The operations stories enterprise IT leaders actually read.
Volume 343, Issue 1 · 9 articles
Memory shortages, AI PCs and Windows changes have broken the predictable three-to-four-year hardware refresh cycle.
Experts tell ITPro that the traditional calendar-driven three-to-four-year endpoint refresh has given way to a mix of cycles, driven by AI PCs, the memory supply crisis, rising prices and Microsoft's Windows timelines.
Refresh decisions now depend on device type, the device's role in the business and budget pressure, not just age, and while experts disagree on whether the cycle is dead, most agree the market is splitting by technology and use case.
IT leaders are advised to plan refreshes around several factors rather than a fixed date.
Riverbed survey: 90% want agentic AI to run IT operations within two years, but 77% won't let AI decide without human approval.
IT Pro reports on Riverbed research finding that 90% of IT managers and tech leaders want agentic AI to power autonomous IT operations within two years, and three-quarters see it as core to future IT strategy.
Trust is the obstacle, as 77% won't let AI make operational decisions without human approval, only one in five run automated IT operations today, and just four in ten have environments ready for agentic AI.
While 76% of projects have moved beyond proof of concept, that is only 5% more than last year, and just 9% are deployed across the enterprise.
New state rules mean data center projects now must handle grid cost, water use and community benefit, not just power.
For three years, finding power was the main test for data center site selection, but a late-September wave of state actions has changed that.
California's new laws make developers pay the full incremental cost of grid upgrades, Massachusetts and other states are adding similar ratepayer protections, and water transparency and local land-use accountability are now additional hurdles.
The author argues that operators, real estate strategists and enterprise architects must plan across all three fronts for projects to survive.
American Express infrastructure head Matthew Liste shares 12 principles for building scalable, reliable enterprise platforms.
In this InfoQ presentation from QCon San Francisco, Matthew Liste, executive vice president and global head of infrastructure at American Express, draws on two decades at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Amex.
He explains 12 core principles for building scalable, reliable platforms, covering technical debt, deprecation and a strong engineering culture.
He also shows how to design infrastructure platforms that reduce complexity, streamline developer workflows and deliver long-term value for senior architects and engineering leaders.
Let's Encrypt will move default certificates from 90 to 64 days on Feb. 10, 2027, so admins should check renewals.
Let's Encrypt will shorten its default TLS certificate validity from 90 to 64 days for all certificates issued from February 10, 2027, while 45-day and six-day options remain and no existing certificates will be revoked.
64-day certificates arrive in the staging environment on October 14, 2026, so administrators can test renewals early.
ACME clients that support ACME Renewal Info should need no changes, but scripts or cron jobs with hardcoded renewal intervals should switch to renewing at a fraction of the certificate's lifetime.
Older datacentres aren't necessarily obsolete; many can be upgraded for AI and higher densities rather than replaced.
In a Computer Weekly opinion piece, a datacentre engineering adviser says operators, investors and owners increasingly ask whether existing facilities are still fit for purpose, prompted by AI and higher rack densities, acquisition due diligence or cooling struggles in heat waves.
Building age rarely determines the answer, since many sites have already adapted through several generations of servers, power densities and cooling strategies.
The author argues the industry is too quick to label facilities 'legacy' and that upgrading, expanding and modernizing existing sites can unlock commercial value for AI.
As AI finds vulnerabilities faster, organizations need a plan for urgent out-of-cycle patching, says Toro Solutions' Katie Barnett.
Katie Barnett, director of cyber security at Toro Solutions, notes that scheduled patching suits most vulnerabilities but asks what happens when one can't wait, especially as AI speeds discovery.
Anthropic's work with Mozilla found 22 Firefox vulnerabilities in two weeks using Claude Opus 4.6, 14 of them high severity, yet organizations still must determine whether they use affected software, where it is exposed and whether it is exploitable.
Weighing urgency against operational risk is complicated by laptops, servers, browsers, firewalls, firmware and systems managed by MSPs or not managed at all.
Rack batteries, BESS and solid-state transformers are reshaping data center power, raising doubts about where the UPS still belongs.
Data Center Knowledge examines how AI-driven densification on the load side and renewables, microgrids and on-site generation on the grid side are questioning the UPS's central place in the power train.
The Uptime Institute's 2026 outage analysis found power issues caused more than one in five IT outages over three years, with UPS failures the leading cause at 39%, and lithium-ion UPS batteries have also contributed to more data center fires.
New architectures such as rack-level batteries, battery energy storage systems and solid-state transformers may disrupt the UPS further.
A proposed 20-story Kansas City data center tests whether urban proximity justifies higher build costs.
A proposed 20-story downtown Kansas City data center designed by SOM would stack compute, power and cooling on a 0.23-acre parcel, trading suburban sprawl for carrier-rich connectivity close to users.
The developer argues that latency-sensitive inference and dense interconnection justify the central location.
IDC and JLL experts note that vertical construction carries cost and operational premiums that only certain workloads, such as low-latency financial trading, may justify.
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