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.

Retailers are looking for technology solutions that can meet a particular need, whether it’s improving the customer experience, enhancing productivity or increasing revenue. I was excited to see some of the latest entries in the field in January at the National Retail Federation’s annual convention.

Retailers, vendors and industry experts at the event demonstrated an array of solutions and shared their perspectives on how technology will affect the industry this year. Here are four takeaways from Retail’s Big Show.

The pace of change in IT is only accelerating, with many industry observers predicting that we’ll see the same amount of change over the next two to five years as we did in the past 10 or 15.

We’re already moving toward a world where data centers are able to handle 100,000 or more microservices, each created and ended on demand, in real time. But to get there, organizations will need to undertake another round of IT modernization. Here are some of the capabilities that organizations should consider as they get started.

Government agencies, retailers, manufacturers, banks, enterprises — organizations across industries can benefit from IP-based camera systems. That’s because the technology enables them to keep an eye on their premises in real time and review recorded images to better understand security incidents and other past events.

But many organizations find that their camera systems provide new capabilities that go far beyond simple security. By treating cameras as data sources and applying analytics capabilities to this data, organizations open a wide variety of use cases that can improve safety, efficiency and productivity as well as security.