What happens when finops finds bad cloud architecture?
Cloud finops teams can evaluate the performance and scalability of cloud
infrastructure. Monitoring key performance indicators such as response times,
latency, and throughput can identify bottlenecks or areas where the current
architecture limits scalability and performance. Since finops normally tracks
this through money spent, it’s easy to determine exactly how much architecture
blunders are costing the company. It’s not unusual to find that a cloud-deployed
system costs 10 times more money per month than it should. Those numbers are
jarring for most businesses. Remember, all that money could have been spent in
other places, such as on innovations. ... However, there are more strategic
blunders, such as only using a single cloud provider (see example above). Maybe
it seemed like a good idea at the time. Perhaps a vendor had a relationship with
several board members, or there were political reasons for the limited choices.
Unfortunately, the company still ends up with a great deal of technical debt
which could have been avoided.
The quantum threat: Implications for the Internet of Things
Quantum computing, though it might be a decade or two away, presents a threat to
IoT devices that have been secured against the current threat and which may
remain in place for many years. To address this threat, governments are already
spending billions, while organisations like NIST and ETSI are several years into
programmes to identify and select post-quantum algorithms (PQAs) and industry
and academia are innovating. And we are approaching some agreement on a suite of
algorithms that are probably quantum safe; both the UK’s NCSC and the US’ NSA
endorse the approach of enhanced Public Key cryptography using PQA along with
much larger keys. The NCSC recommends that the majority of users follow
normal cyber security best practice and wait for the development of NIST
standards-compliant quantum-safe cryptography (QSC) products. That potentially
leaves the IoT with a problem. Most of these enhanced QSC standards appear to
require considerable computing power to deal with complex algorithms and long
keys – and many IoT sensors may not be capable of running them.
What is industry cloud?
Industry cloud platforms allow businesses operating in the same sector to share
or sell data, technologies, and processes to each other. The potential benefits
can be significant, as an industry cloud enables interrelated members of a
supply chain to access insights derived from potentially expanded data sets. An
industry cloud can offer companies an exciting opportunity to exploit existing
data they are not leveraging in a constructive way. ... Joining an industry
cloud can offer significant benefits for companies, but many may reflexively
balk at the idea of sharing or selling data. Consequently, it’s important that a
company has a supportive constituency when considering an industry cloud. Each
type of vendor has its own challenges in developing an industry cloud platform.
For industry clouds driven by supply chain leaders, the most important
requirement will be reexamining tools and methodologies to meet the needs of
less sophisticated supply chain participants. Avoiding the temptation to abandon
the industry cloud and retreat to a standard cloud for internal use is also a
challenge.
Why Instagram Threads is a hotbed of risks for businesses
Threads is very easy to both download and sign up for, as it integrates
seamlessly with a user's Instagram account when first signing up for the
platform. However, this seamless integration could pose security risks,
according to a blog from AgileBlue. Instagram, Facebook, and now Threads are all
owned by Meta and for many users, each of their Meta accounts share the same
login credentials between each of the platforms. "This makes it much easier for
malicious actors to access information as gaining access to just one account
ultimately gives them access to all Meta accounts," the blog said. In fact, as
of writing, only users with an Instagram account can create a Threads account,
so if an individual wants to sign up for Threads, they will first have to create
an Instagram account. "If an employee's Threads account is compromised,
malicious actors can impersonate the employee to gather information or spread
misinformation within their close circle," Guenther says.
With BYOD comes responsibility — and many firms aren't delivering
Management must learn and share the benefits of these systems, make it crystal
clear how data will be handled, and put protection in place to ensure personal
data remains personal. Communication is critical here. It's also critical in
securing the inevitable weak point of any form of security protection — the
users themselves. With that in mind, companies should invest in training staff
in security awareness and encourage them to update devices as and when those
updates appear. Companies should also set standards — and devices that don’t
meet those standards, in terms of security protection, should not gain access to
corporate systems. This is all common sense stuff, really. We know the security
environment is extremely challenging — even police forces are regularly hacked.
In that context, it makes total sense to think about how to manage the devices
connected to your systems and to put in place the software, security, and user
education it takes to protect your business environments. The cost of device
management is relatively negligible compared to the consequences of a successful
ransomware attack, after all.
Why Enterprise Architecture Must Drive Sustainable Transformation
To some, it may seem odd to present these as parallel, equivalent pressures on
businesses. Surely, the continued viability of civilization as we know it should
far outweigh any governmental or regulatory proposal in our thinking about the
future? The importance of the changing regulatory environment, however, lies not
just in its ability to trigger business action: it is a real opportunity for
businesses to transform themselves to a more meaningful, consequential
sustainability approach. A report co-authored by the WEF and Boston Consulting
Group, ‘Net-Zero Challenge: The supply chain opportunity’, found that the supply
chains of just eight sectors, including food, construction, and fashion, account
for more than 50% of global emissions. It also found that 40% of the emissions
could be abated with already-available measures like circular manufacturing and
renewable energy. Even achieving net zero emissions in those supply chains,
according to the report’s investigations, would only raise costs for
end-consumers by 1%-4% on average.
Lean for the modern company
A strong esprit de corps among team members has also long been critical to
support healthy growth and the creation of synergistic value, and the book
emphasizes the importance of building a healthy culture able to support lean
processes and outcomes. This section includes clever material on nurturing a
culture of experimentation and discovery, and validating trust by constantly
raising the bar on deliverables and expectations. May and Dominguez ground their
principles in the core lean ideal of starting with value and working
backward—focusing obsessively on improving operations to seamlessly deliver for
the customer what they call the “Job to be Done.” The authors’ material on
accelerating value creation recapitulates this goal and reminds readers to be
vigilant about combating the inevitable waste generated by successful companies.
As a writer about lean for nearly two decades, I’ve often been frustrated by
misrepresentations of this dynamic system by management gurus who tout only
thin-sliced elements of it.
4 Key Observability Best Practices
For cost reasons, becoming comfortable with tracking the current telemetry
footprint and reviewing options for tuning — like dropping data, aggregating or
filtering — can help your organization better monitor costs and platform
adoption proactively. The ability to track telemetry volume by type (metrics,
logs, traces or events) and by team can help define and delegate cost-efficiency
initiatives. Once you’ve gotten a handle on how much telemetry you’re emitting
and what it’s costing you, consider tracking the daily and monthly active users.
This can help you pinpoint which engineers need training on the platform. ...
Teams need better investigations. One way to ensure a smoother remediation
process is through an organized process like following breadcrumbs rather than
having 10 different bookmark links and a mental map of what data lives where.
One way to do this is by understanding what telemetry your system emits from
metrics, logs and traces and pinpointing the potential duplication or better
sources of data.
Software Engineering in the Age of Climate Change: A Testing Perspective
Regression testing confirms that new code does not break existing functionality.
Preventing regressions reduces the need for repeated testing and bug fixes,
optimizing the software development lifecycle and minimizing unnecessary
computational resources. ... Online education platforms introduce new
features to enhance user experiences. Regression testing ensures these changes
do not disrupt existing lessons or content delivery. By maintaining stability,
energy is saved by minimizing the need for post-deployment fixes. Suppose a
telecommunications company is rolling out a software update for its network
infrastructure to improve data transmission efficiency and reduce latency. The
update includes changes to the routing algorithms used to direct data traffic
across the network. While the primary goal is to enhance network performance,
there is a potential risk of introducing regressions that could disrupt existing
services. Before deploying the software update to the entire network, the
telecommunications company conducts thorough regression testing.
How to make your developer organization more efficient
Automating manual tasks and repetitive processes is crucial for increasing
developer efficiency. “Employing automation for tasks that many engineers face
throughout their SDLC helps to shift focus towards human value-add activities.
This also increases overall delivery throughput, with higher confidence in our
development lifecycle, and produces consistent processes across teams that would
otherwise be handled one-off and uniquely” said Joe Mills. Developers can engage
a team of automation experts to assess certain processes and tasks and help
uncover automation opportunities. The team uses a hub-and-spoke model to scale
their efforts across development teams at Discover and can help teams with
robotic process automation, business automation, or code automation. ... In
addition to these initiatives, engineers at Discover adhere to a set of
practices, internally called CraftWorx, that define and direct the agile
development process. Aligning engineers across these practices reduces friction
because engineers and developers are following the same development
practices.
Quote for the day:
"A leader takes people where they would
never go on their own." -- Hans Finzel
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