Cloud infrastructure

Infoworld – SaaS-ifying your enterprise application? A quick-and-dirty guide

Many enterprises see a need to SaaS-enable applications, making them into a product for customers and partners. But most have no clue about what to do.

Lots of people called it SaaS-enablement, some call it SaaS-ification of software. Whatever you call it, more and more enterprises are looking to turn some enterprise application into a SaaS cloud application.

There are several reasons to SaaS-enable an internal application. Enterprises need to expose a software system to their partners and/or customers to better automate the business. Or, they are looking to monetize applications they view as having value to other companies.

Whatever the reasons, there are a few things to consider first. I call this the SaaS-ification reality check:

More of the Infoworld article from David Linthicum

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21
Feb 18

CIO.com – The truth about SaaS vendor management

everal years ago, Alan Hackney, former CIO of John Hancock and now Health Information Technology Officer for the State of Connecticut, told me that “CIOs were becoming the orchestrator of business services versus the builder of operational business services. Building stuff”, he said, “is now table stakes. Cloud and loosely oriented partnerships is bringing vendor management to the forefront.”

Given this, I wanted to hear from the CIOs in the #CIOChat about their perspectives on SaaS and SaaS vendor management. These CIOs were clear with me that they are moving their organizations to SaaS and public cloud slowly but surely. In general, they said there will be less on premise and more SaaS and public cloud. Most believe in the next three years that on premises will no longer dominant computing workloads.

More of the CIO.com article from Myles F. Suer

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15
Feb 18

InformationWeek – For IT in 2018, Think Change and Change Again

Even with the ongoing new developments in core technologies, IT organizations are facing dramatic changes in how they work in 2018 as they embrace new business concepts and strategies.

We just might be at a point where IT professionals — from the overworked help desk staffer up to the CIO in the fancy office — long for the good old days. You remember those days, when technology, that “T” in IT, ruled the day.

That was when the to-do list was filled with tasks such as configuring hardware, testing compatibility of software packages, upgrading databases, responding to “stupid user” complaints, and fighting to keep hackers out of a system. Even the move to the cloud often was a bits and bytes and connections challenge. Today, a whole new layer of IT complexity has landed on top of all those pure tech issues.

More of the Information Week article from James M. Connolly

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14
Feb 18

TechRepublic – How cloud computing surveys grossly underreport actual business adoption

According to RightScale’s 2018 State of the Cloud report, 66% of enterprises expect to spend at least 20% more on cloud this year. Ironically, those same expectations are almost certainly wildly off, as a whopping 97% admit to not being able to manage cloud costs. In other words, cloud is an even bigger deal than CIOs believe, because their developers keep pushing workloads into cloud providers.

Sending money to the clouds
It’s hard to turn off the flow of funds to the cloud—it’s simply too convenient. Polling close to 1,000 people, RightScale’s survey revealed that more than 25% of enterprises are now spending $6 million or more each year, with plans to grow that spending considerably in 2018:

More of the TechRepublic article from Matt Asay

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02
Feb 18

CIO.com – The 12 biggest issues IT faces today

When CIOs aren’t being overwhelmed by data, they’re wondering who’s securing it. They’re dealing with the pressure of cutting costs while trying to stay nimble as they face difficulties with contractors and the challenges of moving data and services to the cloud. All the while, new threats emerge that require an evolving response.

From finding qualified IT pros to keeping them from jumping ship, a range of sticky technology and personnel issues are giving IT pros cold sweats.

With a host of new concerns in 2018 — and old standbys — where should CIOs be most focused? We’ve gathered insights from experts, the C-suite, recruiters, and those in the trenches to identify today’s top-of-mind concerns and how to deal with them.

More of the CIO.com article from Paul Heltzel

Business continuity / Cloud infrastructure / Disaster Recovery / IT Strategy — Comments Off
27
Dec 17

Continuity Central – A significant number of organizations do not know how much of their IT budget is being spent on IT resilience

Research from Databarracks, has revealed that 30 percent of organizations do not know how much of their IT budget is being spent on disaster recovery and backup services. This follows wider industry research finding that firms in Europe and North America spend seven percent of their IT budget on backup and disaster recovery.

Data from Databarracks’ annual Data Health Check survey revealed a number of insights into organizational attitudes and approaches towards IT resiliency, including:

25 percent do not know what percentage of their IT budget should be allocated for disaster recovery and business continuity;
Only 43 percent of organizations have tested their disaster recovery processes over the past 12 months;
29 percent of respondents answered “less than £1,000” when asked ‘how much annually does your organization spend on backup/DR solutions’.
Peter Groucutt, managing director of Databarracks comments: “It’s often difficult for IT to secure investment for resiliency because it’s not seen as a particularly dynamic or sexy investment that will add value like a new customer-facing system. But we all know we need to invest in resilience to ensure our continued operation.”

IT Business Edge – Shifting the Focus from Infrastructure to Architecture

Technology will always play a central role in the enterprise data environment, but going forward the true challenge will not be finding and implementing the most cutting-edge systems but architecting available technologies in ways that support a successful business model.

This focus on architecture is in stark contrast to just a few years ago when the entire concept was on the wane. As KPMG noted in its latest study, Enterprise Architecture (EA) has become one of the most in-demand skillsets of the year, up 26 percent compared to the year earlier, edging out functions like business process management and data analytics. While part of this surge in interest can be attributed to the growing complexity of the IT landscape, equally important is the way in which EA has evolved from simply wiring up infrastructure to integrating technology, applications, services and people under a common operational framework.

More of the IT Business Edge post from Arthur Cole

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01
Dec 17

CIO.com – Establishing business architecture standards: an industry imperative

Standards, based on the collective experiences of communities of practice, form the basis for advancing the maturity of a given discipline. As that discipline matures and the community of practice grows, standards serve as a critical foundation for enabling scalability and ensuring the integrity of the results.

Standards form the fundamental building blocks for a wide variety of fields. Accountants, manufacturers, engineers, software developers and a range of other professionals rely on standards. The constraints that standards may impose on some individuals are easily offset by the numerous advantages that they provide to consumers and practitioners. The same benefits of standardization also apply to the discipline of business architecture.

Benefits of standards adoption

When considering the impact of standards, we can look at the railway industry. Consider the discrepancies in railway track gauge size in the early 1800s. There were over a dozen gauge sizes used across the U.S.

More of the CIO.com post from Daniel Lambert

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30
Nov 17

Tech Pro Research – CIO roadmap: What’s next for hybrid cloud?

Companies that have implemented hybrid cloud strategies are seeing the benefits, from better ROI to faster digital transformation. But now they must look ahead to new stages of hybrid cloud execution.

In March 2016, IBM surveyed 500 IT decision makers who have implemented hybrid strategies. 26% of the respondents said that they are “gaining competitive advantage through hybrid cloud and are managing their environment in an integrated, comprehensive fashion for high visibility and control.” Of these organizations, 90% reported greater ROI, and 85% reported that a hybrid approach to cloud was “accelerating digital transformation in their organization.”

Hybrid cloud is attractive because it offers companies a middle ground between going “full cloud” and being entirely on premises. It saves money because companies can offload many of their non-mission critical systems to the cloud and avoid investing in new hardware, software, and infrastructure. A hybrid cloud strategy also gives companies the flexibility to maintain their own in-house systems under their own IT staff and governance standards, and even to turn some of these systems into private cloud environments that they themselves create and maintain.

More of the Tech Pro Research post from Mary Schacklett

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28
Nov 17

ZDNet – Cloud computing: How to build a business case

Like any other major tech project, moving workloads into the cloud needs a solid business case — one that takes into account all the likely costs and benefits — before a company can decide whether it’s the correct move.

Cloud migration may be a tougher proposition than a standard IT project because companies have to consider a wider variety of issues — like what to do with all those servers, or even entire data centers, that may be made redundant by the move.

The business case should calculate the costs of migrating to the cloud — which include the cost of moving systems over, as well as the cost of running services in the cloud after migration — and then compare them to the costs of keeping systems in-house.

More of the ZDNet post from Steve Ranger

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.