Why non-IT skills will be vital to IT success in 2020

Today, the value of our IT departments has expanded far beyond operations and technical support. This means the role of the IT pro is evolving to include wrangling the overlapping growing demands for technology across all departments within businesses. Traditional IT siloes have been broken down, radically changing how budgets are allocated and the types of skills IT pros now cite as essential to carry out their work. And in recent months this has been exemplified by a pandemic that has...

By | 7 July 2020 | CIO

Get your SaaS up to speed: Three productivity-killing data problems and how to solve them

With the typical enterprise using hundreds of SaaS solutions, each with its own database, it’s no wonder business leaders complain their data is siloed. Imagine now that a CEO wants to understand the relationship between data in these disparate systems. All of a sudden, she’s looking at the world’s most confusing dashboard, all the while wondering: Can I trust this information? The CEO placates herself with that knowledge that at least she has data to look at, but in the end it...

By | 30 June 2020 | Big Data

Accelerating the DevOps process during Covid-19: How CFOs and CISOs can work together

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought about a new normal. Remote working and videoconferencing has never been more popular; and as a direct consequence, the cloud has never been more popular either. 

Yet a note of caution needs to be applied to those looking at full-speed migration. Jeremy Snyder of DivvyCloud told this publication in April that 'people are really good at creating stuff, but not at cleaning up after themselves', while writing last month Margaret Rogers, VP at...

By | 8 June 2020 | CIO

Edge computing and ITOps: Analysing the opportunities and challenges ahead

It’s true that edge computing is hard to define and is running high on the hype scale. But research and surveys continue to indicate that this trend of processing data where it’s collected for better latency, cost savings and real-time analysis is an innovation with legs. There will be 75 billion IoT devices by 2025, according to Statista.

According to Spiceworks’ “2019 State of...

By | 21 January 2020 | Applications

Get ready for a seismic shift in business structure for 2020 – underpinned by cloud

The technology industry is advancing at a rapid pace, with new developments like IoT and AI moving on leaps and bounds within the span of mere months. The broader impact of this is that the very structure of business is being altered by this acceleration, and the management of such technologies is becoming a discipline – and a necessity – in itself.

In 2020, it will be more important than...

By | 15 January 2020 | Applications

Why cybersecurity needs to focus more on customer endpoints going forward

Cloud-based endpoint protection platforms (EPP) are proliferating across enterprises today as CIOs and CISOs prioritise greater resiliency in their endpoint security strategies going into 2020 Gartner predicts that global information security and risk management end-user spending is forecast to grow at a five-year CAGR of 9.2% to reach $174.5 billion in 2022, with approximately $50bn spent on endpoint security Endpoint security tools are 24% of all IT security spending, and by 2020 global...

By | 10 December 2019 | CIO

McAfee notes the gap between cloud-first and cloud-only – yet optimism reigns on success

Two in five large UK organisations expect their operations to be cloud-only by 2021 according to a new report – but the gap between the haves and the have-nots is evident.

The findings appear in a new report from McAfee. The security vendor polled more than 2000 respondents – 1310 senior IT staff and 750 employees – across large businesses in the UK, France, and Germany to assess cloud...

By | 27 November 2019 | Applications

Exploring the commercial advantages of blockchain technologies – and what CIOs need to do about it

The initial commercial interest in cryptocurrency IT infrastructure was the potential to enable an alternative to government-backed fiat currencies. However, now most of the forward-looking focus is on blockchain, the distributed ledger technology that underpins the new applications.

Although deployments are still very much in the realm of the early adopter, blockchain has proven advantages across several vertical industries: it is safe, decentralised, transparent and can reduce...

By | 11 November 2019 | Blockchain

How shared responsibility means CIOs and CFOs need to be close partners

In today’s complex business ecosystem, the relationship between the CIO and the CFO has to be closely aligned, which goes beyond just an agreement on the budget. The CIO and the CFO have to be as one, working together as two strong pillars that ensure the organisation meets every demand the regulators, shareholders, customers, partners and employees place on it. The days of tension between the CIO and CFO are long gone.

By | 14 June 2019 | CIO

Supply chains and digital transformation: How Manutan rebuilt its systems and strategy

Executive summary: Distributing giant Manutan moved from a reactive customer engagement strategy to a proactive approach through going cloud-native. While the process had various roadblocks, the sense of engagement and community was key. Xavier Laurent, director of value added services at Manutan, has ‘lived the journey of transformation’ over the past 10 years and discusses how the company meets customer demand in the digital economy...

By | 7 May 2019 | Adoption