Business Technology Roundtable

Here's the challenge. Your CEO won't accept anything less than a world-class IT infrastructure that meets the expectations of his most informed Line-of-Business leaders. If you're the CIO and you don't want to rely upon public cloud service providers, then are you ready to deliver the caliber of IT services that they can provision? Take a moment. Consider the implications. Ponder the impact of your actions. All the leading public cloud services providers routinely design and assemble their own data center infrastructure components, due to their extreme needs for scale and cost control. Regardless of the cloud services company, a common element among all these devices is a requirement to run an open-source operating system, such as Linux, and various other purpose-built open-source software components. Gartner, Inc. refers to this trend as the Web-scale IT phenomena. Why You Need to Adopt Web-scale IT Practices What is Web-scale IT? It's all of the things ha...

Senior executives at large multinational enterprises are already demanding that their CIO has a plan in place to ensure that they can effectively procure public and private cloud services for their organization. In smaller companies, some IT managers are now expected to acquire the knowledge and skills to perform a similar role. Are they prepared? To find out, let's review a current IT resource assessment. According to the findings from a recent market study by International Data Corporation (IDC), European IT departments still need to make significant improvements before they have fully embraced cloud architectures and transformed themselves into hybrid cloud service providers. When asked to evaluate their current readiness to execute on their cloud service brokering strategy -- where they become trusted internal advisers to their Line of Business leaders -- European respondents admitted to unexpectedly low levels of confidence that they're ready. As an example, 56 pe...

As the chief executive at your company, if you discovered that you had some major financial standards compliance issues within your organization, would you be concerned about the risks associated with that exposure? If your designated outside auditor had bypassed your internal finance department and chose instead to work directly with your individual Line of Business leaders, would you want to know why? Moreover, would you intervene? Yes, it's a rhetorical series of questions. And I think we all know the answers. Did you know there's a movement that's already in progress that could impact your company's provision and consumption of IT services, with a corresponding potential exposure concern that's related to compliance issues? Have you heard about the Shadow IT phenomenon? According to the assessment of several leading IT market analysts, it's a trend that's already quite pervasive across a broad cross-section of industries. It’s also been a hotly ...