After nearly 2 years of what can accurately be described as 'defensive IT,' marked by reductions in staff, frozen or reduced budgets, and other recession-fueled austerity measures, things are starting to change. In many IT departments, the concept of taking the offensive and supporting renewed growth is back.
The question then comes up in the minds of many IT decision makers, “Which technologies or solutions deserve my closest attention; which will have the biggest bang for the buck?”
I believe that data management and cloud computing are two such areas that should command a lot of attention. The sheer volume of company data is doubling by reliable estimates every 2 years. Further, the nature of that data is changing, including more video, voice, email and other so-called unstructured data. It is vital that IT gets its hands around managing this data explosion before it swamps the organisation with complexity and high cost.
The Chitale Dairy in India, featured on page 18, is a great example of a company that outgrew its IT infrastructure at a time its executives were seeking a tighter alignment between IT and the business. I really liked the way Chitale focused on storage virtualisation and cloud computing to address both of these common challenges while positioning the company for growth.
When it comes to cloud computing, we may well be at the dawn of a great unfolding of cloud over the next several years. But which applications typically are the most cloud-ready? What is the relationship between the cloud and all the virtualisation efforts of the last several years? The feature article on page 24 answers these and many other pressing questions about the rapidly emerging world of cloud computing.
With the aforementioned stories and the rest of this issue of Catalyst, I hope we can help you move your organisation forward in the most responsible way possible.
The question then comes up in the minds of many IT decision makers, “Which technologies or solutions deserve my closest attention; which will have the biggest bang for the buck?”
I believe that data management and cloud computing are two such areas that should command a lot of attention. The sheer volume of company data is doubling by reliable estimates every 2 years. Further, the nature of that data is changing, including more video, voice, email and other so-called unstructured data. It is vital that IT gets its hands around managing this data explosion before it swamps the organisation with complexity and high cost.
The Chitale Dairy in India, featured on page 18, is a great example of a company that outgrew its IT infrastructure at a time its executives were seeking a tighter alignment between IT and the business. I really liked the way Chitale focused on storage virtualisation and cloud computing to address both of these common challenges while positioning the company for growth.
When it comes to cloud computing, we may well be at the dawn of a great unfolding of cloud over the next several years. But which applications typically are the most cloud-ready? What is the relationship between the cloud and all the virtualisation efforts of the last several years? The feature article on page 24 answers these and many other pressing questions about the rapidly emerging world of cloud computing.
With the aforementioned stories and the rest of this issue of Catalyst, I hope we can help you move your organisation forward in the most responsible way possible.
 | Mark Moebius, |
