Doug Theis - Leave your comfort zone.

Forbes – We Must Find A Way To Defy Data Gravity In The Cloud

The IT industry is in the midst of a transformational era in terms of how we treat data. At Moor Insights & Strategy we have discussed countless the times forces that are driving the need for a data strategy, how that need is deeply impacted by real-time analytics, and how data has escaped the datacenter and is now spread from edge to cloud.

The world of IT today is one of hybrid and multi-clouds. IT deploys workloads to the public cloud because it delivers on a compelling value proposition across a number of realms. Deploying resources dynamically, as needed, and terminating them when the project is over saves countless CapEx dollars. Having resources that can be deployed dynamically, gives IT and application owners an almost infinite amount of flexibility.

More of the Forbes post from Steve McDowell

CIO Strategy / IT Strategy / Play Hard — Comments Off
07
Dec 18

HBR – Making Kindness a Core Tenet of Your Company

Scan the newspaper headlines, or switch on cable news for a few minutes, and it’s easy to conclude that we are living through harsh, mean, divisive times. But a recent column in the Washington Post reminded me of a truth that is even easier to overlook: Just as bad behavior tends to spread, so too does good behavior. Kindness, it turns out, is contagious. The column highlighted the work of Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki, who documents what he calls “positive conformity.” In his research, “participants who believed others were more generous became more generous themselves.” This suggests that “kindness is contagious, and that it can cascade across people, taking on new forms along the way.”

More of the Harvard Business Review article from Bill Taylor

Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Hybrid Cloud / Multi-Cloud — Comments Off
06
Dec 18

CloudTech – How DevOps and a hybrid model can make the most out of legacy applications

Do you have an application marked with cryptic warning signs and a wealth of cobwebs that is running on legacy hardware hidden away in the back corner of your data centre? If you’re in enterprise IT, chances are high that you do. These old platforms are often considered a bane to IT. More importantly, legacy applications can present a real headache when attempting to uplift the people, processes and tooling needed to embrace a hybrid cloud model.

Providing self-service, orchestrated workflows and delivery pipelines are just a few signature attributes to constructing a hybrid cloud. Imagine trying to apply these ideas to legacy technology, where the interface requires using an archaic console and software that looks like it was written for Windows 3.1. It’s not fun and often derails any efforts to deliver services living in an on-premises software-defined data centre (SDDC) or public cloud environment. It also splits up a team focused on working within the realm of a DevOps cultural model, because concepts such as infrastructure as code, stateless configuration and collaborative code check-ins crumble.

More of the CloudTech post from Rebecca Fitzhugh

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05
Dec 18

InfoWorld – Sorry, Linux. Kubernetes is now the OS that matters

Linux is just plumbing. The real OS—the real value—is with Kubernetes

The operating system no longer really matters. And for developers and the cloud, that means that Linux no longer really matters.

You can see proof of that in what has not happened. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has not gotten a $34 billion buyout offer from IBM, even though company founder Mark Shutteworth would have taken that deal, despite protestations that the company isn’t looking for a buyer.

More of the InfoWorld article from Matt Asay

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Digital Transformation / IT Governance / IT Leadership / IT Strategy — Comments Off
04
Dec 18

Future of CIO – Three Root Causes of Stalled Change or Digitalization

Digitalization represents the next stage of business maturity which will improve how the enterprise works and interacts with its ecosystem, with people at the center of its focus.

Digital transformation represents a break from the past, with a high level of impact and complexity. It is important to understand that digitalization is multifaceted. It is not a single dimensional technology adoption, but a multi-dimensional business expansion and optimization. When digitalization seems to get stalled and culture is stale, business management must ask the big “WHY” question and dig into the root cause. Because the organization’s ability to change and adaptability directly impact the organization’s long-term competency and business maturity.

More of the Future of CIO post from Pearl Zhu

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03
Dec 18

CIO.com – Workday CIO on tackling SaaS debt and sprawl

Configure your software, don’t customize it — but make sure you have the skills available to do it well: That’s the advice of Workday CIO Diana McKenzie

Being the CIO of a cloud ERP provider is a unique balancing act. As the first customer of your company’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering, you must help drive the company’s flagship forward, but you also must support the technical needs of the organization as a whole.

That’s where Workday CIO Diana McKenzie found herself when joining the company nearly three years ago, after the better part of three decades running IT functions in the life sciences industry. The core of Workday was running on its own software, which performs essential financial, HR and planning functions, but elsewhere issues were coming to the fore.

More of the CIO.com post from Peter Sayer

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Data Center / Digital Transformation / IaaS / IT Governance / IT Strategy / Risk Management — Comments Off
30
Nov 18

IT Business Edge – ERP Entering All Facets of the Economy

Enterprise Resource Planning platforms have been around for several decades. Some people love them, some hate them. What is indisputable, however, is that organizations around the world are being continuously pushed to achieve greater efficiency and faster turnaround, and ERP is a way of achieving both goals.

According to Market Research Engine, ERP is expected to near $50 billion in total market value by 2024, infiltrating tasks as wide-ranging as sales and marketing to distribution management and finance. What’s interesting about the current phase of ERP development is the way it dovetails with a number of other industry requirements besides the perennial need to become more efficient. The rising acceptance of mobile and cloud-based applications, for instance, places greater onus on the need to build more flexible, user-friendly means of support. As well, as business processes become increasingly digital-oriented, ERP brings much-needed intelligibility to complex workflows.

More of the IT Business Edge article from Arthur Cole

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29
Nov 18

CTOVision – Public Attitudes Toward Computer Algorithms

Editor’s Note: An algorithm is just somebody else’s opinion – Glenn Keller

While tech companies and tech gurus may firmly side with AI and machine learning, the general public in the United States is definitely against it. A new survey by Pew Research found that the majority of US adults say it is unacceptable to use algorithms for criminal risk assessments, resume and job interview analysis, and personal finance scores. There are several themes like privacy concerns and absence of humans in decision making that are prime concerns among those who find these programs to be unacceptable.

ComputerWeekly Survey: Data very fragmented, and that’s a worry for most

Cohesity-sponsored survey finds most organisations store multiple copies of secondary data and worry about the cost and the effect on their competitiveness

Most UK organisations store up to 10 copies of the same secondary data, run four or five different products to manage it, and keep it in up to four locations, including two or three different public cloud storage providers.

Not surprisingly, a majority (54%) are also worried about fragmentation of their secondary – ie, not production – data.

Those are some of the findings of a survey sponsored by Cohesity, which provides scale-out data protection appliances and a data management platform.

The survey questioned 250 UK IT decision-makers as part of a study that also asked 650 of their counterparts in the US, France, Germany, Australia and Japan.

The average number of copies of the same datasets in secondary data held by UK respondents is five, and that came out the same across all countries except Japan, for which the number is seven.

More of the ComputerWeekly post from Antony Adshead

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27
Nov 18

Forbes – Where Cloud Computing Jobs Will Be In 2019

$146,350 is the median salary for cloud computing professionals in 2018.
There are 50,248 cloud computing positions available in the U.S. today available from 3,701 employers and 101,913 open positions worldwide today.
Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), Deloitte and Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) have the most open cloud computing jobs today.
Java, Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Software Development, DevOps, Docker and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) are the most in-demand skills.

More of the Forbes article from Louis Columbus

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.