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Apr 14

SwitchScribe – The Biggest Impact on IT Firefighting & Business Agility

Is it reasonable to assume that if you’re buying a safe for all our valuables that you’d buy the one that is the best combination of security and cost. This combination of security and cost would be driven by your budget and the value (intrinsic or sentimental) of your precious items. I would guess that the same principle of budget vs. value would apply to protecting your IT environments.

So many places to look, so many holes to patch

The normal enterprise IT environment is filled with hundreds of applications. In most cases each of these applications is supported by unique design at the hardware and software level, if not also at the network layer. The fact that there is so much uniqueness about our IT environments means we expend inordinate amounts of time dealing with common problems in 100 unique ways. Maintaining these environments has become the bane of enterprise IT groups. By now, we’ve all heard the story of how keeping the lights on comprises 70-80% of the IT budget leaving only a small amount for much needed innovation.

Keeping the lights on has several meanings, including the mundane but critical “general maintenance and support” of each environment. However, keeping the lights on could also mean avoiding outages. Generically speaking, all of us in IT attempt to build and maintain environments with the highest possible availability (within budget and available resources). The problem is that we’re often spending too much time fighting fires of “maintenance & support” and not enough time solving the underlying issues that cause many of the fires or in this case cause many of the outages (same as a fire only worse). Where should IT focus its attention relative to avoiding outages and or reducing the number of fires?

TechCrunch – The Internet Is Held Together With Bubble Gum And Baling Wire

Did you know that, to quote an angry hacker:

The Internet from every angle has always been a house of cards held together with defective duct tape. It’s a miracle that anything works at all. Those who understand a lot of the technology involved generally hate it, but at the same time are astounded that for end users, things seem to usually work rather well.

Today I want to talk about all of the egregious security disasters across the Internet over the last few months, but as Inigo Montoya once said: “No, there is too much. Let me sum up.” Alas, even an incomplete summary is a lengthy litany of catastrophe. Let’s see:

Apple:”Oh dear. “It’s as bad as you could imagine, that’s all I can say.”
Oh, and separately, their OpenSSL implementation is broken.
Linux: “Critical crypto bug leaves Linux, hundreds of apps open to eavesdropping.”(1)
Microsoft Word: “Zero-day vulnerability under active attack.“
Yahoo: “Remote Command Execution Vulnerability.”
Credit cards: Target. Nieman Marcus. California’s DMV. Etcetera

IT Skeptic – Who owns the risk of an IT change?

Stuart Rance posted an interesting blog about What Is Change Management For?. Then we had an excellent discussion about it on Google+, where some great stuff came up that I want to capture here in my IP repository (or “blog” for short). Tell me what you think:

I’m working in the heart of [change management] right now. I agree with every single word, except for one thought:
This article talks of my favourite dilemma – To Protect and Serve. They are often contradictory. If some part of the business – or some development team – wants to go faster than is safe for the organisational IT assets, then Change’s primary role is protection. There are lots of cogs in the machine that move change along, there is only one devoted to mitigating the risk. Where a conflict emerges between Protect and Serve for the Change function, Protect wins.

Stuart Rance

Thanks for the comment +Rob England. I have some sympathy for your position. As you say the issue is trying to get the balance right, but I have very rarely seen IT change management that is too focussed on agility and too little on protection.

What I see all too often is IT that thinks it understands business risk better than the people who should be owning that risk.

CIO.com – CIOs Need to Focus on Competitive Threats

Nothing delivers a rush of business adrenaline like the appearance of a new competitor. When Google bought Nest a few months ago, for example, every CEO with a stake in “smart home” products or the residential energy business took immediate notice.

When FedEx CEO Fred Smith was quizzed about the possibility of Amazon.com competing with his enormous transportation network by using drones to deliver packages, he dismissed the idea as “almost amusing.”

Yet as Managing Editor Kim S. Nash points out in her cover story (” Battle of the Archrivals”), some of the most effective competitive moves happening today in social, mobile, analytics and cloud technologies weren’t on anyone’s threat horizon until recently.

Given that reality, we wondered how and where IT was making a difference in three of the fiercest corporate rivalries: Home Depot vs. Lowe’s, Ford vs. General Motors, FedEx vs. UPS. “Technology boasts permeate the marketing and investment strategies for these companies,” Nash writes.

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14
Apr 14

Data Center Knowledge – Abstracting the Data Center: A look at the DCOS Platform

It’s time to take a step back and look at the data center model that’s impacting today’s business, . It’s time to see just how far this platform has come and exactly where it’s going. It’s time to say hello to the truly agnostic data center. Almost every new technology is being pushed through some type of data center model.

Inside of your current data center model – what do you have under the hood?

Storage, Networking, Compute
Power, Cooling, Environmental Controls
Rack and Cable Management
Building and Infrastructure Security

Although some of these underlying components have stayed the same. Requirements from the workloads that live on top have drastically evolved. Through it all, we’ve also seen an evolution of the physical aspect of the data center. We’re creating powerful multi-tenant, high-density platforms capable of handling users and the new data-on-demand generation. With all of these new technologies and demands, the modern data center has truly become a distributed node infrastructure.

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11
Apr 14

CIO Insight – The Future of Enterprise Mobility

To better understand the immediate future of enterprise mobility, CIO Insight recently spoke separately with Chris Hazelton, research director of mobile and wireless technologies at 451 Research, and Chris Marsh, a principal analyst of enterprise mobility at Yankee Group. The pair discussed mobility trends, device vendors, mobile ROI, and related developments for the enterprise in 2014 and beyond. Here is an edited version of the one-on-one interviews with Hazelton and Marsh.

What are the most important trends affecting how IT handles mobility today?

Chris Hazelton: The two biggest trends driving the way that IT handles mobility are the limited ability to control the devices that employees are using and the increasing amount of corporate data that is going across these devices. This dynamic means IT must control a growing use of corporate data in an environment in which it is steadily losing control.

As IT has ceded ground to users in terms of the devices that are used, the invasion of mobile apps will need to be a rallying point for organizations to regain control of mobile by managing the enterprise data, apps and work environments on mobile devices. Users can control the device, but IT will need to be the gatekeeper for data.

ReadWrite – DevOps: The Future Of DIY IT?

If Gartner’s recent poll of NoSQL database adopters is any indication, traditional IT is dead. Not just a little bit dead. Dead dead.

According to the Gartner poll, a scant 5.5% of NoSQL users identified themselves as DBAs that run their businesses operating on those storage systems. The survey was small, but it might point to a larger trend: Do-it-yourself (DIY) IT, or DevOps.
DevOps Rising

DevOps is sometimes characterized as developers reigning over operations, but that’s not really the case. Rather, as Mike Loukides suggests, “Operations doesn’t go away, it becomes part of the development.” Application developers, increasingly running in cloud environments, take on more traditional operations responsibilities with Ops becoming part of the application.

Harvard Business Review – The Daily Routines of Geniuses

Juan Ponce de León spent his life searching for the fountain of youth. I have spent mine searching for the ideal daily routine. But as years of color-coded paper calendars have given way to cloud-based scheduling apps, routine has continued to elude me; each day is a new day, as unpredictable as a ride on a rodeo bull and over seemingly as quickly.

Naturally, I was fascinated by the recent book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. Author Mason Curry examines the schedules of 161 painters, writers, and composers, as well as philosophers, scientists, and other exceptional thinkers.

As I read, I became convinced that for these geniuses, a routine was more than a luxury — it was essential to their work. As Currey puts it, “A solid routine fosters a well-worn groove for one’s mental energies and helps stave off the tyranny of moods.” And although the book itself is a delightful hodgepodge of trivia, not a how-to manual, I began to notice several common elements in the lives of the healthier geniuses (the ones who relied more on discipline than on, say, booze and Benzedrine) that allowed them to pursue the luxury of a productivity-enhancing routine:

CIO.com – Dissatisfaction with IT grows

Businesses want to spend less on IT operations and infrastructure and shift resources to revenue-producing areas, according to two new studies. But businesses leaders and IT executives are also registering higher levels of dissatisfaction with IT as more demands are placed on technology.

The reports, by the Hackett Group and McKinsey & Co., both agree that business executives want IT to do more to improve the bottom line while companies spend less on infrastructure in the process.

The bad news for people who work in IT operations is that large businesses expect to cut IT staff positions by about 2 per cent this year, thanks to automation and outsourcing, according the Hackett’s survey of 160 businesses with revenues above $US1 billion.

One path to improved automation will likely be through adoption of software-defined infrastructures, something Bank of America plans to do.

IT budgets will grow by 1.7 per cent this year as IT pivots, increasingly, from a service-providing operation to a revenue-generating one, the Hackett Group said in its study.

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Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.