Data Center

While software-defined networking (SDN) is no longer a brand-new technology, many organizations have been slow to change the way they approach networking inside their data centers. Although we in the IT world like to pride ourselves on innovation, the truth is that we’re often just like everybody else: resistant to change, especially when what we’re already doing seems to be working just fine.

However, SDN tools such as Cisco ACI have a number of tangible benefits — both for IT departments and for the business units they support. Here are three of the top benefits for organizations that adopt Cisco ACI in their data centers.

The promises of the CMDB have been around a long time. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) popularized the concept back in the 1980s and 1990s as a foundational element of IT service management.

The benefits are clear: having a trusted data source with a rich set of relational information provides organizations with decision-making capabilities to support more efficient operations, better user experiences and proactive mitigation of risk. The marketplace has no shortage of services, technologies and service management platforms that support and rely on the CMDB. A CMDB, and by extension, the capabilities it enables, continues to be an important goal for organizations, even more so now considering the impact of digital transformation.

North American weather is impacted by what is known as “storm season.” This aligns with hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to Nov. 30. These weather patterns can affect the entire country and they touch our commercial customers in many ways. Power can be disrupted by sudden severe weather conditions that can affect the power grid and produce downtime for your organization.

How can organizations prepare for storm season? Data centers and edge networks need enough capacity and secure endpoints for workers to access their files and applications from anywhere. Employees need access to cloud applications to take full advantage of collaboration tools available to them, and organizations need to protect their power. What follows are some key areas to focus on with storm season preparedness (and a solid work from home strategy), so your users will be able to stay productive and your organization stays functional.

The fact that compliance efforts can be challenging is no surprise to IT professionals and managers. Today’s regulatory environment is full of security and privacy regulations that place strict limits on the collection, handling and storage of sensitive information, and IT teams often find themselves responsible for the heavy lifting of compliance programs.

I recently had the opportunity to visit with a retailer that operates a large contact center to support its international chain of stores. The company was in the early stages of reviewing its compliance obligations and asked us to find ways to modify business practices to reduce the scope of its compliance efforts. After reviewing the company’s activities, we discovered a few small changes in the way the company handles information that could dramatically reduce its compliance burden. Organizations across industries can draw lessons from this experience as they seek to reduce their own costs of compliance.

For organizations to realize the potential value of AI, according to McKinsey, their AI strategy must align with their corporate strategy. They need a “clear data strategy that supports and enables AI,” and they must invest in staff and technical training to ensure they have the skills to implement AI at scale.

I keep those imperatives in mind when I work with business and IT leaders who wonder how AI might help their organizations. My advice to them: To get the most out of the technology — to make AI work for you — it pays to take a phased approach to implementation.

As countless organizations have raced to shift their employees to a remote work model using solutions such as videoconferencing tools, many have learned an unfortunate lesson about their user devices: throttled by their hard drives, they often struggle to keep up with the demands of latency-sensitive workloads. Fortunately, there’s a simple — and relatively inexpensive — fix. Solid-state drives (SSDs) can not only provide drastic improvements to performance, but also offer a boost to security and durability.