Author Archives: gregl

Improved Business Efficiency Is Top Priority for Majority of IT

Posted on by gregl

According to a new annual survey of IT organizations in the U.S., 69 percent see “improving business process and efficiency” as their top priority, followed closely by “aligning IT priorities with business growth” at 61 percent, and “increasing overall productivity with new technologies” at 59 percent.

This finding was part of the IT Priorities Survey that TechRepublic and ZDNet will conduct every year as a means of tracking IT health. Indeed, with 2012 as the survey’s first year, the budget benchmark is pretty healthy.

  • More than twice as many organizations increased IT budgets in 2011 as reduced them.
  • IT budgets have gone up for 38.7 percent of organizations, stayed flat for 44.6 percent, and were reduced at just 16.7 percent of responding companies.
  • More than 20 percent of respondents increased their IT budgets this year by more than 10 percent.

Two-thirds (66.2 percent) of businesses with greater than 500 employees are lowering IT infrastructure costs, while only 44.4 percent of businesses with 49 or fewer employees have reduced their IT infrastructure costs.

Cloud Benefits Best Viewed Long Range

Posted on by gregl

Cloud computing often is seen as providing nearly immediate improvements to an organization’s bottom line. But as more enterprises migrate to the cloud, CFOs are encouraged to take a longer-range look at the benefits.

“Cloud computing gives companies of all sizes the opportunity to quickly scale their IT operations, and minimize the fixed costs traditionally associated with major implementation efforts,” writes Dallon Christensen in CFOworld. “However, moving to the cloud does present a unique set of challenges for organizations of all sizes.

“With many IT departments now reporting to the CFO, cost often becomes the key consideration during cloud implementations,” he writes. “When looking for the right cloud technologies, CFOs must focus on long-term productivity and value to their companies. Cloud computing is more than a passing fad, and companies must make sure they are focused on more than the next quarter’s financial results when making their decisions on the future of their IT operations.”

Acceptance is Rapid for Private Cloud

Posted on by gregl

The concept of the private cloud is gaining rapid acceptance, with nearly half of all IT respondents to a recent IDG Research Services survey saying they already are using private-cloud resources.

“It’s no surprise that private clouds are gaining currency,” stated a Cisco report regarding the IDG survey. “They hold the promise of meeting critical needs of enterprises today, from both an IT and a business perspective.” (At EasyStreet, we’re seeing this trend as well.)

The IDG survey showed that 46 percent of responding IT decision-makers said they are already putting part of their computing resources into a private cloud. Another 25 percent planned to do so within the coming year, and the remainder said they’d be using a private cloud within three years.

“Asked to name the top benefits of a successfully implemented private cloud, survey respondents pointed to increased IT efficiencies, lower total cost of ownership for IT infrastructure, the ability to use resources as needed and the ability to scale up or down to accommodate business needs,” the report stated.

Mobile and Cloud Merger Will Be a New Era

Posted on by gregl

After recent rounds of studying emerging technology trends, Forrester analysts see the flood of mobile apps joining with cloud computing, with some huge implications.

“In the coming years, Forrester predicts that mobile apps and cloud services will merge to form what the company calls the ‘App Internet,’ where specialized apps will use the storage and processing power of PCs, smartphones and tablets and the scale and flexibility of the cloud to allow applications to communicate with other apps and devices,” writes Forrester analyst Brian Hopkins.

“The App Internet, if it plays out, would mark the end of the website as we know it and the dawn of the mobile app era,” he continues. “It’s also certain to change how developers and enterprises create apps and manage the devices that run them. This type of interaction requires a new architecture, and it’s not one that most companies currently support.”

IT Likely Underestimates Cloud Use

Posted on by gregl

Forrester Research last year conducted a survey of IT decision makers, who estimated that 13 percent of their enterprises were using cloud-based IaaS (infrastructure as a service) offerings.

Despite the findings of their own survey, Forrester analysts now figure the usage percentage actually could have been as high as double what the IT folks estimated.

“It often comes as a big shock to the infrastructure and operations people within IT to find they grossly underestimated the cloud services in use at their organizations,” explains Galen Schreck, Forrester’s principal analyst. “They have no idea what the application owners and developers are up to.”

Benefits of Mobile Computing Becoming Clear

Posted on by gregl

Not many months ago, the explosion of employees with mobile computing devices made corporate IT leaders break out in a cold sweat. Now, with more of the jury in, the effects of laptops, smartphones and tablets are showing astoundingly positive results.

According to a recent IDG Research survey being quoted in an Intel white paper, more than two-thirds of respondents are seeing productivity boosts directly related to mobile computing. Also:

  • 69 percent see overall employee productivity go up.
  • 64 percent see faster access to business-critical data.
  • 37 percent see improved customer service.
  • 30 percent see higher employee morale.
  • 16 percent are experiencing reduced costs.

Still, 43 percent of respondents say data security is the biggest headache. “Data security concerns are magnified by the decentralized nature of computing environments,” according to the report, “and the fact that organizations increasingly rely on a tangle of mobile gear.”

Oversize Waste is also Lost Opportunities

Posted on by gregl

People make “size matters” jokes about all sorts of things, but with oversized data centers it’s seldom a laughing matter. After all, the single largest avoidable cost associated with the typical data center is under-utilization of the physical and power infrastructure – often well under 50 percent, according to Schneider Electric’s Data Center Science Center.

“The plan is that the expected load of the data center or network room load will start at 30 percent and ramp up to a final expected load value,” according to a company white paper. “However, the actual start-up load is typically lower than the expected start-up load, and it ramps up to an ultimate actual load, which is considerably less than the installed capacity.”

“Excess electricity costs are significant when data centers or network rooms are oversized,” the paper continues. “The idling loss of a data center or network room power system is on the order of 5 percent of the power rating. When cooling costs are factored in, this becomes 10 percent. The total excess costs over the lifetime of the data center or network room will on average be around 70 percent of the cost of the power and cooling infrastructure.”

Yes, this is money down the drain, but Schneider points out that the wasted capital and expense dollars also mean lost opportunity costs, “which can be many times larger than the out-of-pocket cost.”

Cloud and Virtualization Poised for Even More Growth

Posted on by gregl

Sixty-five percent of IT managers responding to this year’s Computerworld Market Pulse Survey say the need to provide employees with access to corporate data – anytime and from anywhere – is critically important.

“This type of flexibility is a driving force behind many cloud computing initiatives,” according to Computerworld. “Asked which benefits they expect their organization to achieve through cloud computing, 47 percent cited flexibility, followed by scalability (46 percent), the ability to meet demands for more agile services (44 percent), standardized infrastructures (38 percent) and workload virtualization (35 percent).

And speaking of virtualization, 36 percent of the IT managers say their company has already virtualized half or more of its data center. “On aver­age, IT departments have virtualized 37 percent of the data center—a percentage expected to increase to 51 percent over the next one to three years,” Computerworld reports.

More Data Center Space Being Rented, Not Built

Posted on by gregl

According to a Frost & Sullivan survey conducted last year, enterprises will increase data center floor space 15 percent a year through 2013, but the percentage of that space they actually own will decrease six percent.

How can this be? It means simply that a large number of companies are utilizing colocation platforms.

“Even through challenging economic times, the need for physical data center capacity continues to grow,” according to IT Business Edge. “For some businesses, the driver is expansion into new markets or geographies. For others, it’s the need to deal with growing amounts of data generated by applications with high-capacity demands, evolving end-user abilities, or regulatory bodies that demand ever-increasing quantities of meticulous documentation.

“If your data center is running out of space – or power, which is increasingly an important constraint – you have two options. You can build and operate a new facility, or you can lease the capacity you need from one of a growing number of colocation providers who can solve your problem immediately.”

Repairing Personal Cybercrime Averages 28 Days

Posted on by gregl

A 14-country survey Symantec conducted for market-researchers StrategyOne reveals that 65 percent of 77,000 survey participants have been victims of cybercrime.

Further, the victims said they spent an average of 28 days and an average out-of-pocket cost of $334 to repair the damage, excluding the cost of any personal time, which could put the real cost at over $1,000 per incident.

“Something the survey doesn’t mention (and wouldn’t be expected to, since it’s sponsored by an anti-virus company) is the extra price for anti-virus, anti-malware, firewall and other security software and hardware as a result of cybercrime and our fear that we’ll become victims if we don’t implement those extra security measures,” notes the TechRepublic.com blog in reporting on the survey.

“The Symantec survey deals primarily with personal consequences of cybercrime,” the article continues. “Although many individuals have valuable information on their computers, as well as personal data and financial data that can be exploited for identity theft, the exact value of that data is often difficult to quantify.”