IT Strategy

Continuity Central – Organizational risks that you should definitely be acting on

It is easy for organizations to feel overwhelmed by the number and scale of the risks that are faced; but often the perception of the potential harm engendered by various risks is exaggerated. In this article Chris Butler lists the real risks that every organization needs to consider.

Did you know the world’s most dangerous animal is not a shark, or a bear, but is in fact a mosquito? What’s certain is that human perception of risk is notoriously flawed; often, the events that concern and outrage us the most are the least likely to happen.

From political and economic tremors to cyber threats, 2017 represents another minefield of risks for businesses. For organizations, forging a deepened understanding of both threats and risk factors is crucial for remaining robust, resilient, and most of all, ahead of the competition. Part of this involves separating the myths from reality. So, what then are the real risks to business today?

TechTarget – Avoid steep network integration costs in multicloud

While a VPN is useful for multicloud networks, IT teams still need to be careful to avoid high traffic charges, as applications move from one provider to another.

One of the most important — and most complex — concepts in multicloud is network integration between public cloud providers. This model facilitates cross-cloud load balancing and failover but, without careful planning, can also lead to hefty network integration costs.

Nearly all enterprises have a virtual private network (VPN) that connects their sites, users, applications and data center resources. When they adopt cloud computing, they often expect to use that VPN to connect their public cloud resources as well. Many cloud providers have features to facilitate this, and even when they don’t, it’s usually possible to build VPN support into application images hosted in the cloud.

More of the TechTarget article from Tom Nolle

CIO Strategy / Cloud infrastructure / Internet of Things / IT Governance / IT Strategy — Comments Off
05
Jul 17

IT Business Edge – Over 70 Percent of IoT Efforts Are Failing: The Fix Seems Surprisingly Easy

Cisco is generally credited with driving the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT), even though it was Carnegie Mellon back in 1982 that first conceptualized the idea. I’m still at Cisco’s big analyst event this week and was fascinated by a survey shared on stage. Apparently, 74 percent of the survey’s respondents have indicated that their IoT efforts have been going really badly, either not finishing or not finishing within expectations. In addition, these same folks are indicating that about half their time is spent on troubleshooting problems. Cisco connects the latter to complexity. Given that there really is nothing as complex as a typical IoT effort, I see the two stats as related and suggest that IoT efforts are poorly planned, which is why they aren’t completing as expected and likely adding to the complexity problems overwhelming IT organizations.

Now, Cisco is positioning its Network Intuitive efforts at this problem and certainly massive automation can reduce the amount of work, particularly with regard to often repetitive troubleshooting efforts. However, with the IoT in particular, really understanding the problem you are trying to solve and simplifying the effort at the front end would likely have an even bigger initial positive impact.

More of the IT Business Edge article from Rob Enderle

Brain / CIO Strategy / Get Better / IT Governance / IT Staff Retention / IT Strategy — Comments Off
16
Jun 17

HBR – A Little Competition Could Improve Your HR, IT, and Legal Departments

I think we can all agree that corporate functions tend to be a locus of frustration for pretty much all employees — except, of course, the ones from the function that is the object of the frustration in question. If you have ever thought to yourself “Doesn’t legal understand that we are going to lose this deal if they don’t sign off soon?” or “Why is HR’s answer always Our rules don’t allow that?” you are not alone.

Recent McKinsey research showed that senior executives have a low level of satisfaction (an average of only 30%) in their corporate functions across the board. McKinsey’s recommendations are all sensible, such as: “Create incentives for functional leaders to contain costs, instead of allocating costs that business units can’t change.” This issue has long been a bugbear for me. Despite chronically low satisfaction and lots of intelligent prescriptions like this, the problem by all accounts seems to be getting worse, not better.

More of the Harvard Business Review article from Roger L Martin

Business continuity / CIO Strategy / Disaster Recovery / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
15
Jun 17

Continuity Central – Why business continuity managers need to trust ‘gut feel’

Agree or disagree?

Sometimes as a business continuity manager you have a feeling that a certain decision is the wrong one, despite qualitative and quantitative evidence pointing to the contrary. Dominic Irvine explains how research is starting to support the reliability of trusting your gut feeling…

Qualitative and quantitative evidence is sometimes used as a weapon to force decisions through when not everyone involved is convinced; in the face of charts, spreadsheets and PowerPoint decks, gut feel seems like a poor response, and yet what we are learning from research into exertion and fatigue, is that it is one of the most useful tools in our armoury of tests.

After the First World War, much work was done to find a way to measure fatigue but it was deemed such a subjective concept as to be impossible to develop any meaningful way of objectively measuring it. It was not possible to fathom out the complex interaction between emotional, physical and mental aspects of fatigue in a way that could be reliably and accurately counted. And yet, we all know the feeling of being fatigued and how tired we are.

ZDNet – Three ways to survive the rise of the cloud and ‘big software’

Applications that were once simple to manage are now rolled out across thousands of physical and virtual machines.

These sprawling applications include multiple components, with the potential points of integration spread across the enterprise and out into the wider cloud.

So, what are the key challenges CIOs will face as they overhaul their IT departments in readiness for the next stage of enterprise computing? Here are some key lessons for CIOs.

1. Build a platform for business change

Successful companies in the digital age are characterised by their ability to absorb technology into everyday processes and by ensuring there is no division between what might previously have been classed as IT and business professionals.

More of the ZDNet article from Mark Samuels

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / DevOps / IaaS / IT Governance / IT Strategy — Comments Off
13
Jun 17

IT Business Edge – The Devops Chicken or the Agile Infrastructure Egg?

Does devops lead to agile, or does agile lead to devops? Or perhaps they move in tandem as the enterprise gropes its way through digital transition. And if that’s the case, is optimized, automated infrastructure the cause or the effect of this new IT model?

The answers to these questions could be crucial for the enterprise over the next few years because they speak directly to how technology decisions will be made. For instance, if the right infrastructure is required for devops, then what technologies are needed to deliver the appropriate outcomes? But if devops evolves naturally, then how does the enterprise foster an integrated IT environment rather than simply another collection of disjointed point solutions?

According to a recent survey by BMC Software, the top three priorities for IT investment over the next two years are containers, workload automation/scheduling and devops

More of the IT Business Edge post from Arthur Cole

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12
Jun 17

HBR – The Behavioral Economics of Why Executives Underinvest in Cybersecurity

Determining the ROI for any cybersecurity investment, from staff training to AI-enabled authentication managers, can best be described as an enigma shrouded in mystery. The digital threat landscape changes constantly, and it’s very difficult to know the probability of any given attack succeeding — or how big the potential losses might be. Even the known costs, such as penalties for data breaches in highly regulated industries like health care, are a small piece of the ROI calculation. In the absence of good data, decision makers must use something less than perfect to weigh the options: their judgment.

But insights from behavioral economics and psychology show that human judgment is often biased in predictably problematic ways. In the case of cybersecurity, some decision makers use the wrong mental models to help them determine how much investment is necessary and where to invest. For example, they may think about cyber defense as a fortification process — if you build strong firewalls, with well-manned turrets, you’ll be able to see the attacker from a mile away.

More of the Harvard Business Review post from Alex Blau

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06
Jun 17

Data Center Knowledge – Most Data Center Outages aren’t Caused by Tech Failure

Many critical industries such as nuclear energy, commercial and military airlines—even drivers’ education—invest significant time and resources to developing processes. The data center industry … not so much.

That can be problematic, considering that two-thirds of data center outages are related to processes, not infrastructure systems, says David Boston, director of facility operations solutions for TiePoint-bkm Engineering.

“Most are quite aware that processes cause most of the downtime, but few have taken the initiative to comprehensively address them. This is somewhat unique to our industry.”

Boston is scheduled to speak about strategies to prevent data center outages at the Data Center World local conference at the Art Institute of Chicago on July 12. More about the event here.

More of the Data Center Knowledge article from Karen Riccio

CIO Strategy / IaaS / IT Governance / IT Strategy — Comments Off
06
Jun 17

The Register – The joy and pain of buying IT

Study You, dear readers, continually tell us in surveys how hard it is to get the investment needed to help you do your jobs effectively. Regardless of the topic – core infrastructure, middleware, management tools, etc – it’s common to hear stories of execs not “getting it”, while expecting IT to muddle through as more pressure is piled onto already stretched teams.

But it has been a while since we have run a survey specifically focused on the pain and practicality of IT-related procurement, so let’s put this right.

Our latest study includes questions like:

“How often do procurement or finance get involved, then skew decisions towards cost, regardless of value?”

There’s then the old chestnut:

“How often are you forced to buy from an incumbent supplier, regardless of whether it’s the right choice?”

Of course the level of pain or pleasure often depends on the environment you work in and how well business and IT people communicate and understand each other, so we touch on that too, including the problem of senior management often having inflated or unrealistic expectations.

More of The Register article and survey link from Dale Vile

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.