IT Strategy

Arthur Cole – The New Cloud and the Old Data Center

What do your business requirements tell you about your best data center or cloud solution?

The more things change, the more they stay the same. It’s a trite saying but appropriate for today’s cloud infrastructure market, which seems to be evolving along much the same vendor-defined trajectory as the data center before it.

According to new data from Synergy Research Group, the top three vendors duking it out for cloud dominance are … wait for it … Dell EMC, Cisco and HPE. This may come as a surprise to some, considering commodity manufacturers in the APAC region are supposed to be taking over. But according to the company’s research, the new Big Three each hold about 11.5 percent of the market, while an equal share went to multiple ODMs in the Pacific Rim. Microsoft and IBM each held smaller shares, which means that more than a third of the market is divvied up between numerous small to medium-sized vendors.

More of the IT Business Edge post from Arthur Cole

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12
Apr 17

Egon Zehnder – How Digital Transformation Changes Functional Leadership

Do you think your organization can meet the three challenges below? Thanks to my colleague David Birks for a heads-up on this article.

Disruptive technological change is the new reality. In retail, Amazon will now deliver almost anything in two days – and in some cases, two hours. In hospitality, Airbnb leverages social media to create brand loyalty that extends beyond individual trips. In financial services, a generation of nimble fintech ventures are offering products that are setting new standards in speed, convenience and flexibility. And the list goes on.

Legacy organizations must respond – or risk their survival. While each organization will transform itself in a different way, each transformation is certain to have digital at its core, because digital is driving the changes in consumer expectations, markets and products. But successfully making the transition from analog to digital is much more than a matter of moving services online or developing a social media strategy; true digital transformation requires a new approach not merely within business units, but across the entire organization and its functions (see Figure 1).

Data Center Knowledge – Finding the Sweet Spot for Your Data Center

There’s certainly no shortage of options for expanding data center capacity these days. You can renovate an existing facility or add a modular unit onsite or offsite, build one from scratch, lease data center space, or move non-critical data and applications off your servers and into a cloud … and just about any combination of the above.

Which scenario is right for your company? Whatever makes the most sense for the business, said HPE’s Laura Cunningham during her Data Center World session, “Finding the Sweet Spot for Your Data Center.”

So, it’s imperative to know the future direction and financial preferences of your company before meeting face-to-face with a CIO, CEO or CFO to ask approval for any IT project.

More of the Data Center Knowledge post from Karen Riccio

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07
Apr 17

CustomerThink – Do CMOs Really Spend More on MarTech Than CIOs? A New Study Says No

Like many people in the marketing technology industry, I was tickled in 2011 when Gartner predicted that CMOs would soon have bigger tech budgets than CIOs, and even more tickled when Gartner said in 2016 that it had happened. But my recent pondering of the relationship of marketing and IT departments had me rethinking the question. On an anecdotal level, I’ve never seen or heard of a company where the marketing technology group was anywhere near the size of the IT department. And from a revenue perspective, there’s no way that marketing technology companies make up half the total revenue of the software industry.

But just as I was working myself up for some back-of-the-envelope calculations, the good people at International Data Corporation (IDC) announced a report with authoritative figures on the topic. Actually, the study estimates spending on 20 technologies and 12 corporate functional areas across 16 enterprise industries in eight regions and 53 countries, comparing the amounts funded by IT departments and by business departments.

More of the CustomerThink article from David Raab

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06
Apr 17

The Register – Researchers steal data from CPU cache shared by two VMs

A group of researchers say they can extract information from an Amazon Web Services virtual machine by probing the cache of a CPU it shares with other cloudy VMs.

A paper titled Hello from the Other Side: SSH over Robust Cache Covert Channels in the Cloud (PDF) explains the challenges of extracting data from CPU cache, a very contested resource in which the OS, the hypervisor and applications all conduct frequent operations. All that activity makes a lot of noise, defying attempts to create a persistent communications channel.

Until now, as the researchers claim they’ve built “a high-throughput covert channel [that] can sustain transmission rates of more than 45 KBps on Amazon EC2”. They’ve even encrypted it: the technique establishes a TCP network within the cache and transmits data using SSH.

The results sound scarily impressive: a Black Hat Asia session detailing their work promised to peer into a host’s cache and stream video from VM to VM.

The paper explains that this stuff is not entirely new, but has hitherto also not been entirely successful because it’s been assumed that “error-correcting code can be directly applied, and the assumption that noise effectively eliminates covert channels.”

More of The Register article from Simon Sharwood

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05
Apr 17

CIO Insight – Despite the Cloud’s Value, Funds Are Often Wasted

On average, the IT pros surveyed said their organization wastes 30% of its cloud spend.

With its days as an emerging technology behind us, the cloud is now firmly established in the fabric of modern companies: Nearly all organizations are investing in the cloud in some way, according to a recent survey report, “State of the Cloud,” from RightScale. The hybrid cloud has emerged as the most preferred option, followed by the public cloud. Regardless of the chosen cloud pathway, companies are reaping the rewards of faster access to infrastructure, greater scalability, higher availability, quicker time to market and more assured business continuity. Challenges linger, however, especially in the form of security concerns and a lack of needed staffing expertise.

More of the CIO Insight slideshow from Dennis McCafferty

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03
Apr 17

HBR – Why CIOs Make Great Board Directors

According to Korn Ferry unpublished data, there has been a 74% increase in the number of CIOs serving on Fortune 100 boards in the past two years.

It’s no wonder CIOs are the fastest-growing addition to the boardroom: They can help address a host of issues of crucial importance to boards, including using technologies to create operational efficiencies and competitive advantage; identifying opportunities related to cloud computing, digitization, and data; addressing threats and risks associated with information security; and using their experience and judgment to oversee, question, and provide input on technology budgets.

But there’s room for growth. Only 31% of Fortune 100 boards currently have a director who is a CIO, even though technology is at the core of every business today. As Sheila Jordan, CIO at Symantec and director at FactSet, put it, “All companies are technology companies today. Technology is a lever to run the business, but also to change and grow.”

More of the Harvard Business Review article from Craig Stephenson and Nels Olson

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15
Mar 17

The Register – It’s time for our annual checkup on the circus that is the Internet Governance Forum

Unaccountable? Check. Pointlessly bureaucratic? Check. Blocking reform? Check

It’s March again so it must be time for an annual checkup on the Internet Governance Forum – the United Nations body that is tasked with working through the complex social, technological and economic issues associated with a global communications network, and runs an annual conference to that end.

Around this time every year, the IGF’s organizing group the Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG) meets in Geneva to decide how the annual conference will be structured and what topics it will cover, and to set the rules for how sessions and the conference itself will be run.

And we are pleased to announce for another year, the IGF remains a circus, an unaccountable and pointlessly bureaucratic organization that goes to great lengths to pretend it is open to everyone’s input and even greater lengths to make sure it isn’t.

At the two-day meeting, the IGF’s three core issues again took pride of place at the event:

Fantasy of democratic representation
Opaque decision-making and finances
Bureaucratic blocking of any efforts at reform

Let’s take a look at each:

More of The Register article from Kieren McCarthy

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28
Feb 17

TheWHIR – 3 Steps to Ensure Cloud Stability in 2017

We’re reaching a point of maturity when it comes to cloud computing. Organizations are solidifying their cloud use-cases, understanding how cloud impacts their business, and are building entire IT models around the capabilities of cloud.

Cloud growth will only continue; Gartner recently said that more than $1 trillion in IT spending will, directly or indirectly, be affected by the shift to cloud during the next five years.

“Cloud-first strategies are the foundation for staying relevant in a fast-paced world,” said Ed Anderson, research vice president at Gartner. “The market for cloud services has grown to such an extent that it is now a notable percentage of total IT spending, helping to create a new generation of start-ups and ‘born in the cloud’ providers.”

Washington Post – Weather Service suffered ‘catastrophic’ outage; website stopped sending forecasts, warnings

On a day when a blizzard was pasting Maine and Northern California faced a dire flooding threat, several of the National Weather Service’s primary systems for sending out alerts to the public failed for nearly three hours.

Between 1:08 p.m. and 3:44 p.m. Eastern time Monday, products from the Weather Service stopped disseminating over the Internet, including forecasts, warnings, radar and satellite imagery, and current conditions.

Updates to the Weather Service’s public-facing website, Weather.gov, ceased publishing.

In an email to staff on Tuesday, David Michaud, the director of the Weather Service’s Office of Central Processing, said a power outage had triggered the outage and characterized the impacts as “significant”. The cause of the outage was under review, a Weather Service spokesperson said.

“[I] want to ensure you that everyone involved is working hard to avoid these outages in the future and find ways to better communicate to employees across the agency in real time when outages occur,” Michaud’s email said.

More of the Washington post article from Jason Samenow

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.