IaaS

CIO.com – IT governance critical as cloud adoption soars to 96 percent in 2018

With 81 percent of enterprises operating multi-cloud landscapes and 26 percent spending over $6 million annually on public cloud infrastructure, staying on top has never been harder.

In 2018, cloud computing went mainstream. Virtually all organizations (96 percent) use it in one way or another. However, studies show that as users gain cloud maturity, they tend to move from hybrid cloud scenarios – which comprise both private and public clouds – toward multi-cloud landscapes spread across a multitude of service providers. Indeed, according to Rightscale’s 2018 State of the Cloud Report, 81 percent of enterprises already have a multi-cloud strategy in place.

The Rightscale report highlights that many more enterprises view public cloud adoption as their top priority, up from 29 percent in 2017 to 38 percent in 2018. Hybrid cloud has decreased as a priority, declining from 50 percent in 2017 to 45 percent in 2018.

More of the CIO.com article from Marc Wilczek

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30
Mar 18

InformationWeek – How New Technologies Can Spell Disaster

IT compensation expert David Foote warns that outdated HR models threaten to destroy companies as they try to implement emerging IT concepts.

The warning stirs distant memories of the recessionary year 2008 and the Dotcom bust a few years earlier. So many companies, from startups to one-time Blue Chips, laid off thousands of workers or simply disappeared through bankruptcy or acquisition. Their IT teams, entrenched in dated technologies, went from unemployed to unemployable.

These weren’t layoffs of 10 people but 10,000 at a time. Picture 10,000 people, sort of like a small town, with everyone out of work. Could something similar happen in the near future? David Foote says that is a real possibility, but that there is an opportunity for companies and IT professionals to change their paths.

Foote, founder of IT workforce and compensation research firm Foote Partners, issued an analysis of the company’s Q4 2017 compensation data. On the positive side, the market value for more than 400 IT certifications rose for the first time in four quarters, growing by 0.3%, so that the average certification now represents a 7.6% premium on an IT pro’s base salary. Also on the positive side — for employees and the employers who have to recruit them — Foote says the market volatility that we have seen for many IT skills is calming down a bit.

More of the InformationWeek article from James M. Connolly

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28
Mar 18

Future of CIO – What are the Real Challenges of a CIO to Build a high-performing IT?

Information is permeating into every corner of the business, technology is often the driving force of digital disruptions. IT is impacting every business unit and is becoming the driver of business changes. The business paradigm is shifting from the industrial era with the scarcity of knowledge to an information-abundant digital era. And therefore, the role of IT in the current business environment should reflect such a significant shift. However, many traditional IT organizations are overloaded and understaffed, running at the transactional role and still get stuck at the lower level of the organizational maturity. What are the real challenges of a CIO to build a high-performing and high-mature digital IT?

The main part of the IT budget is sunk in the existing IT-systems for keeping the light on: “Keeping the light on” is always fundamental for running IT smoothly.

More of the FutureOfCIO post from Pearl Zhu

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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

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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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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29
Dec 17

IT Business Edge – Why I’ll Never Recommend AWS: The Danger of Draconian Policies in a Social World

Rob Enderle describes his first-hand experience on the risks of using a consumer-oriented business for mission critical systems.

One of the issues with having both a consumer-focused business and an enterprise business is that folks who deal with enterprise decisions during the day are consumers all the time. If you screw with someone on the consumer side, you’ll likely lose them on the enterprise side as well and vice versa. In addition, particularly with something like AWS, you expect the consumer business to use good customer retention and management skills. Well, after waking up recently to every one of my Echos, Kindles and Fire TVs being deregistered and not working, and being locked out of my account for daring to question a questionable Amazon charge, I wouldn’t touch an Amazon enterprise product with someone else’s 10-foot pole. And I think, had this happened to you, you’d feel the same.

Let me walk you through my experience.

More of the IT Business Edge article from Rob Enderle

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26
Dec 17

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

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.