Author: Eric Knorr

Feed: CIO. Author: . As technology extends deeper into every aspect of business, the tip of the spear is often some device at the outer edge of the network, whether a connected industrial controller, a soil moisture sensor, a smartphone, or a security cam.This ballooning internet of things is already collecting petabytes of data, some of it processed for analysis and some of it immediately actionable. So an architectural problem arises: You don’t want to connect all those devices and stream all that data directly to some centralized cloud or company data center. The latency and data transfer costs are ... Read More

Feed: CIO. Author: . We talk a lot about how IT leaders need to formulate the right strategies and ensure the right technologies snap into place. But to make a real difference, IT leaders need to be change agents.Most of us know, for example, that there’s inestimable value in the patterns that emerge from analyzing mountains of business and log data. Or that machine learning can reduce overhead and fuel transformational applications. Or that it’s past time to standardize security policies across multiple clouds. But how do IT leaders get their organizations to make the leap?They need to learn how ... Read More

Feed: CIO. Author: . We reached a big milestone in 2020: Cloud services revenue finally surpassed enterprise spending on data centers, according to the Synergy Research Group. One of the longest-running trends in IT – moving to the cloud – has been turbocharged, driven in part by a pandemic that pushed enterprises to avoid the logistical challenges and capital expense of deploying on prem.But the endless capacity to add horsepower without provisioning your own infrastructure isn’t the biggest draw. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud have become launchpads for the latest technology innovations, which developers can jump on ... Read More

Feed: CIO. Author: . Some things don't change, even during a pandemic. Consistent with previous years, in CIO’s 2021 State of the CIO survey, a plurality of the 1,062 IT leaders surveyed chose “data/business analytics” as the No.1 tech initiative expected to drive IT investment.Unfortunately, analytics initiatives seldom do nearly as well when it comes to stakeholder satisfaction.Last year, CIO contributor Mary K. Pratt offered an excellent analysis of why data analytics initiatives still fail, including poor-quality or siloed data, vague rather than targeted business objectives, and clunky one-size-fits-all feature sets. But a number of fresh approaches and technologies are making ... Read More

Feed: CIO. Author: . Marc Andreessen had it right – software has eaten the world. As a result, the world can be hacked.Just look at the past few months. The SolarWinds caper – the “largest and most sophisticated attack the world has ever seen” according to Microsoft president Brad Smith – gave its Russian perps months of free reign across untold US government agencies and private companies. But stupid also works: Last month in Florida, a water treatment plant’s cybersecurity was so lax, anyone could have been behind a clumsy attempt to poison the local water supply. Meanwhile, miscreants bearing ... Read More

Feed: CIO. Author: . Prior the pandemic, you could ask a dozen people what “the future of work” meant and get 13 different answers. Some insisted it was about distributing discrete responsibilities among two-pizza teams, while others preached about robots eliminating jobs and the need for universal basic income as compensation.Then COVID-19 pressed the fast-forward button, and we learned about the immediate, practical future of work in a hurry. The most obvious lesson – you don’t need to be at the office to get stuff done – was already understood in tech, just never proven at scale. We’re only starting ... Read More

Feed: CIO. Author: . The new normal isn’t new anymore. It’s just normal. In today’s off-kilter, work-from-home world, the No. 1 management lesson has been to relearn what we should have known already: One size does not fit all. The first responsibility of IT leaders during the pandemic is to assess the personal situations of the people who report to them and adjust expectations and work arrangements accordingly.This is not a one-and-done task. People’s family, risk, and health situations fluctuate, so check-ins must be ongoing. “How are you doing?” becomes a real question.As it happens, in the midst of so ... Read More

Feed: CIO. Author: . Fear of the cloud has evaporated. Instead, most companies now use at least several public clouds, from AWS to Azure to Salesforce to Slack. Hence the ascendance of the term “multicloud,” which now encompasses not just the management of IaaS and SaaS clouds, but also private clouds of virtualized on-prem resources.The low barrier to entry of the cloud has been both a blessing and a curse. The ability to simply open a cloud account and start using an application or building one has delivered unprecedented agility. But it also makes it easy for stakeholders to go ... Read More

Feed: CIO. Author: . The first responsibility of any leader is to articulate a vision that can be internalized by all – and to secure the resources and support to attain it. It’s never a “one and done” job; it requires creativity to hit the same directional notes in fresh, motivating ways. Without genuine leadership, organizations languish.The past six months have amounted to a leadership test on a mammoth scale. In March, when the pandemic turned the world upside down, the first task was to enable operations to continue as routinely as possible while ensuring the health and safety of ... Read More

Feed: CIO. Author: . Like other hot new areas of enterprise tech, edge computing is a broad architectural concept rather than a specific set of solutions. Primarily, edge computing is applied to low-latency situations where compute power must be close to the action, whether that activity is industrial IoT robots flinging widgets or sensors continuously taking the temperature of vaccines in production. The research firm Frost & Sullivan predicts that by 2022, 90 percent of industrial enterprises will employ edge computing.Edge computing is a form of distributed computing that extends beyond the data center mothership. When you think about it, ... Read More