IT Strategy

TheWHIR – Nearly Half of All Corporate Data is Out of IT Department’s Control

Many organizations are not responding to the continuing spread of “Shadow IT” and cloud use with appropriate governance and security measures, and more than half do not have a proactive approach, according to research released Tuesday. The 2016 Global Cloud Data Security Study, compiled by the Ponemon Institute on behalf of Gemalto, shows that nearly half of all cloud services (49 percent) and nearly half of all corporate data stored in the cloud (47 percent) are beyond the reach of IT departments.

The report is drawn from a survey of more than 3,400 IT and IT security practitioners from around the world. It shows only 34 percent of confidential data on SaaS is encrypted, and members of the security team are only involved in one-fifth of choices between cloud applications and platforms.

IT departments are making gains in visibility, with 54 percent saying the department is aware of all cloud applications, platforms, and infrastructure services in use, up from 45 percent two years ago. Also, the number of respondents saying it is more difficult to protect data using cloud services fell from 60 to 54 percent, however those gains were offset by more broadly reported challenges in controlling end-user access.

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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27
Jul 16

ITWorld – Disaster recovery in a DevOps world

Organizations that are adopting DevOps methodologies are realizing actual benefits from taking that approach.

According to a 2015 survey by IT Revolution Press in conjunction with Puppet Labs, organizations using DevOps deploy code 30 times faster than others, doing deployments multiple times per day. Moreover, change failure gets cut in half with DevOps and services are restored up to 168 times faster than they are at non-DevOps organizations.

Let’s focus on those last two points for a moment. One thing is for certain: Embracing DevOps also pays off from a disaster recovery standpoint, because the tools and procedures that you use to move applications from development to testing to production and back to development again can also be applied to failing over and recovering from disasters and service interruptions. The same tools that automate the entire DevOps life cycle can also help you make the most use of the resources you already have for recovery purposes.

There are indeed plenty of open-source tools to help with this automation, like Chef and Puppet, which create, launch, and deploy new virtual machine instances in an automated way and configure them appropriately. They even work across security boundaries, deploying on your private laptop, in your own data center, or even up in the public cloud — Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are two major public cloud providers that support Chef and Puppet.

More of the ITWorld article from Jonathan Hassell

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26
Jul 16

Arthur Cole – Navigating the Challenges in IoT Infrastructure

The speed at which the enterprise has embraced IoT infrastructure has been impressive. But with most deployments still in a nascent stage, many organizations are only just now starting to encounter some of the challenges associated with scaling up to production levels.

According to Strategy Analytics, nearly 70 percent of businesses have deployed IoT solutions, and that is expected to increase to 80 percent within the year. But as Datamation’s Pedro Hernandez points out, many organizations are struggling with the analytics side of the equation. While gleaning insight into complex environments is the main driver of IoT, it isn’t always easy to determine exactly how the analytics should be done. As the data coming into the enterprise mounts, so too will the complexity of the analytics process, which can deliver vastly different results based not only on what data is collected and how it is conditioned it but what questions are asked and even how they are phrased.

Perhaps not altogether surprising, the most effective use of IoT is not happening in the enterprise or in commercial operations but on the manufacturing floor, says tech journalist Chris Neiger. Recent research from BI Intelligence shows that industrial manufacturers are well ahead of verticals like banking, telecom and energy in their deployment of IoT solutions. The field is being led by General Electric, which is leveraging IoT for everything from industrial assembly lines to navigation and fuel management systems. Company executives say an IoT-supported Industrial Internet could contribute $10 trillion to $15 trillion to global GDP in the next two decades.

More of the IT Business Edge article from Arthur Cole

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25
Jul 16

CMO.com – Think Executives Are Rational Decision Makers? Think Again

When you create a message for VPs or higher personas, you may be tempted to assume that their decisions are strictly rational and logical and that it’s all about the math. Why? Because they tell you that, and they believe it themselves.

Well, they are lying to you. Not on purpose, but lying nevertheless, according to a recent experiment we conducted with Dr. Zakary Tormala, a social psychologist with expertise in messaging and persuasion.

The study found that in a business decision-making scenario, you can provide executives with the same math with respect to a business proposition, but get significantly different results depending on how you frame the situation.

Conrad Smith, VP of consulting at Corporate Visions, reached out to Corporate Visions’ network of executives and asked them to take part in an online experiment. Participants—113 of them—came from a wide array of industries, including software, oil, finance, aerospace, and others, and occupied a range of high-level roles at their companies, from vice president up to CEO.

More of the CMO article from Tim Riesterer

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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).

Baseline – Cloud-First—Except When Performance Matters

Many companies have a cloud-first policy that hosts as many applications as possible in the cloud, but apps that are latency-sensitive are staying on premise.

In the name of achieving increased IT agility, many organizations have implemented a cloud-first policy that requires as many application workloads as possible to be hosted in the cloud. The thinking is that it will be faster to deploy and provision IT resources in the cloud.

While that’s true for most classes of workloads, those applications that are latency-sensitive are staying home to run on premise.

Speaking at a recent Hybrid Cloud Summit in New York, Tom Koukourdelis, senior director for cloud architecture at Nasdaq, said there are still whole classes of high-performance applications that need to run in real time. Trying to access those applications across a wide area network (WAN) simply isn’t feasible. The fact of the matter, he added, is that there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all cloud computing environment.

More of the Baseline article from Mike Vizard

CIO Strategy / Digital Transformation / IT Strategy — Comments Off
18
Jul 16

IT Business Edge – Confused by Digital Transformation? Welcome to the Club

If you feel that you’re falling behind in the race to digital transformation, take heart – you’re not alone. It turns out that a good chunk of enterprise leaders believe they are either coming up short in building the next-generation data environment or are unsure where they stand because the definition of success is too vague.

This should not come as a huge surprise, of course, since digital transformation is unlike technology developments of the past, primarily because it involves much more than technology. This time, the change reaches way beyond the data center and into the very heart of the business model, and the business culture, itself.

More of the IT Business Edge article from Arthur Cole

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12
Jul 16

ZDNet – Cloud computing pushes enterprise vendors closer to their customers

Cloud computing may help make running enterprises a little bit easier (allegedly), but it has not made running an enterprise software business any easier. If anything, things have gotten more difficult for vendors lately.

The most challenging piece of the rapidly accelerating migration to cloud for enterprise software providers is delivering a superior customer experience.

That’s the gist of a recent analysis produced by Bain and Company, which points out that in the era of cloud connectivity, the era of shoddy releases and so-so customer service is coming to an end. “For many years, enterprise technology companies got along fine with pretty low customer experience ratings–just about the lowest, in fact, of the industries we measured,” the report’s authors, Chris Brahm, James Dixon and Rob Markey, state. But it never seemed to matter, they continue: “Once software or hardware was installed and running, companies were reluctant to go through the expense and hassle of changing vendors, even if the technology wasn’t delivering a superior experience.”

More of the ZDNet article from Joe McKendrick

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.