Digital business initiatives are placing unprecedented pressures on both IT organizations and the infrastructure they manage.
Find out how IT storage professionals are coping with the demands of constant acceleration with this Enterprise Strategy Group Infographic, 2021 Data Infrastructure Trends.
Not all businesses can effectively manage, secure, and support the fleet of Apple devices used by their employees. Apple Business Essentials can enable small businesses’ IT professionals to gain control of these devices while providing a comprehensive support program for employees.
There’s something so convenient about USPS Priority Mail. There are a few standard box sizes to choose from and each of them has a set fee, no matter what you put in the box. There’s no guessing as to how much the package will cost to ship, regardless of how much it weighs and how far it’s going, and your package gets to its destination in 1-3 business days, much faster than if you were to ship it normally. Many organizations are adopting container technology for similar reasons that we use USPS Priority Mail. Standardization makes operations easier for most, and improves speed and agility.
Containers are units of software that are packaged up to easily run on a variety of computing environments. They are already widely adopted, yet still growing. Enterprise Strategy Group asked organizations what percentage of production applications/workloads run on each server type (e.g. containers, virtual machines, bare metal), regardless of where they operate. Respondents noted that today, 27% of applications/workloads are running on containers, but they predicted that in 24 months that number will increase to 39%[1]. For organizations on the path to digital transformation, container technology offers increased speed and agility for IT teams (e.g. DevOps and developers) when developing, deploying, and servicing applications. 34% of surveyed organizations say that the majority of their application development teams are currently building, or planning to build, applications that utilize microservices architectures (using containers) in the next 12 months[2].
With this adoption momentum comes a need for people to protect, optimize, secure, service, and manage container technology. Unfortunately, organizations aren’t always fully staffed to do so. For the 53% of respondents of an ESG research study who reported having a skill shortage in cloud and IT architecture in their organizations,[3] and the 77% of organizations that didn’t feel as though they had all the skills necessary when it comes to container backup and recovery requirements,[4] consuming containers as-a-service (CaaS) may alleviate some pressure and risk when it comes to container management. Adopting a flexible consumption model gives time and resources back to IT teams and helps them to focus on what is most important.
A growing number of organizations are using containerization and microservices to make their IT operations teams and developers more agile to develop, maintain, and support applications more easily and at scale, as a part of their digital transformation journeys. While this adoption can be game-changing for organizations, the process to research and find the right solution provider can be daunting. The ESG Validation Team can’t contain its excitement for containers and has validated several container-related solutions, testing them and helping prospective customers to better understand their value propositions. To learn more about these solutions, check out these Technical Validations and Reviews: Google Cloud for Gaming, Google Cloud for E-commerce, RedHat Openshift Container Storage, StormForge.
[1] ESG Research Report, Data Protection Trends and Strategies for Containers, December 2020.
[2] ESG Research Report, Securing Modern Application Development Environments, December 2020.
[3] ESG Research Report, 2021 Technology Spending Intentions Survey, January 2021.
[4] Master Survey Results: Data Protection Considerations for Containers Dec 21, 2020
In order to assess technology spending priorities over the next 12-18 months, ESG recently surveyed 706 senior IT decision makers representing midmarket (100 to 999 employees) and enterprise-class (1,000 employees or more) organizations in North America, Western Europe, and Asia-Pacific. All respondents were personally responsible for or familiar with their organization’s 2021 IT spending as well as their 2022 IT budget and spending plans at either an entire organization level or a business unit/division/branch level.
ESG conducted a comprehensive online survey of IT professionals from private- and public-sector organizations in North America (United States and Canada), Western Europe (UK, France, and Germany), and Asia Pacific (Australia, India, Japan, New Zealand, and Singapore) between September 9, 2021 and September 29, 2021. To qualify for this survey, respondents were required to be senior IT decision makers familiar and involved with their organization’s overall 2022 IT budget and spending plans.
This Complete Survey Results presentation focuses on 2022 IT budget expectations, technology initiatives and priorities, year-over-year spending change (overall and by different technologies), cloud adoption/usage trends, and the impact of ransomware on both IT and business operations.
ESG conducted a comprehensive online survey of IT decision makers and data architects from private- and public-sector organizations in North America (United States and Canada) between May 3, 2021 and May 15, 2021. To qualify for this survey, respondents were required to be IT decision makers and data architects with knowledge of/responsibility for their organization’s analytics initiatives and goals.
This Complete Survey Results presentation focuses on the impact of public cloud services on data analytics initiatives, including benefits and challenges, as well as what matters most to organizations when evaluating these technology solutions.
I enjoy how this industry keeps pulling us in directions that challenge the norm and highlight the value of innovation. It has quickly become evident that connecting people over video is the low bar in creating immersive experiences for employees and customers. Remember back two years ago that not everyone was very comfortable on video and would frequently not even turn their cameras on. Fast forward to today and what I saw Slack highlight at Frontiers and you will see that video is one small piece of the way people interact, managers manage, and companies connect with customers. I appreciated how Slack used the below simple message at Slack Frontiers to provide inspiration across three very important constituents: teams, partners, AND customers.
The IT infrastructure landscape has transformed. The data center, once the central cog in the IT machine, is quickly becoming only a piece of a larger and more complex environment. Contemporary IT infrastructure is often distributed across multiple locations both on- and off-premises. This research study is intended to better understand the current state of IT infrastructure, including how the increases in scale and distribution of infrastructure environments are increasing IT complexity and otherwise impacting IT operations.
I’ve always made it a priority to choose roles where I can make the biggest impact, and where I can learn and grow. It hasn’t been a clear path (as Sheryl Sandberg would say, it’s not a ladder, it’s a jungle gym), but I can confidently say it’s led me to fulfilling roles.
In this blog post, I’ll share a bit about my background, and then describe why I’m thrilled to join ESG to cover cloud-native and application security – a rapidly evolving and dynamic space. (more…)
Today’s distributed networking environments have IT organizations scrambling to address new challenges, according to recent Enterprise Strategy Group research. But fresh technologies and emerging strategies have the potential to bring in benefits if executed well.
See the data behind these trends and more with this infographic, 2021 Network Modernization Trends.
Let’s face it, while businesses recognize that they should be managing devices, apps, and data better than they are currently doing, there are still MANY midmarket businesses that have not put controls and process in place. I highly suspect that good intentions exist in these companies, but lack of skills, complex solutions, balancing risk and time are all factoring into where device management lands on their priority list. Apple is out to help change this.
The broad adoption of public cloud services as a source and repository of business-critical data and the increasingly distributed nature of IT environments generally and workforces specifically are impacting network infrastructure in terms of both requirements and challenges. In addition to assessing how modern, distributed environments are impacting network requirements and subsequent architecture, it is imperative to understand how key initiatives like cloud and automation are driving and shaping network strategies. Against the backdrop of all these changes, what kind of interest are organizations showing in new networking technologies like WiFi 6, 5G, and SONiC?