IT Trends & Technology

As digital transformation strategies drive more customer initiatives, banks and credit unions are changing their views of cloud usage.  Financial institutions are becoming more pragmatic in their approach to gaining operational efficiencies, improving the customer experience, and move beyond their traditional core banking platforms.  Off to a slow, fragmented start, expect to see cloud adoption accelerate.  Gartner expects the cloud computing services market to grow 17.3 percent in 2019 alone, topping $200 billion worldwide.

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.

Did you know that by 2020 almost a quarter (24 percent) of the “total addressable IT market will be cloud”? That’s Gartner, Inc.’s prediction in the 2017 Planning Guide for Cloud Computing.

With the continued maturity of the public cloud, and the aggressive adoption of cloud services across all industry verticals, companies are feeling the pressure “to build and invest in cloud-first strategies and architectures.” But the hybrid cloud computing puzzle can turn into a nightmare without key management strategies. Here are four that will help ensure success.

A recent IDC white paper survey of medium to large enterprises and their data center servers found that 55 percent of capacity is unused, resulting in Capex waste because of inefficient utilization. Equally important is the Opex waste from the time and personnel resources needed to provision workloads in a scenario in which increased server consolidation process time results in higher costs.

While 451 Research predicts that application containers will grow faster than any other solution type (40 percent annually in 2017 and 2018, many organizations are still determining how and if containers or virtual machines (VMs) are the best fit for their infrastructure plans. The ongoing debate as to the use of VMs or container technology is happening regardless of the growing adoption of containerization, primarily because every business’s needs are different. When it comes to choosing the right option for your business, it’s important to understand the benefits of each by viewing them through the lens of business priorities.

It has often been said that "all good things must come to an end," and this certainly rings true with operating systems in the regards to Technology Solutions. Some systems simply grow too old to be of use, and become obsolete.

The windows operating system can be extremely helpful when operating correctly. Like any system however, if not properly managed, it can bring its fair share of difficulties.

Mainframe vs. the Engineer

Retirement, this word can invoke many different feelings when spoken.  For those that are up in years, they can look at retirement as one big, long vacation! Woohoo! Can’t wait, right?  But for those that are ‘retiring’ from playing their favorite sport at a ripe age of 30, they may not be so enthusiastic about the concept.  And so there are different reactions to this word ‘retirement’.  For me, I would like to retire sooner than later so that I have some good years left….but I digress.

Just like our customers, we, too, evaluate and select our partners very carefully.

I was playing with my grandson and he loves dinosaurs. As we were playing my mind wondered to the mainframe being called a dinosaur over 25 years ago and how it was soon going to be extinct. When I first heard this, I assumed that it would happen in 5 to 10 years. As I know today the mainframe is still running many critical applications and transactions every day. So the mainframe is not extinct…yet the people that administrate them are retiring at a very fast pace, so it makes it hard to find someone to take care of the mainframe on a daily basis.

There has been a lot of a press surrounding the hyper-converged movement. New companies have been formed and existing companies are coming out with new hyper-converged products.

After many attempts throughout the last 3 decades or so, it finally appears that Client / Server Virtualization is here to stay. Most people in the IT industry have heard of VDI, Virtual Machines, or Cloud Servers. One area of Virtualization Services that does not have quite as wide of an audience is the area of Network Virtualization.

Working with a myriad of companies from different industries, it is fascinating to discover why they adopted cloud and infrastructure-as-a-service. Commonly, companies want to focus on its capital and technical resources, business initiatives and growth projects. They do not want to put time and energy into computer hardware and day-to-day support needs

My introduction to IT was via the Air Force in 1989.  Graduating from high School in 1985, well before personal computers became common place and before teaching programming was the norm, I enlisted in in the Air Force.