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Welcome to 2023. As the new year arrives, CIOs are facing a challenging to-do list as they strive to maximize IT productivity and efficiency in increasingly unpredictable times.

As technology projects, budgets, and staffing grew over the past few years, the focus was on speed to market to maximize opportunity, says Troy Gibson, CIO services leader at business and IT advisory firm Centric Consulting. This is no longer true. “As the economic pendulum shifts to cost control, CIOs will have to find ways to continue achieving the same results but with less margin for error,” he notes. “How well teams execute will be key.”

Responding to both old and new challenges, IT leaders must reassess their business and technology strategies and, when necessary, realign them to address rapidly evolving business and economic concerns. The following eight priorities are gaining the most attention.

1. Building resiliency

Resiliency will be a top priority for many CIOs this year as they face a possible recession and ongoing labor shortages. “Technology will play a pivotal role in building resiliency, since it’s entrenched in every aspect and rung of an enterprise,” says Peter Kirkwood, principal consultant at Zinnov, a global management consulting and strategy advisory firm.

Critical IT skills, especially in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, have long been in short supply, and the current labor shortage is intensifying the need for such professionals, Kirkwood notes. “Building resiliency with technology will enable a CIO to think beyond their own team and help them address this challenge for the company as a whole,” he says. “Having the right technology can create a ripple effect, empowering employees, which enables satisfaction and a superior experience.”

2. Improving business intimacy and alignment

Business intimacy enables CIOs to increase their relevance, enhancing their ability to deliver business value. IT leaders can improve business intimacy by bringing new skills and operating processes to the executive table, says Juan Perez, CIO and executive vice president at Salesforce.

CIOs should begin the process by fully understanding the priorities, pain points, processes, investments, and technologies their colleagues are dealing with. “It’s critical that CIOs are aware of everything that’s taking place across sales, service, marketing, commerce, IT, HR, finance, and more,” Perez says.

Increasing business alignment while driving efficiency and productivity with automation and AI tools are important goals in any economic environment. “However, they are especially important as CIOs help guide their enterprises through challenging times,” Perez notes.

3. Rationalizing the technology estate

Over the past decade, enterprises have rapidly added powerful technology and cloud-based services to their portfolios. At the same time, they have been much less likely to retire the legacy systems these new tools were meant to replace, creating a complex web of redundant applications and systems, warns VMware CIO Jason Conyard.

There’s an industry-wide push to reduce technical and data debt and reallocate those resources toward building the future, Conyard says. “CIOs will be looking to rationalize their technology estate to reduce unnecessary cost and maintenance, and to minimize their security attack surface and privacy exposure.”

4. Aligning on business goals

There must be open, transparent, and collaborative working sessions to create alignment on how technology capabilities can be deployed to meet enterprise goals, states Bill Cassidy, CIO at New York Life Insurance. “All participants need to demonstrate strong communication skills, including effective listening, to properly weigh the pros, cons, and tradeoffs of one path of execution versus another,” he adds.

Cassidy notes that when working with colleagues it’s important to “keep a thoughtful end-state in mind” before adding or changing technology ecosystem elements. “Achieving this clear end-state vision requires deep and successful business and technology alignment,” he says.

5. Monetizing data insights

Organizations that can successfully act on their data insights will thrive, says Dan Krantz, CIO of electronics test and measurement equipment manufacturer Keysight Technologies. To achieve this goal, “CIOs need to treat the assessment and analysis of data as a scientific discipline,” he advises.

Krantz suggests that IT leaders should seek Ph.D.-level talent while embracing the latest data mining, data analysis, and analytical tools. He also believes that CIOs should create solutions featuring low-code extensibility, an intuitive user experience, and abundant APIs for maximum composability. “From a people perspective, analytical and quantitative skills are now more pressing than software engineering skills,” Krantz states.

Krantz warns that IT leaders who fail to embrace scientifically-obtained data insights will remain mired in an Excel wormhole. “The negative financial and competitive consequences … will be difficult to escape,” he says.

6. Embracing digital transformation

CIOs in 2023 will need to continue driving enterprise digital transformation, says Elizabeth Hackenson, CIO and senior vice president at energy management and automation firm Schneider Electric.

“At Schneider Electric, we’re focused on transforming our sales tracking processes as well as HR,” Hackenson says. “It’s about being a partner in the business, moving toward greater resiliency, sustainability, and customer value through the adoption of simplified, modern CRM, ERP, and HR systems.” Hackenson believes that her organization’s cloud transition, combined with advanced digital technologies, will lead the firm to a new generation of smart, cybersecure factories and distribution centers.

Hackenson believes that a resilient, future-ready supply chain is driven by efficiency. “Digitization is also essential for achieving sustainability goals across business operations,” she says. The key to success, she notes, is maintaining a close partnership and alignment with all business functions, as well as placing customers and employees at the heart of every digital transformation effort. “It’s also essential to find the right partners who share an agile mindset and commitment to sustainable change.”

7. Modernizing cyber defenses

To defend against emerging cyber threats in 2023 and beyond, IT leaders should consider increasing their investments in IT modernization, says Phil Venables, CISO of Google Cloud.

The increased malicious activity observed in 2022 is no surprise and will only continue to grow in 2023, Venables predicts. “Cyberattacks aimed at a company’s networks can have severe consequences, ranging from financial losses or liability to eroding an organization’s reputation.”

In a modern IT environment, security should be a built-in infrastructure element, not an add-on. “Even with short-term challenges, the long-term benefits of IT modernization are paramount and key to mitigating evolving cyber threats,” Venables explains.

Venables believes that legacy IT presents a significant challenge to security teams. “It’s important to recognize that governments and enterprises cannot modernize their security without modernizing their infrastructure and software development practices first,” he says. “Without a continued focus and investment in IT modernization, organizations will not be able to realize the full benefits of the advances in security.”

8. Preparing to do more with less

A top priority in 2023 should be leveraging technologies that will allow the enterprise to move faster and nimbler, says Nicolas Avila, CTO for North America at software development firm Globant. The challenge is finding ways to achieve these goals in an era of constricted budgets.

Budgets are being slashed across industries, Avila notes. While IT is generally not as affected as many other sectors, given technology’s importance in maintaining competitive success, CIOs still face the need to get more done within a budget that may not allow all goals to be achieved.

Avila believes there will be a significant focus on cost optimization via technology in 2023. “Not only will this allow enterprises to save limited resources, but it will also enable them to redefine business processes to make work less complicated and more in line with what the labor market will be,” he says.

The key to surviving in the year ahead, Avila says, will be to become lean without losing essential capabilities, enabling the enterprise to rebound faster and stronger from the economic shakedown that many observers see coming in 2023. “The reality is that the world is continuing to move faster and faster, and CIOs need to lead the way in making sure their enterprise can match that pace, from customer experience to operations to employee engagement,” he says.

IT Leadership, IT Strategy

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Budget planning during uncertain economic times is never CIOs’ favorite activity. But the next eighteen months aren’t shaping up to be as challenging as some may fear. For the most part, budgets are holding steady or growing in the single digits, with continued investments in security, analytics, and the cloud, among other areas.

Gartner predicts 2023 IT spending will grow 5.1% compared to this year, says John-David Lovelock, distinguished VP analyst at the firm. “We haven’t changed our forecast in three quarters,” he says, noting that the US gross domestic product (GDP) is, technically, already in recession territory and has been for the past six months. He predicts continued GDP softening over the next three years, with minimal, if any, effect on IT spending.

Analyst firm IDC expects more of a moving target on tech budgets due to market volatility, the strength of the US dollar, inflation rates, and continued slow global growth due to economic drag by China and other key countries. If economic factors stay relatively stable, IT spending will grow between 5% and 6% next year, says Stephen Minton, program vice president for customer insights and analysis. He agrees with Lovelock that it will take a major, sustained global recession to cut into that and, even if that happens, Minton says, IT spending will continue to grow, although probably by 3%.

Security tops the list

According to this year’s State of the CIO survey, cybersecurity and risk management are the top investment areas for 45% of IT leader respondents. That’s certainly the case in the corporate technology group at Illinois Tool Works (ITW), a $14.5 billion industrial manufacturing company headquartered in Chicago, says Ron Mathis, corporate IT operations director. ITW is decentralized, Mathis explains, and its hundreds of affiliated companies are treated as entrepreneurial organizations with their own priorities and responsibilities.

Ron Mathis, corporate IT operations director, Illinois Tool Works

Illinois Tool Works

But across ITW at corporate, cybersecurity is the top priority “by far,” he says, and it’s been the top investment for as long as he has been with ITW. His teams spend a “significant portion of their time protecting the company’s assets,” Mathis says. His team also upgrades ITW corporate’s packaged software.

Security is also key for Eduardo Ruiz, CIO at the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health in Washington. “We’re spending significantly more on security,” he says. “Over the years we’ve relied on being under the radar to justify not having to spend so much, but we can no longer do that.” There are more automated attacks that are increasingly sophisticated, and endpoint protection, single sign-on systems, and more staff training are all areas of spending growth in his shop.

Many IT leaders are realizing that their attack surface is “too big,” Gartner’s Lovelock says. Between gig workers, cloud applications, outsourcing, and industry-specific platforms, how they “secure this massive dynamic is changing. They can’t keep ahead by using traditional approaches to security.” And even though many companies already made significant investments in security in the aftermath of COVID, with remote work requiring new tactics, security is now getting both deeper and broader. Nearly three out of five CIOs (57%) who reported a budget increase this year cited the need for security improvements as the key reason for receiving that increase in spend, according to the State of the CIO survey.

Cloud continues to dominate

Cloud migrations are still happening, with 22% of CIO survey respondents tagging that as a top spending priority. Part of that is due to cloud vendors passing along price increases that they’re justifying by saying they need to continue to upgrade their data centers and to pay their employees, according to analysts. Cloud-related services’ cost has risen by between 5% and 7% this year compared to last, IDC says.

Megan Duty, VP of technology and project delivery, Puritan Life Insurance Company of America

Puritan Life Insurance Company of America

Some of the projected growth is due to new users; not everything is yet on the cloud. “We’re nowhere near the saturation point,” says IDC’s Minton. Some industries, including financial services, are taking cloud migrations very slowly because of the sensitivity of the data involved. “We’re still expecting double-digit growth” in cloud expenditures, but at the same time on-premises gear is not completely going away, though it is declining as a share of overall IT spending, he says.

Some custom software requires more time to move to the cloud, as do cross-border applications that are more common in Europe than in the US, he explains. Plus, “it’s hard to turn off a cloud system once you turn it on,” Minton says, and the industry continues to move from CapEx to OpEx spending because of the shift to cloud.

Megan Duty, vice president of technology and project delivery for Puritan Life Insurance Company of America in Scottsdale, Ariz., explains that cloud has been a major focus for her company in the past several years. Keeping those systems going requires the lion’s share of her budget, she says, but cybersecurity, automation, and customer experience-related projects are where the new spending is.

Analytics, automation, and customer experience spending on the rise

Some 35% of CIOs named analytics as a top spending priority, and 27% named customer experience technologies as such. For Puritan’s Duty, that means more creating and improving customer portals like the one the company has launched for its Canvas annuity. Another investment area includes tools given to sales agents.

Ken Piddington, vice president and CIO at US Silica in Katy, Texas, says that his key themes are “speed and agility,” so his priorities are data analytics and automation, which he considers “table stakes” to help all employees do their jobs more effectively and more quickly. “We want to help our organization move faster,” and the goal is to “allow smart people to do the things” that only they can do.

Ken Piddington, VP and CIO, US Silica

US Silica

To date, projects including robotic process automation have been mostly taking place within IT, but the plan is to expand RPA more into the field, he says.

Gartner’s Lovelock says that automation efforts in general have been more internally focused, to allow groups outside of IT to become more effective and able to scale without adding new employees. “Companies don’t want to lay off, but they also don’t want to have to hire when they start to grow again,” he explains.

IDC expects that big data and analytics will be one of four key platforms – along with cloud, mobile, and social — driving growth in traditional IT spending over the next five years. “Meanwhile, cost savings generated by cloud and automation will see more spending diverted towards new technologies” such as AI, robotics, augmented and virtual reality, and blockchain, IDC says.

Dealing with inflation, or buying less with more

These days, IT leaders are keeping a closer eye than usual on pricing, and in some cases are buying out their long-term cloud contracts to give themselves more flexibility. “Executive leadership doesn’t want to hear we’re locked in and can’t move,” US Silica’s Piddington says. Vendors “want to true you up but never want to true you down,” he adds, and shorter-term contracts can help incent them to do so.

For maximum flexibility, Gartner’s Lovelock suggests breaking three- or even five-year contracts into six-month terms.

Although the supply-chain shortage and other factors have caused prices to increase for two or three years now, IDC’s Minton says IT buyers have had enough. “There’s pushback now,” he says, and when there was once more tolerance for the reasons behind vendor price increases, IT leaders are now saying they just can’t keep pace and must keep budgets within a narrow range.

Piddington agrees, saying that the situation is forcing IT executives to “be smarter” and understand where the opportunities are within each vendor relationship to “pull the right levers.” Having strong relationships with vendors, and not just engaging in transactional deals, can “give you more potential” to create the flexibility to work with them on pricing. Lovelock agrees, saying “a long-term relationship is worth money to vendors this year.”

Puritan Life’s Duty says she regularly conducts cost reviews. “We don’t have a lot of fat to start with, but every quarter I look at what we will need to do” in the next quarter or two and revise ahead of time. “We review spend constantly and make sure all spend provides value,” she explains.

Paying more for IT labor

Another key item to budget for is IT staff. Of those CIOs reporting an increase in budget this year, 48% said that increase was due to a need to invest in new talent and skills. Still, approximately 20% of all IT jobs are open these days, with a “massive” migration occurring from corporate IT to tech providers, Gartner’s Lovelock says. “We don’t see an end to that for more than five years.”

ITW’s Mathis says acquiring and retaining talent is his second budget priority, only slightly behind security. “It’s just really hard right now — finding and retaining talent and the whole pandemic work arrangement.” He’s lost some staffers to higher-priced offers, even though he felt they were already being paid “very competitively.”

To retain key staffers, IT leaders must be prepared for salary and benefit hikes, and need to become more creative. Just as CIOs have gone from direct control and ownership of all things technology-related to more of an orchestration role, Lovelock says, the talent question revolves around “whether you need to have the skills, or you need to have access to skills. The next wave of labor arbitrage is finding an AI, not finding a new country” for nearshoring or outsourcing, he says.

For the immediate future, Lovelock says, budget issues will be, if not completely stable, at least manageable. Focus on risk management, he advises, and “have a little faith in your CFO and CEO. They recognize the value you provide, and IT budgets won’t be affected in the same way they were in 2009 and 2001.”

Budgeting, IT Leadership, IT Strategy

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Budget planning during uncertain economic times is never CIOs’ favorite activity. But the next eighteen months aren’t shaping up to be as challenging as some may fear. For the most part, budgets are holding steady or growing in the single digits, with continued investments in security, analytics, and the cloud, among other areas.

Gartner predicts 2023 IT spending will grow 5.1% compared to this year, says John-David Lovelock, distinguished VP analyst at the firm. “We haven’t changed our forecast in three quarters,” he says, noting that the US gross domestic product (GDP) is, technically, already in recession territory and has been for the past six months. He predicts continued GDP softening over the next three years, with minimal, if any, effect on IT spending.

Analyst firm IDC expects more of a moving target on tech budgets due to market volatility, the strength of the US dollar, inflation rates, and continued slow global growth due to economic drag by China and other key countries. If economic factors stay relatively stable, IT spending will grow between 5% and 6% next year, says Stephen Minton, program vice president for customer insights and analysis. He agrees with Lovelock that it will take a major, sustained global recession to cut into that and, even if that happens, Minton says, IT spending will continue to grow, although probably by 3%.

Security tops the list

According to this year’s State of the CIO survey, cybersecurity and risk management are the top investment areas for 45% of IT leader respondents. That’s certainly the case in the corporate technology group at Illinois Tool Works (ITW), a $14.5 billion industrial manufacturing company headquartered in Chicago, says Ron Mathis, corporate IT operations director. ITW is decentralized, Mathis explains, and its hundreds of affiliated companies are treated as entrepreneurial organizations with their own priorities and responsibilities.

Ron Mathis, corporate IT operations director, Illinois Tool Works

Illinois Tool Works

But across ITW at corporate, cybersecurity is the top priority “by far,” he says, and it’s been the top investment for as long as he has been with ITW. His teams spend a “significant portion of their time protecting the company’s assets,” Mathis says. His team also upgrades ITW corporate’s packaged software.

Security is also key for Eduardo Ruiz, CIO at the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health in Washington. “We’re spending significantly more on security,” he says. “Over the years we’ve relied on being under the radar to justify not having to spend so much, but we can no longer do that.” There are more automated attacks that are increasingly sophisticated, and endpoint protection, single sign-on systems, and more staff training are all areas of spending growth in his shop.

Many IT leaders are realizing that their attack surface is “too big,” Gartner’s Lovelock says. Between gig workers, cloud applications, outsourcing, and industry-specific platforms, how they “secure this massive dynamic is changing. They can’t keep ahead by using traditional approaches to security.” And even though many companies already made significant investments in security in the aftermath of COVID, with remote work requiring new tactics, security is now getting both deeper and broader. Nearly three out of five CIOs (57%) who reported a budget increase this year cited the need for security improvements as the key reason for receiving that increase in spend, according to the State of the CIO survey.

Cloud continues to dominate

Cloud migrations are still happening, with 22% of CIO survey respondents tagging that as a top spending priority. Part of that is due to cloud vendors passing along price increases that they’re justifying by saying they need to continue to upgrade their data centers and to pay their employees, according to analysts. Cloud-related services’ cost has risen by between 5% and 7% this year compared to last, IDC says.

Megan Duty, VP of technology and project delivery, Puritan Life Insurance Company of America

Puritan Life Insurance Company of America

Some of the projected growth is due to new users; not everything is yet on the cloud. “We’re nowhere near the saturation point,” says IDC’s Minton. Some industries, including financial services, are taking cloud migrations very slowly because of the sensitivity of the data involved. “We’re still expecting double-digit growth” in cloud expenditures, but at the same time on-premises gear is not completely going away, though it is declining as a share of overall IT spending, he says.

Some custom software requires more time to move to the cloud, as do cross-border applications that are more common in Europe than in the US, he explains. Plus, “it’s hard to turn off a cloud system once you turn it on,” Minton says, and the industry continues to move from CapEx to OpEx spending because of the shift to cloud.

Megan Duty, vice president of technology and project delivery for Puritan Life Insurance Company of America in Scottsdale, Ariz., explains that cloud has been a major focus for her company in the past several years. Keeping those systems going requires the lion’s share of her budget, she says, but cybersecurity, automation, and customer experience-related projects are where the new spending is.

Analytics, automation, and customer experience spending on the rise

Some 35% of CIOs named analytics as a top spending priority, and 27% named customer experience technologies as such. For Puritan’s Duty, that means more creating and improving customer portals like the one the company has launched for its Canvas annuity. Another investment area includes tools given to sales agents.

Ken Piddington, vice president and CIO at US Silica in Katy, Texas, says that his key themes are “speed and agility,” so his priorities are data analytics and automation, which he considers “table stakes” to help all employees do their jobs more effectively and more quickly. “We want to help our organization move faster,” and the goal is to “allow smart people to do the things” that only they can do.

Ken Piddington, VP and CIO, US Silica

US Silica

To date, projects including robotic process automation have been mostly taking place within IT, but the plan is to expand RPA more into the field, he says.

Gartner’s Lovelock says that automation efforts in general have been more internally focused, to allow groups outside of IT to become more effective and able to scale without adding new employees. “Companies don’t want to lay off, but they also don’t want to have to hire when they start to grow again,” he explains.

IDC expects that big data and analytics will be one of four key platforms – along with cloud, mobile, and social — driving growth in traditional IT spending over the next five years. “Meanwhile, cost savings generated by cloud and automation will see more spending diverted towards new technologies” such as AI, robotics, augmented and virtual reality, and blockchain, IDC says.

Dealing with inflation, or buying less with more

These days, IT leaders are keeping a closer eye than usual on pricing, and in some cases are buying out their long-term cloud contracts to give themselves more flexibility. “Executive leadership doesn’t want to hear we’re locked in and can’t move,” US Silica’s Piddington says. Vendors “want to true you up but never want to true you down,” he adds, and shorter-term contracts can help incent them to do so.

For maximum flexibility, Gartner’s Lovelock suggests breaking three- or even five-year contracts into six-month terms.

Although the supply-chain shortage and other factors have caused prices to increase for two or three years now, IDC’s Minton says IT buyers have had enough. “There’s pushback now,” he says, and when there was once more tolerance for the reasons behind vendor price increases, IT leaders are now saying they just can’t keep pace and must keep budgets within a narrow range.

Piddington agrees, saying that the situation is forcing IT executives to “be smarter” and understand where the opportunities are within each vendor relationship to “pull the right levers.” Having strong relationships with vendors, and not just engaging in transactional deals, can “give you more potential” to create the flexibility to work with them on pricing. Lovelock agrees, saying “a long-term relationship is worth money to vendors this year.”

Puritan Life’s Duty says she regularly conducts cost reviews. “We don’t have a lot of fat to start with, but every quarter I look at what we will need to do” in the next quarter or two and revise ahead of time. “We review spend constantly and make sure all spend provides value,” she explains.

Paying more for IT labor

Another key item to budget for is IT staff. Of those CIOs reporting an increase in budget this year, 48% said that increase was due to a need to invest in new talent and skills. Still, approximately 20% of all IT jobs are open these days, with a “massive” migration occurring from corporate IT to tech providers, Gartner’s Lovelock says. “We don’t see an end to that for more than five years.”

ITW’s Mathis says acquiring and retaining talent is his second budget priority, only slightly behind security. “It’s just really hard right now — finding and retaining talent and the whole pandemic work arrangement.” He’s lost some staffers to higher-priced offers, even though he felt they were already being paid “very competitively.”

To retain key staffers, IT leaders must be prepared for salary and benefit hikes, and need to become more creative. Just as CIOs have gone from direct control and ownership of all things technology-related to more of an orchestration role, Lovelock says, the talent question revolves around “whether you need to have the skills, or you need to have access to skills. The next wave of labor arbitrage is finding an AI, not finding a new country” for nearshoring or outsourcing, he says.

For the immediate future, Lovelock says, budget issues will be, if not completely stable, at least manageable. Focus on risk management, he advises, and “have a little faith in your CFO and CEO. They recognize the value you provide, and IT budgets won’t be affected in the same way they were in 2009 and 2001.”

Budgeting, IT Leadership, IT Strategy

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

As the broader economy and business environment continues to recover and rebound, there is an opportunity for IT leaders to leverage increased budgets to strategically invest in and prepare for new approaches to enterprise technology.

As noted by Spiceworks, the majority of businesses are increasing IT spending, with a particular focus on modernisation. “The hybrid work era, which coincided with the standardisation of the cloud as the backbone for enterprise operations, has put in motion renewed demand for software and services to modernise organisations’ technology infrastructure,” the report notes.

In other words, leaders are taking the opportunity of increased spending in IT to prepare their environments for new ways of working, that better integrate cloud and on-premises computing. With hardware, this means a renewed focus on three areas: efficiency, performance, and security. To help businesses capitalise on that opportunity, Intel has designed its vPro platform to deliver meaningful gains to enterprises across all three priorities.

Performance

Hybrid work environments require higher levels of performance, as remote employees rely more on video collaboration, and the organisation looks to more intensive applications like AI, and edge deployments.

Because the vPro platform is powered by the 12th generation of Intel Core processors, it delivers the significantly improved performance needed to make these environments seamless. Intel’s stats show that the mobile processors deliver up to 27 per cent faster application performance, the desktop processes achieve 21 per cent faster application performance, and, for example, this translates to a 23 per cent faster application performance while using Microsoft Excel during a Zoom video conference call.

Efficiency and Sustainability

Last year, Deloitte research found that more than half of consumers now expect companies to take meaningful steps towards reducing carbon emissions and improving sustainability. With IT contributing a considerable amount to the power draw of the typical company, finding efficiencies through the IT refreshes becomes an effective way that the organisation to show proactive steps towards sustainability.

One of the key features in the vPro platform is the Intel Active Management Technology (Intel AMT) that allows organisation to remotely manage the energy consumption of devices by shutting inactive devices down, and reduce the need for remote callouts or deskside visits. Intel estimates that this saves around one million kilowatt hours of energy consumption for every 20,000 devices managed this way, and additionally, by eliminating the need for separate energy management software, saves organisations by $25 – $75 per device.

Security

Adapting a hybrid and flexible approach to work changes the security dynamic. No longer is the traditional “perimeter” defence going to be sufficient, as organisations house data in clouds off-site, and employees work remotely and outside of the boundaries of the organisation. Addressing this security challenge requires a renewed focus on endpoint security.

Intel provides new security features thought vPro which are designed to renew that endpoint security layer. Intel Threat Detection Technology (Intel TDT) provides ransomware detection at the hardware level, allowing for the immediate response before the infection can spread.

The vPro platform also has features to detect living-off-the-land and supply chain-style attacks with a “zero trust” approach, in which AI automatically detects anomalies when applications are behaving unusually.

The vPro Suite Explained

There are four key branches to the Intel vPro solution, designed to bring the functionality of the suite across all platforms, and for all verticals:

Intel vPro Enterprise for Windows has been designed for enterprises and managed service providers that are looking after large fleets of devices.Intel vPro Essentials is the solution that Intel uses to provide SMEs with the core security and device management capabilities available to enterprises. Intel vPro Enterprise for Chrome OS has been designed to bring the efficiency of Chromebooks to enterprise environments by boosting their performance, stability, and security features.Intel vPro, An Evo Design combines two of Intel’s flagship products to deliver the company’s vision around security, performance, and management to mobile business environments.

Combined, Intel is pushing the vPro solution to be the ideal opportunity for a refresh of the IT environment, delivering the performance required of the modern mobile, edge and hybrid-driven organisations, while also being mindful of the changing dynamics around efficiency and security.

For more information on vPro, click here.

Business Process Management, CPUs and Processors

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

As the broader economy and business environment continues to recover and rebound, there is an opportunity for IT leaders to leverage increased budgets to strategically invest in and prepare for new approaches to enterprise technology.

As noted by Spiceworks, the majority of businesses are increasing IT spending, with a particular focus on modernisation. “The hybrid work era, which coincided with the standardisation of the cloud as the backbone for enterprise operations, has put in motion renewed demand for software and services to modernise organisations’ technology infrastructure,” the report notes.

In other words, leaders are taking the opportunity of increased spending in IT to prepare their environments for new ways of working, that better integrate cloud and on-premises computing. With hardware, this means a renewed focus on three areas: efficiency, performance, and security. To help businesses capitalise on that opportunity, Intel has designed its vPro platform to deliver meaningful gains to enterprises across all three priorities.

Performance

Hybrid work environments require higher levels of performance, as remote employees rely more on video collaboration, and the organisation looks to more intensive applications like AI, and edge deployments.

Because the vPro platform is powered by the 12th generation of Intel Core processors, it delivers the significantly improved performance needed to make these environments seamless. Intel’s stats show that the mobile processors deliver up to 27 per cent faster application performance, the desktop processes achieve 21 per cent faster application performance, and, for example, this translates to a 23 per cent faster application performance while using Microsoft Excel during a Zoom video conference call.

Efficiency and Sustainability

Last year, Deloitte research found that more than half of consumers now expect companies to take meaningful steps towards reducing carbon emissions and improving sustainability. With IT contributing a considerable amount to the power draw of the typical company, finding efficiencies through the IT refreshes becomes an effective way that the organisation to show proactive steps towards sustainability.

One of the key features in the vPro platform is the Intel Active Management Technology (Intel AMT) that allows organisation to remotely manage the energy consumption of devices by shutting inactive devices down, and reduce the need for remote callouts or deskside visits. Intel estimates that this saves around one million kilowatt hours of energy consumption for every 20,000 devices managed this way, and additionally, by eliminating the need for separate energy management software, saves organisations by $25 – $75 per device.

Security

Adapting a hybrid and flexible approach to work changes the security dynamic. No longer is the traditional “perimeter” defence going to be sufficient, as organisations house data in clouds off-site, and employees work remotely and outside of the boundaries of the organisation. Addressing this security challenge requires a renewed focus on endpoint security.

Intel provides new security features thought vPro which are designed to renew that endpoint security layer. Intel Threat Detection Technology (Intel TDT) provides ransomware detection at the hardware level, allowing for the immediate response before the infection can spread.

The vPro platform also has features to detect living-off-the-land and supply chain-style attacks with a “zero trust” approach, in which AI automatically detects anomalies when applications are behaving unusually.

The vPro Suite Explained

There are four key branches to the Intel vPro solution, designed to bring the functionality of the suite across all platforms, and for all verticals:

Intel vPro Enterprise for Windows has been designed for enterprises and managed service providers that are looking after large fleets of devices.Intel vPro Essentials is the solution that Intel uses to provide SMEs with the core security and device management capabilities available to enterprises. Intel vPro Enterprise for Chrome OS has been designed to bring the efficiency of Chromebooks to enterprise environments by boosting their performance, stability, and security features.Intel vPro, An Evo Design combines two of Intel’s flagship products to deliver the company’s vision around security, performance, and management to mobile business environments.

Combined, Intel is pushing the vPro solution to be the ideal opportunity for a refresh of the IT environment, delivering the performance required of the modern mobile, edge and hybrid-driven organisations, while also being mindful of the changing dynamics around efficiency and security.

For more information on vPro, click here.

Business Process Management, CPUs and Processors

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Technology is becoming ever-more core to the educational experience, with teachers and students alike relying on rich media, deep data and analytics and cloud delivery to drive better educational outcomes.

At the same time, education has a specific set of requirements of IT that differentiate it from other verticals. Resilience and true all-day computing is required, as is massive scale as every student and teacher in every classroom needs to be working simultaneously. Security is also paramount and, increasingly, the delivery of truly rich media experiences puts additional pressure on the processors, requiring more powerful computing power than ever.

As Gartner noted in its report on the current global trends in education: “This year, the ‘hybrid world’ trend is refined to the more specific ‘digital learning environments,’ reflecting the need to think in multiple dimensions about how, when and where learning takes place. These changes include not only new additions to classroom technologies, but also those that enable this level of flexibility required to deliver instruction under nearly any conditions.”

Intel is placing the vPro platform at the centre of its efforts to address the challenges and opportunities ahead in education. There are five areas that this platform’s features will be appealing to educators in the months and years ahead:

Blended learning: The rich media experience of the classroom is going well beyond video, audio and text. The blending of these more traditional media formats with emerging formats such as VR and AR is going to put additional stress on the raw power of the processors, with the vPro platform providing a boost to the device’s ability to handle that.

Furthermore, AI is becoming increasingly important to the learning experience. Intel, in collaboration with the University of South Australia and meldCX, recently demonstrated what that might look like with the AI Playground, giving students a safe space to experiment with and explore AI. This too requires far more powerful base computing availability to enable within the learning environment.

Management: Schools are environments that involve a lot of devices, and a consistency of experience across the entire facility will be essential in ensuring that the technology doesn’t become disruptive to the learning experience. The vPro platform includes the capability to activate, configure and manage devices, with remote management capabilities, meaning that the school, or it’s managed services provider, can deliver that consistent experience across the whole campus.Security: With so many touchpoints on the network, education faces an uphill battle on security. Late last year there was the example of Newcastle Grammar School, which was infected with a virus that encrypted the entire network, compromising the data of over 900 staff and students. Further data loss meant end-of-year exams and reports needed to be re-written, and considerable expense needed to go into recovering and rebuilding systems.

The vPro platform includes hardware-level security features that provide advanced threat detection and response capabilities, minimising the attack surface across the school network and helping to ensure that vPro-powered devices are less vulnerable in the event that the network does come under attack.

Stability: One of the challenges facing schools is the wide range of devices that are on networks, with a massive number of software configurations. Driver incompatibilities across the school network make overall management difficult. To help the IT managers grapple with this, Intel has produced the Stable IT Platform Program (SIPP) as part of the Intel vPro platform. Key to this is a validation program that aims for no hardware changes within the typical buying cycle (15 months/until the next generational release), which Intel then works with key partners to deliver.Educating the Educators: Helping educators in understanding how to best leverage the technology available to them is going to be essential in maximising the opportunities that platforms such as vPro bring to the sector. With this in mind, Intel has developed the Skills for Innovation (SFI) program designed to help plan, experience, train and deploy technology-supported learning models across the education system.

While events over the past three years have brought unprecedented disruption to education systems, the response – which was to embrace technology, remote learning, and new content delivery mechanisms – has now become an opportunity. With the right technology solutions in place, that allow for a consistency and resilience to computing on and off-campus, students will be able to enjoy the benefits of an expanded, deeper, and richer use of technology to enhance their learning.

For more information on vPro, click here.

Education Industry, Intel

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Technology is becoming ever-more core to the educational experience, with teachers and students alike relying on rich media, deep data and analytics and cloud delivery to drive better educational outcomes.

At the same time, education has a specific set of requirements of IT that differentiate it from other verticals. Resilience and true all-day computing is required, as is massive scale as every student and teacher in every classroom needs to be working simultaneously. Security is also paramount and, increasingly, the delivery of truly rich media experiences puts additional pressure on the processors, requiring more powerful computing power than ever.

As Gartner noted in its report on the current global trends in education: “This year, the ‘hybrid world’ trend is refined to the more specific ‘digital learning environments,’ reflecting the need to think in multiple dimensions about how, when and where learning takes place. These changes include not only new additions to classroom technologies, but also those that enable this level of flexibility required to deliver instruction under nearly any conditions.”

Intel is placing the vPro platform at the centre of its efforts to address the challenges and opportunities ahead in education. There are five areas that this platform’s features will be appealing to educators in the months and years ahead:

Blended learning: The rich media experience of the classroom is going well beyond video, audio and text. The blending of these more traditional media formats with emerging formats such as VR and AR is going to put additional stress on the raw power of the processors, with the vPro platform providing a boost to the device’s ability to handle that.

Furthermore, AI is becoming increasingly important to the learning experience. Intel, in collaboration with the University of South Australia and meldCX, recently demonstrated what that might look like with the AI Playground, giving students a safe space to experiment with and explore AI. This too requires far more powerful base computing availability to enable within the learning environment.

Management: Schools are environments that involve a lot of devices, and a consistency of experience across the entire facility will be essential in ensuring that the technology doesn’t become disruptive to the learning experience. The vPro platform includes the capability to activate, configure and manage devices, with remote management capabilities, meaning that the school, or it’s managed services provider, can deliver that consistent experience across the whole campus.Security: With so many touchpoints on the network, education faces an uphill battle on security. Late last year there was the example of Newcastle Grammar School, which was infected with a virus that encrypted the entire network, compromising the data of over 900 staff and students. Further data loss meant end-of-year exams and reports needed to be re-written, and considerable expense needed to go into recovering and rebuilding systems.

The vPro platform includes hardware-level security features that provide advanced threat detection and response capabilities, minimising the attack surface across the school network and helping to ensure that vPro-powered devices are less vulnerable in the event that the network does come under attack.

Stability: One of the challenges facing schools is the wide range of devices that are on networks, with a massive number of software configurations. Driver incompatibilities across the school network make overall management difficult. To help the IT managers grapple with this, Intel has produced the Stable IT Platform Program (SIPP) as part of the Intel vPro platform. Key to this is a validation program that aims for no hardware changes within the typical buying cycle (15 months/until the next generational release), which Intel then works with key partners to deliver.Educating the Educators: Helping educators in understanding how to best leverage the technology available to them is going to be essential in maximising the opportunities that platforms such as vPro bring to the sector. With this in mind, Intel has developed the Skills for Innovation (SFI) program designed to help plan, experience, train and deploy technology-supported learning models across the education system.

While events over the past three years have brought unprecedented disruption to education systems, the response – which was to embrace technology, remote learning, and new content delivery mechanisms – has now become an opportunity. With the right technology solutions in place, that allow for a consistency and resilience to computing on and off-campus, students will be able to enjoy the benefits of an expanded, deeper, and richer use of technology to enhance their learning.

For more information on vPro, click here.

Education Industry, Intel

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A substantial shift has happened in the enterprise storage industry over the last 12 months that has changed the dialogue about storage. In past years, the first conversations with enterprise storage buyers were about cost efficiency and performance. However, today, the two most important things that come up first in storage conversations are cybersecurity and delivery time. This is a radical change that is redefining strategic planning and purchasing of enterprise storage solutions.

Storage has become part of a bigger conversation that an increasing number of decision-makers in enterprises are recognizing. It’s as if customers are waking up to a new reality – a new normal – that storage needs to be a core component of an enterprise’s corporate cybersecurity strategy, and lead times for delivery of products are longer or, at a minimum, vary by vendor.

One vendor may provide products in weeks, while another vendor will need to take many months to deliver complementary products for an end-to-end solution. Because of this, enterprise buyers and IT solution providers, who provide solutions to enterprise buyers, need to think differently.

In the past, customers and prospective customers who were interested in buying storage solutions were quick to talk about capacity, speed, IOPS, workloads, and application profiles. Storage cybersecurity would not even be discussed until the eighth conversation or later. Yet, in 2022, the first three conversations are laser-focused on cybersecurity and how storage is a critical element of an overall corporate cybersecurity strategy.

The realization that primary and secondary storage are integral to a strong enterprise cyber security posture, including immutable snapshots, fast recovery, fenced-in forensic environments, and more, casts a wide net for the one thing that keeps C-level executives and IT leaders up at night – cyber resilience (or, rather, the lack of it).

If an enterprise does not have the proper level of cyber resilience built into its storage and data infrastructure, there is a huge gap. This is why, on average, it takes an organization nearly 300 days to figure out if they have even been infiltrated by a cybercriminal.

In the work that Infinidat has done to help large enterprises increase their cyber resilience, we have learned what it takes to bring storage and cybersecurity together for an end-to-end approach.

Of course, consolidation and its dramatic impact on capital and operational expense structures are still part of these conversations in the storage market, too. As enterprises upgrade to improve their cybersecurity, they are also using the opportunity to consolidate from a high number of arrays to Infinidat’s petabyte-scale arrays.

Instead of having 50 arrays that have been built up over time, they can consolidate and use a few Infinidat arrays, while getting greater capacity, better availability, unmatched real-world application performance, and higher storage cybersecurity. Consolidation is also a major factor in advancing green IT efforts – less use of power, cooling, floor space, and resources.

Partners need to talk about storage cyber resilience and consolidation with customers, hand-in- hand. But they also need to tackle the other big conversation-starter glaring at all of us in the face – namely, the supply chain challenge that is affecting delivery times.

Customers and partners must embrace the mindset that strategic planning needs to be done earlier, and decisions will need to be made quicker. My message to customers and partners – for their own benefit – is this: talk to their suppliers earlier than they previously have.

Infinidat customers have been benefitting with us. Infinidat has been doing a superb job managing the supply chain and being able to deliver storage solutions faster than suppliers of other types of IT products, such as servers or switches.

But since the supply chain crunch has its ups and downs for all companies (as no vendor is totally immune to vicissitudes), it is smart to talk to us and your other suppliers earlier, so you will not get hit head-on with a supply chain issue.

While Infinidat is able to deliver in a matter of weeks, a server vendor may be saying it will be nine months before the new servers will arrive. The storage platforms cannot be utilized until the servers are installed. So, this is where a partner can step up and find practical solutions to get servers from another source in, for example, a third of the time.

Customers should be working closely with their partners and suppliers to be creative about how to speed up delivery timelines. It may sound like very hard work, but it will actually help prevent bigger problems down the road. There are customers ordering products now, but those products won’t arrive until Q4. They are thinking ahead. They are accelerating decisions as they map out and fulfill their strategic plans.

The functioning of their business depends on these technical and business decisions. You don’t want to have to face an irate CEO who wants to know why you can’t get IT products that are necessary to support the next phase of the company’s digital transformation initiative or elevation of DevOps or help them thwart malware and ransomware threats.

You don’t want to have to explain to the Board of Directors why the data infrastructure could not scale. You don’t want to have to face fines from a government for failure to ensure cyber resilience, leading to the exposure of sensitive data.

Don’t get caught digitally flat-footed.

To learn more, visit Infinidat.

Data Management, Master Data Management