Machine learning-optimised stacks, container-first architectures and DevOps for both software and hardware are among the key trends redefining enterprise IT infrastructure, according to a new report from McKinsey.

The piece, authored by Arul Elumalai, Kara Sprague, Sid Tandon, and Lareina Yee, looks at what is changing and how companies need to fight back.  

Many of these have frequently been covered by this publication; some, like the public cloud going mainstream, are long overdue. Yet there is an interesting titbit here. Given...

Become the disruptor of your industry's status quo, or face the consequences. To succeed, CEOs need to know the answer to a key question in 2018 and beyond. Does our CIO and/or CTO have what it takes to contribute to a meaningful and substantive digital transformation agenda?

As digitally-fuelled disruptors reshape industries, the clear mandate for every enterprise is to re-imagine itself to compete in the increasingly digital economy that's platform-powered and ecosystem-enabled.

To help CIOs and...

United Technologies (UTC), a conglomerate which builds and services products including aerospace engines and elevators, is going to leverage Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Azure in a strategic partnership.

The company says one of its core tenets is ‘giving employees the digital tools and capabilities to work in new and different ways at market speed.’ As a result, Microsoft technologies are set to be used in a variety of UTC businesses.

Pratt & Whitney, an aerospace manufacturer under the UTC...

A new survey released by AlgoSec sets the scene on organisational cloud deployments: almost a third of respondents say they plan to increase their public cloud usage in the next 12 to 18 months, but major security challenges remain across hybrid enterprise networks both during and after migrations.

The study, titled ‘Hybrid Cloud Environments: The State of Security’, polled 450 senior security and network professionals and found a lack of visibility and managing security policies consistently were...

• In 2020, AI will become a positive net job motivator, creating 2.3m jobs while eliminating only 1.8m jobs.
• By 2020, IoT technology will be in 95% of electronics for new product designs.
• By 2021, 40% of IT staff will be versatilists, holding multiple roles, most of which will be business, rather than technology-related.

These and many other insights were presented earlier this month at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2017 being held in Orlando, Florida. Gartner’s...

By 2020 there will be 1.3 million unfilled jobs in Europe, many will be in cloud-related fields. As businesses invest in digital transformation (83% believe cloud skills are critical for digital transformation, according to Microsoft), demand for skilled cloud professionals is set to surge.

Microsoft’s leading cloud platform, Azure, now boasts

The rush to move IT applications from on-premises enterprise data centers to public cloud service providers, primarily on the basis of the promise of a low-cost, has once again been challenged by recent market research findings.

In fact, savvy CIOs and CTOs are seeking comprehensive solutions that meet all their expectations, rather than merely a limited subset. Even if it costs more to achieve that goal, the demand for superior hybrid cloud services is gaining momentum across the globe.

As an example,...

CIOs and CTOs are developing comprehensive hybrid IT infrastructure models, in response to growing demand from CFOs and line of business leaders that request access to applications hosted via both on-premises private cloud and off-premises public cloud offerings.

That's why savvy technology leaders must therefore align with the most qualified vendors and service providers that enable them to manage and support these complex multi-cloud scenarios. Furthermore, the chosen provider must demonstrate vertical...

• 84% of respondents say AI will enable them to obtain or sustain a competitive advantage.
• 83% believe AI is a strategic priority for their businesses today.
• 75% state that AI will allow them to move into new businesses and ventures.

These and many other fascinating insights are from the Boston Consulting Group and MIT Sloan Management Review study published this week, Reshaping Business With Artificial Intelligence. An online 

The key to successful cloud technology implementation lies with the workforce.

Implementing new cloud hosted technology in companies of any size presents challenges and opportunities. It also induces uncertainty and anxiety among the workforce who may see their jobs under threat. There is no doubt that some companies introduce new technology to reduce headcount. But simply replacing people with technology implies that the human capital of the organisation remains underdeveloped and while short-term savings...

“CIOs are starting to wake up to the fact that there’s going to be multiple clouds to address multiple workloads and applications,” says Thor Culverhouse, CEO of Seattle-based Skytap, “which tells me the war around the cloud hasn’t even started.”

It makes for an interesting viewpoint, considering the assertion that the market is all but sewn up. Indeed, Gartner, in its most recent Magic Quadrant for cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), has placed Amazon Web Services...

According to IDC, only 25% of organizations have repeatable strategies for cloud adoption, with 32% having no cloud strategy at all, describing the need for a best practice based repeatable framework for planning cloud adoption that drives business success.

If you’ve moved your enterprise infrastructure into the cloud, to say you’re not alone is an understatement. In researching our latest infographic, it’s clear that more and more enterprises are adopting cloud models and increasing their spending for cloud technologies. It’s also clear that, as cloud options and models increase, building in-house cloud skills and expertise will be necessary to keep pace with advancing cloud technologies and to optimize ROI.

So what's driving cloud...

Cloud computing services supported by converged networks will create new opportunities for forward-looking senior executives to make informed decisions and gain significant new strategic competitive advantages.

According to the latest market study by Frost & Sullivan, transaction data is the new currency for the digital enterprise and high-speed, dedicated and secure network connections are crucial for senior decision makers to monetize their commercial data residing in cloud services.

Furthermore, an...

Skytap, a Seattle-based public cloud provider, has announced it has raised $45 million (£35.2m) to push forward its product development and market expansion.

The round was led by Goldman Sachs, with Hillel Moerman, managing director who co-heads the investment firm’s private capital investing (PCI) group, joining Skytap’s board of directors as a result.

Skytap offers an alternative to the public cloud mindset of ‘forcing customers to rewrite their traditional applications before...

It is indisputable that containers are one of the hottest tickets in open source technology, with 451 Research projecting more than 250% growth in the market from 2016 to 2020. It’s easy to see why, when container technology has the ability to combine speed and density with the security of traditional virtual machines and requires far smaller operating systems in order to run.

Of...

Only a fool believes that moving enterprise applications to the cloud is a panacea for the majority of the challenges facing today’s CIOs. Even cloud migration itself, like any IT project, presents a number of complex challenges. My favourite piece of advice is to think the same as you would if buying a house: don’t be impulsive. By taking the time to develop a clear focus at the outset, cloud buyers can eliminate unwanted costs and complications down the road. First and foremost, be clear around...

In today’s digital marketplace, business agility is praised above all else. Agility, after all, provides the opportunity to change services on a dime and ensure that customer needs are met, and expectations exceeded. But agility is a big concept and often it can be ill-defined and poorly executed upon. However, if your company wants to keep its competitive edge, it has to achieve this goal. As such, the question becomes, how do you do it?

The answer might be simpler than you think. It lies in better user experience....

Many enterprises are jumping on the cloud to modernize their IT. Cloud computing not only provides an on-demand highly scalable compute, storage and network infrastructure, it allows IT to spin up an environment in minutes, driving agility the enterprise has never seen before.

However, moving workloads to cloud or refactoring them to run natively in the cloud is not easy. Once those workloads are running in the cloud, monitoring and managing them is required. IT needs all the help it can...

As cloud deployments have become more complex—with hybrid cloud environments growing in number and importance—networking technologies have not kept pace with advancements in cloud computing and storage. In fact, hybrid cloud networking has become a serious pain for enterprises across industries.

Fortunately, new approaches are emerging that will help IT teams better anticipate these issues, and to ultimately overcome the complexity and related project delays that currently plague them.

At a...