Cloud Computing

We’re just days away from VAI Prevail 2023, our first onsite event since Nashville, TN in 2018. After several years of successful virtual connection, the VAI team, customers, and partners are ready for in-person and face-to-face networking and collaboration. This year, we’re heading to the Walt Disney Swan Resort in Lake Buena Vista, FL, and we have an incredible itinerary over two days.

While concerns have risen around cloud migration, the benefits far outweigh the challenges, and having a cloud strategy can enhance your security profile. In a recent article I published in Strategic CIO 360, I outlined the challenges and pluses of cloud migration, how to handle both, and why you need to make sure your provider is fully transparent about costs.

The next time you're at a sporting event, a retail mall, or the airport, count how many cell phones are in use as evidence that design and development should be a mobile-first approach. Some of the people you'll encounter won't ever put their smartphones down, wholly engaged with making in-app purchases, checking their social network accounts, reading the news, and, of course, interacting. Additionally, the mobile device trend extends beyond consumer use to enterprise functionality, providing employees with continual access to the apps and data they need.

The complexity and magnitude of environmental concerns in food systems present significant challenges to building sustainable operations. Global food supply chains, for example, account for one-third of human-produced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions each year. During a product’s lifecycle, processes related to fuel and energy consumption, food production, and transportation continuously emit gasses into the atmosphere. Cargo transportation alone is responsible for 8% of global GHG emissions.

The chief sustainability officer of The Home Depot, Ron Jarvis, said that there are no environmentally friendly companies, and everything we do has an environmental impact with risks across the board, whether by carbon emissions, chemical exposure, or deforestation. 

In a recent article in Forbes, I wrote about how the current labor shortage of 4.6 million workers—the greatest since the World War II era—is plaguing industries from IT services and security, to manufacturing and retail, as well as transportation and the flow of goods in many areas. By having to take on too many responsibilities to fill labor gaps, workers become less efficient, and therefore less productive, which from an IT perspective can leave the organization vulnerable to cyberattacks.