Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.

Summary: Survey finds traditional CIOs worry more about IT operations, versus digital CIOs, who work closely with top management. But corporate culture may be more a factor than individual styles.

There’s a lot of talk these days about “digital” initiatives, which tend to be treated separately from plain-old information technology work. But are the two really so different?

Yes, says CIO’s Maryfran Johnson, who just presented the results of CIO magazine’s “13th annual State of the CIO” study, which reveals “stark contrasts between traditional CIOs who focus more on internal operations and digital CIOs who expand IT’s influence externally to work directly with customers and business colleagues.”
Data Center at CERN 2 -photo courtesy of CERN Press OfficePhoto: CERN Press Office

In other words, “traditional” CIOs — who worry about the uptime of the mainframe — are different from “digital” CIOs, who are spending time on strategic business growth. (Not to be confused with the emerging title of “chief digital officer,” who focuses on social initiatives, or the existing role of chief technology officer, who is concerned with selling technology solutions.

More of the ZDNet article by Joe McKendrick

You can’t stop people from bringing their mobile devices into a company network. Period.

Seven out of ten companies today are facing the reality of having to define policies and employees rules for personal devices interacting digitally with the company network, states itpro.co.uk. If a company can find a way to keep personal mobile devices relatively safe for the company network, their use can be advantageous, especially in reduced equipment costs for a business and increased productivity.

Luckily there are a variety of Mobile Device Management and Mobile Application Management solutions that enable them to do so. But even with these solutions, it’s important for companies to spell out clear policies.

More of the Magic Blog post

It would be an understatement to say that mobility is changing the enterprise. The reality is that this technology is redefining business and IT in profound and permanent ways. But it isn’t only smartphones and tablets that are driving all the disruption. An array of technologies and systems—ranging from the industrial Internet (Internet of things) to the “appification” of everything—are creating remarkable challenges and opportunities. Moreover, the intersection of cloud computing, big data and social media is pushing mobility in new directions and affecting employees and customers in profound ways.

More of the Baseline article by Samuel Greengard

For many organizations, the move to a hybrid cloud has become a question of when, not if. Hybrid clouds provide users the unique benefit of on demand access to IT resources for the development of new applications, and as well as the ability to easily manage existing ones all in one place.

The vCloud Hybrid Service, built on proven VMware technology that many organizations are already familiar with in their existing virtual environments, provides a secure, dedicated infrastructure-as-a-service hybrid cloud that makes moving applications to the cloud easy for even new cloud adopters.

Transitioning to hybrid cloud depends on the specific requirements of your workload. However, to help get your organization into the mindset of hybrid cloud, we wanted to share the top 5 uses cases for moving to the hybrid cloud:

Use Case #1: Packaged Applications

A common source of frustration from IT departments is the inability to quickly add capacity on-demand to meet business changes. This challenge can be solved by moving packaged applications, such as email or collaborative software, to the hybrid cloud. The vCloud Hybrid Service supports thousands of applications and dozens of operating systems certified to run on vSphere, so users can run existing applications in the cloud with no changes required! Furthermore, this enables users to transfer applications without the need for re-coding or reconfiguration, and with no loss in the level of security, availability, or performance users are already familiar with in their internal data center.

More of the VMware post

Accelerate consultants are fortunate to work with a wide variety of IT organizations. Our clients vary by industry, global footprint, size, and competitive landscape. But one common theme among IT leaders has been that true IT transformation involves much more than just updating the technology. In fact, technology consistently ranks low for the challenges IT executives brace for as they push their organizations to modernize and shift toward ITaaS.

With ITaaS, the expectations and ground rules for IT are rapidly changing from “internal shared service” to “quality services at a competitive price.” As IT, our customers are no longer captive; they can easily work directly with public clouds and SaaS vendors. This conjures up a new meaning to “rogue IT.”

More of the VMware Accelerate post

Over the last several weeks this blog has featured a series of posts about the benefits of the Hybrid Cloud – and today marks a major Hybrid Cloud milestone.

I am excited to announce the General Availability (GA) of Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager service.

Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager Service protects your on-prem applications by orchestrating the protection and recovery of Hyper-V Virtual Machines running in a private cloud (i.e. System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2 or System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1) to a secondary location.

Over the years, as I have spoken with the VMWare community, I have heard things like this: “Well, with Windows Server 2008 you did not have Live Migration; let me know when you have that.” Recently, that one missing scenario has been SRM. Well here it is! And I want to emphasize that this solution is so much easier to use and the way we have architected it is a much more modern, cloud-centric way of doing things.

Hyper-V Recovery Manager assembles some core elements of our Cloud OS strategy (Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Replica, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, and Windows Azure) to deliver a cloud integrated Disaster Recovery Solution. Reaching GA means that the service is now backed by support and SLA assurance, and IT administrators can use it in production environments. We have had a number of customers running this in production in preview, and their feedback has been straightforward: The solution is incredible and it is ready for general availability.

More of the Technet post by Brad Anderson

More than 80 per cent of employees admit to using non-approved software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications in their jobs, a new survey has found.

The survey was carried out by Stratecast, a branch of analysts Frost & Sullivan, and commissioned by McAfee. It asked 300 IT staff and 300 “line-of-business” employees of businesses that employ 1,000 staff or more for their views on “shadow IT” – SaaS applications used by employees for business, which have not been approved by the IT department or obtained according to IT policies. The employees represented different industries, and came from North America, the UK, Australia and New Zealand.

Only 19 per cent of line-of-business employees and 17 per cent of IT employees said that they did not use any non-approved SaaS applications. According to respondents, the average company uses about 20 SaaS applications, seven of which are non-approved.

“That means you can expect that upwards of 35 per cent of all SaaS apps in your company are purchased and used without oversight,” CEOs and CIOs were warned by Stratecast.

More of the Computing.co.uk post