devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: Remote work

  • Work from Home: Changing Enterprise Risk and Careers

    Work from Home: Changing Enterprise Risk and Careers

    In recent weeks, there have been a slew of organizations announcing that their work from home policies will be extended through the end of the year such as is the case with Google and Facebook, or perhaps indefinitely such as Twitter and Square.

    It’s good news to many technology workers who, according to a recent CNBC|SurveyMonkey survey, prefer remote work (25%). Also, a recent survey, produced by Cybersecurity Insiders on behalf of Pulse Secure, found that 38% of U.S. companies experienced gains in productivity. In this survey, 84% of respondents believe they will institute broader and permanent work from home policies beyond the novel coronavirus crisis.

    What does the work from home policies mean for organizations going forward? When it comes to security and compliance, it means quite a bit. According to the Cybersecurity Insiders survey, 69% of respondents are concerned about work from home (WFH) risks, especially due to low user awareness training, poorly secured home and public WiFi networks, use of personal devices and sensitive data leakage.

    A full 78% of respondents expressed their desire to enforce the same level of security controls for remote users as they do for on-premises users. While 65% allow access from personal, unmanaged devices, two-thirds of security professionals anticipate malware, phishing, unauthorized user and device access, and unpatched/at-risk systems to be the most exploitable WFH attack vectors.

    “Sixty-three percent expressed that remote work could impact compliance mandates that apply to their organization; especially GDPR, PCI-DSS, HIPAA and those with data breach notification,” the report found.

    Interestingly, about three-fourths of those organizations surveyed said they have more than 76% of their employees working from up — that’s up from 25% in 2019. Still, a third of those surveyed said their organization is ill-prepared or not prepared to support remote working. Yet, 75% of businesses transitioned to remote working within 15 days.

    “Surprisingly, less than a third expressed cost or budget problems, demonstrating the urgency to support their business. Additionally, more than half (54%) expressed that COVID-19 has accelerated migration of users’ workflows and applications to the cloud,” stated the report.

    How are survey respondents securing their staff who work from home? The survey found the most common to be endpoint security, firewalls, virtual private networks and multi-factor authentication.

    The 2020 Remote Work-From-Home Cybersecurity Report is based on a survey of 413 security decision makers, conducted in May of this year, within multiple industries, including financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, high-tech, government and education.

    Interestingly, the work from home movement may also give a boost to the gig economy, as gig economy work moves from lower-paying taskwork to professional gig work. A recent report, How the Gig Economy is Reshaping Tech Careers and IT Itself, highlighted data that shows 72% of all gig projects were in large enterprise and professional services firms throughout 2018 and 2019, compared with 52% two years prior.

    “This rapid growth is spurred by workers’ interest in flexible careers as well as businesses’ interest in convenience and efficiency. There are signs that the gig economy is finding many adherents overseas as well,” stated the report.

    Whether or not the work from home movement is real or long-term is no longer the question, it’s for how long and how far the trend goes. Enterprise technology leaders had soon prepare for a much more remote and loosely connected workforce.

  • No Excuses: Lock Down RDP

    No Excuses: Lock Down RDP

    We’ve been at the “everyone working remote” thing for months now, and still there are horror stories of people being attacked via Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Early on, it was understandable if not acceptable—but we’re not early on any more.

    During the rush of doing whatever it took to help people work from home, exposed RDP was just one of many stories we heard from systems operators, helpdesk and systems admins. Stories of people carrying desktops home, or thinking that tethering to their phone was a “good enough” internet solution predominated. But those issues are clearing up, and they’re specific to a company or a subset of employees. RDP seems to be more persistent.

    According to Shodan (article last updated end of March 2020), RDP use has spiked—and unprotected RDP use has spiked. Security by obscuring (exposing RDP on non-standard ports) has also gone up, and is not effective versus a determined attack. If your goal is to be secure, history has shown very well that obscurity does not at all work.

    Gil Rapaport wrote a great article about this over on our sister site, Security Boulevard. The only thing I would add is to put it on a Virtual  Private Network (VPN) or RD Gateway with 2FA, if you can. Some organizations still don’t have access to VPN services, but if you do, and RDP isn’t running through them, get to cracking.

    Some areas of the world are coming out of lockdown, but the amount of remote work will not drop to the levels it once was. Not soon, probably not ever. The only thing that was holding up remote work for a wide selection of office jobs was the belief that present was better. Some organizations, via forced remote, have learned that the work can indeed be done by people not warming a seat at HQ.

    So don’t put it off. Make certain you are protected. Sleep soundly at night, knowing that the easy vector for attackers right now is protected for your organization. And keep kicking remote rear. Systems are still running, even with the wild changes that came suddenly, and that’s all you–whether your organization recognizes you or not.

  • Best Practices for Remote IT Management

    Best Practices for Remote IT Management

    As companies adjust to the new normal of a completely remote workforce, IT teams still struggle to maintain productivity and workflows, meaning DevOps practices have never been more of an asset. IT teams must be more agile and efficient to manage their IT infrastructure from remote locations; otherwise, confusion and errors can ensue at a moment’s notice. 

    To ensure IT teams remain efficient and thrive in a collaborative, open culture, there are several steps that companies can take now to cultivate an innovative environment long after COVID-19 is over.

    Implementing “Game Day-Style” Practices

    In theory, “game day-style” practices are probably one of the best ways to ensure teams are ready for any remote work. This involves companies having IT teams work remotely as a test run, and then reporting problems early and often to avoid issues when everyone needs to be remote. Unfortunately, we’re well past this, which means that it’s now up to teams to communicate early and often. Breaking down siloed work environments, while creating open dialogue up and down the leadership chain, can go a long way. Naturally, connectivity is also a key factor here. With communication and connectivity at the core, companies can more easily assemble and designate teams for specific issues.

    This does, though, depend on the encouragement of company leadership, with senior decision-making being integral to the IT team’s success.

    Identifying a Trusted Team Leader

    An enterprise’s IT director or manager requires substantial expertise, true empathy and effective communication. Not with a command-and-control approach, but rather one that supports people by helping to facilitate communications and working to remove impediments without micromanaging.

    However, the most important condition for a director or manager is their own aptitude for working remotely as they must always maintain a high degree of diligence. Their communication and guidance reflect their leadership as well as strengthen the IT team’s capabilities.

    Directors or managers must ensure there is seamless coordination, strengthening cohesion between each team and reducing the number of dependencies. A DevOps approach is instrumental as it entails mechanisms such as version control, automated testing and deployment, ultimately creating autonomous, resourceful teams. Additionally, directors or managers can develop a methodology for pinpointing conflicts and enhancing synergy within IT teams. As a result, when working remotely, IT teams can operate at maximum efficiency and maintain high levels of productivity.

    The Components for Maximum Productivity

    With IT teams working in different locations, productivity and workflow are likely to be strained, especially with the current crisis. To counter this, IT teams have adopted collaboration tools to interact with one another, such as Microsoft Teams, Slack and Zoom. These three platforms have seen a massive uptick in users:

    • Microsoft Teams has a total of 44 million daily active users.
    • Slack added 9,000 new paid customers, having over 12 million daily active users.
    • Zoom has a total of 300 million daily active users.

    While not any one platform is better than the other, it’s important to create the conditions for autonomous, empowered teams. This is where making the most of tools, such as version control, automated testing and other aspects of a good DevOps approach to software development and deployment, come into play. You not only have to manage the teams and their deliverables, but you have to ensure that you have a methodology that quickly identifies when they’re creating conflicts for one another. IT teams should select which is easiest to use and best satisfies their needs. Effective communication is the objective as using multiple messaging channels can cause confusion or reduce any likelihood of productivity.

    Communication Is Key

    Clear and consistent communication is the key to an IT team’s success as members must know what’s happening at all times, including the project’s current status and necessary components, assigned roles and responsibilities, and the overall goals and expectations of the project.

    The enemy of communication is assumption, which can harm an entire group’s synergy and productivity. For example, you assume that the software will simply work as intended, or you assume delivery will happen on time regardless of the project’s timeline.

    Assumption guarantees a project’s failure, which is why it is important to outline everything about the project, both the tangible and intangible.

    Never Forget About the People

    Companies, large and small, need to foster an environment exuding collaboration, communication and good will, which causes IT teams to flourish and grow. Given the current crisis, some companies are taking several measures to ensure that morale remains consistently high among all employees. This means investing time and effort into team-building or team-bonding activities such as virtual coffee breaks, lunches via Skype or Zoom, or even games.

    There is much fear surrounding COVID-19 and companies must prioritize each employee’s well-being, including routine check-ins, team or staff meetings and 1:1 time with managers to ensure that the health and safety of employees is kept at the forefront of decision making.  Creating an inclusive atmosphere also helps remind IT teams that they can depend on one another and are part of a larger community, regardless of the distance.

    The Common Denominator

    Most importantly, for all of the above to work, teams must rely on one underlying element: communication. It is virtually impossible for remote IT management to thrive without clear communication between individuals and their teams. Furthermore, there is the possibility that IT teams will adopt this remote lifestyle permanently once COVID-19 subsides. If so, companies must implement these best practices to ensure their growth and longevity as they will encounter more complex, demanding assignments from others.

  • How 200 CIOs Responded to a Fully Remote Economy

    How 200 CIOs Responded to a Fully Remote Economy

    The COVID-19 global pandemic has ushered a significant priority shift for the digital workplace. As development teams become completely remote, executive priorities are rapidly adapting to meet the gravity of these unanticipated times.

    But, were IT leaders prepared for such a dramatic shift? What are they doing to evolve? To answer these tough questions, let’s turn to the data. A March 2020 study, conducted by Adobe and Fortune, surveyed 200 chief information officers (CIOs) on how their priorities are changing to meet the needs of a global crisis. Here’s what they found.

    Remote Work

    As it turns out, the majority of enterprises (84%) report they were prepared for remote work, with a slight increase for SMBs, at 94%.

    “Like most business leaders, CIOs now have to rethink priorities, or at least reorder them, and we must reinvent ourselves now as virtual leaders,” said Adobe CIO Cynthia Stoddard.

    We are living in a golden age of virtual collaboration tools—teams have Slack, GitHub, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and many other options. Yet, 53% of CIOs still cite communication as the biggest hurdle to remote work. Nevertheless, half of the CIOs surveyed reported their organizations are still actively hiring, indicating steady growth for IT.

    New Technologies

    Regarding technological adoption, some organizations are struggling to keep pace. Twenty percent of CIOs report serious shortfalls in technology tools. Interestingly, less than 25% of CIOs estimated increased financial spending for areas such as public cloud, infrastructure and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML).

    “Indeed, nearly all CIOs (90%) surveyed said they use a public cloud service for at least some of their data, but most is housed on-premises,” said Giselle Abramovich. “Only one in three organizations store half or more of their data in a public cloud.”

    One thing most enterprises agree on is the need for better security—seven in 10 anticipated increased financial investments into cybersecurity.

    Artificial Intelligence

    Only 50% of enterprise CIOs said they use AI in one or more projects (25% for SMB CIOs). However, it seems to be a growing discipline, as 90% of the organizations that have implemented AI have done so in the past year.

    Though AI has garnered significant interest, there are hurdles to actual implementation. According to the report, “the biggest issues related to AI include getting data in order, funding and finding the right talent.” With more people online and the importance of distanced communication, it is likely that investments into AI will increase, especially for use in IT support and customer interactions.

    “We’re making AI a strategic priority at Adobe. AI implementation is difficult for many organizations because it’s still new to most businesses, and there is a shortage in talent that has a deep understanding of it,” said Stoddard.

    Analysis: Impact on DevOps

    CIOs are in a unique position. Leaders are reevaluating business practices and also reassessing their technological investments. As the Adobe/Fortune study shows, many companies were prepared for 100% remote work, albeit some more than others.

    To endure a COVID-19 economical drought, CIOs are taking action. The report indicates increased investment into remote tools, AI and cybersecurity, while aligning hiring and new infrastructure to reach these goals.

    Institutions with a previous investment into cloud infrastructure as well as scalability practices, such as serverless, are likely well-equipped for increased online interaction and unanticipated usages. In this virtual realm, automation is also key to streamline deployments and monitor applications in remote fashions.

    Though the report doesn’t differentiate between company types, it’s likely that digitally native enterprises are well-equipped as well. In addition, the trend from physical storefront to “brick and click,” has only been magnified by the current climate, forcing retail and banks to invest heavily in digital technologies and DevOps.

    From a DevSecOps standpoint, increased end-user online action means an increased number of threats. Thus, security strategies for containers and service meshes should be reevaluated.

    By repositioning priorities, IT can adapt to the new state of interaction. With deliberate execution, CIOs and all executives alike could find themselves on the right side of the river once the economy resumes.

  • Incident Resolution for Remote Teams

    Incident Resolution for Remote Teams

    People working in IT support and incident management right now are faced with unusual difficulties supporting large remote workforces and managing unpredictable workloads. On Reddit, system admins and other IT pros are bemoaning the hiccups and hassles of working in isolation while trying to resolve issues and maintain high SLAs. You can’t go grab your indispensable SME for troubleshooting, because that person is also home and inundated with messages and alerts from many different tools.

    Networks, VPNs and servers are being hammered extra hard right now from higher usage of SaaS apps and collaboration tools. User expectations are even more grandiose than normal: The home-based IT environment is a lifeline to whatever remains of human interaction. IT organizations are expected to make applications and services work flawlessly–overnight. Undoubtedly, IT pros are working with assiduity to keep the wheels of work moving for their employers during a time of crisis. Yet, working longer hours isn’t the answer. We need new ways of working—ones which may prove better than the current status quo for the long term.

    In many organizations, the process of incident management and resolution begins with people looking at screens full of metrics. You see a spike in something, such as network I/O, and immediately begin to investigate it, assuming the worst. A more adverse scenario is when users call out problems on Twitter, Reddit or other popular tech communities, creating a noxious PR situation which IT and the business must swiftly respond to and manage. This ad hoc, reactive fire drill takes time, and resolving that particular issue may not be the most important item of the day. In software development, it’s akin to the bad practice of designing the architecture of a system first and then the user experience.

    Given everything that’s at stake in the foreseeable future of stay-at-home mandates, SREs and IT support technicians need to flip the incident management process. Rather than beginning with the metrics and working backwards to uncover the problem, if there even is one, start by looking for the most important problems to solve. Then, discover the resources and components which support that end-user process and finally, analyze the metrics which are most relevant. For example:

    1. A B-to-C provider of a streaming video service is now seeing a 200% increase in daytime traffic. This is resulting in sluggish load times for users and glitches. 
    2. IT has tagged the components beneath that service, so IT operators know exactly which VMs, databases and load balancers come into play. 
    3. Next, the operations team can identify the most relevant metrics, for instance CPU idle time, to measure and take steps to correct. 

    The Problem-First Approach

    It sounds so simple: flip the process. Yet, this is not the case. IT operators and SREs are not accustomed to thinking in terms of which problems to solve or prevent. Being proactive or predictive hasn’t been the common workflow.

    Here is how IT operations and DevOps teams can take a proactive approach to managing the availability and health of enterprise services.

    Coordinate Across Departments

    Identifying the most critical problems to solve right now is the hardest step and the one which will take the longest. Common problems these days are related to cost and scale: How do I right-size my environment to reduce costs or handle more workloads? Broaden your field of inputs to narrow down to the specific issue, such as slow page loads on the financial reporting website. Product managers, account managers and business unit leads who are the closest to the customer experience can deliver feedback on the top issues affecting customer/user satisfaction. Teams should also review recent support tickets to identify common themes of pain.

    Fine-Tune Your Approach to Metrics

    The Utilization Saturation and Errors (USE) Method is one way to approach the problem-first incident management process. As detailed by Brendan Gregg, a senior performance architect at Netflix, this methodology begins by posing questions, seeking answers and working backwards to the metrics. For each resource that you want to measure, identify three metrics: one for utilization, one for saturation and one for errors.

    “The USE Method has made you aware of what you didn’t check: What were once unknown-unknowns are now known-unknowns,” Gregg explained.

    Standardize Workflows

    Create a common process for incident management across all your teams. Without the advantage of having almost everyone in the same room to huddle together in an ad hoc fashion when big issues crop up, it’s imperative to institute clear steps and roles. Doing so will prevent the frustrations, confusion and oversights that needlessly delay resolution. Since most incidents are composed of multiple contributing factors, teams need to adopt a small number of user-friendly tools to document and organize the information. At our company, we’re now using tools such as Miro, an online whiteboard application, to replace our physical whiteboarding sessions. Of course, there’s also Zoom, Slack, Jira and a host of other cloud-based tools already in place at many organizations. Mandate which tools everyone should use, with some guidelines on how to use them.

    Increase Automation

    In some organizations, scaling requirements in response to demand have increased tenfold. Automation is playing a critical role now; moving away from a web GUI, for example, is more scalable and aligns with modern tools such as Chef and Puppet. User tickets can be auto generated, for instance, from emails and linked to code management systems like GitHub. Modern development and operations teams are also expanding automation in unit testing and provisioning. 

    Watch for Burnout

    Whether there’s more work and/or a need to fill the hours during long quarantine days, many software engineers, testers and architects are working longer days right now. Yet, exhaustion and burnout can lead to errors and oversights along with low morale. It’s up to managers to make sure that employees are taking breaks, working reasonable days and having the time and energy to attend to personal needs.

  • The Way Forward: Digital Resiliency Wins

    The Way Forward: Digital Resiliency Wins

    As we wrote in Digital Transformation: Digitally Resilient Organizations, digitally resilient enterprises have built themselves business-technology platforms that are elastic, agile and can correctly position themselves to securely meet current business demands. These enterprises are also constantly learning from their data and adjusting as markets, workforce and customers demand.

    These enterprises have also eliminated the bulk of their technical debt and continue to innovate so they aren’t disrupted by competitors with a better idea, execution or understanding customer needs.

    Consider the grocery delivery wars, and how the coronavirus pandemic may have shifted the balance. Today, $78 billion retailer Target has a chance to prove, to a delivery-eager customer base, its prior investments in its online services designed to compete with Amazon Prime. Will its new Drive Up pick-up service and Shipt delivery service meet customer demand during this period of social distancing— and keep those customers over the long run—while Amazon tries to manage its way through supply shortages and shipping delays?

    Walmart and Instacart have also seen significant usage surges, due to social distancing mandates. According to app store intelligence provider Apptopia, comparing average daily downloads in February to Sunday, March 15, Instacart, Walmart Grocery and Shipt have seen surges of 218%, 160% and 124% respectively.

    “We’ve also noticed people in the United States have been turning to Target to stock up on groceries, entertainment and everyday essentials. March 15’s downloads saw an increase of 98% over the average number of daily downloads in February,” Apptopia wrote in its analysis.

    While certain industries, such as online food and grocery delivery, may have seen years of adoption growth condensed into weeks, many enterprises are seeing downturns in demand.

    Research firm IDC previously estimated that real GDP in the U.S. would reach 2.4%, but downshifted that to a worst case 1.4%. While IT spending dropped from an expected 5.1% year over year growth to worst case 1.3%. IDC pegs the base scenario for GDP growth now at 2.0% and for IT spending at 4.3%.

    This has thrown CIO priorities into the air. According to a recent poll conducted by McKinsey & Company, CIOs are pressed to solve immediate challenges. For example, 32% cited increased demands for collaboration services and operating norms for working from home at scale, and facing increased strain on budgets (22%), a medium- and longer-term consideration.

    McKinsey & Company advised CIOs to keep their focus on stabilizing emergency measures by strengthening remote working capabilities, improve cybersecurity, adjust ways of working with agile teams and prepare for a breakdown of parts of the vendor ecosystem (supply chain). In the interim, CIOs need to address immediate IT cost pressures to reduce costs, and creatively redeploy the IT workforce, while also pivoting to new areas of focus in the future.

    According to McKinsey & Company, many organizations are successfully digitally engaging with customers, and cited a government in Western Europe who embarked on an “express digitization” of quarantine-compensation claims to deal with a more than 100-fold increase in volume.

    “Sometimes this effort is about taking loads from call centers, but more often it addresses real new business opportunities. To engage with consumers, for example, retailers in China increasingly gave products at-home themes in WeChat,” McKinsey & Company wrote.

    “Technology departments must anticipate and prepare to offer more of these kinds of digital services, products, and channels,” McKinsey & Company advised. “The key to reaching customers will be creating suitable access interfaces between internal IT systems and external social platforms and accelerating the integration of new vendors and distributors.”

    In the months ahead, the organizations to move beyond the economic downturn will be those that built the platforms that enabled them to efficiently endure the recession and position themselves to adapt to whatever the new business as usual turns out to be.

  • Tips For Managing Development Teams Remotely During Coronavirus

    Tips For Managing Development Teams Remotely During Coronavirus

    Thanks to the global coronavirus pandemic, around a third of the world’s population is on lockdown in their homes, which means a huge number of businesses are currently trying to navigate remote working solutions. Trying to collaborate on software development is difficult at the best of times when your team is all in the same office, but with your team split across various home offices communication and collaboration is made all the more difficult.

    Remote development work is an altogether different challenge, one that needs careful thought and new solutions. Luckily, there are ways to get around it, and they don’t all require huge investment or innovation. Just tweaking the way you think and work will help you continue to deliver on your development goals.

    Spread Knowledge

    Many teams run into problems with their remote workforce when they realize knowledge is not equally distributed amongst team members. I don’t mean the company log-in details (though you might have that problem too), but that the company’s vision and culture have not been effectively communicated. In an office setting this isn’t too much of a problem, as developers can be sent off on projects and the team can come together to implement them with one voice at the end, but when the whole team is divided it’s a lot harder to achieve this final cohesion.

    To avoid having to piece your projects together like a jigsaw puzzle, make sure all of your developers are clear on what goals the company wants to achieve as a whole, and what culture and tone the company is wishing to promote. That way any development decisions made in private working sessions are still geared toward the overall company aim, and individual projects will slot in well together.

    Communicate

    To spread knowledge effectively, you also need a major focus on communication. You won’t realize how much the office dynamic contributes to communication until it’s gone. Working from home eliminates many of the little interactive scenarios in which team members can discuss ideas and clarify details. 

    To counteract this, you need to communicate far more than you previously did. Send more emails for clarification and have more regular meetings (over video chat) than you otherwise would. This might seem annoying or even counterproductive at first, but having a clear flow of information across the whole team is important for accountability. 

    Take Note

    Related to communication, you may find it really helps to note more things down. You’d be surprised how much information is transmitted from being physically in the same space as someone, so a lot of workers find it a lot harder to pay attention to video of audio meetings and can easily forget details. Whether it’s minutes of a Zoom meeting or a brief one-on-one phone conversation, jot down a note of important tasks or details to remember, and circulate them throughout your team.

    Be Humble And Accept Feedback

    If you’re managing a development team that’s just gone full remote, accept the fact that you might not have all the answers. This might be as new to you as everyone else, and even if you have experience of remote working before it probably wasn’t during a global pandemic. By all means, show a strong sense of leadership and implement a solid plan of action, but be humble enough to accept that it might not be a perfect plan.

    Show your humility by being open to feedback from your team members. They are having to adjust to a new lifestyle that may require new strategies to deal with. You might consider flexible working hours, or reassessing your tools or communications strategy. Figure this out as a team and you’re much more likely to keep morale up and not sacrifice any productivity.

    Embrace The New Normal

    Most importantly, don’t spend your time waiting for things to go back to normal. Treating this period as a brief interruption to your normal working schedule will stop you from fully committing to new strategies and tools to help you produce good work right now. It will show in your products, and if your remote working period lasts longer than you’d expected it will mess up your production schedule. For now, this is the new normal: embrace that and start with your best foot forward.

  • DevOps Chats: Swiss, Simple Secure Collaboration with Adeya

    DevOps Chats: Swiss, Simple Secure Collaboration with Adeya

    The current situation with so many working from home has shined a spotlight on potential security issues with many of our collaboration solutions. Adeya, says they have the answer, offering Swiss, simple collaboration on a military grade scale.

    I sat down with Francois Rodriguez of Adeya’s executive team to discuss what makes Adeya both simple and secure, as well as what the offering is all about. This is more than video conferencing by the way. This is a well developed and tested collaboration suite that has been in use by the Swiss military and others for years. Have a listen and check out Adeya.

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

    Transcript

    Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone, it’s Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud. You’re listening to another DevOps Chat. We’ve got a new company to introduce you to on today’s DevOps Chat, and the name of the company is Adeya. I hope I didn’t mispronounce that, but my guest will give us the proper pronunciation. I’d like to introduce you to Francois Rodriguez, he’s the chief growth officer at Adeya. Francois, welcome.

    Francois Rodriguez: Thank you for hosting us.

    Shimel: Thank you. So, Francois, did I get the name right?

    Rodriguez: Yeah, correct. The pronunciation is correct. Americans tend to say Adeya, but yes, Adeya is correct. [Laughter]

    Shimel: Okay. Well, you know, I always thought I had a little bit of a French accent. [Laughter] But I’m glad I got it right, then. So, let’s start with the obvious, Francois. Our audience may not be familiar with Adeya. Why don’t you, if you don’t mind, give us a little background?

    Rodriguez: Yeah, the background of the company is the following. So, it is a spinoff from EPFL. EPFL is one of the top five universities in technology in the world, based in Lausanne, so next door. So, for those that don’t know where Lausanne is, it’s next door to Geneva. And from that spinoff, the ask was for encrypting voice communication for the Swiss Army at that time, using a Symbian Operating System. At that time, Nokia was the leading mobile phone operating system, and that was the foundation of the company.

    With the advent of the smartphones, the application has been enriched with messaging and then the mobile application becomes, as well, a desktop application, a tablet application, enabling as well file sharing, instant messaging and we’re introducing as well video conference calling, end to end encrypted. So, that’s the most important element of the suite is the encryption layer, initially deployed and developed for the Swiss Army, so we are using the highest grade of encryption, so called military grade. And we are bringing that technology to companies and small organizations as well.

    Shimel: Excellent. So, the Swiss Army is already a customer, is that correct?

    Rodriguez: It’s the historical customer.

    Shimel: Okay. And then, at this point, has the company raised venture capital? Is it self-funded? What is the situation?

    Rodriguez: Yeah, it’s a venture capital, which is important in this type of business. You certainly have heard the news of cryptogate that was having some links with governments. So, these days, it’s very important when you provide this type of technology that you don’t have strings with any organization state owned or having any back door.

    Shimel: Sure. Sure, I mean, everyone’s worried about that. And, you know, as—well, before we jump more into that, Francois, what about your personal background, your journey? How did you come to be chief revenue officer—excuse me, chief growth officer at Adeya?

    Rodriguez: So, I started my career in telecom. At that time, I was in charge of developing the multimedia content for the youth and student populations. Before the advent of the smartphones, multimedia was games, ring tones. I don’t know if you remember these days.

    Shimel: Sure, I do.

    Rodriguez: And then we developed the music content, the early days of .mp3s. And moving forward, I professionalized my expertise in multimedia, transforming application into more professional applications. With the arrival of the tablets, we develop more and more professional application for enterprise, and then I joined a brand new spinoff from Airbus Enceda to bring connectivity on airplanes. The company used to be called OnAir.

    Shimel: Mm-hmm.

    Rodriguez: You’ve got Gogo in the U.S., so it’s a similar company, providing connectivity to passengers, multimedia and content to passengers, but as well, professional application for the cabin crew, electronic flag backs for the pilots, and more recently, IUTs connecting landing gear, engines, and any data that the airplane was generating.

    Shimel: Sure. Fantastic.

    Rodriguez: I joined Adeya in 2016.

    Shimel: Also, how long has Adeya been around for? I didn’t realize. When was Adeya founded?

    Rodriguez: 2007.

    Shimel: Oh, really? So, it’s been—so, this is not some fly by night, started yesterday company. You guys have been at this a while.

    Rodriguez: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the brand awareness is really recent, because the typical client of Adeya used to be governments that are quite shy to do any marketing around, and it’s really when I joined the company that we started the blocking and enterprise product.

    Shimel: You know, in some ways this reminds me of—so, I’m a little older than you. [Laughter] But, you know, back when we had the AOL message rooms or chatrooms, whatever—they called them meeting rooms, maybe, before then. It was a rather innocent time on the internet where people didn’t realize you can’t let your children go online and just go into some chatroom with people you don’t know and what can go on there. And of course, we saw horror stories of what people were writing in chatrooms being made public or used the wrong way or predators, you know, preying on women and children and stuff. And because—well, it’s the reason why we can’t have nice things, right? There’s always bad people trying to take advantage of things.

    And then, as a result of that, you know, we saw a locking down, if you will, somewhat, of a lot of that kind of technology. But then, I guess it’s just human nature, people want to communicate, right? People want to communicate—even, God knows now, when we’re all locked in our houses, right, people want to still communicate. Being alone and isolated is just kinda foreign to the human condition.

    Rodriguez: Yeah, you’re right. So, I used to put an application on my daughter’s phone to lock the phone after an hour. These days, we’re up to three hours, because, you know, they need to communicate. They don’t go to school any more, so they need to be connected to friends, they need to chat, they need to send pictures, to send videos, to do video calling. These days, video calling is very important for the youngsters. I’m usually not a very big fan of video calling, but they are, so those are—

    Shimel: No, they’re native. They’re native to this, right? To us, we look at it and—actually, I was having this conversation with my COO this morning, talking about, we both  have children who are in high school, college now and in university.

    Rodriguez: Yes.

    Shimel: And, you know, they’re net native people who, the idea of doing video calling, the idea of listening to podcasts and so forth, this is how they’re used to consuming, right? And [Cross talk].

    Rodriguez: They’re used to the technology, they’re used to the technology and they’re also very tech savvy in terms of what features and functions those tools can bring, and they are very, very, I would say, picky on which tools they’re gonna use. And we’ve seen that in certain companies that there is a kind of step back when they propose traditional tools that are quite clunky, quite difficult to use, very slow that you need to put the VPN around and all these old fashioned or traditional tools have been rejected by the young population of workers.

    Shimel: Yeah.

    Rodriguez: And more so now with these days of remote workers where you have, you know, a layer of Bring Your Own Device on top of it where people are installing their own favorite applications, too. It’s very difficult to control. It’s very difficult to put security around when you don’t have a clear policy on what is allowed, what is not allowed, and more so when you don’t bring options. People are starting to download their favorite tools online. Obviously, security is not their top priority, it’s to make their work easy and fast and provide agility to the organization. So, that’s a real issue.

    Shimel: I agree. And you know, I mean, but this is a classic security conundrum, which is, if we just think we’re gonna lay down on the tracks and say, “Stop!” the train runs us over, right? We can’t stop that, so what we need to do is, instead of being the people who say no, we need to be the people to say, “Yes, you can, but here’s a secure way of doing it that maybe isn’t too cumbersome, too expensive, and still allows them to do what they need and want to do from a communications perspective.”

    And I guess, really, that’s what the whole Adeya thing is about, right, is—hey, you wanna video or do voice calls or, you know, messaging, you can still do that, and we understand it’s important. But here’s a way of doing it in a more secure fashion.

    Rodriguez: Yes, security is important, but what we’ve been putting at the heart of the development is the user experience. Because there is a lot of tools in the security space in the market, but very few of them are really providing a seamless experience for the users, and more so when they’re not IT people. Because IT people will always tell you, “That’s very easy, you go in Settings, you configure that, and you put the VPN around and it’s working,” when in fact, nobody knows how to do it.

    So, what we’ve been doing is to bring in one unique application, I’m calling the Adeya like a Swiss Army knife. In one tool, you have got different features. You don’t need to have, you know, upswinging. You don’t need to have configuration. The security layers are ___, you instill it in your device, and you start triggering the feature that you want to use.

    Shimel: Absolutely. Francois, if you could share with our audience, you know, how easy and how much does it cost if you wanted to use the Adeya solution? Let’s say—look, I’m a little worried about our use of Slack and/or Zoom for corporate communications; you wanna use what you wanna use with your kids or whatever, that’s one thing. What does it take to stand Adeya up?

    Rodriguez: So, we’ve got four packages, depending on the security layer that you want to activate. So, the starting price point is $4, the $4 is already, you know, the starter package that provides you one to one video calls, security voice over IP, instant messaging, and as well, you know, all the Dropbox and Lockbox where you can store some documents.

    If you want to have the video conferencing with multiple users, you have an extra option, and if you want to install everything on premise on your own data center, and this is what we do for governments, there is an extra cost to deploy the system, but it’s your entire system, okay? You have no backdoors, no cloud act to open up your data center to foreigners, and you have everything in your house. So, that’s the model that we do.

    So, we’re starting with a very easy to set up cloud solution based in Switzerland and we use the strength of the cloud infrastructure in Switzerland with the data sovereignty, and we go up to deploy your own system on prem.

    Shimel: Really, okay. So, there’s sort of a cloud-based system, if you will, SaaS or cloud-based, and then you have a choice of on-prem. Because I know in many government situations, as you mentioned, they don’t want to share public infrastructure, right?

    Rodriguez: Yeah.

    Shimel: And so, that’s a real requirement. So, Francois, I’ve got to ask you, I mean, it seems like the Adeya system would find a very fertile ground in today’s environment with what’s going on with COVID, with people working from home and everything else—how has this affected, or how has Adeya responding? What are you seeing in the market recently now, just in the last couple weeks, as a result of the pandemic?

    Rodriguez: So, what we see is a variety of demands coming from the historical clients which are government administrations that are really expanding the fleet. It’s not, you know, just to secure a certain special project, but it’s really to provide everyone the tool to work from home, and in the most important security layers. Because, as soon as you leave the government institutions, you need to be connected from whom, with high level security, because then you bring the formation outside the typical firewalls, and this is what the governments are fearing.

    Now, the diversity that we’re seeing is that we start having—hello?

    Shimel: No, no, it’s okay. People are blogging, I have a meeting coming on.

    Rodriguez: Okay, understandable. What we see is, enterprises now coming to equipping their entire organization and not just the top executives that used to travel a lot or go to countries where they need to shield their communication, but as well to protect their messaging, to protect their messaging, to protect the documents that they’re sending, avoiding sending them over e-mail because even though e-mail has been encrypted for several years, it’s very difficult to have the IPs working because the systems are not interworking together, depending on the operator that you use. If one side is using Gmail, the other side is using Microsoft, you don’t have interworking with encryption, for instance.

    Shimel: Sure.

    Rodriguez: This is the—we try to ease the experience with this type of situation. What we see now is the remote workers as well, the employees themselves are contacting us to, “Hey, I heard about your solution. Give me some documentation that I can bring to my IT people.”

    Shimel: Well, that’s the way it always comes in. You know, it’s almost that open source mentality, but very good.

    Rodriguez: Exactly. So, that’s the number—

    Shimel: Francois, as I mentioned to you when we started, the time goes really quick, here. I apologize, but we’re way past 15 minutes.

    Rodriguez: Okay.

    Shimel: I wanna thank you for introducing Adeya to our audience. I wish you will in these uncertain times, both personally and with the company. And as I mentioned to you, maybe we could do a video interview for our TechStrong TV—

    Rodriguez: Yeah, sure.

    Shimel: And have you join us. Maybe we even could use a day or we could record the video through there or something, show people it in action.

    Rodriguez: Yeah. Okay.

    Shimel: Sounds good?

    Rodriguez: Yeah, perfect. Looking forward.

    Shimel: We’ll work on that. Alright.

    Rodriguez: Thank you, Alan.

    Shimel: Thank you.

    Rodriguez: Pleased to meet you. [Cross talk]

    Shimel: Chief growth officer for Adeya, Francois Rodriguez, here on DevOps Chat, this is Alan Shimel, and you just listened to another DevOps Chat.

    — Alan Shimel

  • Coronavirus Economic Shutdown: Analysts Hit the Brakes on Global IT Spending Estimates

    Coronavirus Economic Shutdown: Analysts Hit the Brakes on Global IT Spending Estimates

    By most accounts, 2020 was set to be a pretty good year for U.S. gross domestic product and enterprise IT budgets. That was before the novel coronavirus, and the subsequent economic shutdown that is designed to blunt its spread and avoid overwhelming the nation’s health system. Analysts are now slashing their economic growth rates and enterprise technology spending estimates.

    Previously, research firm IDC estimated that real GDP in the U.S. would reach 2.4%, but downshifted that to a “pessimistic scenario” of 1.4%. While IT spending dropped from an expected 5.1% year over year growth to a pessimistic scenario of 1.3%. The base scenario for GDP growth is now 2.0% and for IT spending 4.3%.

    “The pessimistic scenario is not a worst-case scenario,” said Stephen Minton, vice president in IDC’s Customer Insights & Analysis group. “Things are moving so quickly that we need to constantly recalibrate our assumptions and expectations, but the pessimistic scenario reflects an IT market in which weaker economic growth translates into weaker business and consumer spending across all technologies over the next few quarters. Things could get worse, but hopefully not.”

    Earlier this month, Forrester analyst Andrew Bartels wrote in this post that the U.S. and global technology market spend will slow to 2% this year.

    “That assumes the U.S. and other major economies have declined in the first half of 2020 but manage to recover in the second half. There is also a 50% probability that U.S. and global tech markets will decline by 2% or more in 2020 if a full-fledged recession hits,” Bartels wrote.

    Not all areas in technology will be impacted equally. Forrester expects there will increased demand for cloud infrastructure services, specialized software, communications equipment and telecom services for remote work and education.

    However, Forrester expects computer and communications equipment to potentially decline 5% to 10%, while technology consulting and systems integration services spending could be flat to down 5%, should companies really belt-tighten.

    “Software spending growth will slow to the 2% to 4% range in the best case and will post no growth in the worst case of a recession. Tech outsourcing and telecom services will hold up better, though contract revisions could cause spending to go down, as well,” stated Bartels.

    S&P Global Ratings also predicts slowing IT spend. According to its update, Global IT Spending Set To Slide As Coronavirus Hits Hardware Sales, S&P Global economists cut their global GDP growth rate by more than half to 1% to 1.5% from 2.8%—in just two weeks.

    “We believe the spread of the coronavirus will hurt enterprise and consumer IT spending across the globe with particularly bleak ramifications for the hardware and semiconductor segments. However, we expect some of the deferred spending to return gradually in the latter half of this year through heavy government stimulus in the U.S., China, and elsewhere,” wrote S&P Global Rating Analyst Andrew Chang.

    S&P Global Ratings anticipates IT spending to decline 3% year over year, compared their prior estimate of 2% to 3% growth. S&P Global Ratings expects some of the biggest hits to hardware, with smartphone revenue falling to negative 9% from up to 2% growth, and PCs to negative 9% from a previous range of negative 3% to a positive 4% growth.

    While enterprise technology budgets are being slashed, the need for business-technology isn’t going away. In fact, it’s accelerating as more knowledge workers shift to working from home, more remote collaboration and keeping legacy systems running and moving forward with digital transformation efforts.

    — George V. Hulme

  • Backdrops

    Backdrops

    — ROELBOB