From the Desk of Pete Elliot

Here We Go Again!

This January we still stand at the threshold of the second decade of the 21st century. What’s to come in that decade is anybody’s guess. In our last INsights newsletter, Lief Morin, President at Key Info, wrote:

“It is the Hybrid Cloud that will represent the truest view of the future. The reality is that most applications and most organizations are still creating their Private Cloud visions.” The transition from Private Cloud to Hybrid Cloud will take some time and effort. But it certainly looks like Cloud Computing will be the distinguishing technological shift of the current decade.

Improvements to human interfaces to computing resources represent another major technology shift that is well underway. Then there are storage requirements that grow to enormous proportions. Aided by Cloud Storage, this will be another huge growth area. Currently this phenomena carries the label Big Data and will become more commonplace as the capturing of data in all sorts of unstructured forms becomes commonplace.

Behind all of this lies the Internet--expanding, bloated, at risk and in the center of controversy and facilitating social networking in an unimaginable number of forms yet to come. Lying over all these changes is the big bugaboo of our industry, computer security. With every change, both today and to come, security becomes more difficult

Our second annual CIO Retreat last September returned to the most critical issues facing IT today. Leading experts were on hand to provide their insight into these known critical issues (above.) 

But, in addition, real value was derived from the visibility given to issues that most concerned the CIOs present. These included: managing security in a changing IT environment; dealing with huge increases in data (Big Data) and how to best exploit the information it contains (Business Analytics); and managing social networking activities being implemented in the enterprise by others outside IT (including such topics as the impact of Social Media on enterprise security, dealing with mobility, how the Cloud can make companies more competitive, and CIO as innovator.) Finally, of great interest to all was the notion that plans to deal with these threats and promises have to be closely integrated with the overall goals of the organization.

Understanding our dynamic IT world is our greatest challenge at Key Info. Determining how we can deliver outstanding value in this context is our mission. Much of our education program for 2012 will be focused on imparting our understanding of these areas of great change to you, our clients, and listening carefully to your needs as they change throughout the 2nd decade of the 21st century.

Pete

Marketing Director, Key Info

PS: As we go to press, IBM has announced a huge breakthrough in storage and data-representation technology, reducing the number of atoms it takes to store a bit from 1 million to just 12. The implication will change the way we think of data storage.

For more about Key Information Systems go to our website at www.keyinfo.com.