Happy New Year! As we say hello to 2018, we can reflect on the massive progress technology made throughout 2017. The cloud came to a new level of maturity, cybersecurity incidents rocked the world and organizations embraced hyperconverged infrastructure as the future of data center modernization. But what lies ahead? Read on for a look at cybersecurity predictions for the coming year.
Have you ever looked at your dog or cat staring out the window of your house towards the horizon? Ever wonder if they contemplate what may be beyond their visible perimeter? It used to be that internal IT did not have to contemplate what lay beyond the perimeter. Network security was fairly simple – create a wall of security around the data center and its resources, along with the users and their desktops scattered throughout the building. Traffic passed through the perimeter firewall while users passed through the front building entrance to access the network. It was a page out of the medieval castle defense playbook in that unauthorized users, unknown devices and external threats were kept at bay outside of the walled perimeter.
This holiday season, the frenzy is not about the “must have” toy, it is the must have investment – Bitcoin. The TV networks cannot stop talking about the dramatic rise in its value that seems to occur on a daily basis, if not hourly. The cable business news shows shuffle in cryptocurrency and financial industry pundits to discuss the significance the new digital gold and the cryptocurrency market at large. They debate each other whether bitcoin is a sure deal that will continue returning positive dividends, or a bubble that is about to burst. Both sides of the argument have their “experts” as to why you should or should not get involved bitcoin mania. CNBC reports that people are maxing out their credit cards to buy, buy, and buy. Some people are even taking home equity loans on their house to maximize the number of coins they can afford.
Is your organization’s wireless networking in need of some modernization? Digital transformation has the power to boost your company’s productivity, bottom line, and even employee retention. While the concept may seem complicated, working with a trusted technology partner helps to simplify these concepts.
The digital transformation we are witnessing today has catapulted IT to a role of prominence, innovation, and leadership. IT must now understand more than just technology architectures, it must understand the business drivers and goals of the company that it serves. Innovation and new ideas are the building blocks of business today and it is the job of IT to provide the technology to help make those ideas come to fruition. This is one of the factors leading companies to adopt a Hybrid IT model. But this shift has less to do with technology and more to do with operations management, policies and procedures and the delivery of IT services. A good exercise for developing a hybrid IT strategy begins with asking leadership to re-examine the role that the IT department holds within the organization, with questions such as:
Mark Twain popularized the phrase, “There’s gold in them thar hills,” when he wrote about the gold rush of 1849. Today, the gold lies not in the hills of California, but within crypto mining servers dispersed across the Internet. This new gold is not mined by the power of the pick and shovel, or even dynamite. Instead, computer processors power the mining operations that create this digital gold. Welcome to the modern day gold rush of today’s digital age.
Has your organization clearly defined your hybrid IT strategy? According to Gartner’s Managing Vice President, Chris Howard, "Many organizations have now passed the definitional stage of cloud computing and are testing cloud architectures inside and outside the enterprise, and over time, the cloud will simply become one of the ways that we 'do' computing, and workloads will move around in hybrid internal/external IT environments. As a result, the traditional role of the enterprise IT professional is changing and becoming multifaceted. A hybrid IT model requires internal and external IT professionals to support the business capabilities of the enterprise."
According to the findings of a recent study, it is estimated that 90 percent of companies will eventually move to a Hybrid IT model. This is no surprise considering the many advantages such as agility, scalability, resiliency, automation, simplicity, and reduced costs that only hybrid IT can offer. The quickening migration to hybrid IT is evident in an IDG study published in Forbes, which estimates that a typical IT department has only 40% of its apps and platforms residing in on premise solutions. How exactly does hybrid IT transform the role of the traditional IT team? Read on to find out.
Hybrid IT is a new paradigm that is redefining the function of IT within an organization. However, the implementation of new archetypes always comes with challenges along the way. Change is never easy, but often worth it. The traditional on premise enterprise took a long time to build, so naturally, rebuilding and modernizing it will not happen overnight.
There is a great deal of conversation and interest about hybrid cloud and hybrid IT in the IT community today. While these two buzzwords do share some distinct similarities, they are also very different business IT solutions. Here’s where they find common ground:
