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Tag: Remote work

  • How the Pandemic Renewed Respect for the Agile Mindset

    How the Pandemic Renewed Respect for the Agile Mindset

    Agile methodologies were introduced to us around 10 years ago. In that time, we have seen technology advance at breakneck speed and faced many new challenges in the way we work; arguably, never more so than in 2020.

    However, despite the abundance of change we have experienced, the core values of Agile have stood the test of time. Yes, Agile has been agile, adapting to fit our individual needs. But its values and principles are so strong that they ring true for each and every organization touched by this way of working.

    It’s impossible not to mention 2020, and how Agile shifted and adapted to help us through this turbulent time. What did we notice? Well, much like the renewed gratification you feel for your automotive breakdown service when your car gives up the ghost for the first time in years, we noticed that the COVID-19 pandemic changed Agile in a different way: by providing renewed respect for the agile mindset.

    What is the Agile Mindset?

    When we talk about the agile mindset, we’re referring to the core values that combine to establish a set of attitudes held by those embracing agility. There are four of these core values: Make people awesome, deliver value continuously, make safety a prerequisite and experiment and learn rapidly.

    All four values are of equal importance, but they each have a unique impact on the mindset. For example, making safety a prerequisite means providing employees with the confidence to experiment, innovate and not fear mistakes or failure – these are all natural on our path to achieving new things.

    Additionally, delivering value frequently benefits both our customers and employees. It takes away the pressure of bouncing from one milestone to the next and adds value to a consistent level of delivery. Our customers are happy and grateful, seeing constant developments and improvements to what we provide them.

    The final two values (make people awesome and experiment and learn rapidly) are those that were particularly important during the change and adversity of 2020. Let’s dive into them.

    Making People Awesome!

    Agile methodology is massively focused on people: both employees and customers. When we work in an agile way, we want to enrich our people and give them the freedom to express themselves and show off their skills. This, in turn, helps the entire organization to deliver excellent service to our customers.

    With such a focus on people, the mandate for remote work brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic introduced an obstacle to agile ways of working. Our only human interaction with colleagues and customers was through a screen, which, let’s be honest, just isn’t the same as interacting in person.

    Therefore, employee engagement has become more important than ever. Virtual interactions make it harder to truly see how somebody is feeling about work – whether they are happy or unhappy, motivated or unmotivated. It’s important to check in with everybody regularly; ask them directly how they’re doing and encourage honest answers. Keep the Agile team spirit alive by making an effort to break the screen barrier during meetings.

    There are benefits of remote working for Agile, too. For example, it offers a fantastic work-life balance. When employees are less pressured by commuting or less exhausted by the constant energy of the office, they are happier. And happy employees make happy customers!

    So, the value of Agile’s ‘Make people awesome’ tenet became even more important and respected in 2020. We realized that we must optimize our employees so that they can bring their best selves to work, even during uncertain times.

    Experiment and Learn Rapidly

    This been an incredibly important value, hasn’t it? For lots of us, remote working was a brand-new experience. Perhaps we’d spend the odd day working from the sofa to let the boiler engineer in, but five days a week from home – unprecedented!

    Learning and innovating at speed has been key to being able to work effectively from home. We’ve been truly embracing this aspect of the Agile mindset. But how? Essential to agility is the ability to critically review how we operate. Almost half of businesses say they do this every quarter (43%) and 21% say they do this every six months.

    Regularly reviewing and analyzing how we work helps us to identify areas of improvement, areas that we could experiment with innovation, and gaps in our knowledge. Without this, we’d be walking through our working life with a blindfold on, and likely not be able to pivot in the face of change and adversity.

    A great example of the renewed respect given to the ‘experiment and learn rapidly’ value is the COVID-19 vaccine. It normally takes years to develop, test and roll out a vaccine, but we’ve seen this happen in just months.

    You wouldn’t be mocked for not knowing that the vaccine was being developed way before the pandemic of 2020. In fact, scientists began preparing for ‘Disease X’ over four years ago. They analyzed the response to the Ebola outbreak of 2014 and recognized a need to develop a vaccine that could be used quickly, for an infection that did not yet exist.

    Fast-forward to COVID-19, and while scientists still had lots of work to do to prepare a specific vaccine (designing; initiating the correct immune response; testing and more testing and roll out), their agility, started years ago, meant they had a strong foundation on which to build.

    This value has definitely received more recognition in recent months. This is great, because it’s going to be vital for the continued response to our changing world. We must continue to analyze our response to new ways of working and adapt based on what we find. Are you already experimenting and learning to be ready for the new normal?

    An Essential Mindset for Remote Teams

    The core values of agility have had a huge part to play in our adaptation to the changes we saw in 2020. And many of us have embodied this agile mindset without even realizing – we’re calling this ‘unconscious agility.’

    If you’ve tried something new in the face of remote working, made a conscious effort to deliver value continuously rather than in big chunks, checked in more regularly with your colleagues or relayed the message that mistakes and failure are a natural part of innovation, you’ve been working in an agile way. Even if your organization doesn’t consciously work agile, you can still embody this mindset.

    And it’s going to be key for the new normal – we should already be looking ahead to that. We didn’t have time to prepare for what came in 2020 – it was somewhat of a surprise. But we do have time to prepare for what comes next, and the Agile mindset is key for tackling this successfully.

  • Best Practices for Managing Remote IT Teams

    Best Practices for Managing Remote IT Teams

    With IT teams around the world adjusting to remote working while still struggling to maintain productivity and workflows, ensuring DevOps and Agile practices are in place has never been more important. And while typical DevOps professionals probably have significantly better remote desktop setups than most of their business peers, it’s how IT leaders manage these teams that will make all the difference. One way to approach this is by implementing database monitoring.

    Many DBAs and developers have been working remotely for months now, but as IT budgets grow tighter, they’ll need to do more with less. Ensuring DBAs have the ability to monitor the database from anywhere will be a core part of a continued successful remote working strategy. There are many reasons for database professionals to embrace remote monitoring, whether it’s migrating to the cloud, adapting to new challenges, keeping an eye on multiple instances in many environments or gaining fine-grained access to monitoring data.

    Success Remote IT Team Management

    Here’s a look at some best practices for remote IT teams.

    Easing cloud adoption woes: Cloud adoption is up significantly this year as development teams turn to it, particularly for greenfield projects. But with all of that data migration, database professionals are struggling with being able to monitor cloud-based servers alongside on-premises servers, and having a distributed team doesn’t make it easier. Adopting remote monitoring tools can simplify monitoring of the cloud—once you’re monitoring a remote database server it doesn’t matter where the server is. It’s impossible to say what might happen next month or even next year, but as companies grapple with these cloud challenges, advanced remote monitoring tools can help monitor disparate, hybrid environments from one screen.

    The need for non-production environments: Non-production environments such as UAT and staging are often used to spot problems before deploying software to customers, but it becomes a little more challenging when you can’t simply walk down to the server room, where they’re often housed, and clear up any issues that arise. With remote working and moves to the cloud, consistent database monitoring can help make it much easier to manage non-production servers so that developers can review the systems, understand any potential problems and fix the issues. And although monitoring non-production environments is a good start, errors can still make it into production environments. Setting up database monitoring by configuring the right set of alerts for any environment ensures that teams are always aware of the most critical errors as they’re occurring, rather than finding out after systems become unresponsive.

    Managing access control: When people usually think of “access control,” most immediately jump to the idea of security. But access control is about much more than just keeping people out—it can also mean letting the right people in. Providing developers with read-only access to monitoring tools lessens the load on production DBAs. While the DBA team is handling infrastructure-level tasks, developers can focus on improving the performance and stability of their applications if they have access to monitoring data. Managing this correctly with your developers and DBA teams ensures they have better insights into overall application performance and how their changes affect it.

    Identifying Agents of Change: There’s real value in identifying one or more persons to be an Agent of Change in your organization, especially when working to improve database engineering and delivery. An Agent of Change is adept in both their role as a developer and as a communicator. It’s usually someone from the data processing team who can move into one of the front-end teams and seamlessly offer help both in designing short-term changes and in helping evolve the architecture of the system. Agents of Change are invaluable when you have established silos between development and operations, particularly when there are limited healthy lines of communication between the groups. They work to bridge that gap and can help make a big difference, even for teams working remotely.

    Bringing it All Together

    Remote awareness is critical to keeping development and production environments healthy, but visibility into all of your databases and systems doesn’t need to disappear when nobody is in the office. And considering there’s no telling when people will be able to get back to a normal office routine, remote monitoring becomes much more important. Regardless of location, by actively monitoring databases remotely, companies can spend more time and attention on innovation and freeing up their team for other activities. Look for web-based tools that can monitor hybrid environments seamlessly and allow your software and database teams to do this so that problems can be spotted and resolved quickly. Managing non-production environments and access control are good ideas, as are finding and appointing a team leader who can serve as the liaison between your remote teams. After all, with clearer paths of communication present, your teams can be more productive, too.

  • Preparing for Digital Life After COVID-19 

    Preparing for Digital Life After COVID-19 

    The shift to a digitally dependent remote workforce across numerous industries was instantaneous for organizations after the COVID-19 pandemic spread, and after months of adapting, this way of life has become “a new normal.” IT professionals are facing unprecedented pressure to meet the increased demands they are experiencing now and preparing for the changes that will continue after the pandemic, such as enabling remote employees and driving the business. This presents an immense opportunity for these professionals to make a change.

    In recent months, limits to digital transformation and what organizations are capable of have been tested and surpassed. IT professionals have searched for tools, visibility and insights to help them manage the new challenges so the technology being used by organizations continues to perform well. This means expectations moving forward have been set even higher for the level of performance these professionals provide. If limits can be exceeded and issues solved as they arise, what does this mean post-COVID-19?

    Agents of Transformation

    We call the professionals who are navigating these digital changes and inspiring innovation Agents of Transformation. As the leaders of the IT industry, these technologists are identifying what tools are needed not only for their efforts, but also for the organizations they support to provide a tighter interlock between IT and business leaders. Our recent special COVID-19 research report showed how the pandemic has changed the industry long-term.

    According to the report, 79% of the 1,000 IT professionals we surveyed believe the pandemic will separate the strong from the weak in tech teams worldwide. Even if organizations find themselves surviving the digital transformation changes they’re making during the pandemic, it is crucial they also plan for the future so they do not fall behind with any additional new curveballs. As documented in the chart below, the key areas these Agents of Transformation think will change in business practices are risk and disaster planning, the continued use of remote working tools and flexible resourcing.

    Planning for Changes in Business Practices

    COVID-19 brought a lot of unexpected challenges that forced organization leaders to adapt. It is crucial organizations determine what their plans are moving forward and how they will be implemented. Once organizations know what their ideal digital journey looks like, they can begin to fill in the missing pieces such as how it could be impacted by outside forces like COVID-19 and how they can navigate these changes. Digital transformation will continue to play a key role in a post-COVID world with potential challenges including:

    •       Delivering positive experiences at an increased capacity.
    •       Lack of visibility into the performance of technologies.
    •       Managing mean time to repair (MTTR).

    Continued Use of Remote Working Tools and Technologies

    Even as health risks decrease and more employees are allowed to return to work, survey respondents expect tools and technologies for remote working are here to stay. To be successful moving forward in a world now dependent on digital transformation, organizations should figure out what their digital needs are, whether to efficiently manage increased traffic on their applications or support space for storing the influx of data. It is also important that an organization’s plans for a digital journey focus on things such as collaboration, clear goals and objectives and autonomy.

    Keeping the above in mind, one way to prepare for shifting digital goals is by embracing risk and experimentation. Applying scalable cloud instances alongside microservices allows IT teams to quickly test agile new features with a small group of users, then scale out as needed. The future is uncertain, but with digital transformation continuing to grow, organizations should use this time to push new features for their applications that can address current and potential future bottlenecks. For example, if an organization noticed COVID-19 led to larger issues in their applications, they could use this time to research and try new tools that can address the smaller challenges, allowing for more time to focus on tackling the prominent challenges.

    Jump-starting Your Digital Today

    Organizations can jumpstart their digital transformation by adopting tools such as cloud monitoring, microservices and application performance management (APM). By identifying and preventing issues before the end user experience is diminished, organizations can reduce customer support issues and ensure continued brand loyalty.

    Tools such as APM can accurately monitor and manage application technology stacks, from the user experience to network performance. These tools can help address surges in demand or shifts in resource allocations, especially as user behaviors change throughout the pandemic. While IT professionals often struggle to manage and scale services, it is possible to do this without sacrificing the user experience.

    Cloud monitoring can help organizations prepare for traffic surges during and after the pandemic, through scalable cloud instances that offer additional capacity for IT resources. Many on-premises resources that are bound to offices or other physical locations are currently underutilized due to remote work. As a result, 74% of technologists surveyed said that digital transformation projects which would normally take more than a year to be approved are now moving forward within a matter of weeks. To keep up with this growing adoption, cloud monitoring provides IT professionals with real-time visibility and insights. Implementing microservices can also support organizations to develop, test and deploy new features at an extraordinary rate, resulting in improvements in security, speed and productivity.

    Now that these changes are more familiar to end users, expectations will remain high moving forward. The organizations that successfully tackle challenges during the pandemic will be far more resilient. Internal processes have been a longtime barrier for companies to transform. Our current situation has broken down some old barriers and allowed for rapid changes in styles of work, which is likely to continue in some fashion post-pandemic. Businesses will see the value and become less risk-averse, empowering their IT teams to push the envelope for their ongoing transformations.

    Whether it is through utilizing tools such as APM, cloud monitoring and microservices, disaster planning or managing the complexity of cloud and on-premises assets, technologists have never had a bigger opportunity to lead their businesses through change or bring closer alignment of IT to the business.

  • New ASG Report Looks at COVID-19’s Impact on Software Development

    New ASG Report Looks at COVID-19’s Impact on Software Development

    We are all trying to adapt to a new world created by COVID-19. As the coronavirus continues to spread, the economy and businesses everywhere have been severely impacted, and no one really knows what the so-called “new normal” will be. For now, most organizations have gone remote, not knowing when—or even if—employees will be able to return to their offices.

    While some organizations have been open to the idea of working remotely, many have also struggled to shift to a remote workforce seemingly overnight. For software developers, however, remote work is nothing new. Many developers have successfully worked remotely before the COVID-19 pandemic even started.

    “The Future of Remote Work and Software Development“ research published today by Accelerated Strategies Group dives into the long-term impact of a decentralized workforce on software development and delivery. ASG interviewed 347 industry leaders from around the world to gather and refine data on the impact of COVID-19 on software teams and their organizations’ ability to create software, and the importance of remote work tools and applications during the pandemic.

    The ASG report, commissioned by CloudBees, revealed some interesting trends. The survey found 63% of respondents said digital transformation objectives have significantly or somewhat increased in priority. Business automation (61.6%) and the need for investment in creating contactless services (60.1%) have increased somewhat or significantly.

    More than half of the respondents said the COVID-19 conditions have increased their focus on DevOps initiatives (51.75%) and increased their progress on cloud migration (52.25%). Also worth noting is the growth in companies’ DevOps and Agile adoption, with 46.24% of respondents stating they are using cross-functional teams, 55.64% practicing daily stand-up meetings and 43.23% automating tasks.

    The majority of respondents (59.49%) to the ASG report saw an increase in productivity on software teams since the pandemic started. Forty-two percent of respondents said it has become somewhat easier to complete their work tasks in a timely manner.

    However, feedback concerning respondents’ ability to manage unproductive distractions was mixed: 39.7% said managing these distractions was somewhat or much easier, 36.36% said it was somewhat or much more difficult and 23.48% said they had no change in their ability to manage these distractions.

    When asked to provide insight into the potential negative impact of their remote workforce on productivity, more than one-third (38.6%) of respondents said there was no change, 27.58% of respondents indicated that teams were slowed down significantly or somewhat and 33.83% said things moved along significantly or somewhat faster.

    The majority of remote workers (64.4%) expect to remain working remotely, either permanently or at least three or more days per week, once COVID-19 restrictions are lifted. Only 12.7% said they anticipate returning to an office location full-time.

    For the most part, the transition to working from home has benefited software teams. COVID-19 has not only impacted the global economy, but also business priorities and has accelerated business and software strategies. Though the future is uncertain, and no one has a clear picture of what the “new normal” looks like, there is a huge possibility many software and DevOps teams won’t return to the office—at least not full-time.

  • Engineering Productivity Lessons From COVID-19

    Engineering Productivity Lessons From COVID-19

    The world became a different place post-COVID-19 and how we work, communicate and collaborate has been redefined, possibly forever. Our company has a distributed team across the U.S. and India for development and operations. When “shelter in place” hit the entire world, we were not sure how we’d be able to execute our projects, customer commitments and day-to-day operations. Most of our engineers rarely worked from home, and in India, some even left their homes to be with extended families and parents during the lockdown.

    In first-ever crises like the pandemic, leadership teams have to rethink everything to ensure safety for employees while keeping them engaged, motivated and performing during highly disruptive and stressful times.

    Maintaining During COVID-19

    Here are five strategies and tactics that we applied and iterated to help our teams focus and execute during very unusual and difficult times.

    1. Embrace the change.
    2. Listen to employees.
    3. Empower staff at every level.
    4. Communicate, communicate and communicate.
    5. Facilitate outcome-driven engagement, development and execution.

    Embrace the Change

    It was important for the leadership team to be intentional and systematic in accepting the change and establishing proper guidelines, tools and processes to transition quickly to a work-from-home environment. Selecting the same tool(s) for everyone established consistent, exclusive communications to help mitigate isolation. Some employees needed extra guidance in setting the workplace, schedule and systems to be effective working remotely.

    Listening and Sharing

    Employee health and safety was the top priority when lockdowns began, and it started with active listening to employees. Many employees needed to discuss the latest news on the pandemic or express concerns about loved ones who had contracted the virus. We created different levels of informal and formal check-in sessions in the early days of “shelter in place” to discuss anything, from family challenges including child care and remote school to news and market updates. Having open conversations about shared stress during the onset of the pandemic proved valuable in creating mutual support that we all needed to carry on with our daily obligations at work and at home.

    Empowerment at Each Level

    As we enter this next phase of COVID-19, with many of us fully engaged in some form of “new normal,” we have focused on aligning producers and consumers of deliverables to ensure they are fully engaged and understand the dependencies. This entails asking for individual accountability on deliverables and also encouraging people to work on aspirational goals.

    We were already practicing objectives and key results (OKRs), but COVID-19 made it clear we needed to push harder on further refining OKRs and helping individuals prioritize and rationalize their goals as they progress. The goal-setting through OKRs has been super helpful in bringing our remote employees together on the same page with shared initiatives and missions.

    Communicate and Overcommunicate

    Frequent communications and collaboration across teams was a priority, allowing managers to ensure a clear line of sight into deliverables, priorities, trade-offs, logistical challenges and dependencies. The overarching goal was to keep people productive and avoid unnecessary delays in projects.  While it was important in the early stages of the pandemic to overcommunicate across teams, in time, installing the right processes, tools and objectives drove engagement.

    Outcome-driven Development and Execution

    We use KPIs to measure outcomes on a daily and weekly basis. The outcome could be as simple as fortification of certain buggy areas of the product or security testing and fixing or automating defects. Outcomes can also be future looking cool experimentations that drive product ideas and generate compelling customer value. But the key is to make sure the team understands what success looks like throughout the journey of driving the execution of the outcome to the finish line. A simple example could be to review all security CVEs for open source libraries used in the product and ensure they are updated with the latest security patches.

    We were surprised and delighted to see employees taking matters into their own hands by doing more than they were asked, especially in cases where they could bring their creativity to the table. As leaders, we sometimes undermine the power of an empowered team and the magic it brings to add measurable customer and business value.

    The last few months have been taxing on everyone around the world; we do not know what things will look like in six or 12 months. Yet, we’ve also had the opportunity to learn some invaluable lessons about leadership, management and team culture.  Moving forward past this pandemic’s inevitable conclusion, individual empowerment with outcome-based objectives will be the new recipe for engineering success. We’ve seen first hand how human creativity can get a boost when employees are motivated to share their stories, display their ideas no matter how rough they are and work together toward clear goals and a common shared vision.

  • 5 Ways Traceability Is Changing to Bolster the Remote Workforce

    5 Ways Traceability Is Changing to Bolster the Remote Workforce

    Traceability has always been a useful tool in the development process, but it has become especially important since the COVID-19 outbreak and the increased remote workforce. 

    Where developers and engineers were once working side-by-side, with the ability to discuss their process and keep their team informed, they are now navigating a remote collaboration landscape. According to a 2017 study done by Stack Overflow, there is a correlation for developers between remote work and job satisfaction, and the highest job satisfaction ratings are seen from developers who work remote full time. As technology has grown to make this process easier, remote working is expected to become a norm. 

    Advanced traceability has the potential to hold teams together by allowing increased visibility into each move throughout an entire project. Without traceability, it would be nearly impossible to keep remote teams aligned and on schedule.

    Product development tools have continuously been forced to evolve to keep up with the multi-dimensional nature of requirement, test and risk management. For these processes to be successful, all related variables must work together continuously, at scale, and across teams. 

    We’ve only just started to see how traceability tools can use updated capabilities to streamline the product development process, but we know enough to discuss two things: what’s happening now and what the future may hold.

    Traditionally, traceability could be compared to a map. While not limited to a single view, maps exist to help you navigate your way to a destination. Similarly, traceability leads product developers through every step of their processes, eventually helping them reach their goal. If your map was constantly changing you’d never be able to figure out where you were going, but what if people ahead of you could update it as they went along? This would keep you in the loop of the upcoming twists and turns, and no one would feel blindsided. Traceability makes it easy to share similar production changes with your entire team, all at once.

    In the traceability process, links are built automatically which lets major decision points, reviews and approvals be captured in final documents and reports. This allows for faster and more informed decision making and these live references can exist across versions. 

    With the switch to remote work across the globe, and no immediate end in sight, developers don’t have the option of working side-by-side with their colleagues. Because of this, it is pertinent that they are able to streamline their work in every way possible, and increased traceability is expected to be a pillar of that transition. 

    At the end of the day, connecting the dots is all about making sense of everyone’s decisions. Why did they follow that process, and what factors led them to make the choices they made? 

    In the early days of traceability there wasn’t always room to include every piece of information that you might find relevant down the line. Legacy tools such as the act of manual reporting through Word documents left much to be desired. Today, that’s becoming less of an issue, as developers are allowed more meaningful accountability and insight into interconnections as they happen.

    As we look ahead, we can expect to see these capabilities grow in five different ways.

    Less Manual Effort

    Updating your traceability reports with as little manual effort as possible will be essential to a streamlined, remote workforce. As traceability becomes more advanced, the work to create and maintain it should not become more difficult. 

    More Nuance Captured, Related and Parsed for Meaning

    Improvements in software will make data gathering more precise, and increase the number of items a team can consider relevant, traceable information. This will take additional workloads off of the developers as more items are automatically traced and easily accessible.

    More Attributes Can Define and Predict a Project’s Success 

    If you have a more data-rich, detailed record of activities, it is possible to understand the past with more context and less reliance on costly manual documentation or memory. 

    Dispersed Systems Holding Relevant Information Will Start to Feel Closer and More Interconnected

    Through more dense integration and aligned processes, systems feel more controlled and connected, giving users a more seamless experience.

    Expansion of Communication and Review Capabilities for Stakeholders Who May Be Impacted by Changes

    The availability of a full audit trail of participation will make a big difference in the ease of the review process. The ability to easily see who is impacted by changes will allow teams to proactively manage the effects of said changes.

    In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the number of companies who are maintaining their remote work policies, we can expect to see more innovations related to product development workflows. These innovations will enable easier remote collaboration between colleagues and across teams, overall streamlining the product development process.

  • COVID-19 Long Tail Budget Impact

    COVID-19 Long Tail Budget Impact

    Technology budgets have shifted dramatically since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a recent study from online CIO networking and information hub, Pulse. The pandemic, and its resulting shutdown, will likely continue to have a substantial impact on technology budgets for some time.

    The initial budgetary impact was substantial. When COVID-19 first arrived, many technology budgets were frozen in place. Today, 23% of CIOs report that their budgets are still frozen with 49% reporting a decline in their technology budgets. Seventeen percent said that they expect to decrease their budgets by more than 10% in the next two months.

    Fortunately, it’s not all bad news. Many respondents, 24% of them, predict that within the next two months their budgets will rise, including 9% of respondents who believe their budgets will increase more than 10%. However, most CIOs (27%) say that their IT budget won’t change in the near future.

    “And an additional 6% anticipate their budget will become frozen in the next two months — though, on a positive note, this figure is down from 23% two months ago,” stated the report.

    Surprisingly, there hasn’t been a change in business-technology priorities over the past two months for 79% of respondents, while 21% said that they now have different priorities than from the beginning of the pandemic.

    The priorities of those surveyed include focusing on internal communication and collaboration tools (45%), mobile security (39%), customer communication and collaboration tools (37%), password management tools (28%), virtual private networks (28%), security awareness training (24%), remote desktop tools (23%), encrypted communication tools (23%), and data security tools (15%).

    “Many companies are going to allow (or require) employees to work from home after the pandemic, due to health concerns and reduced overhead. The fact that CIOs are investing in security and end-user technology — even though budgets are decreasing — indicates this,” said Brian Sampietro, CIO at  TGI Office Automation, in the report.

    For those organizations who changed their priorities, the new budget items include virtual private networks (36%), password management (32%), remote desktop tools (30%), data security tools (27%), encrypted communication tools (26%) and mobile security (21%).

    How are CIOs making decisions when it comes to technology purchases? The majority said peer recommendations (69%) and industry analysts (52%). However, social media and email fared poorly as influencers, at 23% and 20% respectively. CIOs are determining needs, according to the survey, based on both executive and end-user requests. Only 10% said they depend upon user requests alone, and only 21% said executives solely drive decisions. Interestingly, 35% of CIOs make decisions quickly: Within one week they said they will decide on the right tool to acquire. The rest said they take more than a month (26%) or within four weeks (39%).

    When it comes to layoffs, there are still rough patches ahead, as a sizable number of organizations still have layoffs on the planning table. While 48% of organizations have maintained their headcount through the COVID-19 crises, 40% do plan to cut staff sizes in the next six months, with 25% not sure if they will cut staffs.

  • DevOps Chats: Easing WFH with strongDM

    DevOps Chats: Easing WFH with strongDM

    strongDM wasn’t founded to help with remote workers forced out of the office by COVID-19. They have been around for five years now. But, the company does excel at allowing you to manage and audit remote access to all of your assets including DBs, servers and clusters (as well as apps and services) anywhere from anywhere.

    In this DevOps Chat we speak with strongDM Justin McCarthy, CTO and co-founder about how the company’s technology works and how it is helping companies move to remote access given current conditions.

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

    Transcript

    Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone, this is Alan Shimel, and you’re listening to another DevOps Chat.

    Really happy to be joined on this chat by Justin McCarthy of strongDM. Hey, Justin, welcome to DevOps Chat.

    Justin McCarthy: Hey, Alan — thanks.

    Shimel: Pleasure to have you on here, Justin. You know, as we were talking a little bit off mic, I don’t know if we’ve introduced our MediaOps community, meaning DevOps and Security Boulevard and Container Journal, we haven’t introduced strongDM to them before. So, why don’t we start with that, Justin, and if you wouldn’t mind, in telling the story, talk about a little bit about your own personal journey.

    McCarthy: Yeah, sure thing. Alright, so, first, I guess I’ll just briefly introduce myself. So, I’m the co-founder and CTO of strongDM. And the product is actually, strongDM itself is the best way to manage and audit remote access to your servers and databases and really even Kubernetes clusters. So, that’s what we focus on. We are a remote access product.

    And the way we came to it is basically just a sort of typical startup story. We’ve been around for five years now, and at the beginning, it was scratching an itch just like so many other infrastructure and DevOps products out there. So, in my career, I’d always been involved in growing the teams that built the product and, inevitably, when you build a product and when you ship and when you have production data, you need to grant access to it. To analyze it, you need to grant access to it to administer it, to debug it.

    And that process always felt a little bit somewhere between inconvenient and scary, right? [Laughter] And so, basically, strongDM — yeah, is the response to all those feelings of, that it wasn’t quite as smooth as it could be, it wasn’t quite as safe as it could be.

    Shimel: Excellent, excellent. And you mentioned the company’s around now about five years.

    McCarthy: Mm-hmm.

    Shimel: That’s cool. Alright, let’s talk about — and you’re right, a lot of companies do grow out of one particular scratch to itch, and I’ve done my share of startups over the last 25 years. And what generally happens is, you find out that that particular itch may have associated itches, right, and there’s ancillary things — well, once I scratch that itch, the next itch pops up, right? To paraphrase “The Phoenix Project” or something and bottlenecks and the goal.

    Talk to us—what’s the itch, and then what have you guys found over the five years about kinda getting to that itch and associated itches?

    McCarthy: Yeah, yeah, definitely. So, at the core, the technical approach that it probably takes is that we are an identity-ware proxy, okay? And the first application of that was for database access. So, that’s where we started, right?

    Shimel: Mm-hmm.

    McCarthy: And in fact, at the beginning of time, we thought maybe that was all there was to it. But as we —

    Shimel: Hold on a second, though.

    McCarthy: Yeah, sure.

    Shimel: So, an identity-ware proxy, primarily for databases. For some of our audiences — our security … actually, our DevOps audience probably gets that, some of our security folks do. But break it down for me, Justin — what exactly do you mean by that?

    McCarthy: Sure thing. So, this is an architecture that I think a lot of folks might know as Zero Trust, a lot of folks might know as BeyondCorp, and there were a lot of examples of it out there in sort of an HTTP only case. When we originally conceived of and built the product, it was kind of even prior to a lot of that nomenclature existing.

    So, what an identity-ware proxy is, it is a proxy for a given type of service. Let’s continue to use databases as the example. So, if somebody needs to interact with a Postgres database or a Microsoft SQL Server database — so, let’s say Alan needs to connect your local copy of Tableau to one of those systems, right? So, Alan would log into strongDM and then strongDM would then conduct all of the traffic, essentially, forward it to the target systems. And the identity-ware aspect is that, essentially, we know it’s Alan the whole time and we’re proxying that traffic and we’re handling, essentially, all of the routing of that traffic.

    Shimel: Got it.

    McCarthy: And what’s interesting about that is that you kind of get a lot of the sort of — you get a separation of sort of Alan’s identity from, you know, the credentialing of the underlying system. So, you can actually credential that separately, which means you can rotate the underlying credentials without bothering Alan.

    Shimel: Now, in and of itself, can that be a security kinda setting up kinda almost a man in the middle type of situation?

    McCarthy: Yeah, so, in a lot of enterprises and environments, you at some point, you have to answer the question, how are we gonna audit this particular traffic stream, right? And so, there are also a lot of products out there that are dedicated to, for example, breaking TLS, right? Being the official man in the middle, right?

    Shimel: Yep.

    McCarthy: So, our product has an element of that built in, although it’s not a generic TLS breaker. What it is, is it’s a protocol specific way to answer the question, you know, given MySQL database selection, what would you want to know about what Alan did yesterday? And so, our product is focused on extracting that kind of rich information about what Alan did yesterday with respect to this MySQL connection.

    Shimel: Sure — great, great. Now, what made databases sort of, you know, the prime example of where to use this or as the first use case?

    McCarthy: Yeah, it was the first use case, largely because, again, we were scratching our own itch. [Laughter] So, that was the one that I most often encountered.

    Shimel: Okay.

    McCarthy: You know, and the appeal is, it’s phrased as, you know, “Can I please have access to this because I need to debug X?” Right? And that always, whoever is saying yes or maybe or no to that request, you know, there’s a lot of hope and trust that when you say yes it’s gonna be okay. So, what our product does is, it takes all that, the sort of emotions around that event [Laughter] and tries to give you an answer for how you make that convenient and how you make that safe for everyone.

    Shimel: Excellent, man — good. Alright. So, first ditch is the database and we figure that out and go from there, Justin.

    McCarthy: Sure. So, as I’m sure, as you found with many products, you know, why adopt 10 different products when you can get your existing vendor to do one more thing for you and then maybe reduce and concentrate more of your attention on one tool and so, that’s where our customers pushed us. And so, the next very strong demand that we saw was, now that all of our data systems are granted and revoked access through strongDM, could you also begin to do some of the interactive session and shell-based protocols? So, the first two there were obviously SSH and Windows Remote Desktop. So, that’s where we went next.

    And the theme, if you can sort of imagine it is, you know, everyone in my organization that maybe has engineer in their title or even analyst or scientist — essentially, all of those folks, they need more than just webpages to do their job, right?

    Shimel: They do.

    McCarthy: And so, if it were just webpages, then existing single sign-on would work great, right? But since it’s more than that, it’s deeper than that, it’s really that whole collection of use cases that our customers began asking us to take on.

    Shimel: Excellent. Good stuff. And so, let’s talk a little bit about — so, how, is this sort of distributed as a SaaS kind of thing or a web-based kinda interface? How does that work?

    McCarthy: Sure, yeah. I would say we are neither traditional SaaS, nor traditional on prem. So, in terms of how the product deploys, our customers end up running a bunch of it, but not all of it. So, with any system that involves credentials, any system that involves cryptography, operating it successfully and carefully is actually a huge part of getting it right, okay?

    Shimel: Mm-hmm.

    McCarthy: So, what we’ve tried to do is, we’ve tried to unify the sort of operation configuration. So, if you think of it like centralizing the policies, centralizing the key management.

    Shimel: Yeah.

    McCarthy: So, that’s the part that we host. But the part that actually runs the proxies and therefore essentially the actual conduits for all the data, that runs entirely in customer environments.

    Shimel: And what kind of environment are you talking about?

    McCarthy: Yeah, so, I would say our average customer, the answer is, like, several. [Laughter] So, there are very few environments where you have just one cloud, where you have just one prem data center. So, it ends up actually being several. And so, that’s another strength of our architecture and our approach is that our product, from day zero, was designed with that in mind, so you can run our proxies in Azure and in AWS and in your existing legacy data center. They all unify into one sort of access plane, and it doesn’t matter the product. The same grant access gesture applies to all of those environments.

    Shimel: Oh, okay. Very cool. Very cool. And, you know, from what you’re describing, to me, it doesn’t really make a difference whether I’m a cloud native company, let’s call it, right, or maybe an old line company that had my database running in the closet, right? This kind of identity by proxy is still something I can utilize to make my life easier.

    McCarthy: Yeah, absolutely. And of course, we would hope that it’s especially suited to a hybrid environment like that, because the ability to, from an end user point of view, from one of your data scientists, they just know the three logical things they need to access to do their job. They definitely don’t care what cloud it’s hosted in. They don’t care what data center it’s hosted in, but from the point of view of that end user, it just looks like one thing.

    Shimel: Okay. Now, let’s look at it from the lens of COVID, which we kinda always have to look at everything today through this lens — it seems like this would be a help, right, if I just had to move my whole workforce home, you know, remote. What have you guys been seeing on that?

    McCarthy: Yeah, I think our story there is pretty similar to what a lot of companies that are part of the sort of next generation of IT and — we’re sort of seeing the same trend that everybody else, more people moving remove, therefore any remote access products are, there’s a lot more interest at the moment.

    So, we were always about granting access remotely. It was always a workforce that was going to be distributed. That was our typical customer, anyway. So, it’s definitely the same theme, but just more than we were seeing pre-COVID.

    Shimel: Excellent, man. Now, one thing — it’s funny, I just had a conversation with another company within the IDM space, kind of in like an ED directory service, let’s call it, and this popped up. With the people working from home, with the explosion of how many apps and SaaS services, you know, we’re all accessing right now, it’s great to be able to have just a single proxy, if you will. So, I only have to worry about really going once and then on the back end, it connects to all of these services, let’s call them, or apps.

    And so, from my point of view, that’s a great thing. From your point of view, Justin, right, now you’ve gotta hook into all of these different, new apps and services. How do you do that? Is that via API? Is it a one-off for every one you’ve gotta go into? You know, what’s involved there if I bring you — you know, some app you guys haven’t encountered before?

    McCarthy: Yep, sure. So, I do, there is an important distinction here. There’s a generation and a category of products that you might call them cloud brokers, right? So, cloud access security brokers, that category where you have a workforce that needs to access Salesforce, needs to access another SaaS application. We consider that sort of part of the market to be something that’s necessary but not our specialty.

    Shimel: Not your place.

    McCarthy: Yeah. So, our specialty is, again, it’s that staff where there’s probably an engineer or somehow technical, there’s a technical name in their role somewhere, and they need access to things that aren’t webpages. And so, for that, the procedure is — hey, I’ve got this maybe let’s say even legacy database or I’ve got this type of terminal access that we do that, let’s say we’ve got a lot of machines that are connected via VNC or something. So, and let’s say that’s not on our official supportive protocols list yet. It’s as simple as, we do an intake, we understand the protocol, we add it to the product — that’s it.

    Shimel: Okay. So, you guys do that. I don’t do that myself. I don’t have to kinda write to an API or something and make —

    McCarthy: Yeah, no, exactly. Any system that feels like any sort of client server access paradigm, we can model it in our, essentially in our platform, and then begin granting access to it.

    Shimel: Okay. Almost out of time, Justin. One more area I wanted to hit on this one, though, and that is — talk to me about what to set up here, right? Whether I’m doing it on the cloud, prem, a little of both — how big a job is it to get this thing up and running?

    McCarthy: Yeah. So, we also, of course, have the advantage of — like I said, we’re five years old, but that means we’re only five years old. [Laughter] So, we knew it had to be easy, right? Yeah.

    So, yeah, the act of deploying our proxies is essentially roughly turning it on. Because what then the proxies do is, they take over, for example, topics like discovery. So, they discover what host names they can access and they begin exposing it back to it in the administrative console. So, that’s the one aspect that, you know, deploying it is pretty much turning on the software.

    Additionally, because so many of our customers rely heavily on automation for their DevOps, another way to think of it is, if you already have, if you already have a great Terraform setup that you’re happy with, you have a great cloud formation setup that you’re happy with, we are gonna integrate natively with that setup as well. So, it’s going to be, you’re essentially the overlay, your proxy overlay on your existing infrastructure is gonna go in and it’s gonna feel exactly like anything else that you’re familiar with deploying via Terraform or inside your Kubernetes cluster, for example.

    Shimel: Perfect, man. All good stuff. Justin, I promised you we were gonna do 15 minutes, but I blew it — but not too bad. We’re not too bad. Well, we’re gonna have you back on. It’s gonna be a little bit of a continuing series, right? So, look forward to our next conversation.

    You know what I realized? We didn’t even mention the website, though. So, for people who want more information, it’s strongDM, S-T-R-O-N-G-D-M-dot com, right?

    McCarthy: Yep.

    Shimel: And then can get, if they wanna go check stuff out there. And we’ll have you back on real soon and continue this, man. Sounds great.

    McCarthy: Great. Alright, thanks a lot, Alan.

    Shimel: Alright. Justin McCarthy, CTO and co-founder of strongDM here on DevOps Chat. Hey, this is Alan Shimel, and you’ve just listened to another DevOps Chat.

  • How DevOps Can Save Your Business from COVID-19

    How DevOps Can Save Your Business from COVID-19

    COVID-19 drastically changed the landscape of the American workforce. Remote work went from something of a niche field to a way of life for millions of people. In fact, research shows that roughly half of all employed Americans began working from home as a result of the COVID-19 crisis. 

    While some employers struggle to adapt to this new way of life, others adapted quickly. Looking forward to the future, the ability to adapt in this way could mean life or death for many businesses. 

    It does not look like this trend will end once a vaccine is found for the disease. Many major companies, including Mondelez and Barclays, have said that working from home may become a permanent fixture of their business models. It is easy to see why. In such an advanced age of technology and communication, people can talk to each other over the phone or computer as easily as walking to someone’s desk. 

    Very soon, a business could utilize 1,000 home locations instead of just one. But all of this comes down to the abilities of IT departments nationwide.

    A recent report from GitHub came out focusing on new software development in the era of COVID-19. While there have inevitably been disruptions in numerous industries, IT professionals have more than met the challenge. The report’s author, Nicole Forsgren, was even quoted as saying, “Developers have continued to contribute and show resilience in the face of uncertainty.” So going into the future, what could be every organizational team’s best friend? 

    If you look at where the market is heading, then it certainly seems like DevOps is in for a massive boom. 

    The Resilience of DevOps

    The need for reliable software has only increased as more and more people attain smartphones and other essential pieces of technology. Five billion people now own mobile phones, which is going to result in speed problems across the globe. This is where DevOps steps in to pick up the pieces. 

    DevOps has the ability to sync, organize and automate the pace of new software releases. By design, it is made for remote operations. However, it also remains viable for operations that take place in the office or any other location. DevOps has the capability of adapting and changing along with the world around it. 

    In the era of COVID-19, that is an incredibly advantageous model as companies may want to work in an office building one week and from home the next. It is the software you need for the world you live in. 

    However, DevOps is only as good as the people utilizing it. It can be a challenge for individuals at companies, who already have so much on their plates, to adapt to the DevOps model. That is why the company has come out with the DevOps Institute. At this point, it just comes down to companies finding the right people who have the necessary technical prowess and soft skills to bring the benefits of DevOps to their workplaces. 

    According to data collected by DevOps, it certainly seems like many businesses face shortages of people skilled in information technology and other skills that could help them adapt to a more remote way of working. 

    The report shows that 48% of respondents were not entering the workforce with the skills needed to manage modern IT environments. Out of all of the people surveyed, only 28% said they believe new workers came in with essential skill sets. 

    These skills will only grow more vital as more businesses begin working from home. For example, the ability to communicate rapidly is essential when people are not in the same location. And it may not come down to human errors either. Faulty technology could result in people not seeing messages or emails on-time, delaying crucial projects. 

    The perfect DevOps engineer will be an individual who has the perfect balance of hard and soft skills. It is someone who knows how to correct a network error promptly but has the communication skills necessary to reach out when issues arise. The ideal DevOps engineer for a company is someone who understands how VPNs work inside and out but also communicates in a manner other people outside of the IT department can understand. 

    Additional Considerations for Implementing DevOps

    There are extra considerations that need to be brought to the table for companies interested in utilizing DevOps. For starters, people in a company need to get started pushing technology and DevOps toward the cloud. In a situation like the COVID-19 crisis, there is no clear timeline of when things will get back to normal. If your company is not already utilizing the cloud, then it is high time to get started. 

    Next, companies need to begin implementing automation as far as possible. Delays in communication can set back company timelines by weeks or even months. Plus, when people are aware, you are going to realize how much time is actually spent performing various tasks that could be done through software. 

    Instead of having a person check for malware, you can have everyone install malware scanners onto their computers so that their safety is being examined in the background as they focus on more important tasks. Detecting malware is only the beginning as businesses can also use automation to test functionalities and deploy to several environments simultaneously. 

    Lastly, as employers turn to DevOps to meet their companies’ obligations, it is critical to keep an eye on potential burnout. With more people working from home, they need to juggle work, family and other obligations in closer corners. 

    DevOps can be a huge lifesaver, but you want to make sure you give your employees sustainable workloads your team can handle. This time is also good to establish clear boundaries between people’s personal lives and work. It can be a good idea to set clear hours for when employees can communicate with each other. Outside of that time frame, it is important to let people relax and focus on other aspects of their lives. 

    Conclusion

    The COVID-19 crisis will pass, but the American workforce may never look the same. Many organizations may end up deciding there are more benefits to working from home than renting an office space. People will get through this, and DevOps will be there to lend a helping hand.

  • Why DevOps and Federal Agencies Need Each Other

    Why DevOps and Federal Agencies Need Each Other

    In times of crisis, the U.S. government needs to bring in tech tools fast to help solve the problem.

    First, now is a vulnerable time and weaknesses are exposed in telework infrastructure as the government rapidly shifted to remote work. Cyberattacks are up as adversaries try to exploit the weaknesses. Second, federal agencies are also overloaded with traffic, to the point that their technology is reaching a breaking point.

    DevOps and DevSecOps may be the key to solving these issues for government agencies. Both, DevOps and DevSecOps, ensure delivery of a product is fast, secure and constantly evolving, which is vital to helping the U.S. government maintain continuity during the ongoing pandemic and set up future stability.

    The Air Force experienced these benefits firsthand when its internal DevOps team pushed out at least 10 updates a day, sometimes up to 30, and sustained that agile standard for some time. This agility, security and speed allows the Air Force to focus on the end-users and mission owners.

    If the government doesn’t have DevOps, it will lack the foundation needed to build a strong tech stack and work with other emerging tech solutions.

    DevOps Use Cases in Government

    With the government workforce spread out geographically, government networks are experiencing an increase in users plugging into virtual environments. Continuous patches and updates keep government systems and networks secure, functional and able to handle the load that comes with a surge of users. DevOps ensures the government has the tools and processes in place to support growth and prevent network failure under the additional stress of onboarding thousands of users each day.

    The government also needs tools that can help the distributed workforce maintain continuity, especially when it comes to security, operations and maintenance. Employees need correct access to do their jobs, but agencies must maintain control over what data is shared and how to confirm users are who they claim to be. Access management is vital in remote environments to ensure tighter control over who has privileged access.

    A modernized approach to privileged access tools means developers can hit targets of continuous delivery to improve systems and security. Otherwise, exploitable vulnerabilities are exposed to bad actors. Solutions for secure privileged access, especially across a distributed workforce, are key to scaling tech across government.

    With a hasty shift to remote work also comes change management, which is already difficult, not to mention the additional strain of a pandemic. In a crisis, federal agencies can’t wait for in-house solutions that take a long time to develop. The government needs commercial tech that can help build remote infrastructure.

    Federal Market Opportunities

    As the government responds to COVID-19, federal agencies are in search of technologies and tools that can support their missions. Many agencies are feeling immediate strain on their IT systems as part of the shift to telework, and have received reallocated and additional budget — with broad latitude on how they spend — and procurement flexibility to modernize their systems. This opens up opportunities for tech companies, like those in the DevOps and DevSecOps space.

    Tech companies that already work in the federal market know that while the government procurement process can be lengthy and complex, it can be well worth the effort for stable revenue. In times of economic uncertainty, working with the federal market can help companies build recession resilience.

    Another part of the opportunity now is that the government needs flexible and scalable technologies that can help them respond to the COVID-19 crisis, but first, they need DevOps tools for a strong foundation and infrastructure.

    The government needs DevOps and DevSecOps now more than ever, and there are commercially successful tech companies that can help with exactly that today. In return, the government can provide a sustainable source of revenue for emerging DevOps companies. Working together can be a win-win for these tech companies and federal agencies, and can help move us toward a more innovative, safer and healthier future.