December 14, 2015

Why high IT talent turnover is your fault

Just 32 percent of IT leaders and 41 percent of IT professionals say their organization has a clearly articulated employee value proposition (EVP), which goes beyond compensation to take into account all of the elements a company has to offer its employees-not just compensation, but also opportunities for career development, career path progressing and succession planning, work-life balance, culture and other company differentiators, Hayman says, but many don't look beyond compensation and vacation time. It is surprising that a higher level of IT professionals feel an EVP has been articulated - leading to the possible conclusion that IT professionals limit their definition of an EVP to compensation and benefits while discounting other factors.


The advent of the citizen developer

The inability of the average business user to somehow mold software into solutions that meet their unique needs in the moment has become a 'holy grail' of several generations of companies attempting to solve the problem -- rapid application development (RAD) two decades ago and then model-driven development and enterprise mashups about decade ago. Lack of ability to directly shape applications to meet users ongoing needs has thus been long-standing, even pernicious, issue that actively holds back the tech enablement. I'd even argue this is impeding the strategic progress of enterprise-wide digital transformation, which IDC says will be a top goal of the majority of organizations in 2016, as existing IT departments are insufficiently sized and resourced to fully digitize the contemporary organization.


BFF @ SoundCloud

One of BFF characteristics is that it eliminates any direct calls outside of the perimeter to the downstream services. Implementation of this pattern also enabled a minimal invasive migration towards microservice-based architecture, as the BFF hid any underlying changes from the application itself. New features went through the BFF, which then called either the new microservice or the monolith. Whenever further functionality got extracted out of the monolith, the BFF was changed, while the app code remained the same. One can see a similarity to the strangler pattern, where the BFF is strangling the public API offered by the monolith.


Use DeployImage Module and PowerShell to Build a Nano Server: Part 1

Nano Server jumps to a whole new level of server management. There is no GUI on the server. All management is done 100% via Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) and Windows PowerShell remoting. Here’s the tricky part…Nano Server is really new. It’s still in testing along with Windows Server 2016. In fact, it’s so that new the installer is a couple of PowerShell scripts and instructions on TechNet with a very long and detailed article about how to set up and deploy it. With all this in mind, I went about writing a sample script to deploy it to a partition structure in a virtual machine. It worked quite well, but a little bird tapped me on the shoulder and suggested flipping it into a module to allow for easy consumption in the PowerShell Gallery.


Digital Transformation is Different for Every Business

The goal of a digital transformation is to bring everyone, from the consumer to the account manager, up to speed with relevant, technology-driven solutions that facilitate business processes. If you think about whothe transformation will primarily affect, it makes sense that those are the areas a business should look to for inspiration. However, businesses tend to look to outside consultants, media reports, and other 3rdparty sources first. The resulting information provided may be helpful to a company, but it may not address the problems their employees and customers face on a daily basis. Businesses can overcome these obstacles by approaching the digital transformation from a place of innovation and openness. The process should highlight the culture of a company and strengthen business teams with a common goal.


Effective IT service brokers look beyond the data center

Cloud computing should be used for new workloads -- and in most IT shops, it is. A Gartner survey of enterprises has found that 70-80% of platform-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service is "net new," Bittman said. Cloud often enters the equation as part of data center modernization plans. "Not everything traditional will be modernized," he said, but when it is modernized it is often called private cloud with automatic provisioning and self-service functions. IT shops should use cloud services for things their team doesn't manage well, so they can focus on providing IT services to their customers. In this scenario, IT becomes an intermediary -- or broker -- between the customer, the data center and the cloud service providers, Bittman said. Some IT pros here said they foresee a shift toward IT broker roles, and others already play the part.


Cyberfraud: a not so silent threat

Protecting against fraudulent online transactions on the side of financial institutions is saving both their own reputation along with other people’s money. Previous studies have shown that customers sometimes take little care in the security of their own online payments, expecting the banks to provide such protection as well as reimburse them their losses. About 28% of users of payment services do not bother to check if the site of a bank is real or fake, 34% of the users connect to public wireless networks on devices that do not have security solutions installed at all. The most typical situation is when a person needs to make an urgent online transaction – not having time to think about what type of connection is being used and how to make it more secure.


Open-source security: Can OpenStack really protect your cloud data?

OpenStack is relatively new code. Therefore is likely to contain numerous software vulnerabilities and implementation issues, which continue to be uncovered by the OpenStack community. However with specific portals and projects devised to tackle emerging security issues head on, it the OpenStack community appears to be taking security concerns quite seriously. At the highest-level, general implementation-based vulnerabilities do exist such as clear text RPC communications and the use of plaintext passwords in some of the authentication files. In addition to this, the reliance of OpenStack on other components can pose an issue. For example, if your team were to use an old version of OpenSSL that suffers from Heartbleed, your organisation’s OpenStack implementation may be affected as well.


How Cloud, APIs Are Transforming Outsourcing

Upwork provides a platform for coordinating labor, but it doesn't offer much in the way of oversight capabilities. That's where Teamed.io comes in. "The way we manage this work is very different," said Bugayenko. "We are micro-task managers. We break down the big problem, which we're solving for the customer, into small pieces. And they we give these small tasks to a large number of people, sometimes 20 or 25 of them. Then our managers and our software enable the management of these micro-tasks, to make sure quality is high and the milestones are in place." Bugayenko is not a disinterested party here, but he claims his distributed approach produces better results than traditional outsourcing. "We have clients who are working with us and with traditional outsourcing as well, and they tell us that the difference is huge," he said.


Data Lake-as-a-Service: Big Data Processing and Analytics in the Cloud

A "Data Lake-as-a-Service" provides a pre-built cloud service that abstracts the complexity of the underlying platform and infrastructure layers, so a company can use a data lake without having to install or maintain the technology themselves. This category is emerging, so the specific software and services provided by vendors varies greatly. Common capabilities generally include automated provisioning, scalable data storage, varying levels of analytic functions and a simplified interface for management. Beyond those, Data Lake-as-a-Service providers can differ greatly, with different features catered to different use cases. For example, Cazena's Data Lake-as-a-Service includes end-to-end security, with data movers that make it simple to encrypt, move and load data into the cloud.



Quote for the day:


"Great things are not something accidental, but must certainly be willed." -- Vincent van Gogh


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