Links List 12.31.09

December 31st, 2009 by Valerie Barber

Wishing everyone a healthy and prosperous New Year!

 A recent survey of CIOs shows that 43% feel their IT departments are understaffed in relation to their workload. A separate Gartner survey of senior business executives finds that 62% recognize that “IT-enabled changes will be a key element in their post-recession strategy”. While these two findings conflict, Gartner’s survey also shows that CIO priorities have shifted from 2009’s cost cutting to 2010’s focus on revenue growth. The shift to growing revenue could be an opportunity for IT leaders to position themselves and their staffs as key comp0nents to the rebuilding plan that could also signal the need for new hires.

With all of the daily cloud news over the past year, it’s no surprise that a number of IDC’s top 10 tech predictions are cloud-related. Number one is maturing of the cloud with improved SLAs and business continuity/disaster recovery that are expected to be the “killer apps” for the cloud in 2010.

As cloud computing continues to mature, 10 big cloud trends have been identified that will help drive enterprise adoption:

1. Price drops as aggressive commodity pricing continues
2. Simpler cloud pricing models including all-you-can-eat
3. Enterprise application vendors embrace metering for easier tracing of usage
4. Enterprise-grade SLAs of 99.9% or better
5. New cloud technologies that improve use and performance, including tools to help reduce the cost of “on-boarding,” or moving applications into the cloud.
6. Security concerns (the #1 inhibitor to cloud adoption) addressed
7. Ubiquitous performance monitoring
8. Open standards for cloud computing advance. “For cloud computing to really take off, it has to be open. Cloud providers will have to allow movement between clouds and interoperability, as well as enabling disaster recovery between clouds,” said Emil Sayegh, general manager of cloud for Rackspace US Inc.
9. Politics will drive decisions. Cloud decisions will increasingly be made with an eye on politics and not by IT managers. The Los Angeles City Council’s approval of a $7.25 million, five-year deal with Google Apps engaged the mayor and city council in a very public debate about cloud services.
10. Decentralized IT decision making; for example, the federal app store allows U.S. government employees to order services and tools without necessarily having to go through an IT approval process for each and every action.

More on last week’s appointment of Howard Schmidt as the White House cybersecurity coordinator…  Schmidt will report to John Brennan, assistant to the presidnet for homeland security and counterterrorism. One of Schmidt’s challenges will be to ensure that sensitive information is secure while at the same time stimulating innovation and coordinating the efforts of civilian and military agencies.

No one end of the decade list is definitive, but here are seven tech advances (compiled by GCN) that show just how far we’ve come in just 10 years. While everything on this list seems mundane or routine, remember: 10 years ago they were not. I’m excited to see what the next decade brings:

• GPS devices – in 2000, the DoD began allowing accurate positioning information leading to GPS on/as handheld devices and in cars, phones, PCs, etc.
• Smartphones – from Blackberry to Treo to iPhone to Droid and continuing…
• Open source – now the mainstream (Firefox, Google Chrome, Linux)
• Web 2.0 technologies
• Flash memory – may even replace hard drives in laptops and PCs
• WiFi – anytime, anywhere Internet!
• XML languages – if it involves storing, identifying, moving or sharing data, particularly via the Web, XML is in the mix

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