It’s no secret that software and applications drive business today — and the future is only going to be more app-driven. So, it’s imperative for businesses of all shapes, sizes and industries, whether cloud newbies or cloud natives, to be thinking strategically about how to develop their software. And to do that, business leaders need to be thinking about DevOps.

Yes, DevOps is a buzzword, but that doesn’t detract from its growing importance for business. To help our customers understand what DevOps is, we started a podcast, Simplifying DevOps.

In two of my previous posts I discussed people and platform. In this post I’m going to share six steps to help your organization get started with platform as a service (PaaS). As with any new solution, it’s important to map out the implementation strategy. Whether your using Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), PaaS, or serverless, an enterprise architect along with your cloud center of excellence provides “recommended practices.” Agree or disagree, a decoupled component design provides flexibility with scale, maintainability, support and empowers faster change while remaining stable.

At this point you might be thinking, “Is it that easy?” Not really. Like any project, planning is required. The plan should be iterative with 2-3 outcomes and with 2-6 team members. First, identify yourself: are you application development or the IT operations infrastructure persona? For example, consider this blog post that describes Microservices: Change is here today and is impacting our processes. Traditionally, these two personas do not know each other, but they should not be afraid of each other. Get to know them, and working together might look something like this:

As companies across industries have discovered in recent years, hyperconverged infrastructure offers simplicity and scalability in the data center. While these benefits are important for almost any business, HCI can be particularly useful for financial firms.

Here are three ways HCI can help banks, credit unions and capital market firms face down common challenges in the industry.

Device as a Service (DaaS) initiatives can streamline device environments for organizations in all sectors, but this emerging approach to device deployment and management is an especially good fit for helping nonprofits meet some of their most common challenges.

Here are three challenges that DaaS can help nonprofits to overcome.

When I was an IT infrastructure director in a previous life, I thought that the term “middleware” was something of a dirty word. I viewed it as inelegant — something that gummed up the works of applications rather than streamlining them (not to mention giving me just one more thing I needed to manage). I’m…