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.

As the calendar turns over to 2020 in a few weeks, you can count on a few things: college football on New Year’s Day, gyms packed full of people promising that…

Recently, someone asked me how organizations can take advantage of untapped cloud consumption capabilities.

At first, the question stumped me. After all, public cloud computing is a well-established model at this point, and virtually every organization is taking advantage of cloud software, infrastructure or platforms on some level. Even organizations that are keeping a sizable chunk of their resources in-house typically have a reason to do so — whether that has to do with cost, security or the need to run legacy applications on certain infrastructure. (It’s not as though these IT administrators simply haven’t considered the cloud.)

Data centers have changed quite a bit since pizza boxes reigned supreme. We replaced those servers with virtualization, reducing our physical footprint and utilizing more of the CPUs and memory. Next came the idea of fully tested systems in the form of converged infrastructure: making sure different components of compute, storage and networking worked well…

Most technology professionals today understand that their companies can’t afford for their IT shops to be stuck in “keep-the-lights-on” mode. Obviously, it’s essential for technology departments to ensure adequate reliability, availability and performance for IT resources. But even if staffers are performing these tasks at the top of their game, an IT shop that stops…

The term “digital transformation” gets tossed around a lot, and not always with a great deal of care or precision. At a fundamental level, the phrase refers to efforts to apply technology to all aspects of a business to achieve benefits such as improved efficiency, increased revenue or a better customer experience. As practiced, digital…