Strong customer relationships have become a critical business priority according to the results of the first report in a four-part series following the eighth annual Logicalis Global CIO Survey. The pandemic has emphasised the importance of digital transformation, particularly creating online experiences for customers as sophisticated as in-person. For CIOs, this has meant rethinking their business strategies. Continuing to shift from day-to-day management, CIOs prioritise innovation, business adaptability, and customer experience more than anything else.

In the age when I have to communicate with my kids via social media to get their attention, it’s no surprise that social engineering bore our most contemporary digital threat, phishing, as the lure for the high-profile cybersecurity threat of ransomware.

What is it and how do we get started? Whilst Observability is a current buzzword, I was reminded of Control Theory lectures many years ago. At that stage it referred to knowing the internal state of a system from observing the outcome. It relied on the systems being linear and deterministic. But our connected world is anything but linear or deterministic. It is hugely interconnected in complex meshes, processes like those involved in online purchasing, run independently but are interdependent, and AI will result in non-deterministic outcomes. My old understanding of the term does not work in this new world.

We find ourselves in unprecedented times. As the Covid pandemic begins to wind down, we are seeing manufacturing, logistics and supply chain issues manifesting themselves across all aspects of our lives. In the IT industry shortages of integrated circuits (silicon chips) are resulting in some very long product lead times, which in turn are impacting our customers abilities to deliver - digitisation projects that are being accelerated in part due to Covid.

The initial pivot towards remote working, as the world underwent its most recent digital transformation due to the pandemic, took an average of 11 days according to a survey from McKinsey. In pre-pandemic times, executives suggest that a transition on such a scale would have taken up to a year, indicating an acceleration of 40x.

One thing we’ve all learnt from the pandemic is that working 9 to 5 in an office isn’t how it has to be. We can be equally productive working from home with flexibility in our hours and a much better work/life balance. One thing that I certainly missed though are those little off-topic chats with people, where ideas are sparked, that air of creativity is hard to reproduce when your day consists of back-to-back video calls.

Logicalis reshape the traditional approach to Enterprise Security with the global launch of Secure OnMesh

Logicalis, a global IT solutions and managed service provider, today announces the launch of its new security solution - Secure OnMesh.

What on earth is that I hear many of you ask, don’t IBM just make big expensive mainframes? Well indeed not, POWER10 is the latest generation of IBM’s Risc-based systems that many Enterprises trust for running their crown-jewel applications on, both on premise and in Public Cloud. Following IBM’s announcement about the POWER10 chip at Hot Chips in August 2020, IBM formally launched the chip this month with the Enterprise E1080 server now available to order.