Doug Theis - Leave your comfort zone.

CIO Strategy / Disaster Recovery — Comments Off
14
Jan 16

Continuity Central – More than half of organizations have had data-related incidents in the past 12 months: AIIM report

51 percent of organizations have had data-related incidents in the past 12 months, including 16 percent suffering a data breach, according to new AIIM research.

The new report, ‘Information Governance – too important for humans’, revealed that 45 percent of respondents feel a lack of information governance leaves their organization wide open to litigation and data protection risks. Furthermore, 41 percent of respondents admit that their email management is ‘chaotic’ and 22 percent are reporting a negative financial impact from cases around electronic records.

“The sheer volume of data in business is a major asset for most organizations,” said Doug Miles, chief analyst, AIIM. “But without effective information governance, that data also carries a potentially huge risk, both in terms of reputation and the bottom line. Lots of organizations are talking about information governance, but far less are actually doing it properly – that has to change in 2016.”

The severity and frequency of data incidents reported in the research has meant that information governance has never had more interest in it. For 28 percent of organizations, information governance is very high on the senior management agenda and more than half (53 percent) have recently launched new information governance initiatives.

The Register – IT infrastructure on demand? Yeah right, say devs

IT operations remain completely out of touch with the needs of developers, with CIOs duped into believing a dusting of VMware magic will allow them to construct the sort of whitebox data factories that power the likes of Google, sandbox vendor QualiSystems has declared.

The vendor’s CTO Joan Wrabetz took aim at the industry’s collective self-delusion while unveiling the results of a survey of end-users at this year’s US and European VMworld events, which she said showed IT operations were utterly out of touch with what developers, users and businesses actually need.

The survey found that three-quarters of organisations take at least eight hours to deliver infrastructure to end users, while 43 per cent take more than a week. In 17 per cent of cases, developers can be twiddling their thumbs for more than a month while they wait for ops to carve out some infrastructure for that latest must have release.

Of course, the easy answer is to just spin it all out to the cloud. Except that the respondees reckon it is private cloud where applications are heading. Of the bods taking the survey, 30 per cent of application workloads are running in private cloud, a figure that is expected to grow to 40 per cent over the next two years.

SwitchScribe – Data Center Trends – Data Center Hugging, it’s got to Stop!

SwitchScribe – I admit I pick and choose the things I agree with from Gartner. However, this year I definitely agreed with their statement “Supply rather than ownership should drive strategy in the Data Center”

Supply

Data Center capacity, even in the most modular of designs takes months to bring on line if you’re building your own. In most cases you’re looking at a year or longer from project definition to opening a building. In the parlance of modern IT six months is not agile let alone a year. Data Center capacity needs to be considered in the whole; how much do I need to own vs how much should I contract or lease from suppliers? There are several realities here ; 1) there is no longer a need to “own” a physical data center facility and 2) we must view data center capacity through the same lens that we view manufacturing and business process improvement.

Assumptions about the need to own:

We’re special and have needs that can’t be addressed in either the cloud or a colocation facility.

We can do it more cost effectively than a colocation supplier

WSJ’s CIO Journal – Mistakes Were Made: CIOs Share The Worst Tech Excuses They’ve Heard

Intel Corp. Chief Information Officer Kim Stevenson faces complex enterprise technology issues on a daily basis. But perhaps none was as baffling as the staffer who reported a PC bursting into flames.

“After an investigation, it was clear the user had thrown the PC into the fireplace,” says Ms. Stevenson, who ranks the employee’s explanation for turning in a charred computer among the worst excuses she’s ever heard for a technology failure. Her tip for anyone planning to throw a work-issued device into a fireplace: “You need to clean of the ashes off before you hand it over to the PC service center.”

As 2015 winds down, we asked CIOs in a range of industries to share some of the lousy excuses they heard for tech failures, missed deadlines and other IT bloopers – from apps with agonizingly slow processing times, to entire systems going dark.

Bill Bradley, CIO of CenturyLink Inc., says often the most unbelievable or unacceptable excuses are those that blame the customer. “Accountability demands that IT delivers solutions without excuses,” he says.

Data Center Knowledge – Getting to the True Data Center Cost

Will it be cheaper to run a particular application in the cloud than keeping it in the corporate data center? Would a colo be cheaper? Which servers in the data center are running at low utilization? Are there servers that have been forgotten about by the data center manager? Does it make sense to replace old servers with new ones? If it does, which ones would be best for my specific applications?

Those are examples of the essential questions every data center manager should be asking themselves and their team every day if they aren’t already. Together, they can be distilled down to a single ever-relevant question: How much does it cost to run an application?

Answering it is incredibly complex, which is the reason startups like TSO Logic, Romonet, or Coolan, among others, have sprung up in recent years. If you answer it correctly, the pay-off can be substantial, because almost all data centers are not running as efficiently as they can, and there’s always room for optimization and savings.

Continuity Central – Shadow IT is a cultural problem and shutting it down is now impossible warns SecureEnvoy

Shadow IT – where IT is built and used inside businesses without explicit organizational approval – is becoming increasingly widespread. In fact, Gartner claims that Shadow IT regularly surpasses 30 percent of a company’s IT spend and is the top concern for CIOs in 2016 due to its ability to lead to compliance failures and business risks.

The security issue is unfortunately not only a critical one but a cultural one. When an employee casually uses an application such as Dropbox to transfer files there is likely to be little thought about the risk of potentially sensitive data – whether that is customer contact details, financial information or intellectual property – falling into the wrong hands.

VMware – The Business Case for Cloud Automation

Automating private cloud infrastructure management helps improve the efficiency of cloud operations and deliver big CapEx and OpEx savings. The following infographic puts some numbers on the return on investment for cloud automation technology, derived from a wide range of customer case studies.

Check out the Infographic for some eye opening statistics.

More of the CIO Vantage post from VMware

Business Development / Get Better — Comments Off
31
Dec 15

Customer Think – How Have You Helped Your Customers Improve Their Outcomes?

As we approach the end of the year, there’s always a huge intensity of activity. A lot driven by the various holidays we celebrate, a lot driven by year end (or quarter end), and some driven by preparations for the new fiscal year.

It’s easy to lose focus on our customers.

But perhaps it’s worth a few minutes to reflect. Perhaps even spending some time in review with them.

The key issue is, “How have you helped them improve their outcomes in the past year?”

At the core of everything we do, our success is measured less on achieving our sales numbers, but more on the results we’ve helped our customers achieve.

It’s important to both our customers and us, but too often we tend to forget about it–or we realize they haven’t achieve the outcomes expected.

This isn’t driven by some airy concept of customer-centricity, though that’s very nice. These are really data driven, tough minded business discussions.

How have you helped your customers improve their outcomes?

Sure you may have gotten an order, but customers don’t buy just to buy. They buy to achieve results. Did they achieve them?

More of the Customer Think post by Dave Brock

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Get Better / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
30
Dec 15

ZDNet – IT managers: we’re hurting for more cloud and DevOps skills

There’s been a lot of talk lately about “two-speed” IT, in which one part of the job is to help with all the cool stuff, such as digital presence and data analytics, while the other part is to deal with the traditional IT maintenance stuff — upgrades, patching, coding, security and so forth.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like two-speed IT is a 50-50 split in time and resources. It’s more like 80-20, in favor of the maintenance side.

That’s the conclusion from a survey of 200 IT executives just released by NetEnrich, which surveyed larger organizations with at least $400 million in annual revenues. The survey finds plenty of adoption of newer approaches that could help shift IT’s emphasis to the digital side — particularly cloud and DevOps. Nearly 97 percent of respondents said they’re moving applications and workloads into public, private or hybrid cloud environments, and 68 percent said that DevOps methodologies have been integrated well into their traditional IT and tech operations teams.

More of the ZDNet article from Joe McKendrick

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
29
Dec 15

TechRadar – The public cloud is not safe – and it’s your fault

Love the headline. This article shines a light on IT professionals taking responsibility for their own systems security.

What has the cloud ever done to you? General enthusiasm for moving huge tranches of private, sensitive company data onto the public cloud seems to wax and wane. It waxes as prices drop, new pay-as-you-go business plans emerge and new SaaS products go online, and it wanes when the media cover an Ashley Madison or a TalkTalk hack – and there have been plenty of those in 2015.

Security concerns remain the most common reason for businesses avoiding public cloud services, but providers like AWS, Microsoft, Google and IBM insist that their clouds are safe. That only leaves one weak link – the people who work for the businesses that use them. If the cloud isn’t as safe as it should be, it’s your fault.

According to analysts at Gartner, 95% of cloud security failures by 2020 will be the customer’s fault. “Only a small percentage of the security incidents impacting enterprises using the cloud have been due to vulnerabilities that were the provider’s fault,” says Gartner’s report Top Strategic Predictions for 2016 and Beyond: The Future Is a Digital Thing.

More of the TechRadar post from Jamie Carter

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.