Doug Theis - Leave your comfort zone.

CIO Strategy / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
28
Mar 16

IT Business Edge – CEOs Share Valuable Lesson: Be Careful When You Hire

It has become a common refrain among tech company founders and CEOs I’ve spoken with over the years: Failing to do an adequate job of vetting the people they have brought on board to help them build their companies has been a handicap that they would love to have avoided.

When I interview company founders and CEOs, I almost always ask them, if they could have one do-over since founding or becoming CEO of their company, what it would be. Occasionally I’ll get a CEO who claims there’s nothing he or she would do over, which, of course, is nonsense. On the other end of the spectrum, I sometimes get candid responses about a bad product development or other tactical or strategic decision made along the way. But if there’s one response I get more than any other, it involves having made far-reaching hiring mistakes.

More of the IT Business Edge post from Don Tennant

Cloud Computing / Data Center / IT Strategy — Comments Off
23
Mar 16

SearchDataCenter – The right infrastructure for fast and big data architectures

The newer fast data architectures differ significantly from big data architectures and the tried-and-true online transaction processing tools that fast data supplements. Understanding big data and fast data’s requirement changes will inform your foray into the hardware and software choices.

Big data architectures

Big data is about analyzing and gaining deeper insights from much larger pools of data than enterprises typically gathered in the past. Much of the data (e.g., social-media data about customers) is accessible in public clouds. This data, in turn, emphasizes speedy access and deemphasizes consistency, leading to a wide array of Hadoop big data tools. Thus, the following changes in architecture and emphasis are common:

More of the SearchDataCenter article from Wayne Kernochan

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18
Mar 16

SearchCloudComputing – Verizon Cloud joins casualty list amid public IaaS exodus

Why do YOU think the big guys are shutting down their cloud operations?

Verizon is the latest large-scale IT vendor to quietly shutter its public cloud after its splashy entry to the market several years ago.

Customers this week received a letter informing them that Verizon’s public cloud, reserved performance and marketplace services will be closed on April 12. Any virtual machines running on the public Verizon Cloud will be shut down and no content on those servers will be retained.

The move isn’t particularly surprising. Despite once-lofty ambitions, Verizon acknowledges its public cloud offering is not a big part of its cloud portfolio and, a year ago, the firm began to emphasize its private cloud services even before its public cloud became generally available. Other large vendors such as Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise similarly have been shutting down their public clouds.

More of the SearchCloudComputing article from Trevor Jones

Data Center — Comments Off
11
Mar 16

Data Center Knowledge – The Life Cycle of a Data Center

Your data center is alive.

It is a living, breathing, and sometimes even growing entity that constantly must adapt to change. The length of its life depends on use, design, build, and operation.

Equipment will be replaced, changed, and may be modified to best equip your specific data center’s individual specification to balance the total cost of ownership with risk and redundancy measures.

Just as with a human being, the individual care and love you show your data center can lengthen the life of your partnership.

This, best utilizing and tailoring your data center to extend its life cycle, is addressed by Morrison Hershfield Critical Facilities Practice Lead, Steven Shapiro, in his upcoming Data Center World presentation, “The Life Cycle of a Data Center”.

More of the Data Center Knowledge post from Karen Riccio

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04
Mar 16

Baseline – Hybrid Clouds: The Long Road Ahead

The challenge facing IT leaders is that there are so many forms of hybrid clouds that they don’t realize how extended a journey their organization may be on.

When it comes to enterprise IT these days, just about everything involves some form of hybrid cloud computing. The challenge is that there are so many forms of hybrid clouds that many IT leaders don’t realize just how extended a journey their organization may be on.

The typical IT organization usually embraces cloud computing first with a few software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. In that regard, the hybrid cloud scenario that emerges is relatively simple: IT leaders need to find ways to share data between existing on-premise applications and SaaS applications that are most often servicing the needs of a specific department or line of business.

IT leaders also find themselves trying to manage infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) environments. IT usually starts out with a few developers taking advantage of platforms such as Amazon Web Services to build and test applications.

More of the Baseline article from Mike Vizard

Uncategorized — Comments Off
03
Mar 16

Continuity Central – Organizational resilience and business continuity: bringing clarity to a confused profession

Resilience is very much a hot topic in the business continuity profession, but there seems to be very little agreement about what we mean by resilience; where it sits in relation to business continuity management; and what its scope should be. This article aims at bringing some clarity and will explore the following questions:

What exactly, is resilience and do we share a meaningful definition, or is it just hype?
Does it have enough value or substance to differentiate it from what we already have?
How much resilience do we need or is it OK to be vague about it?
Where does resilience naturally sit within the organization? Does it make a difference?
What does a resilience programme look like and where should we look for guidance?
In 2014, the British Standards Institution (BSI) published BS 65000 ‘Guidance on Organizational Resilience’. In its wake, waves of business continuity managers have been transformed into resilience managers, following the trend or perhaps pre-empting the arrival of ISO’s 22316 resilience offering, due in April 2017. But have things really changed or did resilience just become fashionable? Are we seeing a re-branding, a seized opportunity to balance-off rarely needed business continuity with more general defences that regularly add material value, or is it inevitable evolution?

In its introduction to BS 65000 BSI states that resilience is “…a strategic objective intended to help an organization survive and prosper …the ability to anticipate, prepare, respond and adapt… to minor everyday events to acute shocks and chronic or incremental change”. There is of course much more in the document and the introduction alone runs to four paragraphs, but at first reading are you convinced? Try the following test:

More of the Continuity Central post from John Robinson

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / IT Security / IT Strategy / Virtualization — Comments Off
02
Mar 16

CloudExpo – Hybrid Cloud Versus Hybrid IT: What’s the Hype?

Once again, the boardroom is in a bitter battle over what edict its members will now levy on their hapless IT organization. On one hand, hybrid cloud is all the rage. Adopting this option promises all the cost savings of public cloud with the security and comfort of private cloud. This environment would not only check the box for meeting the cloud computing mandate, but also position the organization as innovative and industry-leading. Why wouldn’t a forward-leaning management team go all in with cloud?

On the other hand, hybrid IT appears to be the sensible choice for leveraging traditional data center investments. Data center investment business models always promise significant ROI within a fairly short time frame; if not, they wouldn’t have been approved. Shutting down such an expensive initiative early would be an untenable decision. Is this a better option than the hybrid cloud?

Hybrid Cloud Versus Hybrid IT
The difference between hybrid cloud and hybrid IT is more than just semantics. The hybrid cloud model is embraced by those entities and startups that don’t need to worry about past capital investments. These newer companies have more flexibility in exploring newer operational options.

More of the CloudExpo blog post from Kevin Jackson

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01
Mar 16

Baseline – IT Security Teams Are Stretched to the Limit

The growth of virtualization and cloud computing—and the nimble and responsive architectures they enable—has brought companies unquestioned benefits, ranging from increased business agility to reduced application costs. But the heterogeneous environments most companies are now overseeing also have brought unprecedented complexity and vulnerability. With so many sub-environments and so much cross-application traffic to monitor—not to mention an increasingly sophisticated and fast-growing population of bad guys to safeguard against—it’s become difficult for enterprises to even detect a threat, much less respond in a timely fashion. Such is the inescapable takeaway from a recent survey that the SANS Institute conducted for adaptive security vendor Illumio.

More of the Baseline slide show from Tony Kontzer

CIO Strategy / IT Strategy — Comments Off
29
Feb 16

Harvard Business Review – What Do You Really Mean by “Business Transformation”?

Today’s corporate watchword word is transformation, and for good reason. One study suggests that 75% of the S&P 500 will turn over in the next 15 years. Another says that one in three companies will delist in the next five years. A third shows that the “topple rate” of industry leaders falling from their perch has doubled in a generation. Software is eating the world. Unicorns are prancing unabated. Executives at large companies rightly recognize that they need to respond in turn.

And yet.

When executives say transformation what do they really mean? Often, the word confuses three fundamentally different categories of effort.

The first is operational, or doing what you are currently doing, better, faster, or cheaper. Many companies that are “going digital” fit in this category — they are using new technologies to solve old problems. A big operational change can be jarring and drive real business impact, but it doesn’t fit dictionary definitions of transformation, such as “a marked change in form, nature, or appearance” or “to change (something) completely and usually in a good way.

More of the HBR article from Scott Anthony

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / IT Strategy — Comments Off
25
Feb 16

CIOInsight – Why IT spending is all about the business

Dennis McCafferty does it again. He nails the key topics associated with getting IT spending right in this slideshow from CIOInsight.

While most CIOs, IT execs and senior managers agree that it’s important to link tech investments to key business outcomes, relatively few feel their organization does a very good job of doing so, according to a recent survey from Datalink. The report, titled “The Importance of Linking Business Outcomes to IT Investment Strategy,” indicates that these leaders clearly believe that tech spending is all about supporting the business these days—as opposed to merely benefiting IT operations. To get more out of their buck here, companies are looking to streamline operational processes and launch standardization initiatives.

More of the CIOInsight slideshow from Dennis McCafferty

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.