IT Trends & Technology

Keeping pace with digital change can be a huge undertaking for utility companies, both big and small, especially in today’s rapidly evolving digital age. Continuous technology advancements mean even the newest technology will someday be obsolete, and investing in upgrading equipment can be costly, unexpected and hard to prioritize.

A few years ago, the idea of moving all of your IT infrastructure to the cloud was dismissed as just a trend that would soon fade away. The reality, however, is that cloud computing—when planned effectively, implemented properly, and managed with the right vendor—can offer huge financial and operational advantages over traditional data centers.

When you see big brands such as Marriott, Target, and Sony in the news announcing they have fallen victim to cyberattacks or ransomware, it can be easy to think that it could never happen to your organization. Sadly, it is not until an unexpected natural disaster, cyberattack, or even human error occurs and severs access to critical corporate data that a company ends up realizing the full extent of the fallout—to their bottom line and their brand.

Completing a data center migration is no easy task—but it can be a necessary one, whether because of a need for more storage, an effort to comply with new regulatory requirements, or a desire to reduce costs. Unfortunately, many organizations make the already-complicated technical task even harder by failing to comprehensively plan the migration, understand its impact on the business, or take advantage of the experience of migration experts.

To help set your organization up for success, we have put together these 8 best practices that can turn this chore into a turning point.

From just dipping their technological toe in the water to fully hosted data centers in the cloud, organizations have begun to embrace a wide range of managed services. If your organization has followed this path, then it is likely that you have heard the phrase “software defined data centers” (SDDC) and wondered what it meant and if it was right for your operations.

As managed services and hosting solutions have evolved, many customers have found that separating out their SQL databases from their other web and applications services can help them realize significant benefits. Whether the SQL databases are used for application development or in production environments, feeding data-hungry websites or business-critical applications with robust, highly available, and scalable hosted SQL databases can prove to be a differentiator for your business.

From smart grids to smart meters, technology is transforming the way the utility industry does business. IT is being used to enhance operational processes and customer experience in a digital age where information security is trying to keep up with big data. To get an idea of the scope of data being collected, one only needs to look as far as the smart meters utilized by households. A single household smart meter can generate 400 megabytes per year. If you multiply that by 135 million smart meters in the United States, it equates to 54 petabytes, or a little more than half of the data uploaded to YouTube in a year. This data must be stored somewhere that is secure, so that if and when disaster strikes, it is protected.

A few years ago, the phrase ”from the back room to the boardroom” was a new concept when it came to the IT department’s influence on business operations. Now, IT leaders are seen as key business enablers, driving initiatives that have changed the way customers interact with their suppliers and the way employees get their work done. This is all while they are also “keeping on the lights”—ensuring network connectivity, keeping hardware functional, and making sure services are secure and available.

Whether they are engaged to refocus spending on operations, regain control of infrastructure and hardware costs, fill critical staffing gaps, or even reinvent themselves, IT departments use managed services to provide technical resources on their behalf. In fact, 65 percent of CIOs who are focused on growth plan to partner with a managed services provider instead of doing everything in-house.

According to a Forrester study, only 2 percent of companies could restart operations within an hour of a disaster incident. Additionally, based on Gartner calculations, the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute or $300,000 per hour. In short, pairing a major IT disruption with a poorly designed or reactive disaster recovery plan can result in a perfect storm that could cripple your business and have ripple effects for years to come.

Creating a business case for any IT investment is never an easy task, but it can be a critical piece of winning the support of your leadership team to take on a key initiative. Business cases help to present the expected benefits that can positively affect the bottom line and improve overall operations, while also helping to put the potential costs and unknown factors associated with the new technology into context. The business case to migrate to a container-based architecture is no different, but it is also not a new technology. So why would now be a good time for your organization to consider it?

Although mainframes are capable of processing over millions of transactions per second (much more, in fact, than the typical volume of searches on Google), they are largely viewed as unfashionable hardware.

Yet, despite generally being considered legacy technologies, you can plan on them being around for a while. This is because many companies are still using these behemoths, and in certain cases, actively purchasing new machines. Why?

Whether business leaders embrace digital transformation or not, it’s here to stay. Its  impact on enterprise has already proven to be quite profound, and adoption will be necessary to remain competitive and grow with each passing year.

Digital transformation is not just about the digitization of organizational processes needed to run day-to-day business operations. It’s largely a customer- and culture-driven transformation dictated by how consumers choose to do everything from initiate financial transactions to consume entertainment and the preference to use digital devices to communicate and express ideas.

U.S. business productivity has been trending up lately, according to recent government figures. Some of that has to do with the labor force working longer hours and upticks in requests. However, another factor that directly contributes to business productivity is efficiency, brought about by leaner organizational processes and better management.

One way enterprise is achieving efficiency is by leveraging the benefits of hybrid cloud solutions and migrating certain key elements of their IT infrastructure off-premises.

Merriam-Webster has several definitions for the word myth. One of them is “a person or thing having only imaginary or unverifiable existence.”

Not surprisingly, there are many misconceptions and outright myths circulating about the cloud and cloud management that are just that—myths. In order to debunk these myths, one must come prepared with cold, hard facts that speak truth to fable.