Top Blogs for CIOs to Read

Summer vacation is a good time to catch up on your reading. Well, if romance novels aren’t to your taste, why not check out blogs written by members of the CIO community?It’s too easy to get caught up in our own worlds and not venture outside our comfort zones to be challenged by other points of view. Plus, frankly, many C-level executives can exist in a sycophantic universe. It’s good to find out you’re way of thinking may not be the only path.Here are some of the blogs cited by KZO Innovations. Some of the authors write frequently while others might post on a monthly basis (or less frequently). All of the blogs mentioned below are currently active. The site’s list is broken down by technology, CIO leadership, and Business. It includes academic, corporate, and public sector blogs in its list of the 25 recommended for CIOs.One of the suggestions under technology is the Enterprise Security Trends Blog. Written by the folks at Hewlett-Packard, it promotes itself as keeping up with the “latest cyber, consumerisation, collaboration and cloud enterprise security trends.” Recent topics addressed “Information Security Continuous Monitoring (ISCM): the End-State,” “What data is important? And what’s really not?” and “Overcoming the Equation: Security = Friction.”Another cited by KZO is Chuck’s Blog. “(It) is run by Chuck Hollis, the Vice President of Global Marketing for the EMC Corporation, a leader in cloud computing services. The blog was listed in Biz Tech Magazine’s “50 Must-Read IT Blogs” for its insight on information, technology, and customer challenges.” Recent topics covered the appeal of hybrid clouds, policy-based IT, and never wasting a good crisis.Of course no list of best CIO blogs could be complete without a reference to cloud computing. So, KZO gives us Cloud Computing, “the blog of David Linthicum, the CTO and founder of Blue Mountain Labs, a cloud development and advisory company. His blog primarily covers issues in cloud computing and other enterprise technologies.” Sure, it’s written by a CTO but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have information useful to CIOs. He has good ideas on spotting good cloud companies by spotting happy employees; cloud brokers who overpromise and why Amazon is on the right path with its money-losing AWS.In the area of CIO leadership, KZO suggests Five Nines: The Next Gen Datacenter. It is authored by David Chernicoff who says he “looks at technologies that impact data center users and operators, including server consolidation and virtualization, green IT, and the latest hardware advances.” He tackles topics like “The bare metal cloud,” “CIA’s Amazon Cloud,” and “MIT research shows the future of datacenter networking.”Another blog of note in CIO leadership cited by KZO is Cliff Saran’s Enterprise blog. It “focuses on strategies for CIOs and is dedicated to ‘unraveling hype’ in the IT industry to get down to the most important strategies for company leaders.” Topics he covers include: CIOs need to nurture raw IT talent to power the future economy; Web-scale IT shows what technology can achieve; and Tackling the Big Blue software licensing challenge.In the IT business arena, KZO recommends, among others, Capping IT Off and says it “has been continually nominated for awards in the IT blogging space. Capping IT Off is the product of Capgemini, an IT services and business consulting company, and it offers insight into dealing with big data, utilizing digital strategies, and managing your business. It’s written by a rotating roster of authors who provide a global view of issues affecting CIOs. Unlike other blogs on this list, it can feature multiple posts on the same day.