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CEOs play a number of vital roles in their organizations: leader, strategy setter, steward and primary visionary.
Achieving those leadership goals, strategic plans and visions are easier and more effective for CEOs who embrace one of the key enablers of business change today—cloud services.
In the current era of rapid and often unpredictable change, CEOs can find it difficult to keep their organizations relevant, profitable and competitive—corporate upheaval is often just one rival’s innovation or one unforeseen geopolitical or economic development away So what do you, the CEO, need to know about Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and how that can enable your organisation to transform for the digital business era?
It’s one thing to know that cloud computing offers so much for any business that wants to serve customers and stakeholders 24/7, from anywhere and via any device. But CEOs must also understand the complete business case for Software-as-a-Service—the financial impacts, risk aspects and other potential competitive advantages.
To fully comprehend all of the business implications of cloud computing, CEOs need to keep the following in mind: Continue reading
Most large enterprises run some form of legacy applications, for which updates and replacements can be costly and time-consuming, not to mention potentially risky. But failing to modernize out-of-date systems can ultimately damage app performance via slow runtime speeds and poor load balancing.
Many organizations have begun to take on modernization projects with containers, to gain benefits such as portability and scalability, better speed and resource management, and granular visibility. One of the primary challenges to modernization is to get the entire IT team on board, said Chris Gardner, senior analyst at Forrester.
Developers typically are ahead of the curve, while operations teams drag their feet to maintain a currently functional — and secure — architecture. Enterprises’ reliance on time-consuming manual processes and tools that were de rigueur with legacy applications also hinders modernization efforts. If a batch process is how you’ve always done things, and the application is stable because of this, sysadmins will be loath to change it — especially in a risk-averse industry such as finance or healthcare. But manual processes take up valuable time and leave room for error, a bottleneck that opens the door to automation.
Developers won’t naturally become ops people; it’s not in their nature, Gardner said. They need to continue to focus on delivering apps and user experiences as quickly as possible. Instead, systems administrators must become developers to revitalize production support for applications. They also must emphasize proven ops processes while adopting new methods, such as infrastructure as code. Continue reading
Enterprises need software competency to deliver good digital experiences. Agile development is how enterprises get there. Every software development organization today seems to practice the agile software development methodology or a version of it. Or at least they believe they do. – Modern software development 
Whether you are new to application development or learned about software development decades ago using the waterfall software development methodology, today your work is at least influenced by the agile methodology.
But what exactly is agile methodology, and how should it be practiced in software development?
Agile was formally launched in 2001 when 17 technologists drafted the Agile Manifesto. They wrote four major principles for developing better software:
Old hands like me remember the days when the waterfall methodology was the gold standard for software development. The software development process required a ton of documentation up front before any coding was done. Someone first wrote a business requirements document that captured everything the business needed for the application. These documents were long, detailing everything: strategy comprehensive functional specifications, and visual user interface designs. Continue reading
Where Do Core Applications Belong? IT leaders are caught in a dilemma when it comes to deployment of core 
enterprise applications. One side is continuing the expensive and time-intensive effort to maintain and adapt legacy applications, even though it seems they increasingly hinder business activity rather than help it. – Enterprise Applications
The other side is adopting new applications that run in the cloud—an environment that offers promising potential, but is also unfamiliar and may be perceived as risky. Until recently, enterprises used the cloud only for new applications or for those specific to an individual department or business unit. Now, with the growing strength of cloud application offerings, enterprises are starting to consider replacing the core applications traditionally hosted in on-premises systems and put those in the cloud, too.
The success of any move to the cloud depends in part on the architecture that underlies the cloud service or application. When looking at potential cloud solutions for core systems, it is important to understand the different cloud architectures and how they impact application capabilities and performance—and the difference that makes for migration from current systems. Continue reading
Application Architectures: for many organizations, the existing architecture, and systems that support customer- or employee-facing apps are outdated and cannot be scaled or built upon as quickly as required by today’s realities—especially when it comes to
supporting the demands of mobile and the Internet of Things (IoT).
Companies may want to develop new apps, create new customer experiences or expose data to partners or third-party developers, but tremendous improvements to infrastructure, process, management, connectivity, and security are needed to support that plan. This problem is exacerbated when working with partners that use different protocols and databases, making it difficult to connect efficiently.
A new digital transformation layer is needed to help benefit from investments in mobile and IoT, integrate new acquisitions or optimize the partner supply chain. Continue reading
Messaging apps and mobile services from companies like Zinc and Crew are springing up to help connect workers 
not bound to a desk with colleagues in the office.
Office-based employees have a wealth of software tools available to keep them connected with colleagues and the wider business. Even those working remotely can easily stay in touch with their team through email, enterprise social networks, and group messaging tools such as Slack.
That’s not always the case for deskless workers – the vast, yet the underserved chunk of the workforce that tends to fall outside the scope of IT, according to Stacey Epstein, CEO of enterprise messaging app vendor Zinc.
Zinc specifically targets employees in non-office-based roles. They could be anything from emergency workers to construction laborers, nurses, retail workers or service technicians – employees who usually own a smartphone but don’t routinely require access to core business applications.
“Deskless workers are doing their job by fixing something in the field or helping a customer at a hotel desk or a retail store, or if they are in healthcare they are seeing a patient,” said Epstein. “They are not sitting in front of a computer or an office where they can hop into a conference room or even have an impromptu team or group meeting.
“So these workers are inherently siloed from the people and the knowledge that help them do a good job,” she said.
Deskless workers have different technology requirements than typical office workers, said 451 Research senior analyst Raul Castañón-Martínez. They don’t use a computer as their main device to do their job and communications are often sent via text or consumer apps such as WhatsApp. Continue reading
AWS (Amazon Web Services) offers advantages for applications in each of the top five use cases for cloud migration cited by survey respondents:
AWS helps run Microsoft applications such as SharePoint, Dynamics, and Exchange with greater security, easier 
management, and higher performance, respondents say. “Using AWS makes it easy for us to resize [Microsoft Exchange] instances and increase storage without having to go through a lengthy procurement cycle,” says Tom Bentzen, director of information systems for Choice Logistics, a global warehousing, and parts logistics company.
AWS offers a complete range of storage services to support both application and archival requirements. Continue reading
Organizations migrating applications to public IaaS providers must continue to deliver an outstanding end-user experience while 
maintaining security, visibility, and control. F5 application and security services can achieve these goals while providing agility, consistent… Continue reading