01732 759725 06 NEWS a challenge. Yet organisations need to move to the cloud and modernise legacy applications to remain competitive. We’re seeing a real need for a combination of innovation with optimisation. Our clients are looking for pragmatic step-by-step transformation initiatives, rather than wholesale megalithic projects that can be hard to get approved when budgets are under pressure.” Priorities for CIOs include application modernisation, with 82% planning to increase their investment in this area, and better cloud cost management including improved transparency and control of cloud costs. To this end, 80% plan to increase their investment in FinOps and 39% aim to use cloud native tools to reduce licensing costs. Dan Ortman, Global Practice Lead FinOps at SoftwareOne, said: “Adopting FinOps practices will help them optimise not just their spend but the processes, accountability and transparency required to get maximum value from their cloud investment. Once legacy IT is migrated and modernised and cloud is optimised, any savings can be reinvested into innovative projects that help the IT team to achieve more with less.” https://www.softwareone.com/en/now/ cio-pulse-2023-budgets-and-priorities ······ Control of cloud costs a top priority Only 40% of IT teams have complete visibility into where their data resides, according to a survey of 1,450 IT decisionmakers for the fifth global Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) report from Nutanix. The report attributes this failing to the diversification of cloud deployments, with 60% of IT teams now leveraging more than one IT infrastructure, be it a mix of private and public clouds, multiple public clouds or an on-premises datacentre and hosted datacentre. This figure is expected to grow to 74% in the near future. When Nutanix conducted the ECI in 2018, well over half of respondents said they envisaged one day running all workloads exclusively in either a private cloud or the public cloud. Now, rather than seeking to consolidate on a particular infrastructure or IT operating model, most enterprises are embracing a hybrid model where they run workloads across public cloud, on-premises and at the edge. This, it suggests, is creating the need for a single, unified control plane to manage applications and data across diverse environments. The survey highlights a desire to tackle cloud costs, with 85% citing them as a challenging IT management issue. Nearly half of respondents (46%) plan to repatriate some applications to onpremises datacentres to mitigate cloud costs in the year ahead. www.nutanix.com ······ ISO certification for IT asset management The ITAM Forum has met one of its foundational goals with the launch of the world’s first ISO/IEC 19770-1 certification scheme for IT asset management. As a management system like ISO 27001 and 9001, ISO/IEC 19770-1 specifies the requirements for an IT asset management system, including the people, processes and technology necessary to manage IT assets throughout the lifecycle. Previously organisations were unable to demonstrate the quality of their ITAM practices in a consistent, uniform and globally accepted way. The first two organisations to be certified are Softline Group Northern Europe and HDI Group, with others in the pipeline. https://itamf.org/ ······ Calling time on passwords Passwords have outrun their course and it’s time to give users a simpler, more secure way to validate their identity. So says Entrust, following the publication of The Future of Identity Report by the Entrust Cybersecurity Institute. With 45% continued... Recycling server heat with digital boilers Deep Green is one of a growing number of tech firms seeking to create social value from the heat generated by data centre servers. The self-funded British start-up does this by installing an edge cloud data centre in a local business and using ‘immersion cooling’ technology to capture and transfer heat from the servers into the business’s hot water system. Deep Green says around 96% of the heat generated by one of its mini data centres can be recycled in this way. The first UK site to benefit from the technology is Exmouth Leisure Centre in Devon, which is using surplus heat captured from a 12-server Deep Green cloud data centre to cut its heated swimming pool’s gas requirements by 62%, saving over £20,000 a year and cutting carbon emissions by 25.8 tonnes. It is not only swimming pools that can use this technology. Any organisation that has a consistent requirement for heat, such as a bakery, distillery, laundrette or block of flats, could use it to save money and reduce their reliance on carbon-intensive fossil fuel boilers. Mark Bjornsgaard, CEO and Founder of Deep Green, said: “Data is critical to modern society and demand for data centres is growing exponentially. However, this comes at a cost. Current data centre infrastructure is inefficient, using a huge amount of energy and generating a vast amount of waste heat. “By moving data centres from industrial warehouses into the hearts of communities, our ‘digital boilers’ put waste heat to good use, saving local businesses thousands of pounds on energy bills and reducing their carbon footprint.” In all, Deep Green says 30% of industrial and commercial heat needs could be met with its digital boiler technology. www.deepgreen.energy Mark Bjonsgaard, CEO of Deep Green, at Exmouth Leisure Centre. Deep Green’s computers are submerged in mineral oil that captures waste heat. Diagram courtesy of Deep Green.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUxNDM=