CIO Strategy

CloudExpo blog – Cloud and Shadow IT – An Inevitable Pairing?

You can’t seem to have a conversation about cloud technology and its impact on the business without the topic of Shadow IT coming up. The two concepts at times seem so tightly intertwined, one would think there is a certain inevitability, almost a causal linkage between them. Shadow IT tends to be an emotional topic for many, dividing people into one of two camps. One camp tends to see Shadow IT as a great evil putting companies, their data and systems at risk by implementing solutions without oversight or governance. Another camp sees Shadow IT as the great innovators that are helping the company succeed by allowing the business to bypass a slow and stagnant IT organization. Does going to the cloud inherently mean there will be Shadow IT? If it does, is that necessarily a bad or good thing?

More of the CloudExpo blog post by Ed Featherston

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
21
Jan 16

Formtek – Cloud Computing: While Security Remains Biggest Concern, Security Tops List as Reason to Implement Cloud

A new study on cloud computing use by small and medium sized companies from Exact and Pb7 Research finds two surprising results.

The first has to do with security. Typically security is cited as the number one concern for why businesses avoid the cloud; but surprisingly, the Exact report found that security is also the number one reason cited by cloud adopters for choosing the cloud. It seems like some sort of love/hate relationship. The second interesting result is that, in general, businesses using the cloud are better off financially compared to peer businesses that aren’t using the cloud.

More of the Formtek post from Dick Weisinger

CIO Strategy / Data Center / IT Strategy — Comments Off
20
Jan 16

Data Center Knowledge – Data Centers as a Competitive Tool in Today’s Business Landscape

Twenty years ago, data centers were looked at through a Wizard of Oz tinted lens. They were a big, powerful and expensive means for data storage, but few business stakeholders outside the IT department really understood their impact – or knew what was going on behind the curtain. The digital revolution flipped this reality on its head. Today, data centers are no longer bulky cost centers, but drivers of business, enabling the data processing and availability modern enterprises need to maintain continuity and gain competitive advantage.

The Importance of Data

Data is everywhere: it is created by nearly everything – tollbooths, online transactions, instant messaging, telephone calls – and it has become earth’s most abundant digital resource. In fact, every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. As a result, data has transformed into businesses’ greatest asset and competitive differentiator.

More of the Data Center Knowledge post from Russell Senesac

CIO Strategy / Disaster Recovery — Comments Off
14
Jan 16

Continuity Central – More than half of organizations have had data-related incidents in the past 12 months: AIIM report

51 percent of organizations have had data-related incidents in the past 12 months, including 16 percent suffering a data breach, according to new AIIM research.

The new report, ‘Information Governance – too important for humans’, revealed that 45 percent of respondents feel a lack of information governance leaves their organization wide open to litigation and data protection risks. Furthermore, 41 percent of respondents admit that their email management is ‘chaotic’ and 22 percent are reporting a negative financial impact from cases around electronic records.

“The sheer volume of data in business is a major asset for most organizations,” said Doug Miles, chief analyst, AIIM. “But without effective information governance, that data also carries a potentially huge risk, both in terms of reputation and the bottom line. Lots of organizations are talking about information governance, but far less are actually doing it properly – that has to change in 2016.”

The severity and frequency of data incidents reported in the research has meant that information governance has never had more interest in it. For 28 percent of organizations, information governance is very high on the senior management agenda and more than half (53 percent) have recently launched new information governance initiatives.

The Register – IT infrastructure on demand? Yeah right, say devs

IT operations remain completely out of touch with the needs of developers, with CIOs duped into believing a dusting of VMware magic will allow them to construct the sort of whitebox data factories that power the likes of Google, sandbox vendor QualiSystems has declared.

The vendor’s CTO Joan Wrabetz took aim at the industry’s collective self-delusion while unveiling the results of a survey of end-users at this year’s US and European VMworld events, which she said showed IT operations were utterly out of touch with what developers, users and businesses actually need.

The survey found that three-quarters of organisations take at least eight hours to deliver infrastructure to end users, while 43 per cent take more than a week. In 17 per cent of cases, developers can be twiddling their thumbs for more than a month while they wait for ops to carve out some infrastructure for that latest must have release.

Of course, the easy answer is to just spin it all out to the cloud. Except that the respondees reckon it is private cloud where applications are heading. Of the bods taking the survey, 30 per cent of application workloads are running in private cloud, a figure that is expected to grow to 40 per cent over the next two years.

SwitchScribe – Data Center Trends – Data Center Hugging, it’s got to Stop!

SwitchScribe – I admit I pick and choose the things I agree with from Gartner. However, this year I definitely agreed with their statement “Supply rather than ownership should drive strategy in the Data Center”

Supply

Data Center capacity, even in the most modular of designs takes months to bring on line if you’re building your own. In most cases you’re looking at a year or longer from project definition to opening a building. In the parlance of modern IT six months is not agile let alone a year. Data Center capacity needs to be considered in the whole; how much do I need to own vs how much should I contract or lease from suppliers? There are several realities here ; 1) there is no longer a need to “own” a physical data center facility and 2) we must view data center capacity through the same lens that we view manufacturing and business process improvement.

Assumptions about the need to own:

We’re special and have needs that can’t be addressed in either the cloud or a colocation facility.

We can do it more cost effectively than a colocation supplier

WSJ’s CIO Journal – Mistakes Were Made: CIOs Share The Worst Tech Excuses They’ve Heard

Intel Corp. Chief Information Officer Kim Stevenson faces complex enterprise technology issues on a daily basis. But perhaps none was as baffling as the staffer who reported a PC bursting into flames.

“After an investigation, it was clear the user had thrown the PC into the fireplace,” says Ms. Stevenson, who ranks the employee’s explanation for turning in a charred computer among the worst excuses she’s ever heard for a technology failure. Her tip for anyone planning to throw a work-issued device into a fireplace: “You need to clean of the ashes off before you hand it over to the PC service center.”

As 2015 winds down, we asked CIOs in a range of industries to share some of the lousy excuses they heard for tech failures, missed deadlines and other IT bloopers – from apps with agonizingly slow processing times, to entire systems going dark.

Bill Bradley, CIO of CenturyLink Inc., says often the most unbelievable or unacceptable excuses are those that blame the customer. “Accountability demands that IT delivers solutions without excuses,” he says.

Data Center Knowledge – Getting to the True Data Center Cost

Will it be cheaper to run a particular application in the cloud than keeping it in the corporate data center? Would a colo be cheaper? Which servers in the data center are running at low utilization? Are there servers that have been forgotten about by the data center manager? Does it make sense to replace old servers with new ones? If it does, which ones would be best for my specific applications?

Those are examples of the essential questions every data center manager should be asking themselves and their team every day if they aren’t already. Together, they can be distilled down to a single ever-relevant question: How much does it cost to run an application?

Answering it is incredibly complex, which is the reason startups like TSO Logic, Romonet, or Coolan, among others, have sprung up in recent years. If you answer it correctly, the pay-off can be substantial, because almost all data centers are not running as efficiently as they can, and there’s always room for optimization and savings.

Continuity Central – Shadow IT is a cultural problem and shutting it down is now impossible warns SecureEnvoy

Shadow IT – where IT is built and used inside businesses without explicit organizational approval – is becoming increasingly widespread. In fact, Gartner claims that Shadow IT regularly surpasses 30 percent of a company’s IT spend and is the top concern for CIOs in 2016 due to its ability to lead to compliance failures and business risks.

The security issue is unfortunately not only a critical one but a cultural one. When an employee casually uses an application such as Dropbox to transfer files there is likely to be little thought about the risk of potentially sensitive data – whether that is customer contact details, financial information or intellectual property – falling into the wrong hands.

VMware – The Business Case for Cloud Automation

Automating private cloud infrastructure management helps improve the efficiency of cloud operations and deliver big CapEx and OpEx savings. The following infographic puts some numbers on the return on investment for cloud automation technology, derived from a wide range of customer case studies.

Check out the Infographic for some eye opening statistics.

More of the CIO Vantage post from VMware

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.