Windows 8 represents the very latest in application development and deployment architecture from Microsoft, allowing today’s developers to showcase their applications on a new and modern platform.

For many, staying current with the latest technology is critical in addressing IT risk, and also business continuity issues. But what if you’re coding in an older language or have existing apps that you haven’t yet modernized? Don’t worry; innovative technologies make it simple and easy to move your existing applications to the Windows 8 architecture, without changing your application code.

Windows 8 also offers the IT group the possibility of moving to a simplified architecture. Whether you’re coding in COBOL, C#, or VB.NET, the Windows 8 platform is compatible with all of these enterprise development languages. Windows 8 is more than just the next operating system; it is the next platform step for application modernization.

Additionally, long-standing, more complex applications, such as those from banks, insurance carriers and travel agencies, will continue to operate, servicing their users, but now leveraging the very latest and modern technology platform. This provides both a current sense of stability, but also a future path for innovation.

Application performance is often seen as an advantage in moving to the latest operating environment. Many expect that new and existing application deployments can be executed faster and require fewer resources and management. This can be the case in some scenarios, but not across all application deployments.

Certain environments are more appropriate for enterprise application development – Windows 8 is a great example because it supports an industry leading Integrated Development Environment – Visual Studio. Visual Studio combined with Windows 8 increases application development agility and efficiency, giving programmers the ability to take advantage of productive feature sets, and also leverage more modern capabilities, like the Windows 8 tile and touch screen features — a popular addition to the platform. Essentially, Windows 8 delivers a new, efficient, and modern operating environment for enterprise class application development and deployment.

An interesting and further impact of the Windows 8 platform on the development world is its effect on development team behavior. The new platform, as its predecessors, will encourage software engineers to think about whether their applications area ready for the next-generation development and deployment platform. If, however, they aren’t, the popularity of the new platform will motivate them to prepare for that move. This will lead to application compatibility features and roadmaps being developed by architecture teams– and more Windows 8 ready applications will begin to surface in the Windows App store.

So there you have it. While Windows 8 won’t necessarily revolutionize application performance, it will undeniably change the development process and development team behavior. Not only will it challenge existing application architectures, but it will also enable these applications to adopt a more dynamic and user-friendly experience. Today’s application developers will have a whole new environment on which to deliver apps and a new challenge to solve when it comes to application compatibility and modernization.

It will be interesting to watch the continued adoption of the Windows 8 platform, particularly within the corporate market, as organizations begins to prepare for this next wave of innovation.

 

In recent weeks, the issue of the fiscal cliff, has stirred intense debate across the U.S. and has been closely monitored overseas in relation to its potential impact upon the broader global economy. The term refers to the planned tax increases and spending cuts, originally beginning in January 2013, in order to reduce the U.S. budget deficit.

As expected, with potential tax increases in sight, businesses are collectively sitting on their hands and being very cautious in regard to new spending on jobs and equipment. As reported by CNBC, a recent survey by the National Federation of Independent Businesses found that, among small business owners, just 5% plan on adding new jobs and 19% on investing in new equipment in the next three to six months.

With the specter of an economic recession looming, the question is how large and small business can minimize the impact of external forces, such as the fiscal cliff, upon their own organizations’ fortunes and profitability.

I believe part of the answer lies in U.S. innovation, which can have a powerful impact at both the individual organizational level, whether private or public, and at the national level. According to KPMG, one of the solutions to counteract increased taxation and reduced spending is to increase revenues and overall economic productivity. It is here that U.S. innovation can play a key role in both increasing revenues and creating breakthroughs in organizational efficiencies necessary to increase productivity.

While innovation within an organization is often thought of as something that’s championed in good economic times when internal funding flows freely, my belief is that it is something that can be applied regardless of economic condition to both help grow revenues and reduce costs and improve productivity. Certainly it’s easier to gain access to investment dollars in times of economic prosperity, but a corollary to the adage “you have to spend money to make money”, is that in some cases “you have to spend money to save money” as well.

Today, businesses are looking for flexibility in how they allocate their investments on jobs and the internal products and services they need to conduct business. This is perhaps evidenced by the rise in the number of part-time workers as a percentage of full-time employees. In retail in particular, according to the New York Times, the sector has cut a million full-time jobs and added more than half-a-million part-time jobs since 2006.

Organizations can take a similar approach for flexibility in how they finance and utilize the internal products and services they need for operating their business. If we focus on the IT part of this equation, the nexus of forces of cloud, mobile, social and big data technologies clearly have a powerful role to play.

Let’s take a look at the economic potential of these technology forces and how they might collectively contribute to U.S. innovation and productivity:

Cloud computing enables organizations to “pay per use” and scale up or down computing resources on demand based on their specific usage requirements. It also enables companies to reduce their internal data center footprints and move to a more virtualized data center concept. Financially, it enables them to shift many of their IT costs from upfront capital expense to ongoing operating expense across the entire IT stack from infrastructure as a service, to platform as a service, and software as a service. Community clouds have the potential for multiple organizations, and even sectors within an industry, to share their computing infrastructure costs and pool their investments. Some of the quantifiable economic benefits in the literature, such as a KPMG report commissioned by the Australia Information Industry Association, include an estimated increase in U.S. GDP by 8.64% to 10.37% over the next ten years, or 0.83% to 0.99% per year, and a cost savings in IT related expenditure of between 25 and 50%.

Just like the other disruptive trends, mobile computing provides multiple benefits ranging from new revenue sources from mobile-enabled, customer-facing products and services, to cost savings and productivity enhancements from mobile-enabled, employee-facing applications. One of the most interesting areas is the opportunity for businesses to re-invent and re-design their existing business processes, and even some of their existing business models, for the new mobile context. According to the Aberdeen Group, productivity improvements for field-service employees are typically cited in the 20% range with 40% being “best-in-class” in certain industries and scenarios.

In the social computing arena, a report this year by McKinsey estimates that by fully implementing social technologies within their organizations, companies have the potential to improve the productivity of interaction workers by 20 to 25%. This estimate factors in tasks such as reading and answering e-mail, searching and gathering information, communicating and collaborating internally, and role-specific tasks. The same report also highlights a $900 billion to $1.3 trillion of annual value that could be unlocked by social technologies in four sectors of consumer packaged goods, financial services, professional services, and advanced manufacturing. In addition, “social shopping” could influence an additional $940 billion in annual consumption.

The economic potential of big data has also been well published over the last several years. In U.S. Healthcare alone, McKinsey estimates that big data could yield over $200 billion in value per year in the form of reducing healthcare expenditures primarily related to R&D, clinical operations, and accounting and pricing processes. Big data is a key component of the so-called “Internet of Things” where intelligent sensors are ubiquitously deployed to provide real-time data that can yield actionable insights across numerous industry verticals such as transportation, manufacturing and healthcare. According to some estimates, as discussed in my post, 10 CIO considerations for disruptive trends in 2013, the “Internet of Things” has the potential to contribute $10-15 trillion to global GDP by 2030, that’s the size of the current U.S. economy. 

If we look across all these forces and start to add up the economic potential, we see trillions of dollars of benefit particularly in regard to productivity improvements and cost reductions, but also in regard to opportunities for new revenue growth (figure 1). Of course, as with all these cited quantitative improvements, the level of benefit is highly dependent upon the specific use cases involved so these numbers are more for illustrative purposes in terms of their relative order of magnitude.

 

While recent issues such as the fiscal cliff are clearly complex societal matters with multiple dimensions, one of the best ways to minimize its impact is to explore ways to harness and accelerate U.S. innovation, and therefore growth, cost savings and productivity improvements, at both the organizational and national levels. Information technology and new, disruptive forces such as cloud, mobile, and social computing, together with big data and intelligent analytics are just some of the tools at the disposal of corporate executives and government leaders to effect such a change.

In applying this thinking to government, the “cloud first” policy of the U.S. Federal government has been highly successful with demonstrable cost savings. Perhaps now is the time to evaluate a broader policy towards U.S. innovation with a technology component that takes a similar “first” approach across all these disruptive technologies which can add significant financial value back into the economy.

According to a recent McKinsey article authored by James Kaplan, Chris Rezek, and Kara Sprague,  for effective management of Cloud resources, IT and business executives need to apply a risk-management approach that balances economic value against risks.

The use of highly scaled, shared, and automated IT platforms—known as cloud computing—is growing rapidly. Adopters are driven by the prospects of increasing agility and gaining access to more computing resources for less money. Large institutions are building and managing private-cloud environments internally (and, in some cases, procuring access to external public clouds) for basic infrastructure services, development platforms, and whole applications. Smaller businesses are primarily buying public-cloud offerings, as they generally lack the scale to set up their own clouds.

As attractive as cloud environments can be, they also come with new types of risks. Executives are asking whether external providers can protect sensitive data and also ensure compliance with regulations about where certain data can be stored and who can access the data. CIOs and CROs are also asking whether building private clouds creates a single point of vulnerability by aggregating many different types of sensitive data onto a single platform.

Blanket refusals to make use of private- or public-cloud capabilities leave too much value on the table from savings and improved flexibility. Large institutions, which have many types of sensitive information to protect and many cloud solutions to choose from, must balance potential benefits against, for instance, risks of breaches of data confidentiality, identity and access integrity, and system availability.

The cloud is here to stay

Refusing to use cloud capabilities is not a viable option for most institutions. The combination of improved agility and a lower IT cost base is spurring large enterprises to launch concerted programs to use cloud environments. At the same time, departments, work groups, and individuals often take advantage of low-cost, easy-to-buy public-cloud services—even when corporate policies say they should not.

 

High growth and value expectations

Corporate spending on third-party-managed and public-cloud environments will grow from $28 billion in 2011 to more than $70 billion in 2015, according to IDC. However, total spending on the cloud is much larger than these estimates indicate because the figures do not reflect what enterprises spend on their private-cloud environments. Eighty percent of large North American institutions surveyed by McKinsey are planning or executing programs to make use of cloud environments to host critical applications—mostly by building private-cloud environments. At several of these institutions, executives predict that 70 to 75 percent of their applications will be hosted in cloud environments that will enable savings of 30 to 40 percent compared with current platforms.

Using external cloud offerings can yield even more pronounced savings. Some executives cite examples of 60 to 70 percent savings by replacing custom-developed internal applications with software-as-a-service alternatives sourced from the public cloud. In addition, according to recent McKinsey research, 63 percent of business leaders who responded agreed that the cloud can make their entire organization more business agile and responsive.

Risks and opportunities

Using the cloud creates data-protection challenges in public-cloud services as well as private-cloud environments. However, traditional platforms at most organizations have significant information risks that actually can be mitigated by moving to a more highly scaled and automated environment.

 

Risk of contracting for public cloud

Decades of experience matured the practice of writing contracts for telecommunications network services and traditional outsourcing arrangements. Terms and conditions exist for allocating liability for security breaches, downtime, and noncompliance events between providers and enterprises. They may be unwieldy, but they are well understood by providers, law firms, and—in many cases—CIOs and CROs.

Contracting for the cloud is different in many ways. Highly scaled, shared, and automated IT platforms, for example, can obscure the geographic location of data from both the provider and customer. This is a problem for institutions dealing in personally identifiable information because often they must keep some customer data in certain jurisdictions and face regulatory action if they do not. At this point, banking CIOs and CROs that we have interviewed largely do not believe that most public-cloud providers can give them the guarantees they require to protect their institutions from this type of regulatory action. Another novel challenge presented by the cloud is how to conform to regulatory and industry standards that have not yet been updated to reflect cloud architectures.

At some level, for the cloud, we are simply in the early days of contracting for enterprise-class services. How to draft the required terms and conditions will remain an open question until litigation has identified the critical issues and legal precedent has been established for resolving those issues.

 

Risk-management advantages of the public and private cloud

Both public- and private-cloud solutions can provide data-protection advantages compared with traditional, subscale technology environments. Cloud solutions improve transparency—for example, the centralized and virtualized nature of the cloud can simplify log and event management, allowing IT managers to see emerging security or resiliency problems earlier than might otherwise be possible. Likewise, in cloud environments, operators can solve problems once and apply the solutions universally by using robust automation tools.

Perhaps more important, technology organizations can focus investments in security capabilities on a small number of highly scaled environments.

 

A risk-management approach to exploiting the cloud

In many large institutions, information security traditionally has been a control function that used policies limiting what IT managers and end users could do in order to reduce the likelihood of data loss, privacy breaches, or noncompliance with regulations. We believe that IT organizations must now adopt a business-focused risk-management approach that engages business leaders in making trade-offs between the economic gains that cloud solutions promise and the risks they entail. It is still the early days of cloud computing, and risk-management decisions are highly dependent on the specifics of the situation, so there are no hard-and-fast rules. However, some rough principles for managing cloud-information risk are emerging.

Consider the full range of cloud contracting models

“Public cloud” and “private cloud” are useful simplifications, but there are other models that may provide attractive combinations of control and opportunities to tap vendor capabilities:

One option is on-premises managed private-cloud services, in which third-party vendors provide a service that operates like an external cloud offering but is located in an enterprise’s own facility and is dedicated to the organization.

Some flavors of virtual private clouds can be used; these are similar to public clouds in that the solution is externally managed, but like private clouds, they offer dedicated capacity, such as resource pools, that are reserved for each client.

Community clouds feature infrastructure that is shared by several organizations and meets the needs of a specific community of users. Community clouds may, for example, provide industry-specific solutions that ensure compliance with relevant regulations.

 

To complicate things further, the maturity of technological and organizational solutions varies by deployment type and by application, vendor, and specific configuration.

 

1. Pursue a mixed-cloud strategy

Different workloads and data sets have vastly different stakes when it comes to data protection, depending on the nature of the application and which phase of the software life cycle it supports—for instance, development and test versus live production. The public cloud can be a good option for developing and testing software, since this usually does not involve sensitive data. Any workload that includes personally identifiable customer information will require careful consideration before it could be hosted in a public-cloud environment. Control of data access is also important in order to protect confidential business information and intellectual property. Essentially, any data that has business value or is covered by regulation needs appropriate management and protection (for more on the types of information to manage, see Exhibit 2 in the PDF of this article).

In addition, benefits from cloud migration can vary widely by workload. For example, consumer-commerce sites, where capacity demand spikes during major promotions or at certain times of the year, will benefit from taking advantage of the variable pricing available through highly scalable public clouds.

Sophisticated IT shops are developing tools to map workloads to cloud-based hosting options using criteria like mission criticality, sensitivity of data, migration complexity, and peak processing requirements. This will make it possible for IT staff to pursue a mixed-cloud strategy and drive workloads to the hosting options that best balance risk and economic value

 

2. Implement a business-focused approach

Organizations that have mature risk-management functions—for example, large companies in heavily regulated industries such as banking—should establish a comprehensive risk-management approach for cloud computing that extends beyond technology solutions and the IT department. Design and implementation should cover the policies, skills, capabilities, and mind-sets required of the IT and risk-management organizations, as well as the operating units. The risk-management methodology should address several elements, including transparency, risk appetite and strategy, risk-enabled business processes and decisions, risk organization and governance, and risk culture.

 

 

For the full report please visit McKinsey .

TIE Kinetix , a software solutions company that facilitates every step of the e-commerce lifecycle, has put out a list of predictions for the content syndication space in 2013.

 

The company believes that the shift to cloud and SaaS-based solutions will make it possible for SMBs to market content more effectively, affordably and compete with bigger players. TIE Kinetix's 2013 outlook forecasts that while selling through partners will continue to be a major growth strategy for organizations, without the right tools, they will still struggle to maximize the full potential of the channel.

 

TIE Kinetix's Predictions for 2013:

 

1. Uptick in SaaS/cloud adoption will give SMBs a bigger piece of the pie - Larger, formidable enterprises will need to watch SMBs as they make the shift to cloud/SaaS and harness the power of enterprise technology that was not previously affordable. With the same tools as large enterprises, SMBs will be able to market smarter and broader, reaching new customers across the channel.

 

2. The end of brand fragmentation - A critical focus for marketers will be to stop the brand fragmentation that comes through the indirect channel and with multi channel and multi device touch points for customers. To provide a seamless user and brand experience, organizations will look to enterprise software that can streamline marketing content and provide a 360-degree view of the purchase lifecycle. 

 

3. Content marketing expands footprint with mobile and social - In an effort to create a single, unified customer experience across the indirect channel, organizations will seek to better control their marketing content through global syndication. Content marketing will get its fair share of the marketing budget as organizations leverage mobile platforms to deliver location-based content to handheld devices.

 

4. Social media marketing refined - Marketers often embrace new tools enthusiastically at first without fully understanding customer preferences. Growing evidence suggests consumers don't enjoy direct marketing efforts via Facebook but instead prefer more conversational interactions. In 2013 marketers will take a more cautious and educated approach to make sure they are more aligned with customer expectations when it comes to interacting on social media. Social media will continue to play an important role in the marketing mix as long as the right channels are used for the right communications. 

 

5. CMOs tackle tech decisions - Historically, IT has driven integration and e-commerce decisions and has done so from a cost efficiency perspective. In 2013, a paradigm shift will occur whereby more power to source and choose will move to CMOs as they are charged to leverage technology and SaaS-based solutions to reach more people faster. CMOs will look to increase speed to market through technology that can push out timely pricing and product info across all channels and the ones who can do this effectively will own the market. IT's role will be to support these efforts and play a true part in driving revenue.

 

6. Online retailers seek security and protection support - Regulatory changes for security standards in online and mobile technology will plague retailers in the coming year. TIE Kinetix expects that with the increased data breaches and more poorly encrypted data out there, online retailers will struggle to find the optimal way to protect customers and their brands. By choosing SaaS-based solutions from vendors with a proven track record in security, businesses will be able to bring the focus back to selling, with confidence that compliance and advanced security certification management are in safe hands.