IT Governance

InformationWeek – IT Priorities Shifting Toward Security, Managing Costs

A recent IDG survey shows CIOs and IT managers have a renewed concern for operational security and improved customer experience.

The priorities of CIOs and their IT budgets have undergone a rollercoaster journey since the outbreak of the Great Recession 2008. In the midst of the downturn, for example, cutting costs was frequently top of mind for the beleaguered IT manager.

In mid-2009, InformationWeek noted that IT managers “had stopped cutting IT budgets” and might be contemplating “spending a bit more” in 2010.

If budget issues were successfully addressed, then the challenge of aligning IT with the business was a frequent mantra of IT managers asked to express where their priorities lay during the 2010-2013 era, according to InformationWeek research.

In 2014 and 2015, however, IT’s focus shifted significantly again, according to an IDG Research report, in a survey sponsored by Datalink, a data center transformation consulting service.

The survey, “The Importance of Linking Outcomes to IT Investment Strategy,” found that holding down costs remains a concern, and named IT’s new priorities and emphases. Compiled at the end of 2015, the report offered a snapshot of how IT’s outlook had changed over the previous two years as IT staff entered 2016.

More of the Information Week post from Charles Babcock

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Digital Transformation / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
29
Nov 16

CIO Insight – Why Companies Are Overhauling IT Infrastructure

Organizations are carefully examining the state of their IT infrastructure as they dedicate themselves to a digital transformation, according to a recent survey from SignalFx. With this transition considered a primary strategic goal for many businesses, CEOs are often taking the lead in preparing for this major change. However, both CIOs and their teams are also playing critical roles. To ensure success, companies are adopting virtualization and containerization solutions, hosting infrastructure in the cloud and deploying automation solutions, among other steps. With these steps, survey respondents feel very confident about what lies ahead. “Digital transformation is very much a business objective,” said Karthik Rau, CEO of SignalFx.

More of the CIO Insight post from Dennis McCafferty

CIO Strategy / IT Governance / IT Strategy — Comments Off
18
Nov 16

CIO Insight – CIO Provides Best Practices for Peers to Follow

The American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) is a rather meta organization, as it is an association of associations. It is an organization for association management, representing both organizations and individual association professionals. The organization works to nurture a community of smart, creative, and interesting people: the members and their associations.

Reggie Henry joined ASAE eight years ago, and as chief information officer, his job is to implement “exemplary” systems at ASAE that can serve as a model to the rest of the association community and to ratchet-up the use and understanding of technology among ASAE members. Informally, that means questioning everything that can be made better, more efficient, less costly, or more useful to members by the application of current and emerging technologies.

More of the CIO Insight post from Peter High

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Digital Transformation / IaaS / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
17
Nov 16

IT Business Edge – The Cloud Market Is Growing, in Complexity

Enterprise cloud deployments are on the upswing with little or no sign of slowing down in the coming year, but inside all the market projections are some key trends that indicate exactly what form this new infrastructure will take and what services it will support.

Across the board, reports are calling for a continuation of last year’s double-digit growth for 2017 and beyond, but it is fair to say that some earlier assumptions about cloud computing have not panned out, at least not yet.

For one thing, says Forrester’s Dave Bartoletti, big enterprises are turning toward big cloud providers for increased application support, which was expected. But at the same time, regional providers are also still in play due to the highly specialized nature of their service offerings.

More of the IT Business Edge post from Arthur Cole

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Data Center / IaaS / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
16
Nov 16

ZDNet – Cloud will account for 92 percent of datacenter traffic by 2020

Businesses are migrating to cloud architectures at a rapid clip and by 2020, cloud traffic will take up 92 percent of total data center traffic globally, according to Cisco’s Global Cloud Index report.

The networking giant predicts that cloud traffic will rise 3.7-fold up from 3.9 zettabytes (ZB) per year in 2015 to 14.1ZB per year by 2020.

“The IT industry has taken cloud computing from an emerging technology to an essential scalable and flexible networking solution. With large global cloud deployments, operators are optimizing their data center strategies to meet the growing needs of businesses and consumers,” said Doug Webster, VP of service provider marketing for Cisco, in a press release. “We anticipate all types of data center operators continuing to invest in cloud-based innovations that streamline infrastructures and help them more profitably deliver web-based services to a wide range of end users.”

Breaking things down, Cisco expects business workloads to dominate data center applications by 2020 but that their overall workload share will decrease from 79 percent to 72 percent.

More of the ZDNet article from Natalie Gagliordi

Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Data Center / Digital Transformation / IaaS / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
15
Nov 16

Continuity Central – Enterprises struggle with increasing complexity of IT systems

Enterprises today are employing hybrid IT as they struggle to keep up with digital transformation, according to the recently released Harvard Business Review Analytic Services report ‘Hybrid IT Takes Center Stage’.

Sponsored by Verizon Enterprise Solutions, the report presents the results of a survey of 310 business and IT executives worldwide which found that most say their organizations are struggling to keep up with the pace of change in business today while working to ensure the complexity of their IT systems do not jeopardize performance, agility or security.

In fact, 63 percent of respondents indicated they are pursuing a hybrid IT approach to keep up with their existing infrastructure that consists of a mix of private clouds, public clouds and legacy data centers / centres – either on-premises or managed by service providers.

To enable hybrid IT, the report singles out the need for a secure, high-performance network architecture that can deliver the kind of security, flexibility and responsiveness required to stitch all these systems together.

“The vast majority of CIOs and line of business owners are working within the constraints of legacy apps, networks and investments,” said Chris Yousey, vice president of managed services for Verizon Enterprise Solutions. “And while the move to hybrid IT is about protecting their investments, it’s really more about improving performance, availability and above all, agility in today’s business climate.”

Digital McKinsey – Leaders and laggards in enterprise cloud infrastructure adoption

Investments in organizational capabilities rather than specific technology choices separate the leaders from the laggards.

There is a lot of hype and hoopla about the cloud but few reliable facts and benchmarks about the adoption of this technology. CIOs, CTOs, and heads of infrastructure at large enterprises have shared with us their frustrations about adopting cloud-based platforms and migrating processing workloads to virtual environments. To address those frustrations, between 2014 and 2016 we surveyed senior business and technology leaders in more than 50 large organizations in Europe and North America to find out about their adoption of cloud and next-generation infrastructure.1 We focused on the structure and management of their cloud programs, the technical capabilities they’ve implemented to this point, the benefits realized, and their future plans.

More of the Digital McKinsey post from Nagendra Bommadevara, James Kaplan, and Irina Starikova

Business continuity / CIO Strategy / Data Center / IT Governance / IT Strategy — Comments Off
31
Oct 16

Data Center Knowledge – “Right-Sizing” The Data Center: A Fool’s Errand?

Overprovisioned. Undersubscribed. Those are some of the most common adjectives people apply when speaking about IT architecture or data centers. Both can cause data center operational issues that can result in outages or milder reliability issues for mechanical and electrical infrastructure. The simple solution to this problem is to “right-size your data center.”

Unfortunately, that is easier to say than to actually do. For many, the quest to right-size turns into an exercise akin to a dog chasing its tail. So, we constantly ask ourselves the question: Is right-sizing a fool’s errand? From my perspective, the process of right-sizing is invaluable; the process provides the critical data necessary to build (and sustain) a successful data center strategy.

When it comes to right-sizing, the crux of the issue always comes down to what IT assets are being supported and what applications are required to operate the organization.

More of the Data Center Knowledge article from Tim Kittila

Business continuity / CIO Strategy / Disaster Recovery / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
28
Oct 16

Continuity Central – Maintenance of a business continuity management system: a managerial approach

Practical approach to achieving the difficult task of keeping your business continuity plans up to date.

When a business continuity management system (BCMS) has been established and implemented, a serious managerial challenge evolves: the BCMS has to be maintained and put into a continuous improvement process. In this article, Alberto Alexander. Ph.D, MBCI, looks at the activities that need to be performed to maintain and improve a BCMS.

INTRODUCTION

Any organization that establishes and implements a BCMS needs to follow the BCMS processes and deliverables, which are depicted in figure one. The BCMS processes, also known as the BCMS process life cycle model, (Alexander, 2009), consist of six phases.

The stages of the BCMS process life cycle model are the following:

Stage one: business impact analysis
The business impact analysis (BIA), which is conducted during the first stage, analyzes the financial and operational impact of disruptive events on the business areas and processes of an organization. The financial impact refers to monetary losses such as lost sales, lost funding, and contractual penalties. Operational impact represents non–monetary losses related to business operations, and can include loss of competitive edge, damage to investor confidence, poor customer service, low staff morale, and damage to business reputation.

Baseline – Mobility is at the Center of Digital Business

Mobile 2.0 has arrived, so organizations must develop an enterprise mobile strategy that extends beyond smartphones and tablets and into the IoT.

Only a few years ago, a mobile strategy focused mostly on arming workers with phones and laptops that would allow them to call the office and work remotely from home or while on the road. File sharing was difficult, collaboration was challenging, and staying in sync as an organization was next to impossible.

However, as enterprise mobile technology has advanced and clouds have made data more accessible, organizations are learning that basic communication and collaboration, while vitally important, are only part of the picture.

“As mobile devices have evolved into powerful computers and the definition of mobility has expanded, organizations are recognizing that mobile is now at the center of a successful business strategy,” observes Abhijit Kabra, managing director at Accenture Mobility, part of consulting firm Accenture.

More of the Baseline article from Samuel Greengard

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.