EMC, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Transformation

UK businesses at threat of losing IT talent

Weg - Zukunft - Entscheidung - Neuanfang - KonzeptEMC has released a new study highlighting UK businesses are at risk of losing IT talent due to underappreciation of technology in the business on the whole.

The Great Skills Exodus report claims decision makers are failing to prioritise IT as a business enabler, while 88% of IT workers believe the growth and success of their organisation is fundamentally reliant on technology. Frustrations from the IT department can be linked to a lack of transformation in the company they work for as 26% has witnessed an unwillingness to change the way ‘things have always been done’ from the management team.

“IT has got to become a key aspect of the business strategy, not merely a function of the overall business,” said Ross Fraser, UK&I Country Manager at EMC. “Technology is potentially the definitive aspect of any business but it can be seen as a supportive function by a substantial amount of organizations at the moment. Decision makers now have to rethink what they are doing as the process of IT and move with the times.”

While there has been encouraging progress in the adoption of cloud technologies in recent months, it would appear board level decision makers are not realizing the full potential of the technology itself. Cloud as a technology could be perceived as now penetrating the mass market, though the digitally enabled business model, required to activate cloud for its greatest potential, could be seen as lagging.

“If you want to modernize, automate and transform your infrastructure, whether than means on premise or off premise, you have to embrace the idea of new IT,” said Fraser. “There are a few companies where their future probably depends on how well they embrace future IT and I think that there is also a lack of understanding that if they don’t embrace it they will come under huge amounts of pressure and competitive threats because they are not competitive enough as a business.”

Among the concerns put forward by respondents in the survey, 20% feel held back by their organisation’s restrictions on implementing new technologies, 30% feel they have few opportunities to demonstrate their ability, and less than 20% believe their organization has a significant focus on IT as a means of driving innovation.

“The worst case scenario could be that they won’t exist, think about Kodak or Blockbuster,” said Fraser. “Now this is on an extreme level but it does demonstrate how disruptive the digital business model is. It could mean death by a thousand cuts, but if you don’t get the technology question right it could mean major problems in the long run. Every business has the digital challenge, but if they get it right from a technology perspective it creates a workforce which sees where they are working is an important aspect of the business, they start to see career progression and new opportunities.”

EMC believe a stronger and more consistent message throughout the organization on technology, would not only provide the organization with a more competitive position in the market, but also highlight the importance of IT as a function to the on-going success, ensuring employee retention would be increased.

“Technology is at the heart of business transformation and the IT team is ideally placed to help any organisation navigate new opportunities and threats in the market,” said Fraser. “With employment of IT professionals forecast to grow at 1.62 percent per year by 2020, businesses must ensure that they offer the most compelling career opportunities in order to retain the best staff, or risk losing as many as three quarters of their IT team in the coming months – something which would have a hugely detrimental impact on any organisation.”

Sin categoría

State of 5th DevOps Report By @RealGeneKim | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps

As I have mentioned many times, I’ve learned more doing this project than any project in my professional career. This has been a four-year collaboration with Jez Humble and Dr. Nicole Forsgren, as well as Nigel Kersten and Alanna Brown from Puppet Labs. «I only got four hours of sleep last night. I woke up after an anxiety dream about deadlocks in the database.»

Anyone who has run an online service probably knows this feeling. And this is what Jez Humble wrote on our Slack channel, 24 hours before the launch of the 5th annual State of DevOps Survey. As I have mentioned many times, I’ve learned more doing this project than any project in my professional career. This has been a four-year collaboration with Jez Humble and Dr. Nicole Forsgren, as well as Nigel Kersten and Alanna Brown from Puppet Labs.

read more

Sin categoría

Global Cloud Security Market Expected to Grow Exponentially | @CloudExpo #Cloud

According to a study the rising number of cloud-specific security attacks are likely to propel the demand for cloud security systems to 20 percent CAGR over the next four years.
Adoption of cloud computing services has risen and so have the security risks associated with them. According to a study published by Technavio Research, the rising number of cloud-specific security attacks are likely to propel the demand for cloud security systems over the next few years. Growth has been pegged at 20 percent CAGR over the next four years. According to the study, the usage of cloud-based services require users to reveal their credentials and this is a system prone to identity theft. The study predicts the dominance of American customers (which is at 51 percent at the moment) do decline by 2020 due to saturation in the market.

read more

Sin categoría

UNIX – 20 Years Old and Going Strong | @CloudExpo #Cloud

A BriefingsDirect expert panel discussion examines the illustrious 20-year history of the UNIX operating system environment as an industry-wide and global standard success story.
It’s not often that you reach a multi-decade anniversary in information technology, especially where the technology’s relevance remains so high and the promise of more innovation and value is so needed and promising.

read more

Sin categoría

Simplifying the IoT Conversation | @ThingsExpo #IoT #DigitalTransformation

We’ve all been in those sales meetings. The sales person kicks off the meeting by welcoming everyone and introducing the topic of discussion. Then the pre-sales expert drags everyone through their 100-slide PowerPoint deck with enough buzzwords and confusing phrases (at 9 point font, of course) to dull even the most engaged person.
I call these types of presentations the “Jabberwocky Strategy” because they remind me of one of my kids’ favorite poems, “Jabberwocky”, by Lewis Carroll.

read more

Sin categoría

Time Series Data of IoT By @Trendalyze | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #BigData

IoT generates lots of temporal data. But how do you unlock its value? You need to discover patterns that are repeatable in vast quantities of data, understand their meaning, and implement scalable monitoring across multiple data streams in order to monetize the discoveries and insights. Motif discovery and deep learning platforms are emerging to visualize sensor data, to search for patterns and to build application that can monitor real time streams efficiently.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Dave Watson, CTO and Co-Founder of Trendalyze, will discuss real world IoT projects from UK environmental monitoring using Mosquitto, Node-RED, Kafka, Spark, MLlib and R.

read more

containers, Enterprise IT, hybrid, iPaaS, Opinion, Resilience

Head in the clouds: Four key trends affecting enterprises

New trends, concept imageCloud is changing the way businesses are functioning and has provided a new and improved level of flexibility and collaboration. Companies worldwide are realising the cloud’s capabilities to generate new business models and promote sustainable competitive advantage; the impact of this is becoming very apparent: a Verizon report recently revealed that 69 per cent of businesses who have used cloud have put it to use to significantly reengineer one or more of their business processes. It’s easy to see why there’s still so much hype around cloud. We’ve heard so much about cloud computing over the last few years that you could be forgiven for thinking that it is now universally adopted, but the reality is that we are still only just scratching the surface, as cloud is still very much in a period of growth and expansion.

Looking beyond the horizon

At present, the majority of corporate cloud adoption is around Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings such as AWS, Azure, Office 365 and Salesforce.com. These services offer cheap buy-in and a relatively painless implementation process, which remains separate from the rest of corporate IT. Industry analyst Gartner says IaaS spending is set to grow 38.4 per cent over the course of 2016, while worldwide SaaS spending is set to grow 20.3 per cent over the year, reaching $37.7 billion. However, the real promise of cloud is much more than IaaS, PaaS or SaaS: it’s a transformative technology moving compute power and infrastructure between on-premise resources, private cloud and public cloud.

As enterprises come to realise the true potential of cloud, we’ll enter a period of great opportunity for enterprise IT, but there will be plenty of adoption-related matters to navigate. Here are four big areas enterprises will have to deal with as cloud continues to take the world by storm:

  1. Hybrid cloud will continue to dominate

Hybrid cloud will rocket up the agenda, as businesses and providers alike continue to realise that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to cloud adoption. Being able to mix and match public and private cloud services from a range of different providers enables businesses to build an environment that meets their unique needs more effectively. To date, this has been held back by interoperability challenges between cloud services, but a strong backing for open application programming interfaces (APIs) and multi-cloud orchestration platforms is making it far easier to integrate cloud services and on-premise workloads alike. As a result, we will continue to see hybrid cloud dominate the conversation.

  1. Emergence of iPaaS

NASA is teaming up with IBM to host a code-a-thon for developers interested in supporting space exploration through apps

The drive towards integration of on premise applications and cloud is giving rise to Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS). Cloud integration still remains a daunting task for many organizations, but iPaaS is a cloud-based integrations solution that is slowly and steadily gaining traction within enterprises. With iPaaS, users can develop integration flows that connect applications residing in the cloud or on premise, and deploy them without installing any hardware or software. Although iPaaS is relatively new to the market, categories of iPaaS vendors in the market are beginning to emerge, including ecommerce/B2B integration and cloud integration. With integration challenges still a huge issue for enterprises using cloud, demand for iPaaS is only set to grow over the coming months.

  1. Containers will become reality

To date, a lot of noise has been made about the possibilities of container technology, but in reality its use has yet to fully kick-off. That’s set to change as household name public clouds such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google are now embracing containers; IBM’s Blue Mix offering in particular is set to make waves with its triple-pronged Public, Dedicated and Local delivery model. Building a wave of momentum for many application and OS technology manufacturers to ride, it will now become increasingly realistic for them to construct support services around container technology. This does present a threat to traditional virtualization approach, but over time a shift in hypervisors is on the cards and container technology can only improve from this point.

  1. Cloud will be used for Data Resiliency/Recovery services

With cloud storage prices coming down drastically and continuous improvements being made to cloud gateway platforms, the focus is set to shift to cloud-powered backup and disaster recovery services. We are in an age where everything is being offered ‘as a service’; the idea of cloud-powered on-demand usability suits backup and disaster recovery services very well because they do not affect the immediate production data. As such, this should be an area where cloud use will dramatically increase over the next year.

With all emerging technologies, it takes time to fully figure out what they actually mean for enterprises, and these four cloud trends reflect that. In reality we’re only just getting started with cloud, now they understand how it works, the time has come for enterprises to turn the screw and begin driving even more benefits from it.

Written by Kalyan Kumar, Chief Technologist at HCL Technologies.

Enterprise IT, Huawei, News & Analysis, Open Cloud

Huawei’s enterprise business unit grows 44% to $4.5 billion

Maintaining ProfitsHuawei’s Enterprise Business Group (EPG) has reported healthy growth over the last 12 months generating $4.5 billion over the period, an increase of 44% year-on-year.

Speaking at Huawei’s Global Analyst Summit 2016, the company highlighted growth was fuelled by customer demand for new ICT solutions, and outlined it strategy for 2016 under the tagline “Leading new ICT, building a better connected world”. The new proposition is focused around developing open, flexible and secure platforms for customers worldwide.

“In 2015, Huawei EBG experienced rapid growth in the public safety, finance, transportation, and energy sectors,” said David He, President of Marketing and Solution Sales at Huawei EBG. “With the development of innovative ICT including cloud computing, big data, Software-defined Networking (SDN) and Internet of Things (IoT), customers’ business models, enterprises’ IT architectures, and industry ecosystems are changing profoundly. To address our customers’ challenges and strategic demands, Huawei works closely with our partners to develop joint innovations, through which we provide our clients with differentiated and leading products and solutions to help them thrive in the new ICT era.”

The announcement comes after Huawei launched its All-Cloud strategy at the event this week, as a means to capitalize on digital capitalization trends. Building on the ROADS experience model, All-Cloud centres on network modernization and aims to enable digital transformation within enterprise.

The enterprise group’s focus to date has been on the traditionally high-value contracts, though it is not clear what industries have been prioritized for the next 12 months. 76% of Huawei EBG’s 2015 sales revenue was generated from channels and partners, an increase of 47% year-over-year, owing to the fact that the company has now developed partnerships with more than 300 distributors and value-added partners, as well as more than 8000 tier-2 channel partners.

“In line with our ‘being integrated’ strategy, Huawei will continue to support our partners and help them succeed in the new ICT era by enhancing our products, brands, logistics, services, businesses, and IT systems,” said Raymond Lau, President of Global Partners and Alliances at Huawei EBG.

data protection, News & Analysis, Private Cloud

IBM and Box extend partnership to offer greater flexibility on data residence

Partnership hand holdingIBM has extended its partnership with Box to provide enterprises the choice to store data regionally in Europe and Asia on the IBM Cloud.

The IBM cloud will be available as part of Box’s new Box Zones technology, and is the first time that Box customers will have the choice of where to store their data. IBM will also utilize the Box Zones offering to extend its hybrid cloud proposition.

“Organizations want to tap into all of the benefits of the cloud while retaining the security, performance, control and other attributes they might achieve with local data centre infrastructure,” said John Morris, general manager at IBM Cloud Object Storage. “With Box Zones and the IBM Cloud, enterprise customers across Europe and Asia will soon have the choice to leverage the IBM Cloud global footprint locally, and uniquely support hybrid cloud and on-premises deployments, integrating data between Box Zones and on-premises content repositories”

Since the launch of the partnership in June 2015, the pair has integrated a number of different products, including a new version of the IBM MobileFirst for iOS Expert Seller app that is built on Box Platform.

“Box and IBM are focused on bringing world-class technology to enterprises across the globe, and on building dynamic content and collaboration solutions that transform the way our customers do business,” said Aaron Levie, CEO of Box. “Box Zones enables us to combine Box’s rich, intuitive content management experience and collaboration tools with IBM Cloud’s powerful global infrastructure to overcome many of the data storage concerns faced by businesses in Europe and Asia.”

The launch would appear to be well timed as transatlantic data movement and residence has been under continuous scrutiny following the European Court of Justice’s decision to strike down Safe Harbour last October. While EU-US Privacy Shield has been put to the industry, receiving backing from Microsoft in the process, industry insiders have told BCN that the new policy is unlikely to have much impact on the concerns of EU citizens and businesses. As the EU-US Privacy Shield is a policy, not law, companies are likely to refer directly to national legislation as opposed to any European directive.

IBM’s and Box’s partnership could be perceived as a shrewd move to counter any arguments that potential customers have with regard to their data residence and overall compliance.

Sin categoría

Why CIOs are worrying about the future of their IT infrastructure – and their own role

(c)iStock.com/stevanovicigor

CIOs continue to mop their brow over whether their IT infrastructure is good enough to meet their organisation’s long term requirements whilst worrying about where they fit in, according to a new piece of research released by EMC.

The survey, of more than 2700 business and IT professionals in EMEA, examined the CIO’s perspective of what is to be expected in five years’ time, and found that three quarters believe they need to launch new products and services in half the time it takes today. Extracting value from increasing volumes of data is the top IT challenge for organisations, according to 41% of respondents, while accommodating rapid scaling was seen as the next greatest challenge.

In many organisations, the research argues, CIOs are at risk of isolation, managing increasing expectations from IT and finding little common ground with the rest of the C-suite. With increased expectation comes paranoia over whether their business is good enough for the job. More than two in three (69%) of those polled said business growth could reveal weaknesses in traditional IT operations leading IT to hang back as opposed to embracing innovation.

Four in five (80%) of respondents argue implementing a more agile IT infrastructure would reduce risk, while almost half of those polled say they are training IT professionals in the likes of cloud computing and converged infrastructure. The trends are more indicative in smaller businesses; employees with more than 1000 employees tend to have fewer of these issues and are more likely to have invested in training.

“The research casts new light on current attitudes towards IT within businesses of all sizes,” said Nigel Moulton, VCE EMEA chief technical officer. “To reclaim full control, CIOs and their IT teams need to stop spending so much time building and managing different infrastructure components.

“Instead they need to transform IT into an efficient business-focused engine that can scale rapidly in response to changing business needs,” he added.

According to a recent analysis from IDC, EMC and parent company Dell have a combined 19.9% share of the global cloud infrastructure market, ahead of the market leader, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.

The cloud news categorized.