Kategorie: technology

4 DevOps definitions managers must understand

From a software engineering perspective, most DevOps techniques happen at the practitioner level, but true DevOps adoption goes beyond development and operations alone.
DevOps requires fundamental changes to the culture of an organization. To succeed, all stakeholders ought to understand the fundamentals. To help explain, here are four DevOps definitions that managers should understand:
1. Continuous improvement
Adopting best practices should be more than a one-time event. Organizations should have built-in processes that identify areas that can be made better. Some businesses accomplish this through dedicated process-improvement teams. Others allow the teams that adopt the processes to self-assess and determine their own process-improvement paths. Regardless of the method, the goal is continuous improvement.
2. Continuous integration
Continuous integration adds tremendous value in DevOps by allowing large teams of developers working on cross-technology components in multiple locations to deliver software in an agile manner. It also ensures that each team’s work is continuously integrated with that of other development teams, then validated. Continuous integration reduces risk and identifies issues earlier in the software development life cycle.
3. Continuous delivery
Continuous delivery is the process of automating the deployment of software to testing, system testing, staging and production environments. Though some organizations stop short of production, those that adopt DevOps generally use the same automated process in all environments to improve efficiency and reduce the risk introduced by inconsistent processes. Adopting continuous delivery is the most critical component of DevOps adoption.
4. Continuous testing
Organizations should adopt processes in three key areas to enable continuous testing: test environment provisioning, test data management and test integration.
 Each organization should determine what processes to adopt for each area. These processes may even vary with each project, based on individual testing needs and the requirements of service agreements. Customer-facing applications may need more security testing than internal applications, for example.
Test environment provisioning and test data management are more important challenges for projects that use agile methodologies and practice continuous integration than for projects that use waterfall methodology. Likewise, function and performance test requirements for complex applications with components that have different delivery cycles are different if they are for simple, monolithic web apps.
The key point is to establish processes to continuously test code as it is created. This helps make practices such as continuous delivery possible.
A basic understanding of each of these techniques is essential knowledge for managers looking to adopt a DevOps approach.
To learn more about DevOps, download your free copy of DevOps for Dummies.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

How to make the most of multiple clouds

Many customer-facing activities, such as marketing and customer service, are migrating to the cloud along with mission-critical product development activities, manufacturing and operations processes and standard administrative tasks.
According to a study by the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV), cloud services are proliferating across enterprise environments so quickly that most IT teams already use anywhere from two to 15 different cloud service providers. Yet many of these clouds are still managed individually.
This leads to significant management challenges, such as optimizing costs, meeting performance goals, establishing IT governance and ensuring visibility and automation.
Enterprise leaders must think holistically about managing these key business processes in a or risk falling behind the competition.
The state of multicloud
To better understand how businesses are managing multiple clouds and planning for the future, IBV surveyed 1,106 executives across 19 industries and in 20 countries. While 98 percent of surveyed organizations plan to operate in a multicloud environment within three years, fewer than half have dedicated multicloud processes in place. Only one-third have the right tools to manage this multicloud environment.
Additionally, many businesses use even more cloud services than intended. Almost 60 percent of organizations surveyed say that independent cloud adoption by business units has already created a de facto multicloud environment. Shadow cloud services often make the actual number of clouds used by enterprises even higher.
Instead of ignoring or stifling activity on multiple clouds, IT teams must facilitate, orchestrate and optimize their multicloud footing. Enterprises that assemble harmonized multicloud platforms can increase their business advantage while optimizing costs.
The infographic below shows that the organizations that have effectively managed multiple cloud services outperform in key areas. Multicloud management increases revenue growth and profitability in the private sector by more than 20 percent and enhances efficiency and effectiveness in government agencies by more than 40 percent.
While your organization may already use multiple cloud services, does it have the right forward-facing strategy to fully unleash the power of your cloud? Is your strategy accelerating innovation and providing the visibility, governance and automation capabilities fundamental to the success of your IT operations and site reliability engineer (SRE) teams?
Take a stand
Learn to orchestrate your hybrid, multicloud environment at Think 2019 next week in San Francisco. Attend the “Cloud Management in a Multicloud World” session on Wednesday, 13 February from 4:30 PM to 5:10 PM to hear how other enterprises are optimizing their use of multiple cloud providers. including IBM Cloud, or traditional on-premises environments.
Download the Multicloud Field Guide, and watch a video to learn more about the findings from the IBV study.

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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

When modernization works: How Finanz Informatik transformed its business

Global enterprises recognize the need to transform, but often hesitate to move forward on modernization projects due to the and convincing internal stakeholders that change is not as daunting as imagined.
Finanz Informatik, a banking services firm based in Germany, realized immediate value from its modernization project and instituted a culture of change inside the organization.
The challenge
The need to modernize to achieve greater business agility was limiting growth for Finanz Informatik. A homegrown set of outdated scripts tied to its database had created a complex world not suitable for cloud infrastructure, resulting in error-prone automation and too many manual processes.
The plan
Finanz Informatik business leaders decided to modernize their infrastructure and applications by migrating existing WebSphere ND applications to run in a lighter, more flexible and more easily scalable WebSphere Liberty environment.
This seemed like a daunting process for a regional bank with 58 groups, each with its own complete set of apps, for a total of 50,000 Java virtual machines (JVMs) running on 3,000 installations. Finanz Informatik first used IBM technology to ensure the project was feasible for its complex applications and specific challenges, then worked with IBM to identify and close gaps.
The value
The team included representatives from Finanz Informatik, the local IBM Cloud service unit and IBM Support. The team successfully migrated traditional WebSphere ND applications to the lightweight, flexible and reliable WebSphere Liberty runtime over an 18-month period, achieving the following business goals:

Greater flexibility and around-the-clock availability of applications
Lowered costs
Simplified management
A clean separation of ownership to better comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
Full automation and control of the deployment process
A modern and reliable server for building future software solutions
A smooth rollout without major product issues to make change seem less foreboding inside the organization

What’s next
Modernization of existing applications is the next big wave. Based on our experience, the top priority for enterprise digital transformation is modernizing existing mission-critical apps. Those that successfully do are seeing real benefits in the form of greater agility and readily accessible data needed to create new insights more quickly.
Hear from peers at Think 2019
Learn more about how Finanz Informatik succeeded in its journey to cloud. Register for Think 2019 and check out the session, “How Finanz Informatik Achieved Business Agility with IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty”on Wednesday, 13 February from 5:30 PM to 6:10 PM.
Register to join peers from top enterprise organizations at a full-service “Speed Networking” breakfast during Think 2019 at the City Club on Thursday, 14 February from 8 AM to 10 AM. IBM Hybrid Cloud is hosting the event to facilitate peer conversations about the greatest challenges organizations face when modernizing the enterprise.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

APL helps make healthcare more accessible with IBM Cloud for SAP

Indonesia is home to the world’s fourth largest population, with 261 million people spread across more than 18,000 islands. From the bustling streets of Jakarta to the long, sandy beaches of Bali, there’s one thing all Indonesians share: the need for high-quality, affordable healthcare.
APL transports medical supplies throughout the Indonesian archipelago. This presents several challenges. Many drugs and vaccines must be kept at a certain temperature to remain effective. To reach distant communities, we need to transport supplies using ferries or planes. Since we stock more than 5,000 items from the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, we need to be well organized to ship the correct supplies to the thousands of hospitals, clinics and drug stores we serve.
For years, we have managed core business processes using SAP ERP applications. We were running an old SAP version on an outdated Oracle database, and reliability was deteriorating as the landscape began to show its age. When problems occurred, we sometimes had to restore the full SAP landscape, which includes five terabytes of data, a massive task that interrupts our operations, hindering the flow of medical supplies to people across the country.
We knew that to transport vital medical products even more reliably and cost effectively, we needed to find a better way of working.
Finding answers in the cloud
To boost our operational efficiency, we migrated our SAP landscape and some third-party satellite applications to the IBM Services for Managed SAP Applications, a fully managed platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering, which includes disaster recovery.
We are moving to cloud to increase flexibility, uptime and innovation. Choosing a managed cloud service unburdens our IT team from routine tasks, letting them focus on partnering with the business to pioneer digital transformation initiatives. Switching to Managed SAP Applications reduced the time our internal IT department spent on hardware and software maintenance.
As we migrated to cloud, IBM supported us every step of the way. The IBM team worked tirelessly to ensure that the project ran smoothly and remained on schedule. Even when we wanted to add SAP Process Orchestration to the scope of work after signing the contract, the team was very willing to meet our requirements.
Launching mobile capabilities
In parallel, we are upgrading to SAP ERP 6.0 and have replaced the mature Oracle database with SAP HANA 2.0. This migration is a key milestone on our roadmap to SAP S/4HANA, to which we will eventually move with the rest of the Zuellig Pharma.
Promising results
We are currently delivering 97 percent of customer orders on time, and with our new SAP environment on IBM Cloud, we hope to improve and deliver better results. The move to cloud boosts uptime and eliminates the reliability issues of the previous system.
A major advantage of cloud is escaping the long lead times associated with purchasing hardware in Indonesia. For example, ordering a server powerful enough to run SAP HANA usually takes eight weeks, but with Managed SAP Applications, we are able to have the resources ready in four. Faster allocation of compute resources cut our SAP HANA deployment time by two months compared to an on-premises installation.
What’s more, moving to the cloud enables us to shift 59 percent of cost from capital expenditures to operating expenditures. We are saving even more than we expected because we now spend less on managing SAP and satellite applications in the IBM Cloud than we previously spent managing just our SAP landscape.
Transforming the business
Moving our SAP Business Warehouse application to SAP HANA has dramatically enhanced our reporting capabilities. We are now able to offer rich, near-real-time insight to pharmaceutical companies about how their medicines are used, with breakdowns by product, category and province. These insights can help pharmaceutical companies optimize planning and production strategies to ensure that all Indonesians get the healthcare they need. By delivering these insights, we hope to retain existing customers and transition from a distributor into a value-added healthcare services provider.
In the future, we also aim to build on our strong relationship with IBM to explore new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain. There is so much potential to use blockchain to trace medicines as they pass through the supply chain, which can help ensure patient safety.
It is an exciting time for the Indonesian healthcare ecosystem, and we are proud to be at the forefront of the change.
Read the case study to find out more.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Federal agencies are getting “cloud smart” to enhance their missions

Experience matters. It matters in sports. It matters in work. It matters when government agencies adopt cloud technology.
The federal government now has almost eight years of experience since it announced its “Cloud First” policy, which used the best knowledge at the time to guide agencies in adopting cloud computing technologies.
The market has matured a lot in eight years, and cloud technology is more sophisticated, leading the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to recently update “Cloud First” with the proposed “Cloud Smart” strategy. It’s good timing, as a benchmark study conducted by FedScoop shows that, even after eight years, only 34 percent of agencies report cost savings from moving to cloud, the original and still-important impetus for cloud adoption for many organizations.
More than 100 government and industry leaders recently came together for “Get Cloud Smart”, a symposium hosted by MeriTalk and IBM to share how their combined experience is leading to new, smarter strategies to deliver cloud services that support their agencies’ unique missions.
It was encouraging to hear leaders from Customs and Border Protection, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the State Department, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) share their progress and how the new strategy could accelerate adoption of cloud technologies.
Modernizing data for cloud
One theme that stood out is the need to modernize data while updating infrastructure and applications. The value of cloud and cloud-enabled technologies such as AI and blockchain is derived from how they help agencies realize more value form their data. Rob Thomas, general manager of IBM Analytics, made clear in his keynote address that if agencies don’t build an information architecture to prepare for artificial intelligence (AI), they will have difficulty in both climbing the “ladder to AI” and realizing the benefits that cloud can bring.
Deliberately engaging multiple clouds
Agency speakers throughout the morning repeatedly talked about having multiple cloud environments that they now need to manage and connect using hybrid approaches to their traditional IT. It’s critical to be deliberate — which doesn’t mean slow — and plan for long-term needs to securely manage multiple cloud environments.
This is particularly important since no cloud is the same. Kshemendra Paul, DHS CIO’s cloud action officer, shared that his department is laser-focused on data and workload portability across its on-premises and cloud environments. We see this need for hybrid, multicloud solutions across our government and commercial clients. Organizations that are most advanced in this area are taking a platform approach and using cloud-native technologies such as containers and microservices to gain flexibility and agility. IBM Cloud Private and IBM Multicloud Manager are solutions that help agencies manage their environments from a single console.
Transforming federal agency IT
Above all, cloud and cloud-enabled technology represent a huge transformation in how agencies deliver IT. The main takeaway from the symposium is that technology won’t be the primary challenge. Getting the three “Cloud Smart” priorities — workforce, acquisition and security — right will ultimately determine how successfully the cloud advances agency missions.
Given how much emphasis the government speakers gave to these areas, and the work each is doing to help employees thrive in this emerging cloud era, I’m confident federal agencies will use their experience to thrive in the cloud era.
GM of IBM Analytics Rob Thomas shares insight on how agencies can improve their use of data to advance their mission.
See the Get Cloud Smart keynote presentation from Rob Thomas on how agencies are using analytics and AI to generate more value from their data.
Learn more by registering to read the full FedScoop Cloud Adoption federal benchmark study, which shares insights from 169 federal IT executives and leaders about their experiences with cloud adoption.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

3 reasons most modernization projects don’t deliver business value

Global enterprises all face a similar issue: how to merge the value of existing assets, including infrastructure, applications, workloads and data, with new cloud-native efforts that enable greater speed to innovation and scaling for competitive advantage. It doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a journey that sometimes presents a new set of challenges.
The unfulfilled promise
Our experiences with clients at IBM has repeatedly shown that business transformation models designed to “lift and shift everything to cloud and sort it out later” can result in massive and unexpected costs for complex workloads, sometimes as much as five times what was projected.
Developing new apps and tapping into software as a service (SaaS) from more vendors has created new tech silos, making it difficult to manage security, compliance and resiliency, as well as govern across vendors and clouds.
What’s preventing transformation projects from delivering measurable business value?

Projects don’t always equal progress.
The policy of “rip, rewrite and replace” may result in new risk. Even though there’s tremendous value to be harvested from existing assets, some vendors and consultants are advising organizations to rip and replace to transform, often choosing to rewrite existing assets from scratch instead of modernizing them. This can be disruptive and costly because the business must continue to run during the massive overhaul. There is great value in developing new, cloud-native apps, but it doesn’t provide the answer for all applications.

Cloud is no silver bullet.
Most organizations operate in a hybrid environment. Some apps can live on a public or private cloud, but some mission-critical apps may remain in an on-premises environment where they undergo modernization to integrate with cloud-native apps. Additionally, organizations don’t have just one cloud or dataset to contend with, but multiple, fit-for-purpose cloud offerings. They often underestimate the complexity, manual processes and governance and compliance risks that can come with managing many clouds.

Lack of controls and governance.
When siloed development and project teams work outside the oversight of a governed environment, duplication of effort and resources drive up costs. The transfer and use of massive amounts of data can introduce security and compliance threats. Faulty data used to train artificial intelligence (AI) models can put projects, reputations and businesses at risk.

The new wave of modernization
Instead of thinking about environments as two distinct worlds in your transformation journey — “the old world” and the shiny “new world”— to be managed separately, it’s critical to manage existing assets and new assets as one environment to propel business forward. Learn more at Think 2019.

Hear a modernization success story about a German financial services firm who reaped positive results. Meet representatives of the firm in person when they speak on Wednesday at Think 2019 in the session, “How Finanz Informatik Achieved Business Agility with IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty”.
For a broader perspective on the strategy behind planning successful application modernization and cloud adoption, plan to attend the core session “Application Modernization to Migrate and Manage Existing Applications in a Cloud World”with Danny Mace, IBM vice president of application platform.
Join IBM Hybrid Cloud and the IBM Cloud Garage at a reception with live jazz following the core session “Management in a multicloud world” on Wednesday, 13 February at Galvanize, located a few blocks from the Moscone Center. Meet some of today’s top influencers in cloud and talk with peers about trends in modernization.

Register for Think 2019.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud