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.

The digital transformation is underway in the utilities industry, with many public and private service providers modernizing grids and replacing aging infrastructure and assets with more efficient technology.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For the foreseeable future, the mainframe will continue to be a critical part of the business and operational growth of thousands of organizations that rely on mainframes with increasing workloads. That fact is borne out in the BMC Mainframe Research Report, showing that 91 percent of survey respondents predict that their mainframe workloads will continue to grow.

The central role of the iSeries for businesses, as well as the need to optimize its management, is constantly shown by numerous sources. According to the most recent IBM i Strategy and Roadmap, there are more than 150,000 companies worldwide utilizing the iSeries platform.

The IBM AS400 through the current IBM iSeries has been prized for performance, stability, and dependability for more than three decades and continues to serve countless businesses today. According to the market intelligence company iDatalabs, 28,148 companies are using the IBM AS400, but other sources peg the number as well over triple that figure.

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.

A 2017 report by CompTIA indicates that the demand for tech talent in the United States will continue to outpace the supply of workers. And among hiring employers, almost half (47 percent) expect hiring to be moderately or significantly more challenging this year.

More than half of IT professionals surveyed (53%) indicated that optimizing current cloud use is the top initiative in 2017. That number rises to 64 percent among mature cloud users. That’s largely because of the amount of wasted cloud spend, estimated at 30 percent by users and likely to run as much as 45 percent.

Because of the limitations of operating in either a dedicated or a public cloud environment, organizations are moving to a hybrid cloud solution to improve security, reduce costs, and find the best-fit solution for business challenges. But as the survey indicates, knowing where to direct resources for the greatest benefit isn’t easy—even for the most seasoned IT pro. That’s why many businesses are turning to cloud managed services.

According to CompTIA’s IT Industry Outlook 2017 report, there are five major factors contributing to a more challenging landscape for IT professionals in 2017. These factors are:

• Finding workers with expertise in emerging tech fields
• Competition for IT talent
• Finding workers with the right soft skills
• Rising salary expectations
• Insufficient pool of talent in region/locale

If you’re lacking the skills or technology to do something, you can either acquire those resources internally, which is an investment, or you can leverage outsourcing. By outsourcing, you leverage another company that already has those skills and resources available. From a company’s perspective, it’s looking at outsourcing as “do we have a competitive advantage to do it ourselves, or should we rely upon someone who does have the competitive advantage to do it?”