Director of Market Strategy
One of my favorite CIOs once told me there are two kinds of work in corporate IT: AC work and CF work. He then explained the differences. AC work are the business projects that have a material impact on increasing revenue, reducing costs, reducing time to market, and opening new lines of business. These projects typically enhance an organization’s ability...
In our multi-cloud world, workload placement is one of the most crucial IT decisions organizations make. With the plethora of mature and proven cloud options out there, the business case to migrate most legacy, on-premises applications to the cloud is undeniable. But, which cloud do you choose? Desired redundancy, application recoverability, networking, storage, and support are just a few of...
Nearly every cloud provider and data center hardware/software vendor these days promises lower IT management overhead, freeing up IT staff to work on more important projects. Are these providers really making IT simpler and more efficient? Let’s get specific by taking a closer look at a single use case - VMware-based Expedient Enterprise Cloud (EEC). How does EEC help...
Is your organization facing a server or data center hardware refresh in the next 18 months? If so, you may be considering purchasing replacement equipment to put in your primary internal data center or colocation facility. You may also be considering enterprise cloud infrastructure as an alternative. The most common reasons that organizations choose cloud may appeal to you: ...
To take advantage of the inherent benefits of the Cloud (e.g. reduced IT costs, scalability, flexibility, availability), it has become commonplace to migrate legacy applications and business processes to the hyperscale cloud. While some organizations have found success with this strategy, moving to the hyperscale cloud has introduced new problems for many businesses, such as: IT Skills Gap – Running...
Can Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure Simplify Mergers and Acquisitions? Mergers and acquisitions are common in most industries these days. While companies employ many different strategies to integrate newly acquired companies, we’ve found that the companies that leverage Information Technology (IT) as a strategic asset during the M&A process typically enjoy much smoother corporate integrations than those that don’t. We commonly...
How strategic is your IT team? Ask two questions to get a sense of your strategic value: Ask the employees in your organization whether they feel like Information Technology makes the organization run more effectively. As an IT professional, ask yourself whether your IT team helps your organization get the most out of its critical business applications. If...
Hyperscale vs. Enterprise Cloud This is the second installment of a two-part blog post on the difference between “smart” and “dumb” applications. Part 2 covers the characteristics of “dumb applications” that are best suited to run on “smart hardware.” To learn more about “smart applications” (aka cloud native applications) running on “dumb hardware,” read Part 1. Dumb...
Hyperscale vs. Enterprise Cloud While many think buying cloud services is as easy as choosing between AWS or Azure, educated buyers explore all the options – both hyperscale and enterprise clouds - and choose the environment that will maximize application performance while optimizing cloud spend. Often, this best-of-breed approach leads to complex multi-cloud and hybrid IT environments that...
Most of the C-Suite professionals I meet with these days have moved away from the old “IT as a cost center” talk and more towards “IT as a business enabler” thinking. But C-Suite and IT leaders’ actions don’t always match up with words. From my perspective, here are the most common forms of incentivizing the wrong IT behaviors that...
Your software applications are the tools that enable your information technology to meet critical business requirements. What applications you choose influences staff productivity, cost management, flexibility in customer service, business transformation, and more. And, for a growing number of companies, the list of applications used in the business, also known as the application portfolio, can provide strategic competitive advantage in...
Does your organization’s IT infrastructure look something like this? If so, you’re not alone. Many of the organizations we meet with have applications spread across multiple platforms including on-premises, remote offices, colocation facilities, software-as-a-service (SaaS), hyperscale clouds like AWS and Azure, and enterprise clouds that operate similarly to their in-house environments. Put another way, management...
Most of the organizations we meet with tell us that their IT complexity continues to increase. Infrastructure teams that continue to purchase and operate data center servers, storage and network infrastructure have dozens of choices at the beginning of each hardware refresh cycle. System software choices like hypervisors, management add-ons, automation, monitoring and predictive analytics are too numerous to...
For years, IT infrastructure teams have been designing, building, and maintaining a wide spectrum of disaster recovery (DR) solutions to recover critical information systems after an outage. Many of these do-it-yourself disaster recovery (DIYDR) approaches carry hidden risks that come to light at the worst possible time. Perhaps the biggest problem with a DIYDR approach is that it often gives...
Most traditional IT infrastructure teams are faced with the necessity of periodically updating their hardware stack. It’s true whether they use colocation or in-house data centers. The servers, storage, networking, security and data protection equipment and licensing all become outdated and are usually replaced in a cycle every three to five years. Hardware refresh events are often the change events...
One of the oldest and most well-known sayings in IT is “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” The meaning is simple. Many IT leaders choose to play it safe when selecting vendors or products. By buying well-recognized brands, they feel that they are making a safe decision that won’t get them fired. Sadly, the same thinking is still prevalent...
What are the key decision points for selecting your cloud computing platform? It’s a trick question. Few organizations can adopt a single cloud platform to solve all their computing needs. Even small organizations who run pure software-as-a-service (SaaS) environments find themselves using multiple cloud platforms to deliver the applications they need to support their products and services to generate...
Disaster recovery is usually a subset of activities around a larger business continuity initiative in an organization. For this article, we will describe disaster recovery, or DR, as the activities required to restore availability of the computing environment to the organization. IT teams inside organizations have been practicing DR for years, often by implementing do-it-yourself (DIY) DR in the form...
Many IT strategists today are promoting the simplification of IT as a path to better business outcomes. The consensus among them is that complexity can hurt business. Siegel + Gale’s Global Simplicity Index says the world’s top 200 companies lose about 10% of their profits every year due to excess complexity. The SAP whitepaper “Leading Your Organization out of...
IT strategy is more complex than ever, thanks to all the software as a service (SaaS), cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and multiple platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings available today. In the past few years, cloud-first strategies proliferated resulting in hybrid IT environments in which some computing workloads were outsourced and others were not. Reasons for a cloud-first strategy often included...
Off-balance-sheet operating lease financing is used by many companies to manage spend on IT infrastructure. Many companies use this vehicle, also known as an operating lease, to flatten IT infrastructure spend and minimize risk of asset ownership. But the leasing rules are changing. The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and International Accounting Standards Board are eliminating off-balance sheet leases for...
On a recent episode of data center podcast The Hot Aisle, Mark Thiele of Apcera talked about the dangerous belief among some business leaders that IT is created to reduce the cost of IT. Sounds ridiculous, but it happens in so many organizations that this belief deserves more attention. Certainly, a good IT department has a responsibility for efficiency. But if...
Information technology organizations have been pursuing business-IT alignment for as long as businesses have used computers. Wikipedia defines business-IT alignment as: A dynamic state in which a business organization can use information technology to achieve business objectives – typically improved financial performance or marketplace competitiveness. Some definitions focus more on outcomes, like the ability of IT to produce business value,...
When we meet with companies to discuss the value of migrating from traditional on-premises IT to cloud infrastructure, business stakeholders and financial teams are often skeptical. Historically, these stakeholders have viewed the IT budgets and project plans in terms of previous budgets and transactions. When companies previously bought hardware, software and implementation services, the shopping list was simple: Capital...
How to Build a Business Case for Cloud Migration When an organization changes how it attacks a business problem, it’s quite common for these changes to be met with resistance. Information Technology is no exception. Switching from traditional servers, storage, and other on premises IT equipment to cloud versions of these services often triggers resistance from leadership, finance, IT,...
Why Are So Many Companies Adopting a Multi-Cloud Strategy? Multi-cloud is a frequently cited topic in IT trade publications these days. Multi-cloud is defined in a few different ways depending upon the source, but for this article, we will define multi-cloud as the practice of using services from multiple, heterogenous cloud services, including public, private cloud, and software as a...
Every year, more organizations are considering cloud computing as an alternative to traditional on-premises server, storage and network equipment. Change events that drive cloud consideration can include normal IT hardware refresh cycles, changes in company or IT leadership, new lines of business and new applications. How do these organizations compare cloud versus in-house both functionally and financially? Are they missing...
Are you honest with your organization (and yourself) about technical debt? Let’s start with a definition. Much of the historical discussion about technical debt is in software development, even though technical debt can exist across the entire technology environment. Technical debt is often described as inefficiency that compounds over time, like inefficiency related to maintainability, problems, performance or architecture. Some...
One of the most frequent questions I hear revolves around the rise of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. IT professionals are asking “Why shouldn’t I use all SaaS applications if I can eliminate the need for a data center, the hardware and all the tactical IT effort that goes along with it?” The answer to this question focuses around...
All Disaster Recovery as a Service offerings look the same. How do I choose? You’ve made the decision to use a disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solution – budget has been approved, and it’s time to start the evaluation process. What are the criteria you should use to compare seemingly similar DR solutions, and what questions should you...
What are the best metrics to use when comparing cloud to a hardware purchase? Many of the companies we meet with are debating between purchasing a new stack of hardware or implementing an enterprise cloud infrastructure using Expedient servers, storage, security and services. Most of these companies gather information then do a cost analysis to compare the options. Yet...
Data Center Hardware Refresh What business requirements are you addressing with your data center hardware refresh? What are you aiming for when you update data center hardware? I routinely talk to IT leaders about their current projects; one of the most common I hear about is a data center hardware refresh. And, as our conversation evolves, a few key...
What are the Best Use Cases for the On Premises Data Center? What are the practical use cases for an on premises (in-house) data center? When does it make sense to maintain hardware in a data center that is located in your office building or a leased office building? Here are the most common: Leveraging your on premises data...
Technology Lock-In - The “Hidden Threat” of On-premises IT Infrastructure Does your on premises IT infrastructure increase your risk of staying with a technology long after it provides value to your organization? Let’s look at a typical scenario. You’re a CIO or IT director that has finally secured funding for a disaster recovery project; something beyond the backup tapes...
