Poor cloud architecture and operations are killing cloud ROI
If the cloud did not ever have the potential to return ROI back to the business,
nobody would use it. However, there are businesses that are very successful with
cloud, even changing the business around the use of cloud computing. These
companies are leveraging cloud as a true force multiplier to build innovative
solutions, as well as to provide agility and scalability. However, many cannot
find business value with cloud computing. Most disturbing, they are not finding
value while spending about the same amount of money as those who are finding
value. We must therefore conclude that bad decisions are being made. Cloud
computing technology has been relevant for about 15 years. We understand it’s
what you do and your company culture that makes you truly successful with cloud
computing, not what you spend. Why are we still seeing winners and losers? ...
First, bad architectures need to be fixed before they can operate properly. You
can have a disciplined and highly automated operations team and technology
stack, but if the solution is poorly designed, the result is going to be less
than stellar, no matter what.
Innovation: Your solution for weathering uncertainty
Innovation has always been essential to long-term value creation and resilience
because it creates countercyclical and noncyclical revenue streams.
Paradoxically, making big innovation bets may now be safer than investing in
incremental changes. Our long-standing research shows that innovation success
rests on the mastery of eight essential practices. Five of these practices are
particularly important today: resetting the aspiration based on the viability of
current businesses, choosing the right portfolio of initiatives, discovering
ways to differentiate value propositions and move into adjacencies, evolving
business models, and extending efforts to include external partners. ... In
times of disruption or deep uncertainty, companies have to carefully balance
short-term innovations aimed at cost reductions and potential breakthrough bets.
As customers’ demands change, overindexing on small product tweaks (that address
needs which may be temporary) is unlikely to boost long-term performance.
However, “renovations” to designs and processes can produce savings that help
fund longer-term investments in innovations that may create routes to profitable
growth.
The Truth About Cybersecurity Challenges Facing the Healthcare Industry
In general, healthcare IT has accrued technical debt for more than 25 years.
Everywhere you look, whether it’s at the doctor’s office, hospital, or an urgent
care facility, you see disparate and often dated IT systems. It’s not as rare as
you’d think to see WindowsXP–based computers at the check-in desk and throughout
the facility. Many of the most common pieces of equipment and attached computer
systems run outdated operating systems, unpatched and archaic software, and have
little security on them. I promise you it’s not for lack of trying by the IT and
cyber-security team. So much outdated software exists largely because the
vendors that support these systems focus on the healthcare aspect, rather than
upkeep and security. In other instances, some devices were never intended to be
connected to a network — thus rendering them vulnerable to remote attacks
because they aren’t configured to be protected from network-based attackers.
Finally, there is certainly some “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality.
Walking around you’ll find computer systems under people’s desks that have
served a single purpose for a very long time.
Time to Look at the Role of the CISO Differently
It is time to stop searching for non-existent profiles, expecting the CISO to be
credible one day in front of the Board, the next in front of hackers, the third
in front of developers, and all the way across the depth and breadth of the
enterprise and its supply chain. Those profiles don’t exist anymore, given the
transversal complexity cyber security has developed over the past two decades.
The role of the CISO has to be one of a leader, structuring, organising,
delegating and orchestrating work across their team and across the firm — and
across the multiple third-parties involved in delivering or supporting the
business. In essence, knowing what to do is reasonably well established and
cyber security good practice — at large — still protects from most threats, and
still ensures a degree of compliance with most regulations. But by focusing
excessively on purely technical approaches to cyber security challenges, large
organizations have failed to protect themselves effectively and efficiently, in
spite of massive investments in that space over the last two decades.
MACH as an Enterprise Architecture strategy
MACH is an acronym for Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless.
It’s a modern approach for building and deploying software applications that can
help organizations to be more agile, scalable, and flexible. In a MACH
architecture, software applications are built as a collection of independent,
self-contained microservices that communicate with each other through APIs
(Application Programming Interfaces). The front-ends and back-ends components
are separated and the entire solution is designed to be deployed in the cloud.
... There are several benefits of using a MACH architecture for building and
deploying software applications:Agile development: MACH architectures allow
different parts of an application to be developed and deployed independently,
which can make it easier to make changes and updates without disrupting the
entire system. This can help organizations be more agile and responsive to
changing business needs. Scalability: MACH architectures are designed to be
deployed in a cloud computing environment, which can provide the scalability and
flexibility needed to support rapid growth or spikes in demand.
Maximizing data value while keeping it secure
Many organizations stumble and fail because they lack complete visibility into
all data assets in clouds and beyond. To take visibility to a higher level, it’s
vital to have a catalog of all managed and shadow assets, along with their
owners, locations, security and governance measures enabled for the data.
Without a central repository and a single view, there’s no way to know what data
exists, how it’s stored, where it’s used and how it’s shared. Essentially, an
organization winds up flying blind. Yet the advantages of robust discovery and
visibility don’t stop there. With this information it’s possible to adapt and
expand security profiles as needs and conditions change. ... Sharing data in the
cloud involves complexity and risk. That’s a given. To maximize the
opportunity—including harnessing the full functionality of cloud-native tools—an
organization must know who is accessing data and how they are using it.
Therefore, a robust identity management framework is crucial. Administrators and
others must be able to analyze roles and permission settings in data assets that
reside in clouds and across multi-cloud frameworks.
Top automation pitfalls and how to avoid them
Automating a bad process can make things worse as it can magnify or exacerbate
underlying issues, especially if humans are taken out of the loop. In some
cases, a process is automated because the technology is there, even if
automation isn’t required. For example, if a process occurs very rarely, or
there’s a great deal of variation in the process, then the cost of setting up
the automation, teaching it to handle every use case, and training employees how
to use it may be more expensive and time-consuming than the old manual approach.
And putting the entire decision into the hands of data scientists, who may be
far removed from the actual work, can easily send a company down a dead end, or
to end users who might not know how automation works, says James Matcher,
intelligent automation leader at Ernst & Young. That recently happened at a
company he worked with, a retail store chain with locations around the US. The
retailer approached people on the front lines, and employees and managers
working on the shop floors, for suggestions about manual processes that should
be automated.
What’s the role of the CTO in digital transformation?
A CTO needs to take on the role of the ‘bridge builder’ between the strictly
technical components of a transformation strategy and how they can apply to
people and process in the specific context of an organisation. Digital
transformation is a team activity. Each role needs to bring to the process their
full insights and experience for the CTO to manage. The CTO has specific
technological insight and therefore needs to be directly involved in helping the
entire organisation identify where technical systems are simply obsolete and not
fit for purpose so as well as being a bridge builder, CTOs naturally lead the
charge when dealing with a technology-led approach. They must be able to explain
where the value is in the application of technological change in context – too
often we see visions that are de-contextualised from the reality on the ground.
This kind of technological planning does not allow for realistic strategic
planning. With visions of the ambitious but feasible in sight it is then the
whole leadership team’s task to decide what course they are going to map out and
to work together on the digital transformation journey.
How Organizations Should Respond to the CircleCI Security Incident
CircleCI has taken proactive steps to mitigate risk for its customers, but
simply revoking secrets from the platform is not enough, according to Jaime
Blasco, co-founder and CTO of cybersecurity company Nudge Security. “It’s still
important to assume that every connected application and secret has been
compromised. Organizations should verify the steps that these vendors have taken
and also take steps to rotate secrets within any other connected application,”
he explains. Customers can leverage commercially available or open-source tools,
aside from the one offered by CircleCI, to discover their secrets. “One option
is to use Trufflehog, an open-source tool that scans for secrets across multiple
platforms, including CircleCI, Github, Gitlab, and AWS S3,” says Blasco.
CircleCI is assuming responsibility and taking steps to protect its customers,
Assaf Morag, lead data analyst at cloud native security company Aqua Security,
notes. But is important for customers to respond proactively to the security
incident as well.
Artificial intelligence in strategy
Every business probably has some opportunity to use AI more than it does today.
The first thing to look at is the availability of data. Do you have performance
data that can be organized in a systematic way? Companies that have deep data on
their portfolios down to business line, SKU, inventory, and raw ingredients have
the biggest opportunities to use machines to gain granular insights that humans
could not. Companies whose strategies rely on a few big decisions with limited
data would get less from AI. Likewise, those facing a lot of volatility and
vulnerability to external events would benefit less than companies with
controlled and systematic portfolios, although they could deploy AI to better
predict those external events and identify what they can and cannot control.
Third, the velocity of decisions matters. Most companies develop strategies
every three to five years, which then become annual budgets. If you think about
strategy in that way, the role of AI is relatively limited other than
potentially accelerating analyses that are inputs into the strategy.
Quote for the day:
"Effective questioning brings insight,
which fuels curiosity, which cultivates wisdom." -- Chip Bell
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