Adoption Goes Mainstream

    In FY18 Q3, the three leading cloud platforms (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform) accounted for 65 percent of the market share of public cloud infrastructure and platform services. Enterprises are increasingly relying on multiple cloud providers to avoid lock-in and harness innovative product offerings, global presence and flexible pricing strategies. When it comes to multi-cloud adoption in 2019:

    • Lift-and-Shift Will Give Way to Rebuilding. In the initial phase of enterprise cloud adoption, CIOs preferred “lift-and-shift” strategies for migrating complex, legacy applications to public cloud services. In 2019, enterprises will rebuild legacy portfolios to truly take advantage of the cloud’s elasticity, security and utility pricing. Rebuilding is not only the right approach to modernize legacy systems, but also a viable solution for reducing technical debt and unleashing enterprise agility.
    • The Rise Of Managed Private Cloud for On-Premises Requirements. While analyst firm Gartner predicts that 28 percent of enterprise spending will shift to public cloud offerings by 2022, the reality is that the vast majority of enterprise workloads still run inside the corporate firewall. Public cloud providers are taking aggressive measures to conquer the final bastion of data center gravity with private cloud offerings. Managed private cloud infrastructure will become essential for enterprise services that will need data sovereignty, latency or compliance, yet still want the flexibility and agility of cloud. Some recent managed private cloud announcements from the big three cloud platforms show how these providers are taking a pragmatic approach to meet customer demand:
      • In 2016, Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services, declared, “Whether it’s 10 years or 20 years, very few companies will own their own data centers, and those that do will have a smaller footprint than they have now.” During his 2018 re:Invent keynote, Jassy sang a different tune by launching AWS Outposts to bring the power of cloud-native services to enterprise data centers for hybrid interoperability and seamless management.
      • During the 2018 Cloud Next conference, Google introduced its Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) On-Premises that delivers an abstraction layer for running container clusters either on the public cloud or in a corporate data center.
      • In 2017, Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure Stack, which offers the same programmable interface and deployment tooling of Microsoft Azure in a private cloud environment for a consistent hybrid cloud experience.

    The Cloud-Native Skills Gap Widens

    Software containers have fast emerged as the standard deployment vehicle for agile, reliable, scalable and highly available enterprise services. The transition from virtual machine management to container orchestration and monolithic development patterns to agile microservices will transform the way enterprises build, deploy and optimize cloud-based applications. IT operations teams will need to develop a new set of competencies to manage the health and performance of containerized services. IT practitioners can longer rely on manual scripts to manage large, distributed systems but will need to embrace infrastructure as code to provision, deploy, monitor, alert and auto-scale cloud-native services.

    Commodity Monitoring Evolves to Strategic Observability

    DevOps teams will use multiple data sources (metrics, logs, and traces) to understand, verify and debug cloud-native systems. Modern observability requires the ability to consolidate and extract relevant insights from observability pipelines using tools such as Prometheus for monitoring, Jaeger for distributed tracing and Fluentd for logging. While IT teams will need new tools to manage autonomous cloud-native services, it is still critical to understand relationships between individual components and the overall system to effectively troubleshoot microservices in production.

    AIOps Emerges as the Way to Tame Alert Storms

    Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) is a clear necessity for modern IT infrastructure teams to keep up with the diversity, velocity and volume of IT operational and event data. IT teams can proactively prevent service outages, analyze real-time incidents using contextual knowledge and remediate problems using AIOps tools. Here’s how AIOps will help enterprises run and optimize mission-critical systems:

    • Improve Response Time For Digital Interactions. AIOps has the power to boost key metrics for incident management including mean-time-to-detection, mean-time-to-response, mean-time-to-restoration and incident volume handled within a service window. The combination of machine learning and data science techniques in AIOps not only delivers faster incident coordination and response, but also reduces the human time spent per alert with advanced analytics and probabilistic root cause analysis.
    • Eliminate Siloed/Redundant Processes. AIOps offers the ability to consolidate event and incident insights from different IT management tools across on-premises and public cloud environments. A shared AIOps platform offers centralized visibility, faster impact analysis and improved collaboration for a diverse set of stakeholders, including application owners, infrastructure teams and business sponsors.

    Business-Aware, Service-Centric Delivery Can Optimize Customer Experiences

    To help the business remain competitive, IT teams simply must transition from managing hybrid IT infrastructure assets to prioritizing and supporting business-critical services. Service-centric operations management combines business insights, customer knowledge and relevant metrics to improve digital performance, enhance customer interactions and support business goals. IT teams will need to focus on the business value of IT services while offering holistic infrastructure visibility and control at the business process level.

    Clear strategy and focused execution will separate the digital winners from losers in 2019. How enterprises embrace and respond to these key trends will be key to unlocking disruptive innovation, operational transformation and business value.

    — Deepak Jannu

  • Customer Education Through DTV, the YouTube Digital Transformation Channel

    One of the most valuable functions a services provider can perform for its customers is education. High-level education about industry and technology trends is generally not part of any contract, but, as odd as that may seem, keeping customers apprised of important industry trends can help them make wiser choices in the selection of products, the direction of projects and initiatives and the consideration of long-term commitments to emerging technologies.

    Communicating non-commercial educational information can be a tricky proposition, as it is important for any company to avoid the constant barrage of self-serving marketing messages that clog other communications channels. Customers have become impatient with texting and bulk email—and even video, to a lesser degree—as marketing devices. The business customer is suffering from sensory overload. Valuable information has no value if it’s not received.

    Into this scenario comes digital transformation, one of the most-discussed and least-understood business/technology trends extant. It is ubiquitous, all over the information technology landscape and is the subject of trade shows, sales seminars and countless magazine articles that may be outdated before they are printed.

    With a subject such as digital transformation, one of the most effective carriers of accurate, timely information is from the experts and practitioners themselves, leaving the vendors out of the picture—or, at least, less visible. The question is: how?

    In the desire to maintain an educational vehicle with the market, Infostretch established its own YouTube channel for communicating non-commercial messages. Focused on current and future technology trends in software development and delivery in general, the programming explores the opportunities and challenges of digital transformation in particular—which is arguably a vague term being used in various technology market segments. We call it DTV and launched it as a non-commercial YouTube channel. Unlike other corporate-sponsored channels, DTV is not about advertising Infostretch’s offerings. It’s about offering thought leaders an opportunity to see/hear what their counterparts are doing to address the need for and challenges of digital transformation.

    With unbiased insight from a variety of industry experts, DTV brings valuable information to a wider audience than would be possible through conventional marketing channels such as direct email.

    Episodes are kept to a digestible length—15-20 minutes, typically. Brief and to the point, the presentation is informal but informative. We focus on firsthand accounts from the digital transformation front lines, from Fortune 1000 companies and experts across the globe. Topics run the gamut of information technology’s most timely and business-critical trends including digital strategy, digital development, DevOps, quality engineering, cloud, IoT, data analytics and mobility.

    In early weeks, guests included:

    • Adeo Resssi, founder of the Founder Institute, who talks about industry being on the cusp of a massive elimination of white-collar jobs (blue-collar elimination already well underway). Digital transformation is part of the cause, and also part of the way that companies re-imagine themselves. Ressi makes a variety of salient observations on entrepreneurship, technology trends and digital transformation.
    • Kim Polese, founding product manager at Sun Microsystems (and the person who gave Java its name), who talks about the “AI winter.” She notes the undelivered promises of artificial intelligence of the 1990s and its emergence as part of the corporate landscape today. The famed techno-investor discusses “collective intelligence,” a combination of human and machine intelligence in making decisions. Polese served on President Barack Obama’s tech advisory board; in-between giving JAVA its name and serving on that prestigious board, she was named one of Time Magazine’s top 25 most influential Americans.
    • Flying at a higher altitude, Shahin Farshchi of Lux Capital postulates that AI can—or at least can be “trained” to—sniff out fake news and alert consumers of its dangers. What could be more timely?
    • North Face founder and retail legend Hap Klopp explains that the online purchasing model is coming to forward-thinking brick-and-mortar retailers; for example, single checkout or self-checkout at a mall with the elimination of cash registers. Also, kiosks that display promotions, specials or other advertising when the customer approaches, rather in the same way online promotions that are tracked to mouse-clicks (or even mouse hovers). His discussion was so content-rich that it was divided into two DTV episodes.

    It’s no small benefit, but a well-informed customer can also help Infostretch in at least two ways. As noted above, an educated customer will be easier to deal with, as dead-end roads or expensive implementations become easier to spot. And, being the channel of non-commercial information can help ensure loyalty. A well-informed customer is a benefit to any company, and bodes well for the business relationship.

    The latter may need some elaboration: DTV has established Infostretch as a knowledgeable source of information on the myriad aspects of digital transformation—not just what we know but who we know. Meaningful content is conveyed by third parties who are interviewed by Infostretch leadership, people in our brain trust such as Chief Customer Officer Avery Lyford, the author of this article and others. The information and objectivity, coupled with their expert interviewing approach, combine to earn both friendships and trust.

    Why YouTube? Two reasons, primarily:

    • To have the credibility of an educational platform, we felt it was important to have a comfortable neutral setting for these shows—which, to reiterate, are presented commercial-free.
    • As noted above, email and other traditional marketing channels tend to be overused and would not be as effective in imparting this sort content.

    In just the first three months, subscriptions grew by one-third and views expanded three-fold, with many episodes being referred before people actually sign up. And, plans are afoot to expand its footprint to podcasts that are available through iTunes.

    In the era of information overload, it can be daunting to break through the logjam to assure that meaningful messages are received. As an educational vehicle, the DTV YouTube channel is an innovation that has delivered.

    — Leila Modarres

  • DevOps Chat: Digital Transformation with Paul Chapman of Box

    DevOps Chat: Digital Transformation with Paul Chapman of Box

    It seems every organization is chasing digital transformation. Some companies are succeeding, while some are wallowing a bit, trying to figure out how to do it. Box is a company that is both successfully navigating digital transformation and being a catalyst for digital transformation at other organizations.

    In this DevOps Chat we speak with Paul Chapman, CIO of Box, about digital transformation for both Box and other companies, and he gives us his own take on what the environment is like for companies and what they should do to thrive today. Great conversation, enjoy!

    As usual, the streaming audio is immediately below, followed by the transcript of our conversation.

    Transcript

    Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone. It’s Alan Shimel and you’re listening to another DevOps Chat. I’m really happy to have as a guest on today’s DevOps Chat, Mr. Paul Chapman, CIO at Box. Paul, welcome to DevOps Chat.

    Paul Chapman: Thanks. Great to be here, Alan.

    Shimel: Great to have you here. So Paul, before we jump into a couple of the items we wanted to talk about. I guess in case anyone in our audience maybe is not familiar with Box or yourself, why don’t you just quickly level set your background, Box, and we’ll jump in from there.

    Chapman: Sure. Well, maybe I’ll start with just a little background, accelerated bio of sorts. Been in the technology space for quite some time now. I like to joke that although this is the truth, I was a COBALT programmer and an RPG programmer back in the late ’80s. So I’ll fast forward to today and say a lot has gone on in between. I’ve had to reinvent myself many times over to stay relevant. I often tell my team that the pain of change is mandatory. It’s the suffering that’s optional.

    So get comfortable with being uncomfortable if you’re in the technology space. It’s never boring. That’s for sure. I’ve done a lot of things in between but thoroughly enjoying my time over here at Box. We’re born in the cloud, grown up digital company. Very forward thinking, innovative. And we’re helping tens of thousands of organizations around the world to help to transform and digitize the workplace.

    Shimel: Fantastic. So Paul, you mentioned Box and we talk about unicorns and cloud natives and these kinds of things. Box is certainly a member of the club. And while they themselves, generally, these kinds of companies like box eat their own dog food in terms of what they preach and everything, we almost take for granted the transformative wave that they’ve ushered in. Again, I’m your age or maybe more. I remember the 1984 commercial with the hammer –

    [Crosstalk]

    Chapman: Mm-hmm. The Apple one, the famous Apple one.

    Shimel: The Apple commercial. Sure. The Mac commercial. So in a lot of ways, companies like Box and as their poster child for it have broken through the silos that in the IT world, you and I grew up and kinda held us bound. If you can, give our audience a little bit of – I don’t know if that was intentional that it breaks down silos or it was an unintended consequence but talk to us about how is it helping to break down. How does it usher in what – digital transformation is something everyone talks about. How does it help with that?

    Chapman: Yeah. Well, I think when you look at – and I’m gonna sort of just geek out a little bit and share that one of the things that I have – now, we’re starting to see some maturity in what I would call sort of the modern reference architecture for how you run your IT service today or business services today, is that when you look back at sort of the technology that we invested in in the ’90s and in the ’80s, which at the time, was the most modern advanced technology I should say, at the time. Unfortunately, it was architected in such a way that it was very siloed and you ended up sort of building up these sort of monolithic sort of application stacks where you went to sort of the oracles for everything or the SAPs for everything and it was very hard to integrate.

    And unfortunately, what happened is is you sacrificed a lot of what I would call best of breed capability and innovation in that model and because that architecture doesn’t, in a sort of step wise, linear way evolve to support today’s way of working – today, we have a new style of employee. One that has grown up digital that’s been educated by consumer experiences that expects a certain set of things when they enter the workplace. You have a new style of workplace. It’s very open and social and collaborative.

    You have this new style of IT that’s evolved to support that. And when you look at what’s actually happening, the modern architecture is built around this best of breed ecosystem and there’s innovation going on everywhere. But the innovation is generally organizations are picking the area that they’re gonna be the most innovative in and they maniacally focus on the innovation in that space. So they’re the best at what they do and Box is absolutely the best at managing unstructured content for the enterprise with the best compliance and regulatory and so on. And security and risk and all those things.

    And then there are other companies that are the best at messaging and then there are others that are the best at certain types of collaboration. And what we get to do now is to start to bring all these services together because they’re built to interoperate which the architectures of yesteryear weren’t and we get to bring and curate that into the experiences we bring to our employers, partners, suppliers, and customers and therefore, we’re starting to create more automation, more digitization across this best of breed ecosystem. Long winded answer but there’s a lot going on in there today.

    Shimel: Oh, absolutely. So let’s pick into a couple of those areas. Number one is lock-in or the – we used to suffer with these large stacks. You were locked in though. Right? I was talking to someone earlier today, a start up who managed Macs for enterprises. Right? And why haven’t we seen that before? Well, maybe there were enough Macs. But we’ve all suffered from lock in in our technologies.

    Chapman: Yeah. And we don’t like it. We don’t like the way it makes us feel. We don’t like to feel captive or without choice and really today, freedom of choice is extremely important. And so what I do know, though, and this is something that I’ve certainly come to appreciate is especially if you are, as you think about a much more heavily cloud based footprint, you have the freedom from infrastructure. You have the freedom from direct sort of operational responsibilities that in our past lives, we have significant operational responsibilities managing a lot of technology debt and infrastructure and so on and we had to manage service levels, capacity, performance, backups, failover, all the things that are just really keeping the lights on.

    We’re not adding any material value necessarily directly to the businesses. It’s the things, the services that run on top. And so what I’ve seen is is that now as you start to move to a cloud based model which is much more subscription based. The on ramps are a little smaller. The off ramps are a little smaller. The ability to change out services for services that may not be as innovating as fast as others as is a little easier but I think the key thing is this. Every one of those services that you subscribe to, it’s a mutually beneficial outcome. They have to earn your business on an ongoing basis.

    Shimel: Yep. On a minute by minute. Not even daily.

    Chapman: Because if not, the subscription stops and you move it somewhere else and if they are not maniacally focused on innovating in their space, having highly reliable, scalable services, having services that meet your compliance and regulatory requirements and having services that meet your trust and risk criteria for that particular service, they don’t have a business. And so the beauty of this model or this new emerging model, I should say, is that in the old ways, they’d sell you software and then you sort of … you get locked in and it’s hard to move. Now, we think about it as all the time. It’s about the customer all the time. How are we making our customers get more value from their investment in us and how can we make sure we’re providing reliable services and innovative capabilities that they’re subscribing to to maintain them as a customer. And that’s good for us.

    Shimel: Absolutely. So I would even go further, Paul. I’d say the hardware vendors locked you in more than the software guys even did. Right? When you made decisions, whether you were on Solaris or this flavor of Unix or Microsoft or what have you or HP, I mean, HP, and I know you used to be at HP, no disrespect to them, but they were really good at talking about freedom and best of breed while locking you in tighter than a drum. But today, so to me, this all refers to something that I call portability. We have, as consumers, as customers, we have such portability today where we can take our stuff up and go. It’ll run anywhere we want, just about.

    Chapman: That’s a great point. Actually, a really good point. And the infrastructure, I was focusing on the services piece but you’re absolutely right. As I mentioned, the freedom from infrastructure in the cloud world is like no offense to the infrastructure providers. It’s just I add more value to my organization when I’m not focused on those things. It’s a give back of time and one of the most precious things we can give anybody is time. And I’m able to use that time to do what I would consider much higher value, contribute at a much higher value to the organization because of that.

    Shimel: Absolutely. Paul, I wanna transition to another topic that we spoke of but I think you gave me a great segue here and that is that when we talk about things like transformation and thriving and leveraging what we have, what the technology world has to offer us today, so much of it, frankly, isn’t hardware or even software. The success or failure of organizations is often based on their culture and their people. Right? And some, we live in a gee whiz world where we take things, we were talking off hand about answering the doorbell from China, but organizations can’t really thrive, compete, and transform without that cultural sort of happening. Curious on your thoughts on that.

    Chapman: Yeah. Probably … at Box, we talk a lot about the future of work and also, we talk a lot about it’s not about rewriting your software. It’s about rewriting your company. And when we look at companies that … if you look at just some of the statistics, 52 percent of the Fortune 500 have disappeared since the year 2000. And if you do the math, that’s more than one per month. And a lot of people get into this techno-panic thinking it’s technology that’s disrupting these companies but the reality of it is is technology is enabling that disruption but the technology that’s doing this is available to everybody including the incumbents that have built their business models and their operating models on sort of a sort of legacy way of working. And you have – if you look at the companies that are disrupting, it’s because they have a different operating model. They have different business models.

    They operate culturally very different and the cultural shifts are really, really hard, especially in organizations that have become very established in their markets because that’s what got them there. And the reality of it is we used to coin this term sort of this frozen middle part of an organization that didn’t necessarily have – doesn’t necessarily have aligned incentives to change. Because it’s like what’s in it for me on the other side of this change? And they say at any given point, a third of an organization, and this changes, varies from company to company but a third or an organization knows where you’re going and how you’re gonna get there. A third doesn’t but they’re willing to learn and invest and figure it out and a third doesn’t, never will, isn’t interesting, da, da, da, da. And that’s resistance.

    And the resistance to change has to be resolved. A lot of companies will figure out maybe what they need to do and even why they need to do it but it’s the execution of the how and sometimes, that how is where it really holds people back because they realize that they may not be able to get there with the culture and the people they have. And they switch out leaders and so on and I can share some more in what I’m seeing companies that are able to do this successfully. Most of them, it does take sort of what I would call sort of breaking the company somewhat in order to ______ them.

    Shimel: No, no, no. You gotta burn it down. Right? And I don’t wanna burn it down. But there has to be fundamental change. Last question because I know we’re running low on time but how important is leadership? Right? As a CIO, this is kinda your … this is a big part of your role, right? But how important is leadership in making that transformation?

    Chapman: It’s absolutely key. You can’t do it without the right leadership mindsets and call it coalesced support. So I’ll give you a recent example that I was talking to a CIO of a very, very large company that had been struggling with, call it, reinventing itself and reestablishing itself in a new modern digital world and was starting to make some, is starting to make some success there. And one of the questions that we often get asked as CIOs is, “What’s your partnership model look like or your engagement model look like with the business and how do you think about change management?” And like I said, I went to school to learn how to do programming and COBALT and RPG. I never went and got a PhD in change management.

    [Crosstalk]

    Yeah. I’m not an expert at trying to change the mindsets of thousands of people across an organization when at least a third of them, based on our numbers, don’t even want to. Right? I’m jesting a little bit. The CIO is one of the best partners to enable change but isn’t necessarily always in the best position to drive that change across the organization. You have to have leadership alignment and so on and the company I was talking to, I was talking to the CIO and he was asked that question. “What’s your – people are interested because they’re starting to see meaningful change.”

    And they asked him about his relationship model with the business and he said, “Here’s what happened. When we got our new CEO, he went to all of the heads of all the different business functions that we have and said, ‘If we are going to transform, if we are going to think like a digital company, if we’re gonna think like a technology company and we’re gonna disrupt, it’s incumbent upon every single one of you business leaders not for IT to come to you and say, ‘Here’s what our model for working with you is.’ It’s what is your model for working with IT? What is your model for working with the CIO?’”

    And he said that once that accountability came into the business owners, he said it just greased the runway for the CIO and organization to enable accelerated change across the organization because it wasn’t incumbent upon the CIO then to drive that change. It was to enable the change. And I actually think that that’s something that is key here is we have to rethink the model of how we engage and operate, not just it’s a technology solve.

    Shimel: Right. I agree with you. First of all, I wanna apologize for taking up much more time than I think we booked but it was a great conversation. It was kind of fascinating. Maybe we can have you on on another chat at some point or through the other vehicles we use. But look, continued success with Box. We’re customers.

    [Crosstalk]

    devopsy.kinsta.cloud only for our most important data. But anyway, thanks for being our guest on DevOps Chat today and we’ll speak to you soon.

    Chapman: Appreciate it. It’s fun hanging out.

    Shimel: All righty. This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud. Thanks for listening. This is another DevOps Chat. See you soon everyone. Take care.

    — Alan Shimel