Gearing Up for IRCE: Michigan Business Owner Talks About Going Global

Posted on June 3, 2013 by Stephanie Vogel

Chicago IRCE 2013

Tomorrow nearly 4,500 executives and over 200 speakers are going to flock to Chicago for the 9th annual Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibit (IRCE). Here at Online Tech, we were too excited to wait for some of the amazing insights of the growing e-retailing industry. We figured no one wanted to wait, so I’m bringing a little sneak-peek at what’s to come at IRCE.

I got the opportunity to speak with Dan Asma, the president of Michigan-based McKeon Products. McKeon Products started as a small earplug business in 1962, and has since grown into a whole line of ear-care products that can be found in over 40,000 locations in-store and online. Dan started at McKeon’s close to four years ago, when they were just starting to realize their export opportunities had great potential.

So, they pushed their global initiatives. They went to trade shows across the globe. Asma explained that there were two phases for McKeon growing in a global market. The first phase was people coming to the U.S. and using their products. When they got home and realized they didn’t have Mack’s ear-care products available to them, they’d call the company to see how they could become distributors in the area. Subsequently, the second phase involved slowly building those distributor relationships around the world.

I assumed those relationships would be extremely different abroad than here in the U.S., but Asma holds that they were actually strikingly similar. Most of the issues had to do with customs, labelling, and the differences in a distributor’s process (for instance, McKeon is regulated by the EPA and FDA, but in other countries those regulations could look wildly different, or be non-existent).

This hasn’t been the only challenge for Asma related to making McKeon Products a global entity. Dan explains, “It’s been an ongoing process to meet each market’s needs. There are language barriers, cultural differences, and a need to understand how each website’s business model is different than American counterparts.” Also, securing copyrights can be difficult if their brand name (their brand is named “Mack’s”, after the initial owner) has been used in another country for a different purpose.

But they wouldn’t have gone global if there weren’t some rewards. I asked Asma what he found most rewarding about the shift:

“Top of mind, it’s a real validation of the company platform and all the hard work of the people within our company to be able to say, ‘people don’t just like and use our products here, they use and enjoy them world-wide’. It supports our values of supplying an exceptional product and experience to all customers.”

Asma says that he’s excited for IRCE, because there’s going to be so much intellectual capital that he can learn from and take back to the already successful McKeon Products. With 120 sessions ranging in topics from small retailers to e-marketing to technology (and everywhere in between), it’s not hard to share in his excitement.

If you’ll be at the show, make sure to see Dan Asma speak at 5:00pm on June 5th (Wednesday) in the Global E-Retailing track. Also, come see Online Tech in booth #108, where we’re going to be exhibiting our PCI compliant offerings. We’ll also keep you connected if you can’t make it to Chicago, with live-blogging and live-tweeting all week long.

Visit www.macksearplugs.com for more about McKeon Products.

PCI Compliant Data CentersLooking for more information on PCI hosting requirements, recommendations, and the foundation of a secure PCI compliant data center?

Download our PCI Compliant Hosting white paper now for a complete guide to PCI hosting with IT vendors.

Still have questions? Contact us or chat with us now. Find out more about our fully compliant, PCI hosting solutions, or submit a quote request for your project today.

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A Quick Tech Tutorial: Two-Factor Authentication

Posted on May 31, 2013 by Anna Ankenbrand

Two-factor authentication is a best practice to fulfill authorization and authentication requirements for HIPAA compliance or PCI DSS compliance and can protect your data and business.  To gain a better understanding, Online Tech’s Technical Team shares this quick tech tutorial on two-factor authentication.

Listen to an audio version of the interview.

Two-Factor Authentication

Q:  What is two-factor authentication?
A:  Two-factor authentication goes beyond using a user name and password.  It puts a new piece of technology in the mix for better security.

Q: How does two-factor authentication work differently than logging in with a normal user name and password?
A:  Here is an example of how two-factor authentication works.  You have a user requesting access to a system. That user is going to authenticate through a firewall.  It’s going to hit a domain controller to make sure that’s a valid user. Then, it is going to send it to a cell phone and on that cell phone it is going to say approve or deny access.

Once that cell phone sends it to the firewall permission is granted and the person has VPN access. If they don’t have a valid user name, password, or the cell phone setup correctly; they will not get access to the system.

This puts a high level of security into an environment.  So, in this example the cell phone becomes the second factor of authentication and the user name and password being the primary.

Q: Who Should be Using Two-Factor Authentication?
A:  Two-factor authentication is a requirement for PCI compliance. The PCI requirement 8.3 states:

Incorporate two-factor authentication for remote access (network-level access originating from outside the network) to the network by employees, administrators, and third parties. (For example, remote authentication and dial-in service (RADIUS) with tokens; or other technologies that facilitate two-factor authentication).

Anyone with PCI needs to have two-factor authentication.  It would be great idea for businesses that have medical records or social security numbers.  Anyone with sensitive data should be using two-factor authentication in their VPN.

To learn more, join Richard Li and Brian Kelly of Duo Security and Jason Yaeger, Director of Operations/Risk Management & Security Officer of Online Tech as they discuss how to employ two-factor authentication to protect your data and your business in the free webinar, The Affordable Way to Maintain Security and Compliance with Two-Factor Authentication.

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WWJ950 Interview: Cloud Computing, Healthcare IT & Entrepreneurship in Michigan

Posted on May 30, 2013 by Thu Pham

Mackinac Policy ConferenceOnline Tech’s co-CEO Yan Ness is attending the 2013 Mackinac Policy Conference, an event that features national experts and innovative change-makers working collaboratively to create a globally competitive, financially-attractive business environment in Michigan.

While attending, Yan was recently interviewed by Charlie Langton of the WWJ950 radio station on cloud computing, healthcare IT (including HIPAA compliant clouds), mass digitization and how entrepreneurship is changing Michigan.

Listen to it now:
Yan Ness WWJ950 Interview

Yan Ness Interview with Charlie Langton

Yan Ness Interview with Charlie Langton; Source: Organik Consulting

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Online Tech and Duo Security Team Up to Present Two-Factor Authentication Webinar

Posted on May 30, 2013 by Marla Sokolowski

Online Tech hangs its professional hat on being the leader in secure and compliant hosting services. Just a few miles away in our hometown of Ann Arbor, Mich., resides another giant in the data security business.

Duo Security pioneered smartphone-based two-factor authentication and its services are now used by some of the most security-conscious organizations on the planet, along with three of the top five social networks.

Members of both teams are combining to offer a free educational webinar at 2 P.M. ET on Tuesday, June 4, titled The Affordable Way to Maintain Security and Compliance with Two-Factor Authentication. (For more details or to register, click here).

Online Tech uses Duo Security for its own VPN connection for employees and offers the smartphone two-factor authentication for VPN access as an optimal security measure to protect against online fraud and unauthorized access for clients that connect to their networks from a remote location.

Two-factor authentication is a required component of Online Tech’s PCI DSS compliant services and a best practice to meet HIPAA compliance.

Jason Yaeger

Jason Yaeger

Jason Yaeger, Online Tech’s Director of Operations and Risk Management, said Duo Security was the only player in the smartphone two-factor authentication market when Online Tech first partnered with them.

“Duo Security had a unique technology,” he said. “A lot of two-factor services out there were utilizing a key fob with rotating numbers to authenticate. Duo integrated smartphones as second factor. You can lose a key fob and not know it, but nobody loses a phone and does not know it.”

Brian Kelly

Brian Kelly

After tremendous early success, Duo Security is no longer the only player in its space. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, after all. “If it wasn’t such a hot area, we probably would be the only one,” said Senior Product Manager Brian Kelly.

Richard Li

Richard Li

Kelly and Yaeger will be joined by Duo Security’s Vice President of Product and Strategy, Richard Li, when the two premier data security organizations combine to teach businesses how to protect their data – and their reputations.

According to Mandiant, 100-percent of security breaches involve stolen credentials. When sites are breached, passwords are stolen and can be reused to access additional accounts. The impact on business and professional reputations can be disastrous.

To find out more about the webinar and to register via GoToMeeting, click here.

More About Two-Factor Authentication:

Evernote Adds Two-Factor Authentication
On Saturday the online SaaS (software as a service) note-collecting Evernote posted a blog with subsequent email stating that they had discovered and blocked unauthorized activity on their network. In response to the attack, they reset the passwords of the … Continue reading →

Two-Factor Authentication Helps Fight Unauthorized Access
Access is a huge security concern for every company, no matter the industry. Thus, having an extra layer of technical security in place that employees must go through in order to access a company’s network can help reduce the risk … Continue reading →

Simple Security Improvements with Your Mobile Device
Two, 2-minute security improvements to secure your account My inbox receives between 100 and 200 work emails daily – so far, as of writing this at 4:11pm, I’m up to 155. I won’t share my personal email stats – it … Continue reading →

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After the Cloud, What Next? Mobile Technology in Data Centers

Posted on May 29, 2013 by Anna Ankenbrand

What does the future hold for the data center industry? Yan Ness, Co-CEO of Online Tech, gives his thoughts on how the data center industry will evolve over the next five years and beyond.

One of the most popular data center industry trends is making data centers more energy efficient.  This includes making server equipment more energy efficient, using alternative energy resources, as well as using strategies like free cooling.

Ness explains in Let’s Save the Planet by Filling Up the Data Centers that in the next five years the best thing to do is “get the server equipment out of the closet and move into specialty data centers.” This move would have a tremendous impact on the environment since data centers typically incorporate more resources and technology in energy efficient improvements than small to medium companies.

Once everyone has been moved into the cloud and data center efficiencies have been maximized; what will the next step be?  What will the next generation data center look like?

As mentioned in The Next Generation Data Center:  How Michigan Data Centers Fit the Bill, predictions for next generation data centers include producing more energy efficient servers.  Stephen J. Bigelow writes in What will the next big data center transformation look like? that server designs are becoming more energy efficient and can operate at higher data center temperatures.

“Next-generation servers will use only a fraction of their total power when idle and actively power off when unneeded,” said John Stanley, senior analyst at the 451 Group.  Servers that used 400 watts of power but still consumed 60% to 70% of power when idle, now uses only 25% to 50% of its total power when idle.

One of the technology advancements that really interest Ness is making servers more efficient by using mobile device technology.  Ness describes how the data center industry is looking at mobile computing devices and bringing that technology to data centers and servers.

“If you hold your phone, it’s actually is quite a powerful device.  It doesn’t get that hot and uses very little power,” says Ness. The mobile industry has invested a lot of time and resources into getting a lot out of mobile device batteries.  For example, servers could slow itself down when it is not in use like cell phones currently do.

“So by bringing some of that mobile technology to servers and data centers, I think we will see a whole new wave of improvements,” says Ness.

However, Ness brings it back full circle and stresses how important it will be to fill the data centers.  If data centers are full, then it would be financially beneficial for the industry to invest in advancing this type of technology.

Watch more of Yan in our series of CEO video voices:

The Big Switch to Managed Services and Private Cloud
Customer Big Switch to Managed Services “Customers don’t want to deal with equipment anymore,” says Yan Ness, Online Tech’s Co-CEO.  We are seeing customers more focused on buying applications than dealing with their servers.  They want to use our fully … Continue reading →

Let’s Save the Planet by Filling Up the Data Center
In 2013, the biggest trend for data centers is making them more energy efficient. There are very simple things companies can do like turning off the lights in the data center to more strategic plans like locating data centers in … Continue reading →

Online Tech’s Michigan Data Centers Use Free Cooling
In many cooler geographical U.S. regions, data centers are looking at taking advantage of using the outside environment to cool their IT equipment. Although this free cooling concept has been in existence for more than 30 years, it has becoming … Continue reading →

How the Data Center Industry Lowers the Carbon Footprint
Data Center Industry Lowers Carbon Footprint For many years, the data center industry has received a bad rap for being energy hogs. In 2007, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency warned everyone that data centers and servers would consume 3% of … Continue reading →

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The Big Switch to Managed Services and Private Cloud

Posted on May 29, 2013 by Anna Ankenbrand

Customer Big Switch to Managed Services
“Customers don’t want to deal with equipment anymore,” says Yan Ness, Online Tech’s Co-CEO.  We are seeing customers more focused on buying applications than dealing with their servers.  They want to use our fully managed services and HIPAA, PCI and SOX compliant managed server hosting environment rather than do it themselves. “They just want to pay the price and have someone else take care of it.”

Online Tech offers a full range of secure hosting solutions for mission critical applications, including cloud hosting, colocation, managed servers, compliant hosting and disaster recovery.  We recognize that 75% of companies will be outsourcing to the private cloud environment in the next few years.  So, we are making the selling process of those environments easier on our clients.  Mike Klein, Online Tech Co-CEO, explains Online Tech’s Major Data Center Initiatives & Investments.

The Big Switch
Ness refers to Nicolas Carr’s book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, while discussing the outsourcing trend.  In his book, Carr compares the evolution of the computer industry to the power industry.

A hundred years ago, a lot of companies made their own power because they didn’t trust the utility companies.  Companies believed that the utility companies were dangerous and electricity was confusing and difficult to buy.  “It’s kind of like the internet and the cloud today,” says Ness.  “It’s not that easy, not easy to use, kind of confusing to buy, and it’s still kind of dangerous.  So companies keep control of their IT”.

As Carr explains that the computer industry is in a similar revolution.  “As massive information-processing plants have begun pumping data and software code into our homes and business, it’s computing that’s turning into a utility.”

Ness agrees.  He doesn’t know exactly whether it will be 10 years or 100 years from now, but eventually companies will not be managing their IT anymore.  They will be paying a utility company to get access to their computers, storage, and run their application and servers.

Watch more of Yan in our series of CEO video voices:

Let’s Save the Planet by Filling Up the Data Center
In 2013, the biggest trend for data centers is making them more energy efficient. There are very simple things companies can do like turning off the lights in the data center to more strategic plans like locating data centers in … Continue reading →

Online Tech’s Michigan Data Centers Use Free Cooling
In many cooler geographical U.S. regions, data centers are looking at taking advantage of using the outside environment to cool their IT equipment.  Although this free cooling concept has been in existence for more than 30 years, it has becoming … Continue reading →

How the Data Center Industry Lowers the Carbon Footprint
Data Center Industry Lowers Carbon Footprint For many years, the data center industry has received a bad rap for being energy hogs.  In 2007, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency warned everyone that data centers and servers would consume 3% of … Continue reading →

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Data Center Jobs in Michigan, Indiana and Ohio

Posted on May 24, 2013 by Thu Pham

We’re hiring for numerous positions in our Mid-Michigan and Southeast Michigan locations, as well as seeking candidates in Indiana and Ohio! Find out more about them:

Infrastructure Manager (Mid-Michigan)
The Infrastructure Manager is responsible for the budget, people, processes, and systems for our data centers, network, cloud, and storage systems.

Account Executive (Southeast Michigan)
Grow the customer base for one of the fastest growing, most highly regarded high tech companies in Southeast Michigan. As an Account Executive, you will be responsible for acquiring new customers and expanding existing customer relationships. This position reports directly to the Director of Sales. With an uncapped compensation plan and with a Michigan territory, you can achieve your goals and also be home every night.

Account Executive (Indiana and Ohio)
Grow the customer base for one of the fastest growing, most highly regarded high tech companies in the Midwest. As an Account Executive, you will be responsible for acquiring new customers and expanding existing customer relationships. This position reports directly to the Director of Sales, and it comes with a competitive total compensation package that includes both a base salary component and an uncapped commission component.

Senior Sales Engineer (Indiana and Ohio)
The Senior Sales Engineer role is primarily responsible for supporting our Account Executives by developing technical solutions to meet our customers’ requirements and working with our operations team to kick off the order deployment process. The job focuses on new and existing customers in the Indianapolis and Columbus markets, and it has the opportunity to expand into a broader set of sales responsibilities, including managing the commercial aspects of our customer relationships and prospect development.

About Our Industry and Us
The managed data center business is expected to grow to $18.5 billion by 2015. Online Tech, Michigan’s largest managed data center operator, is poised to take advantage of significant growth in demand in across the Midwest. Online Tech owns and operates three premium data centers, and focuses on high-availability, compliance, and security. Online Tech helps clients manage their growing IT demand with a full range of solutions from colocation to multi-tenant cloud to private cloud computing in an independently SSAE 16, SOC 2, HIPAA, & PCI compliant environment.

Most recently, our co-CEO, Yan Ness, was nominated for the prestigious Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. In 2003, Ness led a group of investors to acquire the company. Serving as the company’s CEO since the purchase, he has overseen tremendous growth both physically (from 600 to more than 60,000 square feet of capacity) and financially (an average of 30-percent annual growth). In September 2012, a media company, News-Press & Gazette, invested $20 million in Online Tech, fueling expansion into new Midwestern markets.

We also recently won a FastTrack Award for the fifth time from a local economic development agency, Ann Arbor SPARK, and we received a DiSciTech award from Corp! magazine for excellence in technology for the third time.

Find out more about our company, and send your resume to careers@onlinetech.com!

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Update from Online Tech: Major Data Center Initiatives & Investments

Posted on May 23, 2013 by Mike Klein

Summer is just around the corner in Michigan and when we look outside, it feels like everything is growing right before our eyes.  I want to take a few minutes to give you an update on what’s been happening at Online Tech, as it feels like a lot of things are growing quickly with the company as well.
 
Data Center Updates
If you’ve been to our Mid-Michigan data center in the last 6 months, you may have noticed our new Network Operations Center (NOC) that we built out late last year.  The NOC houses some of our engineers with systems displays on the wall for us to monitor the systems in real time.  This mirrors the NOC in our Ann Arbor 2 data center where we’re also monitoring all of the systems across all of our data centers.

Next month we’ll also be breaking ground at the Mid-Michigan data center to add 2 additional 1-megawatt generators for additional backup capacity.  This $1.5M investment will continue to deliver N+1 (Tier 3) generator backup for all systems as we continue to grow the power footprint of the data center.

New Emergency Broadcast System
OT Emergency Broadcast SystemOne of the areas we’ve been focused on improving is the time it takes to notify our clients of a client-impacting event at the data center.  We took two significant steps over the last 6 months to improve our client-facing communications with a focus on rapid information and communication availability:

  1. We outsourced our VoIP phone system and Exchange server to a trusted partner so our communication tools will work independently of any data center issue that may arise.
  2. We created an Outage Alarm system that can e-mail, text and call our clients in the case of an outage with just a few clicks.  This custom iPad application sits in each data center NOC connected to a 4G wireless network.  This new system dramatically shortens the time it takes to inform our clients of any major incident at the data center.

Our transparency goal is to ensure we inform you of any issues before your customers or users notify you, so you’re in complete charge of the communications with your users.  Our emergency broadcast system allows us to provide very quick communication to you of an issue while allowing our operations team to stay focused on fixing the issue as quickly as possible.

Admittedly, we’re still learning how quickly to send out an alert message.  In the past few months, we have been a little too quick to use the system on what turned out to be minor issues with minimal client impact, but scared a number of our clients with broader than necessary alerts.  I apologize for the over-communication.  We’re working out the timing and breadth of using these alerts.

OTPortal Enhancements
Recently we added features to let you request and track firewall rule changes more easily, copy old firewall rule changes as a starting point for new rules, and have new firewall rules “expire” on a certain date, so that temporary rules don’t accidentally become permanent ones. This can help with security; we don’t want to leave ports or services open after they are no longer needed.

In the next 90 days, we’ll be announcing additional capabilities to the portal to make it easier to control your servers:

  • The ability to view a list of your servers, and enable or disable access to common services, like FTP and HTTP for each one without needing to understand firewall rules to request these changes.
  • Cloud Server Controls: You will be able to start, stop and restart cloud servers through the portal. These actions can be done immediately, or scheduled in the future.
  • Cloud Server Snapshots:  You will be able to revert snapshots for cloud servers. If you are about to install new software, you will be able to easily take a snapshot of the server beforehand. If anything goes wrong with the install, you can easily revert back to that snapshot. Snapshots are temporary and expire (and are automatically deleted) after 24 hours. They cannot be used as long-term backups.

We have more upgrades in the pipeline based on some great suggestions from our clients on how we can improve the portal experience and make it more efficient for you to use.  We appreciate the feedback.  Please keep sharing your suggestions with us.  We find it very helpful in improving the portal user experience.
 
Security Services:
Is data security a concern?  If so, schedule a call with one of our systems engineers to discuss the options you can leverage to secure your servers, network and data.  Security tools like Daily Log Review and Monthly Vulnerability Scanning can take the worry out of attempted breaches and let you sleep better at night.

Daily Log Review collects your server logs daily and analyzes them for anomalies, informing you if immediate action is necessary to protect your data.  Monthly Vulnerability Scanning checks your firewalls, networks, open ports and web applications for holes that hackers can get through and provides you a monthly action report for any open vulnerabilities.

Webinars and White Papers:
Please join us for any number of our upcoming educational webinars.  We have a new series on data encryption starting June 4th, as well as an informational series on disaster recovery recorded at: http://www.onlinetech.com/events/webinars.  We also have a new mobile security whitepaper available at: http://www.onlinetech.com/resources/white-papers.

Net Promoter Score:
Finally, thank you to all of our clients that filled out our one-question survey over the last 6 months as part of our Net Promoter System (NPS) to track and measure client satisfaction.  We received a lot of really good feedback – both on what we’re doing well and where we can improve.  We ended 2012 with impressive results – an NPS score of 80% which sits with the best across most industries for customer satisfaction scores.

We look forward to continuing to serve you and deliver one of the best hosting experiences in the business.

Sincere Regards,
Mike Klein
Co-CEO
Online Tech LLC

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2013 MTL: Managing Innovation in Client Relations & Private Clouds

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Courtney Noonan

2013 Midwest Tech LeadersMichigan data center operator Online Tech will be exhibiting a range of secure hosting solutions for mission critical applications, including cloud hosting, colocation, managed servers, compliant hosting and disaster recovery, at the Midwest Technology Leaders 2013 symposium for IT executives and CIOs held in Detroit, Michigan.

Online Tech’s Director of Operations, Jason Yaeger, participated in a rapid fire Q&A session this morning at the Midwest Technology Leaders conference in Plymouth, Michigan. Matt Roush introduced Online Tech as being a long time home of innovation in the state of Michigan. Jason discussed how Online Tech has managed innovation in client relations and private cloud environments:

Online Tech has taken the initiative to communicate and understand what our clients’ pain points are. We recognize that your business requires uptime 24/7. After looking across the industry and acknowledging the frustration that comes with a lack of communication, Online Tech has now developed an Emergency Notification Systems that goes out to our clients within seconds of any outage.

Online Tech is Michigan’s most trusted provider of private cloud environments. We recognize that 75% of companies will be outsourcing to the private cloud environment in the next couple of years, with 25% of companies already there. Online Tech is making the selling process of those environments easier on our clients.

About Jason Yaeger
Most recently, Jason was the recipient of the 2012 Crain’s Detroit Business CIO of the Year, exemplifying innovation in technology strategy, industry leadership and a track record of “going beyond the call of duty.”

Jason Yaeger is also Online Tech’s Risk Management and Security Officer. Jason has guided the company through the successful completion of many audits, including SAS 70 Type I, SAS 70 Type II, SSAE 16, HIPAA and PCI.

Jason YaegerJason also led the investment in energy efficient improvements last year on Online Tech’s Mid-Michigan data center facility. As a result, Online Tech became the first Michigan data center operator to earn the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ENERGY STAR certification, putting Online Tech in the top 25 percent of facilities in the nation regarding energy performance. Read Online Tech Earns EPA’s ENERGY STAR Certification for Superior Energy Efficiency to learn more.

Read more about private clouds:
Private Cloud Computing: A Game Changer for Disaster Recovery
Private cloud computing offers a number of significant advantages – including lower costs, faster server deployments, and higher levels of resiliency. What is often over looked is how the Private Cloud can dramatically changes the game for IT disaster recovery in terms of significantly lower costs, faster recovery times, and enhanced testability. … Continue reading →

Pairing Cloud Computing Benefits with Security and Compliance
The added business value of cloud computing is multi-faceted, as Online Tech’s co-CEO Mike Klein outlined in a previous article, The Six Benefits of Cloud Computing, which I’ll summarize here: Lower Costs Pooling of computing resources means better efficiency and … Continue reading →

Precautions with the HIPAA Cloud for Healthcare Software as a Service (SaaS) Companies
A recent Google search brought me to a health IT blog, Life as a Healthcare CIO, and the post entitled The Reality of SaaS. The author discusses whether or not SaaS/cloud computing is appropriate for EHR (electronic health record) hosting … Continue reading →

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2013 Midwest Technology Leaders Keynote: Competencies of the New CIO

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Courtney Noonan

2013 Midwest Tech LeadersMichigan data center operator Online Tech is exhibiting a range of secure hosting solutions for mission critical applications, including cloud hosting, colocation, managed servers, compliant hosting and disaster recovery, at the Midwest Technology Leaders 2013 symposium for IT executives and CIOs held in Detroit, Michigan. Here’s a liveblog of one of the featured keynotes:

Keynote: Competencies of the New CIO
Speaker: Larry Bonfante- CIO, United States Tennis Association (USTA)

CIOs today must be more than a provider of technology and services. They must be able to engage with the consumer, board members and senior executives as business executives and thought leaders themselves.

Most CIOs have grown up in the IT realm, they know how to leverage that IT to help business, but the third leg (missing leg) is “human dynamics.” Today’s CIOs need strong relationship management and marketing skills, which are qualities that don’t always come easily to a CIO. Being the CIO of an organization today is a front-facing role and not just sharing IT knowledge.

People should be passionate about the organizations they work for. How many employees take their “souls” off and hang them at the door and put it on when they leave the office? We need our CIOs to bring their whole person and soul to the job.

Organizations need a vision to inspire people and find what makes their people “tick.” It needs to help people understand the link between their efforts and the company vision. It needs to become their vision and not just one hoisted on them.

The main purpose of IT is to drive business value. CIOs shouldn’t be in the business just for the sake of technology being “cool.” IT is about being the very fabric of the business and integrated with it.  IT needs to be part of the decision-making of the business. If you woke up your CIO at 2am, what would their answers be to the following questions:

  • What matters? What are you striving for?
  • How are the things we doing in IT enabling those outcomes?
  • If we are doing things that don’t matter, why are we doing them?

When it comes to communication, even if you think you have communicated enough, communicate some more! The key to communication is listening. CIOs need to become better listeners so they can become better communicators.

CIOs of yesterday were often easy to pick out of a crowd, because…

  1. They dress different than everyone else
  2. They haven’t built relationships with anyone in the room
  3. When they open their mouth, they speak “geek speak”

Today’s CIO need to speak to people in clear English. When entering the boardroom, they need to be able to speak business in the language of board members and truly fit in. Tailoring the message to the audience in the room is key.

Everyone looks at life through their own lens and constantly ask, “What’s in it for me?” If CIOs are going to be effective relationship managers, the question needs to be: “What’s in it for them?” When you’re a leader, it’s never all about you. Leaders build their team and consistently give others credit, it’s about serving others. It is critically important to work members of your team as individuals and do what is effective for them.  CIOs owe it to people to develop them to the best THEY can be.

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