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MTN awards network modernization deal to Nokia
2021-09-14 02:00:00| Total Telecom industry news
MTN, a prominent service provider in South Africa and the Middle East, has partnered with Finnish telecom vendor Nokia to modernize its network and enhance voice services. Nokia will provide 5G cloud infrastructure and cloud-native IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) to drive MTN's voice vore evolution…read more on TotalTele.com »
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Why application modernization is important for your business and how to get started
2021-09-08 17:14:39| The Webmail Blog
Why application modernization is important for your business and how to get started nellmarie.colman Wed, 09/08/2021 - 10:14 Many organizations are looking to modernize applications to ensure future resiliency. But the complexities of cloud technology and architecture can act as blockers. So, where do you begin on your application modernization journey? Which approach will best fit your organization and meet your goals? In our latest webinar, Amir Kashani, VP, Cloud Native Development & IoT, Chris O'Malley, Senior Practice Manager, Cloud Native Development and Jim Rosser, Customer Solutions Architect will help you identify which application modernization approach is the best fit for your organization. Watch the on-demand webinar to hear about the following: How modern application capabilities such as automation can power innovation An explanation of the pathways to modernizing applications with benefits and use cases Customer case studies including a pharmaceutical company that adopted a serverless platform How cloud native replatforming enables scaling and high availability Why serverless refactoring can be a good starting point for application modernization How containers can reduce operating costs enabling monitoring and scaling Amir shares some pertinent points on application modernization. You need to leverage people, processes and technology to build applications with people and process being the most important aspect. Application modernization is not just about the cloud or technology but also involves organizational changes and upskilling teams to build modern applications. Application modernization is interwoven with cloud native, DevOps and cloud-first, as they are all slices in the same pie. You have to use them all. Amir describes how application modernization enables innovation. Leading companies favor experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition and iterative design over traditional big design. A new feature, product or service is put out into the world for feedback and iteration. The key isn't success, as often experiments fail, but those failures are lessons. And the faster you can take ideas to experimentation, feedback and back around the innovation flywheel the quicker you reach the right answer. But how does application modernization benefit businesses? Amir shares a customer case study of a US airline that used Kubernetes. Airlines don't operate at a consistent workload 24/7. So being able to have infrastructure that allowed them to scale up and down was great, with unplanned failures going down by 40%. Its a success story on leveraging containers in a highly regulated industry. Jim Rosser explains one of the ways application modernization is achieved. Whenever we build modern applications, IT operations are embedded and considered first. We want to ensure that we're exposing the right metrics, we're exploring and tracking the right KPIs so that the application is not only functioning generally, but also functioning for what the business needs. The three routes to application modernization are cloud replatforming, container adoption and serverless refactoring as Jim describes. Cloud native replatforming has the lowest barrier to entry. Its using replacements for what you already have on-premises or elsewhere and moving it all to managed services. This lowers TCO without having to change a huge amount of code. Container adoption, which has been the talk of the town for the last five to eight years, involves putting applications in containers, making them portable and testable across environments. Serverless refactoring involves a fully managed infrastructure that can scale and has high availability. It provides a quicker time to market because youre focused on the core business without having to worry about things like OS. Its consumption-based, meaning you only pay when someone hits your website. Each of the pathways has benefits, with serverless refactoring opening up new opportunities, as Jim explains. Customers using serverless refactoring are data-driven. They are focused on understanding how to use data for innovation and business growth. It's extremely exciting to see customers starting to focus on building smart applications with AI and machine learning because theyre no longer just focusing on business logic. The are many use cases for application modernization, as Chris O'Malley describes how a SaaS transformation benefitted a customer. As you'd expect migrating from on-premises to AWS with a serverless approach meant cost went down dramatically. The developers became much more efficient at releasing new features. We were also able to leverage serverless features to satisfy the customers security posture. This was all done alongside training the customer on how best to operate, maintain and build cloud native applications. In another example, Chris shares how an incremental modernization helped a customer. Their business-critical application can now scale and is resilient. In fact, after testing we saw performance improvement approaching 400%. It was a dramatic and much-needed improvement. Its a common pattern that when we introduce new CI/CD processes we see a massive improvement in developer productivity. With new features and bug fixes being delivered more efficiently than previously. Why application modernization is important for your business and how to get startedLearn how you can unlock the full value of the cloud with serverless refactoring, container adoption and cloud native replatforming. Identify the right application modernization approachhttps://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/17680/495173/identify-the-right-application-Watch the webinar
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Five steps to data modernization success
2021-06-11 16:36:00| The Webmail Blog
Five steps to data modernization success nellmarie.colman Fri, 06/11/2021 - 09:36 To move your business to the top of your industry, you need to deliver superior customer experiences, create new revenue streams and make fast, strategic decisions. And todays modern data capabilities make this possible so you can deliver business insights that drive real innovation, speed and flexibility. But few companies have been able to make the foundational shifts necessary, to achieve such outcomes. According to a report by McKinsey Digital, even though 70% of financial institutions have had a modern data architecture roadmap in place for 18-24 months, almost half still have disparate data models. And most have integrated only a quarter of their critical data into their target architecture. To achieve data modernization success, you need to get the right data, to the right application, at the right business moment, while delivering a new level of business insights. If youre relying on disparate data models and outdated data architectures, youre setting yourself up for data quality issues which ultimately adds complexity and cost and holds you back from achieving your target outcomes. But by taking five key steps, you can deliver and continually optimize your modern data architecture. This forms the foundation for innovation, superior customer experiences, business insights, real-time agility and the ability to make the most of modern cloud native applications. Step 1: Data discovery Start by getting your team on board. Focus on understanding the high-level data issues and goals, and brainstorm ideas about how to drive a better data architecture that satisfies business and application demands now and in the future. Step 2: Data architecture assessment Understand your current data architecture in depth, including what data is available and what is needed by business processes and applications. Identify use cases to focus on, as well as their high-level architecture. Define the strategy and roadmap. Step 3: Data architecture and engineering This is where the strategy and roadmap are implemented. Design the overall architecture including which clouds, technologies and platforms to be used. Develop pipelines to ingest, transform and store data. Build out data lakes, marts and platforms as needed to implement the modern data architecture. Work with cloud native application development and operations teams. Step 4: Business intelligence and reporting Now its time to turn your data into actionable results. Define your data models, build dashboards with real-time refreshes and automate reporting. Step 5: DataOps Set up a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement and innovation. This involves an orchestration of people, processes and technology to deliver trusted, high-quality data. With a DataOps approach, you can create predictable delivery and change management of data, data models and related artifacts. This includes: Data lifecycle process framework - Incorporates DevOps, agile development and statistical process controls. Collaborative data management practice - Improves communication, integration and automation. Cloud platform and tooling - Orchestrates and automates security, quality and metadata. Expert guidance for your data modernization journey With Rackspace Data Modernization, you can build intelligent applications and experiences, drive targeted real-time action, and make predictive, data-driven decisions that accelerate innovation and increase ROI. Our data specialists will help you harness the power of a modern data architecture and AI so you can monetize your data by uncovering new use cases for increasing business efficiencies and customer engagement with up to 70% reduction in implementation time and cost. The Rackspace Data Modernization solution spans the five key steps described above, meeting you wherever you are on your data modernization journey. And when youre ready for process maturity and agile delivery, combined with world-class managed support focusing on data lifecycle management, turn to Rackspace DataOps. Rackspace DataOps is delivered in two parts: Rackspace Elastic Engineering for Data complemented with Rackspace Data Pipeline Management. Rackspace Elastic Engineering for Data Our experts work closely with your business across one joint, agile team to collaboratively accelerate data initiatives, while passing on collective knowledge gained from multiple Rackspace Technology clients to your internal team. Rackspace Elastic Engineering for Data provides access to a truly innovative managed service that enables data lifecycle management to help increase operational efficiency and accelerate innovation. Do with approach: Our Elastic Engineering Pod works in an agile, sprint-based model right alongside your team Consistent team: No matter which tier of hours you use each month, youll always work with the same pod that knows you, your environment and your business. Flexible, tiered pricing: Purchase fractional access to your pod via straightforward hours-based tiers and scale up and down monthly should your business needs change Multi-faceted skill sets: The Rackspace Elastic Engineering Pod for Data consists of an engagement manager, architects and engineers working together as one unit. Ongoing innovation: Rackspace Technology leverages leading cloud platforms tools and frameworks to deliver progressive improvement, enablement and transformation. Rackspace Data Pipeline Management With Data Pipeline Management for Rackspace DataOps, you can focus on outcomes and innovation, and maybe getting some sleep at night. Our automated pipeline monitoring system is supported with reactive 24x7 response by our global Rackspace DataOps team. In addition to monitoring, alerting and incident management, youll receive troubleshooting, platform escalations, runbook-based resolution, and operational support. Get started today by signing up for a complimentary Data & Analytics Strategy Session. Youll discover how a modern data platform can accelerate your path to becoming a truly data-driven organization. Five steps to data modernization successTo achieve data modernization success, you need to get the right data, to the right application, at the right business moment, while delivering a new level of business insights. Here are the five steps youll need to take.Complimentary Data & Analytics Strategy Session
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Farm Workforce Modernization Act Creates a More Functional, Compassionate Farm Labor System
2021-03-19 00:51:04| National Farmers Union
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 18, 2021 Contact: Hannah Packman, 303-819-8737 hpackman@nfudc.org WASHINGTON In an effort to improve the American agricultural labor system, the U.S. House of Representatives today voted in favor of the Farm Workforce Modernization Act. The chamber passed an earlier version of the bipartisan bill in late 2019. At the organizations convention earlier this […]
A brief guide to legacy system modernization
2020-12-07 23:04:08| The Webmail Blog
A brief guide to legacy system modernization nellmarie.colman Mon, 12/07/2020 - 16:04 As we enter a new era of AI advances and data-driven business models, businesses are taking a fresh look at their technology systems. Instead of seeing IT as a cost required to run their business, theyre recognizing that technology can be an asset that grows their business. Your legacy systems may have fueled your growth in the past, but theyre reaching a maturity point. As you embark on new paths and strategies such as social, mobile, analytics and cloud strategies like AI and IoT youll likely end up, like most businesses, ignoring your old systems. But dont linger in this stall or dilemma zone. Its time to unlock the data and intelligence held in your legacy systems and include them in your digital transformation journey. In this guide, well discuss how to make this happen so you can position yourself to meet customer demands and business challenges and redefine your business. What is a legacy system? A legacy system refers to outdated infrastructure, applications and processes. Typically housed in monolithic and tightly coupled environments, legacy systems generally run on software and hardware that is customer-owned, hosted, managed and supported. Although these systems are functional, they can create a financial burden to maintain, require difficult-to-find IT skills to operate and hinder your ability to innovate. What is legacy modernization? Legacy modernization is the process of updating and optimizing business systems to gain operational efficiencies, address technology constraints, meet customer experience expectations and support adoption and integration with other systems based on newer technology platforms. The process of legacy modernization is initiated when organizations find themselves stuck between maintaining older, expensive hardware that is unable to interoperate with new technologies, and undertaking the monumental task of revamping infrastructure to take advantage of a best-fit platform to support its business goals. This leads CIOs and IT leaders to balance a variety of factors to determine the time to modernization, where modernization delivers the most impact and how to properly plan the project to reduce business disruptions. The minimum goal of legacy system modernization is to achieve a like-to-like system parity with operational enhancements. The ideal goal is to achieve significant leaps in performance, agility and innovation. Legacy modernization can range widely on the spectrum. One option may be to refactor code using migration tools to run the same system with minimal code changes on more modern infrastructure. In some cases, emulators are available that let you avoid code changes altogether. On the other end is completely re-architecting the system, replacing the legacy system with one built using cloud native development tools. Legacy system modernization strategies Most legacy modernization projects can take either a revolutionary or evolutionary approach. Revolutionary modernization Revolutionary modernization refers to a complete, from-the-ground-up infrastructure transformation. For example, mergers and acquisitions frequently require this approach when one business must quickly adapt to the infrastructure of the new entity. Another common application of a revolutionary approach is where the legacy system has gone beyond being a burden and has become a risk. A common problem is when legacy systems are no longer supported by their vendors, which leaves organizations with security or compliance holes, and no new patches or updates. This approach presents risk, disruption and higher costs. Evolutionary modernization More risk-averse organizations usually choose the evolutionary method. The evolutionary modernization approach is a multi-phased, long-term model to achieve the same goals as the revolutionary approach. With the evolutionary approach, organizations take a workload-by-workload path to modernization, modernizing one workload at a time. This slower approach reduces business disruptions and spreads costs over time. Organizations locked into vendor contracts might take this approach to modernize around the legacy system while waiting for contracts to expire. Also, hybrid models allow organizations to connect cloud resources to on-premises environments to support evolutionary legacy transformation. Six considerations for choosing a legacy modernization approach To decide between adopting an evolutionary or a revolutionary approach, you should start with a thorough evaluation of your operations to determine the best path forward. The evaluation process should include assessing the following considerations: 1. Workload Audit applications and software to determine their business value, criticality and where there are opportunities to modernize. Assess workloads holistically in context of the go-forward business direction. 2. Architecture Review infrastructure elements, performance and ROI to assess where newer technologies can deliver better outcomes. 3. Financial Evaluate spend to find budget burdens and ways to optimize resources to support current operations and prepare for whats next. 4. Risk Weigh the possible disruption to the business, as well as any associated impacts to business processes and organizational culture against the desired outcomes of your legacy system modernization project. Also consider the risk of keeping the legacy system as-is, including maintenance for out-of-support systems or those with limited resource support staff. 5. Operations Determine which new skill sets, training and processes need to be factored into modernization costs and timelines. 6. Security Plan ways to protect systems before, during and after modernization to avoid data loss, outages or exposure. In the security plan, organizations should confirm adherence to governmental and industry compliance regulations in the new environment. The benefits of legacy system modernization Modernization offers the following payoffs: Operational efficiency: Modernized IT systems deliver better performance, faster time-to-market and better experiences for internal and external customers. Reduced costs: Decommissioning monolithic apps, data center space and physical servers reduces software, hardware and licensing costs. IT agility: With modernized systems, you can tune your environment to react faster to seasonal fluctuations, leverage data across the organization, integrate systems to optimize processes, adapt to business conditions or quickly jump on the next innovation opportunity to beat your competitors to the marketplace. Why do you need a legacy system update? Factors that driv
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