Data Center

As many organizations shift elements of their IT infrastructures to the public cloud, they must be aware of the new risks this move carries. Often, organizations make the false assumption that, in outsourcing the ownership of hardware and data center operations, they have also outsourced security to the cloud service provider.

While this is partially true because the organization is no longer required to deal with physical and infrastructure security, stakeholders are still responsible for compliance, data security, application security and possibly platform security if they are managing their own virtual machines or containers. A CSP’s documentation of the shared responsibility model will explain in more detail where it delineates responsibility.

Metrics and reporting – these may not be the most exciting concepts but when configuring your enterprise resource planning (ERP) or other enterprise operations platform, thinking about them upfront can save you and your employees time and frustration, not to mention save your organization money.

Most modern software platforms make it easy for customers to add fields, allowing you to collect every piece of data that might be informative or helpful. It’s tempting to add an attribute here or an extra field there. Stop. For every field you want to add – for that matter, every field that already exists – think about it critically.

It’s expensive to collect data. Your employees need to touch every field or at least supply the data or source to populate them. When forms require so much data entry, people tend to find ways to avoid the perceived burden. Non-required fields are ignored, free-text fields are filled with the least amount of content allowed, and even pick-lists can be cheated (it’s so easy to pick the first option or leave a default value).

You can avoid all of this by keeping one question at the forefront of all data design decisions: What story do I need to tell?

As organizations build multicloud environments, it’s important that they think strategically about guiding principles and capabilities. Multicloud may involve any combination of the major hyperscale public cloud platforms — Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform — or a hybrid that also includes private clouds.

For many organizations, multicloud works because it lets them use the provider that offers the best features, security, resilience or cost-effectiveness for a specific workload, without limiting them to a single option. Multicloud also facilitates the DevOps objective of providing rapid time to value for features or products. The ability to accelerate the frequency and quality of releases is a paramount goal of DevOps, and a well-maintained multicloud solution can help organizations achieve that objective.

Both multicloud and DevOps thrive on rapid-response flexibility, and that makes it essential to have a strategy that can guide important decisions.

In a previous blog post, I discussed using AI in the call center with virtual assistance. In this post, I want to go further to dissect the various pieces, components and decisions that need to be made to roll out a successful chatbot solution.

The year 2020 saw significant business disruptions, which caused many organizations to adopt new technology strategies, repurpose or resize infrastructure, and honestly assess the suitability of existing solutions moving forward. Amid all this introspection, one general theme seems apparent: Automation should be a key component of any business strategy not only in the office but in the home office as well.

What follows are five tips to help get the creative juices flowing as you look to automate more of your daily tasks. Then, you can make room for innovation and a more rewarding work experience — regardless of location.

Power and cooling systems for IT equipment are often an afterthought when it comes to day-to-day business operations. Yet they support the backbone of your entire organization, as most everything is connected to IT these days. Departments such as e-commerce, payroll, human resources and communications (think employees’ email or VoIP phones) rely on your servers to be up and running, and your networking equipment to keep everyone connected. A good way of thinking about power and cooling is to think of it the same way you think of your car.

Let’s say you want to take a trip and you forget to check the tire pressure before departing, or you haven’t replaced your tires in a long time and they are heavily worn. Something as small as a nail or a bump in the road can cause your tire to blow out, and now you are stuck changing a tire. The tires, the engine, the brakes, these are all important components of your vehicle, and if you don’t maintain them properly you may end up in some sort of unpleasant event, preventing you from completing your journey. This is similar to how you should be thinking about your power and cooling equipment.