Industry Wrap № 5.
And that’s a wrap! Next Dimension curates the most practical and useful tools and strategic IT insights from the web.
This week we shared articles across our social media covering the following topics: Filling the Gap Between the Boardroom and Server room, Simplify Your Infrastructure and, IT Reliability and Security: Avoiding Stops.
Looking for details? Continue reading to see more.
Filling the gap between the boardroom and server room
Evaluating IT Asset Management can achieve cost savings of 20%. IT and the Boardroom should collaborate on these 10 techniques.
When business executives come together to reduce operating costs they evaluate their IT spending and cost drivers. They calculate how IT costs impact the delivery of IT services, as well as their effect on business costs and revenue. They can achieve cost savings within IT and throughout the organization, by focusing initiatives on 10 IT cost optimization techniques:
1. Implement shared services
2. Adopt a cloud-first policy where appropriate
3. Consolidate enterprise data centers
4. Rationalize and standardize enterprise applications
5. Improve IT financial transparency practices
6. Focus on IT demand-side spending for greater business cost optimization
7. Implement robotic process automation
8. Evaluate IT asset management practices
9. Evaluate digital business transformation ideas
10. Optimize the workforce
“As you determine which of the top 10 suggestions you can initiate or continue to gain short-term cost savings, consider how you will also want to institutionalize IT cost optimization as an ongoing discipline,” says Irma Fabular, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner.
Simplify Your Infrastructure: why try to do this yourself
Gartner offers 4 steps to simplify your infrastructure and thrive in a cloud-first world.
Across industries, the cloud continues to be one of the fastest-growing segments of IT spend. In the new era of cloud, cost optimization will be crucial. Multicloud strategies will warrant provider independence and address concentration risk. The presence of in-house cloud skills will be a key indicator of enterprise agility, including the ability to distribute cloud services where customers want to consume them, on-premises and on the edge.
These four factors will impact cloud adoption in 2020 and the steps that you can take to thrive in a cloud-first world:
1. Cost optimization will drive cloud adoption
2. Multicloud will reduce vendor lock-in
3. Insufficient cloud IAAS skills will delay migration
4. Distributed cloud will support expanded service availability
As a new decade begins, businesses should consider how these trends will influence their cloud adoption and migration plans for years to come, taking steps now to prepare their IT infrastructure for the future of the cloud.
Smart Manufacturing: Deloitte offers a phased approach to improving operational efficiency.
The COVID-19 pandemic has put extraordinary stress on global economies and highlighted as perhaps never before the importance of maintaining an agile supply chain and efficient manufacturing operations. By scaling smart factories across locations, manufacturers can adjust their production processes and product mixes to the volatile supply-demand drivers among plants. A network of smart factories could drive organizations’ overall competitiveness in the form of improved efficiencies and competitiveness that could be critical in the tough economic environment ahead.
In the article below these items will be discussed:
- Challenges associated with scaling smart factory solutions
- Implementation components and techniques to address the challenges and lead to scaled adoption of the solution
- Considerations to keep the scale successful
IT Reliability and Security: Avoiding Stops
Forward-thinking organizations will continue to shift their priorities to protect the agile workforce.
Even with security in question, not all businesses were not able to stop during the pandemic. Taking the time to strategize deployments, and forecast project outcomes is an indication of good cybersecurity. As companies hastily adopted tools to facilitate remote work, security, the IT component that often delays projects to ensure protection, had to keep pace.
Spending on network security equipment decreased by 12.6% from 2019 to 2020 as cloud-based security solutions increased to facilitate remote work. Spending on cloud security is expected to grow by 33.3% from 2019 to 2020. Some companies were forced to disable systems with the intention of re-enabling them later. But anytime a change is introduced to an environment, security is at risk. Prioritizing endpoint security and user authentication will take hold for the foreseeable future. Human behaviour and employee training will be emphasized as the physical security of an office are gone.
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