Doug Theis - Leave your comfort zone.

ITWorld – Disaster recovery in a DevOps world

Organizations that are adopting DevOps methodologies are realizing actual benefits from taking that approach.

According to a 2015 survey by IT Revolution Press in conjunction with Puppet Labs, organizations using DevOps deploy code 30 times faster than others, doing deployments multiple times per day. Moreover, change failure gets cut in half with DevOps and services are restored up to 168 times faster than they are at non-DevOps organizations.

Let’s focus on those last two points for a moment. One thing is for certain: Embracing DevOps also pays off from a disaster recovery standpoint, because the tools and procedures that you use to move applications from development to testing to production and back to development again can also be applied to failing over and recovering from disasters and service interruptions. The same tools that automate the entire DevOps life cycle can also help you make the most use of the resources you already have for recovery purposes.

There are indeed plenty of open-source tools to help with this automation, like Chef and Puppet, which create, launch, and deploy new virtual machine instances in an automated way and configure them appropriately. They even work across security boundaries, deploying on your private laptop, in your own data center, or even up in the public cloud — Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are two major public cloud providers that support Chef and Puppet.

More of the ITWorld article from Jonathan Hassell

Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / IT Strategy — Comments Off
26
Jul 16

Arthur Cole – Navigating the Challenges in IoT Infrastructure

The speed at which the enterprise has embraced IoT infrastructure has been impressive. But with most deployments still in a nascent stage, many organizations are only just now starting to encounter some of the challenges associated with scaling up to production levels.

According to Strategy Analytics, nearly 70 percent of businesses have deployed IoT solutions, and that is expected to increase to 80 percent within the year. But as Datamation’s Pedro Hernandez points out, many organizations are struggling with the analytics side of the equation. While gleaning insight into complex environments is the main driver of IoT, it isn’t always easy to determine exactly how the analytics should be done. As the data coming into the enterprise mounts, so too will the complexity of the analytics process, which can deliver vastly different results based not only on what data is collected and how it is conditioned it but what questions are asked and even how they are phrased.

Perhaps not altogether surprising, the most effective use of IoT is not happening in the enterprise or in commercial operations but on the manufacturing floor, says tech journalist Chris Neiger. Recent research from BI Intelligence shows that industrial manufacturers are well ahead of verticals like banking, telecom and energy in their deployment of IoT solutions. The field is being led by General Electric, which is leveraging IoT for everything from industrial assembly lines to navigation and fuel management systems. Company executives say an IoT-supported Industrial Internet could contribute $10 trillion to $15 trillion to global GDP in the next two decades.

More of the IT Business Edge article from Arthur Cole

CIO Strategy / Get Better / IT Strategy — Comments Off
25
Jul 16

CMO.com – Think Executives Are Rational Decision Makers? Think Again

When you create a message for VPs or higher personas, you may be tempted to assume that their decisions are strictly rational and logical and that it’s all about the math. Why? Because they tell you that, and they believe it themselves.

Well, they are lying to you. Not on purpose, but lying nevertheless, according to a recent experiment we conducted with Dr. Zakary Tormala, a social psychologist with expertise in messaging and persuasion.

The study found that in a business decision-making scenario, you can provide executives with the same math with respect to a business proposition, but get significantly different results depending on how you frame the situation.

Conrad Smith, VP of consulting at Corporate Visions, reached out to Corporate Visions’ network of executives and asked them to take part in an online experiment. Participants—113 of them—came from a wide array of industries, including software, oil, finance, aerospace, and others, and occupied a range of high-level roles at their companies, from vice president up to CEO.

More of the CMO article from Tim Riesterer

CIO Strategy / IT Security / Shadow IT — Comments Off
21
Jul 16

CIO Insight – Why IT Departments Lack Diversity Programs

The majority of IT departments and their organizations are doing relatively little to increase workforce diversity, according to a recent survey from TEKsystems. Very few tech pros and leaders, for example, said their company has a formal diversity program in place. They admit that they struggle to find quality talent to fill open IT positions, but they don’t often consider diversity in recruitment efforts—ignoring the value of existing diversity programs which could help close gaps.

“While IT departments struggle to find qualified IT workers for their teams, our data indicates that most have yet to leverage diversity programs to help solve that challenge,” said Michelle Webb, director of diversity and inclusion for TEKsystems. “In our conversations with clients regarding diversity initiatives, we’ve found that IT departments are less aware of the value that diversity programs can play in their skills-sourcing efforts when compared to human resources or business leadership.

With the shortage of qualified IT workers likely to increase, organizations need to add diversity programs to their arsenal to address their hiring needs.

More of the CIO Insight slideshow from Dennis McCafferty

CIO Strategy / Data Center / Disaster Recovery / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
20
Jul 16

Continuity Central – Majority of organizations experience downtime and service degradation due to IT capacity issues

Super interesting research on the hidden troubles associated with IT capacity.

Sumerian has published the results of its latest research, in conjunction with analyst house Freeform Dynamics. The research revealed a genuine mismatch between the IT infrastructure that businesses have in place versus what they actually need , supporting the widely held view that there is significant overspend on server capacity across industries. Worryingly, it also revealed a total mismatch between the capacity management tools and processes currently in place versus those needed to deal with this issue.

Key highlights of the research include:

76 percent of IT professionals resort to overprovisioning IT infrastructure in order to avoid capacity related issues
‘Overprovision and forget’ remains the most common approach amongst IT professionals, with the vast majority relying heavily or partially on instinct and vigilance (90 percent), system alerts and alarms (86 percent), and a range of ad hoc tools and practices (73 percent), to manage capacity in a very reactive way. As a result, less than one in five (18 percent) rated their capacity planning practices for their overall IT system resources as ‘very effective’, with others admitting they were less than ideal (54 percent), or wholly inadequate (21 percent).

Baseline – Cloud-First—Except When Performance Matters

Many companies have a cloud-first policy that hosts as many applications as possible in the cloud, but apps that are latency-sensitive are staying on premise.

In the name of achieving increased IT agility, many organizations have implemented a cloud-first policy that requires as many application workloads as possible to be hosted in the cloud. The thinking is that it will be faster to deploy and provision IT resources in the cloud.

While that’s true for most classes of workloads, those applications that are latency-sensitive are staying home to run on premise.

Speaking at a recent Hybrid Cloud Summit in New York, Tom Koukourdelis, senior director for cloud architecture at Nasdaq, said there are still whole classes of high-performance applications that need to run in real time. Trying to access those applications across a wide area network (WAN) simply isn’t feasible. The fact of the matter, he added, is that there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all cloud computing environment.

More of the Baseline article from Mike Vizard

CIO Strategy / Digital Transformation / IT Strategy — Comments Off
18
Jul 16

IT Business Edge – Confused by Digital Transformation? Welcome to the Club

If you feel that you’re falling behind in the race to digital transformation, take heart – you’re not alone. It turns out that a good chunk of enterprise leaders believe they are either coming up short in building the next-generation data environment or are unsure where they stand because the definition of success is too vague.

This should not come as a huge surprise, of course, since digital transformation is unlike technology developments of the past, primarily because it involves much more than technology. This time, the change reaches way beyond the data center and into the very heart of the business model, and the business culture, itself.

More of the IT Business Edge article from Arthur Cole

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / IT Strategy / Virtualization — Comments Off
12
Jul 16

ZDNet – Cloud computing pushes enterprise vendors closer to their customers

Cloud computing may help make running enterprises a little bit easier (allegedly), but it has not made running an enterprise software business any easier. If anything, things have gotten more difficult for vendors lately.

The most challenging piece of the rapidly accelerating migration to cloud for enterprise software providers is delivering a superior customer experience.

That’s the gist of a recent analysis produced by Bain and Company, which points out that in the era of cloud connectivity, the era of shoddy releases and so-so customer service is coming to an end. “For many years, enterprise technology companies got along fine with pretty low customer experience ratings–just about the lowest, in fact, of the industries we measured,” the report’s authors, Chris Brahm, James Dixon and Rob Markey, state. But it never seemed to matter, they continue: “Once software or hardware was installed and running, companies were reluctant to go through the expense and hassle of changing vendors, even if the technology wasn’t delivering a superior experience.”

More of the ZDNet article from Joe McKendrick

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.