Cloud infrastructure

Business continuity / CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Disaster Recovery — Comments Off on Continuity Central – Crisis preparedness and its impact on shareholder value
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

Bi-Modal IT / CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Digital Transformation / IaaS / IT Strategy / Uncategorized — Comments Off on IT Business Edge – Clouds Vie for Critical Workloads
06
Sep 17

IT Business Edge – Clouds Vie for Critical Workloads

Editors note: Like the Skytap illustration in the article, Expedient clients are using public and private cloud services RIGHT NOW to improve application performance, reduce maintenance workloads, and improve uptime. These organizations don’t have the luxury of waiting for their development teams or primary software vendors to rewrite their mission critical apps from the ground up.

It seems that cloud providers are no longer fooling around when it comes to getting enterprise workloads. With new migration packages and services optimized for mission-critical data and applications, CSPs large and small are eager for your business.

The question for most enterprises, however, is whether to stick with the hyperscale providers like Amazon and Microsoft, or go with a not-so-large firm that may have a bit more flexibility when it comes to matching infrastructure with customized user needs.

Skytap, for one, is hoping that the one-size-fits-all approach will not be enough for most enterprises as they embrace crucial service offerings like Big Data and the IoT. CEO Thor Culverhouse argues that the cloud giants are overlooking key market segments like the legions of mission-critical apps that are stuck on legacy systems but will have to move to hybrid infrastructure in order to keep up with the speed of business activity. His plan is to offer specialized infrastructure optimized for the 75 percent of the enterprise workload that is not likely to become cloud-native any time soon.

More of the IT Business Edge article from Arthur Cole

Bi-Modal IT / CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off on CIO Insight – Two-Speed IT: Juggling Competing Agendas (Part 1)
03
Aug 17

CIO Insight – Two-Speed IT: Juggling Competing Agendas (Part 1)

How can IT leaders juggle seemingly competing agendas: to meet the business’ demands for increased innovation, while cutting costs and slashing budgets?

With the ever-increasing interest in technology solutions, IT’s stakeholders are giving them two competing demands:
1. Produce new innovative, strategic technology-based capabilities.
2. Do so with reduced resources.

How can IT leaders step up to the plate and juggle these seemingly competing agendas: to meet the business’ demands for increased innovation, including new digital systems and services, all while cutting costs and slashing budgets?

Unleash Your DevOps Strategy by Synchronizing Application and Database Changes Register
One popular solution has emerged within IT thought leadership. Often called “two-speed IT,” this idea proposes that the IT organization does not attempt to resolve the tension between these two ideas. Instead, IT lumps all of its technology into one of two broad buckets: operational technology and innovative technology. Do this, and operations won’t slow down innovation, and expensive innovation investments won’t inflate operations’ budgets.

More of the CIO Insight post from Lee Reese

Business continuity / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Data Center / Disaster Recovery / IT Governance / IT Strategy — Comments Off on SearchDataCenter – Distributed data centers boost resiliency, but IT hurdles remain
27
Jul 17

SearchDataCenter – Distributed data centers boost resiliency, but IT hurdles remain

Distributed data center architectures increase IT resiliency compared to traditional single-site models, with networking, data integrity and other factors all playing critical roles.

Architectures that span distributed data centers can reduce the risk of outages, but enterprises still must take necessary steps to ensure IT resiliency.

Major data center outages continue to affect organizations and users worldwide, most recently and prominently at Verizon, Amazon Web Services, Delta and United Airlines. Whether it’s an airline or cloud provider that suffers a technical breakdown, its bottom line and reputation can suffer.

More of the SearchDataCenter article from Tim Culverhouse

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / IT Strategy — Comments Off on ZDNet – Overspending in the cloud: lessons learned
26
Jul 17

ZDNet – Overspending in the cloud: lessons learned

One of the reasons virtualization (the precursor to cloud computing) gained popularity in the early 2000s is that companies had too many servers running at low utilization. The prevailing wisdom was that every box needed a backup and under-utilization was better than maxing out compute capacity and risking overload.

The vast amounts of energy and money wasted on maintaining all this hardware finally led businesses to datacenter consolidation via virtual machines, and those virtual machines began migrating off-premises to various clouds.

The problem is, old habits die hard. And the same kinds of server sprawl that plagued physical datacenters 15 years ago are now appearing in cloud deployments, too.

More of the ZDNet article from Michael Steinhart

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Digital Transformation / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off on HBR – The Board Directors You Need for a Digital Transformation
20
Jul 17

HBR – The Board Directors You Need for a Digital Transformation

When the term digital transformation was first bandied about by consultants and business publications, its implications were more about keeping up and catching up than true transformation. Additionally, at first it was only applied to large, traditional organizations struggling, or experimenting, in an increasingly digital economy. But true digital transformation requires so much more. As evidenced by the recent Amazon acquisition of Whole Foods, we’re living in a new world.

Early transformation efforts were focused on initiatives: e-commerce, sensors/internet of things, applications, client and customer experience, and so on. Increasingly, our clients are coming to us as they realize that in order for these disparate initiatives to thrive, they need to undergo an end-to-end transformation, the success of which demands dramatic operational, structural, and cultural shifts.

More of the HBR post from Tuck Rickards and Rhys Grossman

Azure Stack / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure — Comments Off on Technative – Why Microsoft’s Azure Stack is a game changer for hybrid IT
18
Jul 17

Technative – Why Microsoft’s Azure Stack is a game changer for hybrid IT

Could Microsoft’s not-so secret weapon get the edge on AWS?

The promise of the cloud is based on offloading processing and other data management tasks to offsite locations, but businesses of all sizes are gradually coming to realise that they’re better off running certain applications internally.

Microsoft are hoping Azure Stack will bridge this gap, giving Azure users the ability to run Azure consistent services in their own data centers. “Azure Stack will be a game changer in terms of how we run our data centres” predicts Mark Skelton, Head of Consultancy at OCSL, a Microsoft-friendly IT service provider. He adds:

It effectively creates Nirvana; one place to code, one place to develop and one platform to build upon.

Here are a few reasons why Azure Stack is in huge demand before it’s release.

More of the Technative post

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / IT Governance / IT Strategy — Comments Off on IT Business Edge – Multi-Cloud Software: Trading One Dependency for Another?
17
Jul 17

IT Business Edge – Multi-Cloud Software: Trading One Dependency for Another?

Having a multi-cloud strategy these days is like having a multi-server strategy in ages past: Why trust your workloads to a single point of failure when you can move them about at will?

But while distributing resources over multiple points fosters redundancy and eliminates vendor lock-in on one level, the enterprise should be aware that this invariable pushes these same risks to another.

It’s no surprise that upwards of 85 percent of organizations have implemented a multi-cloud strategy by now, says Datacenter Journal’s Kevin Liebl. Following major outages at AWS and Azure earlier this year, the vulnerabilities of placing all data in one basket have become clear. Using multiple clouds provides clear advantages for disaster recovery, data migration, workload optimization, and a host of other functions.

More of the IT Business Edge post from Arthur Cole

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off on Arthur Cole – When the Cloud Becomes Just Normal Infrastructure
12
Jul 17

Arthur Cole – When the Cloud Becomes Just Normal Infrastructure

Strange as it may seem, the cloud only holds about a fifth of the total enterprise workload, which means there is still time for the enterprise to suddenly decide that the risks are not worth the rewards and start pulling data and applications back to legacy infrastructure.

Unlikely as this is, it nonetheless points out the fact that there are still many unknowns when it comes to the cloud, particularly its ability to provide the lion’s share of data infrastructure in ways that are both cheaper and more amenable to enterprise objectives.

According to Morgan Stanley’s Brian Nowak, the cloud is nearing an inflection point at which it should start to show accelerated growth into the next decade.

More of the IT Business Edge post from Arthur Cole

CIO Strategy / Cloud infrastructure / Internet of Things / IT Governance / IT Strategy — Comments Off on IT Business Edge – Over 70 Percent of IoT Efforts Are Failing: The Fix Seems Surprisingly Easy
05
Jul 17

IT Business Edge – Over 70 Percent of IoT Efforts Are Failing: The Fix Seems Surprisingly Easy

Cisco is generally credited with driving the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT), even though it was Carnegie Mellon back in 1982 that first conceptualized the idea. I’m still at Cisco’s big analyst event this week and was fascinated by a survey shared on stage. Apparently, 74 percent of the survey’s respondents have indicated that their IoT efforts have been going really badly, either not finishing or not finishing within expectations. In addition, these same folks are indicating that about half their time is spent on troubleshooting problems. Cisco connects the latter to complexity. Given that there really is nothing as complex as a typical IoT effort, I see the two stats as related and suggest that IoT efforts are poorly planned, which is why they aren’t completing as expected and likely adding to the complexity problems overwhelming IT organizations.

Now, Cisco is positioning its Network Intuitive efforts at this problem and certainly massive automation can reduce the amount of work, particularly with regard to often repetitive troubleshooting efforts. However, with the IoT in particular, really understanding the problem you are trying to solve and simplifying the effort at the front end would likely have an even bigger initial positive impact.

More of the IT Business Edge article from Rob Enderle

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