Doug Theis - Leave your comfort zone.

Baseline – What Worries IT Organizations the Most?

IT employees and leaders have a lot to worry about these days, according to a recent survey from NetEnrich. For starters, they’re spending too much money on technology that either doesn’t get used or fails to deliver on its promises, findings show. They devote too many hours to “keeping the lights on” rather than innovating. And the increase of tech acquisition decisions being made outside of the IT department (shadow IT) elevates existing risks about cyber-security and business app performance. Meanwhile, tech departments are still struggling with a lack of available talent to support agility and business advances. “Corporate IT departments are in a real bind,” said Raju Chekuri, CEO at NetEnrich.

More of the Baseline slideshow from Dennis McCafferty

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / IT Strategy — Comments Off
23
Feb 16

The Register – Add ‘Bimodal IT’ to your buzzword bingo card: Faster… more stable… faster. But stable

Thanks to Gartner, we have a new buzzword: bimodal IT. It’s nothing special actually, just a new way to describe common sense, and the fact that the world – the IT world in this case – is not black or white.

In practice, in modern IT organisations it is better to find a way to integrate different environments instead of trying to square the circle all the time. This means that you can’t apply DevOps methodology to everything, nor can you deny its benefits if you want to deploy cloud-based applications efficiently. (Gartner discovers great truths sometimes, doesn’t it?)

But here is my question, “Does bimodal IT need separate infrastructures?”

Bimodal IT doesn’t mean two different infrastructures
In the past few weeks I published quite a few articles talking about Network, Storage, Scale-out, and Big Data infrastructures. Most of them address a common problem: how to build flexible and simple infrastructures that can serve legacy and cloud-like workloads at the same time.

From the storage standpoint, for example, I would say that a unified storage system is no longer synonymous with multi-protocol per se, but it’s much more important if it has the capability of serving as many workloads as possible at the same time. Like a bunch of Oracle databases, hundreds of VMs and thousands of container accessing shared volumes concurrently. The protocol used is just a consequence.

To pull it off, you absolutely need the right back-end architecture and, at the same time, APIs, configurability and tons of flexibility. Integration is another key part, and the storage system has to be integrated with all the different hypervisors, cloud platforms and now orchestration tools.

More of The Register post from Enrico Signoretti

CIO Strategy / IT Strategy — Comments Off
19
Feb 16

CIOInsight – A Hire Calling: How to Assemble an IT Dream Team

When interviewing IT job candidates, why simply fill vacancies when you can bring on a dream team of well-rounded players? By assessing candidates for strengths that extend far beyond a simple command of job description-based tech skills, you’ll recruit employees who can make meaningful, lasting impact throughout your entire organization. In the book, Hiring Greatness: How to Recruit Your Dream Team and Crush the Competition (Wiley/available now), authors David E. Perry and Mark J. Haluska reveal best practices—as well as pitfalls to avoid—in landing future stars who will unleash innovation while generating enviable ROI for your department.

More of the CIO Insight slide show from Dennis McCafferty

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18
Feb 16

Baseline – Why Are Companies’ IT Transformations Lagging?

The challenges of migrating to a digital business and IT framework are daunting. Today’s fast-moving environment requires new information technology systems, different thinking and entirely new skills. A recently released report from Dimension Data and the Business Performance Innovation (BPI) Network, “Crossing the Transformation Divide: What Frontline IT Workers Need to Make the Leap,” indicates that organizations are largely falling short of the desired mark, and many are close to failing, according to IT workers. Of course, all of this is significant news because IT transformation is increasingly a critical factor in determining whether organizations reach key business goals and achieve a competitive advantage. – See more at: http://www.baselinemag.com/it-management/slideshows/why-are-companies-it-transformations-lagging.html#sthash.8ny1P6q1.dpuf

More of the Baseline slide show from Samuel Greengard

Cloud Computing / Data Center / IT Strategy / Virtualization — Comments Off
17
Feb 16

VMTurbo – What’s the Promise of Orchestration?

In my conversations over 2015, I have found that one of the top of mind goals for many Directors and CIOs for this year is the goal of fully automating the orchestration of the environment. It is a common pain felt across the IT staff, the lack of agility and automation when it comes to provisioning new workloads for the environment.

Whether the plan is to expand the VMWare suite through vRealize Automation, pursue a third party technology like Chef, Puppet, CloudForms, or move into a full IaaS or PaaS environment through OpenStack or Cloud Foundry, the objective is to speed up the auto-provisioning capabilities of the data center to meet the rapidly growing needs for faster, more responsive applications at a quicker delivery time. However, the benefits of moving to automated orchestration, also create new challenges.

Why Orchestrate?

To answer this question, let me throw out a scenario that many can probably relate to today. An administrator logs into his Outlook first thing Friday morning, and at the top of his inbox is a request for a new VM from a coworker, who plans to begin testing a new application in the next couple of weeks per the CIO’s initiative.

More of the VMTurbo post from Matt Vetter

Cloud Computing / Data Center / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
16
Feb 16

Data Center Knowledge – How Data Center Trends Are Forcing a Revisit of the Database

Ravi Mayuram is Senior Vice President of Products and Engineering at Couchbase.

Data centers are like people: no two are alike, especially now. A decade of separating compute, storage, and even networking services from the hardware that runs them has left us with x86 pizza boxes stacked next to, or connected with, 30-year-old mainframes. And why not? Much of the tough work is done by software tools that define precisely how and when hardware is to be used.

From virtual machines to software-defined storage and network functions virtualization, these layers of abstraction fuse hardware components into something greater and easier to control.

More of the Data Center Knowledge post from Ravi Mayuram

CIO Strategy / IT Strategy / Shadow IT — Comments Off
10
Feb 16

CIOInsight – How to Embrace Rogue IT

Rogue IT is the foundation upon which innovation can be built. Rather than being restricted by traditional application and product development processes, non-IT teams can rapidly deploy solutions matching business requirements, thus accelerating new cost savings and resource efficiencies.

You might as well embrace rogue IT, or shadow IT, which will continue to grow in importance, and its impact will be felt globally, according to Tim Kelleher, vice president of IT Security Services at Century Link. Rogue IT might just lead to innovation and competitive advantage, he says. Employees increasingly will bypass corporate IT by subscribing to new collaboration, analytics or other cloud services to get work done, he says. Others will build homegrown applications via the cloud and other development platforms. This trend to remove power from corporate hands is enough to strike fear in any CIO because security risks and bandwidth restrictions can accompany each new project. On the other hand, “while the natural tendency is to limit unauthorized usage,” says Kelleher, “rogue IT can prove very useful to organizations today, driving new levels of innovation and productivity.

Wall Street Journal – CIOs Say Focus on Customer Is Paramount

We asked chief information officers how they expect their role to change in 2016 and beyond. They said the “seat at the table” discussion is over, and that the CIO exerts greater influence inside the C-suite as technology permeates every line of business.

Many CIOs said they now shape corporate strategy, not just support it. While they still have a mandate to improve operating performance, keep costs down and drive productivity using technology, they also guide product development and user experience design.

“Regardless of industry, CIOs will have more responsibility directly to the customer,” said Bill Bradley, CIO at CenturyLink Inc.

While in the past viewed as mostly a technical position, “the CIO…is now considered very valuable in the ability to bridge the gap between IT and internal and external customer needs,” said Erika Lance, CIO at Nationwide Title Clearing Inc.

Back in the Newsletter Business – Expedient Data Center News Digest

Many of you have been asking when I would start publishing a data center newsletter again. The answer is now! The Expedient Data Center News Digest is a monthly email newsletter about colocation, cloud computing, disaster recovery and CIO strategy. Click here to subscribe and have a look.

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.