But he says the biggest challenge Fair Isaac has run into has been with how it laid out its storage. "We went into this with the assumption that the limiting factors would be memory or CPU utilization. That turned out to be untrue -- wed load 32 VMs onto a four-processor 580 and end up not pushing the processor or memory," he says. Unfortunately, the limiting factor was the low number of I/Os per second, a common user complaint among virtualization users.
"Once we figured that out, we changed the way we laid out our disks and made our [server clusters] smaller. Now we do no more than five servers per cluster," Tierney explains.
Jared Beard recalls playing around with a VMware license almost nine years ago when he was still working at a dotcom for online education. The technology's potential was evident; the pitfalls would only become clear after he went to work for the University of Indiana in Bloomington, Ind.
"The main thing we ran into is the learning curve -- a huge learning curve," said Beard, now the associate director of information technology labs for the university's Kelley School of Business. The VMware licensing matrix he describes as "mind-numbing." In addition, troubleshooting VMs was time-consuming at first, and it took awhile to get speedier with installs. "Once you get past that, the flexibility you get back is worth the investment in time," he adds.
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
