It’s downright embarrassing when the head of the CIA can’t use e-mail to
whisper sweet nothings without his love affair being outed four months after
it reputedly ended.
The fact that the lady in question and General David Petraeus, who ran the
wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, used a shared Gmail account to leave
messages for each other in the draft folder – a tactic employed by terrorists
to avoid incriminating e-mail trails – has also prompted concern about
whether the spy chief’s cyber security was blown by somebody else besides
the FBI at any point.
IT organizations that want to build private cloud services face tremendous challenges. The technologies are immature, but they are the easiest hurdle. Processes and funding models must change. Organizational cultures need to be rewritten, even though politics stand in the way. Service orientation requires tight alignment with the business. Measuring success means measuring business results.
How should leadership drive cultural, political and organizational change in IT to deliver private cloud services?
How should operational processes change to support a private cloud service?
How should IT use technologies to build a private cloud service?
When I talk to CIOs, they usually complain that the trend of Bring Your Own Device, or BYOD, is undermining their ability to keep their organization’s infrastructures and data secure. Every employee who comes to work with his or her smartphone or tablet and pulls up sales reports, help tickets and other corporate data creates a small hole in the IT armor companies have spent billions to build. Over time, the argument goes, the holes become a dangerous sieve.
My response to those worries: BYOD is a force of nature, so you better not get in its way. And it’s just raising the curtain on another, even bigger trend that follows right behind it. Let’s call it BYOS, short for “bring your own services.”
A new survey about cloud computing explores the business growth opportunities for buyers and consumers of cloud services alike, with surprising findings about confidence and a high degree of ongoing experimentation.
The multi-year annual survey on the cloud market provides a springboard for examining some of the implications for where the growth opportunities are and where the inhibitors for the growth may be.
To learn more about where the cloud business has been and where it’s going, BriefingsDirect sat down with Michael Skok, Partner at North Bridge Venture Partners. The interview is conducted by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Intel CEO and president Paul Otellini, 62, has apparently tired of beating back the dragons that periodically threaten to devour the company and has decided to retire early.
Intel CEOs have all previously stepped down when they were 65, when retirement is mandatory, with their designated replacement clear. This is not the case this time.
The board, reportedly surprised by his decision, asked him to hang around for six months while it searches for his successor and starts an “orderly” transition. He will leave in May, his anniversary.
Companies are continuing to move along with adopting cloud computing even though they haven’t completed their formal strategies for using it, according to ZDNet.com.
Analyst IDC found that nearly three-quarters (69 percent) had already started using private cloud technologies, with nearly half (40 percent) saying they were using public and hybrid cloud.
But while some companies are already taking the plunge, 64 percent of UK organizations said they are still «considering» what to do with the cloud (compared to 60 percent in France and 52 percent in Germany).
Most enterprises’ cloud strategies aren’t particularly sophisticated, however, and focus on the technology-related drivers for cloud adoption, such as cutting the cost of IT, rather than business-related drivers, such as creating new revenue streams, according to IDC.
Did you know 72% of data breaches worldwide the previous year occurred at companies with 100 or fewer employees — a 63 percent increase. However, with unified security solutions, small businesses can gain enterprise-class safeguards at an affordable price.
I just got off the phone with a friend of mine. His name is AJ and he was particularly grouchy. He had just spent the last 12 work hours scouring month-old machine logs so that he could compile a quarter-end audit that met his company’s compliance requirement. AJ is the Director of IT for what would be considered an SMB. It’s a modest home warranty related company that deals with homeowner end users, finance and loan offices, mortgage companies and manufacturers. It does roughly 15-20 million in business each year and employs about 60 direct employees and maybe 100 contracted agents. AJ has a staff of 3 other IT professionals, but given the workload, could easily double that headcount.
AJ is very proud of his jack-of-all-IT-trades status. He is proficient at writing code as he is virtually installing access on contractor home devices or planning strategic IT footprint expansion. And it’s this proficiency that has been making him grumpy. Because he can work some sort of magic with just about any application, the bosses have him wear many different hats. In fact, one of his online IT forum handles is “The Maddest Hatter.” But it is this reliance on his tribal knowledge and multidisciplinary acumen that keep the C-Levels saying “that sounds like it’s right up AJ’s alley.” AJ’s biggest problem is that there are only 24 hours in a day and he can only prioritize so many projects that are interspersed with hair-on-fire emergencies.
Big Data is everywhere. Predictive analytics and real time in-memory computing isn’t everywhere.
This truth (if we can accept it to be so) represents something of an imbalance.
As a subset of data mining, predictive analytics driven by in-memory computing efficiencies now has an opportunity to bring real-time analysis and insight to fast-moving live transactional data flows. Or to put it another (rather shorter) way, we can now start to manage and understand Big Data better than ever.
If we combine contemporary approaches to predictive analytics with the newly arrived Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor that produces what is claimed to be over one teraflop per second in terms of workload computational power for highly-parallel workloads, then CIOs can start to think about what “50-processor core computing” will mean for us in the very near future.
The enhanced adoption of Cloud, Big Data, Mobility is causing more services to be developed and aggregated, hence there is a greater emphasis on Agile for service aggregation. Agile processes have specific methods to manage the rapid development cycles and changing requirements in application development. There are several steps to achieving Agility for the entire lifecycle. The first step is to perform a thorough business analysis and review existing, target business processes. Based on the analysis appropriate services that are reusable can be designed and developed. Services can then be developed at either the Enterprise levels or lower levels. Enterprise services such as email and collaboration have been very popular in organizations and agencies, other services can be developed at the business, application and database levels. The integration and workflow aspects of these services have to be defined and then the services are integrated and assembled with the overall solution.
In 2013 business will continue on the path of big data, bigger opportunities, and evolving their recipe of how to innovate in an environment of emerging risks. This is article one in a series about the future of cloud technology and the business of Big Data – and how to harness the risks of a data-driven world for growth and sustainability.
Since the very beginnings of trade and commerce, it has been a commonality that most information exchange between buyer and seller, customer and business, was treated as a discrete, confidential, and almost intimate affair. Trust was earned, not given.
Consider the not so distant history of the local American bank. Banks have been collecting personal information about their customers for decades, harkening back to consultations over a notepad, paper deposit slips, and hand-written applications. The reputations of applicant and banker, buyer and seller, were local reputations, with personal and professional references limited to the confines of the community and the reality of proximity.