Efficiency, always a top concern of IT leaders, is the subject of heightened focus in 2023, thanks to ongoing inflation and the threat of recession. Expenditures for cloud services in particular are coming under close scrutiny, at a time when cloud spending is nearly half of many IT budgets. “As more and more workloads migrate…
Several years ago, an earthquake struck a West Coast community and threw almost everyone’s data center offline. There were regional electrical outages and communications disruptions, and systems failed. It’s a vivid memory because I was the CIO of an area financial institution at that time. We went into disaster recovery failover mode, with everyone in…
Firewalls have come a long way from their humble beginnings of assessing network traffic based on appearance alone. Today’s next-generation firewalls (NGFWs), which must protect all areas of enterprise, can filter layer 7 applications, block malicious attachments and links, detect known threats and device vulnerabilities, apply patching, prevent DDoS attacks, and provide web filtering for…
Quantum computing will change the world — the industry has rightfully accepted this as fact. However, until it does, we must contend with some limitations in the noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) era machines we have today. Many use cases allow us to show customers how to solve complex business problems with actual NISQ quantum computers. Still,…
IT leaders have known for years that having “a seat at the table” is essential to their success. Without insight into and influence over key organizational decisions and priorities, CIOs are disadvantaged when it comes to launching and supporting initiatives that will help the business thrive. But these days, that seat at the table, where…
Members of the EU Parliament have agreed on a first draft for regulating the use of AI. The AI Act is now taking the next procedural step to be negotiated and worked out with individual member states. In the end, there should be an EU-wide body of law to regulate the use of AI technologies, such as ChatGPT. Essentially, the AI…
Due to a risk of not being able to scale and innovate properly, nor provide a basis to accommodate new platforms or programming languages, a decision was made in mid-2019 to migrate the entire Allianz Business System (ABS) — the IT core applications including its database in Germany — to standardized x86 servers with Linux…
Recent research from IDC report Enterprise Automation to Mitigate the Digital Skills Shortage found that up to 80% of organizations in the APAC region, excluding Japan, find it difficult or extremely difficult to fill vacancies in IT roles. Some of the hardest roles to fill include security, and development and data professionals. The report also…
Looking for your next read? Why not pick up a book that will inspire you to be a more effective leader, help you spot challenges and pitfalls in your IT strategies and processes, or prepare for the future of information technology? I asked CIOs and other high-level IT leaders to recommend books that have impacted…
Cracking the code for fast, reliable automotive service requires vision — especially in an era in which customers expect flexible, convenient experiences delivered on their terms. For US tire retail chain Discount Tire inspiration for reinventing its retail automotive experience would come from familiar territory: the less than 20 seconds it takes a NASCAR pit…