"Since COVID-19, the shift to remote work has influenced many organizations to invest in digital transformation initiatives at warp speed," opines Ashwin Rajeeva in The Enterprisers Project.

"With little to no time for strategic planning or preparation, the onset of the pandemic served as an accelerator for companies and CIOs to establish new business models that prioritize and deliver efficiency, flexibility, and speed.

With remote and hybrid work now considered the norm, more enterprises are adjusting to this new reality by adopting a digital service mindset and embracing forward-thinking ways to stay ahead and future-proof their business. Even with businesses optimistically moving forward to keep up with the rapid pace of digital transformations, 70 percent of these initiatives unfortunately still fail. more

John Edwards writes in CIO, "All successful CIOs know how to instruct, motivate, energize, and even excite their teams. Yet only a relative handful of IT leaders can truly be described as inspirational figures, capable of leading their teams to goals that collegues at other enterprises can only dream about.

CIOs who are purposefully positive and responsible, with a focus on integrity, tend to inspire others, says Ola Chowning, a partner at global technology research and advisory firm ISG..." more

"Have you received a vendor proposal in the past six months?" asks Jackie Wiles in Gartner

"If so, it might have demanded a price increase of 10%, maybe even 30%, for an IT contract that typically rises 3% to 5% a year. When senior management asks if that's really warranted, it may be difficult to tell. You need a sound process for diagnosing the cause of price hikes and a strategy for (re)negotiating terms.

Rising inflation has obscured visibility into costs just as organizations are looking to deploy technology to reduce the cost of doing business and create a competitive advantage..." more

Stephanie Overby writes in CIO, "Serving in a board advisory role is an increasingly important experience along the career trajectory of the modern CIO. It can expand your exposure to different businesses and a diverse set of leaders and give you an opportunity to expand your critical-thinking skills.

'The personal and professional networking from joining a board is tremendous. It allows you to get your name out there and be associated with other organizations outside of the company you work for,' says Josh Drew, regional director at Robert Half. 'And second, and most importantly, many of these opportunities allow CIOs to make an impact on their community.'..." more

"Since the pandemic the cyber world has become a far riskier place," warns Steve Durbin in CSO Online

"According to the Hiscox Cyber Readiness Report 2022, almost half (48%) of organizations across the U.S. and Europe experienced a cyberattack in the past 12 months. Even more alarming is that these attacks are happening despite businesses doubling down on their cybersecurity spend.

Cybersecurity is at a critical inflection point where five megatrends are making the threat landscape riskier, more complicated, and costlier to manage than previously reported. To better understand the evolution of this threat landscape, let's examine these trends in more detail..." more

"In a perfect world, refresh cycles would regularly leave the IT shop all new and shiny," repports Pam Baker in InformationWeek.

"Unfortunately, there's not much that's perfect in the real world. Shiny left the building a long time ago when much of IT's assets moved to the cloud. As for new stuff, well that's an old dream in a new normal where old systems clang their worn beat on a recession drum.

That description a little too poetic for your taste? No worries: To spell it out in terms of practical nuts and bolts, most in IT are charged with making old systems work for yet another budget period at production levels on par with the new systems they aren't allowed to buy..." more

Rosalyn Page writes in CIO, "Small and medium business' CIOs have much to teach larger enterprises, according to Fabienne Wintle, CIO of Navii, the Australian government-backed platform that supports small and medium businesses going digital.

Wintle, who is also the CIO of Tourism Tribe, had an interest in connecting businesses with information through technology, and tells CIO Australia she always saw technology as being about how to organise information and make it useful for business..." more

Jackson Shaw writes in Dataversity, "It's understandable why this verify-first, trust-later mentality has gained steam over the last few years. And the reality is, that organizations don't have much of a choice. The world saw an alarming 105% surge in ransomware cyberattacks last year (Sonic Wall), and that number will only continue to rise.

While a zero trust framework can create a more secure environment that protects against unauthorized access to sensitive data and digital assets, it does not come without challenges. Knowledge workers can only thrive when they have access to the tools and applications they need to succeed. But zero trust roadblocks to access can -and often do - bring workflows to a halt. Access to sensitive data is part of the job, but if people change roles and find themselves locked out of pertinent files or applications, their work suffers..." more

"Of all the security techniques aimed at ensuring data security and combating data breaches, data loss prevention tools are far and away the most common," opines Karen Scarfon in SearchSecurity.

"DLP tools constantly monitor and analyze data to identify potential violations of security policies and, if appropriate, stop them from continuing. DLP tools range the gamut, from those focusing on a single part of an organization, such as email services or laptops, to ones specializing in data backup, archival and restoration..." more

Daniel Tannenbaum writes in IT Security Guru, "Besides levelling the playfield, cloud technologies are a future-ready solution that makes running a business simpler and safer. Here, we look at five benefits of moving to the cloud.

1. Improved security

The cloud is designed for maximum data security, thanks to high levels of encryption and security layers that give it an edge over on-premise servers and data centres. While this higher level of security and data integrity does not mean that you will not experience cloud security challenges, implementing the right strategies will help keep most risks and threats at bay..." more

"Phishing," writes Josh Fruhlinger in CSO Online, "in which an attacker sends a deceptive email tricks the recipient into giving up information or downloading a file, is a decades-old practice that still is responsible for innumerable IT headaches. Phishing is the first step for all kinds of attacks, from stealing passwords to downloading malware that can provide a backdoor into a corporate network.

The fight against phishing is a frustrating one, and it falls squarely onto IT's shoulders..." more

Every day across organizations both large and small, intrusions and breaches happen. Attackers get inside. If the organizations are fortunate, they detect and get them out before they do any damage. They remediate the situation before the intrusion turns into an official breach. But for many less fortunate, when breaches happen they can last for weeks, months, or years under the radar. Once finally discovered, the investigations can be long and painful, and they often get publicized. more

New research in this year's report also reveals for the first time that 83% of organizations in the study have experienced more than one data breach and just 17% said this was their first data breach. And at a time when inflation is growing, breached businesses have passed higher costs to customers, with 60% of organizations in the study reporting that they increased the price of goods and services in response to losses from the breach. more

Organizations have created more data than ever before, data is now spread across a wider attack surface, putting it at a heightened risk of becoming a compromised risk. The manner and location of data storage and correspondence has had to shift to meet the needs of remote and hybrid workers, with companies being forced to take a more rigorous approach to data security. more

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions help companies coordinate the work of various departments by integrating all the necessary information within one shared database. While ERP systems are traditionally associated with manufacturing, they now support organizations in multiple sectors, education included.

As the digital transformation in schools, universities, and other educational institutions is picking up the pace, ERP adoption is gradually increasing, and this trend is forecasted to continue. more

With the skyrocketing rate of data growth, it's a wonder how data centers, enterprises and people can store so much information.

Is the storage industry likely to reach a point when a "No Vacancy" sign will hang, telling users that they will need to discard all new data as soon as they generate it? Will users have to discard their history to make room for new data? Or will IT find satisfactory homes for this data deluge? The answer isn't simple. more

Micron has begun production of the first 232-layer NAND chip in sufficient volume to feed storage partners.

It is the first time that a NAND manufacturer has cracked the 200-layer, with the previous top chip, a 176-layer model, last unveiled back in November 2020, a near-32% improvement (or 56 extra layers) in less than two years. Other layer count landmarks included 64, 96 and 128-layer products. more

For the last several years, we have written about drive failure, or more specifically, the annualized failure rates for the HDDs and SSDs we use for our cloud storage platform. In this post, we'll look at drive failure from a different angle: life expectancy.

By looking at life expectancy, we can answer the question, 'How long is the drive I am buying today expected to last?' This line of thinking matches the way we buy many things. For example, knowing that a washing machine has an annualized failure rate of 4% is academically interesting, but what we really want to know is, 'How long can I expect the washing machine to last before I need to replace it?' more

Seagate has announced it is targeting mid-2023 for the launch of its first hard disk drives (HDDs) to exceed a capacity of 30TB.

CEO David Mosley explained on its recent earnings call that development is progressing well and Seagate is on track to start shipping its '30TB+ family of drives' to select customers by 'this time next year'.

Although full specifications have not yet been confirmed, the new drives will be based on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, which industry commentators believe will pave the way for HDDs far larger than the current crop. more

Today machine learning technology is implemented across various business sectors to coordinate processes based on predicted outcomes.

If you are looking to improve your organization's efficiency, consider leveraging machine learning tools. These platforms can help your team build machine learning models that will generate meaningful insights. In turn, this can lead to smarter business decisions and better outcomes across the organization. more

By 2027, chatbots will become the primary customer service channel for roughly a quarter of organizations, according to Gartner, Inc.

'Chatbots and virtual customer assistants (VCAs) have evolved over the past decade to become a critical technology component of a service organization's strategy,' said Uma Challa, Sr Director Analyst in the Gartner Customer Service & Support practice. 'When designed correctly, chatbots can improve customer experience and drive positive customer emotion at a lower cost than live interactions.' more

Developer OpenAI has invited one million users to sign up for its waitlist. DALL-E is available on a freemium basis, with users using credit in exchange for a prompt generation. Each credit can be used to generate four images from an original prompt, or three images from an edit or variation, prompt, which use an existing image.

DALL-E users will earn free credits that refill every month or have the option to buy additional credits. Every user will receive 50 free credits during their first month of use and 15 free credits every subsequent month. more

Artificial intelligence is the future, but it already has a prominent standing in the present. As data science gets more sophisticated and consumers continue to demand a more personalized customer experience, AI is the tool that will help enterprises better understand their customers and audiences. But even though AI has all the potential in the world, if we cannot figure out how to address the ethical challenges that remain, this full potential may never be reached. more

We are still gathering up information on how the midrange Power E1050 stacks up on SAP HANA and other workloads, but in poking around the architecture of the entry single-socket Power S1014 and the dual-socket S1022 and S1024 machines, we found something interesting that we thought we should share with you. We didn't see it at first, and you will understand immediately why. more

While still in its early stages of development, quantum computing shows much promise for helping businesses find new ways to solve challenges. By nature, processes powered by qubits are capable of going beyond any possible findings produced through classical computing, due to qubits' superpositioning (the ability to represent the values of 0, 1, or any value in between) and entanglement properties. With large organisations such as IBM, and government agencies like NATO and the UK Government starting to invest in the technology, the space is set to be prosperous for many sectors, if developed successfully in the coming years. more

To be of value, it must serve up data or processing resources rapidly. Otherwise, why bother? No one would pay for the cloud if it ended up being much slower than having the same services available internally.

Here are the some of the top trends in cloud networking for 2022:

Cloud Networking's Big Challenge

Enterprises today are evaluating how to develop applications that leverage IoT, mobile connectivity and artificial intelligence (AI) at scale. According to most surveys, they plan to deploy such applications in the next five years. But at the same time, they admit that if they could demonstrate the ability to ship more products at lower cost with higher reliability, they would develop and deploy such applications much sooner. The performance of cloud networking stands in the way. more

Edge computing companies enable distributed computing throughout a network, including to the very edge. The best edge computing companies also allow users to harness comprehensive data analysis, with many possible applications like IoT, artificial intelligence, machine learning, cybersecurity, and remote workforce support. Here are the top 10 Edge computing infrastructure management solution providers that are all major players in the growing edge computing market in 2022 more

Establishing a disaster recovery plan could be a stressful task for IT and database administrators. There are countless options available and many things to consider. Yet without a solid plan, the organization risks losing valuable data. This article will cover some practical guidance to help anyone who is tasked with establishing business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) plans. more

Remember when tech workers were ruining San Francisco by their very presence?

The crisis peaked between 2014-2017 when the booming tech industry was blamed for driving up the cost of real estate. Tech companies drove high demand for office space and also rental housing.

Now they're being blamed for ruining San Francisco - by their absence. more

This has led many security professionals to ask if Microsoft 365 Defender can provide enough threat coverage to protect their organization. They wonder if they need advanced detection such as computer vision machine learning against phishing threats and other highly targeted threats, and what tools are required beyond Microsoft Defender to keep users safe?

Why You Need Advanced Phishing Detection to Protect Email Users

Email is an important communication channel for professional and personal use. With our world being a remote work-from-anywhere on any device workforce, people use the same devices for personal and professional use. At the same time, email threats have become advanced, and signature-based detection struggles to stop these threats from today's cyber criminals. Microsoft's built-in security can detect and stop known threats. It struggles with zero-hour threats, spear-phishing, threats from trusted services, ransomware, and other complex phishing attacks. more

They simplify the development process by providing a wealth of functionality and interoperability for programmers to use as they build their products. They save time and resources by eliminating the need to develop existing functions from scratch.

However, over the years, malicious actors have found many ways to access and steal data from websites, servers, and other infrastructure through APIs. An incorrectly implemented, misconfigured, or forgotten API endpoint (see Zombie/Rogue APIs) can leave your entire infrastructure vulnerable to cyberattacks. Many APIs manage sensitive data, including personally identifiable information (PII) and intellectual property (IP) information, which can make them especially lucrative targets for attackers. more

Software developers today have more options open to them. They have tools and services that can help them build new applications quickly, then launch those services to customers globally, and then scale them up to meet growing demand. Microservices architectures and agile development put the emphasis on moving faster and spinning up new services whenever customer needs and business needs have to be met. more

Many Business Units and application owners adopt their own tools to manage the architecture artifacts in silos. These tools cannot effectively manage frameworks, document current architectures, develop future scenarios and manage initiatives towards achieving organization goals.

Main concerns of CIO's of the Organizations are,

• Information 'All over the place'
• Portfolio Redundancy
• Poor data quality
• Poor Business IT Alignment
• Multiple stakeholders across Organization
• Transform the Operating Model
• Business Strategy Challenges
• Business and Technology Risks

Usage of Enterprise Architecture tool mitigates all the above concerns. Enterprise architecture (EA) tools are software applications designed to support enterprise architects and other business and IT stakeholders with strategically driven planning, analysis, design and execution. more