Carol Pollard

The Case for Standards

As cloud computing models emerge and evolve in a significant way to deliver reliable, automated services across private, hosted and public environments, standards provide a base of consistent, interoperable management across different cloud service implementations.

Application Performance Management and User Experience Management

When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atom bomb.

Application Management in Virtualized Systems

When customers start using virtualization, they have a preliminary notion of what virtualization is. But, once they get in and start using it, they see it’s like a Swiss army knife, and they can use it in many different ways.

Chapter 11 – Application Programming Interfaces and Connected Systems

We live in a world of massively interconnected businesses, requiring equally interconnected software applications. In recent years, the use of application programming interfaces (APIs) has largely replaced technologies such as electronic data interchange and custom-written integration programs for development of new system interactions. APIs are now the de facto industry standard for integrating data and functionality across diverse application ecosystems.

Application Management in the Cloud

The use of public and private cloud environments by organizations around the world continues to grow at a rapid pace and shows no signs of abating in the near future. The financial benefits of cloud computing will continue to drive its adoption. However, cloud computing brings unique challenges for managing the applications that run in those environments. Application management in cloud environments is multifaceted. In each of the public cloud environments there is a user (i.e., IT department) dimension to the question of application management. There is also a service provider aspect to application management. The capabilities and responsibilities are different in each instance. In infrastructure as a service and private cloud environments, the customers IT department is responsible for the active management of the applications and is able to install the appropriate tools that allow them to do that.

Distributed and Componentized Applications

The definition of the word “application” is exceedingly broad and defined differently in a wide variety of contexts. Often, the only trait “applications” have in common is the fact that they are created from software code and designed to perform a discrete task or set of tasks.

Application Management in the Internet of Things

The Internet of things (IoT) is an explosion in progress that promises to change the lives of nearly every human being. IoT is only possible because of advances in technology that allow the miniaturization of components and drastic reduction in power requirements. There are two application components in any IoT environment. One is the remote application that resides on or in close proximity to the system that collects data from associated sensors. The other component is the one that receives data that were captured by the remote application. Because the IoT systems are frequently unattended and may not be physically secured, of all of the management functions, security is of paramount importance.

Chapter 1 – Overview

Managing Applications in the Digital Enterprise provides a comprehensive discussion of application management processes, techniques, tools, and standards, along with the history, current art, and future promise of application management in the multifaceted environment of mobile and cloud computing. To guide the reader through the many facets of application management covered in this book, this chapter provides an overview of the contents of each of its 17 chapters and three Appendices.

The Evolution of Application Management

Living systems are never in equilibrium. They are inherently unstable. They may seem stable, but they’re not. Everything is moving and changing. In a sense, everything is on the edge of collapse.

Management of Mobile Applications

Laptop computers, tablets, and smartphones have dramatically changed the way in which people work, interact with each other, and even how they think. It is not just the mobile devices themselves, but those devices together with the applications that run on them and (usually) network connectivity that provide access to additional application functionality and additional data. Mobile applications (mobile apps) bring with them a new set of management challenges, particularly in the realm of security. Bring your own device (BYOD) has simultaneously complicated and simplified the challenge of managing mobile apps. BYOD made managing mobile apps more complicated because of the diversity of devices on which the applications may run. Alternatively, BYOD simplified the management challenge because most of the responsibility for managing the performance and availability of mobile apps is shifted to the user of the device.