CIO Strategy

TheWHIR – 3 Steps to Ensure Cloud Stability in 2017

We’re reaching a point of maturity when it comes to cloud computing. Organizations are solidifying their cloud use-cases, understanding how cloud impacts their business, and are building entire IT models around the capabilities of cloud.

Cloud growth will only continue; Gartner recently said that more than $1 trillion in IT spending will, directly or indirectly, be affected by the shift to cloud during the next five years.

“Cloud-first strategies are the foundation for staying relevant in a fast-paced world,” said Ed Anderson, research vice president at Gartner. “The market for cloud services has grown to such an extent that it is now a notable percentage of total IT spending, helping to create a new generation of start-ups and ‘born in the cloud’ providers.”

Washington Post – Weather Service suffered ‘catastrophic’ outage; website stopped sending forecasts, warnings

On a day when a blizzard was pasting Maine and Northern California faced a dire flooding threat, several of the National Weather Service’s primary systems for sending out alerts to the public failed for nearly three hours.

Between 1:08 p.m. and 3:44 p.m. Eastern time Monday, products from the Weather Service stopped disseminating over the Internet, including forecasts, warnings, radar and satellite imagery, and current conditions.

Updates to the Weather Service’s public-facing website, Weather.gov, ceased publishing.

In an email to staff on Tuesday, David Michaud, the director of the Weather Service’s Office of Central Processing, said a power outage had triggered the outage and characterized the impacts as “significant”. The cause of the outage was under review, a Weather Service spokesperson said.

“[I] want to ensure you that everyone involved is working hard to avoid these outages in the future and find ways to better communicate to employees across the agency in real time when outages occur,” Michaud’s email said.

More of the Washington post article from Jason Samenow

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Digital Transformation — Comments Off
16
Feb 17

Continuity Central – Report looks at the prevalence of business-critical custom applications

At the 8th Annual Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Summit at RSA in San Francisco, Skyhigh Networks unveiled its ‘Custom Applications and IaaS Report 2017’ report.

Conducted in partnership with the CSA, the report is based on a broad survey of software development, IT administration, IT security, operations and devops professionals across the Americas, EMEA and Asa Pacific, involved in developing, deploying and securing custom applications. While respondents forecast rapid IaaS adoption, they at the same time expressed numerous unresolved concerns about the security and compliance of their custom applications in IaaS platforms.

“Custom applications are a core part of how our business operates, and moving these to the cloud provide IT an opportunity to ‘start fresh’ with the right visibility, controls and overall security, without getting in the way of business operations,” said Stephen Ward, CISO, TIAA. “Meeting our security requirements for our applications, as well as our IaaS environment, is absolutely critical to accomplishing our business goals for cloud and overall software programs.”

Some of the key findings from the survey include:

Every company is a software company. Every company has developers writing custom code to improve engagement with employees, partners and customers.

TheWHIR – Why Does It Seem Like Airline Computers Are Crashing More?

Another week, another major airline is crippled by some kind of software glitch.

If you feel as if you’re hearing about these incidents more often, you are—but not necessarily because they’re happening more frequently.

Delta Air Lines Inc. suffered an IT outage that led to widespread delays and 280 flight cancellations on Jan. 29 and 30, a problem the carrier said was caused by an electrical malfunction. A week earlier, United Continental Holdings Inc. issued a 2 1/2-hour ground stop for all its domestic flights following troubles with a communication system pilots use to receive data.

These two shutdowns were the latest in what’s been a series of computer crack-ups over the past few years, including major system blackouts that hobbled Southwest Airlines Co. as well as Delta for several days last summer—affecting tens of thousands of passengers.

SearchCloudComputing – For enterprises, multicloud strategy remains a siloed approach

Although not mentioned in this article, enterprise cloud providers like Expedient are often a key player in the multicloud mix. Enterprise clouds deliver VMware or HyperV environments that require little or no retraining for the infrastructure staff.

Enterprises need a multicloud strategy to juggle AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform, but the long-held promise of portability remains more dream than reality.

Most enterprises utilize more than one of the hyperscale cloud providers, but “multicloud” remains a partitioned approach for corporate IT.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to dominate the public cloud infrastructure market it essentially created a decade ago, but other platforms, especially Microsoft Azure, gained a foothold inside enterprises, too. As a result, companies must balance management of the disparate environments with questions of how deep to go on a single platform, all while the notion of connectivity of resources across clouds remains more theoretical than practical.

Similar to hybrid cloud before it, multicloud has an amorphous definition among IT pros as various stakeholders glom on to the latest buzzword to position themselves as relevant players. It has come to encompass everything from the use of multiple infrastructure as a service (IaaS) clouds, both public and private, to public IaaS alongside platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS).

More of the SearchCloudComputing article

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09
Feb 17

CIO Insight – Deep Insecurities: Things Just Keep Getting Worse

Ninety-three percent of companies’ security operation centers admit they’re not keeping up with the volume of threat alerts and incidents, putting them at risk.

Cyber-threats
Despite a growing focus on cyber-security—along with gobs of money and staff time thrown at the task—things just seem to get worse. According to a December 2016 report from McAfee Labs, 93 percent of organizations’ security operation centers admit that they are not keeping up with the volume of threat alerts and incidents, putting them at significant risk of moderate to severe breaches.

Altogether, 67 percent of the survey respondents (more than 400 security practitioners spanning multiple countries, industries and company sizes) reported an increase in security breaches. Yet, on average, organizations are unable to sufficiently investigate 25 percent of security alerts.

More of the CIO Insight article from Samuel Greengard

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08
Feb 17

Fast Company – The Tech Geek’s Guide To Talking To Other People At Work

That blank stare from the CMO doesn’t mean she’s an idiot. It means you need to translate your tech speak into business speak.

I was talking with the head of research and development for a major medical device company, and he was really frustrated. “Anett,” he said, “my leadership team doesn’t understand what we’re doing. We’re not just a back-office function supporting the company—we’re building our products!” He felt like his team was getting trampled on and disregarded—he just didn’t know how to get his message across.

People in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields are used to getting blank stares and being asked dumb questions when they talk about their work. But it’s not that everyone else is stupid—it’s just that you know a lot more about the technical details than they do.

In other words, it’s a communication challenge: You need some better ways to present your solutions, discoveries, or obstacles to everybody else in your organization—to translate them from tech speak into business speak. So whether you’re a recent engineering grad just entering the corporate world, or a mid-career IT manager hoping for that big promotion, here are four tips to help you explain what you do and why it matters.

More of the FastCompany article from Anett Grant

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17
Jan 17

Customer Think – The term “Digital” is simply the latest proxy for describing current unmet needs

Grow my company, and maintain profitability. This is likely the core job for any business owner and/or management team. The markets punish public companies that cannot maintain growth and/or profitability over time. Hey founders, initial growth don’t count! Everyone grows from zero.

The term “Digital” is simply the latest proxy for current unmet needs in many markets. While it’s simple, it’s also confusing. Both customers and suppliers alike have difficulty expressing what needs are in a consistent fashion; which is why we — as whole — have great difficulty achieving high rates of product launch (or solution implementation) success. The only way to address this is to, once and for all, come to a common agreement.

Terms like Digital, the Sharing Economy, etc. are simply trying to describe how certain solutions and platforms are addressing current unmet needs in the market. Products and services that are struggling are serving former unmet needs.

More of the Customer Think post from Mike Boysen

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16
Jan 17

Untitled

From the article: “The problem I see more often is that leaders don’t make decisions at all. They don’t clearly signal their intent about what matters. In short, they don’t prioritize.” Is your IT staff clear on priorities?

Every organization needs what I call a “hierarchy of purpose.” Without one, it is almost impossible to prioritize effectively.

When I first joined BNP Paribas Fortis, for example, two younger and more dynamic banks had just overtaken us. Although we had been a market leader for many years, our new products had been launched several months later than the competition — in fact, our time to market had doubled over the previous three years. Behind that problem was a deeper one: We had more than 100 large projects (each worth over 500,000 euros) under way. No one had a clear view of the status of those investments, or even the anticipated benefits. The bank was using a project management tool, but the lack of discipline in keeping it up to date made it largely fruitless. Capacity, not strategy, was determining which projects launched and when. If people were available, the project was launched. If not, it stalled or was killed.

Prioritization at a strategic and operational level is often the difference between success and failure. But many organizations do it badly.

More of the Harvard Business Review article from Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez

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11
Jan 17

IT Business Edge – Whistleblower Advises IT Pros on How to Handle Corporate Malfeasance

Michael G. Winston’s name will probably forever be linked to the Great Recession of the late 2000s, but in a good way: He’s the whistleblower who dared to take on the subprime mortgage lender Countrywide Financial Corp. So what better person to ask about blowing the whistle as an IT pro?

Now a leadership consultant and author of the book, “World-Class Performance,” Winston has become something of a folk hero in the recession’s aftermath, never shying away from speaking out on corporate malfeasance. In a recent interview, I presented a hypothetical scenario to him in which a newly hired network engineer learns that the IT organization is engaged in an effort, initiated by the CEO, to hack into the networks of the company’s competitors, and he’s expected to go along with it. What should the network engineer do?

More of the IT Business Edge article from Don Tennant

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.