Interop News: Experts at Interop Talk About the Role of the CIO, Shadow IT & The Future of the Cloud

interop news

Interop, an independent technology conference and expo designed to inspire, inform, and connect the world’s IT community is taking place in New York this week. The conference hosts presentations and workshops that introduce new ideas and programs that aim to help set your organization’s IT plan apart.

 

Whether you’re at the event or not, the three Interop news articles below highlight key topics that are already taking center stage– along with the viewpoints and opinions around them.

 

The New CIO: C Stands For Change via InformationWeek

“What does the CIO role look like now, and what will it look like in the future? Experts at Interop New York share the key skills and traits that will soon separate the winners from the losers.

 

IT execs love to recount an old-school joke: CIO stands for ‘career is over.’ That joke dates back to a different time, when CIOs mostly dreaded making a bad vendor choice or botching an ERP project. Today’s business climate depends on speed and agility more than statesmanship — and CIOs dread falling behind the current pace and being deemed irrelevant.

 

‘The C in CIO stands more for change than chief,’ said Jonathan Feldman, CIO of Asheville, N.C., at the InformationWeek IT Leadership Summit at Interop New York on Tuesday.

 

That’s a useful way to start examining the future of the CIO role. The CIO must manage tremendous change coming in cloud and mobile technologies, data analysis, and BYOD — and even bigger, more fundamental changes as companies’ core business models change to a focus on digital interactions with customers and partners.”

 

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IT pros should pay attention to ‘shadow IT,’ Interop NY keynoters urge via ITworld

“Interop New York speakers opened the conference with a provocative message: Instead of ignoring ‘shadow IT’ in their organizations, IT pros should try to understand what they are failing to deliver that workers wind up taking care of themselves.

 

‘Shadow IT is an opportunity to become closer to our business and to build a culture of collaboration,’ said Steve Comstock, who was recently appointed CIO for CBS Interactive, the online content division for the CBS television network.

 

Shadow IT, also often called bring-your-own-IT or BYOD, is the practice of employees procuring their own IT resources, without going through the appropriate organizational channels.

 

Shadow IT ‘was basically the scary monster under my infrastructure, the data going somewhere that we didn’t know about. The software being deployed that wasn’t being managed,’ Comstock said.

 

Although a recent issue in the trade press, BYOD has existed in the workplace for decades, Comstock said.”

 

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Interop News: The Future Of Cloud Computing via InformationWeek

At Interop 2014, cloud computing experts debated the best way to take advantage of the new technology trend.

 

“Cloud computing is beginning to transform the way enterprises buy and use technology resources, and that was evident at the Interop 2014 conference and exhibition in New York this week. Cloud experts and practitioners of all stripes were in attendance and provided some insights — positive and negative — on where this trend is heading.

 

In a workshop on Designing Infrastructure for Private Clouds, Ivan Pepelnjak, the network architect for UpSpace.net AG, a consulting company in Slovenia, hit upon one of the defining characteristics of cloud computing. ‘Cloud is all about self-service. … You need to be able to allow your [internal] customer to change the rules on the load balancer and firewall. When someone says, ‘’This will never fly in my organization,’ just tell them, ‘Your developers are already using Amazon.’

 

In weighing an open source internal cloud versus commercial products, he asked: ‘How expensive will it be to operate cloud? On the open source side you will have total control. But can you afford that? You either pay vendors or pay staff.’”

 

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Interested in seeing the conference presentations? You can find them here. Here’s a great list of top tweets from the event.

 

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