Strategies and Trends for Information Technology Leaders
I’m waiting for the time when it becomes a “groan” to talk about cloud computing, but that time clearly isn’t yet. As of last December, 48 percent of our surveyed respondents from our February report, Optimizing Cloud for Service Delivery, viewed cloud as essential to their business (among cloud adopters that is) versus 33 percent…
by Wayne Kiphart of Logicalis Industry standards transformed the hardware and software markets and unleashed tremendous innovation. Today, the evolution and increasing acceptance of ITIL best practices promises to transform IT service management (ITSM) and facilitate the controlled expansion of IT environments to include business services operation centers, and public and private clouds. This column…
The quest for business agility became nearly universal as the U.S. was appearing to emerge from recession. The central idea is that organizations of all sizes need the speed and agility of a startup to respond rapidly to changing conditions. Now that the U.S. economy is sputtering again, demands for business agility are becoming even…
I admit it: I’ve always hated the term business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR). It just sounds so broad and like spending money in case something bad happens. And it always comes wrapped with technical terms like “recovery point objectives,” “failover SLA’s,” and “OS compatibility.” Frankly, all those technical terms just don’t resonate with me. What does…
In a traditional global IT enterprise, different business units, geographic regions, and functional entities each do things their own way. Service providers, meanwhile, have generally accommodated these specialized requirements. After all, the customer is always right, right?. This mindset is changing as business organizations gradually accept the proposition that a great majority of their IT…
“I just got my people trained on SOA,” I heard someone say recently, “and now they want to go off and learn about Cloud computing. When are they ever going to do some actual work?” We in IT are lucky that the big new ideas keep coming in, even if it can be hard sometimes…
Cloud computing is no longer just a buzzword according to a recent study commissioned by Avanade, a business technology services provider. The Cloud Computing survey shows a 320% increase over the past nine months of respondents reporting they are testing or planning to implement Cloud computing. This, according to Avanade, is the first data that…
The economic downturn has had a significant impact on IT spending, particularly in certain sectors. According to new EMA research, 2009 budgets in the education, retail, manufacturing, and banking/finance sectors are all down between 15% and 35% over Q1 of 2008. January and February 2009 IT dollars show a continuation of this decline in spending,…
We have all been deluged with suggestions on how to survive during the current economic slump. From admonishments to “weather the storm”, which, in the extreme, advocates hiding behind an equipment rack whenever the CFO was about and selling the conference table to save a few bucks and hoping to come out the other side…
Columns like this are a bit formulaic. I know it, you know it, yet we all read them: “10 best movies of 2008”, “10 best books of 2008”, “10 worst technologies”, and on and on. Heck, Fox Sports devotes half of its programming to those annoying Best Damn countdowns. What most of us balk at…