Data Center

WSJ – Cloud, Not Tax Cuts, Drives IT Spending: Survey

Corporate information-technology budgets are expected to inch up over last year, as large firms continue to shift more workloads to the cloud, according to Morgan Stanley.

Despite recent federal tax cuts aimed at boosting corporate spending, most chief information officers say their IT spending plans haven’t changed, the bank said in a report Wednesday.

The results are based on a survey of 75 U.S. and 25 European CIOs at companies in a range of industries, most with more than $1 billion in annual revenue. The survey was conducted online and by phone between February and March.

More of the Wall Street Journal article from Angus Loten

Bi-Modal IT / CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Data Center / Digital Transformation / IaaS / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy / Shadow IT / Technical Debt — Comments Off
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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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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26
Oct 17

Continuity Central – Key trends in business continuity invocations

ach year Sungard AS publishes a summary of its business continuity service invocations, providing useful insights into incident trends. Here Daren Howell presents four key trends from the most recent data.

It’s easy to take for granted or forget the extent to which our lives now rely upon technology that is always on. Every now and again, however, something happens to remind us of this reliance and it’s often an uncomfortable situation for everyone involved. As IT environments become increasingly complex, unfortunately these types of incidents are only going to increase.

Over the past few years, there has been a steady uptick in the number of instances that businesses have required recovery services, reversing what was a long-established downward trend. Businesses are facing an evolving threat landscape, with the increase in malicious cyber attacks, alongside changing working habits that have seen more flexible approaches to the workplace environment and the infiltration of different and more complex technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things. It’s perhaps, therefore, unsurprising that the need for recovery support is on the rise, however it is not always for the reasons you would expect.

TechTarget – More users flub evals of colocation data center providers

Colocation data center buyers are needlessly captivated by impressive features at data centers that distract them from important decision-making information.

If enterprises want to make the right colocation decisions, they’ve got to ask better questions.

IT pros in search of a colocation data center for their IT gear today know what’s most important to them: price, physical security and uptime. But increasingly, enterprises ask vague, open-ended questions instead of pointed relevant questions to evaluate and choose a colocation data center provider.

Comparison of colocation data center capabilities is a boring problem solved with a simple recipe: Take the time to research and ask the most appropriate questions, said Peter Kraatz, the national portfolio director of consulting services at Datalink Corp., a data center services provider in Eden Prairie, Minn.

More of the TechTarget article from Robert Gates

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29
Sep 17

Continuity Central – DNS attacks an increasing problem for public and education sector around the world

Councils, schools and government offices were among global public sector and education organizations hit badly by DNS attacks last year – with nearly half reporting dealing with the issue cost them hundreds of thousands of pounds.

One in five (19 percent) of public sector sites and 11 percent of education bodies affected by DNS attacks say sensitive information was stolen. A fifth (20 percent) of public sector and 12 percent of educational victims also think intellectual property data was lost, while 10 percent of schools and colleges affected say they needed to take more than one day to recover.

This is in the context of yearly average costs of DNS security breaches to be now running at £1.7m ($2.2m) for organizations globally, with malware (35 percent), DDoS (32 percent), Cache Poisoning (23 percent), DNS Tunnelling (22 percent) and Zero-Day Exploits (19 percent) as the main threats.

CIO Insight – Why IT Architectural Plans Often Get Derailed

The majority of organizations know that they need to do a better job of planning for IT infrastructure, software development, data needs and cyber-security. But surprisingly few of them actually take part in long-term, tech-focused architectural planning, according to a recent survey from CompTIA. The accompanying report, “Planning a Modern IT Architecture,” indicates that most companies assign these efforts on a shorter-term, year-to-year or project-to-project basis. Given the increased significance of digital transformation, it remains critical to pursue broad, comprehensive strategies through close collaboration with business departments. But, to do so, CIOs and their tech teams will have to overcome obstacles in the form of budget shortfalls and a failure to gain buy-in throughout the company.

More of the CIO Insight slideshow from Dennis McCafferty

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18
Sep 17

TheWHIR – Experts Dispute VC’s Forecast that Caused Data Center Stocks to Slump

The stocks of all seven US data center REITs (there are now six, following a merger that closed Thursday) slid down simultaneously this week, after a well-known venture capitalist and hedge-fund owner said at an investor conference that advances in processor technology will eventually lead to the demise of the data center provider industry.

But industry insiders say his views are overly simplistic, and that history has shown that advances in computing technology only create more hunger for data center capacity, not less.

Since server chips are getting smaller and more powerful than ever, companies in the future will not need anywhere near the amount of data center space they need today, Chamath Palihapitiya, founder and CEO of the VC firm Social Capital, who last year also launched a hedge fund, said Tuesday afternoon, according to Seeking Alpha, which cited Bloomberg as the source:

More of TheWHIR post from Yevgeniy Sverdlik

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28
Jul 17

The Register – Healthcare dev fined $155 MEEELLION for lying about compliance

A health records software company will have to pay $155m to the US government to settle accusations it was lying about the data protection its products offered.

The Department of Justice said that eClinicalWorks (eCW), a Massachusetts-based software company specializing in electronic health records (EHR) management, lied to government regulators when applying to be certified for use by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

According to the DoJ, eCW and its executives lied to the HHS about the data protections its products use. At one point, it is alleged that the company configured the software specially to beat testing tools and trick the HHS into believing the products were far more robust and secure than they actually were.

More of The Register article from Shaun Nichols

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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

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.