With Xyte’s Mobile RMM, users can remotely monitor connected devices on the go through an intuitive live map interface, allowing them to see the location of devices in relation to their own location, making it easier than ever to manage large-scale deployments. Teams can send remote commands, check real-time device states and view recent changes such as temperature adjustments, Wi-Fi status and other key parameters. In addition to monitoring, users can interact with devices in real time, issuing commands and observing how device statuses change after the commands are received.

“This is an incredibly powerful feature. It may seem simple, but the ability to monitor an entire network of connected technology – whether AV systems, sensors or industrial equipment – straight from your phone is a game-changer,” says Omer Brookstein, CEO and co-founder of Xyte. He continues, “Our mobile RMM not only simplifies remote monitoring but gives teams the flexibility to stay on top of their installations, whether they’re managing a handful of devices or thousands. With AV systems becoming more and more mission critical, the ability to monitor and manage them from a mobile device from anywhere and at any time is more imperative than ever before.”

According to Xyte, it was the first to introduce QR code device claiming on mobile devices, which allows both end-users or dealers and system integrators to quickly scan and claim devices as part of their managed environment. Building on these previous platform capabilities, Xyte’s Mobile RMM extends beyond mobile QR code device claiming, allowing users to identify, actively manage and troubleshoot devices remotely. While larger displays may still provide the best experience for monitoring high-volume installations, mobile RMM ensures quick, efficient action while on the move.

Another version of this article originally appeared on our sister-site Commercial Integrator on Sept. 23 2024. It has since been updated for My TechDecisions’ audience.

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Speaking at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference in Sydney, Paul Delory, VP Analyst at Gartner said, “In the current economic climate, the biggest problem companies face in 2023 may not be IT infrastructure. I&O teams, however, will be impacted by economic and geopolitical forces and will have a vital role to play in ameliorating their effects.”

Delory continued, “This won’t be a year to realize grand ambitions, but it marks a moment to refocus, retool and rethink your infrastructure. In every crisis lies opportunity, and in this case, the chance to make positive changes that may be long overdue.”

According to the Stamford, Conn. research firm, the top four cloud, data center and edge infrastructure trends include the following:

Trend 1: Cloud Teams Will Optimize and Refactor Cloud Infrastructure

Public cloud usage is almost universal, but many deployments are ad hoc and poorly implemented, says Gartner. I&O teams have an opportunity this year to revisit hastily assembled or poorly architected cloud infrastructure to make it more efficient, resilient and cost-effective.

The focus of refactoring cloud infrastructure should be on optimizing costs by eliminating redundant, overbuilt or unused cloud infrastructure; building business resilience rather than service-level redundancy; using cloud infrastructure as a way to mitigate supply chain disruptions; and modernizing infrastructure. According to Gartner, 65% of application workloads will be optimal or ready for cloud delivery by 2027, up from 45% in 2022.

Trend 2: New Application Architectures Will Demand New Kinds of Infrastructure

I&O teams are continually challenged to meet new and growing demands with new types of infrastructure — including edge infrastructure for data-intensive use cases, non-x86 architectures for specialized workloads, serverless edge architectures and 5G mobile service. Gartner predicts 15% of on-premises production workloads will run in containers by 2026, up from less than 5% in 2022.

I&O professionals must evaluate alternative options with care, focusing on their ability to manage, integrate and transform in the face of constraints on time, talent and resources. “Don’t revert to traditional methods or solutions just because they’ve worked well in the past,” said Delory. “Challenging periods are times to innovate and find new solutions to meet business demands.”

Trend 3: Data Center Teams Will Adopt Cloud Principles On-Premises

Data centers are shrinking and migrating to platform-based colocation providers. Combined with new as-a-service models for physical infrastructure, this can bring cloud-like service-centricity and economic models to on-premises infrastructure.

According to Gartner, 35% of data center infrastructure will be managed from a cloud-based control plane by 2027, from less than 10% in 2022. I&O professionals should focus this year on building cloud-native infrastructure within the data center; migrating workloads from owned facilities to co-location facilities or the edge; or embracing as-a-service models for physical infrastructure.

Trend 4: Skills Growth: Top Priority for Successful Organizations

Lack of skills remains the biggest barrier to infrastructure modernization initiatives, with many organizations finding they cannot hire outside talent to fill these skills gaps. IT organizations will not succeed unless they prioritize organic skills growth.

I&O leaders must make operations skills growth their highest priority this year. Encourage I&O professionals to take on new roles as site reliability engineers or subject matter expert consultants for developer teams and business units. Gartner predicts 60% of data center infrastructure teams will have relevant automation and cloud skills by 2027, up from 30% in 2022.

The post These Four Trends Are Shaping the Future of IT Infrastructure appeared first on My TechDecisions.

With Microsoft leveraging GPT-4 and integrating it throughout its Microsoft 365 suite, the company is now adding some of these capabilities to its industry clouds, including Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit, with new AI offerings specifically designed for nonprofit organizations.

In response to data that shows donations to nonprofits are decreasing while they also report large job vacancy rates, Microsoft is introducing a new Fundraising performance dashboard that offers up to-date interactive views of campaign performance, donor conversation and other fundraising analytics built on Power BI’s data visualization platform.

In a LinkedIn post, Microsoft also says nonprofits can use Dynamics 365 Marketing to use plain language queries to segment donors, volunteers and other constituents to identify how donors prefer to be contacted and when they would typically donate. This can help streamline the generation of donor and volunteer marketing materials.

Microsoft is also bringing its Viva Sales AI Copilot into Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit’s Fundraising and Engagement too, giving nonprofits AI-based tools to help them automate communications and generate relevant communications, reminders and recommendations to stay connected and engaged with donors.

Microsoft is also integrating the AI-based capabilities of Teams Premium into Fundraising and Engagement to help nonprofits be more productive and make sure donors, constituents and staff have all necessary information.

To help nonprofits identify individuals most likely to donate, Microsoft is introducing a new AI-powered donor propensity model into Fundraising and Engagement that leverages an organizations data. Microsoft is working with a select group of nonprofits to test this model, with plans to make it available in the second half of the year.

Microsoft is also integrating with fundraising and finance software vendors to help streamline reconciliation and reporting, in addition to maintaining a long list of implementation, data migration and payment partners.

In addition, the company is building an AI-powered Humanitarian Data Insights Tool to help humanitarian organizations better plan and resources their aid operations. This will be available in late 2023.

Microsoft will also be launching new AI and cloud open-source tools and resources in the Innovation Hub GitHub repository for specific nonprofit challenges, the company says.

The post Microsoft to Bring New AI Capabilities to Nonprofit Cloud appeared first on My TechDecisions.

After all, trading our Fiat 500 for a Ferrari won’t automatically make us race car drivers. There’s a whole process involved.

Cloud migration is the same. We can’t simply move our local servers to the cloud and expect to be dazzled. It’s only one step of many, and we need to finish the entire cloud-native transformation process before we get those umbrellas out. But once it’s done, it will rain. To give you an idea of the potential precipitation, Gartner claims that enterprises saved an average of 15% on their IT costs by migrating services to the cloud. That alone makes the migration worthwhile. However, cost savings are far from the only (or even the primary) reason to go cloud native.

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s take a closer look at the steps needed to complete a cloud-native transformation.

1. Set the goals: start by figuring out what the goals are. Where do you – the entire organization – want to be tomorrow or a year from now? What about five years from now? Make sure these goals align with the company’s business needs and objectives before you begin.
2. Set a strategy and timeline: Set a strategy that aims at achieving the goals you’ve just established in a realistic timeframe. Also, don’t forget that the strategy must align with your business’s overall purpose and, most importantly, include a customer success period for your people.
3. Research the technology: You know your goals and strategies, which means it’s time to choose the tech. Be diligent and do the research, but ultimately your shiny new goals and strategies should determine which tech, platform and provider to go for. Also, remember that this is a long-term change, so keep an eye out for solutions that offer agility, scalability and value over time.
4. Pick the right people: It’s time to delegate. You have a brilliant project with clear goals, an excellent strategy and the right tool already added to cart. It’s time to choose your champions. Ideally, they’ll all be super-popular geniuses who love cloud solutions, but failing that, a mix of qualified and eager colleagues will usually do (the former can be motivated and the latter can learn). If speed is high on your list of priorities, cloud experts or managed cloud providers will turbocharge your transformation journey.
5. Optimize processes: The team’s first order of business should be to decide which processes and applications to optimize and automate in the cloud for maximum ROI. Why not migrate all of them, you ask? Unfortunately, not every single process and application will be more efficient in the cloud. If you’re unsure which ones are and aren’t, reach out to and work with experts on cloud optimization. They know their stuff.
6. Time to migrate: Goals set, strategy ready, tech chosen, A-team assembled, processes and applications identified for migration; you’re ready. All that time you spent on steps 1-5 pays dividends in the form of a rapid and smooth transition, especially if you decided to include experts in the process.
7. Manage: Don’t forget this step! The world of technology evolves at a blistering pace, and you need to keep testing, experimenting, and optimizing your stack to ensure you meet your objectives. Remember: it’s a lifestyle change, not a fad diet. If your costs aren’t falling or your other (likely more valuable) objectives aren’t being met, reach out for help to experts in the field.

And there you have it! Ready the umbrellas. The next step, now that we are wise in the ways of cloud transformation, is to spread the good word. We must let the world know that the migration itself is but a part of a greater process of modernizing and optimizing our data, analytics and security. Without goals, strategy, tech, team, and process, our umbrellas will catch only the lightest of drizzles – and worst of all, the full potential of the cloud will go unfulfilled.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kevin Davis is the global CTO of AWS at Atos, a leader in cloud and digital workplace. He previously served in the same capacity at Cloudreach. He is a passionate technical leader who delivers high-quality, customer-driven solutions leveraging DevOps and public cloud technologies.

The post How to Migrate (Successfully) to the Cloud appeared first on My TechDecisions.

According to the San Mateo, Calif.-based company’s annual Enterprise Network Transformation report, 98% of IT leaders say they plan to increase their investment in cloud services despite a growing fear of a looming recession.

In addition, 94% of organizations say SASE will play a larger role in their networking and security plans, and 62% plan to eliminate multiprotocol label switching from their operations.

The company says these trends highlight the ongoing shift to the cloud from traditional IT to help support hybrid and remote work models, but also indicate that enterprise IT leaders see networking and security as vital to their organizations’ long-tern success.

According to the report, 47% of IT leaders say their organization will accelerate cloud and network services adoption despite economic uncertainties, which suggests that IT leaders recognize the ability for cloud to help support distributed work and lead to better application performance and security.

Other findings suggest that organizations are reinventing how they think about security in the wake of the pandemic and distributed work. The survey found that 90% of IT leaders believe that zero trust network access is a crucial component of SD-WAN and SASE services, while 98% say hybrid work has increased the need for new network and security solutions.

An overwhelming 99% of IT leaders said hybrid work has changed the way they view managing networks and security, but the report also indicates that organizations are still behind when it comes to hybrid work plans as 58% say they need plans for a hybrid workforce immediately, while 39% said they need plans in the next 6-12 months. Another 3% said they need those plans more than a year out.

The report ultimately concludes that SASE and network-as-a-service solutions are now critical to solving the problem of network complexity and security. According to Aryaka, 96% of C-level IT leaders say managed services and network-as-a-service will play a larger role in 2023.

In a statement, Aryaka CEO Matt Carter says businesses need to be able to be flexible, adaptable and nimble.

“Our report indicates that the vast majority of CIOs, CISOs and IT leaders are preparing for this uncertainty by investing in and adopting architecture, policies and technologies that converge networking and security, as these disciplines are critical to business success,” Carter says.

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“Hyperscale cloud providers are driving the cloud agenda,” says Sid Nag, vice president analyst at Gartner, in a statement. “Organizations today view cloud as a highly strategic platform for digital transformation, which is requiring cloud providers to offer more sophisticated capabilities as the competition for digital services heats up.”

Nag added, “Generative AI is supported by large language models (LLMs), which require powerful and highly scalable computing capabilities to process data in real-time. Cloud offers the perfect solution and platform. It is no coincidence that the key players in the generative AI race are cloud hyperscalers.”

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) Growth forecast

All segments of the cloud market are expected see growth in 2023. Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is forecast to experience the highest end-user spending growth in 2023 at 30.9%, followed by platform-as-a-service (PaaS) at 24.1%.

The Stamford, Conn. research firm also predicts that by 2026, 75% of organizations will adopt a digital transformation model predicated on cloud as the fundamental underlying platform.

“The next phase of IaaS growth will be driven by customer experience, digital and business outcomes and the virtual-first world,” said Nag. “Emerging technologies that help businesses interact more closely and in real time with their customers, such as chatbots and digital twins, are reliant upon cloud infrastructure and platform services to meet growing demands for compute and storage power.”

While cloud infrastructure and platform services are driving the highest spending growth, SaaS remains the largest segment of the cloud market by end-user spending. SaaS spending is projected to grow 17.9% to total $197 billion in 2023.

“The technology substrate of cloud computing is firmly dominated by the hyperscalers, but leadership of the business application layer is more fragmented,” said Nag. “Providers are facing demands to redesign SaaS offerings for increased productivity, leveraging cloud-native capabilities, embedded AI and composability – particularly as budgets are increasingly driven and owned by business technologists. This change will ignite a wave of innovation and replacement in the cloud platform and application markets.”

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The Swiss company’s survey of 600 IT decision-makers in the U.K. and U.S. finds that IT leaders are focused on improving cloud cost management and reducing their organizations’ technical debt, with 72% of CIOs admitting that they are behind in their digital transformation because of that technical debt.

According to the company’s research, this is concerning, as 92% of CIOs are expected to deliver digital transformation initiatives that act as revenue generators this year.

As they are being pressured to essentially do more with less, CIOs are still dealing with technical debt due to rushed cloud migrations as a result of a transition to distributed work during the COVID-19 pandemic, with 38% of IT leaders agreeing to that sentiment.

In addition, 31% say their cloud workloads were not optimized before they began their cloud migrations, and 38% said they miscalculated their cloud budgets when providing SaaS apps, resulting in significant overspending on the cloud.

Organizations are also still struggling with their on-premises legacy systems, with 51% of CIOs saying the growing complexity of hybrid and multi-cloud IT systems is one of the their top three challenges.

Nearly half of CIOs say they need improved transparency and control of cloud costs to help them maximize value of cloud investments and improve buy-in from business executives, and 80% plan to increase their investment in FinOps to achieve this, SoftwareOne says in its report.

Despite budget pressures, 82% will increase their investment in application modernization, and 912 will continue increasing security investments.

Craig Thomson, senior vice president of cloud and application services at SoftwareOne, says in a statement that businesses are struggling to complete IT transformations as they deal with budget pressures.

“Yet organizations need to move to the cloud and modernize legacy applications to remain competitive,” Thomson says.  “We’re seeing a real need for a combination of innovation with optimization. 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.”

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The study, from New York-based cloud security firm Wiz, finds that the growth of cloud platforms in recent years and an increase in APIs are expanding the possibilities of cloud computing and storage, but are also broadening the attack surface.

The three major cloud providers–AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP)–each reported 2022 Q3 cloud revenue that reflected an increase of at least 20% from the same period last year. In addition, all thee cloud platforms are increasing their offerings, with the privileges available to control API access increasing by 15% for AWS, 20% for Azure and 45% for GCP.

The company’s State of the Cloud 2023 report finds that 57% of organizations are using more than one cloud platform, which means their IT and security teams need greater knowledge and visibility into these multiple platforms, as well as the interfaces between them.

However, Wiz data shows that organizations are placing a disproportionate amount of workloads with one cloud provider, as 78% of organizations have over 80% of their workloads in a single cloud provider.

Most companies have a few disproportionately large accounts alongside smaller ones, the report says. For over 97% of customers using AWS, the largest 5% of their accounts contain over 50% of their workloads.

“In other words, although most AWS customers do not maintain a single monolithic account in the strictest sense, they do use a handful of what might be considered monolithic accounts,” the report says.

AWS is the most commonly used platform, as 72% of workloads across all companies surveyed are running on Amazon’s cloud service. In addition, 62% of companies choose to place more of their workloads on AWS than with other cloud providers.

Among companies using more than one platform, Azure is the most common secondary platform (41%), but at customers using more than two platforms, GCP is the most common tertiary platform (44%), the report finds.

However, organization’s aren’t prioritizing security when it comes to cloud adoption, as 47% of companies have t least one database or storage bucket exposed to the internet, and over 20% of those cloud environment with publicly accessible buckets have buckets that contain sensitive information.

Those exposed resources are compromised within hours, according to Wiz, which conducted an experiment where S2 buckets with names that attackers might be targeting were attacked within 13 hours. In another test, an S3 bucket with an unguessable name but was referenced in a commit to a public GitHub repo was attempted to be listed within 7 hours.

Read the company’s report for more information.

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In addition, a third of respondents reported wasting between 10%-20% of their annual application expenditures due to unused, unaccounted for or mismanaged SaaS and Software subscriptions and licenses.

While many organizations have instituted automated processes to manage SaaS and cloud, the majority (54%) rated their workflows to govern authorized use and licensing of SaaS applications and cloud infrastructure only as “satisfactory.” Further, 9% of organizations said they have experienced unplanned spend and budget issues due to immature or nominal process automation maturity. 

“Oomnitza’s research underscores the double-sided sword that cloud and SaaS represent,” says Valerie O’Connell, research director at EMA. “Anyone with a credit card can spin up resources. That’s great for adoption and ease of access, but it’s also a recipe for overspending. Cloud instances, that for whatever reason become abandoned, can keep racking up charges for underlying compute, network and storage resources. Effective process automation capabilities add much needed control and optimization of SaaS, software and cloud investments.”  

Additional Survey Findings 

Key findings from Oomnitza and YouGov’s 2023 Snapshot Survey: SaaS and Cloud Spend Optimization & Automation report include:

• 50% of respondents lost at least 10% of their annual expenditures on software and SaaS applications; 17% lost at least 20%
• 53% of respondents reported spending more than 10% of their annual budget on underused, unmanaged or unaccounted for cloud resources; 19% wasted at least 20%
• 63% of respondents reported that their organization experienced unplanned cloud and SaaS expenditures and issues with varying workflow automation maturity
• Only 29% of respondents felt that their organization had mature process automation for software, SaaS and Cloud spend governance

Software, SaaS and Cloud Spend Trends by Company Size & Industry

There were some trends when the sample was analyzed by company size and industry:  

• Large enterprises (more than 5,000 employees) appeared twice as likely to experience significant (30%) software and SaaS spend management issues compared to small enterprises (less than 5,000 employees)
• 43% of utilities and infrastructure firms and 32% of professional services firms wasted between 10% to 20% of their annual software expenditures
• Large enterprises were not immune from wasting expenditures on cloud resources with a reported 22% overspending by more than 20%
• Nearly a quarter both consumer and public services firms (23%) and utilities and infrastructure firms (22%) overspent at least 20% on software and SaaS
• 11% of large enterprises reported using mostly ad-hoc or manual processes to manage SaaS applications and cloud infrastructure, resulting in unplanned expenditures and issues
• 75% of professional services firms reported either satisfactory or less than optimal use of automated processes to manage SaaS licenses and cloud resources

IT Leaders Must Reduce Spend  

Arthur Lozinski, CEO and co-founder of the San Francisco-based Oomnitza, says, “IT leaders must reduce spend and optimize resource use in order to survive the current macroeconomic climate.”

Oomnitza and YouGove’s research offers insight into quantifying the amount of software, SaaS and cloud expenditure waste. Lozinski underscores the need for enterprises to mature and expand their IT process automation capabilities to improve operational efficiencies.

“We’re living in an era where IT has to do more with less and that cannot be accomplished with manual ticket-based processes,” he says. 

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Penned by Yariv Adan, director of product management for Google Cloud AI and Industry solutions, the blog dives into the challenges call centers faced in 2022, and what organizations should do to enhance their call centers this year.

According to Adan, 2022 was a “high-stakes year” for call centers as organizations grappled with pressure to rapidly scale up their call center operations in response to macroeconomic changes, customer experience demands from end users, and an inability to incorporate new AI technologies.

The cloud and AI expert says end user experiences should be seamless and efficient, and through their preferred channels. While conversational AI can help business leaders who are unsure about how to make that journey, Adan says.

Meanwhile, Google increased its strategic investment in contact center AI, including the launch of its Contact Center AI Platform, a contact center-as-a-service offering designed with a user-first, AI-first and cloud-first structure.

In 2023, Adan says organizations must meet end users where they are, and on their own terms, and expectations by leveraging user-centric technologies and best practices.

“Enterprise B2C can’t exist anymore in a parallel world of different and often inferior user experience,” Adan writes. “Google has over 20 years of experience in building such consumer experiences, with multiple products successfully serving billions of users. Bringing these capabilities and experiences from our consumer products and research teams to our cloud offerings was a key component for our product offerings in 2022 and is a big part of our key investments in 2023.”

According to Google, a vast majority of customer experience user journeys start with a Google or YouTube search, so connecting with users at that point before they reach out directly to the contact center is a priority.

Contact centers also need to adopt modern cloud and AI solutions to evolve. Citing a McKinsey study, Adan says cross-channel integration and migration issues hamper progress, and traditional telephony systems are falling behind.

Organizations should also work to reduce implementation investment and accelerate time to value, which Adan admits can be a challenge for contact center solutions. However, scaling cloud and AI can provide a faster path to advanced conversational AI.

Google offerings such as out-of-the-box integrations, AI-based chat and voice calls with info-seeking virtual agents and pre-built components and APIs can help accelerate time to value and make contact center operations more efficient, Adan says.

“With these new capabilities, our customers can now see results as soon as they implement CCAI. We’re excited to get our customers to where they want to be faster!”

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