If you’re part of a substantial development organization standardized on Microsoft development tools, chances are you’ll need to integrate Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Visual Studio with third-party tools. The DevOps movement further highlights the need to connect a diverse set of people, processes, and tools, including the business stakeholders and the operations space. When establishing a modern end-to-end development practice you’ll almost certainly need to hit the integration button. Here are a few insights to set you on the right path: The Microsoft Visual Studio Integrated...

The cloud has transformed the way companies purchase and deploy software. Department managers buy best-of-breed solutions for marketing automation, budgeting and forecasting, financials, procurement, expense management and more. This open marketplace can create “cloud silos,” which offers a single department the opportunity to increase productivity, but can actually hamper visibility into business drivers when data in these critical systems have to be accessed across or between systems. By combining these cloud islands into an integrated, responsive and agile technology nerve center for the ...

Transitioning from the freedom of summer to the structure of back to work and school can be tough for all of us. Yet, September is a time of renewal, a time to refocus on our goals and remember that, sometimes, making big changes begins with small ones. The key is not to overwhelm ourselves, but to keep moving forward, often with small steps at a time. We know that the big work of migrating hundreds of thousands of machines running Windows Server 2003 -- including 175 million websites or one fifth of the internet, according to recent numbers provided by Internet services firm Netcraft -- st...

Public perception of privacy and security in the post-Snowden era has changed, leading to end users caring vastly more about the topic. Last year, there were more breaches than ever before; ad-tracking technology has grown and will keep growing, collecting more and more data; and awareness of government access to personal data has increased. Although it is still difficult to fully understand the long-term consequences of data collection at this level, the concerns are rising both from a user and a collector point of view. End users, whether they are employees or customers, are requesting a h...

Yesterday I attended a session in Palo Alto on the subject of Data Refinery and the speaker was Will Gorman of Pentaho. I did not realize that Pentaho was acquired by Hitachi Data Systems couple of months ago. The terms “data lake” was coined by James Dixon of Pentaho. I wrote a blog on this subject last year. As soon as the term started to appear in the data lexicon, other interesting terms such as “data swamp” appeared.

Today’s business ecosystems span across multiple organizations, security perimeters and trust zones, increasing the number of attack vectors. With the migration of enterprise applications to the cloud, attack surfaces have expanded significantly. Compounding the problem, today’s wave of attacks are more sophisticated and diversified than ever. The combination of enterprise complexity and advanced attacks has broken the traditional enterprise perimeter, creating the perfect storm for threats and information loss, where a new security paradigm is needed.

The processes for IT, facilities and human resources (HR) are broadly similar and do overlap, such as with commencement and exit procedures, and can easily be brought together in a single tool to manage. However, even when doing so and when supporting departments have their own tools and processes, it is not always clear to end users where they should turn for support. For instance, in practice the management of mobile phones can be sourced to each of these departments, or a combination thereof. The collaboration between IT, facilities and HR, also called shared service management, cuts costs ...

Now that we’ve had a few years of cloud adoption under our belts, I thought it was a good time to take a look at how some of the cloud models are performing. Public cloud has it’s own great case study with Amazon AWS, and private clouds see strong supporters with forward-thinking IT teams. But there is another model that is winning over IT teams, the hybrid cloud, and it has good reason to. With the rise of cloud models, we’ve heard a lot about the benefits of public and private clouds. Public clouds gave us the ability to leverage low-cost services to help organizations transition to cloud...

At the outset, Hyper convergence looks to be an attractive option seemingly providing lot of flexibility. In reality, it comes with so many limitation and curtail the flexibility to grow the hardware resources such as server, storage, etc independent of each other. In addition, performance nightmare bound to hit once the system gets loaded. In late 1990s, storage and networking came out of compute for a reason. Both networking and storage need some specialized processing and it doesn't make sense for all the general purpose servers doing this job. It is better handled by the specialized grou...

We live in a hyper-connected world, and we're sharing information and collaborating on an entirely new scale. Millions of smartphones are sold every day. In a single minute online we send more than 200 million emails, share 2.4 million pieces of content on Facebook, and perform 4 million searches on Google. There are more than 1.3 billion websites out there. Angel investors, crowd-funding and crowd-sourcing are sparking a rich start-up culture. It has never been easier to realize a good idea. This level of collaboration and the sophistication of connectivity are casting everyone as an innovat...

During the last two #IoTuesday Twitter sessions, our chats have centered on what it will take to capitalize on the Internet of Things (IoT) opportunity and what the industry’s collective responsibility is to break down barriers to adoption. Topics ranged from the evolution of the Industrial Internet to consumer IoT applications to the role of APIs and API management. And underlying all of this, how we move from today’s connected devices and vertical siloes to a horizontal IoT marketplace with interconnectivity at its core. In this month’s IoT chat we will be joined by Alex Bakker and Ron Exler...

The pricing of tools or licenses for log aggregation can have a significant effect on organizational culture and the collaboration between Dev and Ops teams. Modern tools for log aggregation (of which Logentries is one example) can be hugely enabling for DevOps approaches to building and operating business-critical software systems. However, the pricing of an aggregated logging solution can affect the adoption of modern logging techniques, as well as organizational capabilities and cross-team collaboration. We need to choose our log aggregation tools carefully to make sure that we don't intr...

DevOps has traditionally played important roles in development and IT operations, but the practice is quickly becoming core to other business functions such as customer success, business intelligence, and marketing analytics. Modern marketers today are driven by data and rely on many different analytics tools. They need DevOps engineers in general and server log data specifically to do their jobs well. Here’s why: Server log files contain the only data that is completely full and accurate in the context of how search engines such as Google are crawling websites. If a search engine spider enc...

The word quantum often portends New Age mumbo-jumbo, in spite of the fact that quantum mechanics underlies many of today’s most important technologies, including lasers and the semiconductors found in every computer chip. Nevertheless, today quantum computing is becoming a reality. And while it may look to the layperson like mere mumbo-jumbo, in reality of the technology has largely moved out of the theoretical stage, as recent news indicates. In fact, two important announcements over the last few weeks underscore the progress quantum computing is making.

Organizations from small to large are increasingly adopting cloud solutions to deliver essential business services at a much lower cost. According to cyber security experts, the frequency and severity of cyber-attacks are on the rise, causing alarm to businesses and customers across a variety of industries. To defend against exploits like these, a company must adopt a comprehensive security defense strategy that is designed for their business. In 2015, organizations such as United Airlines, Sony Corp, Anthem and the Office of Personnel Management experienced data breaches through malware and o...