| |December 20139CIOReview will be the GrowthBusiness Continuity: Getting More Significant for Business to Maintain with TimeFrancis D. John, President & CEO, UNSiprovider of cloud storage software to or public storage cloud. Headquartered in Dallas, UNSi provides Internet, Data and Voice Services for businesses with multiple locations. With mobility advances, BYOD programs, allowing employees to communicate and work on multiple devices, and the increase use of social mediafor business, business professionals require full-time access to their data 24x7x365 with little tolerance for down-time. People rely on instantaneous communications and have little patience for delays. Real-time communications makes it even more crucial for businesses to have a backup redundancy plan. Both large and small businesses need to make their offices more resilient to outages, especially in light of more and more natural disasters taking place worldwide. Companies need to ensure their data is highly fault-tolerate and that they have back-up redundancy solutions in place. BYOD - Bring Your Own Device With the Millennial generation ­ the use of social apps is changing our landscape and we have to be prepared for more and more of the millennial generation entering the work force. No longer can a PC be relied upon. Security is a major issue with the use of personal tablets and smartphones being used in the corporate environment.The question is, how the industry is going to react when more and more employees in the years to come bring their iPhone, tablets and sit at their desk and peruse Google and blog to complete research for work while using the company's wireless network. This can be considered a disruptive methodology. How do we integrate a generation of people that grow up using so many different tools at their disposable and will not think twice about bringing those to use in the corporate environment. It is a challenge to support the millennial generation coming to workforce that is so heavily engrained in using multiple devices from home and bring to the workforce. Security is a major issue and ensuring that IT infrastructure at the corporate environment supports multiple devices that employees may bring to their work stations.Supporting the original services which are sold to a customer when they are using your solutions in a totally different way than they had originally intended when they purchased your solution is connectivity, the need for more and more bandwidth than originally intended. This goes hand in hand with Bring Your Own Device ­ people bring their own devices to work from home. So many options these days that one cannot control what customers are using and running over their network infrastructure. This brings scalability of the network and security as rising issues that IT managers face. but achieving both is difficult. "Software defined everything" is a promising technology trend to solve this problem. By managing replication, error correction, network partitioning, and resource allocation in software, commodity hardware can be kept simple and be produced and housed on massive scales. Challenges for EntrepreneursWhen an industry is going through transformational changes, there are many opportunities, over many years, for entrepreneurs. The cloud is transforming multiple industries: compute, storage, networking, datacenters, management, so the opportunities are endless. And, of course, the entrepreneur's natural instinct is to think big. The challenge for cloud entrepreneurs is to get beyond the hype and focus on creating value by solving specific business problems very, very well. Focus, patience, and execution are the greatest challenges in this ocean of opportunities.Francis D. JohnMichael Tso
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