IT Trends & Technology

Technology is evolving quickly, and organizations' ability to adapt and integrate new technology with their legacy systems is increasingly becoming a problem for IT leaders. According to the 2018 Opsview State of IT Infrastructure Survey, less than 50 percent of respondents believe they are seeing progress toward transforming their legacy infrastructure and are able to embrace digital transformation.

At the end of the day, every CIO and IT professional is there to enable the business to run at its highest potential. And the last thing a CIO wants to be thinking about is if their infrastructure can handle the business’s demand for responsive and innovative technology. This is why partnering with a service provider for infrastructure as a service is a popular solution to these challenges in many different ways.

Small and medium-sized businesses often have laser-like focus on aggressive growth targets and maximizing customers’ positive experiences with their brand. With these pressures and the push to do more with limited budgets and less staff than their larger competitors, these organizations often have little time left over to focus on the IT services that make their business hum. 

On August 24, 2005, when the storm that would become Hurricane Katrina was several days out from landfall along the Gulf Coast, Walmart’s director of business continuity activated the company’s emergency operations center, recalled key staff, and set years’ worth of plans into motion. In the days that followed the devastation of Katrina, Walmart was able to deliver 100,000 free meals and 1,900 truckloads of supplies to survivors and to provide emergency workers with supplies and protective gear. 

It’s easy for an organization to find itself struggling to understand what cloud computing is and how it can translate the technology into tangible operational improvements. Without this foundation, it can be difficult for an organization to ensure that it is taking full advantage of the cloud’s potential. Nowhere, though, is this challenge more prevalent than in the healthcare industry—in addition to transforming their operating models with the rise of digitization, these organizations must also juggle stringent compliance requirements and ongoing concerns about security and data privacy.

From June 2014 to May 2017—a period of just three years—almost 250 million financial records were breached, including JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, Experian, and Equifax. Although sophisticated hackers were involved, each breach actually was initiated by known security vulnerabilities in computer programs or networking hardware that could have been overcome with strong internal controls and routine security reviews.

Does your company still run legacy software on your computers? Maybe Windows 7—or how about Microsoft Office or Exchange Server 2010? If so, you are not alone; as many as 39 percent of Windows users are in the same boat. 

When your organization makes the decision to migrate your legacy systems to the cloud, completing the move in itself isn’t the goal. Instead, the end goal is for your organization to reach a more reliable, responsive, and flexible state through the IT backbone that enables your business.

T professionals are continually challenged to find new and more efficient ways to implement and manage heavily used applications to enable their business. Because one single server cannot possibly handle all of the incoming requests or the performance requirements complex applications require, the idea of deploying multiple server instances has taken hold.

It’s a phrase that you can’t help but hear in technology circles: cloud computing. From virtualizing computing resources to managing applications to storing data to hosting web services, cloud computing seems to have something to offer every organization. In fact, Gartner expects the cloud computing services market to grow 17.3 percent in 2019 alone, topping $200 billion worldwide.

It is easy to think of outsourcing as just a way to reduce costs and overhead. Organizations contract with an outside vendor to perform an IT function or to provide an IT service that they can’t, either because their own internal costs to deliver it have become prohibitive or because it no longer fits their core capabilities.

As businesses of all sizes become increasingly dependent on information technology, it’s no secret that it’s becoming harder and harder to attract and retain talented IT professionals to keep all their systems and hardware up and running. Making matters worse, business is becoming more data-driven, software is becoming more ubiquitous, and the Internet of Things is bringing technology into more everyday items, all of which require IT professionals to work to stay ahead of the trends while also tending to the basic blocking and tackling of modern IT services.

It’s no secret that IT spending has risen dramatically over the past several years. This rise is because of a number of factors, including the rise in cybersecurity vectors, widespread adoption of IoT devices, consumer preference for online card payment transactions, and overall trends in the digital transformation, to name a few.

Global IT spending on enterprise software alone almost doubled from just over $225 billion in 2009 to an estimated $424 billion by 2019. Year over year, IT spending is expected to increase 5.5 percent.

One trend that theoretically should lower IT costs is application containerization. It is analogous to how the shipping industry uses standardized containers to ship cargo around the world. The application is packaged along with all dependencies, including runtime components isolated from other processes.

While a recent study by SAP Center for Business Insight shows that digital transformation in healthcare is growing, the slow pace of that growth can be directly attributed how healthcare organizations are grappling with some of the most significant IT challenges. While the use and plethora of digital platforms have become standard, the resulting big data, the need for interoperability and real-time analytics, as well as the need for greater mobility and security, are all setting the stage for more challenges moving forward.