Cloud Computing

CIOInsight – Why IT Must Pursue an Information Governance Plan

Most organizations can benefit from outside help on governance. Call me if you’re looking for resources.

The majority of IT executives said their organization is either implementing a formal information governance (IG) program or is planning to do so, according to a recent survey from Veritas. The resulting “State of Information Governance” report defines IG as “the activities and technologies that organizations employ to maximize the value of their information while minimizing associated risks and costs.” To support this, the research reveals that most companies are issuing formal data use policies and requiring employees to identify data that is confidential. They’re also training staffers on data storage and archiving. In addition, findings break down organizations into those which are “high performing” on IG, and those which are not. While overall adoption rates among both are strong, high performers are more likely to deploy email and file archiving, while issuing formal use policies. “Information is both the lifeblood and the bane of any business, no matter its size, industry or location,” according to the report. “Enterprises collect and analyze data from a myriad of internal and external sources to improve business efficiencies and decision-making processes.

More of the CIOInsight slideshow from Dennis McCafferty

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15
Jun 16

HBR – The Dirty Little Secret About Digitally Transforming Operations

Earlier this year, we walked the halls of the Hannover Messe, one of Europe’s largest events for industrial manufacturers. The newest robots, 3-D printing systems, and data-mining hardware and services were all there along with a host of people hyping Industry 4.0, the Internet of Things (IoT), Digital Manufacturing, and big data and advanced analytics. It seemed as though everybody from the best-known software giants to basic industrial parts providers was marketing a “latest technological breakthrough” — even if it amounted to little more than a new sensor attached to an old piece of equipment.

Amazing dreams were being sold: A black box that could be installed in your plant and would improve your competitiveness — all by itself; big data servers and algorithms that would tell you how to improve your process — with no additional engineering investment; virtual-reality glasses that would make your workforce more productive — just by putting them on.

It was all reminiscent of 19th century advertisements for cure-all patent medicines.

More of the Harvard Business Review article from Markus Hammer, Malte Hippe, Christoph Schmitz, Richard Sellschop and Ken Somers

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13
May 16

CIO Insight – How Security Laws Inhibit Information Sharing

Third-party vendors could provide compliance services to companies and ISAOs, a likely market solution given that they already have expertise and can spread the cost among many clients.

A new report finds that although there is a need for actionable threat intelligence and information-sharing worldwide, significant obstacles exist because of data privacy and protection and national security laws. The result is a chilling effect on cross-border cooperation that must be addressed. In that spirit, the report, “Information Sharing and Analysis Organizations: Putting Theory into Practice,” by Price Waterhouse Cooper, analyzes global legal hurdles to information-sharing and offers potential solutions.

More of the CIO Insight article from Karen Frenkel

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12
May 16

HBR – https://hbr.org/2016/05/the-impact-of-the-blockchain-goes-beyond-financial-services

The technology most likely to change the next decade of business is not the social web, big data, the cloud, robotics, or even artificial intelligence. It’s the blockchain, the technology behind digital currencies like Bitcoin.

Blockchain technology is complex, but the idea is simple. At its most basic, blockchain is a vast, global distributed ledger or database running on millions of devices and open to anyone, where not just information but anything of value – money, titles, deeds, music, art, scientific discoveries, intellectual property, and even votes – can be moved and stored securely and privately. On the blockchain, trust is established, not by powerful intermediaries like banks, governments and technology companies, but through mass collaboration and clever code. Blockchains ensure integrity and trust between strangers. They make it difficult to cheat.

In other words, it’s the first native digital medium for value, just as the internet was the first native digital medium for information. And this has big implications for business and the corporation.

Much of the hype around blockchains has focused on their potential to fundamentally change the financial services industry – by dropping the cost and complexity of financial transactions, making the world’s unbanked a viable new market, and improving transparency and regulation. Indeed, it is already having a big impact on that sector. However, our two-year research project, involving hundreds of interviews with blockchain experts, provides strong evidence that the blockchain could transform business, government, and society in perhaps even more profound ways.

More of the Harvard Business Review article from Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott

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11
May 16

CIO Dashboard – 3 Strategies to Decrease IT Costs and Increase Business Impact

Guest post by Suheb Siddiqui and Chetan Shetty

A veteran CIO recently said, “The last few months felt like I time traveled back to the 1980s. Business stakeholders are demanding the applications they want, designed the way they like, and at a speed dictated by their priorities.” He wasn’t talking about an AS400 based Cobol program; he was talking about custom apps written on industry standard platforms, provided by numerous Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers such as Salesforce, Oracle and ServiceNow.

Our industry has undergone numerous transitions. In the 1980s and part of the 1990s, business users were in control. They could pick their favorite “best of breed” applications, and design and customize them how they wanted. Integration and governance was expensive and difficult. Then, Y2K fueled the growth of Megasuite ERPs. Starting in the late 1990s, IT started controlling the agenda and strong governance led to cost efficiencies, albeit at the expense of user satisfaction.

Fast forward to 2016, Software as a Service (SaaS) and PaaS solutions are empowering users to be in control again. As a result, we are witnessing a growing gap between the total IT spend of an organization, which is increasing as users buy their own SaaS solutions, and the IT budget controlled by the CIO, which is under constant cost pressure. Successful CIOs have to find new strategies to bridge this growing “Digital Divide.”

CIO Insight – The Essential Requirements of a Digital CIO

Here’s another excellent Dennis McCafferty slide deck on the modern CIO.

CIOs are becoming more central to overall business strategy, and a full arsenal of soft and hard skills are needed to meet the challenge.

What’s the difference between “yesterday’s CIO” and the modern-day digital one? Digital CIOs maintain a higher profile in the corporate board room, where board members have raised their expectations of IT performance and the delivery of new, business-benefiting innovation, according to a recent survey from BT. The resulting “The BT CIO Report 2016: The Digital CIO” also indicates that, given these challenges, board members increasingly recognize that today’s CIOs must be more creative than in the past. Indeed, in assessing the “must have” qualities of digital CIOs, survey respondents were most likely to cite the need to work in a flexible manner with new business models and remaining open to new ideas/solutions, along with “soft skills” such as effectively responding to feedback and looking at situations from different perspectives. However, even with these shifting needs, CIOs still spend more time maintaining IT systems rather than looking for new solutions, but that balance appears to be reversing. “Digital transformation is under discussion at the board level, in IT and operational teams, in every organization and in every industry,” according to the report. “That’s exactly how it should be (because) the scope of what is digitally possible is uncertain

More of the CIO Insight post from Dennis McCafferty

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02
May 16

TechTarget – AWS, partners’ balancing act weighs on users, too

AWS partners are a critical part of the growing ecosystem, but the choice between third-party services and the waiting game for native tooling can create problems for users.

There’s a constant balancing act between Amazon and its AWS partners over how best to fill the gaps in its cloud platform — and that creates a set of dilemmas for customers, too.

Amazon has put considerable effort in recent years into expanding its ecosystem, with more than 2,400 AWS partners in technology and consulting. At the same time, it’s constantly churning out improvements to its cloud platform, adding hundreds of upgrades and new services every year. Those parallel efforts can create a strain as both sides try to fill the gaps. For customers, the uncertainty around the ever-changing ecosystem can mean tough decisions for their own environment.

Amazon releases the minimal viable product and iterates from there to add more features, so the challenge often becomes deciding to wait for those additions or go third-party, said Theo Kim, vice president, technical operations and security at Jobvite, Inc., a recruiting software company in San Mateo, Calif. Kim used the example of Web Application Firewall from Amazon which he said has a great price point, but Jobvite is holding out for an expected version that supports Elastic Load Balancing (ELB).

More of the TechTarget article from Trevor Jones

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28
Apr 16

Continuity Central – The benefits of moving business critical to the cloud

The key difference is the way in which cloud allows these problems to be mitigated, resolved, and avoided in future.

Core enterprise applications such as ERP are not as readily moved off-site as other applications – but they’re propelling a new wave of cloud adoption. Andres Richter explains why organizations should consider making the switch.

Modern enterprise management software has come a long way from its industrial routes in providing procurement and manufacturing functionalities. Responding to changes in the technology landscape such as mobility, big data analytics and cloud computing, the software has had no choice but to evolve. Employees now require instant information at their fingertips, wherever they are, from any device. Unsurprisingly, core business functions of modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) such as financials, operations, HR and analytics require the same, consumerized flexibility offered by a plethora of non-business critical cloud-based applications. But it’s only the CIOs committed to future proofing their IT who have spotted this opportunity and have made the move from on-premise to a cloud-only or an integrated approach.

While vendors look at ways to disrupt the market, the challenge of convincing ‘stick in the mud’ IT decision makers that business continuity can be maintained during the transition to cloud ERP and beyond remains: but we are seeing an increase. Panorama Consulting’s ERP Report 2016 sees 27 percent of businesses adopting cloud ERP, a rise from 11 percent in the previous year. In our experience, more than 20 percent of current customers at Priority Software are already in the cloud. The take-up is particularly high in industries such as digital media, professional services and business services.

Wall Street Journal – Big Firms Focus Tighter IT Spending on Cloud: J.P. Morgan Chase

Budget pressures have large firms focusing technology spending on cloud services, leaving some IT vendors behind – and Wall Street analysts are taking notice.

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., in a report released Thursday, said big companies are shifting more workloads to Microsoft Corp.’s Azure and Amazon.com’s AWS cloud services, while keeping IT budgets tight.

The accelerated move to the cloud, and in particular the rapid rise of Amazon’s AWS cloud service among large corporations, signals a “changing of the guard” in enterprise IT, suggesting that “threats to traditional, on-premise IT infrastructure vendors are serious,” the report said.

It said Microsoft still holds a commanding lead in the IT market for large businesses, but AWS, which has long been popular with smaller firms, is making significant inroads.

The findings are based on a survey of 207 CIOs with an average annual IT budget per firm of $600 million, together representing some $126 billion in enterprise IT spending every year.

Despite their size, IT budgets at these firms are set to grow this year by only 2.8%, compared to more typical annual growth rates of 3% to 4%, the report said. At the largest firms – those with annual IT budgets of more than $2 billion – spending is expected to growth by less than 1%.

Both Gartner Inc.IT +0.33% and International Data Corp. have reported similar slowdowns this year in enterprise IT spending.

TechTarget – Google cloud outage highlights more than just networking failure

Google Cloud Platform went dark this week in one of the most widespread outages to ever hit a major public cloud, but the lack of outcry illustrates one of the constant knocks on the platform.

Users in all regions lost connection to Google Compute Engine for 18 minutes shortly after 7 p.m. PT on Monday, April 11. The Google cloud outage was tied to a networking failure and resulted in a black eye for a vendor trying to shed an image that it can’t compete for enterprise customers.

Networking appears to be the Achilles’ heel for Google, as problems with that layer have been a common theme in most of its cloud outages, said Lydia Leong, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. What’s different this time is that it didn’t just affect one availability zone, but all regions.

“What’s important is customers expect multiple availability zones as reasonable protection from failure,” Leong said.

More of the TechTarget post from Trevor Jones

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.