Monthly Archives: January 2016

What Belongs To The CIOs Agenda in 2016: Prioritize IT Investments

The ever-increasing expectations of customers and the ever shorter innovation cycles have a fundamental reorientation of the IT landscape and the underlying unavoidable control mechanisms. The biggest mover among the technology trends in 2016 compared to previous years is the Design Thinking.

More and more companies use design thinking to target better their products and services to customers. IT budgets are an absolute top priority of CIOs. In 2016, however, the design thinking form the basis of many transformation projects that need to be orchestrated by CIOs.

Business Intelligence and analytics have long been one of the CIOs top priorities, and although new investments press on, it will also in 2016 be number one on the list. In Gartner survey of 2,944 CIOs from 84 different countries, CIOs responded that BI/analytics will be the first place for investment with 50 percent of CIOs had this area in the top three of their investment priorities.

Here are CIOs priorities for investment in 2016, according to Gartner:

  1. BI/analytics (39 percent)
  2. Infrastructure and data center (27 percent)
  3. Cloud (25 percent)
  4. ERP (21 percent)
  5. Digitization and digital marketing (21 percent)
  6. Mobile solutions (20 percent)
  7. Security (15 percent)
  8. Network, voice and data communications (10 percent)
  9. Legacy modernization (10 percent)
  10. Industry-specific applications (9 percent)
  11. CRM (9 percent)

While the mobile solutions and CRM are a lower priority of CIOs in 2016 than in previous years, there are also areas that they now prioritize higher than in the past.

cio-agenda

Biggest Challenges

When CIOs asked what their biggest challenges at the moment, the answer is that the lack of the right people and squeezed budgets. Nearly 59 percent of CIOs think we have a decided talent crisis, however, only 17 percent of respondents who actually believes that the lack of the right skills prevents them from reaching their goals.

The survey also shows that more and more CIOs are beginning to work with so-called bimodal IT where one splitter IT organization into two departments. It is done to be better able to work at different speeds and cope with both the traditional operation and the more agile and innovative IT projects.

Cloud Instead of Outsourcing

Traditional outsourcing contracts that promise guaranteed cost savings of 10 to 15 percent per year over a period of 5 to 10 years have become the significant exception. The demand for flexible cloud solutions, which are now also increasingly provided locally and which make it possible to respond to short-term changes in demand through appropriate consumption adjustment.

In the medium term, all new IT initiatives on new technologies such as cloud services, big data and analytics, mobile computing and social media will take priority. In the long term, budgets are increasingly spent on new things that were not feasible on the ancient architectures and technologies. New digital products and services will be in focus. A new information framework will be required to support the product development, delivery, quality, and growth.

By 2018, at least, half of IT spending will be channeled into cloud-based solutions. Without cloud services nothing will go in the future, because cloud forms both the basis for new digital products and services. To meet these challenges, CIOs should rethink their management model. In reality, hybrid cloud landscapes will be implemented that can be used to integrate and management for IT organizations.

The Ten Main Criteria When Choosing a Managed Services Provider

The IT function continues to question how to manage more demand for services among the increasing complexity, with limited resources and experience. The pressure on the IT continues while companies are faced with fixed budgets or increasing reduced and increase expectations of IT to create value and business innovation.

For this reason, organizations IT cannot do it alone. They are seeking trusted IT services to help them reduce the cost, manage complexity, ensure desired levels of availability, maintain frontline techniques and incorporate technological innovation.

The potential benefits of managed services are achieved only if a suitable supplier is chosen, who you can demonstrate the ability to provide knowledge, processes, and resources to overcome their internal capabilities. When evaluating providers of managed services, you can consider the following 10 criteria to make an informed decision.

Knowledge and Expertise

Any managed service provider should, at least, have the knowledge that goes beyond conventional management and operating system availability and maintenance. Check the level of knowledge related to management changes, virtualization, high availability, middleware and databases data, multiple network technologies, integration platform, mobility, security and, of course, cloud technologies.

Ask about scalability and availability of staff to establish specialized techniques, how to organize and share information with the best-approved practices. Similarly, a managed service provider should have extensive experience in all delivery models, including not only managed services and cloud but also conventional and IT strategic outsourcing. Thus, the provider can help customers achieve a structured multi-strategy (internal, managed services, outsourcing, and cloud) to meet the individual needs of the company.

Technology-based Approach

Find out if the service provider has a precautionary approach to the problem and the improvement plan. Look for a provider that goes beyond the little monitoring and management of the device. For example, the provider can use sophisticated technologies such as advanced analysis to boost the prevention of incidents through patterns analysis of failure on all platforms and processes, providing visibility within the areas for the client and improvement of the service provider.

The provider should employ the sophisticated technology of secondary system in all managed services offered. It can provide capabilities such as the complex mechanisms of alert, classification and prioritization of tasks, and scaling and repair incidents. Find out how much the service provider uses automation to reduce human intervention and improve quality and productivity.

Conform to Industry Best Practices

The key to a reliable IT infrastructure and high availability is to optimize IT management. A vendor service should employ industry best practices to manage their IT resources to adapt the management of IT services. They include problem management, incident cases, change, configuration, inventory, capacity and performance and creating reports. They are also critical areas to investigate best practices make the transition from an internal management system to the provider.

Consolidated Service Visibility

Your provider services must be willing to share examples of policies and process documentation and explain how it played through multiple delivery centers. A service provider should have a knowledge management system that allows the personal access to historical information problems and solutions from anywhere.

It is also important, the means by which the service provider provides visibility into the strength of its infrastructure and the operation of its managed services. Look for a secure web-based portal that consolidates related services within a single panel with real-time service visibility and online tools to manage services.

managed_service_provider

Support Multi-environments

Current infrastructures are traditionally heterogeneous environments comprising products network, hardware, and software provided by a variety of distributors. A service provider should have a minimum proven experience in multi-environments and especially collaborate with distributors leaders to ensure availability and updated visibility into product development routes and new technologies. A right service provider should play a professional trusted advisor role, helping you choose technologies that would best suit your business.

Providing Consistent Services

Choose a managed services provider with a worldwide capacity that can help to position companies of all sizes to grow and expand in today’s global economy. Global delivery capabilities offer many advantages, including a rapid deployment in new locations, the ability to effectively manage client projects covering operations in many countries, local language support to subsidiaries or branches, and location of resources and data within the country to address legal requirements and regulatory requirements. Check if the service provider has standard delivery processes in all places and how they organize and communicate teams among them.

Performance Based Service Level Agreements

A significant advantage of the managed services is that the responsibility lies with the supplier performance services. Your priority should be on what the service provider provides more than how the service is provided, which allows the supplier to innovate, improve service delivery and reduce costs.

In turn, the service provider should be willing to commit contractually to meet their needs regarding service and support these commitments to economic sanctions or other compensation if these service level agreements are not maintained.

Comprehensive Portfolio of Managed Services

Since the needs of your business and IT are in continuous change, you need the flexibility to add managed services without unnecessarily increasing costs and complexity. Many organizations have realized that fragmentation services, using numerous managed services can be quite complicated and expensive.

To ensure flexibility in the future, make sure any potential supplier offers a complete managed solution services, from infrastructure management to the managed security, resilience, mobility and other IT services for managed hosting and cloud. Moreover, look for a provider that offers you flexibility such as to enable it to retain its current equipment and even their current processes.

Technology Foresight

With the increasingly frequent strategic partnerships, is essential to consider the impact that relations procurement can have, not only in the business results but also in the primary business model and corporate culture of the company. If innovation and transformation are essential elements in its strategy of activities, what can make a Managed Services supplier?

Do they have the knowledge or exclusive experiences that bring clarity to the future technological or market changes? What competitive advantages could the provider bring? How it can help the experience, assets and coverage provider and network of partners to develop new business models or grow into new markets?

Reputation and Financial Stability

Whether you are thinking short term as first steps into managed services or if you are looking long-term strategic relationship, prospecting of financial stability is with the provider is critical. It is worth to consider the experience; services offered, and opinions provided by analysts and specialized in IT and business press.

DedicatedSolutions goals are clearly defined as per the above top ten criteria. We want to deliver the best service to our customers while keeping the costs for our clients as little as possible. Through the combination of Tier III & Tier IV data center facilities, the ability to offer our customers multiple 10 Gig pipes at each location and only providing the best hardware possible, we can truly offer a 99.9% uptime – guaranteed.

Our staff continually strives to serve you with the best possible support. All our facilities have 24×7 staffing – whether it be network technicians, system administrators or support members. Besides the uptime, we also guarantee and warrant you that you will have unlimited bandwidth with our unlimited solutions.

The Four Steps to Succeed in Your IT Systems Management

Organizations that are large or small, public or private, local or international, facing unprecedented challenges to support critical business initiatives in the dynamic business environment. Users are now scattered in many places; they bring their own mobile devices to work and expect IT to deliver fast and efficient services as well as support for those systems.

It is now possible that organizations achieve IT effectiveness without cutting the service levels by the adoption of a System Management strategy. DedicatedSolutions provides you with the best-dedicated server hardware in our multiple data centers across the globe.

If you have not decided yet how to build your Infrastructure, the below four steps can help companies improve the efficiency of the different processes of production, sales and administration; reduce costs and increase their competitiveness through the use of our managed services, information and communication technologies.

Know Your Infrastructure

See your network from a whole new perspective of the strategy of IT systems management of an organization depends on the discovery process. Managers must know what components are on the network, how assets are performing, who is not in compliance with IT policies and what to do to comply again. Unfortunately, the inventory lists do not always agree with reality and systems often fall into oblivion.

DedicatedSolutions provides visibility to all IT environment assets to collect and update management data automatically in real time. Although new assets enter the environment through acquisitions, lifecycles of IT, mobile workers or policies and other can be managed by our custom solutions.

On the other hand, whether you remain connected or not, DedicatedSolutions predefined applied policies on the new system stores the information in a central repository that can be used to provide proactive maintenance, providing solution and produce reports and alerts on any changes for administrators.

Manage Your IT Environment More Efficiently

Today, most organizations require operations around the clock, seven days a week, but traditionally, the management of IT systems has become a decentralized manner with product manuals in multiple processor points that are far from providing general availability. Administrators can perform maintenance and typically keep the systems in operation, but the work is hardly consistent between systems and usually is not documented and is performed manually.

DedicatedSolutions provides a unique framework where you can perform administration tasks remotely from anywhere consistently. Administrators can handle groups of machines by type, operating system, platform, department, geographical location or virtually any other distinguishing characteristic.

Combined with visibility into all IT assets and behavior systems, this accessibility allows policies based management systems. Administrators can set, monitor and update policies from a central console and leave them to machines distributed in the environment. Systems can fit in multiple groups and meet with various policies. It creates a focus on system management, which enables organizations to maintain a consistently healthy IT environment and with minimal impact on users.

SoftwareMgmt

Automating the Maintenance and Troubleshooting

Many organizations already have some automation in their IT environments, usually in the form of monitoring and alerting. Usually, when there is an issue with any system components in the infrastructure, a flurry of emails sent to the IT team. However, you and an administrator cannot manually create a ticket and solve a problem. Regular maintenance is also done in much the same way – task by task, machine by machine.

The custom solutions and managed services of DedicatedSolutions can automate IT tasks that are recurrent such as patch management, the operation of software and implementing solutions and analysis of the cause. Our 24*7 Help Desk provides relevant performance information to managers as they are working on solving a problem and can even solve problems automatically without manual intervention.

The result is that management of IT is possible using a minimum amount of resources. Simultaneously, automation allows regular maintenance of organizations tasks to improve IT service levels, expand capacity and meet needs of new business initiatives while reducing costs.

Tangible Results Monitors

IT services that are providing management of IT tasks are one of the most important functions, but it is also inconsistent and consumes a significant quantity of time. Rather than being viewed as a cost center, IT needs to show the contributions they are making to business and the value of supporting business goals and initiatives.

DedicatedSolutions provides the platform to collect data relevant from distributed systems management, store the information in a central repository and report them to the concerned person. Because different audiences require various levels of technical detail, customizable reports of DedicatedSolutions ranging from executive summaries to snapshots system and detailed historical reports. And because data have already been collected in real time and have managed centrally, time to compiling reports is minimal.

An Integrated Platform

DedicatedSolutions gives IT organizations the visibility and control they need to manage effective and efficient distributed systems. Automation streamlines maintenance and troubleshooting to improve user productivity without increasing IT costs. Administrators can then leverage the visibility and control to validate the results, and the management can take advantage of the information to make accurate decisions. Our integrated platform consolidates all aspects of apparatus under a single administrative panel, standardizing maintenance, monitoring and troubleshooting across the organization.

Five Top Trends That Will Define IT Landscape in 2016

Of all the important issues that keep executives awake, probably none is more important than to think “Are we keeping up to the date?”. The rapid pace of change in IT and business, in general, means that CIOs and other senior technologists cannot afford to be decentralized.

Where should you focus your energies as you build your to-do list for 2016? Forecast 2016 Computerworld survey of IT professional outlines five key areas – cloud computing, security, Internet of things, analysis, and the development of IT as a change-agent that promise to define the IT landscape in 2016.

IT As An Agent of Change

Finally, IT can move fully towards the center of the company in 2016 as the digital processing becomes an important strategic priority. Thanks to the economic growth, CIOs, and their IT organizations are well positioned to drive this change, increases in staff and a pronounced trend toward strategic spending.

Almost half (46%) of the 182 survey respondents said they are preparing for increased spending on technology, with anticipated budget increases averaging 14.7%. (Those numbers are higher than last year when 43% of respondents said they expected to increase spending, and the expected average was 13.1%.)

At the same time, 37% of respondents this year said they are planning to increase IT staff, compared with 24% last year. In addition, 42% of those hiring plans are looking for people with expertise in technology and business, that will articulate the value of IT in meeting business objectives.

This mixed knowledge will be essential for IT to achieve its primary goals in 2016 – 19% of the respondents said their mission is to generate new revenue or increase the existing ones in the next 12 months. Also, on the list is the acceleration of business processes and agility (cited by 40% of respondents) and improved collaboration with business units (35%).

While IT has made great progress in moving towards the strategic center of the company, there is more work to be done – mostly focuses on building relationships with business stakeholders.

Cloud Computing

As organizations are building an IT infrastructure for the future, there is no doubt that the cloud will play a key role. The real test is to figure out which model of cloud computing is the best choice for a particular company.

Almost half (48%) of the Forecast 2016 survey respondents said that cloud computing is an area for increased spending in their organizations, and 14% cited cloud initiatives as the draft most important technology for the coming year. Some 29% confirmed that they had already moved some business applications to the cloud with more plans; while 7% said they are in the process of migrating mission critical systems in a cloud environment.

On the other hand, 22% of respondents said their organizations are conducting beta testing or pilot programs covering the complete list of cloud delivery methods including private, public and hybrid options.

Now that the cloud is a standard element of IT architectures, the question facing CIOs is whether to use cloud-based systems and which deployment model is best for their organizations. Some things will be given a private cloud model while others take advantage of external cloud services or new types of delivery models.

Security

Data breaches made high profile last year (2015), with attention grabbing headlines. Maintaining the security is again at the top of IT budgets for the third year.

Exactly half of respondents this year (versus 46% last year) said security spending will increase in 2016; making safety the first choice among technology initiatives related to higher spending. When they were asked to identify the most important project of technology currently underway in their organizations, security came in second place (chosen by 12% of respondents), behind cloud computing by only two percentile points. And 16% of these identified security as their biggest challenge regarding leadership for the coming year; surpassed only by budget and economic pressures.

it-trends

The Internet of Things

The so-called Internet of Things (IoT) is no longer the stuff of science fiction, but a reality shortly for IT organizations across many industries. IoT technologies can be implemented in all kinds of practical uses, such as optimizing the supply chain through RFID, and performance monitoring focused on energy saving system.

Forecast 2016 Computerworld survey states 29% of respondents identified initiatives and IoT projects such as machine-to-machine and telematics as new areas of spending for this year. By comparison, last year, only 12% of respondents said that the work of IoT would be a new IT spending in 2015. Similarly, the percentage of the respondent said they planned to launch IoT projects in the next 12 months, which is 15% higher as compared to last year.

Analysis

As businesses pivot towards the digital market, the significant expenditure in the analysis of data will continue. The business analysis was No. 5 on the list of major projects for IT respondents and No. 3 in the technologies that they will get an increase in expenses over the next 12 months.

Having organized all your data, companies are now finding out how to use them effectively. At the same time, the analytical capabilities are being integrated into more and more applications and workflows for daily use, rather than being only available in separate tools.

The analysis also is infiltrating rapidly throughout the area of ​​machine learning, artificial intelligence and pattern recognition. This analysis can help discern patterns that are not apparent to humans.

The Wearables

While products like Google Glass and Apple Watch were announced with great fanfare, the reality is that companies are not willing to make practical use of the wearable systems, at least in the future foreseeable.

The wearable technology was last in the list of Forecast 2016 Computerworld survey, currently being evaluated in beta and pilot projects, with only 4% of respondents saying they had projects involving current wearables.

Moreover, 78% said they might work on wearable applications or anticipating the need to support wearables in the near future. And only 8% of these people said that the wearables would play a role in their commercial and technological operations while only 12% said they were adjusting their management strategies to include wearables mobile devices.

Wrong Misconception About Managed Service Providers and Why You Should Care For MSP

Some organizations are hesitant to outsource the management of their hosting to a specialist provider, but it can provide many benefits if you do so. Unfortunately, some misconceptions deter organizations to choose a Managed Service Provider (MSP). In this blog, we refute some of these misconceptions.

Management by an MSP is More Expensive Than Doing it Yourself

People often think it is costlier to outsource the management of their hosting to a managed service provider than to do it yourself within the organization. Where often inadequate about being considered is that it often costs more money to take their own qualified people who can do this work. Furthermore, these people are hard to find, because they are very much in demand in the industry. To cope with illness and leave, you need more than one person needed. These people must be continually trained by the rapid changes in the market.

When choosing an MSP, you can rest assured that there is always someone who solves the work for you, when you want. You save on recruitment and personnel, and you can be confident that the work is performed by a multidisciplinary team of experts.

Managed Services Are Only For Only Large Organizations

It is often thought that managed hosting is only intended for large organizations because thousands of dollars per month would cost to manage the services. One of the main features of a managed hosting provider’s is to offer this scalability and, therefore, affordable solutions for both small and large organizations. MSP provides efficient, clear communication and can provide customer-friendly services at a competitive price.

It Is Only All or Nothing

Some organizations believe outsourcing of hosting is only possible when one outsources everything. It is not real because you can also choose to outsource some and keep some in-house. You choose which services you want to reduce the service level that suits your organization.

managed_service_provider

A Private Location and Staff Provide Better Service

Before remote access, monitoring needs, and redundant cloud platforms were common, companies have their own location and its own staff possibly for better service. Today, this is largely superseded by the use of remote access cards, virtual consoles in cloud platforms and the redundant hardware infrastructure.

Incidentally, this does not mean that your own IT staff is redundant. On the contrary, many managed service providers work correctly closely with the staff of their clients and possibly also with third parties, such as developers. Organizations that extend the knowledge of their employees with the expertise of an MSP, often see an increase in the performance of their online business. By working as a team together, the strategy of the organization is managed, and the MSP provides the service and support.

All MSPs Deliver the Same, Only Different Prices

Many different parties managed hosting market, where prices vary widely. The term “managed hosting” is frequently used, but the service is supplied varies between suppliers. For a few bucks per month, you will, of course, get a different service than if you have a few hundred dollars a month to spend there. So it is important that you clearly have what you want exactly when you choose managed hosting.

DedicatedSolutions Managed Services Give You the Choice

The above misconceptions are just some examples of arguments that come forward not to opt for a managed service provider. If you choose managed hosting does it not mean that your platform and applications to be hosted on the infrastructure of the MSP.

DedicatedSolutions understand that each organization has different needs and requirements. We offer Custom Solutions that has a different focus and a different level of support. From a simple web server up to complex enterprise solutions such as database clusters, terminal server and communication software – we got you covered! We also offer custom consulting and implementation Services as part of our “Managed Services” offering.

Our network delivers 100% Uptime Guarantee with the best service to our customers while keeping the costs for our customers as low as possible. Through the combination of Tier III & Tier IV data center facilities, the ability to offer our customers multiple 10 Gig pipes at each location and only providing the best hardware possible, we can truly offer a 1000% uptime – guaranteed.