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Connected Culture

How To Build a Connected Culture

Building a connected culture has become increasingly important because mobile devices and applications have changed the landscape of the IT world. No longer are business users tied to their desks or offices. They can be productive anywhere, thus the content must be updated much more quickly. Reports don’t take weeks to compile, nor do they require the IT organization to deliver the information. The most successful companies are building and deploying solutions that a business user can access from any type of device, at any time, and display the data in the format that they want. To facilitate this type of solution most companies are in the process of migrating their data into the cloud, reducing their infrastructure costs, and allowing a much more enhanced end user experience. The Internet – and more specifically Social Media – has changed how the public’s perception of a particular business or company is viewed (thus directly impacting sales). It used to be said that a happy customer would tell 10 people about their experience and would tell 100 if the experience was bad. With Social Media, the number of people that you tell has grown exponentially. One customer’s angry post can be shared and reposted to 100’s of others, impacting prospective clients. This means that business’s need to be more focused on each client rather than lump all clients in one big basket (a 5% negative rating might have been OK in the past, but no longer). As a business moves to focus on clients, it is imperative that they have great insight to the individual customer, their preferences, and even their desires. Companies have had this data for years but not had the ability to quickly or easily leverage it in order to better serve the client while they are in the middle of a transaction. A connected culture does not come without its downfalls; the information technology groups must change how they do projects. Building and delivering technology changes can no longer be an IT only event. Business users must be more engaged during the entire project, rather than only be engaged through the rollout. Companies must have business stake holders that can spend time each day with the project team. This is hard for many since business users all have full time jobs. In addition, each business must design a cultural process change roadmap as projects move along this drives adoption and make the end product much stronger. Without developing process changes, new technology or a new system will not provide the benefits that the business sponsor is looking for and will be a roadblock to complete adoption of a new technology. While these changes are hard in some organizations, the benefits of a connected culture outweigh the problems and make for smooth transitions and better return on the investment. Given that technology continues to change, it is important for companies to remain agile in their process and recognize the importance technology has in delivering a seamless customer experience. Like Related Posts Salesforce OEM AppExchange Expanding its reach beyond CRM, Salesforce.com has launched a new service called AppExchange OEM Edition, aimed at non-CRM service providers. Read more The Salesforce Story In Marc Benioff’s own words How did salesforce.com grow from a start up in a rented apartment into the world’s Read more Salesforce Jigsaw Salesforce.com, a prominent figure in cloud computing, has finalized a deal to acquire Jigsaw, a wiki-style business contact database, for Read more Health Cloud Brings Healthcare Transformation Following swiftly after last week’s successful launch of Financial Services Cloud, Salesforce has announced the second installment in its series Read more

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cloud computing

We Are All Cloud Users

My old company and several others are concerned about security, and feel more secure with being able to walk down the hall and see the servers working away in that air-conditioned closet. But who do you trust more:  your IT guy that looks at your IT security every once in a while or a provider like Google that has a team of engineers constantly monitoring its systems looking for security issues. In fact, Google has some of the best security specialists in the world.

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abc

Alphabet Soup of Cloud Terminology

As with any technology, the cloud brings its own alphabet soup of terms. This insight will hopefully help you navigate your way through the terminology, and provide you the knowledge and power to make the decisions you need to make when considering a new cloud implementation. Here’s the list of terms we will cover in this article: Phew—that’s a lot. Let’s dig in to the definitions and examples to help drive home the meanings of the list of terms above. SaaS (Software as a Service) This is probably the most common implementation of cloud services end users experience. This is software that users access through their web browser. Some software may be installed locally to help augment functionality or provide a richer user experience, but the software installed locally has minimal impact on the user’s computer. Figure 1 provides a high-level overview of this concept. Figure 1 High-level overview of Software as a Service You are probably a user Facebook, Google docs, Office 365, Salesforce, or LinkedIn either at home or at work, so you’ve experienced SaaS first hand and probably for a long time. What SaaS tools are you using outside of those mentioned here? Reach out and let me know—I’m very curious. PaaS (Platform as a Service) PaaS allows a developer to deploy code to an environment that supports their software but they do not have full access to the operating system. In this case the developer has no server responsibility or server access. When I first started writing about cloud technology three years ago, this was kind of primitive service. The provider would just give you access to a folder somewhere on the server with just a bit of documentation and then you were on your own. Now there are tools, such as CloudFoundry, that allow a developer to deploy right from their Integrated Development Environment (IDE) or from a command line production release tool. Then CloudFoundry can take the transmitted release and install it correctly into the cloud environment. With a little trial and error, anyone with a bit of technical skills can deploy to a tool like CloudFoundry where the older style of PaaS took a lot of skill and experience to deploy correctly. IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) Originally IaaS dealt with a provider giving a user access to a virtual machine located on a system in the provider’s data center. A virtual machine is an operating system that resides in a piece of software on the host computer. Virtual Box, Parallels and VMWare are examples of software that provide virtualization of operating systems called Virtual Machines (VM) Virtualization of servers was all the rage for a while, but when you try to scale within the cloud with multiple virtual servers there are a lot of drawbacks. First, it’s a lot of work to make VMs aware of each other and they don’t always share filesystems and resources easily. Plus, as your needs grow, VMs with a lot of memory and disk space are very expensive, and very often an application on a VM is only using a portion of the OS. For example, if you are deploying a tool that does data aggregation and runs as a service you won’t be taking advantage of the web server that might be running on server too. The issues mentioned in the previous paragraph are common headaches for those moving their on-premise implementations to the cloud, and those headaches gave rise to Docker. Docker is a lighter weight form of virtualization that allows for easier sharing of files, versioning, and configuration. Servers that could only host a few VMs can host thousands of Docker images, so providers get better bang for the buck for their server purchases. Further explanation of Docker is an article all by itself, but for now it’s import to realize that Docker needs to be part of any discussion of moving your applications to the cloud. DaaS (Desktop as a Service) Desktop computers are expensive for large corporations to implement and maintain. The cost of the OS, hardware, security software, productivity software, and more start to add up to where it makes a major impact on any corporation’s budget. Then just as they finish deploying new systems to everyone in the company, it’s time to start upgrading again because Microsoft just released a new OS. Another fact with most desktop computers is that they are heavily underutilized, and DaaS allows an IT department to dynamically allocate RAM and disk space based on user need. In addition backups and restores are a breeze in this environment, and if you are using a third party provider all you need to do is make a phone call when a restore of a file or desktop is needed. Plus upgrades to new operating systems are seamless because the DaaS provider takes care of them for you. The main advantage I see with DaaS is security. With one project I was involved with, we restored the state of each Desktop to a base configuration each night. While this did not affect user files, it did remove any malware that might have been accidently installed by a user clicking on the wrong email. Documents from Microsoft Office or Adobe products were scanned with a separate antivirus program residing on the storage system they were a part of, and the network appliance that we used did not allow for the execution of software. That made it very secure for the client I was working with. So what does a user have on their desktops? Luckily in recent years there has been an explosion of low cost computing devices, such as a Raspberry PI, that support Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) so your users could access a windows desktop from the linux-based PI which you can get for a measely . DaaS is awesome for your average information worker, but for a power user like a software developer this setup in my experience doesn’t work well. Your average developer needs

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