IT budgets shift away from capital expenses thanks to the cloud

IT organizations are enjoying a slow but steady increase in budgets, but their capital expenses and hiring trends are essentially flat, reflecting the effect of the shift to cloud computing. That’s the takeaway from Computer Economics’ annual IT Spending and Staffing Benchmarks study for 2017/2018. The study finds that the greatest effect has been a decrease in the total amount of spending that goes toward the capital budget."Unless you are an IT equipment manufacturer, this is good news," said David Wagner, vice president of research at Computer Economics in a statement. "The cloud transition is far from over, and we're already seeing more efficient IT departments, particularly on a cost-per-user basis, which is at a new low. Business applications and network infrastructure are the top areas of new IT spending, while the data center, for the first time, is at the bottom. We take this as a sign the cloud transformation is continuing in earnest."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IT budgets shift away from capital expenses thanks to the cloud

IT organizations are enjoying a slow but steady increase in budgets, but their capital expenses and hiring trends are essentially flat, reflecting the effect of the shift to cloud computing. That’s the takeaway from Computer Economics’ annual IT Spending and Staffing Benchmarks study for 2017/2018. The study finds that the greatest effect has been a decrease in the total amount of spending that goes toward the capital budget."Unless you are an IT equipment manufacturer, this is good news," said David Wagner, vice president of research at Computer Economics in a statement. "The cloud transition is far from over, and we're already seeing more efficient IT departments, particularly on a cost-per-user basis, which is at a new low. Business applications and network infrastructure are the top areas of new IT spending, while the data center, for the first time, is at the bottom. We take this as a sign the cloud transformation is continuing in earnest."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Partnerships among many paths to fintech tipping point

Fintech adoption and revenue have grown quickly and consistently enough to inspire some hand-wringing by banks and on their behalf, and to prompt speculation not just about which company will be the next unicorn, but how finance will react, and how the fintech industry as a whole will develop.Media coverage seeking the next dominant power — a fintech version of Amazon — may miss an important trend underlying the fintech industry growth. Fintech companies have tended to succeed through partnership and collaboration, reaching new markets and expanding services by finding mutual benefit with another company.“The fintech industry will only continue to grow, and this will be aided by an influx of collaborations between financial institutions and fintech companies to come,” wrote Alice Chen in a blog post for Due, a digital wallet for payments online.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tackling Computational Fluid Dynamics in the Cloud

Cloud computing isn’t just for running office productivity software or realising your startup idea. It can support high-performance computing (HPC) applications that crunch through large amounts of data to produce actionable results.

Using elastic cloud resources to process data in this way can have a real business impact. What might one of these applications look like, and how could the cloud support it?

Let’s take buildings as an example. London’s ‘Walkie Talkie’ skyscraper has suffered from a bad rap of late. First it gave the term ‘hot wheels’ a whole new meaning, melting cars by inadvertently focusing the sun’s rays …

Tackling Computational Fluid Dynamics in the Cloud was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Worth Reading: Ego is the enemy

When you hear the word enemy, you probably think about regular expressions, bugs, deployments, meetings, and deadlines. Actually, in our quest to reach our goals and become the software developers we want to be, we are usually our own worst enemies. Ego is what prevents us from asking for help, learning, collaborating and working hard. Here with ego we are referring to the unhealthy belief in our own importance: our arrogance and our self-centered ambition. That petulant child in every person who chooses to win all the time and at the expense of others. —Free Code Camp

The post Worth Reading: Ego is the enemy appeared first on rule 11 reader.

The First IoT Culling: My Devices are Dying.

 

Cull: to reduce the population of (a wild animal) by selective slaughter

As an early adopter of technology, I sometimes feel like I get to live in the future. Or as William Gibson said “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed”. There are a lot of benefits to be gained from this, but there are also risks.  One of the biggest risks is 

How long is the product you choose going to be around?

 

I was an early adopter in the first wave of IoT devices, from wearables to home convenience devices, I dipped my toes in the pool early. Most of these platforms were Kickstarter projects and I’ve been generally happy with most of them, at least the ones that were actually delivered. ( That’s a story for another time…).

But in the last six months, the market seems to have decided that there are just too many of these small companies.

The Death Bells are Ringing

In the last year, I’ve noticed that there’s starting to be a trend. Many of the early platforms that I invested in seem to be disappearing. Some have been bought off and killed. Remember the Pebble watches which Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: What have we learned from WannaCry?

Ransomware has been a growing threat for a couple of years now. More than 4,000 ransomware attacks have occurred every day since the beginning of 2016, according to an FBI report. So, it was no surprise to find it in the headlines again recently. The WannaCry ransomware attack proved to be one of the most successful and widespread to date -- it took a single day to infect more than 230,000 computers across more than 150 countries.WannaCry was able to spread so effectively because of a known vulnerability that Microsoft patched back in March. Organizations that fell victim had failed to patch, and many lacked basic security protections and working backups. Analyzing in the aftermath it’s clear that we have a problem. We already know exactly how to guard against ransomware, the problem is that many organizations aren’t doing it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Don’t Build Big Data With Bad Data

I was at Pure Accelerate 2017 this week and I saw some very interesting things around big data and the impact that high speed flash storage is going to have. Storage vendors serving that market are starting to include analytics capabilities on the box in an effort to provide extra value. But what happens when these advances cause issues in the training of algorithms?

Garbage In, Garbage Out

One story that came out of a conversation was about training a system to recognize people. In the process of training the system, the users imported a large number of faces in order to help the system start the process of differentiating individuals. The data set they started with? A collection of male headshots from the Screen Actors Guild. By the time the users caught the mistake, the algorithm had already proven that it had issues telling the difference between test subjects of particular ethnicities. After scrapping the data set and using some different diverse data sources, the system started performing much better.

This started me thinking about the quality of the data that we are importing into machine learning and artificial intelligence systems. The old computer adage of “garbage in, garbage Continue reading

50% off Grand Theft Auto V for PlayStation 4 and XBox One – Deal Alert

When a young street hustler, a retired bank robber and a terrifying psychopath find themselves entangled with some of the most frightening and deranged elements of the criminal underworld, the U.S. government and the entertainment industry, they must pull off a series of dangerous heists to survive in a ruthless city in which they can trust nobody, least of all each other. Explore the stunning world of Los Santos and Blaine County in the ultimate Grand Theft Auto V experience, featuring a range of technical upgrades and enhancements for new and returning players. The list price of this highly rated game has been reduced 50% to just $29.99. See it on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: The rise and rise of the IT chief of staff

At two-thirds of companies today, a senior IT leader is working on the next draft of the IT strategy, or perhaps revising a workforce plan in preparation for a transformation. After that, he or she might chase down some red flags on the monthly IT scorecard or meet with a finance leader to discuss a budget update. And before leaving for the day, this leader might draft a monthly IT team newsletter or put the finishing touches on a deck for an upcoming all-hands meeting.Who is this person, the CIO?No, it’s the IT chief of staff.The CIO role is changing fast as they get involved in product technology, help to shape digital strategy and build digital acumen across the company. The only way CIOs can find time to do these things is to delegate many of the IT management and governance tasks that have traditionally filled much of their calendars.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Improving on history—the Linux history command, that is

The Linux history command allows users to repeat commands without retyping them and to look over a list of commands they've recently used, but that's just the obvious stuff. It is also highly configurable, allows you to pick and choose what you reuse (e.g., complete commands or portions of commands), and controls what commands are recorded.In today's post, we're going to run through the basics and then explore some of the more interesting behaviors of the history command.The basics of the Linux history command Typing "history" and getting a list of previously entered commands is the command's most obvious use. Pressing the up arrow until you reach a command that you want to repeat and hitting enter to rerun it is next. And, as you probably know, you can also use the down arrow. In fact, you can scroll up and down your list of previously entered commands to review them or rerun them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Improving on history—the Linux history command, that is

The Linux history command allows users to repeat commands without retyping them and to look over a list of commands they've recently used, but that's just the obvious stuff. It is also highly configurable, allows you to pick and choose what you reuse (e.g., complete commands or portions of commands), and controls what commands are recorded.In today's post, we're going to run through the basics and then explore some of the more interesting behaviors of the history command.The basics of the Linux history command Typing "history" and getting a list of previously entered commands is the command's most obvious use. Pressing the up arrow until you reach a command that you want to repeat and hitting enter to rerun it is next. And, as you probably know, you can also use the down arrow. In fact, you can scroll up and down your list of previously entered commands to review them or rerun them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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