The Next Generation of Infrastructure Services

Danske Bank is testing the IBM Watson-based services platform that uses cognitive technologies to help IT service providers improve operations.

With rapidly changing business needs and accelerating business cycles, organizations need consistent and reliable service delivery across a “supply chain” of services from multiple vendors. There is no compromising choice for reliability. Both play an equally important role in a business’s success and they need the services they are using to continuously evolve.

For the IT services industry, it means a shift from system integration to services integration, and from a people-led and technology-assisted approach to one that is technology-led and people-assisted. In other words, most standard tasks and processes will be executed by increasingly autonomic systems that are data-driven, cognitive and automated.

This approach also means the evolution of automation and advanced analytics to cognitive delivery. Like many in the industry, we believe cognitive delivery is the next stage of the delivery lifecycle transformation.

Companies are already taking better advantage of the wealth of operational data and experience to gain insights that trigger automated actions for better business outcomes from IT or advise human experts to make better decisions.

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Cognitive Computing Comes to the Help Desk

In many organizations, support for IT problems can be somewhat haphazard. The result of a user request often depends on the IT worker responding to it, who needs to ask the correct series of questions to get the answers they need. This may not be a straightforward process, however; what workers think they need to know may not actually be correct. A breakdown in support functions may even lead to the rise of shadow IT, as workers become frustrated and revert to using the tools they understand instead of those approved by the organization.

IBM Security: Perspective on the Recent “Petya” Cyberattacks

What is the Petya Ransomware campaign? A calculated ransomware campaign with a heavy footprint in Ukraine was detected on June 27, 2017. The source of the attack is currently unknown. To date, the attack has affected global organizations in the banking, pharmaceutical and transportation industries.

Most reports, and the ransom demand itself, refer to the activity as Petya, a well- known malware that has existed for quite some time, but at least one security company believes it is not a true Petya variant. IBM can confirm the ransomware tool is spreading via the National Security Agency (NSA) exploit ETERNALBLUE, similar to the WannaCry events last month.

A Modern Disaster Recovery Plan for the Hybrid Cloud

No longer do traditional IT services fall solely under the purview of on-premises data centers. Workloads are increasingly being transferred to the cloud in order to meet changing business requirements and achieve greater agility and flexibility.

IDC predicts that more than 80 percent of IT organizations will commit to hybrid architectures this year, according to a recent Forbes report on business resiliency. The same report found that CIOs are being tasked with creating a disaster recovery plan that will serve their organization well in a hybrid cloud environment.

What does a top CIO do to enable a digital business?

CIOs nowadays need to partner with business leaders to quickly identify and integrate new platforms, and deliver business results and develop the skills to create a culture of consistent innovation.

How should they do to modernize IT delivery and infrastructure to enable digital business? They need to optimize IT investment and deliver more business value for every dollar spent. At the same time, the business demands they extend the technology core to be digital-ecosystem ready, e.g. to encompass unstructured data into BI/Analytics.

2 key things they need to start with:

• Provide open data access across new and traditional systems: build the data foundation for digital business
• Optimize a hybrid cloud infrastructure: with a secure, hybrid infrastructure, integrated across multi-vendor clouds and on-premises apps and systems.

Matthew Glitzer, Director, Global Technology Services, IBM Greater China Group shared his insights at an exclusive CIO seminar in Hong Kong last Friday. Check out his slides at http://buff.ly/2tboyZT.

Billions of Threats, Milliseconds to Respond: Automating Resiliency

Time is not on our side. To succeed against threats, organizations need automation and cognitive technologies combined with strategy, process and testing. Effective resiliency requires investment, leadership and a culture where people imprint an always-on attitude onto their professional DNA.

For decades, business continuity was viewed as a way to prevent disasters when hardware and software failed. This process focused primarily on preparing for human error, poor change management and natural disasters like hurricanes, floods and fires. But now, more than any other time in history, cyberattacks are flooding the front lines in the resiliency battle. Cyberattacks aren’t just another threat — they’re the mother of all threats.

The innovator’s guide to the digital galaxy

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of different industries sit what once were innocuous organizations — companies that stayed in their own spheres of influence and didn’t disrupt the flow of business as usual.

But now, they are capitalizing on existing and emerging technologies to expand their reach, open up new business models, and make products and services available in new industries — including yours.

You can’t see them yet, or call them by name, but you know they’re out there, eyeing your customers, employees and every unspent dollar, euro and yen in your marketplace. This trend is keeping CEOs and line-of-business leaders up at night. Worldwide, nearly 70 percent of C-suite members expect industry convergence to increase over the next few years.