Digital transformation fuels upside market opportunities, and related growth goals are now the CEO's top business priority, according to the latest worldwide study by Gartner. Moreover, a growing number of CEOs will focus more on financial priorities – especially profitability improvement.

The annual survey of CEO and senior business executives in the fourth quarter of 2018 examined their business issues, as well as some areas of technology agenda impact. In total, 473 business leaders of companies with $50 million or more – and 60 percent with $1 billion or more – in annual revenue were qualified and surveyed.

Digital business market development 

"After a significant fall last year, mentions of growth increased this year to 53 percent, up from 40 percent in 2018," said Mark Raskino, vice president at Gartner. "This suggests that CEOs have switched their focus back to tactical performance as clouds gather on the horizon."

The survey results showed that a popular solution is to look in other geographic locations for growth. Responses mentioned other cities, states, countries and regions, as well as 'new markets' would also include some geographic reach — although a new market can also be industry-related, or virtual.

Twenty-three percent of CEOs see significant impacts arising from recent developments in tariffs, quotas and other forms of trade controls. Another 58 percent of CEOs have general concerns about this issue, suggesting that more CEOs anticipate it might impact their businesses in the future.

Another way that CEOs seem to be confronting softening growth prospects and weakening margins is to seek diversification — which increasingly means the application of 'digital business' to offer new products and revenue-producing channels.

Eighty-two percent of Gartner's survey respondents agreed that they had a management initiative or transformation program underway to make their companies more digital — that's up from 62 percent in 2018.

Cost management has risen in CEO priorities. When asked about their cost-control methods, 27 percent of respondents cited technology enablement, securing the third spot after measures around people and organisation, such as bonuses and expense or budget management.

However, when asked to consider productivity and efficiency actions, CEOs were much more inclined to think of digital business technology as a tool. Forty-seven percent of respondents mentioned technology as one of their top two ways to improve productivity.

According to the Gartner assessment, digital business planning must include the whole executive committee. However, the survey results showed that CEOs are concerned that some of the executive roles do not possess strong or even sufficient digital skills to face the future.

On average, CEOs believe that sales, risk, supply chain and human resource officers are most in need of more digital expertise. And, once all executive leaders are more comfortable with the digital sphere, new capabilities to execute on their business strategies will need to be developed.

Outlook for digital transformation skills development

When asked which organisational competencies their company needs to develop the most, 18 percent of CEOs named talent management, closely followed by technology enablement and digitalisation (17 percent) and data centricity or data management (15 percent).

"Datacentric decision-making is a key culture and capability change in a management system that hopes to thrive in the digital age. Executive leaders must be a role model to encourage and foster data centricity and data literacy in their business units and the organisation as a whole," Mr. Raskino concluded.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Keumars Afifi-Sabet

The database market continues to shift to the cloud – and according to Gartner, three quarters of all databases will be deployed or migrated to a cloud platform by 2022.

The finding, which appears in the analyst firm’s latest report, ‘The Future of the DBMS Market is Cloud’, revealed how artificial intelligence was influencing the need for greater data usage. Only 5% of databases will be cloudless by 2022, Gartner added, being considered for ‘repatriation’ to on-premises environments.

Last year, global database management system (DBMS) revenue grew 18.4% to $46 billion (£36.4bn), according to Gartner’s figures. Growth in on-premises systems, the company added, was not down to long term strategy; instead, price increases and forced upgrades are undertaken to mitigate risk.

“According to inquiries with Gartner clients, organisations are developing and deploying new applications in the cloud and moving existing assets at an increasing rate, and we believe this will continue to increase,” said Donald Feinberg, Gartner distinguished research vice president. “We also believe this begins with systems for data management solutions for analytics (DMSA) use cases – such as data warehousing, data lakes, and other use cases where data is used for analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

“Increasingly, operational systems are also moving to the cloud, especially with conversion to the SaaS application model,” Feinberg added.

Of total DMBS revenue growth, cloud database management systems accounted for more than two thirds (68%) of it. Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS), Gartner added, accounted for more than three quarters of that. This gives rise to another trend – that cloud service provider infrastructure is becoming de facto data management platforms.

This is again linked back to multi-cloud, and organisations having to reinforce their strategies due to complex implementations. Gartner recently found that, of respondents who were on the public cloud, more than four in five (81%) were using more than one service provider. “Ultimately what this shows is that the prominence of the CSP infrastructure, its native offerings, and the third-party offerings that run on them is assured,” added Feinberg.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Bobby Hellard

Connor Jones

Keumars Afifi-Sabet

Gone are the days when teams could work on a project for months (or even years) before releasing it to production. Now even two-week cycles are too long due to ever more demanding customer expectations and an always-growing field of competitors.

Organisations today expect to deliver new features to production on a weekly, daily or even hourly basis. This accelerated timeline lets organisations adapt to market shifts and technological changes. It keeps companies on the same pace as their competitors. Most importantly, it enables businesses to continuously deliver value to customers.

There is no question that being better, faster and more reliable is beneficial. But how can businesses achieve that? The short answer is through DevOps.

DevOps saves time by speeding delivery and eliminating lean time

Which phases of the software development life cycle take the most time? The answer, perhaps surprising, is none of them. The most time is wasted not in any one phase, but in between phases. Developers wait for business analysts to give them requirements. Testers wait for developers to finish their code, and developers wait for testers to tell them whether the code works. Both developers and testers wait for system administrators to deploy new releases to different environments. And sysadmins wait for everyone else to tell them why deployments failed. 

The sad truth is that in many companies a significant effort is spent on tasks that do not bring value to the company. Waiting does not bring value, yet many organisations have processes in place with time built in for waiting for another team or colleague to do something. Repeating the same set of manual tests over and over again does not bring value, yet this is a normal practice for many businesses. Handing over deployments to a different department when the team in charge of an application could do it themselves by executing a single command does not bring value, yet there are often separate departments for deployment.

DevOps enables seamless collaboration between teams

Who is in charge of a product? The answer is usually "no one in particular". Everyone is in charge of a particular aspect or phase of the development life cycle, but no one is in charge of a product from beginning to end. And to make things even more complicated, employees often focus solely on their assigned roles.

Developers don’t always consider how their work affects testing and deployment, since it’s not their responsibility. They may not even know how their applications are tested or deployed. The same can be said for all other departments. Sysadmins likely do not consider how much time others spend opening Jira tickets in order to deploy something. No one team considers the complete life cycle of an application, because responsibility is split among too many silos. There is a lack of empathy. Communication between teams is limited and one team does not understand how their actions affect another.

DevOps addresses the disconnect between teams by building empathy between all those involved in an application’s life cycle. The practice unites distinct teams into a single team that responds to a single product owner. It dismantles silos by creating self-sufficient teams fully in charge of everything related to their application from start to finish. Such teams are in charge of requirements, development, testing, deployment to production, and even monitoring and pager duty. They are in full control of what's happening with their application.

As a result, there is nothing to be handed over to other teams or silos. There is no need for inefficient handovers in the form of Jira tickets, emails or other administrative hurdles. DevOps is all about cultural changes aimed at creating autonomous and self-sufficient teams in charge of the entire life cycle of one or more applications. Therefore, creation of “DevOps departments” and employment of “DevOps engineers” completely misunderstands what DevOps tries to accomplish.

DevOps is not about creating more silos, nor it is about renaming existing departments as “DevOps departments”. Instead, it's about people working together to accomplish a common goal: successful release of new features to production.

When everyone works as a single team focused on a single product, communication improves, the need for administrative overhead decreases and ownership is established. Working together and understanding how one department’s actions affect others create empathy. As a result, productivity and quality increase, and costs and time to market decrease. 

Eliminating lean time and automating repetitive processes inevitably increases the time teams have at their disposal. Saved time combined with better cooperation between those involved in application life cycles allows teams to focus entirely on actions that bring value by dedicating precious time and effort to solving problems and innovating.

For real innovation to happen, everyone in the company needs to be involved. Elimination of wasted time and resources, improved collaboration and decentralised innovation are the three key ingredients that allow organisations to focus on what really matters. They allow businesses to move from trying to catch up with competitors to being able to innovatively tackle today and tomorrow’s challenges.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

As the workforce has become more dispersed, organisations have looked to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to provide 24/7, anywhere access to corporate apps and desktops. But legacy VDI has fallen far short of its promises, especially when it comes to performance and simplifying IT. However, with cloud adoption accelerating, organisations have the opportunity to completely transform end user computing, deliver beyond the promise of VDI, and take advantage of new levels of agility that drive growth. 

The cloud VDI market, sometimes referred to as desktop as a service (DaaS), is experiencing explosive growth, but within the space, there are multiple approaches and their differences are vitally important for IT leaders to understand. To help determine what the best deployment and management approach is to meet an organisation’s unique needs, there are three primary questions to ask VDI and DaaS providers: 

• Is the solution globally available? 
• Is the solution customisable for enterprise needs? 
• Is the solution turnkey? 

Let’s take a closer look at the three questions you need to ask virtual desktop providers.

Is the solution globally available? 

Most enterprise software was built for one customer and for one data centre. So, the focus was on making the software as scalable as possible within one data centre. That’s the case with legacy VDI. 

It requires a significant amount of resources and has proven cumbersome for most organisations to operate VDI even within a single data centre – let alone three or four. So, a customer might choose to deploy the VDI stack in just one data centre to reduce complexity and management overhead. However, in a larger organisation, most users are not close to that data centre. Because they’re remote, they’re subject to high latency and low bandwidth connections. These networks also can have high packet loss, which requires the use of expensive leased lines to solve.

The upshot is high latency and unhappy users. Even though various remoting protocols have been employed to try to optimise performance, they can’t change the laws of physics.

But a new approach exists now, thanks to the public cloud. Instead of one data centre, the public cloud is made up of many data centres distributed across the globe. Today Microsoft Azure has 54 cloud regions worldwide and more coming, which means that every organisation using Azure now has 54 data centres. It’s time to put them to use.

Because Azure is a globally distributed cloud, it requires a globally distributed cloud VDI solution – and that all comes down to solution architecture. A cloud-native solution, based on a globally distributed architecture, is what you need to look for; it’s the only way to get the performance, security and scalability benefits that have eluded traditional VDI  – whether it’s on-premises or in the cloud – but which are very real today. With the right cloud VDI solution, IT teams can deploy desktops at the edge of the cloud region nearest each user. These edge-native virtual desktops can be deployed within about 25 milliseconds of any user in the world, and that means users get incredible performance.

Is the solution customisable for enterprise needs? 

Ideally, IT teams will be able to manage all their virtual resources – apps, desktops and workstations – using their existing tools and processes, from a single pane of glass. That’s one way to simplify management processes and reduce the need for retraining. To meet the needs of enterprises, the ability to use existing corporate images, integrate with popular enterprise apps such as Skype and Microsoft Teams, and use established GPOs, security policies and multifactor authentication, is required.

One critical aspect of security is strong authentication, but more is needed. A virtual desktop architecture that separates the control plane from the data plane is fundamental to security, because it means that an organisation’s valuable data stays safe and doesn’t enter the virtual desktop control plane. Find out whether potential solutions offer this separation.

Because the IT budget is perennially tight, another important requirement to add to your list is the ability to easily integrate existing IT service management solutions, such as ServiceNow and BMC Remedy. This will efficiently orchestrate desktop provisioning and resource lifecycles.

Is the solution turnkey?

There is the option to build-your-own  VDI solution using many available products, but experience has shown this route requires significant IT team and financial resources. The other option is to choose a turnkey service. Deploying a cloud VDI solution can be as easy as buying a physical PC. Simply choose your configuration:  CPU, memory and storage, and whether or not you want a GPU. Then deploy it in the cloud region closest to the end user. Even better, what if you could scale horizontally across cloud regions – globally – in minutes? Ask providers what’s possible now.

With a truly turnkey service, the provider should own the reliability and availability service level agreement (SLA). Many IT teams want to get out of the desktop SLA business, because it’s time-consuming busy-work that detracts from accomplishing more strategic objectives that contribute to business growth. Know what a vendor’s uptime stats mean and what you’re willing to tolerate in terms of downtime. There’s no reason to accept less than 99.95% desktop availability. 

Goodbye to “good enough”

Some organisations have gotten used to settling for a VDI solution that is slow and expensive because it’s better than nothing. But something better is now possible, thanks to the availability of cloud-native VDI solutions that quickly and easily scale across cloud regions; enterprises don’t have to settle for “good enough” anymore.

By asking the three questions above, you will be able to vet providers to find the VDI solution that will best match your enterprise’s needs, and provide the business agility you need to thrive.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Connor Jones

In April, Amazon made its managed blockchain available to the public. Two weeks later, the company announced that it would offer $10,000 to any employee who quit Amazon and formed their own delivery company.

While the two announcements may not seem immediately connected, the relationship is there if you scratch the surface. But before I get into why, let me back up a little. Since blockchain exploded into the public consciousness with the price surge of Bitcoin in late 2017, business leaders have been wondering whether they should be exploring blockchain solutions. When Amazon made launching a blockchain as easy as opening a Facebook account this year, the question took on new urgency.

Today, though, it’s still not a viable technology for most business applications. Here’s why.

When blockchain makes sense

Blockchain is a technology that consists of a digital “chain” made up of individual “blocks” or data inputs. The chain is immutable, meaning that once a block is added, it cannot be changed or removed by any party. It’s also shared; no single party has control over the chain.

So, at a very high level, blockchain tends to make sense for businesses that have a need for an immutable record of transactions and are willing to share their data with a third party (or multiple third parties).

While the first half of that proposition appeals to a lot of organizations (banks, for example), the second half – the part about sharing data – often does not.

“A solution in search of a problem”

I’ve talked to a lot of business leaders interested in exploring how blockchain could support their operations. But it’s rare that blockchain is a simpler and more efficient solution than whatever the organization is currently using.

In fact, most blockchain efforts out there (with the exception of cryptocurrency) are still in the pilot stage as various groups try to see what will and won’t work.

Take, for example, the state of Illinois, which has partnered with blockchain company Hashed Health to create a blockchain-based pilot program to help issue and track medical licenses. The use case is compelling: government data is a great candidate for sharing publicly, and medical licenses are the kind of sensitive data it makes sense to make untamperable.

And just because we haven’t found many workable applications yet doesn’t mean they’re out there. That’s exactly what happened when economist Alvin Roth developed a model for trading houses without money – a lot of people made fun of him, until it found its home as the structure for America’s kidney donation bank.

Blockchain for partnerships?

One blockchain application many analysts have proposed is partnerships that require close collaboration. In that situation, blockchain would allow for a sort of “trust but verify” approach, ensuring that no party could manipulate the transaction record.

An example, you say? Oh, I don’t know, maybe… a major online retailer like Amazon partnering with a lot of dispersed delivery companies and interested in transparently managing the supply chain.

To be clear, I’m speculating here. But Amazon rarely does things that don’t benefit Amazon directly, and the timing coincidence of the two announcements is striking.

Should your company use blockchain?

As I said in the beginning, blockchain isn’t a viable solution for most companies right now. But that doesn’t mean you should write it off without considering it. Generally, I’d say blockchain may benefit your company if:

• You’re pretty big – medium to enterprise level – or you have a dedicated dev team used to building software and developing systems. The blockchain by itself is useless; to make it work, you’ll have to figure out how to build it into an application, which means you’ll have to have the internal resources for that project
• You’re willing to share your data. That’s baked into the nature of blockchain. It’s non-negotiable
• You need an immutable ledger. This is probably the easiest criterion to meet, but note that needing an immutable ledger alone isn’t reason enough to adopt blockchain
• Blockchain is simpler and less complex than any other solution out there. This is the real kicker. If you’re only using blockchain to use blockchain – and using it adds complexity to your company – it’s not a good solution

In other words, if you’re mainly interested in blockchain because you feel like you should be, you’re probably safe letting other people experiment before you invest a bunch of resources.

Interested in hearing more in person? Find out more at the Blockchain Expo World Series, Global, Europe and North America.