IT Trends & Technology

While attending the Gartner Sourcing Summit a few weeks ago, I was able to participate in a few sessions and talk to several attendees about their BiModal strategy – being able to keep their current systems operational, as they look for new ways to innovate with different technology capabilities.  This can be a real struggle for IT departments having to task employees with responsibilities to keep the existing legacy infrastructure up and operational, while also trying to innovate with new applications, mobile and other capabilities that are a completely different delivery model.

Research, planning, off-site meetings, consulting, surveys – various activities go into creating strategies for your organization.  The time, effort and expense that goes into creating your strategy – you can’t afford to let it live on paper.  Here are three ways to get your strategy off the paper and into action.

We hear it every day – technology is continually changing and there is no sign of it slowing down any time soon.  With the continual change comes the high price of keeping technology up to date to meet demands and upgrades.  More and more businesses turn to cloud providers to help them with these rising demands and help keep the rising costs under control.  So you are off to the race with planning, design, development, testing and finally implementation.  But the race doesn’t stop there; it has only begun.

Recently I have received some raised eyebrows when our prospective clients and current clients learn that we plan on continuing to invest in All-Flash storage arrays, like EMC’s XTremIO, instead of the traditional storage arrays.  The question I typically receive is, “Why?  Isn’t the all-flash array a lot more expensive?”

More with less. Economics is a key driver to implementing change within organizations.  In today’s economy there are two terms heard regularly – do more with less; and what is the impact to the organization.  The role of the CIO is changing – demands to implement applications, manage more websites and add new software, are increasing at an alarming rate.  These requests are not only the demands of the customers but internal business units.  Meeting these demands quickly and efficiently without adding staff or seeing an increase in budget can put a tax on any CIO and their employees.  

Implementing a Cloud solution, like many IT projects, requires careful planning, thorough testing and requires continual assessment.    It is not like the rotisserie chicken commercial where you can just “set it and forget it”.  So what are the important steps of managing the cloud service provider ongoing relationship and what should you expect from your cloud provider.

Private cloud solutions make sense when they make sense. One of the challenges for the CTO of a company is trying to determine if their strategic IT direction will be to utilize a private cloud.

Once upon a time the term outsourcing was deemed automatic job loss or loss of control over your critical systems. With technology changing, the lines between consumer and business blurring, security and compliance standards rising and business drivers changing the technology world continually – the role of the CIO has changed and now outsourcing has become an extension of your staff – not a replacement.

What can companies do about the security of private company information when it comes to employees using their own devices for work?

Do:

For years business leaders have been forced to get creative due to budget constraints.  Today’s IT leaders are in a very challenging position; the business cannot operate without the services provided by the technology team.  Everybody wants the best, fastest technology available but due to capital constraints it is very hard to get new hardware purchases funded.  How can an IT leader provide the latest, greatest, fastest technology with no money to buy what they need?  The answer is easy — work with a private, enterprise-class cloud services provider.

Do you ever reach a point in your life where and unexpected opportunity arises and you can’t help but think it is the forces of nature that presented it so you might as well take advantage of it? That is exactly how I ended up on a plane thousands of feet in the air getting ready to tandem skydive.

After using Microsoft Word for so many years, I was introduced to Microsoft OneNote. To be honest, I had never heard of this software before but sure glad I did! In the Project Manager world, OneNote has helped in the organization of multiple projects and tasks within each project.

This is always a tough question for me.  I personally think First National Technology Solutions (FNTS) has great products, services and exceptional engineers.  I am also an employee of FNTS so it’s possible my judgment is skewed. I asked one of our current customers the question and here are his responses:

As an IT professional who works with many corporations that have mission critical websites that cannot experience outages, I am not alone in wondering what went wrong with the http://www.healthcare.gov site launch. For the amount of time and money that was invested in launching this site, the types of outages and problems encountered should have been significantly less than what was experienced. Not every implementation, especially one on this large of a scale, is flawless but with proper planning and testing many of the pitfalls could have been avoided. A recent article in CIO magazine highlighted areas necessary to be evaluated for other companies to avoid similar problems.