Another day, another breach. No wonder security is tied for the top barrier to cloud adoption, according to 2017 research from RightScale, with 25 percent of survey respondents naming it, alongside expertise and expense, as their greatest challenge.
In the face of security concerns, IT executives have mistakenly found comfort in private clouds over public clouds. The RightScale survey found that enterprises run about 75 percent of workloads in the cloud, with 43 percent done in a private cloud and 32 percent handled in a public cloud.
A few years ago – in the early days of Blockchain – a lot of people were taken with the idea of a multifunctional chain on which all transactions could be handled. After Ethereum was launched in 2014, its advocates were talking themselves hoarse about the transformative opportunities the platform introduced. Decentralized applications, they predicted, along with all sorts of value transfers would be executed exclusively on Ethereum from that point on, and no other networks would ever be needed.
In a world where the internet rules all, where 94% of business buyers conduct online research, and where e-commerce sales are poised to fall between $427 billion and $443 billion by the end of this year, we think it’s safe to say that your website is a vital part of your business strategy. Whether you’re a B2B company, a local business, or an e-commerce site, digital presence is key to maintain in your drive towards success. Digital Performance will take priority in 2018 for the following reasons:
Competition is fierce – 79% of people who don’t like what they find on one site will go back and search for another site.
Every year about this time, we gaze into crystal balls to divine the future of our industry – or at least where it’s headed over the next 365 days. The result is often a triumph of incrementalism: we predict that we will get more of what we already have. The truth is, technology isn’t as revolutionary as we often think – and commenting on incremental changes alone may not help us understand what lies ahead.
Along with a few near-term predictions – so hard to resist – I’d also like to make some predictions not just about technology per se, but about related changes to organizations, processes, and the cultures around them. Here’s my main prediction: By 2030 what we’ve come to know as “IT” today will be virtually unrecognizable.
The word polymorphism is used in various contexts and describes situations in which something occurs in several different forms. In computer science, it describes the concept that objects of different types can be accessed through the same interface. Each type can provide its own, independent implementation of this interface. It is one of the core concepts of object-oriented programming (OOP).
I believe that this may finally be the year that the CIO role ‘crosses the Rubicon,’ leaving behind its traditional, IT-focused orientation. But I don’t believe that either of the previous predictions of this outcome — fading into oblivion or rising to a business executive level — is correct.
Instead, I think this is the year that we will see the role of the CIO transformed into something altogether different.
As you have probably heard, the EU commission signed the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) back in April 2016. The legislation is designed to help companies handle efficiently the data challenges of the 21st century and give strict guidelines as to how to work with massive flows of digital information. It is set to protect web users (data subjects) from malicious use and loss of their personal info and, also, to give people greater control over how their records are processed.
It’s conference season and, as you might expect, Jason and I have been on the road covering a bunch of them. It’s always great to see what the disruptive players in the market are doing — and this year did not disappoint. But there is one thing that repeatedly happens that just gets under my skin: transformation-washing.
As Jason explained in a Forbes article over a year ago, ‘washing’ is when a vendor (or pundit) applies a buzzword loosely in an overt attempt to attach themselves to its buzz. And transformation-washing is rampant.
So data warehousing may not be cool anymore, you say? It’s yesterday’s technology (or 1990’s technology if you’re as old as me) that served yesterday’s business needs. And while it’s true that recent big data and data science technologies, architectures and methodologies seems to have rendered data warehousing to the back burner, it is entirely false that there is not a critical role for the data warehouse and Business Intelligence in digitally transformed organizations.
The rise of the market for No-Code platforms and tools has given rise to a burgeoning population of ‘citizen developers’ – non-technical business personnel who can use these platforms to build an increasingly powerful set of business applications without writing a line of code.
As this market matures, different platforms focus on different challenges. As a result, a wider range of ‘citizen’ roles also evolve, such as citizen process creators and citizen data analysts.
High on this list: the new role of citizen integrator.
A citizen integrator is a non-technical business user who uses a No-Code integration tool to perform either application integration or data integration tasks – as well as tasks that combine these two integration modes.