How to Plan for a Potential Downturn: Lead with Innovation
As talk percolates of a potential downturn, a knee-jerk reaction for many companies is to tighten the belt, shrink budgets and re-evaluate staff resources. Yet, strategic innovation can fuel organizations through a downturn. Innovation combined with the business benefits a recession provides — like availability of great talent, cheaper operating costs and frankly, less competition — can provide just the right accelerant to retain or gain market share during a slowing period.
Flux7 Announces New, Evolved Range of Services
Today we announced a new and evolved portfolio of services to help enterprises design, architect and self-manage digital business technology platforms that support digital transformation and growth. I’m excited to share this new service portfolio with you. As an organization that embraces continuous improvement, we are constantly reflecting on how to best serve the business, technology and process requirements of our customers. The demands on our customers have evolved a great deal over the past couple years, and as a true partner, we’re evolving alongside them.
PCI Case Study: Hotelier Automates AWS Security Best-Practices
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is an information security standard for any organization that processes credit card data. The standard was created to increase controls around cardholder data to reduce credit card fraud. While PCI has been around for almost 15 years now, new challenges around the standard emerge as companies migrate systems that are subject to PCI Auditing to the cloud. In today’s blog post, we’ll share the story of how a hospitality giant, worked with the AWS Consultants at Flux7 to build automated compliance into its AWS PCI-related systems.
New AWS CloudFormation Functionality Addresses Programmability, Reusability
Allowing you to programmatically describe and provision your infrastructure, AWS CloudFormation is a critical service in the AWS toolbox for anyone building infrastructure and applications in AWS. To further automate CloudFormation, at Flux7 we created dozens of custom scripts that generate CloudFormation templates and create Service Catalogs. Having worked with CloudFormation at all scales — from startups to Fortune organizations — we’ve encountered two CloudFormation challenges that we’re excited to see new CloudFormation capabilities address: Programmability and Reusability. These new features introduce streamlined workflows that allow us to abandon our custom tooling and in today’s article, we share three particular examples with you of how CloudFormation’s new capabilities can help reduce your customization efforts, too.
IT Modernization and DevOps News Week in Review 11.18.19
“Today 99% of all new software projects have open source dependencies,” said GitHub CEO, Nat Friedman, as he opened GitHub Universe last week. At the show GitHub made several product announcements, as did partners, including the GA of code navigation for Ruby, Python, and Go repositories (with more languages coming soon), GitHub Actions and GitHub Packages; GitHub for mobile; custom filter notifications; and the beta of code search, code review assignment, and schedule reminders.
Flux7 Named to CRN Next-Gen 250 List for Third Year Running
We are honored to share that Flux7 has been once again named to the CRN Magazine 2019 Next-Gen 250 list — for the third consecutive year. In case you are unfamiliar, this annual list recognizes standout IT solution providers that embrace emerging technologies to adapt to an evolving marketplace. Those on the list (you can find the complete list at www.crn.com/nextgen250) have been identified by experts at The Channel Company as meeting their customers’ technology needs in areas such as business analytics, cloud computing, mobility, unified communications, virtualization, or other leading-edge technologies before they became mainstream.
Forrester Predictions 2020: Cloud HPC, App Modernization Growth Continues
Cloud computing has upended the infrastructure and operations landscape. While early benefits — like the ability to minimize infrastructure costs through a pay-as-you-go model — still apply, as cloud providers have grown the maturity of their offerings, enterprises are finding more advanced benefits like extreme scalability and reduced time-to-market. These benefits continue to lure customers to the cloud with Forrester reporting that 65% of North American enterprises now rely on public cloud platforms. This number is up from 60% as reported Forrester last year, a number that in itself was five times the percentage of just five years prior.
IT Modernization and DevOps News Week in Review 11.11.19
At Microsoft’s Ignite conference last week, the firm announced several updates for Azure, most notably Azure Arc which will allow enterprises to run Azure cloud tools on competing clouds, deploying VMs, databases and more on AWS or the Google Cloud. Using Kubernetes as the base for building hybrid cloud deployments, this move underscores Nadella’s strategy to enable companies to use the best technology for them.
AWS Case Study: Security Firm Preps for FedRAMP with Flux7
A large security provider wanted to offer its threat detection, incident response, and compliance management solution to government agencies in the cloud. However, Federal government agencies are required to use FedRAMP authorized products; FedRAMP is mandatory for federal agency cloud deployments and service models at the low, moderate, and high-risk impact levels. As a result, the security firm turned to the cloud consulting team at Flux7 to help it prepare its solution for AWS GovCloud FedRAMP certification in the AWS cloud.
Specialty Retailer Begins Cloud Journey with Flux7 Secure Start
From competing with big-box operators to weathering seasonality in the business, specialty retailers face unique challenges. One specialty retailer that we’ve had the opportunity to work with recently is facing these challenges head-on with a proactive approach based on its core values to provide superior customer experience and continuous improvement. These two values combined in a drive to technology transformation that would simultaneously create digital improvements and an enhanced eCommerce experience.
IT Modernization and DevOps News Week in Review 11.04.19
Gartner has released its annual Top 10 technology trends for the year ahead and has structured this year’s trends around the notion of people-centric smart spaces. According to David Cearley, vice president, and Gartner Fellow, in a press release, “Putting people at the center of your technology strategy highlights one of the most important aspects of technology — how it impacts customers, employees, business partners, society or other key constituencies. Arguably all actions of the organization can be attributed to how it impacts these individuals and groups either directly or indirectly. This is a people-centric approach.”
Specialty Retailer Begins Cloud Journey with Flux7 Secure Start
From competing with big-box operators to weathering seasonality in the business, specialty retailers face unique challenges. One specialty retailer that we’ve had the opportunity to work with recently is facing these challenges head-on with a proactive approach based on its core values to provide superior customer experience and continuous improvement. These two values combined in a drive to technology transformation that would simultaneously create digital improvements and an enhanced eCommerce experience.