Data Center

Look at nearly any new offering from the largest names in technology — Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others — and you’re likely to find an accompanying environmental and sustainability initiative.

There’s been a growing awareness in recent years about the impact of energy use by corporate data centers, both on the environment and on organizations’ bottom lines. Public cloud hyperscalers have recognized this concern and have responded by optimizing their environments to help organizations meet their spending and sustainability goals.

As you make decisions about where to place your IT workloads, keep the following considerations in mind.

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is the fastest-growing category in data center infrastructure. The reasons for this are clear: This technology eliminates silos, simplifies management and enables scalability — three benefits that organizations need to support their digital transformation initiatives.

Judging from search engine traffic — and from the calls I receive — there’s some confusion out there about hybrid cloud and multicloud. In truth, both are completely viable models, with various organizations relying on each to achieve significant business benefits. But before IT and business leaders can decide which approach makes the most sense for them, they need to step back and ask themselves what outcomes they are trying to achieve.

Driving greater automation is a process that underlies most every project in the data center. It’s an important business differentiator that can help determine an organization’s success. And like all good things, there are lots of problems that gum it up. Having greater awareness of some of these roadblocks will help you see and address them sooner.

Three of the most common problems you’ll encounter are: long system uptime, manual restarts and dated processes. This post will help you address them and strengthen your automation efforts.

Organizations keep their data in a lot of different places: onsite, in the cloud (another person’s data center) or in an all-in-one data warehouse. Often, this data is siloed. But if an organization could harness the power of its data and become a data-driven organization, it would be able to grow and compete more effectively. The company could move mountains — or so the idea goes. So why do data projects fail, and how can changing the organization’s culture turn things around?

When it comes to mergers and acquisitions, there are two realities: There’s the fantasy about how perfect everything is going to be, and then there’s how it actually turns out.

Although there are real benefits when two organizations combine forces to increase market share and complement each other’s strengths, there are also many challenges that are often overlooked when bringing together the culture, systems and assets of two companies, especially regarding IT infrastructure and environments.

Follow these tips to navigate three of the most common roadblocks to making your fantasy version of M&A a reality.