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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

Business continuity / CIO Strategy / Disaster Recovery / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy / Uncategorized — Comments Off
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

Azure Stack / CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Disaster Recovery / IT Security / IT Strategy / Virtualization — Comments Off
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

CIO Strategy / Digital Transformation / IT Strategy — Comments Off
10
Nov 17

IT Business Edge – Getting on the Right Side of Automation

It’s a fait accompli at this point that the enterprise will become significantly more automated over the next decade, both in terms of IT operations and infrastructure management. And while this will most certainly affect the knowledge workforce, and probably cost jobs, it will also bring about a higher level of data productivity that will ultimately enhance the value of both human and technological resources.

Automation works best when it is directed at the rote, repetitive tasks that occupy the majority of the knowledge worker’s time. This can include everything from system mapping and resource provisioning to data tracking and analysis. If there is one thing that the current crop of automation solutions excels at, it is taking over these mindless operations to allow humans to concentrate on the more creative aspects of fulfilling the business model.

More of the IT Business Edge article from Arthur Cole

Business continuity / Disaster Recovery — Comments Off
09
Nov 17

Continuity Central – Cascading effects and escalations in wide-area power failures

A new academic paper has been published that looks at the cascading impacts of wide-area power outages. Supported by London Resilience, the paper has been written by the Cascading Disasters Research Group of UCL’s Institute For Risk And Disaster Reduction.

‘Cascading effects and escalations in wide-area power failures’ aims to “provide a synthetic overview of the cascading effects caused by wide-area power failures, and to define the recurrent impacts and sources of escalation.”

The format uses bullet points and examples to facilitate reading in conditions of limited availability of time.

Baseline – Business Units Participate in Tech Buying Process

In today’s enterprises, line-of-business (LoB) departments are playing a bigger role in the technology buying process, especially when it concerns applications and services related to mobile and collaborative technologies. And increasingly, those two technologies are viewed as a single entity by most IT and business executives. Those findings highlight the “CDW Digital Workspace Solutions Report,” which is based on a survey of nearly 2,000 IT and non-IT executives who participate in their organization’s purchasing decisions for digital workspace solutions. This view aligns with CDW’s definition of digital workspace as the culmination of various technology silos coming together to seamlessly connect people and get work done effortlessly, anytime, anywhere and on any device. “The fact that our survey found 41 percent of digital workspace solutions are now selected by departments outside of IT shows how pervasive and integral voice, video and other collaboration technologies are becoming to organizations,” observed Nathan Coutinho, director of workspace solutions for CDW.

More of the Baseline slideshow from Eileen McCooey

Business continuity / CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / IaaS / IT Strategy / Uncategorized — Comments Off
07
Nov 17

ZDNet – SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS: Understand the differences

Understanding the cloud is critical to the future of business. Here’s a brief explanation of the three layers by which cloud services are delivered.

Cloud computing is one technology moving faster than almost all others toward becoming table stakes in enterprise IT. In 2017 alone, the public cloud services market is predicted to grow 18 percent, hitting a value of $246.8 billion, according to research firm Gartner.

Understanding the cloud can help business leaders make more strategic investments and remain competitive going forward. Cloud clarity starts with understanding the model itself.

As a service
According to 451 Research analyst Carl Brooks, for a technology solution to qualify as “as a Service,” it has to meet the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) definition parameters, which he paraphrased as “self-service, paid on-demand, elastic, scalable, programmatically accessible (APIs), and available over the network.”

More of the ZDNet article from Conner Forest

CIO Strategy / Get Better / IT Staff Retention / IT Strategy — Comments Off
06
Nov 17

Fast Company – This Is Why We Default To Criticism (And How To Change)

“Susan doesn’t pull her weight. She’s always negative, people don’t like her.”

“Robert is just incompetent. Why am I asked to do my job well when he gets to skate by?”

“This department would be better off if Beth was fired, everyone knows it, what are you going to do about it?”

Tim Cole, now founder and CEO of The Compass Alliance, used to hear criticism like this regularly in a previous work environment. Tasked with taking over a department he admits had a “septic culture,” Cole stepped into a quagmire of low morale. There was legitimate debate on shutting the operation down,” he explains, “despite the contribution to profitability.”

More of the Fast Company article from Lydia Dishman

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