Are agile, DevOps and similar certifications worth it?

Certifications have always been about benchmarking and assessing IT professionals' ability to use technology and provide something of a guarantee that candidates are competent with needed skills in the workplace. But as DevOps, continuous delivery, agile, scrum and other frameworks become necessary, the question around certification of these skills becomes this: How can you accurately assess and measure the less-tangible, softer skills hiring managers require? And if you're an IT pro, do you need one or more of these certifications at all?"This isn't so different from the existing certification world in that it's about measuring people's ability to use tech to drive the business. We can use certifications to verify that they have the hard skills to do the job and use certain tools, but we also need to measure understanding of principles and best practices around technology," says François Déchery, co-founder and vice president of customer success at continuous delivery solutions company CloudBees.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Making the case for in-house data centers

Outsourcing, cloud services and financial pressure are constant realities for IT leaders. Shared data centers and cloud service providers are often a good choice. If the organization’s IT demands are difficult to predict or highly variable, building additional data centers make little sense.Despite the cloud trend, managing internal data centers effectively remains an important IT responsibility. Cost optimization, vendor management and creative ways to add value are all in play for data center managers in 2016.Meeting increased demands for data center services Industry surveys suggest that data centers are under increasing pressure to deliver results. Consider the following findings from AFCOM’s 2015 State of the Data Center Survey. Gathering information from over 250 leaders, the findings provide a useful snapshot of opportunities and priorities for data center management.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Making the case for in-house data centers

Outsourcing, cloud services and financial pressure are constant realities for IT leaders. Shared data centers and cloud service providers are often a good choice. If the organization’s IT demands are difficult to predict or highly variable, building additional data centers make little sense.Despite the cloud trend, managing internal data centers effectively remains an important IT responsibility. Cost optimization, vendor management and creative ways to add value are all in play for data center managers in 2016.Meeting increased demands for data center services Industry surveys suggest that data centers are under increasing pressure to deliver results. Consider the following findings from AFCOM’s 2015 State of the Data Center Survey. Gathering information from over 250 leaders, the findings provide a useful snapshot of opportunities and priorities for data center management.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why machine learning is the new BI

Business intelligence has gone from static reports that tell you what happened, to interactive dashboards where you can drill into information to try and understand why it happened. New big data sources, including Internet of Things (IoT) devices, are pushing businesses from those reactive analytics – whether you look back once a month to spot trends or once a day to check for problems – to proactive analytics that give you alerts and real-time dashboards. That makes better use of operational data, which is more useful while it’s still current, before conditions change.“There’s a demand for real-time dashboards,” says Herain Oberoi from Microsoft’s Cortana Analytics team. “A lot of businesses want to get the pulse of their business. But dashboards show things that have already happened.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Rejecting employees’ pleas, EmblemHealth CEO sets major IT layoff

EmblemHealth CEO Karen Ignagni told employees Tuesday that "several hundred" IT and operations workers will be laid off as a result of a decision to hire services firm Cognizant.The announcement came just as IT employees at the New York-based insurer began an effort to convince the firm not to move the work to an outsourcer.Ignagni explained her decision in a video to employees that was posted on YouTube by attorney Sara Blackwell. The Florida attorney, who is representing displaced Disney IT workers, has been helping the EmblemHealth IT employees organize.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Bugcrowd raises cash because of the power of the people

News today from security testing vendor Bugcrowd highlights an increasing trend towards leveraging an outside community to do good things for organizations.First, the news: Bugcrowd is investing a $15 million Series B led by Blackbird Ventures along with existing investors Costanoa Venture Capital, Industry Ventures, Paladin Capital Group and Rally Ventures. Not one to miss out on a funding opportunity, Salesforce Ventures also joined the round. The company has now raised $24 million since its founding at the Startmate accelerator in Sydney, Australia.What Bugcrowd does is pretty simple. Its flagship product, Crowdcontrol, is used by a bunch of high-profile brands, including CreditKarma, Fitbit, Motorola, Tesla, TripAdvisor and Western Union, to resolve security bugs in their products. But this isn't any magic bullet “apply our advanced platform and resolve your bugs automatically” kind of science fiction. Instead, Crowdcontrol leverages that most ancient of resources—the crowd. Bugcrowd has built a vetted community of over 27,000 security researchers, all of whom helps Bugcrowd's customers reveal the holes in their software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: BugCrowd raises cash because of the power of the people

News today from security testing vendor Bugcrowd highlights an increasing trend towards leveraging an outside community to do good things for organizations.First, the news: Bugcrowd is investing a $15 million Series B led by Blackbird Ventures along with existing investors Costanoa Venture Capital, Industry Ventures, Paladin Capital Group and Rally Ventures. Not one to miss out on a funding opportunity, Salesforce Ventures also joined the round. The company has now raised $24 million since its founding at the Startmate accelerator in Sydney, Australia.What Bugcrowd does is pretty simple. Its flagship product, Crowdcontrol, is used by a bunch of high-profile brands, including reditKarma, Fitbit, Motorola, Tesla, TripAdvisor and Western Union, to resolve security bugs in their products. But this isn't any magic bullet “apply our advanced platform and resolve your bugs automatically” kind of science fiction. Instead, Crowdcontrol leverages that most ancient of resources—the crowd. Bugcrowd has built a vetted community of over 27,000 security researchers, all of whom helps Bugcrowd's customers reveal the holes in their software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: BugCrowd raises cash because of the power of the people

News today from security testing vendor Bugcrowd highlights an increasing trend towards leveraging an outside community to do good things for organizations.First, the news: Bugcrowd is investing a $15 million Series B led by Blackbird Ventures along with existing investors Costanoa Venture Capital, Industry Ventures, Paladin Capital Group and Rally Ventures. Not one to miss out on a funding opportunity, Salesforce Ventures also joined the round. The company has now raised $24 million since its founding at the Startmate accelerator in Sydney, Australia.What Bugcrowd does is pretty simple. Its flagship product, Crowdcontrol, is used by a bunch of high-profile brands, including reditKarma, Fitbit, Motorola, Tesla, TripAdvisor and Western Union, to resolve security bugs in their products. But this isn't any magic bullet “apply our advanced platform and resolve your bugs automatically” kind of science fiction. Instead, Crowdcontrol leverages that most ancient of resources—the crowd. Bugcrowd has built a vetted community of over 27,000 security researchers, all of whom helps Bugcrowd's customers reveal the holes in their software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

EU charges Google with foisting its search and browser on smartphone makers

The European Commission on Wednesday made new antitrust charges against Google, alleging that the company foisted its search application and the Chrome browser on Android smartphones makers as a condition to license its other apps and services. The commission also charged Google with preventing makers from selling devices running variants or “forks” of its Android operating system, and giving financial incentives to both phone makers and mobile network operators if they agree to preinstall Google Search on their devices. In its contracts with manufacturers, Google has made the licensing of the Play Store on Android devices conditional on its search application being pre-installed and set as default search service, according to the commission.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AWS focuses on hard disks for new big data services

Amazon Web Services is going retro to help companies deal with big data workloads. The cloud provider announced Tuesday it's launching two new volume types for its Elastic Block Store service that are powered by traditional, spinning disk hard drives. The new Throughput-Optimized HDD and Cold HDD EBS volume types let companies store files cheaply in a way that's still useful for big data workloads like MapReduce and Kafka. the Throughput-Optimized service is aimed at frequent use cases, while the Cold HDD service is built for those same uses, but for applications that reference the items stored less frequently. To get all of that data into AWS, customers can now call on a new 80TB Snowball storage appliance. That joins the existing 50TB Snowball, which was already available for users to order from AWS and get delivered to their data center for data transfer. Using the Snowball, users can ship their data securely from on-premises servers to Amazon's. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDC’s guide to avoiding vendor lock-in

"All too often, the vendors have the upper hand," says research and advisory firm IDC in a recent report. High switching costs or other "vendor control points," such as proprietary technology integrations or overly customized applications, can make it too much trouble for enterprise customers to discontinue using one vendor and switch to another.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Verizon is offshoring jobs, records say

A key issue raised by labor unions in their weeklong strike against Verizon is the offshoring of work. The unions say Verizon has plans to send more jobs overseas. Verizon isn't saying what it is doing in this respect, but there is a paper trail of documents filed by its employees that point to offshoring.The union contends that Verizon wants, in a labor contract, to shift more jobs to contractors. Nearly 40,000 Verizon workers are on strike."They want the ability to contract work -- as much as 50% -- the great majority of that is offshore," said Marilyn Irwin, president of the Washington area Communications Workers of America Local 2108. CWA is one of the unions involved in the strike.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Verizon is offshoring jobs, records say

A key issue raised by labor unions in their weeklong strike against Verizon is the offshoring of work. The unions say Verizon has plans to send more jobs overseas. Verizon isn't saying what it is doing in this respect, but there is a paper trail of documents filed by its employees that point to offshoring.The union contends that Verizon wants, in a labor contract, to shift more jobs to contractors. Nearly 40,000 Verizon workers are on strike."They want the ability to contract work -- as much as 50% -- the great majority of that is offshore," said Marilyn Irwin, president of the Washington area Communications Workers of America Local 2108. CWA is one of the unions involved in the strike.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

APIs abound, but challenges remain

Businesses are now widely using application programming interfaces (APIs), but despite widespread use, a recent study has found most companies are struggling with challenges ranging from getting infrastructure in place to finding suppliers to simply setting strategy and objectives."APIs can add tremendous value to a business, but simply having them is not enough," says Rahim Bhatia, general manager, Developer Products, CA Technologies. "Like products, they have to be properly created, managed, monitored and secured or bad things can happen, as we saw in recent connected car incidents or the Snapchat breach two years ago."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel axes 12,000 jobs as it looks to break away from PCs

Intel is cutting 12,000 jobs worldwide as the company restructures operations to diversify from PCs into growth areas of IoT and servers.The layoffs account for about 11 percent of employees worldwide. Intel is also consolidating work locations worldwide in a move the company hopes will save it US $750 million this year.Data center equipment will be Intel's growth area growing forward, generating a large part of Intel's profits and potentially making up for the declines in the PC market.Growth drivers will include memory and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology, which the company added from its recent $16.7 billion acquisition of Altera, CEO Brian Krzanich said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple introduces new MacBooks with faster processors and longer battery life

Apple notebook refreshes aren't announced during special media events anymore, but Apple still knows how to pull a trick out of its sleeve when it has to. Earlier today, Apple quietly announced a compelling refresh to its 12-inch MacBook line.First and foremost, Apple's new 12-inch MacBook models now sport Intel's Skylake dual-core M processors, an addition which should make Apple's svelte notebook much more energy efficient. On top of that, Apple's MacBook line was also graced with improved graphics performance, faster flash storage and last but not least, a full additional hour of battery life.While the dimensions of the refreshed MacBook haven't changed - it's still just 13.1 millimeters thin while weighing in at just 2 pounds - the internals have been beefed up tremendously.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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