In October, Gartner released its Top 10 IT Trends. It’s an interesting list but some of the points just don’t hit close enough to home. Which ones REALLY matter to me as a business owner? Is there a message about my business I need to consider? Below are 5 of the 10 and some things you need to consider:
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Gartner IT Trend |
What about it? |
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1 |
Virtualization. “The data center of the future is going to be completely virtualized.” Cappuccio predicted. |
If you have replaced a server in your business in the past year and did not have a serious conversation about virtualization, find another IT consultant. There are tremendous benefits in on-going maintenance, reliability, flexibility, power consumption and speed of implementation. |
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4 |
Unified communications and collaboration. This will be especially important as younger workers are hired. |
The workforce of tomorrow will need training classes to use a deskphone! Your plans need to provide highly flexible and adaptable communications – iPhones and Android devices, iPads and tablets, texting, chatting and messaging all playing well together and allowing collaboration anywhere. |
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5 |
Thinking horizontally. Companies need IT pros with business smarts. |
Geeks can no longer run the show. Does your IT provider understand that you run a business? Do they know the impact of IT on your income statement and your balance sheet? Are they involved in strategic planning? |
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7 |
Windows XP migration. Vendors will cease testing their apps on it. |
The migration to Windows XP was the largest migration ever. Windows XP will be all but dead in a couple of years. Do you have a plan to migrate to Windows 7? Even better, can you envision being platform independent and running your business software using a web browser? |
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9 |
Cloud computing. Users will shift more services to the cloud. |
Does your strategic planning process for IT require you to consider the impact of cloud computing? Are you regularly (at least quarterly) considering what services are better and more cost effectively served being in the cloud? |
Computerworld Article: http://bit.ly/atM1NV
Anyone who has considered hosting their information or applications in the cloud has experienced some reservations or perhaps even some anxiety. We have some concerns but we’re afraid to air them for some reason. We need to identify the rather large elephant that is standing in the room and I found a succinct article in the 9/27 edition of Network World magazine in an article on SaaS by Jon Brodkin found here:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/092710-software-as-service-security.html
Here are his 5 problems:
Update on "cloud" computing
Almost everyone who has ever used a web browser has heard of cloud computing. But what is it? Thankfully, in order to legislate something, you have to define it so into this mess steps the National Institute of Standards and Technology to guide us out of the fog and into…. the clouds, so to speak. Here is version 15 (yes, 15) of their definition that was posted 10/7/2009:
“Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”
Thank goodness our taxpayer dollars are doing something useful.
There is more to their definition but I wanted to point out the three service models by which cloud computing is delivered that may be helpful to you in understanding this new world.
