IT Security

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

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Digital Transformation / Disaster Recovery / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Staff Retention / IT Strategy / Shadow IT / Technical Debt — Comments Off
02
Feb 18

CIO.com – The 12 biggest issues IT faces today

When CIOs aren’t being overwhelmed by data, they’re wondering who’s securing it. They’re dealing with the pressure of cutting costs while trying to stay nimble as they face difficulties with contractors and the challenges of moving data and services to the cloud. All the while, new threats emerge that require an evolving response.

From finding qualified IT pros to keeping them from jumping ship, a range of sticky technology and personnel issues are giving IT pros cold sweats.

With a host of new concerns in 2018 — and old standbys — where should CIOs be most focused? We’ve gathered insights from experts, the C-suite, recruiters, and those in the trenches to identify today’s top-of-mind concerns and how to deal with them.

More of the CIO.com article from Paul Heltzel

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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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04
Dec 17

The Register – Seek ‘passion’ and tech skills will follow, say recruiting security chiefs

Plugging the infosec skills gap with expensive consultants or by trying to hire already skilled people won’t fix recruitment headaches, Thom Langford, CISO at Publicis Groupe, insisted at the #IRISSCERT conference in Dublin this week.

He argued that the industry should be looking for “passionate people and inspire them”, rather than people with CVs ticking the appropriate boxes.

“I’m not asking for people to take chances, rather give people opportunities” by looking beyond qualifications and experience and thinking about potential.

“We need to stop looking only for round pegs to go into round holes,” Langford said, adding that those with an IT background pick things up more quickly.

More of The Register post from John Leyden

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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

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29
Nov 17

Continuity Central – Common trends and weaknesses in crisis preparedness and business resilience

Victoria Cross, managing partner, Instinctif Partners’ Business Resilience team, discusses the top trends which have emerged from the company’s CrisisOptic and RecallOptic online diagnostic and benchmarking tools over the past year.

In the year since the CrisisOptic and RecallOptic tools have been available, we have helped over 50 businesses and organizations to quantify their business resilience. Three areas have emerged as common weaknesses in crisis preparedness and business resilience strategies and the following article looks at these in turn:

Post-incident review is a weak area

A score of 100 percent is the highest that can be achieved in each category measured, with the Review category (conducting and learning from a post-incident review) being identified as the most common area of weakness. Many of the companies obtained a low score in this area, with some even scoring zero. The average score was 50.7 per cent.

Interestingly, although overall it might be expected that larger companies would generally score more highly, size has not proved a clear indicator of preparedness. In fact, we have seen both global brands and small manufacturers scoring zero in this category.

ZDNet – Cloud computing: How to build a business case

Like any other major tech project, moving workloads into the cloud needs a solid business case — one that takes into account all the likely costs and benefits — before a company can decide whether it’s the correct move.

Cloud migration may be a tougher proposition than a standard IT project because companies have to consider a wider variety of issues — like what to do with all those servers, or even entire data centers, that may be made redundant by the move.

The business case should calculate the costs of migrating to the cloud — which include the cost of moving systems over, as well as the cost of running services in the cloud after migration — and then compare them to the costs of keeping systems in-house.

More of the ZDNet post from Steve Ranger

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24
Nov 17

The Register – VMware refuses to support its wares running in Azure

VMware has responded to Microsoft’s plan to run its stack in Azure, by saying customers who choose that option will have to forego support.

“This offering has been developed independent of VMware, and is neither certified nor supported by VMware,” wrote Virtzilla’s senior veep for product development and cloud services Ajay Patel.” Patel added that no VMware partners have collaborated with the company to build Microsoft’s offering.

VMware’s reason for denying support was explained on the basis that standing up a VMware-based cloud service needs a lot of careful work ~~one does not simply walk into Mordor~~.

“Our experience has shown public cloud environments require significant joint engineering to run enterprise workloads,” Patel wrote, later charactering VMware-on-AWS as a “a jointly architected, and fully tested and validated cloud service”

More of The Register article from Simon Sharwood

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01
Nov 17

Continuity Central – PwC survey highlights massive corporate planning failures when it comes to cyber security

44 percent of the 9,500 executives in 122 countries surveyed say they do not have an overall information security strategy; 48 percent do not have an employee security awareness training programme, and 54 percent don’t have an incident response process.

PwC has published its 2018 Global State of Information Security Survey (GSISS).

Executives worldwide acknowledge the increasingly high stakes of cyber insecurity. 40 percent of survey respondents cite the disruption of operations as the biggest consequence of a cyber attack; 39 percent cite the compromise of sensitive data; 32 percent cite harm to product quality, and 22 percent cite threat to human life.

Yet despite this awareness, many companies at risk of cyber attacks remain unprepared to deal with them. 44 percent say they do not have an overall information security strategy. 48 percent say they do not have an employee security awareness training programme, and 54 percent say they do not have an incident response process.

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.