IT Trends & Technology

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.

Most dictionaries define a broker as an agent who acts as an intermediary in the purchase or sale of a commodity, or a person or entity distributing something tangible.

Cloud service brokers (CSBs) work much the same way in that they work as an intermediary between a customer and a cloud service provider. There are many reasons why a company would choose to work with a CSB, but the main benefit is the management of provider services for customers who lack the time or resources to utilize cloud services to best meet the organization’s business needs.

Whether it is to meet shifting business objectives, pursue revenue growth, or achieve greater operational efficiency, there is a clarion call to enterprises prompting the move of many of their workloads over to multi-cloud providers.

A recent Forrester Consulting report indicated that 86 percent of survey respondents are planning to move or have already moved many of their mission-critical workloads over to multiple cloud providers. Much of the demand is being driven by our reliance on IoT devices and the need for big data analytics, in addition to enterprise revenue goals and demands.

The technology ecosystem is always changing, making it imperative for businesses to embrace new technologies available to them. However, many organizations rely on legacy technology to run their operations making it extremely difficult to make the transition to a more modern and innovative system.

As IBM iSeries celebrates its 30th anniversary, it continues to be a system of record for critical applications and data in sectors such as healthcare and manufacturing. The forward momentum of the digital business often means the server lags behind in the business backup strategy. This poses a myriad of challenges for users when it comes to avoiding downtime with iSeries backup strategies.

In the digital age, a comprehensive multi-cloud strategy is necessary in order to remain agile and innovative as you scale. In fact, IDC research indicates that over 90 percent of enterprise-scale organizations will be using multiple clouds over the next several years.

As the scope and pace of digital adoption continues to evolve and expand, business stakeholders now see it as imperative to survival and growth. Although total cost of ownership (TCO), operating expenditure (OPEX), and capital expenditure (CAPEX) are clear issues influencing digital adoption, it is the people sitting at the center of processes and technology that are the nexus of change.

For every business today, digital transformation is imperative for surviving and thriving in the digital age. However, support for legacy technology will continue to be a factor because transformations are gradual, and become a mix of the old and the new. We see this specifically around the management of multi-cloud strategies. In a recent VMware and MIT Technology Review report that surveyed 1,300 IT leaders, 62 percent of respondents cited the integration of legacy systems as their biggest challenge in multi-cloud.