What is Your 2017 Business Strategy?

December 26, 2016 / G C Network / Comments Off on What is Your 2017 Business Strategy?

Getting Your Network in the Cloud

By G C Network | May 25, 2016

Join us with Virtual Newsmakers on Saturday, May 28th at 11:00am for a YouTube Livestream on cloud computing. Virtual Newsmakers is a webcast show featuring virtual newsmakers, who are bridging…

Enterprise Networking in a Cloud World

By G C Network | May 17, 2016

Enterprises must rethink network management in the cloud computing world. This new reality is driven by the rise of software defined networking, the virtualization of everything and a business imperative…

The Game of Clouds 2016

By G C Network | May 13, 2016

In the mythical, medieval land of AWS, a civil war brews between the several noble Cloud Services over rulership. Meanwhile, across the sea, the former controlling dynasty, Traditional IT, attempts…

10 Ways to Flash Forward

By G C Network | May 7, 2016

Not to long ago I was honored to be included as a storage expert in the Dell ebook, “10 Ways to Flash Forward: Future-Ready Storage Insights from the Experts.” This…

The Future of Storage

By G C Network | April 28, 2016

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of doing a Blab on advanced storage with Daniel Newman and Eric Vanderburg.  We covered some pretty interesting points on enterprise storage…

DevOps and Hybrid Infrastructure Synergy

By G C Network | April 3, 2016

(This post first appeared in IBM’s Point B and Beyond) The definition of DevOps emphasizes collaboration and communication between software developers and other IT professionals while automating the software delivery…

Are electronic medical records worth it?

By G C Network | March 23, 2016

The use of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) by medical professionals has increased dramatically. According to HealthIT.gov, 2015 statistics show that 56 percent of all U.S. office-based physicians (MD/DO) have demonstrated meaningful use…

Finding a Framework for Hybrid Cloud Risk Management

By G C Network | March 6, 2016

 (Sponsored by IBM. Originally published on Point B and Beyond) Hybrid cloud is rapidly becoming essential to today’s information technology processes. This is why hybrid cloud risk management has become…

Cancer, cloud and privacy shield

By G C Network | February 23, 2016

(Originally published in Dell PowerMore) For more than 10 years, the rapid rise of cloud computing has enabled an even more rapid application of cloud to genomic medicine. In fact,…

Hybrid Cloud Versus Hybrid IT: What’s the Hype?

By G C Network | February 3, 2016

(Originally posted on Point B and Beyond) Once again, the boardroom is in a bitter battle over what edict its members will now levy on their hapless IT organization. On…

Photo credit: Shutterstock


End of year predictions in December are as predictable as tomorrow’s sunrise, but a recent video on 2017 Technology Trends helped me really understand how important a digital transformation strategy is to just about any business executive. The CSC Town Hall conversation actually identified some of the specific tasks that today’s corporate executive really need to address in the coming year. To enhance your opportunity for 2017 business success, your action item list should include:

  • Reconfiguring both corporate front and back office operations for digital execution which is expected to reshape organizational structures, employee compensation models and every business’ partner community;
  • Preparing for intelligent machines advisory services to the enterprise that will drastically increase productivity and business competition;
  • Leveraging the industrial internet, aka the Internet of Things, that will use sensor cross connectivity to improve human safety and machine productivity
  • Dealing with radically new and culturally driven business innovations that originate from the East Asian “Sinosphere”
  • Using simplified cloud computing platforms that will drive 80% of all corporate information technology into public cloud platforms by 2020; and
  • Capturing the value proposition of the truly interactive virtual experience and digital interface for enhanced user experience and worker productivity

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To survive these imminent changes, corporations must identify new transformational business opportunities within the context of their specific industry vertical and competitive landscape. This requires much improved collaboration between business and technology leaders around developing an explicit linkage between the cloud computing economic model and the relevant business economic model. This linkage will inevitably include the effective use of virtual IT operational models that include dynamic infrastructure provisioning, infrastructure auto-scaling, application microservices and serverless computing. Preparing for these changes may also require a rethinking of your core business because customer experience design may actually drive your business success. Since quality experiences are based on customer empathy, business analytics, and cognitive technology, a successful business strategy may need to blend all of those capabilities. This also means having an ability to engage with both your customers and employees in meaningful ways, no matter where they happen to be.


Your corporate information technology team itself will also need to deal with an extremely rapid shift from technology operations to robust and automated IT service management. The coming transition to a public cloud dominated IT industry landscape also will also demand corporate strategies around:
  • Matching cloud deployment and service model options to organizational risk tolerance;
  • Enhancing organizational expertise on cloud computing through an increased training investment strategy; and
  • Preventing digital operations failures due to an inability to monitor and enforce the necessarily strict IT governance models.

One final thought. Organizational risk tolerance levels may also need some significant recalibration because it only takes one successful “fail-fast” entrepreneur to reshape an entire industry. Chief financial officers and chief risk officers need to take a holistic approach that integrates business risk management and performance management, including compliance where required, as part of the overall business strategy and execution. In addressing this need, external risk management services may be the key to evolving your company from basic compliance and ad-hoc responses, to optimized business risk management, in which the value of risk management far outweighs the costs. 

This post was brought to you by IBM Global Technology Services. For more content like this, visit ITBizAdvisor.com.

Cloud Musings

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