IT Strategy

ZDNet – If you want to be secure, get in the cloud

Some CIOs are reticent to rely on the cloud. The high cost of a data loss means executives decide to keep information within the enterprise firewall. However, a change in stance is taking place – and many business leaders recognise the cloud is actually a better way to keep information safe and lawmakers in check.

CIOs in all territories face a tranche of data rules. Businesses are currently preparing for another change in legislation. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is due to come into force on 25 May 2018 and will see companies fined up to 4 per cent of their global turnover for breaches.

GDPR will require a serious step up in security policies and procedures. The potential costs, both in terms of financial and reputational damage, could leave executives out of pocket, out of a job – or even more seriously – in jail.

However, evidence suggests a wake up call is required. Research from insurance specialist Lloyd’s suggests 92 per cent of companies have suffered a data breach in the past five years. Executives must react and take a proactive approach to information security.

More of the ZDNet post from Mark Samuels

CIO Strategy / Digital Transformation / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
21
Dec 16

ZDNet – Gartner’s digital transformation, IT crystal ball for 2017: Reading between the lines

ugmented reality will become a shopping paradise, webpages will start to give way to screen-less voice interactions, blockchain technology will create a business worth $10 billion, and the Internet of Things will save $1 trillion a year by 2022.

Those items reflect Gartner’s crystal ball predictions for 2017 and beyond. The predictions were outlined at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando. The theme for the conference is digital transformation, experiences, and engagement.

Jason Hiner at TechRepublic is looking at the implications for IT as these trends play out, but it’s worth looking here at the business takeaways amid the tech shifts.

In a slide, here’s a look at the technologies companies will have to put together and navigate. At the very least, the slide provides a starter set for a tech buzzword drinking game.

Here’s a between-the-lines reading of Gartner’s prognostications.

By 2020, 100 million consumers will shop in augmented reality. Gartner analysts Daryl Plummer and David Cearley argued that AR will go mainstream. Retailers will use AR to boost the shopping experience as digital information blends with the physical.

More of the ZDNet post form Larry Dignan

CIO Strategy / IT Strategy — Comments Off
20
Dec 16

Baseline – IT Skills Gap Burdens Staff and Management

IT skills gaps may be the biggest single problem facing mid-sized IT organizations today. More and better technologies amplify the problem. How does your organization address the skills gap?

Today’s business and IT environments are faced with a formidable array of labor challenges. One of the biggest is coping with ongoing and worsening skill and knowledge shortages. Not only do these gaps create more work for employees—often resulting in stress and burnout—but they also impact operational efficiency and bottom-line results. “Exploring the IT Skills Gap,” a recent survey of more than 300 IT leaders by IT staffing firm TEKsystems, examined the current state of project-based IT staffing and workforce planning.

Among other things, it found that hiring has become far more difficult over the last five years, and finding contingent workers has also become more challenging. As a result, organizations are suffering negative consequences as a result of the current environment. “It’s clear that workforce planning often occurs as an afterthought compared to other areas of planning for IT projects and initiatives,” said Jason Hayman, TEKsystems research manager.

More of the Baseline Magazine slide show from Samuel Greengard

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / IaaS / IT Strategy / Virtualization — Comments Off
19
Dec 16

Data Center Knowledge – TSO Logic: Cloud Migration Offers Instant Savings

Need help doing the math to see if your in-house virtual machines would be cheaper to operate in the cloud? If so, contact me.

Nearly half (45 percent) of on-premise virtualized operating system instances could run more economically in the cloud, for a 43 percent annual savings, according to research released this week by infrastructure optimization company TSO Logic. The research makes starkly clear the cost of legacy hardware, and the savings potential of cloud migration.

More than one in four OS instances are over-provisioned, the company says, and migrating them to an appropriate sized cloud instance would reduce their cost by 36 percent.

Drawn from an algorithmic analysis of anonymized data from TSO Logic’s North American customers, the research also showed that of 10,000 physical servers, 25 percent are at least 3-years-old. The same workload as done on Generation-5 servers could now be done on 30 percent less Generation-9 servers, based only on processor gains, the company says.

More of the Data Center Knowledge post from Chris Burt

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16
Dec 16

Arthur Cole – What’s Up with Digital Transformation?

Practical article from Arthur Cole on how digital transformation is different than what we’ve been doing for 40 years in IT.

Some enterprise executives may rightly be confused by the whole concept of “digital transformation.” Digital technology has been a common facet of the enterprise for decades, so what exactly is being transformed?

In a nutshell, the difference this time is that rather than using digital technology to support and streamline existing business processes like sales, support and customer relations, the processes themselves are becoming digitized into services. So instead of using data infrastructure to make it easier to sell, say, cars, a digitally transformed business incorporates service-level functionality into the car itself, along with all the support systems that contribute to the manufacture, sale and ongoing support of the car.

More of the IT Business Edge post from Arthur Cole

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Data Center / Digital Transformation / IaaS / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
15
Dec 16

ComputerWeekly – IT Priorities 2017: What will IT decision-makers be focusing on?

Each year, TechTarget looks at how CIOs and senior IT decision-makers will be investing in IT in the 12 months ahead

Budgets for staff and on-premise servers are falling as CIOs focus on cloud computing, according to the TechTarget’s IT Priorities 2017 survey.

Most of the 353 people surveyed said their IT budgets would remain the same. Only 17% said their budget would increase by more than 10%, 16% said their budget would increase by 5% to 10%, and 9% said their budget would decrease.

The survey found that most of the budget increases would be invested in cloud services (43%), software (43%) and disaster recover (30%).

More of the ComputerWeekly post from Cliff Saran

Business continuity / Disaster Recovery / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off
14
Dec 16

Continuity Central – The rise of SIP-based cyber attacks

Cyber attacks using the VoIP protocol Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) have been growing in 2016, accounting for over 51 percent of the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) security event activity analysed in the last 12 months, according to a new report from IBM’s Security Intelligence group.

“SIP is one of the most commonly used application layer protocols in VoIP technology, so it’s not surprising that it’s the most targeted. In fact, we found that there has been an upward trend in attacks targeting the SIP protocol, with the most notable uptick occurring in the second half of 2016,” states the IBM Security Intelligence group.

The second most targeted protocol, Cisco’s proprietary Skinny Client Control Protocol (SCCP), accounted for just over 48 percent of detected security events during the same time period.

Harvard Business Review – How Loss Aversion and Conformity Threaten Organizational Change

To achieve true transformational change, CEOs must have more than a strategic plan. To effect actual change, they need to understand how biases — their own, and their employees’ — can shape behaviors and decisions, and prevent them from achieving what they set out to achieve.

CEOs need to be especially aware of how the subtle forces of bias can operate in our subconscious and influence our choices. Let’s take a look at the two I see most often: loss aversion and conformity.

Loss Aversion
Picture a management team, composed of highly accomplished individuals with long tenures at the company, gathering at the annual planning meeting. The CEO has been in place for five years, business performance has been strong and Wall Street has rewarded shareholders handsomely.

More of the Harvard Business Review article from Sean Ryan

CIO Strategy / IT Staff Retention / IT Strategy — Comments Off
12
Dec 16

CIO Insight – What CIOs Must Do to Retain Skilled IT Employees

This problem seems to be universal. How are you dealing with retention?

The majority of CIOs surveyed said they are concerned about retaining current IT staff over the next 12 months, according to a recent survey from Robert Half Technology. Many of these executives said their operations would be adversely impacted if a valued team member left without notice. To avoid this, and to strengthen staff engagement and retention, CIOs are regularly checking in with employees to make sure they’re satisfied with their job. They’re also getting proactive about career guidance and development, while regularly benchmarking salary and benefits to ensure they’re staying competitive. (Despite such efforts, however, relatively few CIOs have come up with a formal retention strategy.) Of course, regardless of how hard CIOs try to keep IT staffers, some of them will leave. So technology leaders often turn to project and contractual workers to fill in the gaps—possibly finding promising new talent for more permanent hiring arrangements

More of the CIO Insight slide show from Dennis McCafferty

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09
Dec 16

Continuity Central – C-Level and IT pros disagree on organizations’ ability to recover from a disaster: Evolve IP survey

When it comes to assessing an organization’s ability to recover from a disaster, a significant disconnect exists between C-Level executives and IT professionals. While nearly 7 in 10 CEOs, CFOs or COOs feel their organization is very prepared to recover from a disaster, less than half of IT pros (44.5 percent) are as confident , a technology survey conducted by Evolve IP reports. The survey of more than 500 executives and IT professionals uncovered factors, including compliance requirements and use of hosted solutions, that contribute to an organization’s disaster recovery confidence overall.

Disaster recovery compliance was a clear driver of confidence in the ability to recover IT and related assets in the event of an incident. In fact, 67 percent of respondents in banking, 58 percent of respondents in the government sector and 55 percent of respondents at technology companies feel very prepared: of these disaster recovery compliance was noted as a requirement by 97 percent, 73.5 percent and 71 percent respectively.

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.