Doug Theis - Leave your comfort zone.

Future of CIO – Running Indispensable IT: How to Scrutinize IT Effort via the Business Lens?

It has become more obvious that information is the real source of business innovation. IT will continue to be a critical department.

IT is one of the most invaluable assets of the business besides people, IT is also perhaps one of the most expensive investments in modern organizations today. Many IT organizations are at the cross-road, either keep providing commodity IT service as a business support center – becoming irrelevant, or contribute to the top line business growth by leveraging technology as a means to an end. How can contemporary CIOs put “Chief Investment Officer,” hat on, scrutinize IT effort from the business lens and make the IT organization indispensable?

IT investment in the business can often become the decisive factor to run a high-performance organization with a long-term perspective: IT investment is usually costly. Considering many companies across sectors making a huge investment in sophisticated information & technology tools are greatly wasted because the appropriate processes to leverage those tools are not implemented or adopted smoothly. More often than not, IT can lift or break the business in a shorter time spectrum.

More of the Future of CIO post from Pearl Zhu

Cloud infrastructure / IT Leadership / IT Staff Retention / IT Strategy — Comments Off
14
Jan 19

CloudTech – How the ‘severe’ cloud skills gap will impact on company culture

Another day, another story focused around cloud skillsets – or lack of them. A new survey from artificial intelligence platform provider OpsRamp has found the vast majority of respondents continue to struggle finding the right talent for cloud environments.

The research, which was conducted at Gartner’s Infrastructure, Operations and Cloud Strategies conference, found 94% of the 124 respondents were having a ‘somewhat difficult’ time finding candidates with the right technology and business skills to drive digital innovation. Nine out of 10 hiring managers polled said the digital skills gap was either ‘somewhat big’, ‘quite big’, or ‘huge.’

The survey findings appear in a report which focuses on how the battle for cloud talent has become well and truly joined. With the ominous subtitle of ‘from a cloud-native skills gap to a full-blown crisis’, there are plenty of warnings in place.

More of the CloudTech post from James Bourne

Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure — Comments Off
11
Jan 19

InfoWorld – The path to cloud security goes through integration

Making your cloud more secure is about talking to other security systems more than tossing technology at the problem.

The cloud security problem is not really a problem any more. Indeed, we have the best security technology in the public clouds these days, and in some cases it’s better than what’s in the on-premises systems that are no longer receiving the R&D spending love.

So, if security is so good in the cloud, why do so many in IT believe there an issue? The fact is that public cloud never works alone (although it seems that way if you listen to the public cloud providers). They need to interact with third-party systems, such as credit-checking services and data-validation services, as well as many systems running on traditional on-premises platforms.

More of the InfoWorld article from David Linthicum

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / IaaS / IT Strategy — Comments Off
10
Jan 19

CIO.com – What’s driving IT budgets for 2019

Technology leaders weigh in on where IT spend will shift, with many companies focusing on infrastructure, security, and user experience.

he majority of IT leaders expect their 2019 IT budgets to increase or remain unchanged, driven largely by the need to upgrade aging infrastructure, accelerate a shift to the cloud or improve the employee experience of what IT offers.

More of the CIO.com article from Sharon Florentine

Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Data Center / Data center compliance — Comments Off
09
Jan 19

TechTarget – Explore the new year’s emerging IT trends

Small data centers, intelligent IT management tools — digital diversity? Catch up on the 10 trends driving IT operations forward in 2019, and how they’ll shape your organization.

Nothing dies in enterprise IT, but the older technologies and approaches consistently make room for emerging IT trends. In 2019, prepare to support serverless computing and SaaS-based workloads right alongside the data center.

These technologies will systematically reshape the way organizations deploy and operate IT workloads. Trends such as global and diverse digital infrastructure, creative IT teams and more present opportunities and challenges for the business and IT staff. These 10 emerging IT trends, outlined by Gartner senior director analyst Ross Winser during the firm’s IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2018, are poised to change infrastructure and operations in 2019.

More of the TechTarget article from Stephen J. Bigelow

Business continuity / CIO Strategy / Disaster Recovery / IT Governance / IT Leadership / IT Strategy — Comments Off
08
Jan 19

Continuity Central – Gartner highlights ‘digital twins’ as an emerging organizational resilience tool

In its latest ‘Hype Cycle for IT in GCC’ Gartner identifies various technologies that will reach mainstream adoption in five to 10 years. Of these one in particular – ‘digital twins’ – has strong potential for assisting organizations improve their organizational resilience.

Gartner says that a digital twin is a virtual representation of a real object that is designed to optimize the operation of assets. The primary short-term use is to lower maintenance costs and increase asset uptime.

Digital twins use artificial intelligence and machine learning alongside other techniques to create digital avatars that change and develop alongside the physical aspect being modelled. They can be used to harden existing systems and design new, more resilient, ones; they can also be used to identify hidden vulnerabilities.

Forbes.com – Seven Remarkable Takeaways From Massive Kubernetes Conference

The 8,000 attendees attending the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Kubernetes conference this week in Seattle demonstrated the exponential growth in interest in this complex, technical combination of open source technologies.

Kubernetes is container orchestration software – essentially, plumbing for running enterprise-class software in the cloud. Not the kind of nuts-and-bolts tech that you might think would generate such enthusiasm.

More of the Forbes article from Jason Bloomberg

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Data Center / Hybrid Cloud / IaaS / IT Governance / IT Leadership / IT Strategy / Multi-Cloud — Comments Off
04
Jan 19

InformationWeek- Debunking Three Common Cloud Misconceptions

Combatting the misconceptions surrounding cloud computing requires continuous exploration of new opportunities emerging today because of ongoing cloud technology innovations.

Each organization’s digital transformation is different, based on internal operational goals, desired business outcomes and unique customer needs. Despite specific requirements of individual businesses, there’s an important common denominator in our digital era: the need for increased agility. The speed at which organizations need to perform and transform continues to accelerate – the ability to adjust course in real-time to best serve internal and external audiences is paramount, and best enabled with open cloud platforms.

More of the InformationWeek post from Jeff Canter

CIO Strategy / IT Leadership / IT Strategy — Comments Off
03
Jan 19

CIO.com – 4 KPIs IT should ditch (and what to measure instead)

Everything about your job has changed. It’s time your metrics did too.

Craig Williams, CIO of telecommunications networking company Ciena, knows exactly how his IT team will be evaluated by the company’s leaders in 2019. They will look at a wide range of metrics that include things like talent management (days to fill open position, number of employees completing management development), profit participation (revenue per IT employee), and change management (rate of adoption for new social media, data, and collaboration tools).

More of the CIO.com article from Minda Zetlin

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / IaaS / IT Strategy — Comments Off
02
Jan 19

ComputerWorld – How Microsoft Lost the Web

Microsoft’s announcement earlier this month that it was dumping its own browser technology for Google’s – turning Edge into a Chrome clone – was a stunning acknowledgement that the company had lost its decades-long battle for browser supremacy.

“We intend to adopt the Chromium open-source project … to create better web compatibility for our customers and less fragmentation of the web for all web developers,” Joe Belfiore, a corporate vice president in the Windows group, wrote in a Dec. 6 post to a company blog. But while Belfiore blew the open-source horn, he didn’t bother to recap how Microsoft reached this point when earlier in the century, it was the dominant browser maker, accounting for more than 90% of all usage after it laid waste to Netscape Navigator.

More of the ComputerWorld article from Gregg Keizer

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.