Blogs

The insights that Paul shares regarding testing hosted desktops as part of a digital workspace strike me as an essential requirement as businesses consider scaling their environment beyond what they have ever planned. 

I think of Login VSI as the standard for testing hosted desktops and a way IT pros can help predict user experience while deploying at scale with confidence. Listen as Paul and I chat through the digital workspace ecosystem and how Login VSI is helping customers succeed with their strategies. 

ESG recently completed its annual technology spending intentions survey of 664 senior IT decision makers at midmarket (i.e., 100 to 999 employees) and enterprise (i.e., 1,000 or more employees) organizations across North America and Western Europe. As part of that research, respondents with purchasing influence or authority for networking products and services were asked about their organization’s networking spending plans over the next 12 months, and the results were published in the ESG brief, Network Spending Trends for 2021 (only available to ESG clients).

Big data estates, advanced analytics and insights, and the democratization of artificial intelligence (AI) are accelerating digital transformations aimed at harnessing the value of data across the business landscape. It is especially prominent in financial services, healthcare, and consumer services where customer experience reigns (and an unfortunate feeding ground for fraud and abuse).

This week, IBM announced several enhancements to its storage portfolio. While there was a lot of good stuff in there, IBM’s new Spectrum Fusion offering deserves a deeper conversation. My colleague Paul Nashawaty covered some of the value it offers in his blog. I wanted to take a step back, however, and look at IBM Spectrum Fusion as it relates to the overall direction of IT storage and Infrastructure.

When digital initiatives evolve in the data center, so too should your ability to choose how you consume IT resources. The desire to move to the cloud has some IT leaders intrigued, yet they continue to look into ways to maximize their existing IT investment and bridge the gap to get to the cloud. This has many IT leaders not moving to the cloud just yet but preferring to buy infrastructure via a consumption-based model such as a monthly subscription based on resource utilization for their on-premises data center.

IBM’s Eric Herzog, Chief Evangelist and Vice President of Worldwide Storage Channels, briefed us at ESG on the recent IBM Storage announcement launch focused on modernization infrastructure for the edge, core, and hybrid cloud. This post will cover key elements in this launch where IBM’s focus is on Spectrum Fusion HCI and the importance of edge, core, and hybrid cloud as well as simplifying Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes.

The way we interact with content is changing; however, the systems that contain the data are also evolving. Historically, the approach to connecting with businesses was through a website and web pages, often from a laptop. Now, the interaction is much more dynamic. But interaction with web content is only part of the story. Businesses connecting with their customers often require multiple ways of engagement. This can be through a web page, but also through mobile, tablets, watches, and other IoT devices such as beacons. Obviously, the shift of data distribution has evolved and the delivery of content also needs to evolve.

Digital workspaces, a term adopted by internal IT organizations to describe projects, are often shaped and defined based on what a technology vendor can map to from a technology or solution perspective. I am a proponent of digital workspaces and was pleased to see multiple companies come together in an effort to put consistency behind digital workspaces. Full details on the Alliance can be seen here: Ten Tech Leaders Form the Digital Workspace Ecosystem Alliance to Help Organizations Navigate Remote & Hybrid Work Solutions

Now that we are within a month of the RSA conference, the security diaspora must prepare itself for a cacophony of hyperbole around three industry initiatives: Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), eXtended Detection and Response (XDR), and zero trust.

Yup, all three areas are innovative and extremely promising, but a bit overwhelming as well. Look for more from me on SASE and zero trust in the coming weeks. For now, we'll focus on XDR.

When is a midrange storage array not a midrange storage array? When it can break down the traditional definitions of storage arrays. Given the state of modern IT, it is time to do away with labels such as entry-level or midrange for storage technology. That is an antiquated way of classifying technologies. And the Dell Technologies PowerStore is an excellent case in point. At first glance, someone might think of the PowerStore as just another midrange array, but that would be a huge mistake.

Join me and Scott Sinclair as we speak in this latest 3-minute video about the impact of digital transformation on IT infrastructure, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), and the state of artificial intelligence.

In March 2021, Lenovo announced new offerings that provide new ways for clients to accelerate computing with their Lenovo TruScale Services, which enables flexible consumption of server resources. The purpose of this launch was to accelerate real-time insights from the edge to the cloud; incorporate eighteen new ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile systems in the portfolio by expanding AMD’s family of third generation EPYC microprocessors, including eight new ThinkSystem V2 servers updated with third generation Intel Xeon scalable processors; and deliver ready-to-deploy analytics and AI offerings with SAS edge analytics, city security AI with Addfor, and scalable machine learning with cnvrg.io.

We all understand that zero trust is a complex initiative. There’s a wide array of use cases, supporting technologies, starting points, and strategy options. On the bright side, one of the keys to succeeding with zero trust remains something companies arguably have the most control over – collaboration across the organization. The less encouraging news? These cross-functional relationships could be better.

A newly released ESG Brief gives insights into how IT professionals are feeling about in-person conferences and other events that have been such a lynchpin of their (and their vendors') marketing, educational, and entertainment calendars for decades...and which have essentially all been replaced by online events since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. You can read the ESG Brief here. The ambivalence of the results was perhaps predictable. While it took a while for us to all settle into the "new normal" it has also made us both long for and question the "old normal." There is value in each. It will be interesting to see how things shake out as COVID—at least as a pandemic—"passes" and we all (vendors, end-users, and commentators) have a genuine choice.

I have been tracking the progress and success of HYCU for the past 3 years or so. The company has consistently delivered on its roadmap and expanded its platform well beyond the original focus on Nutanix. Its leadership team with Simon Taylor at the helm resisted the (I am safely guessing) many temptations for an equity event these past few years—until recently with last week's announcement of an $87.5m series A round. This is significant.

As the old security adage goes, “A well-managed network/system is a secure network/system, and this notion of network and system management is a cybersecurity foundation. Pick any framework (i.e., NIST Cybersecurity framework), international standard (i.e., ISO 27000), best practice (i.e., CIS 20 Critical Controls) or professional certification (i.e. CISSP), and much of the guidelines presented will be about security hygiene and posture management.

The identity and access management ecosystem has come a long way in the past decade, invigorated by cloud identity, customer identity, mobile identity, and open identity standards. Industry incumbents and cloud providers have made significant investments to support scalable, distributed, multi-factor enabled and decentralized identity systems.

In my first (and exciting) week at ESG, I met with a series of sharp-minded entrepreneurs and newly funded startups that are tackling the complexities of authorization, access governance, and multi-cloud identity orchestration.

The topic of network and security convergence has been front and center in the industry over the last year. The line between networking and security continues to blur, with collaboration increasing across traditionally siloed IT functions and technologies used by these teams continuing to inch closer together. One of the more notable initiatives is secure access service edge (SASE), and both enterprises and vendors alike are now embarking on their SASE journey.

This week Cisco held its annual customer event, Cisco Live, for its global audience. With over 100,000 attendees from over 200 countries, this may be one of the best attended Cisco Live events. Despite most organizations having to work from home over the past year, it certainly hasn’t slowed down the innovation and productivity from the Cisco engineers. The theme of this year’s event was Turn IT Up, something that organizations across the globe have been doing since the pandemic hit and Cisco was quick to call out the IT heroes that worked tirelessly to transition to work-from-home environments and enable businesses to continue operations.

In a recent briefing with George Crump, Chief Marketing Officer of StorONE, we learned about Seagate and StorONE's latest offering that is designed to provide affordable high-performance and high-capacity storage solutions. The offering from StorONE, which became available in early March 2021 and features Seagate’s drives, was created specifically with a focus on databases, virtualization video surveillance, file, backup, and archive capability.