Risk Management

InformationWeek – Should You Declare Bankruptcy on Your Technical Debt?

Technical debt is a hidden cost that robs your business of its ability to be nimble and make needed changes for your customers
Decision-makers, it’s high time we wake up to the real cost of technical debt. Financial debt is a burden that’s familiar to many people, but for businesses, especially retailers, that burden takes on an additional form: technical debt.

For companies building their businesses on outdated platforms, technical debt is what’s keeping them from evolving to meet the demands of today’s increasingly mobile consumer. According to a study by Accenture, 85% of executives believe that their legacy platforms are hindering their ability to move to a more digital model.

Executives and IT teams often put software migration on the backburner, choosing instead to focus on the kind of projects that result in more immediate monetary returns. Yet the longer technical debt is allowed to accrue, the costlier it becomes. Should your IT department stick with its broken platforms, just to avoid the overhaul, or is it time to pull the plug?

More of the InformationWeek post from Sara Hicks

Business continuity / CIO Strategy / IT Leadership / IT Strategy / Risk Management — Comments Off
13
Mar 19

InformationWeek – CIO Survey Shows Shifts in IT Leadership Role

CIOs have made headway towards a more strategic position in the organization, but challenges remain on the road to digital.
It wasn’t too long ago when many IT organizations were still considered to be just keep-the-lights-on cost centers within the enterprise. But thanks to a lot of effort on the part of technology leadership inside enterprise organizations, that seems to be changing. These days CIOs and IT organizations have shifted to contributing strategic value to the technology within the company, even if the business itself is sometimes still slow to recognize it.

That shift is evident in a new CIO survey and report from Grant Thornton, a tax, audit, and advisory services firm. National managing principal for Enterprise Technology Strategy and Innovation at Grant Thornton, LaVerne H. Council, told InformationWeek in an interview that IT has been working to become more than just a cost center. IT needs to move into a critical new role in the age of digital — from cost center to trust center.

More of the InformationWeek article from Jessica Davis

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Disaster Recovery / IT Security / IT Strategy / Risk Management — Comments Off
04
Mar 19

Continuity Central – CTO? Why updating your backup strategy should be on your 2019 to-do list

Backup technology has evolved over the years, but the time has come to take a completely fresh approach, says Avi Raichel. In this article Avi explains: Why backup is a CTO concern; What CTOs need to do to update the backup strategies in place; How CTOs can help the business become IT resilient.

It’s no secret that backup is one of the most important things that a business can invest in, and it’s because of this that the evolution of backup has been such a grand one. The very first computer backups were made on to large reels of magnetic tape (punch cards), and have consistently evolved – from tape, to spinning disk, and then on to flash. However, what hasn’t changed with backup is the central idea of creating ‘golden copies’ of data, to be used ‘just in case’.

This idea is now, arguably, archaic. These traditional backups that only provide a snapshot in time are no longer compatible with the modern times. In this age, businesses, particularly digital ones, need to be ‘always-on’ – 24/7, 365 days a year. Because of this, the requirement for recovery point objectives (RPOs) of seconds, and recovery time objectives (RTOs) of minutes is essential.

More of the Continuity Central post from Avi Raichel

Business continuity / Disaster Recovery / IT Security / IT Strategy / Risk Management — Comments Off
28
Feb 19

Continuity Central – 2018’s outages: what are the lessons for 2019?

Doron Pinhas looks at the common factors behind various high-profile technology outages in 2018 and proposes a practical approach which will help organizations reduce unplanned downtime in 2019.

Flying these days is almost never a pleasure, but in 2018, it was a downright nightmare with dozens of glitches and outages that kept planes grounded. 2018 wasn’t such a great year for other industry sectors as well. Financial service customers also had a rough year accessing their funds and performing urgent financial transactions. In the UK, for example, banks experienced outage after outage. Three of Britain’s biggest banks – HSBC, Barclays and TSB – all experienced outages on a single day, making online banking impossible, and there were dozens of other incidents peppered throughout the year.

And if your business lives on cloud platforms and SaaS, you might have found yourself running ragged at times trying to access your IT with all of the major cloud platforms suffering from outages throughout the year as well.

It may be 2019 now, but the fundamental gaps that led to those service disruptions haven’t been resolved, so we can expect more such outages this year, and probably every year until companies figure it out – which, if you’re a business continuity or IT professional, raises the question: what should I do to avoid outages?

More of the Continuity Central post from Doran Pinhas

CIO Strategy / IT Governance / IT Strategy / Risk Management — Comments Off
27
Dec 18

CIO.com – IT Risk Management – Part 2: The Move Towards Dynamic Technology Risk

In Part 1 of our two-part blog series on today’s technology risk landscape, we discussed the results of KPMG’s 2017 inaugural tech risk survey.

In Part 1 of our two-part blog series on today’s technology risk landscape, we discussed the results of KPMG’s 2017 inaugural tech risk survey — which found that despite the rising profile of the technology risk function across the 1st and 2nd line of defense, the organization still does not actively manage risks and show its value to the larger business. Instead, many remain stuck in traditional, compliance-focused approaches to technology risk.

More of the CIO.com article

IT Governance / IT Leadership / Risk Management — Comments Off
26
Dec 18

CIO.com – IT Risk Management Part 1: The Changing Technology Risk Landscape

The technology risk landscape for mobile, IoT and cloud is changing — fast. Companies are adjusting to keep up with the speed and velocity of change, including the adoption of emerging technologies, such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and blockchain. As a result, there is an increasingly direct connection between IT risk and enterprise risk—and, more broadly, enterprise strategy.

More of the CIO.com article from Sharon Goldman

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Data Center / Digital Transformation / IaaS / IT Governance / IT Strategy / Risk Management — Comments Off
30
Nov 18

IT Business Edge – ERP Entering All Facets of the Economy

Enterprise Resource Planning platforms have been around for several decades. Some people love them, some hate them. What is indisputable, however, is that organizations around the world are being continuously pushed to achieve greater efficiency and faster turnaround, and ERP is a way of achieving both goals.

According to Market Research Engine, ERP is expected to near $50 billion in total market value by 2024, infiltrating tasks as wide-ranging as sales and marketing to distribution management and finance. What’s interesting about the current phase of ERP development is the way it dovetails with a number of other industry requirements besides the perennial need to become more efficient. The rising acceptance of mobile and cloud-based applications, for instance, places greater onus on the need to build more flexible, user-friendly means of support. As well, as business processes become increasingly digital-oriented, ERP brings much-needed intelligibility to complex workflows.

More of the IT Business Edge article from Arthur Cole

Business continuity / CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Disaster Recovery / IaaS / IT Security / IT Staff Retention / IT Strategy / Risk Management — Comments Off
26
Oct 18

Continuity Central – For disaster recovery, there are better options than secondary data centers.

Disaster recovery is a headache that every IT department has suffered and in this arena, as in so many others, the cloud offers a better choice, says Laz Vekiarides. In fact, not only is a secondary data center for DR no longer needed, it’s actually no longer a sustainable option…

The days of the secondary data center / centre are numbered, and that is a good thing for the enterprises that have struggled to build them, fund them and maintain them solely for disaster recovery purposes. When on-premises disaster recovery was the only option, IT teams had no choice but to grit their teeth and take on the cost and resource burdens of physical secondary data centers. Today, though, the growing cloud adoption rate and availability of cloud-forward co-location providers have transformed the data center world. One result: the industry has more efficient and cost-effective choices, including hybrid cloud DR.

Key questions to ask before moving DR to the cloud
Nothing is easy in IT, and no data center leader should believe promises about quick or simple transformations from on-prem secondary data centers to cloud or hybrid models.

Continuity Central – Why disaster recovery should become a thing of the past

For businesses today, regardless of industry, the outage of a key IT system ranks among the most serious technology challenges they can face. In fact, the Business Continuity Institute’s 2018 Horizon Scan Report estimates that unplanned outages are the third biggest risk to businesses globally. Beyond the financial ramifications of downtime, the long-term reputational consequences are significant as customer confidence is dented. Rebuilding trust after a major IT failure can be a multi-year process.

In the 1970s when data center / centre managers first came into being, they began to understand how dependent on computers their organizations would soon become. With that in mind they instigated the notion of disaster recovery – an insurance should one or more applications, storage components, databases or network elements go offline.

More of the Continuity Central post from Patrick Smith

Business continuity / CIO Strategy / IT Governance / IT Leadership / IT Security / Risk Management — Comments Off
22
Oct 18

Information Week – Why IT Should Care About Legal Holds

When it’s time to preserve company data and communications relating to pending legal matters, the IT and legal groups have to work together.
When litigation looms, a corporation has a duty to identify and preserve relevant documents and other data that may be important to the legal matter. The goal is to avoid the intentional or inadvertent destruction of relevant evidence that might be used at trial. This process is called a “legal hold.”

While a legal hold sounds like it falls squarely into the realm of the legal department, lawyers rely heavily on IT to execute many of the activities associated with a legal hold. This puts a burden on IT and can put legal, IT or the organization at risk if legal obligations aren’t met

More of the Information Week article from John Tredennick

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.