The Business of IT

SAS IT newsletter Dec 2018

ian.hight@sasit.co.nz (Ian Hight) — Tue, 04 Dec 2018 01:36:42 GMT

Welcome to the SAS^IT November newsletter

In this issue

How to outsource successfully
Axicom customer story
Content Hub – IBM i
Cloud first? 10 benefits to consider
IBM Think 2019
Customer Portal

How to outsource - SUCCESSFULLY

Outsourcing has become increasingly important for improving service quality and reducing costs, yet many organisations are still getting it wrong, or missing opportunities by not even considering it. I have outlined in this article why you should consider outsourcing some business functions, how you decide what to outsource and who to, along with my thoughts on what you need to do to achieve success.

Four billion internet connections and the dramatic adoption of cloud computing means that it’s increasingly difficult to remain competitive if you only rely on staff to undertake all of your required business functions. Many organisations now benefit from outsourcing and/or use specialist contractors, often located offshore.

Benefits

Almost all outsourcing arises from a desire to address one or more of the following four problems:

1. High operating costs - particularly high labour costs.
2. Key staff members spending too much time on mundane tasks/processes.
3. A lack of skill or knowledge in a particular area – and difficulty recruiting and retaining the skills needed in that area.
4. Key person or skill dependencies where a critical mass of people with a particular skill is required, but is uneconomic to enable (such as holiday/sick leave/weekend/afterhours/training coverage).

Many New Zealand businesses don’t view outsourcing in a positive light, which is unfortunate as outsourcing done well, can be one of the smartest ways of dealing with the problems listed above, and as a result can help organisations improve resilience, efficiency, effectiveness, competitive positioning, and improve profitability.

The major reason for a negative sentiment about outsourcing is the bad reputation generated by a few high-profile failed engagements. Typically, the outsourcers involved are offshoring to inappropriately skilled resources. Maybe you have experienced issues caused by an inappropriately skilled contact centre worker who is based in another country. The fact that the resources are located offshore is not the issue, problems arise when the job skills required along with workers skills are not properly aligned.

It dumbfounds me when New Zealand businesses offshore work to parties that do an inferior quality job compared to what could be done by New Zealand workers. The only reason to do that is to save money but that is simply short sighted, as brand damage is likely to destroy any short-term financial gain, and be more permanent.

It’s easy enough for anyone to reduce the cost of a business function by moving it offshore. It’s also easy enough to raise or lower the quality of work done by moving it offshore. The objective however, should be is to simultaneously lower cost AND improve quality – often easily achieved when appropriately skilled resources are engaged.

Closer to home there are plenty of appealing onshore outsourcing options; for the most part not as financially appealing as offshore options but still offering considerable benefits: largely benefits derived through economies of scale, and the availability of specialist resources.

What to outsource

There has been a great deal of research into the type of functions/processes that are suited to outsourcing and those which should be retained in-house. Whilst the individual circumstances of organisations will vary and therefore outsource decisions will be different, there is widespread acceptance of some “rules of thumb”. These rules of thumb are commonly represented in the matrix below:

Using two key factors when deciding what to outsource: The Strategic importance of the task/function; and the extent to which the task/function contributes to Operational performance, four quadrants are created. Barnes identified a preferred approach for each quadrant:

It is proposed that outsourcing is ideally suited to functions that are of low strategic importance, but which can make a big impact on operational performance. Data centre services and help desk services are good examples.

Whilst the logic of this decision matrix remains as valid today as it was when Barnes created it 10 years ago there have many changes making it much easier to outsource work of all kinds.

There are now in excess of 4 Billion people connected to the internet and it has become increasingly easy to connect with and assign responsibilities to eager and highly skilled workers around the world.

All New Zealand users of AWS, Azure, IBM cloud and other public clouds, whether they realise it or not, have not only outsourced and offshored their IT systems, they have also outsourced and offshored many of their IT administrative tasks as well. A decision that makes a lot of sense.

Selecting your outsource provider

Selecting an outsource provider is like selecting a tradesman; you know there is a wide range to choose from; different skill levels, different experiences, different cultures, different track records, different locations that operate in, and different charge out rates. If you don’t take the time to do the analysis and research your options properly you risk experiencing a shoddy engagement.

Spend some time on Google, ask your network of contacts, seek people with relevant industry experience using LinkedIn and other online resources.

Like any search for a relationship partner don’t try and short circuit the process; yes it’s really easy to find a partner if “any partner will do” but outsourcing a business function is too important to take a short-sighted or short-term view. Just think about someone you know who has exited a failed relationship. Enough said.

How to make outsourcing work for you

The success of an engagement starts by scoping the functions which are appropriate to assign to an outsource partner. Culture and brand alignment are likely to be important and therefore it will be necessary to define expectations and confirm that you have the necessary alignment.
Here is a list of recommendations that I believe will optimise the likelihood of a successful engagement:

Set clear objectives. It is reasonable to expect that benefits will be obtained in all three areas:

1. Cost reduction
2. Quality improvement
3. Ready access to specialist expertise

Prioritise functions that have low strategic importance, but which contribute significantly to operational performance.

Do thorough research: Ensure that the outsource partner has all of the capabilities that will be needed to deliver on the objectives. Reference check to confirm that success stories are the norm.
Ensure that there is a clear and well-structured agreement so that both parties have a comprehensive and common understanding of what will be done.
Do not abdicate control. You are still responsible for the outcomes; the difference is that you now need to manage an outsource provider and not a group of staff. Someone with appropriate skills to take responsibility for managing the outsource provider will be needed.
As with all initiatives of significance ensure that senior management is involved and supportive.
Ensure that there is regular, smooth and open communication between the parties.
Continuously monitor key metrics and trends, including “soft” metrics such as the proactive presentation of value-added ideas.
Acknowledge that change always meets with resistance. To minimise resistance, follow change management best practices including developing a plan based on a partnering approach with realistic timelines and achievable outcomes.

In summary; I predict that organisations will increasingly need to respond to the presence of onshore and offshore outsource providers. Organisations can view outsourcers as a threat or as an opportunity. Over the last decade or so I have assessed the situation from several perspectives: I have worked for both offshore and onshore outsource providers and been a purchaser of both onshore and offshore provided services.

I see that the world is changing; In New Zealand it’s getting harder to recruit specialist skills and easier to engage specialist outsourcers to provide organisations with the outcomes they seek.

Axicom Australia undertakes IT Infrastructure modernisation

Summary

SAS^IT assisted Axicom to achieve a multifaceted IT system upgrade over a period of eleven months involving upgrading ERP software, refreshing hardware, changing data centres, and moving to a significantly more flexible hybrid architecture. These improvements were achieved on-time, on budget and have strengthened Axicom’s market position to the extent that Axicom now has a modern architecture, modern secure, high-performance infrastructure and the flexibility to deploy and use new technology as required, largely on demand and consumptive based.

About Axicom

Axicom is Australia’s leading provider of independently owned wireless infrastructure. The company owns, operates and manages a portfolio of approximately 2,000 towers in Australia, covering a substantial portion of the Australian population. Axiom’s customers include the major Australian wireless carriers such as Optus, Vodafone, Telstra and various State and Federal government agencies, as well as wireless broadband data service providers.

The relationship with Team Computing and SAS^IT

SAS^IT has been providing ICT Managed Services to Axicom since October 2015 with Sydney-based reseller Team Computing. The scope of the engagement included the provision of infrastructure and related services associated with Axicom’s ERP application: JDE EnterpriseOne.

Challenges and Objectives

Axicom was faced with a major JDE upgrade, which required a rebuild, significant testing, and took advantage of an offer by SAS^IT to refresh the underlying technology at the same time. The move to new infrastructure also facilitated a move to the Equinix Data Centres – and a significant change in the architecture achieved the objective of increased business agility through integrated access to public cloud services.

Of major importance was ensuring that changes would be made without putting business operations at risk.

After a period of consultation including a review of options, SAS^IT was engaged to deliver on the following four objectives:

1. An upgrade to core technology infrastructure
2. An upgrade to the ERP application
3. A move to new, more advanced data centres in Sydney and Melbourne
4. A transition to a flexible and scalable hybrid architecture

Approach

SAS^IT managed these changes using a multi-disciplinary team committed to professional project practices. The project began in November 2017 with completion achieved in September 2018.
The core technology upgrade involved a transition from an IBM Power 7 to Power 8, introduction of an All Flash Storage Area Network (SAN), and upgrades to systems replication technology, as well as high speed connectivity to Microsoft Azure.

The ERP application upgrade was a multi-phased sub-project resulting in the deployment of JDE 9.2 development, test, and production environments.

SAS^IT had recently implemented a new hybrid-cloud solution within the Equinix Sydney and Melbourne data centre campus to take advantage of these new facilities, the high-speed connectivity to the Public Cloud providers, and the ISV community residing there.

The transition to a flexible hybrid infrastructure was the major change in that it involved integration of on-premises, private cloud and public cloud environments including orchestration between the different platforms. This hybrid model was important because it would enable Axicom to develop and deploy applications faster, and more efficiently.

Results & Future plans

Axicom now has flexibility of choice. The new architecture provides a gateway to integrate software as a service (SaaS) solutions and cloud born applications such as Office 365.

Axicom has also gained access to a richer set of managed services; in part provided by the cloud providers but primarily by SAS^IT widening the scope including the addition of a service delivery management function. The entire initiative took eleven months from inception to go live and was successfully completed on time, and under budget.

Andrew Fox (Axicom Head of Information Technology) commented that:

“SAS^IT has delivered a significant improvement to the infrastructure solution they provide to Axicom, resulting in a full technology refresh, a change in datacentre and an architectural design shift. Each of these elements has delivered benefits to the Axicom business with improved performance, flexibility, availability and currency of long-term support. The most notable achievement was SASIT’s ability to deliver these complex changes on time, within budget and to specification in parallel with Axicom’s upgrade of its JD Edwards ERP system.”

Phil Martin (SAS^IT Group CEO) commented that:

“We invested significant funds to develop what we believed would be a seriously flexible, customer centric, hybrid-cloud environment built with IBM Power Systems at the heart of the solution. Building this solution provides our customers with choice and flexibility to put their compute, and storage hosted assets where they are most appropriate, allowing our customers to be far better equipped to deal with the digital challenges of a modern-day business.”

Martin commented further “Few customers can predict what their business might look like in three years or less, and this solution provides a resilient, but flexible platform to cater for an uncertain future, with unprecedented choice baked in.”

For more information about how SASIT may be able to assist your organisation through the implementation of new technology in a hybrid cloud environment please contact Ian Hight: ian.hight@sasit.co.nz

Content Hub IBM i

SAS^IT is a long-standing IBM business partner with deep expertise in 24/7 operation of mission critical systems particularly IBM i based systems.

We have put together some information assets which we think will be of value for our IBM I customers. The assets are:

Application & infrastructure modernisation - White Paper
How to achieve cost effective 24/7/365 support for IBM i based systems
Efficiently analyse your IBM i applications – step one in your roadmap
Why a transition environment is important – The SAS^IT /Equinix solution
IBM Power: End of Life dates that will affect you
SAS^IT story: IT excellence over several decades

You can view these documents in our content hub here:

www.sasit.co.nz/content-hub

We believe SAS^IT is the largest IBM i IaaS provider in Australasia with 130 systems under management across seven data centres (4 in Aus, 3 in NZ)

Cloud first? 10 benefits to consider

Over the last couple of decades much has been written about the advantages of “cloud”, but practically the benefits that cloud could provide your organisation can only be evaluated in the context of the specific needs of your organisation. The generic term “cloud” can’t be evaluated as good or bad all depends upon both the specific cloud features in the context of your organisation.

The current reality is that most organisations have hybrid IT systems. Systems where some IT components (hardware and software) reside external to the organisation (in the case of NZ mostly offshore), these are known as “cloud” and some components residing locally – typically within your own premises.

The scale and variety of cloud provider offerings dwarf the capabilities that are able to be provided by any single organisation; which is the primary reason why cloud use all over the planet has grown steadily for the last two decades and is unlikely to slow down in the foreseeable future. Most commentators predict that cloud adoption rates will accelerate.

Rather than assessing the value of “cloud” on any single measure such as cost, or functionality, or security; a better alternative is to consider the bundle of features that are “cloud” in the context of what you want to achieve.

Here is a list of 10 benefits of “cloud”:

1. On demand computing capacity including storage, on an almost unlimited scale
2. Enormous application and service functionality
3. A vast array of flexible pricing options including pay per use in tiny increments
4. A huge variety of security options
5. Availability from anywhere anytime
6. A single point of entry to a wide range of vendor and partner relationships
7. A fertile playground of some of the world’s most ground-breaking innovations
8. Access to automated operational processes
9. Simplified procurement including standardised agreements
10. Many development frameworks and environments

When thinking about this list; it’s not hard to understand why an increasing number of organisations have adopted the motto: “cloud first”

IBM Think 2019

"THINK" is a slogan first used by Thomas J Watson in December 1911 while managing the sales and advertising departments at NCR. Now of course THINK is an IBM Trademark and also the branding of IBM’s worldwide user conference.

The upcoming Think Conference will be in San Francisco: February 12-15 2019. Last year the conference was attended by almost 40,000 (yes that’s 40,000) delegates and attendees will be of a similar number in February 2019.

If you would like to know more about the event including the 3-day agenda and speakers please visit this site www.ibm.com/events/think/

SAS^ITwill have representatives attending the 3-day event.

Customer portal released

At SAS^ITwe pride ourselves on being easy to do business with and on the quality of our customer service. Our latest initiative is the provision of a customer portal.

Our portal is a private, secure website that enables 24x7 access to customer specific information and currently includes the capability to log jobs, check on status, and escalate actions. The portal has been designed as a compliment to, not a replacement of, our other exiting support channels including service desk, phone, and email.

Our product roadmap will see the customer portal developed into more of a one-stop-shop by adding functionality such as the ability to review important documents and policies, check on systems status, and locate detailed information about products and services. Our key objective is to improve our service quality by empowering customers with greater control and transparency.

The customer portal (beta version) has been rolled out to a number of customers over the last few months. Feedback from these users is assisting in refinement of the product roadmap.

If you would like to become a portal user please contact Ian Hight: ian.hight@sasit.co.nz

Newsletter Aug 18

ian.hight@sasit.co.nz (Ian Hight) — Wed, 15 Aug 2018 07:01:07 GMT

Welcome to the SAS^IT August newsletter

In this issue

Taking a different approach to disruption
Legacy application modernisation
SAS^IT creates a new website
SAS^IT’s Ajay Nabh recognised internationally for thought leadership
A large delegation to attend TechU
Artificial Intelligence’s (AI) new use case: Integration?

SAS^IT – Taking a different approach to disruption

There is growing press on the topic of digital disruption, and in our view it’s often over hyped. Our perspective is that business disruption is occurring at a faster rate, but that digital technology is simply just one enabling factor. Outside of the technology itself, the other major drivers of business disruption that we see impacting the landscape are:

Greater competition. The continuation of globalisation, the blurring of market boundaries, and decreasing barriers to entry.
Cultural changes: Managers are placing greater importance on organisational agility including spending more time on research and experimentation. Old business models and more cumbersome traditional approaches, just don’t cut it anymore; for customers or staff.
Decreased tolerance for what’s not working. Linked to the two points above; the competition for customers, and for retaining and acquiring new staff means that poor systems and processes can no longer be tolerated.
A growing number of highly skilled technology architects. Cloud has enabled anyone connected to the internet to have immediate access to much the worlds most advanced technology. But like a DIY novice standing in a Mitre 10 Mega having access to all those products doesn’t mean you will have a great house. Success often starts by engaging an architect.
A greater number of inter-organisational alliances/partnerships. Building products and developing services increasingly involves cross boundary collaborations. Organisations taking this approach are bringing better products to market far faster than their competitors.

To let our customers know how we are responding these disruptive factors we created a video

Legacy application modernisation

Deciding what to do with your older IT systems is seldom straightforward: Replace? Modernise? Migrate to the cloud? It can quickly become complicated.

For decades, SAS^IT has been working with customers across Australasia to manage, support, and differentiate themselves using technology, as well as providing operational management of business critical applications and infrastructure.

To help organisations navigate the path ahead, we have produced a white paper, we hope you find it useful.

To download the whitepaper click here: Modernisation Whitepaper (*.pdf)

SAS^IT creates a new website

We recently unveiled a new website to ensure that the wider market is kept informed of our evolution and growth as a Managed Service Provider. The homepage banner presents an animated cloud graphic which highlights the company’s increased focus on managing cloud environments, and more specifically managing hybrid environments which are now the norm of Australasian businesses.

The new look is more modern, has less pages, but we hope has all the information you’re looking for. The website is of course complimented by our LinkedIn site and YouTube channel.

SAS^IT’s Ajay Nabh recognised internationally for thought leadership

Many SASIT customers will be aware that our Senior Solutions Consultant Ajay Nabh is a member of NatApp’s elite “A Team” a distinguished group of 25 NetApp technical experts from around the world.

In June these internationally recognised experts met in Sunnyvale California to discuss and develop recommendations for consideration by NetApp’s executive management group.
Ajay commented “It’s very encouraging to see the scale of resources that NetApp has focused on new, cutting edge, cloud offerings. The company continues to do an amazing job of reinventing itself to stay at the forefront of data management”.

NetApp is clearly focused on enabling organisations to easily and securely unite and manage data across the widest variety of environments. The company has established a leading position in hybrid cloud management using a data fabric based approach.

NetApp’s products and services align very well with SASIT’s broadening offerings to assist customers derive value from better management of their own and third part data; said Ajay.

A large delegation attendED IBM TechU

TechU - which was held in Sydney this month, is IBM’s most comprehensive technical training event in A/NZ. TechU involved more than 100 focused lectures and labs, on-site certification sessions, a solution centre expo, and networking opportunities.

Sessions were delivered by some of IBM’s leading engineers, developers and product experts on AI, Cloud, Data, Security, and Systems.
SASIT was well represented at the event this year with a five person delegation.

Artificial Intelligence’s (AI) new use case: Integration?

In the last year or so we have seen a great deal of increased publicity about AI. AI is an umbrella term that includes multiples technologies such as computer vision, machine learning, natural language processing, and others. It’s useful to think of AI as software that has the ability to see, hear, reason, and learn.

Recent publicity has typically been focused on use cases such as fraud detection, voice enabled assistants, data security, image recognition, and driverless cars; but what about systems integration?

Integration is becoming increasingly important for organisations wanting to stay competitive by leveraging data and capabilities provided by third parties. Currently integration is mostly the domain of technical specialists, undertaking their work cautiously and slowly. But therein lies a problem; businesses now want integrated capabilities on demand. AI has the potential to turn these wants into reality.

At the device level automated integration is already here; the challenge is to provide complete systems that will automatically connect together. So how can you design for integration between ecosystems, platforms and things you cannot predict? The answer is using AI.

Lets’ consider a practical example: A bank needs to transfer funds to a new trading partner. The banks AI will know which API's to connect to, and just the right information to exchange and complete the transaction, in a secure manner. No integration project, no technical team, and no big cost.

Evolution of Integration

Up until very recently integration has mostly been something businesses have either outsourced, or used in house technical teams for. The problem, however, is that the demand to connect to things digitally is out stripping the ability for human integrators to deliver; whether they are specialist in-house teams, or outsourcers.

To meet this demand, integration delivery needs to be re-balanced in other ways. Enter the digital integrator. The digital integrator uses meta data analysis for improved data mapping, and provides process analysis to suggest better integration, all packaged as part of a product. This approach reduces the need for integration specialists and opens up integration to a process of human initiated needs fulfilled by AI enabled systems.

AI can therefore enable a greater number of people to perform integration. Humans can drive integration by using AI services to request digital outcomes. The AI engine listens to requests, then connects them together with the data and systems needed to support the requirement. AI based integration potentially shortens the learning curve of both specialist and less / non-technical integrators to manage data and business flows, enabling almost anyone to perform integration tasks.

In many business ecosystems we now have the following actors:

Integration specialists - The traditional integration people who generally focus on enterprise projects, bulk data processing and governance.
Ad-hoc Integrator's - Tend to be in line of business roles and use fit for purpose tools for Mobile and API development
Citizen Integrator's - Are focused on personal projects, want instant gratification and integrate using data sync SaaS apps often on mobile devices
Digital Integrator's - Are AI and ML (Machine Learning) driven, support digital business projects and deliver automation using deep learning

Challenges

This new and rapidly evolving environment is not without its challenges. The first challenge, obvious to the technically minded, is the need for common standards for AI/ML integration, as without a common standard for interconnection AI/ML will struggle. The challenge of standards, however, is a challenge in decline as increasingly the world is creating API's which in turn fuel the development of standards.

The next challenges relate to change management, security and data privacy. With the rapidly increasing use of productised API management systems these areas are also becoming less of a challenge. Change management is enforced by API management platforms ensuring the integration actors work to guidelines and processes enforced by the API owner. Security and data privacy are also managed by policy ensuring that API consumers are not only authorised but also mandated to control access to data at a very granular level. So the technology provides the policy makers with the tools they need to enforce policy.

How does a digital integrator know which API to connect to, to deliver on the task the business owner has directed them to fulfil? For a long time API's have operated with levels of discover-able meta data. Meta data is like digital sign posts that direct data consumers to APIs. With the right systems and processes in place the API owner retains full control over what data, and services, are made available.

The most controversial challenge is; how much do we trust an AI? Most of what has been described so far is current technology, and some product vendors are actually starting to incorporate AI into their API management and integration products. So why is this whole area a candidate for wallowing in a trough of disillusionment? Basically it’s us humans and our inherent distrust of AI. However AI and ML, driven by citizen integrators, is now gaining momentum in terms of social acceptability.

Key enablers

AI and machine learning techniques applied to integration are emerging as digital integrator technologies.
Growing criticality for a business to leverage AI to support automation, insight and engagement.
Emerging technology innovations in AI for reduced time to integration and enabling citizen and ad-hoc integrators.

Inhibitors

Organisations lack awareness for these emerging offerings of AI in integration platforms and the benefits of applying such new technologies.
Business is cautious about exposure caused by high-value application and data flows used by AI.
Concerns about how to bring AI systems into the realm of reliable mission critical systems.

We suggest it is now time to investigate the benefits of AI by experimenting with integration platforms. However, temper that with a good dose of scepticism and be directed by integration specialists. Even with new AI technology integration specialists still have a key part to play.

SASIT Newsletter Mar 18

ian.hight@sasit.co.nz (Ian Hight) — Sun, 11 Mar 2018 00:05:42 GMT

Welcome to the SAS^IT March newsletter

In this issue

IBM Power9 - so what?
Some common sense about digital engagement
SASIT adds skills and experience with senior appointments

Want to combine legacy and leading edge – no problem!
API’s: The fast-track to transformation

IBM Power9 – so what?

At a time where it seems everything is “cloud first” and nobody is buying hardware anymore – take a cold shower, it’s not actually the case and nobody knows that better than IBM who recently released the Power9, the latest in a long line of Power systems. Is it a big deal? For most organisations probably not, however, IBM are still making some of the best server technology on the planet and for those of you who are looking to own your own tin it probably doesn’t get much better than this. In this video Chris Ticknor from KeyInfo does a great job of presenting the top five things that customers are likely to get excited about.

Some common sense about digital engagement

Technology has an uncanny ability to generate hype and excitement as well as a degree of uncertainty. These days, there is an endless supply of headlines about digital disruption and the ability for software to reshape business, industries, and even life as we know it. Start-ups appear out of nowhere and use technology to rapidly build share in markets that have been relatively stable for many years.

Internet billionaires become celebrities seemingly overnight. Suddenly, companies are advised to transform themselves digitally or suffer dire consequences. As these dramas play out, consultants, advisors, and providers rush in to join the fray. CIOs and, increasingly, other C level executives are given charters to ‘go mobile,’ ‘build apps,’ ‘get in the cloud,’ and ‘use big data.’ It’s easy to see why common sense thinking about what to do can get lost in all the noise.

This eBook by CA Technologies CTO Otto Berkes provides some simple guidelines to help your organisation succeed in a world increasingly dominated by digital engagement.

Warning: This eBook is 101 pages long. Lengthy but worth the time to read.

SAS^IT adds skills and experience with senior appointments

SAS^IT has strengthened its capabilities with two recent appointments: Tim Partington takes on the role of Head of Professional Services and Donna Robinson has been appointed Head of Managed Services. Both appointments highlight the company’s increasing focus on value added services.

Tim Partington
LinkedIn

Tim has been in the IT industry for decades and brings significant business, solution and delivery expertise having worked across a wide breadth of NZ business. Tim has a reputation for applying an unwavering focus on customer value and outcomes. Away from the office Tim can be found on one of his motorcycles enjoying riding around the countryside.

Donna Robinson
LinkedIn

Donna also has over 30 years IT experience in both customer and vendor roles including time at Dimension Data and Revera. Donna is passionate about building high performance teams and delivering exceptional support services. When not working, she enjoys being outdoors: On the water fishing, kayaking, mountain biking, watching rugby, motorsport and supporting kids sports.

Want to combine legacy and leading edge – no problem!

For those of you still running 5250 green screens (yes we know you are out there) it might be inconceivable that you could combine that technology with an intelligent chatbot. Take a look at this video where an IBM Watson chatbot works in association with an IBM i and the Slack collaboration tool to provide an automated solution to the problem of users requesting password resets.

A very cool demonstration of what is possible when you combine the old and the new.

API’s: The fast-track to transformation

APIs are the building blocks of digital transformation. They enable organisations to rapidly and easily implement digital initiatives in association with legacy systems whilst ensuring compliance with corporate processes and procedures relating to security, maintainability and scalability. By doing this organisations can move at speed to seize business opportunities and at the same time have confidence that existing systems are not placed at risk.

The growing use of APIs means that API management is becoming critical. API management ensures that extended systems and environments can be controlled and administered simply and cost effectively.

SAS^IThas partnered with CA Technologies for the primary reason that CA’s API Management product is simply the global leader in this area, as validated by Gartner. This introductory video highlights the reasons why it might be time to get serious about API management.

SASIT Newsletter Dec 17

ian.hight@sasit.co.nz (Ian Hight) — Sun, 10 Dec 2017 21:39:18 GMT

Welcome to the SAS^IT November newsletter

In this issue

Reflecting on 2017
Is it time to move mission critical applications to the cloud?
Solving API management

SAS^IT to offer Private Storage as a Service
Change freeze notification

Reflecting on 2017

Well, that was the year that was….. An elongated election, and subsequent downturn in business confidence has certainly had an impact on business, and investment strategies. When adding the nearing retail disruption that is Amazon, and digital disruption in general, you could be thinking it's time to retire to a life more simple. But where's the fun in that? Exciting times are just around the corner!

With change comes opportunity, and there is certainly a lot of change underway at present - with much of it driven by the changes in the IT arena. Some of the most significant areas of change and potential disruption are those of machine learning and artificial intelligence, and the ability to access the required compute capability. Add to those disruptive technologies the other emerging technology breakthroughs including robotics, nanotechnology, quantum computing, biotechnology, IOT, 3D printing and autonomous vehicles, and you have an enormous amount of change on the horizon. The technology available, or becoming available, is making it easier to access complex analytics engines to drive customer engagements. Simple examples of businesses using this capacity include the aforementioned Amazon, where predictive analytics based on big data insights provides an increasing degree of personalisation. So much of this capability is about presenting information or products that are "most" relevant. The ability to link up and integrate “data” is becoming all important.

To focus on that word relevant - it's time to share some of our plans in more detail as we embark on a significant period of investment to ensure that we deliver additional value to our customers in what will be challenging and disruptive times.

In talking to our customers over the last year it has become apparent that more businesses are seeking to disrupt themselves, and are investing in trialing new technologies to understand how best to counter the international businesses seeking to "cut their lunch". To deliver these customer centric initiatives often involves using Cloud based applications - and also involves moving quite a lot of data around these environments which can be expensive, and complex.

Solving this problem is where SAS^IT is investing….

Our focus, with the recent additional investment in Australia, is to “add” real value with our Hybrid solutions, and high speed, low latency connectivity to the Public Cloud environments – with our job being to deliver that seamless integration between these systems and environments.

This significant investment will be live early in 2018 and involves us implementing large IBM Power Systems, Storage, Intel compute, and Cisco Nexus connectivity, along with high bandwidth, low latency direct connectivity to most of the Public Cloud environments via Cloud Exchange, within the Equinix Data Centres in Sydney and Melbourne. Why invest is compute in Australia I hear some people ask - when there is so much compute available through the Public Cloud providers?

The answer to that question is both simple and quite complex:

None of the Public Cloud companies are providing IBM Power Systems compute across all operating environments with high speed connectivity to multiple Public Cloud services for commoditised compute, and the services that reside there
Most applications residing on IBM Power Systems require high speed low latency connectivity to applications running on Intel based machines
Data has gravity - and whilst most Public Cloud providers don't charge to move data onto their platforms - some charge a huge amount to move data off their platforms
High end compute is still not "cheap" in the Public Cloud - unless it's used for small time slices - rather than continuously
Managing infrastructure across Public and Private compute environments can be challenging - and is often a distraction to IT Departments

To solve these challenges SASIT will move workloads from the Vocus Data Centres in Melbourne and Sydney to the Equinix Data Centres where our core offerings will be located.

The outcome that we will be providing will deliver quite a few key benefits, including:

Significantly more compute available on larger IBM Power Systems - with these systems initially installed in Sydney and Melbourne. They will run a mix of IBM i, AIX and Linux - however additional IBM Power Systems will also be implemented where dedicated operating environments require it. These systems will deliver significantly more compute and scalability than we have available currently
Tier zero storage with significant elasticity into the Petabytes - providing data storage enabling customers to leave their data on storage outside the Public Cloud providers, and yet providing choice for Public Cloud commodity compute - whichever Public Cloud provider has the best solution and price at any given time. This outcome delivers flexibility and choice based on the unique requirements of any individual customers
Cisco UCS Intel compute within the SAS^ITPrivate Cloud - for when either virtual or dedicated compute is required outside that available through the Public Cloud providers - offering choice in not only where the data resides - but also where the compute is consumed
Cisco Nexus switches and direct, high speed, low latency access to Public Cloud providers through the Equinix Cloud Exchange fabric - delivering the data transfer speeds required by many of the applications we currently host. The Equinix Cloud Exchange also allows us to present IBM Power Systems to the community connected to the Equinix Cloud Exchange for on demand processing consumption
RightScale management offering a single management view across all platforms except IBM Power systems (initially) - whether within the Public or Private Clouds - presenting one view of a customer's compute resources
SAS^IT's Customer Portal - will provide access, visibility and transparency across all platforms and services delivered - including call management/service management. The first phase of this platform is in the final stages of testing, and will be available early in the New Year
Continuous improvement of our automation and orchestration platforms to enhance and speed-up the management and delivery of customers systems
“Speed to market” is the focus – which provides the delivery of a required outcome quickly across multiple environments – and the flexibility to develop that robust solution at speed

Whilst the above is a stepping stone – the real focus is on our investments in further developing our Cloud skills, and expanding our Services capability and offerings more and more into the Public Cloud arena.

As businesses move more and more to an "agile" form of delivering IT - the requirements for greater flexibility will compound - and it's for this reason that we have invested heavily on building out our systems, and more importantly, our services capability to meet this demand.

In the process of the significant changes that we are putting the business through we are developing our value proposition as a hybrid cloud MSP to ensure that we continue to provide a range of value added services that our customers want to consume. Our business is here to ensure that our customers have all the tools needed to prosper in the fourth industrial revolution.

On that note I wish you all a thoroughly relaxing summer break - and look forward to catching up in the New Year.

Is it time to move your mission critical applications to the cloud? SAS^IT offers a low risk approach

The forces driving change

There are numerous factors driving organisations to modernise their business systems including:

Pressure to improve customer experience
A desire to avoid the high maintenance and support costs associated with legacy infrastructure and software licensing
The need to respond to greater competition from digital disrupters
The desire to implement new functionality rapidly across diverse environments
The drive to optimise productivity through self-service and automation

In response to these factors many organisations have turned to Cloud based solutions. Whilst Cloud adoption has been growing steadily over the last 10 years, Cloud migrations of mission critical systems have proven to be very challenging. Most of the mission critical business applications in use today weren’t built for the Cloud with their architectures based on vertical scaling and infrastructure resiliency. Cloud native applications are typically designed to operate on horizontally scaling environments with micro-service based architectures and complete resiliency.

Migrating mission critical systems based on traditional architectures can often involve expensive rewrites, and/or significant complexity. Compounding the challenge is the fact that expert Cloud skills and expert migration skills are rare, and in high demand.

Hybrid: the most practical way forward

For most organisations the practical solution to the challenge of modernising business systems is to take a step by step approach combining existing mission critical systems with Cloud based systems in a hybrid environment. Cloud provides for scalability, time to value, extensive functionality and flexibility. Existing systems (on premise or Private Cloud) provide stability, familiarity, and greater control. Hybrid computing brings the two environments together to support each other. This functionality allows IT teams to run workloads wherever most appropriate be that; on-premise, in a Private, or Public Cloud.

Increasingly organisations are looking at Hybrid Cloud from a business function perspective. Many functions can be placed in the Cloud without a great deal of complexity; for example HR, payroll, CRM, and marketing. These applications can then be integrated with on-premise or Private Cloud applications such as an ERP and core financials using API’s.

SAS^IT recognises that for many customers the best approach is to adopt Cloud technologies alongside legacy infrastructure. This approach facilitates low risk digital transformation by protecting and leveraging existing systems and harnessing the power of Cloud.

Some organisations may have concerns about availability, security, systems performance, scalability or some other metric. The hybrid infrastructure options available from SAS^IT mean that most, if not all, requirements can be met and importantly a tailored Service Level Agreement (SLA) can be established to provide for the specific requirements of every customer.

SAS^IT facilitates the pathway to your digital future

Today many organisations operate mission critical applications on IBM Power Systems – on premise and/or in a Private Cloud. To facilitate the digital transformation of these customers, early in 2018 SAS^IT will implement Power Systems and private storage infrastructure within the Equinix Public Data Centre nodes in Sydney and Melbourne. This infrastructure will have high capacity network connectivity to the major Public Cloud providers resulting in low latency between traditional applications running on Power Systems and any associated Cloud based applications.

Physical connectivity is important but only a building block; SAS^IT has a highly skilled team delivering consulting, project and managed services to ensure an optimised Hybrid Cloud environment. Also supplied by SAS^IT is a technology roadmap to meet the evolving needs of the organisation, while managing risk, and reducing cost and complexity.

The unique value proposition from SAS^IT

SAS^IT has an accumulation of learned experiences acquired over decades and consequently few understand the architectural and technical constraints of more traditional monolithic mission critical systems. SAS^IT is in the fortunate position of having a unique blend of skills, resources, and experiences ideally suited to assisting organisations transition from large monolithic mission critical systems to modern Cloud based alternatives using Microservices.

We recognise that there is often huge business investment in a well proven mission critical system. A lift and shift approach to Cloud transition would achieve very little and incur great risk (and cost). Similarly a rip and replace approach is also high risk, and costly. The SAS^IT approach is to leverage the proven mission critical system, to systematically architect it considering all the possibilities of Hybrid Cloud.

A Hybrid Cloud architecture utilising microservices correctly designed and managed will enable the client organisation to continue to operate their mission critical application as if it was a single system whereas it will have been transformed to unleash the power and flexibility made possible through distributed Cloud services.

Solving API Management

Some businesses are adding API based interconnections at a rate of hundreds per month, this growth is huge. This rapid growth of API's is at the same time creating a massive problem to manage. Given the rise of internet security threats, the problem of managing API interconnections is also growing into a high-risk security issue. Until very recently API's, and more to the point connecting them, was a bespoke development function, but in today's high rate of change, connected business environment, that simply won't cut it. To adequately manage all this connectivity requires a dedicated API manager which sits between the outside world and inside business systems.

The requirements for API management fall into three basic categories:

Providing a means for product managers to optimize value.

API's in the past were costly to produce, and due to their complexity, very slow to implement. Due to the cost and complexity involved, there was a tendency to make API's wide-ranging in the scope of operation, this, in turn, came with the very real risk of providing too much information and potentially to the wrong party. API managers consume all the legacy API's and information sources a business has to offer then allows the fast composition of API's that deliver optimal subsets of that information. Add to this the ability to orchestrate operations and translate information and some very powerful optimisations of business information and service values are possible.

Managing the relationships between API providers and consumers.

With B2B integration projects one of the most complex aspects to manage is the relationship with the other party requiring many meetings and phone calls. In today's information-centric digital world this is just not practical, instead, the API manager has taken over these aspects. To do this the API manager must perform four basic tasks:

They must make it easy for API users (Developers) to access the API and understand what it does so that they, in turn, can write applications that consume it
They need to identify who is using the API, this is typically facilitated by providing an API registration process that results in the issuing of an access key
They must be able to communicate with users both individually and potentially as a community
Lastly but not in the least, they must provide good support to solve any issues that arise. A common way of doing this is through discussion forums. Good API managers provide developer communities with prebuilt functionality to support this.

Enforcing agreements on API use and security.

Providing an API key is usually only the first step in the process of allowing access and tracking usage. Providing the access key usually comes with having agreed how the API is to be used which often involves applying quotas to consumption and rate limits as to how many API calls can be made. Further to this, the API manager provides security through digital encryption of data, all embedded in the solution.

The digital enterprise must be tightly secured from the application right through to the API, all this must be accomplished without compromising the user experience. The API manager must identify and neutralize threats and enforce robust policies through consistent and repeatable security. The key areas being:

Protection against threats and OWASP vulnerabilities such as SQL injection
Control access to SSO and identify management while maintaining user convenience
Provide end-to-end security for apps, mobile and IoT

SAS^IT to offer Private Storage as a Service by placing NetApp technology near the edge of the cloud.

For organisations who want to utilise a broad portfolio of Cloud services to keep themselves competitive yet at the same time maintain close control of their data by keeping it at the edge of the Cloud, NetApp Private Storage might be the answer. This video provides an overview. For further information please contact SAS^IT

Christmas period - Change freeze

Reminder SAS^IT systems will be subject to a change freeze from:

8:00 am Monday 11^th December until 8:30 am Monday 8^th January

The change freeze is applied to reduce the risk of a disruptive issue related to critical systems at a time when many engineers are on holiday. SAS^IT does, however, maintain a skeleton staff working 24 x 7 throughout the change freeze period.

Whilst the change freeze will be transparent for most customers it does mean that no modifications or upgrades associated with critical systems (Production and DR) will be undertaken during the change freeze period. In the event that your business requires your own specific freeze period, or the SASIT change freeze could create a problem for your organisation, please discuss the circumstances with your SAS^IT Account Manager.

SASIT Newsletter Nov 17

ian.hight@sasit.co.nz (Ian Hight) — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 02:50:01 GMT

Welcome to the SAS^IT November newsletter

In this issue

Hybrid Cloud - Business Drivers
Is it time to engage a managed services provider? (MSP)
The evolution of APIs
IBM Bluemix - Who does this appeal to?
SAS ^IT has a YouTube Channel
Change freeze notification

Hybrid Cloud - Business Drivers

Organisations considering change typically look at implementing a solution that incorporates a mix of on premise, and public or private cloud, referred to as a hybrid cloud model. Hybrid cloud can simply be a single on premise application connecting to a single cloud function. However, today’s business systems are more likely to follow a distributed computing model, and form part of a complex network of business functions spanning on premise virtual machines, and many cloud functions.

Cloud is typically marketed to promote benefits such as improved efficiency, flexibility and even opportunity for expansion. However many of these benefits can lack tangibility, often making it difficult to validate a move to the cloud.

Whilst the term “hybrid” has become popular in recent years, essentially we are talking about distributed systems: Modern systems are highly distributed in terms of information inputs and outputs.

Distributed Systems

Twenty years ago enterprises were focused on controlling and protecting information within their boundaries. In contrast modern enterprises work with highly distributed information systems extending well beyond their physical boundaries.

The business drivers for the adoption of modern distributed systems can be grouped into four areas:

Performance

Distributed systems allow for greater overall service performance than systems whose function is centralised in a single location. By spreading the computational load across different application services, each location is under less stress, allowing each application service to perform more efficiently, which increases the performance of the overall service. One example of how this works is in high demand messaging services. Instead of placing the load for every current user transaction onto a single server, transactions are spread across a number of different servers. In this way, the demand on each individual application service is reduced, and the data each application service receives percolates to the other application services in the background.

Reliability

When computation is centred on a single machine, the health of that machine is the health of the entire service; if it goes down, so does the entire service as is often the case in hardware centric systems. However, distributed systems can continue to function if one application service ceases to function. While the performance demands on the other application services will go up, as will the stress each virtual machine is under, the other application services will still work; so the risk of failure is reduced.

Scalability

Because distributed systems work across a variety of different machines, they are inherently scalable. That is, the distributed system can adjust how many system resources it is making use of in light of what kind of demand the system is under. If a system is under high demand, then it can have every machine running to capacity. However, if the load on the system is relatively low, it can take different components of the distributed system offline to save power. When demand on the system goes up again, these components can come back online.

Synchronization

When services run on a single server, there are no issues associated with data synchronisation: all the data is simply present on that machine. However, an issue can arise with distributed systems. Different distributed system components are handling tasks and data at any given point in time, there will be small periods of time in which data exists on one component, but not on others. As long as the application service stays online long enough for this temporarily unique data to percolate across to other application services, there will not be a problem. However, if an application service goes down before it proliferates its unique data, there will be inconsistencies within the system. This outcome can be designed for by ensuring any unique data is minor and in the event of a failure that transactions are re run to ensure there is no loss.

The Benefits of Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid cloud benefits build upon the advantages of distributed systems. Essentially a hybrid cloud model takes all of the advantages of public cloud and integrates these advantages with more traditional systems.

More specifically those benefits are:

Options for Innovation

Barriers to innovation are reduced in a cloud environment, as large capital expenditure is not required for modelling a new service. Previously, cost associated with such an initiative would include capital expenditure for infrastructure, labour and time for research then more resources to install and maintain. These resources could place a lot of pressure on capacity management practices and impact forecasting given the many uncertain variables.

In a hybrid cloud environment, concepts can be tested without capital expenditure, prototyped in the cloud environment then rapidly deployed and measured for success. The added benefit of hybrid cloud is the availability of resources combining both internal and external environments including data, network, processing, and storage.

Scalability / flexibility

Scaling on IT infrastructure can be expensive, inefficient and place pressure on accurate forecasting in growing companies. However a hybrid cloud environment can provide the opportunity for businesses to scale out to a cloud environment for specific workloads. Implementing automation rules on the cloud provides the ability to scale resources up and down as business demands change. This allows the hybrid cloud system to take advantage of unlimited resources based on demand driven usage, optimising the environment for performance and efficiency.

Increased Speed to Market

In many organisations speed to market is a key differentiator. In the digital age the ability to quickly spin up environments to test, prototype and launch new products is highly desirable. For organisations with IT infrastructure that is working near or close to capacity, spinning up new environments can be a challenge and potentially hinder business progress.

Business Continuity

Business continuity has been identified as one of the most important considerations for IT operations. A business continuity solution is not just backing up and/or replicating information to the cloud, nor is it simply a Disaster Recovery plan. Business continuity means being able to continue to do business during a failure or disaster. In basic terms, it means that when a failure or disaster happens, information is still accessible with little or no downtime.

A business continuity solution therefore needs to be planned to consider key elements such as resilience, recovery and contingency. Hybrid cloud solutions are often considered by organisations as a key component of a business continuity solution where critical data is replicated to a cloud in a different location to the primary system. This solution provides data insurance in the event of a disaster (natural or technological), minimising downtime and costs associated with such an event. Providing robust data connections and messaging through solid API based designs is key in delivering on this benefit.

Risk Management

Companies can leverage hybrid cloud as the first step in moving to a predominately cloud environment. A hybrid solution provides the perfect opportunity for companies to test the capability of particular workloads and providers and thereby assists them in planning cloud strategy.

Improved Connectivity

When moving components of a business to the cloud there can be problems from network performance that impact critical applications. This problem can be difficult to prevent, especially during peak traffic periods and is a result of irregular public internet performance. A Hybrid Cloud solution could mitigate this issue by leveraging connectivity solutions to guarantee bandwidth between on premise and cloud locations, thereby improving performance by reducing distance-based latency.

Security Considerations

There is an argument to be made that network security can be compromised in public cloud environments. Security compromises can be expected as data is no longer kept entirely in a private location across private systems but rather accessed via the internet, so additional security measures need to be applied. However, a private hybrid cloud system allows much more control in design and architecture and so a higher level of data security is attainable over public cloud alone.

Hybrid cloud architectures have obvious potential to benefit many organisations, but are dependent on each businesses requirements and desired outcomes. There is rarely a one solution fits all scenario when it comes to complex IT infrastructure. It is therefore important to understand each and every critical variable in order to make informed, aligned and beneficial decisions.

Is it time to engage a Managed Services Provider? (MSP)

It is becoming more difficult to cover all the bases with in-house IT expertise. The speed of change in digital business means that it is almost impossible to have an in-depth knowledge of all the technologies that your organisation needs. Even the simplest organisation can have many virtual servers and networks to maintain, terabytes of data, distributed enterprise software, web servers, complex security demands, and decisions to make on placement of workloads in cloud or on premise.

Digital business requires agile implementation of new business models using cloud services and 24x7 operations. Adoption of cloud service technologies often results in a diverse and unique hybrid IT environment, spanning a number of vendors, processes and delivery models. To add further complexity often all of this needs to be delivered in the face of flat or declining IT budgets.

Handling complexity is where Managed Services Providers (MSPs) can add significant value. MSPs enable organisations to transform, manage and maintain systems through the provision of skills, technology, and processes that complement those skills and capabilities held within your organisation.

Why organisations adopt managed services

Typically organisations seek assistance from an MSP to address a range of issues including complexity, service quality, risk and cost. Not in isolation but collectively; keeping operations running efficiently, evaluating and implementing new capabilities whilst managing cost and risk.

The business drivers most often cited when engaging an MSP are:

Improved service levels. The level of service quality is usually the overall measure being assessed, backed by a written SLA (Service Level Agreement) - a contractual document defining the roles and responsibilities and expected outcomes. Whilst an SLA is important the speed of change means it should be regularly updated.

Increased efficiency and business resiliency. An MSP will have capabilities to achieve these outcomes including best practices, standards, monitoring, automation, and a range of business continuity measures.

Better access to skills. It is increasingly difficult to find, retain, and develop specialist skills. An MSP has the advantage because these resources can be pooled across multiple customers giving the individuals greater opportunity and at the same time giving organisations access to a wider range of specialist skills.

Cost reduction. An MSP is able to leverage economies of scale to deliver services at a lower cost point than can achieved by a single organisation. Costs of infrastructure, cloud services, and staff resources can be shared across multiple customers.

What to look for when selecting a managed service partner

Skills & experience that you don’t have - organisations are not going to engage the services of an MSP if they already have all of the skills needed. Expect an MSP to have in-depth knowledge and skills to support the technologies and cloud services that are required. At one level technology is becoming much easier to buy and use however the number of technologies and their “under the hood” sophistication continues to grow rapidly. Consider the number of technology job titles in use today that weren’t conceived of five years ago.

An effective MSP goes beyond break/fix and simple monitoring. It is proactive, nips problems in the bud and looks to make continuous improvements through prioritisation and automation. An MSP adds value, by contributing to improvement and optimisation of your business operations. An MSP should keep abreast of emerging technology and market changes. It should also be able to add new services easily as a customer’s suite of IT products and services grows and changes.

Customer focus – it’s vital that an MSP has a customer-focused approach. Most businesses aren’t one size fits all, so an MSP should be prepared to tailor its approach to each organisation. MSP staff should listen closely to requirements and respond to them efficiently.

Increasingly customer environments are hybrid environments comprising a range of in-house systems and public and/or private clouds. It is likely that a variety of vendor products are involved; expect the MSP to have extensive knowledge of and relationships with key vendors. This knowledgebase should include visibility of product roadmaps.

Most importantly an MSP should take the time to understand the customer business because only by doing this will they be able to optimise your value proposition. Lastly, and it probably goes without saying, the MSP should have a human touch along with deep technical expertise.

Clear processes including compliance oversight – look for clear, transparent and consistent processes. Processes inform about reliability and professionalism. Well defined processes will reduce risks related to compliance, security, and business continuity.

Financial stability and reputation An investment in engaging an MSP is an investment that both parties make. Time will be invested, information will be exchanged and relationships formed. Given the scope of the investment made it is well worth confirming the financial stability and reputation of the MSP before getting started.

If you are considering engaging the services of an MSP please talk to SAS^IT. We have a successful 40 year track record and pride ourselves on close and productive relationships with our customers. Our product and service offerings are continuously evolving as we strive to stay at the forefront of what it means to be an industry leading MSP.

The evolution of APIs

Doing business today is highly dependent on being interconnected. Not that long ago businesses often worked hard to avoid connecting their information with anyone outside their organisation.

APIs are actually not that new, in fact they have been in extensive use in the corporate world for at least the last 20 years. Serious API focus started around the year 2000, with Salesforce.com producing the first web-based API. That same year, eBay released its API and two years later, Amazon started Amazon Web Services.

The practical use of APIs over that time has evolved as the industry has incrementally improved the efficiency, access and security of their APIs. The idea of providing publicly accessible entry points to a system has been a key part of software design since the earliest days of computing. What has accelerated the concept is obviously the internet and maybe not so obviously, distributed systems. Simply put todays systems are becoming highly distributed in terms of their information sources and outputs.

APIs have now come of age with the advent of cloud computing, where the ability to host external APIs has matured to a point where cloud service providers have scalable capacity to handle transaction loads and spikes in traffic. Mobile platforms now put applications in reach on millions of devices, all having access to back-end APIs across the Internet.

Some businesses are adding interconnections at a rate of hundreds per month, which is huge growth. However, the rapid growth of APIs is at the same time creating a massive problem to manage. Given the rapid rise of internet security threats, the problem of managing API interconnections is also growing in to a high risk security issue. Until very recently API's, and more to the point, connecting them, was a bespoke development function, but in todays, high rate of change, extensively connected business environment, that simply doesn’t cut it.

API Gateways

API gateways enable enterprises to very selectively control access to information for both internal and 3rd party developers. API gateways allow the rapid implementation of new APIs using low code techniques that can take the dependency away from developers and in to the hands of digital delivery teams to drive business agility. API gateways add further value by providing standardisation of interfaces and common application of policies to maintain efficient response times across all the APIs that an enterprise needs to manage. Further to this API gateways provide sophisticated security measures specific to the needs of APIs.

What is fuelling the growth of APIs today is the monetisation opportunities that they create. Traditionally and to this day, the primary commercial driver for APIs was in business to business relationships. However B2B revenue is being rapidly overtaken by the ability to sell information on the open market. API managers are facilitating this by providing using tracking and thus monetary metering of information consumption making API managers a revenue generation potential opportunity.

SAS^IT in association with Computer Associates are this month launching a new package of services and consulting centred on API management. These new services are centred on CA's market leading API Manager. SASIT along with CA, has moved beyond API management; we now provide all the tools you need to modernise application architectures using API’s and micro services, with the speed and security required to create a scalable and agile business.

Please contact SAS^IT for further information or to organise a demonstation.

IBM Bluemix: Who does this appeal to?

The public cloud market is dominated by Amazon and Microsoft. However when you look at the Gartner quadrant you quickly see who is in the pack behind. One interesting member of that pack is IBM with their Bluemix public cloud. What catches the eye is that IBM's Bluemix seems set to break from the pack and head in the direction of the two dominant players, something that not many of the other pack members currently appear to be doing.

IBM Bluemix is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) developed by IBM. IBM continues to add new developer functionality onto its Bluemix cloud platform, providing support for low-code application development and adding security authorisation into applications, among other enhancements. Bluemix supports several programming languages and services as well as integrated DevOps to build, run, deploy and manage applications on the cloud. Bluemix is based on Cloud Foundry open technology and runs on SoftLayer infrastructure. Bluemix supports several programming languages including Java, Node.js, Go, PHP, Swift, Python, Ruby Sinatra, Ruby on Rails and can be extended to support other languages such as Scala and buildpacks.

Overall, IBM’s goal is to make Bluemix the go-to platform for developers of all types, from so-called “citizen developers” to professional development teams building enterprise applications and commercial products. The Bluemix platform features more than 150 tools and services covering areas such as cognitive intelligence, blockchain, security, Internet of Things, DevOps and more.

By focusing on the DevOps model, Bluemix can reduce the downtime of redeploying applications. Continuous delivery is one way this outcome can be provided. The integrated environment provided by Bluemix allows developers to automatically deliver code without the hassle of building and debugging installation scripts. This automation reduces the time needed to manage code delivery and puts it in the hands of the testers and user community faster. an application can be deployed to multiple spaces which allow segregation of environments for development, testing and production.

Bluemix allows developers to focus on delivering business value, rather than on maintaining the development environment, by scaling environments elastically based on business demand. Instead of manually deploying workloads, Bluemix will automatically redeploy workloads to other virtual machines (VMs) if there is an outage. To provide continuous availability, Bluemix abstracts the underlying architecture and keeps the manageability of services and applications at an easily understood level. Users are able to stop or start applications and define how much memory is associated with each application while Bluemix manages the rest.

In a recent Forrester study on the low-code development market, analyst Jeffrey Hammond wrote, “The market for mobile low-code development platforms is growing because more aspiring, semi-professional, and professional developers use them to close the gap between demand for mobile applicationss and the talent available to create them. Tools must support a variety of mobile workloads, as well as developers with varying skill levels.”

The report added that vendors who support multiple workloads with a high-fidelity, what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) experience will lead the pack. In addition, “Vendors that can provide easy but extensive integration, support mobile specific features (e.g., notifications or TouchID), and create pixel-perfect UIs will emerge as market leaders,” the report said. As an overview the Bluemix WYSIWIG editor provides the following:

Bluemix has all the popular runtimes already installed and ready to go. And you don't see your favourite runtime; you can install your own, because Bluemix is based on Cloud Foundry technology.
Bluemix has a large and growing catalogue of services that are already installed and licensed for the platform, so they are easy to incorporate into your application. And they have usage-based pricing.
The Bluemix composable service approach lets you "kick the tires" of new technologies like Watson services.
If the Bluemix runtimes and services aren't enough for your needs, you can build your own environments using Docker-based containers.
If you need to control the entire software stack, Bluemix supports virtual machine deployments via OpenStack.

“We have a maniacal focus on the developer,” Angel Diaz, IBM’s vice president of Cloud Technology & Architecture. “We can support rapid application development and address the so-called citizen developer and manage it in a way that the CIO is comfortable with. But then we can go further, it’s not just rapid application development with low-code and no-code, it’s about bringing the capabilities around cognitive, around data cleansing, around content carrying of unstructured data, around block chain, etc.”

Bluemix for developers is growing fast and add Watson a dash of cognitive, and artificial intelligence that creates unique appeal.

SAS^IT YouTube channel

YouTube is home to around 1.5 Billion active users and is the second largest social media site on the Internet. SAS^IT recently set up a YouTube channel in order to bring you interesting and relevant video content.

We have created four playlists:

Partner videos: Videos created by our suppliers that we think you might find interesting
Service overviews: SAS^IT service offerings presented in video format
Industry expert interviews: Opinions of a number of IT industry experts
Customer stories: First hand stories told by SAS^IT customers

We will endeavour to supply new and interesting video content on an ongoing basis.

Our YouTube channel is available to be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK7dNMe_U_uzUusR1AH8iZg

Christmas period - Change freeze

SAS^IT systems will be subject to a change freeze from:

8:00 am Monday 11^th December until 8:30 am Monday 8^th January

Whilst the change freeze will be transparent for most customers it does mean that no modifications or upgrades associated with critical systems (Production and DR) will be undertaken during the change freeze period. In the event that your business requires your own specific freeze period, or the SAS^IT change freeze could create a problem for your organisation, please discuss the circumstances with your Account Manager.

SAS IT Newsletter Aug 17

ian.hight@sasit.co.nz (Ian Hight) — Thu, 17 Aug 2017 05:55:25 GMT

Welcome to the SAS^IT August newsletter

In this issue

Why should you care about data privacy?
Software expertise facilitates faster path to market - DTR customer story
The next stage of virtualisation - Containers
IBM Power systems support
Co innovation and customer centricity
Watson summit draws a large crowd

Why should you care about data privacy? Interview with Sheila Fitzpatrick

By Ian Hight

Data privacy is probably a topic that you haven’t given much consideration to. If that is the case then we suggest that now would be a good time to rethink. The consequences of getting data privacy wrong are becoming more severe and at the same time compliance is becoming more challenging as regulations change and cloud based operations create new liabilities.

Given the changing landscape we thought you might be interested in the expert analysis and opinions of Sheila Fitzpatrick who is one of the world leading authorities on the topic of data privacy. Sheila visited New Zealand recently and presented at a number of forums. We took the opportunity to interview her whilst she was here.

Software expertise facilitates faster path to market - DTR customer story

DTR is a New Zealand business that has been serving Kiwis since 1962. The company has evolved significantly since then and today sells a wide range of products including whiteware, computers, furniture, gaming equipment and much more through 23 stores nationwide. At the core of the business the company offers finance products and cash loans.

SAS^IT has a long standing relationship with DTR for the provision of software development and integration services.

In recent years, the pace of change has accelerated and in order to stay competitive it has become essential to use technology in increasingly smarter and more sophisticated ways.

Whilst DTR have their own highly skilled IT resources, developing and bringing to market increasingly sophisticated financial products often calls for timely specialist skills and that’s where SAS^IT comes in as part of the team. SAS^IT’s involvement typically might include: architecture, systems design, user interface design, coding and integration.

Central DTR components to the development of new financial products are; the Sovereign Financial System, DTR’s core business application and an external interface to Equifax for the integration of individual's credit data.

During the last 12 months SAS^IT has worked closely with DTR and brought to market “Easicash” which involved integrating the cash loans system with a web based application to facilitate simple and efficient loan applications. Also developing a revolving credit account capability which involved a major overhaul of the DTR hire purchase system and provides an improved customer experience through more efficient processing. A further project involved developing a web based system to enable car dealers to use DTR to provide financing.

Lee Trigg – IT Manager at DTR commented: “The main reason we engage SAS^IT is that we have confidence in their ability to deliver. SAS^IT helps us get products to market quickly which is increasingly important. We now see them as part of our team who can contribute as required with architecture, systems design, programming and so on. The fact that they are very easy to deal with is an added bonus.”

The next stage of virtualisation - Containers

By Ivo Kohler

Up until a few years ago, the most common way for enterprise software to be developed, sold and deployed was as monolithic packaged applications requiring large computing platforms. More recently, due to the growth of cloud computing, agile development processes, and the need for lightweight, virtualised applications and enterprise architecture flexibility, the market trend has been toward microservices and containerisation.

The reason microservices and containerisation have become so popular is that they allow organisations to decouple software into smaller functional pieces and separate the software from the underlying hardware. Doing both of these things, speeds up development, allows for faster and lower cost updating, increases resiliency and increases scalability.

Containerisation is, in effect, OS-level virtualisation (as opposed to VMs, which run on hypervisors, each with a fully embedded OS). Containers are easily packaged, lightweight and designed to run anywhere. Multiple containers can be deployed in a single VM. A microservice is an application with a single function, such as routing network traffic.

The microservices architectural approach involves developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms. These services are built around business capabilities and independently deployable by fully automated deployment components.

The concept of containers is not new; stringing microservices together into functional applications is an evolution of the service-oriented architecture (SOA), which was very popular a few years ago. Also containers have been available in Linux for a very long time, however it was the Docker open-source project that has really accelerated the current uptake of containers.

Docker provides an additional layer of abstraction and automation of operating-system-level virtualization on Linux and Windows. Docker uses the resource isolation features of the Linux kernel such as cgroups and kernel namespaces.

So now you may be wondering what the difference between containers and VMs is. A simple analogy is that a VM is a house, it has its own foundation, plumbing, electric wiring etc. On the other hand we have a container. Think of a container as an apartment in a block of flats. It is still very secure. It has its own doors, however many parts are shared with the other apartments (electric wiring, plumbing, etc).

The advantage is fairly obvious, in order to provide secure access to certain applications (apache, ftps, even database) hefty VMs (i.e. RAM, CPU , HDD, management ) no longer need to be provided.

Now it is possible to run many independent applications, which can be completely isolated from each other.

Containers are very portable. A container application can be developed on a laptop and once completed it can be deployed on any Docker host as long as the architecture is the same. A Docker host can be run on a VMware farm or on any public cloud provider.

At SAS^IT we have, or will have migrated to containers: apache webserver, reverse proxy, load balancers, mail relay and many other software functions. The general rule for us is: if we can containerise an application, we will.

Running a container on a single Docker host comes with some challenges, when maintenance is needed or if the Docker host goes down, obviously the container will go down with it. Resilience is where container orchestration application comes in. Simply define what the application should look like (RAM, CPU allocation, what port should be listening on) and then pass this information to the orchestration layer.

An orchestration application such as Kubernetes will take care of scheduling the application across the nodes. From this point on it is not necessary to worry about where the container (pod in Kubernetes terms ) runs. If any of the hosts that are part of the Kubernetes cluster go down, the Kubernetes itself takes care of re-scheduling the pod elsewhere. Bear in mind that the idea of most containers is that they can be destroyed at will, and a new one is started, instead and the whole process should take no more than a few seconds, yes that’s right, seconds.

Where traditionally a business would run a single application per VM, with containers it’s easy to run many applications (depending on the specification of the VM itself) on a single host.

In summary, microservices and containers are relatively easy to deploy and can bring major benefits to companies of any size.

IBM Power systems support

By Ian Hight

For many years SAS^IT has been Australasia's largest provider of managed services for the IBM power systems platform with more systems under management than any other IBM Business Partner in this region. The market move to cloud particularly over the last five years has benefited SAS^IT in a number of ways, the most obvious being in the provision of public cloud services but also with the provision of private cloud services that include management of IBM i platforms. Managed services of IBM i systems ranges from the provision of cloud based infrastructure through to on demand 24 x7 support. We have IBM infrastructure spread across five data centres as well as providing support for customers with on premise equipment. A short overview is presented in this video.

Co innovation and customer centricity

By Tony Wilson

Recently I decided to go out and talk to as many groups as I could about Co Innovation and Customer Centricity. The main reason I did this was because I was concerned that business leaders seeking improved customer engagement were becoming overly focused on the technology. The point I wanted to get out there and lead some thinking on, was it's actually about sound business strategy. And more to the point, we now have a huge amount of data on which to base good business strategy.

There is an internet full of customers out there but how do you effectively engage with them? This is not a new question, the build it and they will come attitude was one of the primary reasons for failure in the dot-com era, something I witnessed first-hand. The difference today is we have some much more real time information about the digital world we are operating in which in turn enables solid real time decision making. The foundation of any digital engagement strategy is asking and answering for yourself the why question.

Why are we on Facebook?
Why have we invested in that mobile app?

I'd like to emphasize that to be successful it is important to really understand, 'very well' the reasons that the business is 'online', what outcomes are expected, and under what conditions. The point I made in the workshops I ran was that it may be more effective to appear at a trade show with posters, balloons and a coffee machine; if the business doesn’t fully understand the answer to the why question this may be the best option. The business could be wasting money on a sophisticated content delivery platform.

So assuming the why question has been answered the next step is to figure out what activities, campaign's and projects are going to be needed. Here is where Co Creation thinking starts as the what question comprises two key things, the market assets and the audience. This is a very deep subject, which is hard to cover in a short blog but...businesses must constantly evolve in order to remain relevant and aligned to the changing needs and expectations of their customers. Do nothing, and you risk leaving the door open for that disruptive competitor to come in and capture an un-serviced customer, potentially eroding your market share.

So why focus on co-creation?

Companies engage in co-creation projects because they want them to foster the discovery of customer interest and value, which they can turn into innovation and competitive advantage.

Most co-creation objectives can be classiﬁed into one of three categories:

Generation – In these cases, the company’s objective is to solicit ideas, suggestions or designs from customers and other stakeholders, through contests or open-ended appeals, for subsequent use in the design and development of products and services.
Reﬁnement – Here, collaborators work with company representatives to reﬁne one or more features of a target product or service, to help improve its physical performance, leading to a better customer experience.
Creating Things – Collaborators and the company professional's work together to develop a prototype of an entirely new product or service. In almost all cases the prototype needs additional reﬁnement and improvement before it is ready for commercialization.

Meeting co-creation objectives drives engagement with market assets. Engagement I must emphasise is a doing thing. This can be digital engagements with information content or services or real world physical stuff, back to the balloons and coffee machine!

Engagement turns contacts into interested customers whom the business will facilitate, invite and inspire.
Engagement converts to Interaction - Interaction usually happens within your organisation's building, website and social media presence and is successful when the audience proactively advocates your organisation and its assets
Empowering engaged people and providing them with timely feedback, if done well, might create enthusiasts. On an average, for every 1,000 contacts, you’ll get one enthusiast

Focusing on co-creation then by necessity leads to becoming customer centric in your thinking. So hopefully I have provided a brief but useful overview into driving customer centricity through co-innovation.

Watson Summit draws a large crowd

Around 650 people packed into Shed 10 on Auckland’s waterfront on Wednesday afternoon. As well as listening to a number of presentations, attendees had the opportunity to see demonstrations of business applications that incoroporated cognitive computing. The sheer size of the turnout highlights the current level of interest in artificial intelligence, and particularly Watson.

Thirteen year old Canadian Tanmay Bakshi stole the show. He was billed as “the world's youngest working algorithmist”, who even knew that was a job? But of course algorithms are essential to AI, neural networks, and machine learning.

Beyond being an algorithimist, Tanmay is an author, teacher, keynote speaker, IBM cloud advisor, coder (he started at 5 years old) and You Tuber with over 22,000 subscribers. Quite simply a genius kid who impressed the crowd. A very short video of him on stage at the Summit is shown below. Also – if you want to listen to him talking about his favourite topics see the interview he did last year.

Another global ransomware attack – Petya

ian.hight@sasit.co.nz (Ian Hight) — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 02:11:43 GMT

Barely a month after the WannaCry ransomware virus made its presence felt around the world, today we learn of a new ransomware campaign known as Petya. This new virus is affecting computer networks using Microsoft Windows. It was first seen affecting systems in the Ukraine, but has quickly spread across other computer networks in Europe and further afield. In an advisory issued at 9:30 am this morning New Zealand’s government cyber safety Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert NZ) stated that they had no reports of Petya ransomware affecting New Zealanders.

The cyber attack is believed to be a form of ransomware which Cert NZ describes as a malicious software that shuts down computers and demands a ransom to be paid for them to be unlocked. Some international business which have offices in New Zealand are reported to have been impacted overseas. They include law firm PLA Piper, advertising firm WPP and shipping giant Moller-Maersk.

To help prevent an attack, it’s critical to ensure that all systems in a network are patched. Petya gets into unpatched versions of Windows systems (XP through 2008 R2) by exploiting a vulnerability in Microsoft's Windows SMB server. If Petya enters a network through an unpatched system, it will be able to spread to any other trusted systems in the same network, even if they have been patched.

This vulnerability exploited by Petya is known as EternalBlue. Microsoft released a patch for EternalBlue, called MS17-010, in March this year. The ransomware encrypts not only the file system on affected computers but also the Master Boot Record (MBR) in environments where the malware is able to do so.

If you would like any assistance to deal with the Petya threat, please contact our support desk.

SAS IT Newsletter June 17

ian.hight@sasit.co.nz (Ian Hight) — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 00:33:29 GMT

Welcome to the SAS^IT June newsletter

In this issue

AWS summit - a full house
Cloud wars
Demand still strong for NZ data centre space
NetApp introduces Hyper-converged
SAS^IT customer satisfaction survey 2017 - findings
Wow ... Just back up the bus
Rubrik extends cloud data management capabilities
Insights from Microsoft’s Digital Transformation research – Asia Pacific

AWS summit - a full house

By Ian Hight

On 31 May Shed 10 and The Cloud on Auckland’s Queens Wharf was overtaken by a massive crowd including a number of SAS^IT staff.

On arrival, you could have been forgiven for thinking that you had turned up to a rock concert, but of course the 3,000 or so people were there to find out about what was new with AWS.

As has become the pattern, the Summit was a flurry of technical sessions, product and services updates with a good helping of customer and vendor stories. Unsurprisingly this year basic cloud services such as provisioning compute, storage and DR no longer generated much interest with a majority of attending organisations having done this some years prior.

One of the highlights was the keynote presented by Glenn Gore, Chief Solutions Architect. Glenn covered a lot of topics and managed to weave into his

presentation several demonstrations of AWS’s Artificial Intelligence offerings

including showcasing Amazon Lex, a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text; Amazon Polly a service that turns text into speech and Amazon Recognition, a service that enables you to add image analysis to applications.

Attending the sessions reinforced the importance of our decision to invest in the development of services that compliment AWS offerings.

Cloud wars

AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google, and Oracle cloud have an increasingly strong influence on New Zealand business. However, New Zealand is a very small part of the battle of the cloud Titans playing out on the international stage over which we have little involvement or influence. This article looks at how the fight is playing out and then suggests where this war may be going and more to the point how this battle could affect businesses of tomorrow. Cloud computing is a phenomenon that just keeps on gaining momentum and is unlikely to slow down anytime soon. Many of us have been following the huge growth numbers as the Titans of the International Public cloud market battle it out. AWS got started in 2006 and now dominates the global market. AWS has only been in New Zealand for five years, however, it now seems that every man and his dog is an AWS expert. Then we have seen Microsoft hitting back, and now starting to gain market ground on AWS who’s market growthat this point seem to be slowing slightly. In the other corner, we have the dark horse of the cloud market Google, who have been quietly building out their platform and market potential. and are now starting to go harder. And recently we have Oracle throwing down the gauntlet and challenging everyone else to a fight. Plus lots of other players with single digit market shares going after their part of the cloud territory.

But what is it they are fighting over? Well, it's us - you and me. Did we volunteer for this? Well kind of, we like the benefits these guys can deliver to us. However, if you take a step back from the battle, is it a bright future we are headed to or tech globalization beyond our control? And there lays the challenge for us all. The basic assumption of Cloud is we give responsibility to another party to operate our business systems, IT infrastructure or both. In this new digital world that's a lot of responsibility and market power in the hands of the Titans.

Currently, the market is very skewed to AWS which looks set to continue, but in this tech battle, anything is possible. AWS built its business over the last 10 years with a loyal base of developers at small companies who flocked to its services with credit cards circumventing IT management control. Their current rate of market growth slow up appears to have a lot to do with the need to attract more of the slower moving bigger companies who have a traditionally heavy investment in the likes of Oracle IBM and Microsoft. Who are all in the market and getting it together, right now particularly Microsoft, who the last 6 months has made significant gains. Oracle has weighed in with a strong offering targeted at larger business, so the fight goes on with some cannibalism. Then we have Google that got most of its revenue from online advertising which is starting to be seriously impacted by ad blocker use, so they are moving their income source to public cloud services, they too want a slice of the enterprise market.

The question is, how does the competition catch up with Amazon? And can it? Well, the leg up that Microsoft and Oracle have in the enterprise market will certainly help. Moving from on premise to the cloud with familiar tools is a lot less daunting than moving everything to AWS. AWS is running behind in some areas of the business systems market, the most obvious area is Artificial Intelligence. AWS entered this market last year, which is set to be part of what the pundits are calling business 2.0 going forward. AWS are out to close this gap and going at it aggressively. Obviously like in any battle, for every strike there is a counter strike and countermeasures. But with a market potential of $300 billion (and still growing) no one is giving up soon. As we learned a long time ago, nothing stays the same in the tech market and the AWS advantage may not hold longer term.

So for the business of tomorrow, we have to concede that the battle of the cloud Titans is not going to stop anytime soon. Business here in New Zealand is going to greatly benefit from the fight as it provides us access to systems with levels of investment our economy alone could not support. Access to global investment in public cloud is the big key outcome for New Zealand business, we are going to be able to take this massive investment in tech, access it, and use it. We are going to be able to achieve things that ten years ago would not have been possible for business in a country of our size. The battle of the Cloud Titans is global so the playing field for business is fairly even, giving us the ability to punch above our weight on a Global scale, where previously we could only dream of playing, as we cash in on the spoils of the Cloud war.

Demand still strong for NZ data centre space

Whilst public cloud services are driving a move from on-premise equipment to offshore data centres; onshore data centres across New Zealand also appear to be experiencing strong demand.

SAS^IT is seeing increased market concern over the potential for external events to impact business operations, which is driving demand for disaster recovery and business continuity services.

Whilst the benefits of cloud are typically well understood, practically it’s just not feasible for many organisations to move all of their workloads to a public cloud. For some, the lag brought about by trans-Tasman communications is a show stopper, for others it’s commercial considerations, and yet others just have a preference to remain in New Zealand.

SAS^IT has for several years offered hosting services from our own datacentre in Auckland as well as affiliate centres in locations across New Zealand and Australia. Our expansion into public cloud services enables us to offer the best of both worlds providing flexibility and choice.

To learn more about our Hosting services, visit our site SAS^IT hosting services

NetApp introduces Hyper-converged

NetApp has recently announced its long-promised hyper-converged appliance. Named: NetApp HCI, the product combines SolidFire flash storage, NetApp software and third-party servers in one chassis. It comes with a cloud-style pay-as-you-go pricing plan and a vCenter plugin.

The company's core software and SolidFire are at the heart of NetApp HCI. The package includes a new cut of ONTAP Select that is better at managing storage in remote offices and combining data stored in disparate places such as VSANs, physical arrays, IBM Bluemix, commodity servers and NetApp HCI. There's also a new version of OnCommand Insight that can optimise storage, forecast demand and advise on costs across multiple platforms.

Whilst NetApp might be late to the hyper-converged party it looks like it arrived with something to shout about, particularly the cross-platform data management capabilities and the ability to scale compute and storage independently. NetApp HCI also has a strong quality-of-service play that allows resources to be allocated to applications as needed without creating noisy neighbour problems.

At the same time as the HCI notification, NetApp announced upgraded ONTAP software for its traditional FAS arrays and instituted a consumption pricing model.

Time will tell how successful the product will be in the busy hyper-converged market, however, NetApp is feeling in a confident mood; the company has literally described its HCI announcement and associated software updates “the most far-reaching innovation announcement in its 25-year history”.

The announcement of NetApp HCI is likely to prove pivotal in changing the perception of the company from being a traditional storage company to a cloud, SaaS (software-as-a-service) software company.

SAS^IT customer satisfaction survey 2017 - findings

Chris Woodhead from Equifax (shown below) was the lucky winner of the survey respondent’s prize draw. Enjoy the action cam Chris!

The key findings from this year’s survey were:

SAS^IT’s performance

An overwhelming majority of our customers stated that SAS^IT has a very good understanding of the operational needs of their business
When asked about their experience of SAS^IT operational services, all respondents indicated they would recommend SAS^IT
The majority of customers stated that SAS^IT is proactive and regularly provides new insights
Almost 90 % of respondents agree or strongly agree that SAS^IT is easy to do business with

Overall the results we similar to the previous year

Areas of interest

Compared with the previous year, customers highlighted their interest in a much broader range of topics and services, including managed cloud, BI and IOT
The number of customers indicating that they have already or intend to move workloads into one or more of the public clouds showed a significant rise when compared with the previous year
A large percentage of customers indicated that they would like SAS^IT to provide a customer portal, and whilst this service was already scheduled, it has now been escalated and become a priority project.

We are very grateful to those of you who took the time to complete our online survey. We acknowledge the fact that online survey requests are regular and usually unwanted arrivals in our email, so the fact that many of you opted to help us refine our service offerings by providing feedback is appreciated.

Wow ... Just back up the bus

By Tony Wilson

By 2018, more than 60% of enterprises will have at least half of their infrastructure on cloud-based platforms. At Gartner’s 2016 Data Centre and Infrastructure Operations Management Conference, 13% of those polled indicated they had already deployed cloud backup for some of their data, and 42% indicated that they plan to investigate or deploy cloud backup for at least some of their data in 2017.

But the traditional ‘One size fits all’ backup policies often consume significant resources. It’s very easy to end up storing vast amounts of data that you did not intend to protect in the first place. For example, backing up a user’s entire drive or all of a file servers’ folders and directories. Internal IT teams are rapidly also becoming the managers of multisource services from the cloud. This explosion of cloud infrastructure causes another vast area in which there is significant scope to backup unnecessary information.

It is recommended that IT management perform a reclassification of the data being protected, rather than lower QoS or reducing return to service SLA’s. This approach will help meet tactical budget challenges and realize cost savings. Do not, of course, alter backup policies and procedures in a way that would conflict with external regulations or internal corporate mandates, and as always, consider an archiving solution for regulatory compliance where possible. With the increasing threats from ransom ware and malware backup as a remediation should also be taken in to account.

Many organisations are striving to find ways to better protect data, which often includes capturing a copy of the data more frequently (as in more than once a day, perhaps hourly to every few hours). However, some data may not warrant the current backup policy, much less an improved recovery point objective (RPO). In these cases, due either to the low business-criticality of the data or the very low change rates of the data, we recommend less-frequent backup. Most backups are used for short-term operational recovery. Many recoveries are used to satisfy restore requests for data that was created recently or just deleted, or corrupted from a virus. In each of these cases, the latest data is being recovered, making longer retention of earlier backups unnecessary.

IT management are, more recently, finding that backup delivered as a service is very attractive, certainly for a portion of their data. Bandwidth limitations can, if not managed, limit the usefulness but data reduction and network optimisation techniques can change this outcome significantly. A very good example of a system that provides this deliverable/outcome is Rubrik (isn’t Rubrik the company name? Surely it’s the Rubrik appliance – or some such thing), mentioned in the next article below. Good use cases being put in practice today are around cloud backup to protect data in Remote Office/Branch Office environments, as well as test and development data end point protection. Rubrik has a very good server end point solution that covers this requirement well.

Cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is becoming a lot more prevalent. However, IT managers should ensure that overall costs are not compromised by egress (restore) charges and Return to Service times, which is where our earlier points around being selective comes in again.

Rubrik extends cloud data management capabilities

Rubrik recently extended its capabilities as a Cloud Data Management platform announcing new services for cloud-native applications running on AWS and Azure. This announcement means customers can now backup, recover, and manage data across on-premise, private, and public cloud environments. Rubrik Cloud Data Management is deployed on-premise through plug-and-play appliances.

According to IDC, more than 80% of IT organisations will be committed to hybrid cloud architectures by the end of 2017 - so the announcement looks well timed. Rubrik sales are strong with the company on track to become the fastest growing enterprise infrastructure company ever: In just six quarters of sales, the company has achieved a record run-rate approaching US $100M including a number of Fortune 500 customers as well as customers across all vertical industry segments.

For cloud-native applications, Rubrik orchestrates a range of data management functions—including backup and recovery, replication and disaster recovery, archival, copy data management, search, and analytics.

By deploying Rubrik as a software instance on AWS and Azure customers are able to achieve inter- and intra-cloud replication (Azure to AWS, across AWS regions, across Azure regions), bi-directional replication between cloud and on-premise, and cloud data archival.

One of the most appealing features of the Rubrik offering is its simplicity including using an HTML5 interface to manage applications on-premises, and in the cloud. The search function is also impressive with the ability to almost instantly locate data including files, folders, filesets, VM, and database instances (Windows, Linux, SQL databases).

We believe that there is a growing need for simple backup and recovery solutions that provide data services across clouds not only for data protection, but for new purposes like test/dev, analytics, reporting, etc. Rubrik’s new cloud native support is a great example of a product for modern times.

If Rubrik is new to you, here is a 78 second overview: Rubrik cloud data management.

Insights from Microsoft’s Digital Transformation research – Asia Pacific

Microsoft, and many others, the 4th Industrial Revolution is upon us – whether we like it or not. Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of World Economic Forum, described the 4th Industrial Revolution as one that is characterized by a fusion of the physical, digital and biological worlds; one that is already dramatically disrupting traditional industries, business models, systems and governance. He said that while the first three revolutions changed how we consumed, travelled, manufactured and communicate, the 4^th Industrial Revolution “will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before.”

This enlightening whitepaper brings together the survey responses of around 1,500 business leaders in the Asia Pacific region. One concerning finding was that whilst 80% believe they need to digitally transform, 22% of them have built little or no strategy to do so.

The study also identified the top five emerging technologies of interest to the respondents:

Artificial intelligence
Internet of Things
Wearable technologies
Quantum computing (big data)
Virtual reality

The report provides commentary on the New Zealand findings (100 respondents) only 36% of New Zealand businesses have futureproofed their organisations with a full digital transformation strategy in place. 47% are in the midst of integrating digital into their organisations and around 17% have made limited to no progress at all.

If you would like to read the full report you can download it here The status of digital transformation in the Asia Pacific region

WanaCry Ransomware attack – what can we learn?

ian.hight@sasit.co.nz (Ian Hight) — Tue, 16 May 2017 02:07:30 GMT

Wow, last weekend was a stressful one for many in that over 200,000 people, across 10,000 organisations, in over 150 countries found out what it feels like to be a victim of ransomware. Should we be surprised ? Not really; security specialists have been pointing out for quite some time just how exposed we are. When we interviewed Peter Benson 3 months ago (Peter Benson 2017 security predictions) and asked him for his IT security predictions, he suggested that ransomware would grow by about 40 % in 2017 and more importantly he said we should expect a wider variety of ransomware.

What happened in this case? A hacker/s (as yet unknown) deployed a ransomware virus called WannaCry that targeted Microsoft servers running the file sharing protocol Server Message Block (SMB). Only servers that weren't updated after March 14 with the MS17-010 patch were affected. Whilst computer users around the world have been impacted at the time of writing there were no reported cases in New Zealand. Does that mean we can rest easy? No; ransomware has no respect for geography and it’s not that the threat is gone. Have all the at risk machines been patched? No that’s unlikely, plus there is a number of security experts warning of a second wave of the attacks from variants of the initial virus.

So what can we learn from this?

Virus strikes can be global and can occur at eye watering speed
Ransomware hackers are not fussy about who is attacked – they will take anyone’s currency – so long as it’s bitcoin, oh and yes you can pay for that in NZ$
We are need to be vigilant:
Make sure your mail filtering software is completely up to date.
Make sure your Microsoft security is completely up to date and enabled.
Make sure that your desktop security programs are patched and virus signatures up to date
Reinforce with your staff not to open emails unless they know the sender and can identify the attachment type.
Make sure you have a safe and reliable backup in the event that the worst happens.

SAS IT Newsletter April 17

ian.hight@sasit.co.nz (Ian Hight) — Thu, 20 Apr 2017 07:14:43 GMT

Welcome to the SAS^IT April newsletter

In this issue

The digital disrupters will win – even if they lose
New faces
Moving toward a digital future
Infrastructure as code
Business Continuity Planning – Bah humbug
10 Surprising Facts About Larry Ellison
9 Things that you might not know about IBM’s Watson
IBMi 7.1 selected software withdrawal and support discontinuance

The disrupters will win - even if they lose

By Phil Martin - Group CEO

Allow me to explain what I mean – disruption is happening across all business areas. Not all disrupters end up being an Amazon behemoth – but in the course of them playing in what might be a space that your organisation owns, they will drive change that might be difficult to react to quickly. In the early days of Amazon (when Amazon was focused on books) it wasn’t just the high street book stores that felt the shift, it was the printing companies that no longer printed books as Amazon went digital once they’d built the customer base and platform to provide downloadable content.

Uber might not force the taxi companies to provide a competing service proposition in the first instance, but eventually an alternative to the traditional taxi service will “force” change that many taxi companies are ill prepared to compete with – especially the smaller ones. In the meantime Uber can afford to lose millions – driving down taxi prices across the world, and changing the experience of taxi ride consumers who can now see where their ride is, can read reviews on the driver, and know the make and model of the car that is collecting them, and pinpoint where it is at any time prior to picking them up. That level of service and information will become the new norm.

It is in that context that the IT environment continues to evolve and change at an ever increasing rate, and the capability of "IT" continues on a steep growth trajectory that leaves some businesses behind, and others streaking ahead. Increasingly the competitive landscape will change as the strategies and investments being made today play a part in how organisations market themselves, and stay relevant to their customers tomorrow.

Technology is being used as a change agent and enabler, and often a game changer for organisations as never before. The media is full of articles focusing on the business disrupters, in the context of either being disrupted, or being the disrupter. More recently in Australia Amazon have made the first steps in setting up warehousing and distribution capacity - which has some traditional retailers in a "pickle". Those without a strong internet presence (and I don’t just mean a static online purchasing portal), without an Omni channel capability are likely to be seriously threatened by the new entrant - who arrives with massive financial resources, and a clear internet sales strategy, with a lower cost to serve/deliver. It should be noted that Amazon is not just about selling product over the internet – what they are doing is using computing algorithms to better understand you, the consumer, so that when you log in they know what you might want before you even need to ask. Amazon already knows what your browsing history is, what you’ve previously purchased, and can pick with reasonable accuracy what you might want to look at or purchase next – and then they populate the screen with those choices – making your job as the consumer so much easier – reducing the time to value for both.

There are also no shortage of tech startup's either, with amazing new ideas and insights, and no lack of capital entering the market in support of these tech startups.

With businesses that are largely dependent on bricks and mortar, with branch networks to sustain, it's getting harder and harder to create a roadmap of change - where the business gets the support it needs for today, whilst it builds out the capability and functionality it needs for tomorrow. The answer is to capitalize on the functionality of the current systems, through integration – as the business still needs its traditional business operating at optimal levels – whilst building the platforms for future customers to interact with.

Back to the concept of value – which is an ever changing commodity. Where once a branch network with skilled and capable staff was enough – on its own it is becoming far from that. Customers might want to visit a branch “sometimes” seeking technical advice, support, or to see and touch a product – but where they want to transact on line, the mechanism for them to do so needs to be available – without which the customer will go elsewhere. If their experience elsewhere is better than your business can provide – much of that persons business will walk with them.

The concept of bi-model was born out of the desire (probably need) to support the applications that deliver the current business model, whilst bringing on disruptive technologies to support where the business needs to be at some point in the future - or at some point on the evolutionary continuum - to compete with these well-funded disruptors.

Life in IT is not getting easier either - the number of technologies that need to be supported keeps increasing - the working day is getting longer, with everyone being connected all of the time, and the new reality is that 24 x 7 accessibility to "all" systems - including email - is a necessity. Social media has been primarily the preserve of the “younger” generation (and yes Facebook et al is used by all generations – but it’s the younger generation who are posting anything and everything - constantly – and it’s this new generation who are just starting to increase their earnings, and spending power, and will soon become a dominant force in the consumption based market.

So how can businesses deliver IT in this new environment? It's not easy, and it won't really get easier with time.

What I see happening more and more is that the new CIO/IT Manager is becoming the conductor of an ever changing orchestra, with the members of the orchestra being made up of skills based on internal capability, closely aligned with external partners where it makes sense. It’s just not practical (or cost effective) for most organisations to employ all of the skills across all of the products and services that they need. Of course playing tunes 24 x 7, whilst the conductor adds and removes the band members is tricky, but necessary, and the IT environment needs to be in a position of flexibility so that it can deliver what the business needs in support of the business strategy (assuming that there is a clear business strategy that incorporates change).

Innovation within a business needs headspace to grow, it needs to be nurtured, watered and fed. Without innovation it's likely that others within any industry will be making the investments - making the changes, and investing - and that in time the relevance that was once the reason for your customers to remain loyal is a thing of the past. Failure to change and adapt quickly is more and more likely to mean extinction.

An example of this phenomenon could be the branch networks of old, where bricks and mortar meant products were in front of people - so that customers could visit, see the product, and make a decision based on the capability of the sales person within the store to understand the needs/wants and provide the appropriate outcome.

These days, more and more people are educating themselves on line - to the point of becoming almost experts, before they seek out that same assistance. They have become educated buyers. Many know what they want before they look to purchase. That means they don't need to visit a store front. They will buy online, knowing that what they've purchased will meet their requirements. If the item doesn’t match they can return the item for a credit - reducing the risks associated with buying on line.

Commodity items were the first to make the change from store front to on line. An example of this phenomenon has been Amazon and the impact on book sales from the local book retailer, and in turn the move away from physical books to the delivery of electronic books - in this case Amazon disrupted its own profitable book sales and distribution business to provide the digital equivalent at a much lower price. Distribution in this case moved from bricks and mortar, to downloads - changing the market forever. What is also interesting is where Amazon are pouring money into now (outside of the AWS Cloud). Big Data and analytics – watch this space.

All is not lost for retailers though - and the advent of the Omni-channel marketing engine was born. One of many definitions of Omni-channel refers to the shift of businesses to provide a seamless experience, regardless of the sales channel, or device used. Consumers can then engage with the company in a physical store, through a website, mobile app, catalogue, or via social media. The seamless presentation of information and knowledge provides everything that is needed for the buyer to make a "decision" to buy.

More and more people are conducting their research on line, interacting with others who have purchased the products or services, without the seller knowing anything about the prospective purchaser. The first the reseller might know is when they make a sale. The game now is how can a business influence the buying cycle, providing the information as and when required, to logically take the customer on a journey (possibly of discovery) - to the point where the interaction has been a positive one - leading to the natural conclusion - being a sale.

Introducing flexibility and agility. Companies need to ensure that the systems that make the business its revenue and profits “now” continue to operate and deliver as they have been, whilst a new business model is built to deliver the experience required by the new form of buyer/customer. The two environments then ideally are linked together to provide the seamless transition from old style to new. In most cases that doesn't mean throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and replacing everything in a big bang (and quite frankly very risky) approach. It involves creating the new, and then integrating the old with the new, as both styles of buyer will continue to coexist.

That co-existence is the business saviour. Continue making money from the current model, whilst using the new model to increase sales in the face of ever changing competition. Doing nothing is a go out of business strategy, and perhaps not doing enough will still leave the business heavily exposed to disruption, which may not be recoverable - it's just a matter of when (and can often mean death by a thousand cuts). The value of disrupting your own business before someone else does can’t be underestimated.

As an IT provider we are working with a number of organisations to assist them to deliver outcomes that will have those businesses ready to take on the changing competition when it does arrive - as it surely will (arguably most businesses have already faced a degree of competition brought on by digital disruption). Again - the name of the game is to disrupt your own organisation when you have the time and resources to do so - before you're in a position of having neither the time nor the money when someone else disrupts it for you. The new kid on the block might not last long - they don't need to - to have caused irrecoverable harm to your business. They just need to outlast you with a proposition that takes your customers away - long enough for your business to go out of business. Don’t be the frog in heating water who doesn’t realize that he’s being boiled alive as the incremental temperature changes are too small to catch and react to.

New faces

Dr. Sean van Deventer
Head of Professional Services

Sean is responsible for the Professional Services Team which focuses on Architecture at the Enterprise and Solution levels, Business Consultancy, the Project Management Office and Project Services.

Sean has been in the IT industry 20 years and holds a Masters Degree in Business Administration from the University of Stellenbosh and a PHD in Business Information Systems from the University of Auckland.

Prior to joining SAS^IT, Sean held senior roles at Theta, KiwiRail and HCL Technologies.

Away from the office Sean can be found on the Motocross track where he competes in various competitions through-out the year.

Moving toward a digital future

By Tony Wilson - Consultant

Bimodal on the face of it seems a very logical approach to implementing business change in the digital world. It's founded on levelling the massive amounts of data available to the business to achieve new outcomes and realities. This is often enabled with the assistance of data scientists and can incorporate machine learning or similar technologies.

Bimodal, as its name says, has two modes of operation. Mode 1 refers to the current tried and tested operation of any given business. And Mode 2 refers to small practical experimentation projects designed to prove before being implemented the initiatives that can be used to drive Mode 1 forward.

Both Mode 1 and 2 can be used to drive in the same strategic direction. The really interesting part is how the initiatives to drive this forward, are incubated and implemented.

Bimodal is not the only approach to digital transformation in the enterprise and may not be suitable to all. However, bimodal approaches provide business leaders with an approach to innovation without risking critical business systems and operational processes and provide business leadership with a level of comfort for implementing change. Particularly for the organisations that have not done anything innovative for some time! But a Bimodal approach can good approach to enable organisations to move towards a digital future. In this article, I will look at how to go about bimodal and what that means.

Modes of Operation

As I outlined in Part 1 bimodal as its name says has two modes of working. Mode 1 focuses on making existing business systems digital ready. Mode 2 is more exploratory, using experiments to solve new digital transformation issues.

Gartner defines bimodal as having three implementation stages: Start, Synthesise and Scale.

1. Start

First, the Mode 2 systems, infrastructure and supporting team needs to be created and then verified that Mode 1 and Mode 2 can work independently on small contained projects that emphasise learning. The key point being that Mode 1 and 2 systems and processes are actually independent. This phase helps build confidence for the later scale phase that no interdependencies exist between the two modes. To scale, companies then need to take bimodal to an enterprise level, with the ability to take on more projects with increased complexity and interdependence within the modes.

2. Synthesise

During the synthesis phase, bimodal has to be embedded into the organisation and start to become part of the DNA. Once bimodal has been embedded and is operating satisfactorily at a small scale, the following six key principles can be followed to scale it to the organisation.

3. Scale

Goals, Metrics and Collaboration
Bimodal requires a single business strategy and a single vision to unite everyone. Despite the two modes, the entire enterprise needs to operate under a cohesive strategy to create a collaborative culture. Business and IT leaders need to recognise and reward collaborative work, the desired result is the formation of virtual teams focused on outcomes.

Experimentation
This is very much something that needs to be done and shown, not told". Bimodal needs to be experienced, and it's important to gain organisational buy-in to the concept. To build support, select a few small projects and demonstrate how bimodal works, keep it practical.

Land and Expand
Select a particular aspect of the business and focus only on bimodal in that area. Use that one area of the company to go "deep" with bimodal techniques by working to make it agile, employ DevOps, and utilise lean start-up techniques and innovation techniques. Once you've developed "deep" bimodal in one business unit, start to move the same principles across other business units. Add one team, then another, to go "wide" within the business.

Ideas Nursery
Mode 2 is the place to develop capabilities as plant seedlings would develop strong roots in a nursery. After they are strong, transplant the capabilities out to the Mode 1 organisation.

Modernise before Scale
The key to bimodal success is the core environment must be ready for digital work. Mode 1 will be mainly responsible for addressing issues with core technology. This includes tasks such as implementing an API architecture, modernising the applications portfolio or implementing the hybrid cloud. Bimodal doesn't mean IT teams can ignore key technology or systems. However, Mode 2 can be used as a lever to get the business to invest in the core as it defines in a very practical way what is possible and how to implement it. In this vein, IT leaders and their teams must showcase the potential for what the technology core could offer if the business is willing to invest. Renovating the core is vital to scaling bimodal operations!

Optimise Don't Just Implement
Physically road map the process of getting the best ideas incorporated into products and services. Look at where the delays are, and apply the capabilities (i.e. agile, DevOps) to those areas. Being able to clearly show where in the process these techniques will help the organisation improve agility and speed is the key to gaining buy-in. Then apply lean principles to creating agility, speed, velocity and innovation.

Bimodal can split the IT departments focus and take the eye off the ball of winning business in the digital age. If it is solely focused on the improvement of internal business systems, bimodal can work against key principles of customer obsession. However, it's not a new idea to have two organisations operating in very different ways with different goals. But it does run the risk of not having customers central to the technology strategy.

There are principally three headline risks to manage:

Risk 1 - Alienation of Personnel leading to disengagement
If an organisation does go too far down the two speed delivery approach advocated by bimodal there is a risk of alienation of personnel. Some people like to be involved in rapid change and don't want to think they are working in slow core business systems. Other people don't like too much change and will likely push back on rapid change.

To mitigate this it's important that the personnel mix is well thought out and people need to feel they can move on with the change. Its old fashioned business change 101 where the process and speed of change need to be core to the approach.

Risk 2 - Isolation of IT from the business operation
Bimodal risks further isolates IT from business functions by relegating change management responsibilities solely to IT. There is a risk that it could lead back to a culture of IT domination with little business alignment or buy in.
The obvious mitigation to this is that bimodal project engagements must be a combination of business and IT personnel.

Risk 3 - Competing architectures
Organisations run in bimodal way can create a stigma that the mode 1 group operating back-office systems is slower than the mode 2 unit building digital technologies. Employees may not want to work on mode 1 because of the perception that it is not innovative. This runs the risk of creating a culture of competing architectures.

But…

Companies recognise that traditional IT and business change delivery conducted in stages cannot cultivate the crisp innovation required. Bimodal does help enable a culture of experimentation and innovation but the key to this is it cannot be IT alone and the implementation of business change must be managed like any other business change project.

Bimodal comes with the concept of planned and predictable change. The basic concept is to try out the change in an innovative practical but small way (Mode 2) then once the small initiative is proven scale it up (Mode 1). On the face of it this is a practical way to bring about change whilst managing the risks. However, follow bimodal incorrectly and you risk operating in two parallel businesses. This means that management must keep unity between probably two teams and more likely two sets of supporting IT systems. Both groups following the same strategy, vision and goals but at different stages of development.

Gartner reports that now around 80% of organisations have completed a bimodal project of some nature and nearly half of them subsequently moved on to make strategic decisions based on the outcomes. One of the key tenants of Bimodal being to fail faster and get comfortable with the learning process. But doing this often means an uncomfortable mind set change for business leaders.

The Mindset Challenge

Mode 1 is based on the experience the business and its leaders have gained through years of experience. But Mode 2 forces leaders to be open to new technologies and use cases. Often doing this means throwing out or at least pushing to one side that Mode 1 experience and being open to the opportunities and challenges of Mode 2. To do this requires that leaders take a beginners mind set, that's a lot easier said than done when they are experienced people.

An example of this is the car plant that traditionally took areas of its plant off line on a rotating schedule for maintenance. A bimodal project applied to a single piece of plant indicated that maintenance could be carried out using predictive analytics to identify on a component level the parts of the plan requiring maintenance. This promised the outcome that no longer did they need to take whole sections of plant off line for maintenance, instead it could be maintained using small maintenance windows and the predictive process identified in mode 2. However, moving the change process from Mode 2 to Mode 1 was a very scary step to make. But when they eventually did it, they saved a huge amount of money and efficiency gains.

Learning to Unlearn and Grasp the Digital Future

Business leaders need to learn to unlearn based on a combination of best practices and development of new ideas. To do this a diverse culture needs to be developed based on information. To do this requires developing a lot of organisational competencies in data science and machine learning. This then needs to be put alongside the ongoing work of digital anthropologists who are constantly pushing out research on how people are behaving and interacting in the digital world. People don't all think alike but it’s our diversity that delivers the outcomes for business, and bimodal does have a lot of good points to enable delivery.

Infrastructure as code – the next frontier

By Simon Murphy

Part 1 – first things first

Modern IT teams are increasingly adopting software development practices to build and manage infrastructure, leveraging many of the same techniques and process flows that our software development cousins have been employing for decades. Managing infrastructure elements (servers, storage, networking, etc.) as code allows us to develop, test and deploy changes with greater velocity and less risk than has been possible in the past.

Infrastructure as Code is an operating model and change management practice of deploying and managing infrastructure using the same tools and approaches that developers use build and maintain software applications. Configuration changes are made to scripts and definition files, which are committed to a version control system (VCS) before being rolled out to production via a series of automated and semi-automated test and validation cycles. When managing infrastructure as code, changes are never manually made to a production system (in fact, logging on to a production server at all is discouraged) outside of the automated change pipeline.

There are a number of reasons why we would want to move to a more structured and controlled way of deploying and managing infrastructure:

Velocity of Change - using software development approaches we can rapidly develop, test and deploy changes, allowing us to move with agility and speed. The goal is to build infrastructure that supports change, rather than inhibits it
Reduce Risk - by automating the test and release cycle we can vastly improve the reliability and consistency of infrastructure changes. Versioning allows for rapid rollback in the event of a production issue, we can even rebuild our entire environment using another cloud provider if required
Reduce cost - high levels of automation and rigorous testing leads to increased standardisation. Instead of troubleshooting production issues on a particular server, we can simply redeploy a new one in its place, as its configuration is defined in the codebase it is easily reproducible.

To achieve the above outcomes, there are three basic guiding principles that we can apply:

Reproducible – it should be possible to easily and reliably rebuild or replace any infrastructure element at any time

Consistent – there should be virtually (different IP addresses are OK) no difference between individual systems providing the same service, configuration drift is one of the main enemies and should be eliminated as far as possible

Repeatable – it should be possible for team members to apply changes using easily repeatable methods, this usually means using scripts, automation tools or server tempting in favour of making manual, ad-hoc changes

In Part 2, we will take a look at some of the more practical aspects of managing infrastructure as code, as well as starting to look at some of the basic tooling and processes.

Business Continuity Planning – Bah humbug

By Nalin Wijetilleke – CEO Continuity NZ

Well, unfortunately that is the attitude of many NZ organisations.

If it happens we will deal with it – after all, why would we spend time and money working on something that might not even happen?

Once upon a time that kind of thinking was acceptable, but things are changing rapidly and that approach is now reckless at best.

Yes, it’s difficult to understand the complexity of modern threats like cyber terrorism, let alone the probability of being impacted, but that’s no excuse for not having some kind of business continuity plan.

A plan that will guide process and actions in the event that your organisation is brought to its knees, whether through a cyber attack, weather event, malicious staff action, hardware or software failure.

To help you avoid embarrassing questions from your CEO (after all, there are quite harsh penalties in NZ with respect to Director liabilities) or worse, a journalist, we spoke with highly respected Business Continuity specialist Nalin Wijetilleke who shared his thoughts on the steps that should be taken to ensure that our organisations are protected from mortal outages.

1. Risk Reduction - The risks that could jeopardise the running of business should be identified and appropriately mitigated. While that does sound straightforward, many threats are often unknown or unquantified, which is why specialist advice is crucial to implement the correct tools, techniques and practices.

2. Response - The way the organisation responds is very important. A small issue could easily get out of control and become a crisis. There are ample examples from within New Zealand when basic safety issues have been overlooked resulting in major disasters. To be well prepared to effectively respond to such situations, organisations must have well-rehearsed plans and communication strategies.

3. Recover - Recovery plans should be designed to be flexible and scalable to a broad range of scenarios. Those responsible must detail the actions required within pre-established time frames. Whom to contact, when to escalate and plans with the key suppliers should be in place. The plan should show the priority and sequence of resolution activities.
Resume - Once the problem is resolved, the process for resuming operations must be started. All critical activities and when to resume after a disruption must be pre-defined.

4. Restore - Depending on the nature of the disruption or the disaster, restoration can take anywhere from hours to months. The time to return to ‘business as usual’ after a critical process or product/service line failure can be pre-defined based on analytical techniques. Preplanning provides opportunity to think ahead as to what resources, external support or stakeholder communications are needed during the recovery and resumption stages.

5. Review - It’s always good to learn from your mistakes. They should be well documented and actions taken to further improve resilience. Impact on the people, business, customers, community, and environment are all key aspects reviews should focus upon.

According to managing director of Continuity NZ and international speaker on the discipline of business continuity management, Nalin Wijetilleke, a logical first step is to take stock of your business’ current state including extent of exposure.

10 Surprising Facts About Larry Ellison

Oracle's founder is infamous for his lavish lifestyle and business acumen. Here are 10 surprising facts you may not know about Larry Ellison:

1. Ellison is currently the 7th richest person on the planet, with a net worth of $52.2 billion.

2. Born to an unwed mother in New York City, he contracted pneumonia at just nine months of age and was given to his great-aunt and uncle for adoption. He wouldn't see his biological mother again for almost five decades.

3. Unlike Bill Gates, Larry Ellison was not exposed to computers in his childhood and didn't have that inherent advantage early in life. He was first introduced to computer design during his second attempt at university.

4. The first company Ellison co-founded launched in 1977. It was called Software Development Laboratories and his investment was $1200. He and his partners won a two-year contract to build a database for the CIA; they called the project "Oracle." Their company would become Relational Software Inc. in 1979, and change names one more time, in 1982, to become Oracle Systems Corporation.

5. Ellison almost lost everything when Oracle nearly went bankrupt in the early 1990s.

6. An adventurer and adrenaline junkie at heart, Ellison suffered numerous injuries as a result of his participation in extreme sports, including mountain biking and body surfing.

7. A 2003 book authored by investigative journalist Mike Wilson gets right to the heart of Ellison's legendary reputation. It's titled, The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison*: God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison.

8. Ellison owned one of the largest yachts on the planet until 2010, when he sold his rights to the Rising Sun to David Geffen.

9. He's a licensed pilot and owns two military jets.

10. Ellison has been married and divorced four times. His second wife married him prior to the founding of Oracle and when they divorced shortly after, signed off on any rights to the company for $500.

9 Things that you might not know about IBM’s Watson

1. Watson was named after IBM's first CEO, industrialist Thomas J. Watson.

2. The computer system was specifically developed to answer questions on the quiz show Jeopardy.

3. When competing on Jeopardy Watson had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content consuming four terabytes of disk storage including the full text of Wikipedia but was not connected to the Internet during the game.

4. In February 2013, IBM announced that Watson software system's first commercial application would be for utilization management decisions in lung cancer treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York City, in conjunction with health insurance company WellPoint.

5. Watson parses questions into different keywords and sentence fragments in order to find statistically related phrases. Watson's main innovation was not in the creation of a new algorithm for this operation but rather its ability to quickly execute hundreds of proven language analysis algorithms simultaneously to find the correct answer. The more algorithms that find the same answer independently the more likely Watson is to be correct. Once Watson has a small number of potential solutions, it is able to check against its database to ascertain whether the solution makes sense.

6. Watson uses IBM's DeepQA software and the Apache UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) framework. The system was written in various languages, including Java, C++, and Prolog, and runs on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 operating system using Apache Hadoop framework to provide distributed computing.

7. Watson can process 500 gigabytes, the equivalent of a million books, per second.

8. In August 2016, IBM announced it would be using Watson for weather forecasting. Specifically, the company announced they would use Watson to analyse data from over 200,000 weather stations, and data from other sources.

9. In July, 2016, IBM and Manipal Hospitals (a leading hospital chain in India), announced launch of IBM Watson for Oncology, for cancer patients. This product provides information and insights to physicians and cancer patients to help them identify personalised, evidence-based cancer care options.

IBMi 7.1 selected software withdrawal and support discontinuance

IBM has announced that it has withdrawn IBMi OS V7R1 from marketing effective September 30 2017. IBMi OS V7R1 became generally available in April 2010. No new functionality will be added to V7R1 and support will end on 30 April 2018, after which time IBM intend to announce a fee based extended service offering. Hardware maintenance is not affected by this announcement.

We strongly encourage customers to upgrade, as there are many functional benefits with V7R2 and V7R3 and of course to avoid the costs of paid support for V7R1 post April 2018. Our technical teams are available and keen to assist you to plan and execute your OS upgrade.

The Business of IT

SAS IT newsletter Dec 2018

How to outsource - SUCCESSFULLY

Benefits

What to outsource

Selecting your outsource provider

How to make outsourcing work for you

Axicom Australia undertakes IT Infrastructure modernisation

Summary

About Axicom

The relationship with Team Computing and SASIT

Challenges and Objectives

Approach

Results & Future plans

Content Hub IBM i

Cloud first? 10 benefits to consider

IBM Think 2019

Customer portal released

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Newsletter Aug 18

SASIT – Taking a different approach to disruption

Legacy application modernisation

SASIT creates a new website

SASIT’s Ajay Nabh recognised internationally for thought leadership

A large delegation attendED IBM TechU

Artificial Intelligence’s (AI) new use case: Integration?

Evolution of Integration

Challenges

Key enablers

Inhibitors

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SASIT Newsletter Mar 18

IBM Power9 – so what?

Some common sense about digital engagement

SASIT adds skills and experience with senior appointments

Want to combine legacy and leading edge – no problem!

API’s: The fast-track to transformation

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SASIT Newsletter Dec 17

Reflecting on 2017

Is it time to move your mission critical applications to the cloud? SASIT offers a low risk approach

The forces driving change

Hybrid: the most practical way forward

SASIT facilitates the pathway to your digital future

The unique value proposition from SASIT

Solving API Management

SASIT to offer Private Storage as a Service by placing NetApp technology near the edge of the cloud.

Christmas period - Change freeze

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SASIT Newsletter Nov 17

Hybrid Cloud - Business Drivers

Distributed Systems

Performance

Reliability

Scalability

Synchronization

The Benefits of Hybrid Cloud

Options for Innovation

Scalability / flexibility

Increased Speed to Market

Business Continuity

Risk Management

Improved Connectivity

Security Considerations

Why organisations adopt managed services

What to look for when selecting a managed service partner

The evolution of APIs

API Gateways

IBM Bluemix: Who does this appeal to?

SASIT YouTube channel

Christmas period - Change freeze

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SAS IT Newsletter Aug 17

Why should you care about data privacy? Interview with Sheila Fitzpatrick

Software expertise facilitates faster path to market - DTR customer story

The next stage of virtualisation - Containers

IBM Power systems support

Co innovation and customer centricity

Watson Summit draws a large crowd

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The relationship with Team Computing and SAS^IT

SAS^IT – Taking a different approach to disruption

SAS^IT creates a new website

SAS^IT’s Ajay Nabh recognised internationally for thought leadership

SAS^IT adds skills and experience with senior appointments

Is it time to move your mission critical applications to the cloud? SAS^IT offers a low risk approach

SAS^IT facilitates the pathway to your digital future

The unique value proposition from SAS^IT

SAS^IT to offer Private Storage as a Service by placing NetApp technology near the edge of the cloud.

SAS^IT YouTube channel

SAS^IT customer satisfaction survey 2017 - findings