It’s no secret that the more engaged employees are at work, the more they contribute to the success of the organization. But what drives the modern employee experience? And how can technology contribute to keeping employees engaged and to helping …
Today, software developers leverage continuous integration to deliver exceptional consumer-centric applications. Continuous integration is rooted in the Agile methodology. Since the emergence of Agile, enterprises have worked relentlessly toward improving development strategy and optimizing the software development.
This quest eventually resulted in the emergence of the Lean methodology. Now, continuous integration (CI) is the methodology that’s emerging as a champion among DevOps teams. The method encompasses developers working on a small piece of code and pushing them to market as deliverable as soon as they’re complete.
Historically, programmers toiled away in seclusion, working on large chunks of code and adding their work to the central repository once they’ve completed their task. The method made it much more challenging to merge substantial changes into the main program. Even worse, the code typically contained many bugs that weren’t apparent until the programmer merged the new work with the main project.
In the broadest definition, CI is the routine integration of small changes in code into a primary repository. Using the method, developers test code early, frequently and often.
Continuous integration does not eliminate bugs. However, it does help programmers find them remarkably faster. Also, with a CI pipeline in place, developers can produce deliverables quickly.
Using continuous integration methodology, software developers endlessly process, test and upload changes and code additions. Programmers save their work in a central repository that’s accessible to all team members. This way, all personnel have access to the latest version of code. By centralizing the storing and sharing of code, software development firms reduce the common errors that occur when many team members work on different versions of the same product.
Continuous integration is the first half of the continuous delivery cycle. By combining continuous integration with continuous delivery (CD) programmers streamline overall workflow, enabling them to deliver high-quality updates and programs faster. Enterprises that deploy both continuous integration and continuous delivery enjoy notable improvements in performance.
The CI/CD pipeline enables developers to quickly create business solutions that empower employees to meet corporate goals. The methodology ensures the release of reliable, top-notch software. Furthermore, the CI/CD pipeline reduces costs, labor, errors, outages and downtime.
Companies that deploy continuous integration and delivery can leverage the increased functionality of the method to deliver enhanced products and services. Resultantly, these firms gain an advantage in a highly competitive market.
On a typical day at a software development firm that leverages the CI/CD pipeline, a developer might write a new feature or fix a bug, then push the updated code to the centralized repository. The repository would then run an automated integration test and notify stakeholders if there are any bugs or other quality concerns. As Jeremiah Small, Director of Engineering at Soliant Consulting, points out, “This empowers the development team to identify and fix bugs more quickly, because the changes tend to be more incremental and less complex than they would be with less frequent integration.”
After the review, and a final sign off by programmers, the code would move to the central repository. Meanwhile, feature development and bug fixes will continue. This process will repeat several times a day.
The CI/CD pipeline is especially beneficial for large teams. The method makes the most of many programmers working on small tasks. The difference is that all changes remain in sync. CI/CD methodology delivers on the concept of large teams working together to achieve a common goal.
Continuous integration/continuous delivery is an effective method for creating both internal and external resources. Companies of all sizes can benefit by embracing the philosophy.
A CI/CD pipeline can give any firm the ability to move nimbly and quickly while delivering high-quality goods and services. Today, continuous integration and continuous delivery are the latest tools that forward-thinking leaders use to outdo the competition.
The post Why So Many Businesses Are Implementing Continuous Integration appeared first on SmallBizTechnology.
You’re probably wondering about the chain of events that led to me hiring a harmonica tutor and asking him to teach my 250 team members them to play John Mayall’s Room to Move.
I’ll get to the specific details around …
The Customer Data Platform (CDP) has certainly been getting a lot of attention in marketing software circles over the last year as big dawgs like Salesforce and Adobe enter the fray, but Amperity, a Seattle-based startup, has been building a CDP solution since it launched in 2016, and today it announced some updates to give customers more control over the platform.
Chris Jones, chief product officer at Amperity, says this is an important step for the startup. “If you think about the evolution of our company, we started with an idea that turned into a [Marketing Data Platform], which was the engine that powered all of that, but that engine was largely operated by our delivery team. We’re now putting the power of that engine into the customers’ hands and giving them the full access to that,” Jones explained.
That is giving customers — which include Alaska Airlines, Nordstrom and The Gap — the power to control how the software works in the context of their companies, rather than using a black box approach where you have to use the software as delivered. He says that customers want the ability to start using the system to gain insights on their own.
One of the primary pieces in the newest version of Amperity to allow them to do that is Stitch, a tool that lets users pull together all of the interactions from a customer in a single view — ingesting the data, sorting, deduplicating it and delivering a list of all the interactions a brand has had with a given customer. From there, they can use the new Customer 360 visualization to get a more graphical view of the data.
Amperity Stitch Screenshot: Amperity.
Jones says companies can use this data to help different groups within a company, whether marketing, sales or service, understand the customer better before or during an interaction. For example, a marketer can segment the data in a very granular way to find all of the regular customers who aren’t part of the company loyalty program, and deliver them an email listing all of the benefits of joining.
Amperity launched in 2016, and has raised $37 million across two rounds. Its most recent funding came in 2017, a $28 million investment led by Tiger Global Management, according to Crunchbase data.
European police have arrested six people as part of an investigation into a theft which saw €24 million (US $27 millon) stolen from users of cryptocurrency exchange.
The post After €24 million stolen by typosquatting a cryptocurrency exchange, six people arrested appeared first on The State of Security.
You can now power your Kubernetes platform by auto-deploying policy configurations for redirect and rewrite features like redirecting HTTP traffic, blocking URLs, or responding to a request that requires policy evaluation. To perform this kind of evaluation, the appliance requires …
Following last year’s exceedingly successful inaugural MITRE ATT&CK™ conference, this year’s highly anticipated ATT&CKcon 2.0 conference will be held from Oct 28-30 at MITRE’s McLean headquarters. MITRE’s always open to hearing feedback about the limitations of the ATT&CK framework and how to make ATT&CK more useful. Today, I want to look at the structure of […]… Read More
The post ATT&CK Structure Part I: A Taxonomy of Adversarial Behavior appeared first on The State of Security.
Internet services outages happen. Try as we all might to prevent them, outages still happen because the internet is an interdependent ecosystem of very sophisticated services that sometimes have an impact on each other in unexpected or unwanted ways.
On …
There’s a mythology around today’s factories that says everything is automated by robotics, and while there is some truth to that, it’s hard to bring that level of sophistication to every facility, especially those producing relatively small runs. Today, Bright Machines, a San Francisco startup announced its first product designed to put intelligence and automation in reach of every manufacturer, regardless of its size.
The startup, which emerged last fall with $179 million in Series A funding, has a mission to make every aspect of manufacturing run in a software-defined automated fashion. Company CEO Amar Hanspal understands it’s a challenging goal, and today’s announcement is about delivering version 1.0 of that vision.
“We have this ambitious idea to fundamentally change the way factories operate, and what we are all about is to get to autonomous programmable factories,” he said. To start on that journey, since getting its initial funding in October, the company has been building a team that includes manufacturing, software and artificial intelligence expertise. It brought in people from Autodesk, Amazon and Google and opened offices in Seattle and Tel Aviv.
The product it is releasing today is called the Software Defined Microfactory and it consists of hardware and software components that work in tandem. “What the Software Defined Microfactory does is package together robotics, computer vision, machine handling and converged systems in a modular way with hardware that you can plug and play, then the software comes in to instruct the factory on what to build and how to build it,” Hanspal explained.
Obviously, this is not an easy thing to do, and it’s taken a great deal of expertise to pull it together over the last months since the funding. It’s also required having testing partners. “We have about 20 product brands around the world and about 25 production lines in seven countries that have been iterating with us toward version one, what we are releasing today,” Hanspal said.
The company is concentrating on the assembly line for starters, especially when building smaller runs like say a specialized computer board or a network appliance where the manufacturer might produce just 50,000 in total, and could benefit from automation, but couldn’t justify the cost before.
“The idea here is going after the least automated part inside of factory, which is the assembly line, which is typically where people have to throw bodies at the problem and assembly lines have been hard to automate. The operations around assembly typically require human dexterity and judgment, trying to align things or plug things in,” Hanspal said.
The hope is to create a series of templates for different kinds of tooling, where they can get the majority of the way there with the software and robotics, and eventually just have to work on the more customized bits. It is an ambitious goal, and it’s not going to be easy to pull off, but today’s release is a first step.
Many software vulnerabilities are already known, and vendors have even issued patches, but the problem is there are so many patches that it’s often difficult for companies to keep up. Vulcan Cyber wants to help by bringing a level of automation to the patching operation, and in the process reduce exposure to known risks.
Today, it announced a $10 million Series A round from Ten Eleven Ventures and YL Ventures.
In a typical scenario, security researchers find vulnerabilities, the vendors disclose them and patch them. From there it’s up to individual companies to take care of downloading and installing the patch, but Vulcan Cyber co-founder and CEO Yaniv Bar-Dayan says the number of patches has been growing at a furious pace with 6000 patches in 2016, 16,000 in 2017 and 18,000 last year. And that growth trajectory is continuing this year, he says.
Vulcan’s ultimate mission is to help companies remediate security vulnerabilities from their infrastructure. They do this by bringing a level of automation to the process, recognizing that humans can’t keep up with these numbers. “We automate the process of prioritization and deployment to remediate more vulnerabilities faster,” Bar-Dayan explained. What’s more, he said that Vulcan does this without risking business operations, while reducing risk and costs.
Vulcan Cyber risk prioritization view. Screenshot: Vulcan Cyber
The company raised a $4 million seed round last year, bringing the total raised to $14 million so far. As TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois pointed out while writing about that seed round, it’s able to achieve this level of automation, while working with the tools developers and security teams typically work with anyway.
“Vulcan Cyber plays nicely with all of the major cloud platforms, as well as tools like Puppet, Chef and Ansible, as well as GitHub and Bitbucket. It also integrates with a number of major security testing tools and vulnerability scanners, including Black Duck, Nessus, Fortify, Tripwire, Checkmarx, Rapid7 and Veracode,” Lardinois wrote.
The company was founded last year and has 25 employees. It plans to continue building its engineering team in Israel with the money from this round, as well as opening an office in San Francisco for sales, marketing and customer success.
Cybercriminals have learnt something very valuable in the last couple of weeks: in order to regain access to their data, cities in Florida are prepared to pay out huge Bitcoin ransoms to hackers.
The post $1.1 million in two weeks – Florida cities pay out big to ransomware gangs appeared first on The State of Security.
With relinquishing control of core infrastructure, learning to use cloud services, and planning a roll out, your journey to the cloud can be a daunting experience. But with the Citrix Workspace intelligent experience just around the corner, there has never …
WeWork announced today that it will acquire Waltz, a building access and security management startup, for an undisclosed amount. Waltz’s smartphone app and reader allows users to enter different properties with a single credential and will make it easier for WeWork’s enterprise clients, such as GE Healthcare and Microsoft, to manage their employees’ on-demand memberships to WeWork spaces.
WeWork’s announcement said “with deep expertise in mobile access and system integrations, Waltz has the most advanced and sophisticated products to provide that single credential to our members and to help us better connect them with our spaces.” Waltz was founded in 2015 by CEO Matt Kopel and has offices in New York and Montreal. After the acquisition, Waltz will be integrated into WeWork, but maintain its current customer base.
WeWork has been on an acquisition spree over the past year as it evolves from co-working spaces to a software-as-a-service provider. Companies it has bought include office management platforms Teem (for $100 million) and Managed by Q, as well as Euclid, a “spatial analytics platform” that allows companies to analyze the use of workspaces by their employees and participation at meetings and other events.
Likewise, Waltz isn’t just an alternative to keys or access cards. Its cloud-based management portal gives companies data about who enters and exits their buildings and also allows teams to set “Door Groups,” which restricts the use of some spaces to certain people. According to Waltz’s help site, it can also be used to make revenue through ads displayed in its app.
According to Information Age, a key IT trend for 2019 is the global shortage of cybersecurity skills in the workplace. In fact, in its 2019 IT Security Employment Outlook report, eSecurity Planet estimates there is a shortfall of …
Sales teams have long turned to tech solutions to help improve how they source leads, develop relationships and close deals. Now, one of the startups that helps out at a key point in that trajectory is announcing a round of growth funding to help fuel its own rapid growth. Showpad, a sales enablement platform that lets salespeople source and organise relevant content and other collateral that they use in their deals, has raised a Series D of $70 million.
The funding, which brings the total raised by Showpad to $160 million, is coming in the form of debt and equity. The equity part is co-led by Dawn Capital and Insight Partners, with existing investors Hummingbird Ventures, and Korelya Capital also participating. Silicon Valley Bank is providing debt financing. This is one of the first big investments out of Dawn’s Opportunities Fund that we wrote about last week.
The company is not disclosing its valuation but Pieterjan Bouten, the CEO who co-founded the company with Louis Jonckheere (currently CPO), confirmed that it has doubled since the $50 million Series C that it raised in 2016, with the company growing 90% year-on-year at the moment in terms of revenues.
And as a point of reference, another sales enablement player, Seismic, last December raised a Series E of $100 million at a $1 billion valuation.
Founded in Ghent, Belgium, Showpad today operates across two main headquarters, its original European base and Chicago. The latter was the homebase of LearnCore, a company that Showpad acquired last year that focuses on sales coaching and training, which has been used as a strategic acquisition to expand Showpad’s primary product, a platform that acts as a kind of content management system for sales collateral. (Today, while Chicago is where Showpad builds its go-to market efforts and professional services, Ghent focuses on engineering and product, he said.) As it happens, Chicago is also the headquarters of Seismic.
As Bouten sees it, Showpad is part of what he considers to be the fourth pillar of the technology marketing stack: storage (the cloud services where you keep all your data), CRM, marketing automation and sales enablement, where Showpad sits.
While the first three are key to helping to manage a salesperson’s activities and work, the fourth is a crucial one for helping to make sure a salesperson can do his or her job more effectively. Traditionally a lot of the content that salespeople used — presentations, white papers, other materials — to help make their cases and close their deals would be managed offline and directly by individual salespeople. Showpad has taken some of that process and made it digital, which means that now teams of salespeople can more effectively share materials amongst each other; and interestingly the material and its link to successful sales becomes part of how Showpad “learns” what works and what doesn’t.
That, in turn, helps build its own artificial intelligence algorithms, to help suggest the best materials for a particular sales effort either to someone else in that team, or to other salespeople using the platform.
“To date there has been enormous innovation in automating the marketing and sales workflow. However, in the end, sales comes down to one person selling to another,” said Norman Fiore, General Partner at Dawn Capital and member of the Showpad Board, in a statement. “Historically, this has been an offline process that has been wildly inconsistent and opaque. Showpad’s suite of products succeeds in bringing this process online for the first time with data-rich feedback loops on the effectiveness of teams, managers, salespeople and even individual pieces of sales content.”
This is a crowded area of the market with a number of standalone companies building sales enablement solutions, but also other companies within the sales stack also adding on enablement as a value-added service. For now, though, Bouten notes that these are more strategic partners than competitors. Salesforce is a partner, he says, and “We integrate with Salesloft to make sure sure emails that are sent out are using the right content. We become the single source of truth but also are being used for outreach.”
Today, the company has around 1,200 enterprise customers, including Johnson & Johnson, GE Healthcare, Bridgestone, Honeywell, and Merck, and the plan going forward will be to continue building out the services that it offers around its sales enablement software.
“You can equip sales people with the best content, but if they are not trained and coached in the right way, it goes nowhere,” he said.
In the attacker’s world, all vulnerabilities and potential exploits work toward the hacker’s advantage — not yours, not mine. This includes WordPress hacks. While living back east (over a decade ago), I was friends with several small business owners. One weekend morning, the owner of the local photography studio called me at 7 am and […]… Read More
The post 13 Reasons Why WordPress Hacks are Successful appeared first on The State of Security.
Defining a data breach can be tough for a lot of organizations. However, since the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018, organizations that operate in the EU need to follow regulatory guidelines that can have real business implications if ignored. But when a cyber incident hits your organization, do you know […]… Read More
The post Report: Organizations not completely clear on what IT security incidents to report appeared first on The State of Security.
One of the biggest shifts uncovered by the MBO Partners State of Independence study series is the increased use of online marketplaces to find work by freelancers and other independent workers.
As the study chart below shows (click to enlarge), in 2012 only 3 percent of full-time independent workers reported having used an online marketplace to find work in the prior 12 months.
In 2019, 24% said they had.
Relatively few (8%) report using online talent marketplaces as their primary source of work.
But online talent marketplaces have become important secondary and tertiary sources of work. Independent workers use them to fill in gaps in their work schedules, explore new markets, find new clients and learn new skills.
Going forward, the use of online marketplaces by independent workers will no doubt increase.
The 2019 data show 29 percent of full-time independent workers reported they intended to use an online marketplace over the next 12 months.
And as the chart above also shows, there's a strong correlation between between one year’s reported intentions and the next year’s reported usage.
So we're very confident forecasting that next year we'll see close to 30% of full-time independent workers using online platforms to find work.
We'll continuing reporting on the findings of MBO Partners State of Independence study (we worked with MBO on this study) over the next few weeks.
