Doug Theis - Leave your comfort zone.

WSJ – Cloud, Not Tax Cuts, Drives IT Spending: Survey

Corporate information-technology budgets are expected to inch up over last year, as large firms continue to shift more workloads to the cloud, according to Morgan Stanley.

Despite recent federal tax cuts aimed at boosting corporate spending, most chief information officers say their IT spending plans haven’t changed, the bank said in a report Wednesday.

The results are based on a survey of 75 U.S. and 25 European CIOs at companies in a range of industries, most with more than $1 billion in annual revenue. The survey was conducted online and by phone between February and March.

More of the Wall Street Journal article from Angus Loten

Business continuity / CIO Strategy / Disaster Recovery / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
05
Jun 18

On stones, clay and rubber balls: why business continuity is not a risk management discipline

Mark Armour explains why he believes that we need to agree on our definitions and change our thinking around risk management, business continuity and resilience.

First, this is not about where the responsibility for business continuity should reside within an organization. It is about the responsibilities of the business continuity profession and its practitioners. Lately, I’ve witnessed the practice of risk management begin to take over that of business continuity. Many practitioners promote this alignment and foster the perception that business continuity is simply a part of the practice of risk management. I say this is bad for both disciplines and the organizations they serve.

For the sake of clarity, let’s start with some simple definitions:

The Institute of Risk Management states ‘Risk management involves understanding, analysing and addressing risk to make sure organisations achieve their objectives.’ The International Risk Management Institute describes its work as ‘The practice of identifying and analyzing loss exposures and taking steps to minimize the financial impact of the risks they impose.’

InfoWorld – When being cloud-native is a bad idea

Although being pushed as the end game for most cloud-based applications, there are trade-offs to consider.

It’s good to be cloud-native, or at least that’s what everyone is telling you. The idea is that you refactor (meaning partially recode) your applications to take advantage of the native features of the host cloud, such as its native APIs, storage systems, database systems, or security systems, depending on what that host cloud services offers.

The promise you’re being given is that being cloud-native will provide enhanced performance, lower operational costs for your applications, easier operations, and a bunch of other benefits as the cloud platform improves over time.

More of the InfoWorld article from David Linthicum

Business continuity / Disaster Recovery — Comments Off
08
May 18

The Register – New and inventive code is transforming your business – and bringing with it new and inventive ways for things to fail

Businesses are becoming increasingly digitalised, with operations and customer experiences relying on data and devices being online all the time.

Application architectures and practices are evolving around high-availability and low-touch administration to allow rapid change, while also serving a variety of platforms.

Increasingly, this is putting tier-one business applications, such as enterprise resource planning and collaboration, on the frontline. These tier-one apps are the lifeblood of digital business: of real-time manufacturing, of decision taking, of customer interaction.

So, OK, you’ve digitalised your operation, but what if your system goes down or data is lost? Remember WannaCry in 2017: critical hospital systems locked down by a global ransomware outbreak?

More of The Register article from Dave Cartwright

CIO Strategy / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
07
May 18

Computer Weekly – How a new ISO standard helps you take control of your IT assets

The updated ISO standard 19770-1:2017 offers IT managers a way to bring their hardware and software assets under a single management standard.

You must have control over your software and hardware. Not just because you should – but because it makes perfect sense and it is good for your business.

The updated ISO standard 19770-1:2017 promises to help you do just that. ISO 19770-1:2017 is really not a new standard, but an update from ISO 19770-1:2012.

But it is not a minor update. It feels more like an overhaul in that it now meets the requirements of a “real” management systems standard, such as ISO 27001. In relation to IT asset management (ITAM), the standard helps to address some significant problems when it comes to reducing risk and establishing a best practice for managing your IT assets.

The 19770-x family covers all the essential areas, such as lifecycle processes and best practices, software tagging and usage rights (entitlements).

More of the Computer Weekly article from Jesper Østergaard

Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / IaaS / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
24
Apr 18

Continuity Central – Vast majority of organizations are unable to identify anomalous behaviour in cloud applications

Bitglass has published the findings of a survey for its ‘Cloud Hard 2018: Security with a Vengeance’ report, which includes insights from over 570 cybersecurity and IT professionals on their approach to cloud security.

Visibility and compliance challenges continue to trouble organizations, with less than half of respondents claiming they have visibility into external sharing and DLP policy violations in their cloud application and environments. Even more worrying was the finding that 85 percent of organizations were unable to identify anomalous behaviour across cloud applications.

ZDNet – As cloud adoption soars, cloud architect becomes a top career choice

Could you imagine 15 years ago telling your colleagues, or your college career officer, that you wanted to someday be a ‘cloud architect?’

Make room, enterprise architects, data architects and systems architects. There’s a new architect in town, the “cloud architect,” and his or her role is to make sure clouds are staying in formation.

That’s the gist of a survey of 997 technology professionals conducted by RightScale, which documents a shifting role for IT managers and professionals in the emerging cloud-centric enterprise.

The role of cloud architect is on the rise, the survey shows. This year, the survey finds 61 percent of architects identify themselves as cloud architects, an increase from 56 percent in 2017. The percentage of architects identifying themselves as “IT architects” has decreased to 31 percent in 2018 from 35 percent in 2017.

More of the ZDNet article from Joe McKendrick

CIO Strategy / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Staff Retention / IT Strategy — Comments Off
12
Apr 18

Forbes – Is It Time For A Technology Haircut?: The Lasting Value Of Pruning Your IT Landscape

What doesn’t make sense? Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon all prune their massive technology portfolios more than you do.

I’ve been studying this issue for a while and have recorded my latest thinking about why you should be pruning your portfolio in detail on EarlyAdopter.com in this article: “Numerify: Using Systems of Intelligence for IT Pruning” The article also explains how to use a system of intelligence, essentially advanced BI applied to IT, to provide detailed information about all aspects of IT to help with pruning.

While that article explains the details, in this space I’d like to take a closer look at the benefits of pruning.

The two main benefits are:
1. Increasing the pace and amount of resources truly freed up to support innovation.
2. Reducing staffing costs related to keeping the lights on.

The first benefit related to innovation comes from the fact that a well-executed pruning program not only retires systems that are providing low value, but also makes operations more efficient in general. Pruning leads to understanding. Understanding leads to optimization, which if meaningful, should mean that your systems become easier to run and change.

More of the Forbes article from Dan Woods

CIO Strategy / Digital Transformation / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Staff Retention / IT Strategy — Comments Off
11
Apr 18

Future of CIO – The Digital CIO as the Gap Minding Role

CIOs are the gap-minding role as IT is in the unique position to oversee underlying business functions and structures. IT leaders have to look things from all different angles.

Nowadays, information is permeating into every corner of the business and technology is often the disruptive force of digitalization. The CIO is not a static management role, but a dynamic leadership role due to the changing nature of technology and overwhelming growth of information. Especially now more and more enterprises are leveraging IT for revenue-generating initiatives. The IT leader of the future and the exemplars of today must move away from pure IT manager, and become a trustful business partner and an insightful strategist to bridge the gap between IT and business, and between the industrial age and the digital era, The important component of IT leadership success has to do with the definition or scope of the role that the CIO is playing and the profundity of IT leadership influence.

More of the Future of CIO post from Pearl Zhu

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.