Are there IT jobs in cloud capacity management?

If a company moves only 30% of workloads from its data center to the public cloud, that will reduce IT ops demand. Is there still a role for the ops engineer?

A role is evolving in the IT space for cloud capacity management, wherein an IT professional steers the high-level cloud strategy of the business, said Kurt Marko, technology analyst at MarkoInsights. Another option is to gain skills on a specific public cloud platform for a cloud operations engineer job.

Cloud capacity management jobs require an ability to choose cloud consumption strategies and set allocations, then calculate actual use and reconcile the numbers. In contrast, a cloud operations engineer will execute cloud migrations, scale resources up and down, deploy patches and updates and complete related tasks. Businesses refer to these jobs as cloud consumption, procurement or capacity manager positions.

Adding cloud capacity planning to the overall IT mission is worth it, especially when companies unknowingly misuse resources. "Cloud makes it very easy for people to spend a lot of money without realizing it," Marko said.

IT operations management skills pay off on public cloud

Configuration automation and orchestration lets organizations get the most out of available cloud services -- the trends drive each other.

"When we can express an environment in a configuration file or database -- some consistent configuration object, that can be versioned -- that opens up [the possibility to use] containers and AWS database as a service instead of running a whole operating system to run a database," said Matt Sprague, manager of infrastructure services at CDI Managed Services, a Roswell, Ga.-based managed technologies offering of CDI LLC. To ramp up automation, the IT organization needs a configuration management database to map the infrastructure supporting applications.

"Ideally, you build [business intelligence] into your automation framework and put business rules in ... and tie it to a CMDB [configuration management database]," Sprague said. Rather than blindly deploy to the cloud or hold delay projects for review, cloud operations engineers set up this automation framework to make decisions based on these inputs. The cloud advisor who crafted this setup can then continuously review the results against corporate strategy, and tweak the rules as needed.

A cloud capacity manager is not necessarily worried about the day-to-day operations of which application uses which AWS EC2 instances and which S3 storage, Marko said. Instead, the cloud consumption manager ensures that the business allocates what it needs on one or several cloud providers to size the deployment correctly, or -- if necessary -- suggests keeping the workload on premises. They have some help from the major public cloud vendors.

Microsoft's Azure Resource Manager tool sets up roles in the cloud platform for a person to control what the enterprise uses and how employees access those resources, among other service delivery decisions, Marko noted. AWS also does this to a lesser degree, he added -- AWS Management Console, for example, shows monthly spending and security settings.

source:  http://searchitoperations.techtarget.com/

Enterprises likely won't reach 100% public cloud operations, so consider cloud capacity management skills an addition to or evolution of -- but not replacement for -- IT operations capabilities.

What Trump means for government tech

President Donald Trump famously does not use email or a computer. In December, in fact, he suggested that messages “should be sent via courier like in the old days" to ensure security.

As president, he must lead a government that is ever more reliant on technology to deliver services to citizens and increasingly under threat from cyber attacks directed at the nation's internet-connected assets and critical infrastructure.

Cybersecurity
Trump's statements and policies on cyber have evolved since the Sept. 26, 2016, presidential debate, when he closed out an answer to a question on the subject by saying, "The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough. And maybe it's hardly doable."

On Oct. 3, 2016, Trump tried to advance his cyber policies in a brief statement, saying, "As President, improving cybersecurity will be an immediate and top priority for my Administration. One of the very first things I will do is to order a thorough review of our cyber defenses and weaknesses, including all vital infrastructure."

That review, which Trump has said will be completed in his first 90 days, will "provide specific recommendations for safeguarding different entities with the best defense technologies tailored to the likely threats, and will followed up regularly at various Federal agencies and departments."

In addition, he said, "The Cyber Review Team will establish detailed protocols and mandatory cyber awareness training for all government employees while remaining current on evolving methods of cyber-attack."

Trump also said he would enhance U.S. Cyber Command and boost offensive cyber capabilities to deter adversaries.

Cyber experts contacted by FCW (GCN’s sister site), however, could not point to much in the way of specifics regarding policies or personnel the transition team has put in place to address cyber.

Former federal CIO Karen Evans, who more recently has run the U.S. Cyber Challenge organization, is among the transition team advisers on cybersecurity. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani will lead a group tackling cybersecurity issues. And Trump has appointed Tom Bossert, a former George W. Bush administration official with significant cybersecurity experience, to the White House post of homeland security advisor.

But beyond that, "we know virtually nothing," said Michael Sulmeyer, director of the Cyber Security Project at the Harvard Kennedy School. Sulmeyer said appointing Giuliani to head an advisory panel puts a high profile face on the topic, but "an external advisory board…doesn't substitute in the slightest for a governance structure."

"What you need are people inside the government who actually have the responsibility to execute cybersecurity-type functions and tasks and jobs," he said.

Sulmeyer said he hopes Trump follows the example of the Obama administration when it adopted and built on much of the work done by the Bush administration.

"The hope is that the incoming team recognizes that the work that the previous administration has done is not partisan," and they look for ways to improve upon and continue the work that's been done to date, Sulmeyer said.

He cautioned that cyber will not be a day-one priority for the Trump team given other more pressing demands, including continuing to staff the executive branch.

"At some point within the first 30 days, we really should be expecting a little more depth from the new team [on cyber], even in terms of vision, even in terms of objectives," he said "That would be, standard, and I think a fair expectation that those of us on the outside should have of the incoming team."
Contracting
As president-elect, Trump has inserted himself directly into conversations about government projects, naming and shaming high-profile contractors. Using the reach of his Twitter account, Trump challenged Boeing about the $4.2 billion price tag on the pair of new Air Force One 747s and threatened to cancel the aircraft company's contract.

Shortly after that tweet, Trump took to Twitter to warn Lockheed Martin about the rising cost and delays of the F-35 joint strike fighter program. He suggested that he would ask Boeing to look at modernizing the F-18 as an alternative. Following that flurry of tweets, Lockheed's stock took a 2 percent tumble, and Boeing’ edged up 1.5 percent.

Some federal IT contractors FCW spoke with in January said those tweets have made them a little nervous, not because they are leery of being called on the carpet, but because of the uncertainty injected by the abrupt combative stance, as well as an apparent new unpredictability from the White House on contracting issues.

"Can I expect to bid one thing on a contract, then have to renegotiate it when the White House objects to it later?" asked one of those contractors, who asked not to be identified for fear of putting his company on Trump's radar. "That makes bidding on big contracts a harder thing to do. ... It's not the tweets, it's the uncertainty they inject."

However, one agency CIO told FCW the new president's call out of contractors might be a good thing overall for federal buyers. The president's use of social media acts as a kind of "soft power," the CIO said, which gives the administration leverage to keep contractors in line. On the downside, the official noted that soft power could also push some contractors to "overbid" to cover unforeseen future costs and not be perceived as inflating the price later on.

"The use of social media by the president has the interesting effect of both discouraging contractors who don't think they can deliver at a fair price and discouraging contractors from [post-award] price inflation," the CIO said.

source:  https://gcn.com/articles/2017/01/23/trump-on-tech.aspx?admgarea=TC_Cloud

Are small businesses really moving away from cloud?

Kent Christensen

Aaron Brooks

The rise of cloud computing adoption has given way to a countertrend: reverse cloud migrations. Service providers discuss the factors driving their customers' unclouding projects.

That adage, "What goes around, comes around," is proving true in the cloud as service providers witness clients migrating data in reverse, back on premises in a move
known as "unclouding."

An IDG survey, commissioned by Datalink, noted that about 40% of the respondents with public cloud experience had moved workloads back on premises due to cost or security concerns. Kent Christensen, practice manager, data center and cloud, at Datalink, an Insight company, said the number of organizations looking to uncloud was among the most interesting results of the survey.

"We heard about this [unclouding trend] but never had it quantified like that," Christensen said.

Yet reliance on cloud computing remains strong. The survey found that companies struggle with dividing workloads between on-premises and off-premises platforms. In two years, workloads in corporate data centers are expected to decline from 59% to 47%, with much of the difference shifting to public cloud.

Unclouding: Workloads that exit the cloud
According to service providers, both mission-critical and non-mission-critical systems are being pulled back from the cloud. Other drivers prompting this developing unclouding trend are cost savings, the need for cloud-related skill sets and the changing data center economics of hyper-convergence.

"If you just say cloud is going to solve all these problems and don't look at your workloads, you're bound to put things in that don't make sense for a number of reasons like hidden costs or unexpected service levels," Christensen noted.

For example, it may not make sense to keep an app in the cloud that runs all the time, he said. "If you have something that might be bursty or opportunistic, it's something I might turn up for a while and do analytics and turn it down. That's a no-brainer for cloud," he said.

On the flip side, Christensen said, it might behoove an organization to architect an internal solution for something that runs all the time and is somewhat predictable, like a system containing customer information.

"The ones being brought back are what I call steady state apps: predictable in resources, they consume no variance in traffic requests and resource patterns, and [do] not [require] a big geography to serve on multiple devices all over the globe," agreed Aaron Brooks, director of innovation at Softchoice.

Brooks said Softchoice had a client with a financial app that experienced no peaks and had a steady traffic pattern, so they bought inexpensive equipment to bring it back in-house, he said, which "made a lot of sense."

"I would say the No. 1 reason people are looking to bring something back on premises is absolutely cost, and their apps don't need that elasticity so they feel they're overpaying,'' Brooks noted. A lot of apps end up in the public cloud in a very feature-rich environment, he added. Companies find they haven't taken advantage of all those features, so they bring those apps back.
"They feel they can get more for less," he said. "The second biggest reason is not understanding how to get the most out of public cloud and [not] having the right tools and experience to manage cloud properly."

Kevin McDonald

You can go home again ... but it may not be easy

Gaining access to your data in a usable form, it turns out, can be problematic in the cloud.
Alvaka Networks worked with a customer to pull back "well over 100 servers" out of a public cloud's shared hosting environment back on premises "due to a myriad of access challenges," said Kevin McDonald, executive vice president and CISO. The client shared equipment and networking with other cloud customers, but not the application, he added.

"I've had a half-dozen conversations in the past six months with people who want out," he said, "but they don't know how to get out because of the way their data or system was integrated. So they don't know how to get their data back intact, in a way that's usable."

 

One cloud provider that Alvaka works with for monitoring presents data using its own interface. While the provider will give a customer a download of raw data, the data won't have the presentation layer, McDonald explained. As a result, the client company needs to build its own user interface.
"If there is a proprietary presentation layer, you can literally be hostage to that provider until you find an alternative, and, in some cases, [companies] haven't been able to."

Graphing information, for example, such as chart and diagrams, may be returned in a proprietary way if the client has a software as a service type of contract, he said. The cloud provider will present data in a graphical format that is both current and historical, but "that graphical engine becomes unavailable if you leave them, and they'll give it to you in raw form -- [and] it's basically useless."
In most cases, he said, companies are unable to create their own user interface to the data. "It's a big challenge," he said.

Alvaka's client was also told it had to do the reverse migration during the cloud provider's maintenance window so it wouldn't strain the cloud system's resources.

"Everything is about timing in IT. ... You're at the mercy of a public cloud provider,'' McDonald said, unless a company has direct access to its data.

The caveat that Brooks gives to most clients is if they haven't utilized platform services, it's not that complicated to do the unclouding process. Softchoice uses the information for a system running in the public cloud to architect it back to the client's data center. The service provider builds a new environment, migrates the apps and data over to the on-premises data center, and redirects the traffic to the new environment, he said.

Once all the testing is done, which includes ensuring the end-user experience is good and security adhered to, "we can decommission or turn off the cloud environment. Typically, there are dependencies between apps, so we want to make sure the one coming back integrates with the others," he said.

Softchoice sees a lot of users break apps because they don't understand that the application coming back in-house doesn't always "play nice" with others, Brooks said.

Disaster recovery and backup can also be a dicey proposition in the public cloud, McDonald said, because a company must rely on its cloud provider to get its data back. "We've had situations where a company paid for backup and then went to get it and it wasn't there,'' he said. In cases where companies are required to stay highly compliant, he added, "I would argue cloud isn't the panacea they think it is."

Understand the implications of unclouding

Before deciding what to pull back or keep in a public cloud, know what you have, Christensen advised. Forty-three percent of the Datalink survey respondents said they had conducted an app inventory. Only 31% had done an assessment to determine whether an app is a good candidate for cloud.

Companies also need to figure out ahead of time if apps depend on others and need to stay together. "In order to understand the impact of running an app in the cloud, you should understand your inventory, your workload requirements and interdependencies," he said. "Otherwise, you're guessing."

Companies should also bear in mind that it typically costs "significantly more" to bring an app back than putting it in the cloud -- as much as eight to 10 times more, Christensen said. Companies should make sure they understand their service-level agreements (SLAs), he cautioned.
"In most cloud [scenarios], you don't have unlimited transactions. That could surprise [some customers]. One of most common reasons people are pulling out of the cloud is they didn't understand their SLA,'' or the cloud provider didn't have a service the company expected, like backup, disaster recovery or high availability, he said.

Lastly, unclouding requires an unclouding migration strategy. "It's not just pushing a button," Christensen said. "If you moved it into an environment and you're moving it back to another environment ... it may not be straightforward; it could be complex."

source:  TechTarget.com

Career Advice from 5 Technology Leaders

Abbas Haider Ali, CTO, xMatters: The best piece of IT advice I've been given, and I think this applies to technology in general, is that it's very easy to get complacent in what you're doing, so [it's important to] take the outsider perspective. And there's a couple of ways you can run that into practice. It's sometimes helpful to talk to your peers and have them evaluate what you're doing. I see a lot of really interesting companies putting that into practice by developing their own innovation groups in-house, as well. [That means] taking a part of their teams, splitting off different functions and saying, 'You're no longer bound to the reality of what we have today. If you were trying to solve the same business or technology problem with a clean slate, acting as our disruptor, what would you do?' And I think that's one of the most important things,  it's very easy to kind of focus on the one foot in front of the other approach, but the only way to make significant change sometimes is to take the outsider perspective.

John Viglione, CTO, Vertex Incorporated: I've been lucky to have a number of excellent mentors in my career. Early on, one mentor used the expression, 'If the door is locked try the window.' What she meant by that, in effect, was that there's always more than one way to achieve your goal. It's really easy, especially if you're an engineering type or a technical type, to get locked on 'the solution,' but there's always different ways to achieve your goal. Don't force yourself into a corner, give yourself options.

Don Schuerman, CTO, Pegasystems: The best piece of IT career advice [I've ever received] is actually a piece of management leadership advice that I got from my wife. It was about understanding that when you're managing people and working with people, it really becomes incumbent on you, the leader, to step into others' shoes. I remember when I was first starting to manage people, I was struggling with getting people to understand the way I wanted to work, and my wife said, 'That's not your job. Your job is to work the way they want to work.' My job is to understand how all the people on my team want to communicate, what their individual styles are, and allow myself to be flexible to do the things that are going to make them most successful. And I think that piece of advice was really useful to me.

Schuerman: There's another thing that I've discovered over the years. I have a side gig where I've done a lot of improv comedy. I did it as a side job throughout college, and I think that there's a real need in this transformative period for technology leaders to adopt an improvisational mindset. We heard a lot this week about adopting a beginner's mind, of being open to new experiences. Satya Nadella was talking about being a learn-it-all rather than a know-it-all. And I think that improvisational mindset of [saying to yourself] 'I'm going to come with a lot of confidence and I'm going to come with a background of my own understanding and my own knowledge, but I'm going to be open.' In improv we call this 'yes-and.' I'm going to listen and accept the new things that come in and respond in the moment. It's something we have to be able to do to innovate and keep transforming at the pace that the market is demanding.

Ray Toler, VP of IT and marketing, HTRI: The best piece of IT career advice that I have been given isn't specific to IT. It's actually a much more general business piece of advice. You need to have a vision and you need to have a goal, and you need to be able to communicate that, but you really need to focus on the milestones. Everybody needs to know where you're going, but to build trust, to build expertise, to enhance your skillset, you have to focus on the pieces in between. It's great to have that five-year goal of where you're going, but getting that 30-day win, getting that six-month win, continual improvement and enhancement of the user experience and IT performance, that's all critical.

Otto Berkes, CTO, CA Technologies: I think the best piece of IT advice or technology advice that I've been given is to not be afraid to fail. Get something out there. Not all ideas take off, but make sure that, as with anything that you do in the technology space, you learn from the experience.

source:  TechTarget.com

Sort data in MS Excel by color

Was anyone else aware that you could sort your data in MS Excel by the color of a row? 

Our friends at Excel-Easy.com provide us with an easy to follow approach to search through an MS Excel sheet with hundreds of rows and then highlight each row that may contain information that you want to further review.  As you scroll through the numerous rows you can then highlight the row in a color such as Yellow and then apply the sorting method to bring all of those rows that you want to review in more detail to the top of the list.

I was scrolling through an MS Excel sheet with over 10,000 rows trying to find rows that may contain a specific keyword in any of the columns.  This approach made it easier to apply a 2nd pass through of refinement to get my results.

Thanks!

source:  http://www.excel-easy.com/examples/sort-by-color.html