IT Trends & Technology

The democratization of the cloud within the enterprise has freed operational costs, productivity, and innovative possibilities across departments that have formed the basis for digital transformation. The downside is, that freedom has led to unchecked cloud sprawl that is hampering security and cost containment. In fact, 53 percent of all cloud users and 64 percent of mature cloud users estimate that 30 percent of cloud spend is wasted, according to the RightScale 2017 State of the Cloud Report.

As mergers and acquisitions (M&A) increase, more IT departments will be faced with data center consolidation. Although it’s common practice for the acquired company to adopt the data center practices of the parent company, consolidation still requires detailed evaluation of current equipment, processes, and personnel.

Although the progression from a hybrid to a multi-cloud strategy is steadily increasing, it remains a challenging process for many businesses. In fact, fewer than half of organizations have a multi-cloud strategy, according to a Business Cloud News survey.

While most businesses understand the importance of cloud computing to digital transformation and having an agile business, the cloud can only perform as well as the business’s network infrastructure. For businesses preparing to embark on a cloud strategy, aligning the network to the needs of the cloud is the first step to ensuring that the strategy is optimally realized.

Despite the growing momentum towards digital transformation, businesses across all sectors are limited to incremental change because of budget constraints. The result is legacy technologies and IT infrastructure that must be maintained for a wide variety of reasons. The challenge with this incremental approach is fulfilling the IT staffing needs for maintaining these legacy systems.

Container technology adoption has been picking up steam in the last several years across all sectors and types of organizations. According to a Forrester report, 82 percent of container users expect to have more than 100 containers deployed within the next two years.

In the recent IDC paper, “The Business Value of the Connected Mainframe for Digital Transformation,” there is a clear path for its part in digital transformation moving forward. How organizations find that way forward is largely dependent on keeping pace with innovation, including making decisions regarding updates and support.

Although it hasn’t yet reached the stage of ubiquity, container technology is well on its way to becoming a fundamental part of the IT infrastructure toolbox. While its many uses revolve around applications and app development, they are delivering ROI in multiple forms. A Forrester study found that 66 percent of organizations who adopted containers experienced accelerated developer efficiency with even more seeing an increase in application deployment speed.

There are plenty of reputable sources that point to near parity in container adoption versus virtualization, such as SDxCentral’s 2017 Container and Cloud Orchestration Report. The bigger story is the many potential users that are still on the fence about containerization. The hesitation of this significant base of holdouts often stems from the fact that they don’t know as much about containerization as they do about virtualization.

Every second counts in the business sector. Real-time data solutions are necessary in assisting company leaders in business decisions to stay competitive, relevant and accessible. SAP and SAP HANA are completely re-imagined cloud platform solutions that provide live data for real-time business.

You don’t have to search far to find numerous articles touting mainframes or x86-based server farms as the superior choice for organizations. But when the question of the right choice for the future becomes the focus, things may change in the mainframe versus server farm debate.

We have all heard of the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT applies to physical objects that we use, such as computers, cars, mobile phones and other everyday devices. A white paper from Cisco predicts that by 2020, the number of internet-connected devices will reach a staggering 50 billion globally. A newer trend being coined by Cisco is the “Internet of Everything” or IoE.

The IoE extends the definition of IoT and includes people, processes, data and things, which is pretty much everything. IoE includes a level of hyper-connectedness for anything and everything that connects to the internet, such as applications, data and Application Program Interfaces (API). First National Technology Solutions  (FNTS) already is helping businesses manage and integrate all connections that IoE currently includes.

If your business is running legacy IT systems—and chances are that it is—you know they can introduce a number of challenges for you and your staff. But more than just an annoyance, legacy systems eat into your bottom line, costing you money, alienating customers, and introducing security risks. Legacy IT is a form of technical debt not easily satisfied.  Here are just a few of the issues you may be facing.

Having discovered the advantages of the cloud, many enterprises are now taking a multicloud approach, implementing a mix of public, private, and hybrid cloud architectures in their efforts to make computing more efficient and available.

Public and private clouds each have their advantages—and limitations—tied to issues of cost, scalability, and manageability. IT leaders are increasingly seeking a “best of both worlds” solution by adopting hybrid cloud infrastructures.