Blogs

At this year’s Pure Accelerate we were offered a glimpse into the future of data storage. Contrary to what you might expect, the event didn’t center on some new array or a new version of flash. Rather, the focus was on how Pure is transforming the way it delivers storage technology, how its storage supports modern application environments, and how its customers consume and manage its storage.

Recently, I had the pleasure of attending an analyst briefing with Ben Bolles, Vice President of Products; and Mike Koponen, Senior Director, Product Marketing and Strategic Alliances, at Pivot3 discussing their latest launch. It was interesting to see the advances in the hyperconverged infrastructure space and the differentiation Pivot3 is bringing to market.

When we look at Pivot3’s core areas, it is clear they are competing in a large market, but they keep the focus on video surveillance. This is a market segment that is clearly gaining adoption, not only at the data center core but also at the edge and in the cloud.

Commvault is celebrating its 25^th birthday and what a ride it has been so far! I have to admit that Commvault has a special place in my heart because I pretty much started in this space at the same time and have known the company as a partner and then as a (fringe) competitor for many years when I was on the vendor side.

The past couple of years are really the most important, in my view, as they totally changed the game for the company. I blogged about this a few times in the past. (Check out my blogs here.)

Commvault’s strategy was revisited by CEO Sanjay Mirchandani, with the effect of fundamentally changing the company’s portfolio, but more importantly its future prospects for many years to come in line with what I see as the fundamental market trend of intelligent data management.

IBM Think! 2021 delivered a number of areas IT leaders may want to consider with new and existing initiatives and infrastructure deployments. This year’s event amplified the importance of growth in artificial intelligence as it relates to IBM Cloud Pak, digital transformation and digital business models, IBM Watson Orchestrate self-service automation, public and hybrid cloud, and application and infrastructure modernization, to say the least. Our research at ESG aligns nicely to the messages IBM delivered this year. Listen as Mark Peters, ESG Practice Director; Scott Sinclair, ESG Senior Analyst; Mike Leone, ESG Senior Analyst, and I discuss and share our thoughts on this year’s IBM Think! 2021 event.

Last week’s Executive Order by President Biden provided a glimpse into each branch of government’s cybersecurity accountabilities and a strong declarative on the mandatory use of foundational security tools.

In part, the Fact Sheet says: “The Executive Order helps move the Federal government to secure cloud services and a zero-trust architecture, and mandates deployment of multifactor authentication and encryption with a specific time period. The Federal government must lead the way and increase its adoption of security best practices, including by employing a zero-trust security model, accelerating movement to secure cloud services, and consistently deploying foundational security tools such as multifactor authentication and encryption.”

I’ve been blogging about what the “big 3” topics at this year’s (virtual) RSA conference should be. I started with a blog about XDR, followed by another about zero trust. My final blog of this series looks at what CISOs want to hear about SASE at RSA.

Why SASE? Because:

One may think that the pace of cloud innovation and changing consumption models have simplified life for IT professionals. However, ESG's annual Technology Spending Intentions Survey highlighted that 75% of organizations believe IT complexity has increased over the last 2 years. Dell Technologies World was packed with announcements and information to help IT professionals address this complexity and transform operations. Listen in as Mark Peters, Practice Director; Kevin Rhone, Director ESG Channel Acceleration; Scott Sinclair, ESG Senior Analyst; and I share our thoughts on the event and the potential Dell is creating with Apex.

Doug Cahill and I had the opportunity to discuss some of the operating dynamics in today's IT organizations and how the pressure of embracing cloud innovation is creating the opportunity for distributed cloud environments. What is distributed cloud? Simply put, distributed cloud is a connected ecosystem of cloud services, developer-ready infrastructure, and legacy IT that provides consistent operations for modern applications. Listen in as Doug and I explore the importance of distributed cloud and its potential impact in the market.

Effectively addressing national emergencies and times of crisis has always required private and public sector collaboration. The most recent and obvious example being the development and delivery of COVID-19 vaccines. And like COVID-19, ransomware attacks cross borders, necessitating a coordinated national and international response by government agencies and technology leaders.

This month, as we head toward RSA Conference USA 2021, where  more than 40,000 security practitioners are usually all buzzing throughout the Moscone Center in San Francisco, we will all be signing in to virtual sessions instead. And just like last year, compromised credentials continue to be one of, if not the top vector for breach, fraud, and theft. These stories are in the news daily.

2021 is poised to be a transformational year for Dell Technologies, with Dell Technologies APEX playing the lead role. At this year’s Dell Technologies World, Dell announced the availability of what is expected to just be the start of a broad portfolio of managed IT services. Combined with the announced spin off of both VMware and Boomi, Dell Technologies is finding its focus—a focus I expect will lead to benefits for both Dell and its customers, but there is still much to be done.

The focus at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2021 demonstrated that containers and Kubernetes is growing up—fast! The adoption of Kubernetes and its overall business impact, along with how the growth of applications and cloud adoption expands beyond the developer, was a key message at the event. Kubernetes has been ready and is expanding its presence in the overall business ecosystem, with deployments both in the cloud and at the edge.

It's always good to catch up with Jeremy. We had very similar starts (a story for another blog) to our careers in IT. I'm always impressed with how tuned in Jeremy is with IT professionals and his constant drive to innovate in this digital workspace market. 

HPE made a big announcement this week on the data storage front, introducing Unified DataOps. At a high level, I am a big supporter of innovation along the lines of what HPE is doing—namely, providing technologies that fuel the transition from buying systems to realizing positive business outcomes. That’s because more and more, I see business leaders trying to achieve two seemingly conflicting goals:

As organizations grapple with ongoing data ecosystem complexity, the key question being asked is: how can organizations take back control of their data ecosystem and enable more people to better leverage data that matters to them? I believe it starts with data empowerment for all the key data stakeholders throughout the business, including both experts and generalists alike. Organizations need help in ensuring the right people are empowered to do their jobs more effectively and not get inundated with tasks that fall outside of their job descriptions. While this is true across the entire business from IT and operations teams to business analysts and developers, an area that continues to have a spotlight put on it is the data team, consisting of data engineers, data scientists, and ML engineers.

April showers bring May flowers, and this year’s RSA Conference. Usually there’s one topic at RSA that everyone is talking about but this year there will likely be 3: secure access service edge (SASE), eXtended detection and response (XDR), and zero trust. In my last blog, I described 8 things security executives want to hear about XDR. This one focuses on zero trust.