Doug Theis - Leave your comfort zone.

The Register – So your client’s under-spent on IT for decades and lives in fear of an audit

Infrastructure as code is a buzzword frequently thrown out alongside DevOps and continuous integration as being the modern way of doing things. Proponents cite benefits ranging from an amorphous “agility” to reducing the time to deploy new workloads. I have an argument for infrastructure as code that boils down to “cover your ass”, and have discovered it’s not quite so difficult as we might think.

Recently, a client of mine went through an ownership change. The new owners, appalled at how much was being spent on IT, decided that the best path forward was an external audit. The client in question, of course, is an SMB who had been massively under-spending on IT for 15 years, and there no way they were ready for – or would pass – an audit.

Trying to cram eight months’ worth of migrations, consolidations, R&D, application replacement and so forth into four frantic, sleepless nights of panic ended how you might imagine it ending. The techies focused on making sure their asses were covered when the audit landed. Overall network performance slowed to a crawl and everyone went home angry.

More of The Register article from Trevor Pott

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02
Jun 17

Continuity Central – Revamping the business continuity profession: a response

Recently, Continuity Central published ‘Revamping the business continuity profession’; an article in which Charlie Maclean-Bristol looked at challenges faced by business continuity professionals and offered his suggestions for revamping the discipline. Here, David Lindstedt and Mark Armour, developers of the Adaptive Business Continuity methodology, offer their response to the article:

David Lindstedt: Naturally, most folks starting to embrace Adaptive Business Continuity will agree that traditional business continuity methods are not working and it’s time for a change. I totally agree that ‘resilience’ will not be the ‘savior’ of business continuity. As Charlie correctly points out, resilience is an inter-discipline, not a discipline on its own. A business continuity practitioner could run it, but so could anyone from any of the inter-disciplines like ERM, EM, IT DR, etc. The chief concern with resilience will always be: what are the boundaries to what gets included (individual personal psychology to environmental sustainability to the entire content of a MBA program?) and how do you measure its effectiveness?

TechTarget – Enlightened shadow IT policy collaborates with users

A cloud-era shadow IT policy still needs to manage risk, but the era of “no way” is giving way to allow users quick access to the productivity apps they need.

Most IT departments have spent time rooting out the shadow, or non-IT-sanctioned, applications and systems in use within their organizations. Today, users find that cloud-based services not necessarily approved by IT enable them to quickly subscribe to applications and platforms that improve their collaboration and productivity. That advantage is prompting IT organizations to rethink how to work with users rather than have a shadow IT policy that is in full-out combat against apps that haven’t been fully blessed by the enterprise and could introduce security risks.

More of the TechTarget article from Sandra Gittlen

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31
May 17

IT Business Edge – Ensuring IT and Legal Are on the Same Page

As I’ve mentioned lately, cybersecurity is dependent on humans. Much of that revolves around human behavior and how cybercriminals prey on our mistakes, laziness, and dedication to multi-tasking. Yet, there are other areas where humans directly affect cybersecurity; one is communication.

I sat in on a session at the Enfuse 2017 conference called “Can I Get a Translation?” The discussion centered around the need for legal departments and the IT or security teams to speak the same language when talking about cybersecurity.

One of the problems is that IT and legal have different interests, the panel explained. Legal, for example, is looking for potential smoking guns in the data, but that’s not IT or the security team’s goal. But if that data isn’t stored or protected correctly, you know which department is going to get blamed, right?

More of the IT Business Edge article from Sue Marquette Poremba

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15
May 17

CIO insight – Why So Much of a CIO’s Day Is Devoted to Security

65% of network and systems admins struggle to determine whether app issues are caused by the network, systems or apps, while 53% run into difficulties measuring latency and delay problems when troubleshooting apps.

A growing number of CIOs, other technology leaders and IT professionals are spending a considerable amount of their time troubleshooting security-related issues, according to a recent survey from Viavi Solutions. The resulting report, “State of the Network Study,” reveals that a significant number of survey respondents are spending a quarter of a standard work week on the detection and mitigation of threats. One of the trend-drivers is that email and browser-based malware has increased over the past 12 months, as has the overall sophistication of attack methods. “Enterprise network teams are [devoting] more time and resources than ever before to battle security threats,” said Douglas Roberts, vice president and general manager of the enterprise and cloud business unit for Viavi Solutions. “Not only are they faced with a growing number of attacks, but hackers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their methods and malware. Dealing with these types of advanced persistent security threats requires planning, resourcefulness and greater visibility throughout the network to ensure that threat intelligence information is always at hand.

More of the CIO Insight slideshow from Dennis McCafferty

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08
May 17

ZDNet – Cloud and the New CIO

Cloud changes everything, and never more so than the role of the CIO, as the recently-released State of the CIO 2017 report[1] reveals.

As the report points out, CIOs still perform the delicate balancing act “between crafting technology strategy and driving business innovation while overseeing routine IT functional tasks such as cost control, vendor negotiation, crisis management, and operational improvements.”

However, although not explicitly stated, it is implicit that cloud services will continue to play a large part in making the CIO more efficient. For example, cloud computing is now the default way for enterprises to deliver new services, whether or not they are officially sanctioned by and acquired through the IT department. This plays to the LOB manager’s need to ‘just get things done’ because convenience and speed will – as so many commentators have already pointed out – always trump security and process. We’ll return to this point a bit later.

More of the ZDNet article from Manek Dubash

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05
May 17

Greylock – The New Moats

Why Systems of Intelligence are the Next Defensible Business Model

To build a sustainable and profitable business, you need strong defensive moats around your company. This rings especially true today as we undergo one of the largest platform shifts in a generation as applications move to the cloud, are consumed on iPhones, Echoes, and Teslas, are built on open source, and are fueled by AI and data. These dramatic shifts are rendering some existing moats useless and leaving CEOs feeling like it’s almost impossible to build a defensible business.

In this post, I’ll review some of the traditional economic moats that technology companies typically leverage and how they are being disrupted. I believe that startups today need to build systems of intelligence — AI powered applications — “the new moats.”

More of the Greylock article from Jerry Chen

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04
May 17

Continuity Central – How personal biases can affect business continuity decisions

Managerial biases such as overconfidence and myopia can explain many failures in business decisions but new research shows how personal biases can be used to improve decision making.

Conventional approaches to eliminating biases focuses on ‘changing the mind’: if people can be trained to recognise their biases and think more logically, better outcomes are likely. However, increasing evidence suggests that such a de-biasing approach is not enough for effective decisions, because it only deals with our conscious half – what Daniel Kahneman famously called System 2. Our automatic half – Kahneman’s System 1 – also plays a role in determining a decision and it is sensitive to our surrounding environment. Even contextual factors, such as the weather being sunny or cloudy, can significantly influence the decisions made.

ZDNet – Cloud v. Data Center: Key trends for IT decision-makers

Cloud-based compute, networking and storage infrastructure, and cloud-native applications, are now firmly on the radar of CIOs — be they in startups, small businesses or large enterprises. So much so that, whereas a few years ago the question facing them was “Which workloads should I move to the cloud?”, it’s now becoming “Which, if any, workloads should I keep on-premises?”. While most organisations will probably end up pursuing a hybrid cloud strategy in the medium term, it’s worth examining this turnaround, and the reasons behind it.

The general background, as ZDNet has explored in recent special features, is the competitive pressure for organisations to undergo a digital transformation based on cloud-native applications and methods such as DevOps, in pursuit of improved IT and organisational performance.

More of the ZDNet article from Charles McLellan

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01
May 17

Arthur Cole – The Reality of an Intelligent IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) may be barely off the ground, but developers are already looking for ways to imbue the technology with high degrees of intelligence.

On one level, an intelligent IoT is a reason unto itself given that the scale and complexity of the data environment is beyond the capabilities of today’s management tools. But ultimately, the expectation is that much of the IoT will govern itself, and that includes the basic interactions between systems and users.

Zebra Technologies’ Tom Bianculli gave eWeek a good overview of all the ways in which intelligence is likely to affect the IoT. From the intelligent enterprise itself, capable of dynamic data streaming, real-time analytics and self-managing applications, to advances in health care, transportation, retail and virtual every other industry, the intelligent IoT has the potential to revolutionize the way we live, work and play.

More of the IT Business Edge article from Arthur Cole

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.