CIO Strategy

Continuity Central – Disaster recovery is a key driver of trend to move virtual workloads to the cloud

Druva has published the results of its 2017 VMware Cloud Migration Survey, which looked at how enterprises working in a VMware environment are approaching cloud migration. The survey results show a powerful trend toward moving virtual workloads to the cloud due to its lower cost, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) being the preferred destination for workload migrations. Disaster recovery, workload mobility, and archival automation were all strong adoption drivers, with many organizations looking to save money and maximize IT initiatives focused on simplifying their infrastructure.

Key findings of the Druva 2017 VMware Cloud Migration Survey:

There is a major shift in the VMware market to migrate data centres to the cloud. 90 percent of companies are aiming to migrate their workloads by 2018, with a clear preference for AWS (47 percent), followed by Microsoft Azure (25 percent).

Data Center Knowledge – Multi-Cloud Is a Reality, Not a Strategy – Part 1

James Kelly is the Lead Cloud and SDN Expert at Juniper Networks.

So you’re doing cloud, and there is no sign of slowing down. Maybe your IT strategies are measured, maybe you’re following the wisdom of the crowd, maybe you’re under the gun, you’re impetuous or you’re oblivious. Maybe all of the above apply. In any case, like all businesses, you’ve realized that cloud is the vehicle for your newly dubbed software-defined enterprise: a definition carrying onerous, what I call, ‘daft pressures’ for harder, better, faster, stronger IT.

You may as well be solving the climate-change crisis because to have a fighting chance today, it feels like you have to do everything all at once.

More of the Data Center Knowledge post from James Kelly

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14
Sep 17

ZDNet – Security Features Built into Cloud Services

Public cloud providers go to great lengths to secure their infrastructure, but organizations are still responsible to protect their apps and data. We look at Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

As we discussed in an earlier post [link to cloud fears entry], it’s a little late in the game to be wholly suspicious of cloud computing. However, there’s still a lot to talk about in terms of securing the cloud.

The security features offered by public cloud providers represent only a part of the shared responsibility model; the other part falls within your organization’s responsibility. For example, your public cloud provider may offer security groups for identity and access management (IAM) and firewalls that scan traffic on specific ports and to and from specific IP addresses.

More of the ZDNet article from Larry Seltzer

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12
Sep 17

Customer Think – Software Developers Fear That A.I. Will Soon Replace Them

Since its inception in the 19th century, Artificial Intelligence is a growing topic of conversation in both science fiction and intellectual debate. To Cut a long story short, AI turns out to be the most disruptive and pervasive technologies of the current digital revolution. Right from automobiles to health care, home automation, aerospace engineering, material science, sports, the technology has been used very creatively, in hitherto unheard of sectors and has the potential to profoundly affect how we interact across the globe. As a result, the tech industry’s interest becomes stronger than ever.

According to the Oxford dictionary “The theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.”

More of the Customer Think article from Nishtha Singh

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11
Sep 17

Continuity Central – Gartner publishes ‘Hype Cycle for Cloud Security in 2017’

The Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud Security aims to help security professionals understand which emerging technologies are ready for mainstream use, and which are still years away from productive deployments for most organizations. The 2017 edition of the Hype Cycle for Cloud Security is now available and a summary is below.

“Security continues to be the most commonly cited reason for avoiding the use of public cloud,” said Jay Heiser, research vice president at Gartner. “Yet paradoxically, the organizations already using the public cloud consider security to be one of the primary benefits.”

The attack resistance of the majority of cloud service providers has not proven to be a major weakness so far, but customers of these services may not know how to use them securely.

“The Hype Cycle can help cybersecurity professionals identify the most important new mechanisms to help their organizations make controlled, compliant and economical use of the public cloud,” said Mr. Heiser.

The Register – ‘Other’ may yet become the biggest and most useful cloud

In recent weeks I didn’t write stories about Packet.net splashing down in 15 new nations to start an edge compute service, or the plans that Tata Telecoms shared with me to expand its data centre footprint by targeting partnerships with users of its submarine cables.

I skipped them both because the companies concerned are minor players in the big, big, drama that is the shift from on-premises computing to the cloud. Even if we’d loosed the crack Reg Punning Squad to work some headlining magic, I couldn’t imagine many of you would click on news of either company.

But a conversation with Zerto’s president Paul Zeiter has me thinking perhaps we all need to spend more time looking at small clouds.

Zeiter pointed out to me that in almost every enterprise IT category, there’s a couple of leaders, a few followers and then a big pool of “other” that often accounts for 40 per cent or more of the market. And sometimes the “Others” are more interesting than the mainstream: for example, The Register has often had good responses to our coverage of niche PC vendor Eurocom becuase the company makes stuff like server-class laptops that insist their batteries are actually an uninterruptible power supply.

More of The Register post from Simon Sharwood

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07
Sep 17

Continuity Central – Crisis preparedness and its impact on shareholder value

All commercial organizations operating in the digital era exist within a challenging landscape. Underlying trust is weak; expectations of good, transparent governance are high; and acceptance of failure is low.

At the same time, communicating with stakeholders is becoming more complex as traditional addressable audiences fragment into ever-evolving, always-online socially-connected communities, guaranteeing that issues and crises play out very publicly and swiftly.

To navigate these challenges successfully and to protect value for shareholders as companies grow, it’s vital to enhance business resilience. Reducing risk and building trust should be as important as innovating and pursuing operational excellence.

What is a crisis?

The British Standard for Crisis Management (BS 11200:2014) defines a crisis as “An abnormal and unstable situation that threatens the organization’s strategic objectives, reputation or viability.” Understanding this definition is vital in helping an organization to prepare itself to deal with a crisis. Through worst-case scenario planning, organizations can identify what abnormal events they could be exposed to, the impact of abnormal events on the ability to execute strategic objectives, and the damage that could be caused to reputation and viability.

More of the Continuity Central post from Robert McAllister

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10
Aug 17

Data Center Knowledge – Zero One: Can the CIO Change IT’s Bad Rep?

Ask line-of-business executives (LOBs) what IT people really do, and you might get a blank stare. Sure, they troubleshoot email and website problems, but herein lies the rub. Tech workers only seem to jump into action whenever their technology breaks. We’ve always known about this perception problem, but it’s bigger than most people think.

Here’s an interesting stat from a recent McKinsey & Company survey: 51 percent of IT respondents reported undergoing a major transformation in the past two years, yet just 36 percent of their business peers reported the same. This means a good chunk of business people probably had no idea the tech people were stressed with a big project, nor did they grasp the project’s business benefits.

More of the Data Center Knowledge article from Tom Kaneshige

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09
Aug 17

Continuity Central – To BIA or not to BIA is not the question…

Continuity Central recently conducted a survey to seek the views of business continuity professionals on whether it is feasible to omit the business impact analysis (BIA) from the BC process. Mel Gosling, FBCI, explains why he believes this is the wrong question to ask…

The Big Picture

It’s always useful to step back and see the big picture, and with the question of ‘To BIA or not to BIA?’ this bigger picture is that the BIA is an integral part the business continuity management (BCM) process specified in ISO 22301 and promoted by business continuity professional associations such as the BCI in its Good Practice Guidelines. Rather than looking closely at the detailed question, we should look at the bigger picture and ask ourselves whether or not we should use this specific BCM process at all.

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.