Tucci On Stage at EMC World
Live long and prosper.
Live long and prosper.
As more enterprises in more industries turn to cloud solutions, we are seeing an increase in certain kinds of challenges. One that is particularly interesting involves moving legacy applications to a cloud environment.The challenge of legacy applications gets to the heart of some of the key differences between a cloud solution and traditional solution. One great advantage of the cloud is that it disconnects the dependency between this specific application and that specific hardware. In the cloud, applications usually do not live or die because of a specific piece of hardware.The role of hardwareHowever, legacy applications actually can live or die because of a specific piece of hardware. Pre-cloud, the way you met the demand for application reliability and availability was, in no small part, by running the application on reliable hardware. If you had a mission-critical application, you would turn to best-in-breed server hardware. Similarly, you would design in redundancy through redundant power feeds, redundant server power supplies, multiple network interfaces and redundant switch infrastructure.The focus on using only the highest-quality physical components does not apply in public cloud environments. Public cloud is built on low-cost commodity hardware, designed with the fault domain at the rack level, with the expectation that all servers in a single rack will and do fail. The availability/reliability strategy for public cloud is to address redundancy at the software level.Cloud native applicationsCloud native applications do not rely on hardware for their reliability and availability. Instead, they typically have many instances running on many servers. The instances may be spread across the public cloud provider’s data center or even across multiple regional data centers, so cloud-native applications handle scale very well, by design. This is in sharp contrast to legacy applications, which are usually single-instance and expect the underlying hardware platform to be resilient.Therein lies the problem. A legacy application relies on hardware for reliability and availability, but the cloud disconnects software from hardware, leaving a significant gap. In fact, many public cloud providers will not provide a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for a single-instance application, since their ability to meet SLAs relies on their ability to leverage multiple instances for redundancy.A range of optionsIf you have a legacy application you want to move to the cloud, what’s the best way to proceed? Should you accept not having an SLA, and focus on being able to bring your application back up as quickly as possible if it fails? Should you reconfigure the application with an architecture for public cloud, or even redevelop the legacy application completely to work with a public cloud?These options aren’t without downsides. If you can live without an SLA, doing so might be a suitable alternative, provided you can tweak things enough to get the recovery time inside an acceptable recovery window.Similarly, if you don’t need web scale, then keeping your application’s traditional architecture, with a few tweaks for cloud-enablement, might suffice. The issue with traditional legacy application architecture is that it often transfers poorly to the cloud. Completely redeveloping the legacy application for the cloud will address most issues. However, unless you specifically need the scalability of cloud-native applications the cost of redevelopment can make it difficult to achieve a reasonably timely ROI.Dell Services can helpAt Dell Cloud Services we help our customers overcome challenges like this every day. With legacy applications, we meet the challenge head-on. For example, we can simply move your application directly into Dell Cloud Dedicated Service — Dell’s hosted private cloud. The critical difference with this choice is we do provide an SLA, even for your single-instance application. We can perform the migration live to avoid downtime. We also provide security above the hypervisor, for additional peace of mind. You get the benefits of a stable, secure private cloud environment with the protection of an SLA, without the expense of modifying your legacy application.If you are facing a legacy application, we look forward to hearing from you. Visit www.Dell.com/cloudservices, or contact a Dell Cloud Specialist to learn more.
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Your talent is the backbone of any digital workforce transformation. It’s only by diving into the needs of your own employees and by fulfilling their true expectations that you’ll be able to create a productive, engaged and loyal talent base. HR departments everywhere, and particularly those in the largest companies in the world, are accountable for a vast employee community. It’s up to the Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) to leap into the breach to turn modern-day challenges into opportunities. Improving engagement and productivity, enhancing results by investing in latent talent or implementing mobility solutions: technology can serve as a conductor for digital workforce transformation. Assuming, of course, that this transformation goes hand in hand with a great employee experience. It’s essential to spend time and budget on figuring out your workforce’s needs and expectations of their best possible experience.Pooling employee contributions and implementing change, step by stepPutting theory into practice, we discovered there was room for workforce improvement at our Sweden office. Through TellDell, our internal tool for feedback, we discovered recently that the NPS in Sweden was declining.[1] Through follow-up and establishment of a culture of feedback, we were able to understand the cause of this rather low score. The quality of the workplace appeared to hamper people’s workplace happiness. Infrastructure issues such as a lack of parking spaces, a small work floor, a high level of noise, an old-fashioned interior or bad ergonomics can lead to employee dissatisfaction.So how did we strip out inefficiencies and provide a good workplace? We first implemented a culture of feedback, then we implemented the improvements our employees requested. We installed the culture of feedback which made all of this possible.Optimizing digital dexterity of the Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) According to Gartner’s latest CEO Survey, the CHRO is the least digitally savvy in the C-suite. Primarily, the new role in workforce transformation and the associated responsibilities didn’t form part of the HR management’s skill set. Until now, this was basically not what a CHRO was asked to do. Considering the technical complexity of the job, comprehending complex labor law compliance, it has simply not been a top priority.Therefore, it is of paramount importance that a CHRO truly understands employees’ needs , while also involving IT personnel in the process of digital transformation. This way, a much broader understanding of how people want to work is achieved.Another positive evolution these last few years is the impact the younger generation of hires in HR have on the digital dexterity of the sector. These young people are generally educated in new technology, they are daily users and they tend to understand better what current employees are looking for.Digital transformation intrinsically linked with cultureAs a CHRO you have an immense impact on your organization’s culture and you can help build a culture that is sustainable and attractive for next generations of employees. How? By transforming to a mobile mind-set. Employees all around the organization spend an increasing amount of time out of the office and each year the number of occupied office chairs is diminishing.“10 years ago, people were satisfied with being able to send emails or making phone calls when they were not at their desk, nowadays the exact same level of access to applications and data, security, efficiency and comfort is expected outside of the office, anywhere, anytime.”At Dell Technologies, we recognized these needs and therefore initiated our remote flexibility policy. Remote flexibility is not just about providing more choices to team members about the location they are working. It is to provide the infrastructure, tools and services so that team members can work the same way, or better, when they are remote, as when they are working at their company’s offices. Mobility starts with leadership and that is why the support of the CHRO is crucial in this matter.A loyal employee base as the result of technological progressMobility and new technology solutions in general are there to support us in our roles as devoted digital workforce transformation evangelists. Repetitive tasks can be taken over by technology which means employees will be confronted with having to manage more complex business situations, but will also be more satisfied at their jobs. Shifting to a productive and loyal employee base by working better instead of harder without undermining the importance of soft skills. This course of action will create a skill set that will gain importance when we intensify cooperation with technology.[1] Net Promoter Score®, or NPS®, measures customer experience and predicts business growth
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SANAA, Yemen (AP) — Yemeni officials say a senior security official was found dead in the southern port city of Aden, just a day after his abduction. The officials say Brig. Ibrahim Harad was abducted late on Tuesday in front of his house in an Aden district. His body was found in the same district on Wednesday with multiple bullet wounds. No group has so far claimed responsibility for Harad’s abduction and death. Yemen has been convulsed by civil war since 2014, with Iran-backed Houthi rebels on one side and the internationally recognized government, which is supported by a Saudi-led coalition, on the other.
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COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — Sri Lanka’s president has welcomed the first 500,000 doses of a COVID-19 vaccine from India, which has donated the shots to eight countries in the region. The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was manufactured by the Serum Institute of India. Sri Lanka says 150,000 health workers and 115,000 selected military and police troops will be the first to be inoculated at six hospitals in Colombo and its suburbs. India’s donation covers 250,000 people and Sri Lanka is making efforts to obtain more vaccines, either through donation or purchase. The country has ordered 2 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine and is planning to order 3 million more from India. It also expects some from the U.N. COVAX Facility to be able to vaccine 20% of the population.
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JERUSALEM (AP) — The Israeli military says a drone has come under anti-aircraft fire over the skies of Lebanon. It says the aircraft was not hit and continued on its mission. Wednesday’s incident was the latest sign of rising tensions between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Israeli warplanes and drones violate Lebanon’s airspace almost daily, sometimes to carry out airstrikes against Hezbollah-allied Iranian targets in neighboring Syria. Israel accuses Hezbollah of violating a 2006 cease-fire and says the overflights are needed to keep an eye on the group. The frequency of the low-flying warplanes over Beirut and other parts of Lebanon has intensified in recent weeks, making residents jittery.
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