Data Center

ZDNet – Why moving piece by piece to the cloud will see businesses succeed more

The conversation around whether it’s a good idea for a business to migrate their on-premises legacy infrastructure into the cloud is no longer the focus, according to Bulletproof CEO Anthony Woodward. Rather, many C-level executives are now looking at what are the best ways to use the so-called cornerstone tool to transform their business.

Woodward believes there are two key drivers behind the increasing adoption of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). The first is that businesses believe cloud will give them the competitive advantage to move faster, and the second motivator is that businesses are being required to transform for fear they may be outmanoeuvred by new entrants to the market.

Gartner has predicted the global IaaS market will reach $22.4 billion in 2016, a 38.4 percent increase on last year’s market value of $16.2 billion. In fact, the IaaS market is expected to be the fastest-growing public cloud services segment worldwide.

More of the ZDNet article from Aimee Chanthadavong

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29
Aug 16

ZDNet – Delta outage highlights how airline industry needs new IT approaches

Delta blames a power outage in Atlanta for bringing its systems down, canceling flights, and stranding passengers. Southwest’s systems stumbled last month after a faulty router and nixed about 2,300 flights. United Continental grounded flights over a bad router in July and June. Welcome to the world of cobbled together legacy systems and an industry that needs to move toward cloud computing much faster.

IT outages are a fact of life. And now that technology is no longer a separate entity from business, screw-ups hit more people and damage reputations. The big question is why in 2016 airlines are being brought down by single points of failure when cloud services offer resiliency zones, backup options, and redundancy to keep critical systems running.

Delta cancels more flights as it recovers from system-wide outage | Delta Air Lines says power problems are behind computer outage that grounded flights

More of the ZDNet post from Larry Dignan

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19
Aug 16

WSJ – Failures Like the Delta Outage Are a Fact of Digital Business

Customers are still feeling the fallout from computer problems at Delta Air Lines Inc. that began with an electrical outage in the dark hours of Monday morning. Flight cancellations grew throughout the day to about 1,000 and Delta continued to cancel flights Tuesday – 680 as of 5:15 p.m. ET – as it tried to restore normal operations.

“Following the power loss, some critical systems and network equipment didn’t switch over to Delta’s backup systems,” the company said in a statement. Delta hasn’t gone into detail about which systems didn’t perform as expected or why. Airline reservations, maintenance and operations systems are notoriously complex, made all the more so by layers of technology integrated after years of mergers and acquisitions.

Other industries deal with such complexity but none more publicly than airlines, says Allan Frank, co-founder and chief IT strategist at The Hackett Group, which advises large companies on technology best practices. You have “multiple systems from multiple companies over a period of years, he says. “A glitch can take down the whole house… In the end, people are stuck at airports and there’s a direct, emotional impact.”

More of the Wall Street Journal article from Kim S. Nash

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17
Aug 16

Baseline – CIOs Are Confident Their Staff Can Meet Challenges

With tech departments now expected to make valuable contributions to business strategies while continuing to satisfy nuts-and-bolts operational IT needs, CIOs and other tech leaders expressed considerable confidence in their staff’s ability to successfully tackle these challenges, according to a recent survey from TEKsystems. The resulting midyear “Reality Check” report indicates that both tech budgets and full-time staffing are increasing. Hopefully, such organizational investments will put IT in a better position to pursue new initiatives—an area in which survey respondents express a comparative lack of confidence. Meanwhile, organizations continue to struggle to hire qualified IT talent, especially for roles such as architect, programmer, developer, project manager and software engineer. “If IT leaders aren’t experiencing these trends yet, they should be on the lookout for how they could affect their organizational needs,” said Jason Hayman, research manager for TEKsystems.

More of the Baseline slideshow from Dennis McCafferty

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16
Aug 16

ZDNet – The 7 Attributes of a Comprehensive Cloud Strategy

Whether or not these seven topics comprise a comprehensive cloud strategy, they are all topics that IT professionals should understand as cloud computing becomes more integrated into the business.

We believe a pragmatic cloud strategy will work best, based on your own unique landscape and requirements. Working every day with customers and partners in co-innovation, we quickly realized that there is no one-size-fits-all approach.

There is a lot of hot air involved in cloud discussions – and a lot of foggy principles. I happen to believe that a pragmatic cloud strategy will work best, based on your own unique landscape and requirements. Working every day with customers and partners in co-innovation, we quickly realized that there is no one-size-fits-all approach.

Here are my TOP 7 attributes of a comprehensive cloud strategy that need to be addressed when you discuss Cloud computing in your company – even more so if you discuss with vendors and partners. We found this framework helps to start a meaningful discussion and get everybody aligned – demystifying the cloud and leaving out the hype.

#1 Software as a Service (SaaS)

If we need to take a focus here when we talk about SaaS, it will be the user experience. Cloud solutions start with engaging the end user more than other solutions. Not because they are SaaS, because they can and they are innovating faster and responding to trends like mobility, social, collaboration, etc. Developing or consuming cloud solutions you will most often be the first using the latest and greatest available technology.

More of the ZDNet article from Sven Denecken

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10
Aug 16

ZDNet – Half of all cloud services outside of IT departments, but IT is getting wiser

A new study from the esteemed Ponemon Institute says we still aren’t doing nearly enough to protect enterprises in the cloud.

For starters, the survey of 3,476 IT and IT security practitioners, commissioned by Gemalto, a digital security vendor, finds that half of all cloud services and corporate data stored in cloud are not controlled by IT departments. So, there’s a lot of cloud activity among business units that’s potentially not vetted or governed.

However, IT departments are getting a better handle on things, the survey also shows. Fifty-four percent of respondents are “confident” that the IT organization knows all cloud computing applications, platform or infrastructure services in use – a nine percent increase from a similar survey from 2014.

The survey doesn’t spell out how and why IT is getting a better grip on shadow cloud adoption. It may be assumed that there are more policies in place and greater communication and collaboration on best practices. IT may be getting more active in its evolving role as cloud broker or service provider to the enterprise, providing catalogs or directories of vetted services available to business users.

More of the ZDNet post from Joe McKendrick

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08
Aug 16

IT Business Edge – Tread Carefully into the Mission-Critical Cloud

The initial phase of the cloud transition is nearly done, with more than three-quarters of enterprises pushing at least a portion of their workload to public infrastructure.

As expected, however, most of this is non-critical data and applications and is largely limited to storage and backup services rather than production workloads. So it stands to reason that the next leg of the cloud journey will involve mission-critical workloads – the stuff that sets the corporate suite’s hair on fire if it should cease to function for any reason.

This is why the growth of cloud computing is likely to slow down some as we approach the next decade. It’s not that the enterprise is growing tired of the cloud or is starting to see more of its flaws (yes, the cloud does have flaws), but that future deployments will have to be handled with more care as the stakes get higher. Not only will cloud services have to be more resilient going forward, but they will be increasingly optimized from the ground up to suit highly targeted processes, which takes time and coordination between users and providers.

More of the IT Business Edge post from Arthur Cole

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02
Aug 16

The Server Side – Managed services model addresses cloud-based analysis paralysis

It can be a tad disconcerting when a popular trend pushes its way through the industry and you and your organization are yet to jump on the bandwagon. For enterprises that haven’t yet moved their applications onto the Azure, Google or Amazon cloud, it would be understandable for managers and C-level executives to be questioning both why it hasn’t happened yet and when it actually will. But according to Jordan Jacobs, vice president of products at SingleHop, the Azure, Amazon and Google cloud models are being oversold, and for many core business functions, a managed services approach to application hosting is often a better model.

Public clouds vs. managed services model

“The thing that wows a lot of people is the market share discrepancy between public clouds and managed services, especially when compared to the press each one gets,” said Jacobs. “Amazon, Azure and Google get all of the press, but they’re actually only about a third of the managed services and managed hosting market.”

Unfortunately, the love affair the press is having with the dominant cloud providers is causing a great deal of consternation with decision makers. On the one hand, decision makers feel that they need to catch up with the latest trend; on the other hand, they are having a hard time rationalizing, in terms of cost efficiencies, security, and business benefits, the porting of their core business applications into the public cloud. It’s creating a sort of analysis paralysis, where decision makers are unsure of whether using the public cloud is the right move, whether the managed services model makes more sense or if they should just keep everything on premises.

More of The Server Side post from Cameron McKenzie

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29
Jul 16

CIO Dashboard – CIOs Wanted for Innovation Expansion

Do CIOs have a role in product development? Some say no. Call on the CTO or CDO or CMO. But those who wish to banish CIOs to the backend of the enterprise for eternity haven’t taken a close look at what’s needed in the enterprise as innovation shifts from products to software and service solutions.

We’re in the midst of an innovation boom. Traditional, standalone products are no longer enough to wow and woo customers. Enterprises are setting up innovation outposts in Silicon Valley to tap into the culture and brainpower of startups to develop sticky products that customers can’t live without. Call it digital or the new way of doing business, but savvy companies are converging technology, data and product design to expand innovation. Think of software and service solutions this way…

Are you selling a fitness wearable or giving consumers the thrill of learning what they’re physically capable of and sharing the experience with family and friends?
Are you providing a refrigerator or empowering people with a remote access view of their food so they can spend more time at home breaking bread with family versus shopping?
Are you offering a ride from here to there or the freedom for people to move fast and fluidly with on-demand availability to cars and data that enable them to make decisions about how they spend their time?
This trend is crossing industries, but consider the automotive sector as one example

More of the CIO Dashboard article from Chris Curran

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20
Jul 16

Continuity Central – Majority of organizations experience downtime and service degradation due to IT capacity issues

Super interesting research on the hidden troubles associated with IT capacity.

Sumerian has published the results of its latest research, in conjunction with analyst house Freeform Dynamics. The research revealed a genuine mismatch between the IT infrastructure that businesses have in place versus what they actually need , supporting the widely held view that there is significant overspend on server capacity across industries. Worryingly, it also revealed a total mismatch between the capacity management tools and processes currently in place versus those needed to deal with this issue.

Key highlights of the research include:

76 percent of IT professionals resort to overprovisioning IT infrastructure in order to avoid capacity related issues
‘Overprovision and forget’ remains the most common approach amongst IT professionals, with the vast majority relying heavily or partially on instinct and vigilance (90 percent), system alerts and alarms (86 percent), and a range of ad hoc tools and practices (73 percent), to manage capacity in a very reactive way. As a result, less than one in five (18 percent) rated their capacity planning practices for their overall IT system resources as ‘very effective’, with others admitting they were less than ideal (54 percent), or wholly inadequate (21 percent).

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.