Category: Office 365

9/7/2019 0 Comments

Case STudy: How Do Organisations Digitally Transform?

In this blog article, I'm going to outline the key steps required to help transform a medium to large organisation. Digital Transformation is the ability of an organisation to change their culture, in order remain competitive. By using new technologies more effectively than their competitors, this leads to greater market share, lower price points, improved product and/or service quality and constant innovation for clients. Notice that I start with culture, not technology.

I'll draw on my 20+ years of hands-on experience as a solution architect and professional technologist with DXC Technology and Santander, as well as my expertise in running cultural change and technical courses at ALC Training & Consulting.

Here are the key steps and they are in order:

Use an Agile framework to help structure the entire transformation. My recommendation is to use the Scaled Agile Framework or SAFe as it's the number 1 agile method. Couple this with The Open Group Architecture framework or TOGAF to reduce solution risk. This will involve sending all the senior leaders on a Leading SAFe 2-day course and your architects, engineering and development functions on TOGAF Part 1 and Part 2 courses (4 days). It's important here to align your initiative to value streams, not projects or programs.

This is the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe):

And this is the top slice of TOGAF. You would use TOGAF as part of the architecture functions in SAFe.

Understand what business objectives you'd like to achieve in the next 3-5 years. There are techniques in both TOGAF and SAFe for helping flesh these out.
Work with all the key stakeholders to develop a common mission and vision. Lots of great information on how to identify and manage stakeholders in TOGAF. This was the most important skill I gained in my career.
Send your security experts to become certified on the Certified Cloud Security Professional certification. This will ensure they have a good all-round grounding in cloud security specifically. Because it is different. The diagram below shows the Top 12 Cloud Security Threats, and they are in order. Data Breach is No.1....no surprises there really!

Identify key execution leaders, usually the program manager, a senior project manager and the lead architect, to go onto the 4-day Implementing SAFe course to become SAFe program consultants. I wouldn't recommend relying on outside consultants unless you want to hire someone. 3 would be the minimum for a large organisation (5000+ employees), minimum of 2 for a medium (100-5000 employees).
Run a value stream workshop with the key stakeholders to determine the best value stream to take forward that will deliver your first epic and the associated top 5-10 features. Very important here to involve the business really early and start thinking about security and safety early in the piece. Both TOGAF and SAFe have components that you can use in a workshop.

Start running internal Leading SAFe workshops to ensure everyone know how SAFe works and outline the value stream that we're going to take forward. Use the workshop to seek feedback and help improve the decision-making process.
Think about training for your technical resources. Unless you've been living under a rock, you're probably looking at Office 365 Security & Compliance (2 Days) and either AWS Quickstart (1 Day) or Azure Fundamentals (1 Day).
- My personal pick is to stay with Azure. It's the most popular with my students in Australia. You could also consider Google and Oracle. I've had a handful of people use Google and only 2 use Oracle. I think they were from Oracle.
- I would recommend the Office 365 Security & Compliance course, as it helps people understand how Office works on Day 1 and then walks them through the security components on Day 2. It's a great course for non-technical people who want an appreciation of security, relevant to a product suite, they're used to using.

Identify the first Agile Release Train, be clear on what success looks like and ask your people to self-organise across the train, using the SAFe principles. Blend in the principles from the enterprise / solution architecture function and seek feedback from the teams.
Perform a training needs analysis workshop, by involving all those people that are required to build and deliver the solution. This is where you'll need to identify the technical and soft skills that will be missing. This will include specific vendor product training, probably through eLearning methods and vendor training.
For soft skills, start thinking about cultural change programs for everyone on the trains. I'd recommend DevOps Foundation for everyone, DevSecOps Engineering for security and lead developers and DevOps Leader for the key leaders managing the train. The diagram below is from the DevOps Foundation and outlines 3 cultural principle for success.

Don't forget to bring the business on the journey too, so I can recommend the Cloud Computing Foundation (2 Days), designed for non-technical professionals and leads to an accredited APMG certification.
Almost certainly your transformation will contain a significant data component, so I can recommend training for all your technical resources on the newly released Enterprise Big Data Professional certification. Here is a slide outlining how the MapReduce framework works in Hadoop.

At this stage, you'll be very close to deploying your first Agile Release Train, so you'll need to ensure the relevant people have attended the SAFe Product Manager, Scrum Master and SAFe for Teams courses.
Finally, launch your train through a face-to-face Program Increment (PI) Planning workshop and allow your SAFe Program Consultants and Scrum Masters to coach the teams to success. Don't forget to measure at every step to show progress. This is all explained in the SAFe implementation roadmap. If followed correctly, you'll be delivering multiple features in the first 50 days.

Over time you'll launch more trains, that are aligned to value streams to deliver more epics and features. As you grow, the trains will become much faster and with a team of 125 people or more, you'll delivering features much faster than ever before.
Importantly, constantly track where you are in your business objectives, your mission and vision, to ensure you keep the trains on the tracks. There is where the Lean Portfolio Management components in SAFe that helps with the governance piece of this.

Do you have questions with these steps? Feel free to reach out to me directly:

Twitter: twitter.com/musiccomposer1
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/paulcolmer/
Instagram: www.instagram.com/paulcolmer/

Have an awesome week, beautiful people.

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25/6/2018 0 Comments

Top 6 Cloud Service Providers in February 2018

For the first time in 2018, it's become easier than ever to gauge the state of the cloud market. New data from the top cloud providers, mean we can really see who is dominating the landscape. In this blog, I've chosen to look at the total revenue as an indicator of success. Partly because it's easy to measure, but also because it given an indication of relative market opportunity and growth.

This chart is taken from a great ZDNET article that was published earlier this year:
www.zdnet.com/article/cloud-providers-ranking-2018-how-aws-microsoft-google-cloud-platform-ibm-cloud-oracle-alibaba-stack/

It clearly shows Microsoft as the dominant force, which I predicted would be the case back in 2016. My colleagues at DXC Technology will attest to that prediction. I think it's also a reflection on a number of compelling events that have materialised over the past few years:

Microsoft have invested significant amounts of money into their cloud strategy and you can see it's paying off. www.onmsft.com/news/microsoft-spending-more-10b-year-azure-data-centers
Microsoft's cloud portal was reskinned around 3 years ago, which put AWS on the back foot. azuretalk.wordpress.com/2015/02/24/azure-portal-new-look-and-feel/
All medium and large corporate companies of note, already have a relationship with MIcrosoft through an Enterprise Agreement (EA). This EA provides Microsoft with significant scope for commercial leverage, through price reductions, discounts and bundled services, across the Azure and Office 365 platforms. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Enterprise_Agreement
Office 365 is a serious force to be reckoned with. There is no real competition in this space and the vast majority, if not all companies, use some components of the product suite. Integrated with Active Directory technologies for authentication, authorisation and access control.

Although Google offers their G-Suite, I don't really see it as a serious competitor or replacement for Office 365. In fact they complement each other. I typically use Google for managing both business and personal data on my Google Pixel and then Office 365 for Surface Pro, MAC and iPad and then OneDrive across all of them. Below is a quick snapshot of how Google and Office stack up:

On the Amazon Web Services side, there is much progress and improvement especially in the area of new services. AWS are very good in the Serverless and PaaS spaces, adding a whole series of new innovations. These and exciting innovations were announced at the AWS ReInvent 2017 conference last year and include:

AWS Fargate - Serverless Containers
Amazon ECS for Kubernetes - Container Management
Amazon Neptune - Graph Database
Amazon Sumerian - Create and run 3D apps for Virtual Reality & Augemented Reality Use Cases
AWS IoT Analytics - Analyse IoT data at scale
Amazon Rekognition Video - Video Analysis using Machine Learning

You definitely can not accuse Amazon of being static, boring, with all this innovation coming thick and fast. Amazon are certainly pushing the curve, as there are no Microsoft Azure equivalents for some of these services. Amazon Sumerian is a case in point. See the screenshot below:

Oracle are coming up fast, probably as a result of their push in the past 12-18 months. A rep at Oracle invited me to attend Oracle Cloud World, which introduced me to the maturity and sleek look of their latest cloud offerings. The pics below gives a quick overview of the Oracle Cloud offerings:

IBM is a little way behind the Top 2 leaders with their suite of cloud offerings. IBM Watson is probably the best known. I'm still waiting for IBM to approach me to, and invite me to their conference. Check out the screenshot below:

More information on IBM cloud services can be found here:
www.ibm.com/services/cloud?lnk=hpmse_ts&lnk2=learn

Alibaba are a definitely one to watch. My prediction, is that by 2020 Alibaba will be No. 3 by revenue and may well be looking to eat up AWS with a takeover strategy, to compete with Microsoft. Here is a quick overview of the predicted growth of Alibaba revenue vs AWS:

And here is a good article that articulates how large and dangerous Alibaba really is. I do apologise for all the popups, but the free content on the site IS worth the pain:
www.cbinsights.com/research/amazon-alibaba-international-expansion/

The link below gives another perspective on the Microsoft / AWS revenue growth story, outlining some of the great customers stories to come out of the Azure platform. These include:

Coca Cola
UPS
Toyota

www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/04/27/microsoft-tops-amazon-in-q1-cloud-revenue-6-0-billion-to-5-44-billion-ibm-third-at-4-2-billion/#57a5358a5d4b

Finally if you feel you need some specialised training or business advice on AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM, Oracle or Cloud CyberSecurity, feel free to reach out to me or to ALC Training:
www.alctraining.com.au/courses/cloud-computing/

#CloudComputing #Cloud #AWS #Amazon #Microsoft #Azure #Office365 #CyberSecurity #CCSP #Training #Coaching #AI

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6/4/2018 0 Comments

#CyberSecurity as Code in Microsoft Office 365

Last week I was running a course in Auckland , where I demo the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center. The great thing about this new tool, is that it is policy-based, interactive and extremely visual.

What does that really mean?

You need to firstly determine the important information around your corporate security posture. Then you can translate this into the Security & Compliance Center, via a series of rules. This allows you to maintain compliance with the law, a regulated industry and your company polices.

Once the policies are in place, you have a series of interactive visualisations and methods, for determining how end-users are using the platform and whether they are in breach of your policies.

Here is a simple example. I always recommend starting with the Secure Score, once you have your Office 365 tenant running. You’ll need an E1 / E3 or E5 licence to be able to follow this through:

Go to Home.
Click on the Customise button.
Click onto Add Widget, click the Office 365 Secure Score tile and click Add:

Don’t forget to Save the customised home screen and then access the tile by clicking on Go to Secure Score:

Depending on the security posture of your organisation, you can choose to increase or decrease your target secure score. A way of benchmarking this is to have a look at other clients with a similar profile, using the comparison bar chart:

The types of recommendations the tool makes can include the following:

Multi-Factor authentication recommendations to prevent simple password only logins.
Enable audit data recording, so you have an audit trail in the event of a security incident.
Reviewing malware detections reports on a weekly basis to ensure that you’re protected from the latest advanced persistent threats.

Other incredible features that are policy-based include setting up Data Loss Prevention Rules, using pre-defined templates that align to geography and industry:

Setting up Data Governance Rules to ensure that you retain contain in-line with legislation and ensure it is securely deleted after that time:

Obtaining all the various compliance reports associated with Office 365 and Azure for a particularly geography and industry:

Lastly here is a great tweet on how to setup permissions in the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center:

https://twitter.com/MusicComposer1/status/971592726297718785

The trick with permissions, is to understand the various roles that you can assign to groups and users and how permissive or restrictive those roles are. If you need to tailor the roles, keep the original defaults, and simply create a new role, with a detailed description of how it differs from the default role.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center, there are plenty of great links on TechNet, starting here:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn532171.aspx

And if you feel you need something a little more, check out our face-to-face classroom training course. The 'pièce de résistance' is where I interactively demo the tool and coach you through the latest security best practices:

https://www.alctraining.com.au/course/office-365-security-compliance/

And finally, here is a great iconic picture to share, showing the wonderful city of Auckland and the great country that is New Zealand:

Oh…and I just must share the best Auckland pic of the Ed Sheeran concert too!!

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Author

Paul Colmer is an AWS Senior Technical Trainer. Paul has an infectious passion for inspring others to learn and to applying disruptive thinking in an engaging and positive way.

Paul has experience in building digital architecture strategies. This includes the development and execution of training material and workshops, architecting and leading digital transformation initiatives, providing expertise on social media marketing, as well as advanced presenting using comedy, drama and music.

Certifications include: Amazon Web Services(3 x Associates + 1 ML Specialty), Scaled Agile Framework (SPC), Cloud Security (CCSP), DevOps Culture (DevOps Foundation & DevSecOps Engineering), Big Data (EBDP), Data Science (EBDA), Microsoft Azure (AZ-900), Office 365 and a few others......

He is currently one of the Rise.Global Top 50 Global Cloud influencers on social media.

www.rise.global/the-cloud-social-influencers-power-100/p/1804096/r/2556192

And one of the OnalyticsTop 100 Big Data influencers on social media:

onalytica.com/blog/posts/big-data-top-influencers-and-brands/

He is also a keen writer and an award-winning open-mic comedian.

Contact Paul Colmer via LinkedIn.

Or simply watch his videos on YouTube.

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Case STudy: How Do Organisations Digitally Transform?

Top 6 Cloud Service Providers in February 2018

#CyberSecurity as Code in Microsoft Office 365

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YOUR CART

Case STudy: How Do Organisations Digitally Transform?

Top 6 Cloud Service Providers in February 2018

#CyberSecurity as Code in Microsoft Office 365

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Author​​

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