You live it. You breathe it. But do you actually like technology? Yes, apparently you do. At least that’s the impression cast by a new survey from The Harris Poll. While you may spend your entire day immersed in pursuits of cloud, mobility, data analytics and other IT innovations, the research provides a welcome opportunity to take a step back and assess how you truly feel about the impact of it all upon society. And to add comparative value, the survey contrasts the responses of CIOs and other tech leaders to sentiments of the general U.S. population. Certainly, there are differences of opinion. But on topics such as tech’s overall impact on our lives and its capacity to spark innovation and creativity, you’ll be happy to see that perspectives are fairly positive overall.
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May 14
WSJ – Disparate Sourcing Strategies Confound Analytics Efforts
Disparate Sourcing Strategies Confound Analytics Efforts
Many companies that sourced back office capabilities like IT, finance, and HR in silos are now having a hard time consolidating their data to perform analytics.
Over the last decade, many large companies pursued various models for sourcing low-cost or scarce labor for back office functions. They sent work offshore, whether to third-party providers or company-owned “captive centers.” They outsourced to vendors who performed work on site. And they set up new corporate offices in the U.S. to handle activities like billing, claims processing, or IT. Often, each back office function pursued its own strategy independently.
Now some of these companies are beginning to realize their piecemeal approach to sourcing no longer adequately serves the business. “CEOs are wondering, ‘Why do we have a finance center run by a third party in Mumbai and a captive center for HR in nearby Pune?’” says Marc Mancher, a principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP and the U.S. national leader for its outsourcing advisory services practice. “They want to see a cohesive strategy that achieves the company’s collective goals, rather than the individual goals of IT, finance, or HR.”
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May 14
Arthur Cole – Rise of the Mega Data Center?
It seems the more the enterprise becomes steeped in cloud computing, the more we hear of the end of local infrastructure in favor of utility-style “mega-data centers.” This would constitute a very dramatic change to a long-standing industry that, despite its ups and downs, has functioned primarily as an owned-and-operated resource for many decades.
So naturally, this begs the question: Is this real? And if so, how should the enterprise prepare for the migration?
Earlier this week, I highlighted a recent post from Wikibon CTO David Floyer touting the need for software-defined infrastructure in the development of these mega centers. Floyer’s contention is that “megaDs” are not merely an option for the enterprise, but the inevitable future, in that they will take over virtually all processing, storage and other data functions across the entire data ecosystem.
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Apr 14
CIOInsight slideshow – The Evolving Role of the IT Organization
While most IT organizations aspire to play a strategic role when it comes to consulting with the business, there may come a day when that is its only primary function. A new survey of 1,300 senior IT leaders conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of CA Technologies makes it clear that the role of the IT organization is transforming, but there’s not much consensus about the rate at which that transformation is occurring. CIOs, for example, believe they are exercising more control over that transformation than the rest of their IT colleagues.
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Apr 14
SwitchScribe – The Biggest Impact on IT Firefighting & Business Agility – Data Centers
Protection & Value
Is it reasonable to assume that if you’re buying a safe for all our valuables that you’d buy the one that is the best combination of security and cost. This combination of security and cost would be driven by your budget and the value (intrinsic or sentimental) of your precious items. I would guess that the same principle of budget vs. value would apply to protecting your IT environments.
So many places to look, so many holes to patch
The normal enterprise IT environment is filled with hundreds of applications. In most cases each of these applications is supported by unique design at the hardware and software level, if not also at the network layer. The fact that there is so much uniqueness about our IT environments means we expend inordinate amounts of time dealing with common problems in 100 unique ways. Maintaining these environments has become the bane of enterprise IT groups. By now, we’ve all heard the story of how keeping the lights on comprises 70-80% of the IT budget leaving only a small amount for much needed innovation.
Keeping the lights on has several meanings, including the mundane but critical “general maintenance and support” of each environment. However, keeping the lights on could also mean avoiding outages. Generically speaking, all of us in IT attempt to build and maintain environments with the highest possible availability (within budget and available resources). The problem is that we’re often spending too much time fighting fires of “maintenance & support” and not enough time solving the underlying issues that cause many of the fires or in this case cause many of the outages (same as a fire only worse). Where should IT focus its attention relative to avoiding outages and or reducing the number of fires?
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Apr 14
SearchDataCenter – Converged solutions are simply not simple
I’ve been thinking a lot about two areas of IT: complexity and convergence, which have a lot to do with each other.
Collectively, we operate some very complicated infrastructures, which make many aspects of IT difficult. With a massive funding round for Nutanix, the integration of Whiptail into Cisco as UCS Invicta, and VMware’s release of VSAN, we are seeing a lot of convergence happening. Normally siloed areas of IT are being forcibly integrated.
Our data centers are piles of kludges
We don’t start out with complicated systems. The first system designs we do to solve a problem are concise, simple and easy to implement.
Problems tend to arise during the implementation process. Sometimes it’s a missed requirement–somebody didn’t talk to everyone or the right people. Sometimes it’s an assumption, perhaps that the management interface on your Fibre Channel switch could do gigabit speeds, but it’s actually only 10/100. At any rate, you need a fix, and that fix makes a mess of your clean design.
Gradually we add things to a nice design to handle new business requirements. We replace aging or failed components with new parts, but those new parts are never the same as the old ones. We come up with numerous “easy fixes” for problems and they stack up, kludge upon kludge upon kludge, until all that’s left of the original, simple system design is the Visio diagram from years before.
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Apr 14
Arthur Cole – The Long and the Short of the Enterprise Cloud
The cloud is the latest juggernaut to sweep the enterprise IT industry, and if you ask most experts, the expectation is that the entire data universe will one day reside on distributed virtual architecture.
At the moment, however, the vision has not been completely sold to the people who build and maintain enterprise corporate environments.
According to new data from 451 Research at the behest of Microsoft, more than 45 percent of IT executives consider their organizations to be beyond the pilot phase of cloud computing, with at least half of that group saying they are “heavy” cloud users. However, only 6 percent have labeled the cloud as the default platform for new applications, while only 18 percent turn to the cloud regularly for new projects. All of this suggests that while the enterprise has embraced the cloud with open arms, the vast majority are using it for low-value or non-critical functions – hardly the new data paradigm that has been touted so far.
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Apr 14
GigaOM – RIP, the server. It’s time to breathe the air of cloud connection
Do you agree?
Sometimes, it’s hard to tell when a novelty becomes a trend or a trend becomes the new normal. This is not one of those times. The era of the on-premise server is clearly behind us, with the cusp of change literally on our calendars.
In just the past week, we’ve seen significant server-shedding events and announcements from Google, Box and Amazon Web Services. Even Microsoft finally seems to get it: enabling people to work from anywhere is more important than keeping them leashed to a platform going nowhere.
This is no longer just a matter of doing things a little more cheaply, or a little less painfully, by doing them in the cloud. It’s bigger than that. Today, running your business on private servers is on the same level of odd behavior as carrying scuba tanks to provide a private air supply. Does it give you more control of exactly what you breathe? Certainly, but can you make a business case for all that excess weight? Going forward, the notion of owning your own server farm is looking equally eccentric.
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Apr 14
CIO.com – How CIOs Prepare for the Worst
Three CIOs discuss how a successful business continuity plan requires prioritization, awareness and testing
Prioritize What You Protect
Michael Rosello, SVP & CIO, Alliance Data: To really assess the effectiveness of a business continuity and disaster recovery plan, you’d need to invoke it, but you’d never want to do that. We’ve spent a lot of time over the past five years crafting every aspect of our plan–from making the process, methodology and technology investments that support business continuity to testing it in mock exercises.
As a mid-market company, we have established many partnerships, and our partners have their own business continuity and disaster recovery processes, so we are continually revamping our plans to work with theirs. Our partners are just as critical to our continuity processes as our own business units. Ultimately, a plan is only as good as all the people who go along with it.
We conduct a business impact analysis on our environment to prioritize the most critical components and test those. When you work with multibillion-dollar enterprises that have lots of moving parts spread over the country, you can’t test everything.
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Apr 14
VMware – Top 5 Ways IT Can Stay Relevant in the Cloud Era
You have heard it said that “rock and roll is dead.” The same could soon be said about your IT department.
External pressures are driving an extinction of the IT department. Today’s business users are becoming more and more savvy, growing up with all kinds of technology in both the home and the office. Desk-side computing is dying off quickly, being left behind by technologies—like tablets, smart phones, and even wearable technology like eyeglasses and wristwatches—that make your employees more mobile and agile. This type of technology doesn’t typically need desk-side support, and when users are frustrated enough to need “human” help, they look for services such as Kindle’s Mayday for instant assistance that’s specific to the device/service that they are experiencing issues with.
The movement toward mobility and agility naturally drives organizations toward more cloud-based services, and software as a service (SaaS) rather than customized applications. This means that as time goes on, storage infrastructure, compute infrastructure, network infrastructure, and the data center will become less and less relevant.
Today’s business managers need to move at the speed of technology, and often consider the IT department a hindrance more than anything else. So how do you reverse that trend?
