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Keep your IT infrastructure and assets secure: IBM (September 2008)

More business transactions occur electronically every year, and mid-sized organisations are retaining a growing volume of sensitive data. This data is available to an expanding user base, including employees, trading partners, suppliers and customers. IT infrastructures are more extensive, more complex, more distributed – and more accessible. This accessibility is making organisations susceptible to attacks and intrusions from ever-increasing and evolving threats. Hybrid threats and sophisticated, profit-driven hackers are increasingly bypassing traditional security defences like firewalls and anti-virus scanning. When an attack compromises data, an organisation faces customer service issues and lost revenue, data and productivity, some of which might be unrecoverable. In many industries, there is also the requirement to retain data to comply with government regulations and audits – losing this data to an external threat or insider attack could create severe consequences to your bottom line and reputation in the form of fines or even the closing of your business. In a recent McAfee poll of 1,400 IT professionals with at least 250 employees in their companies, one-third said that a major security breach could put them out of business.

Virtualisation: how it can dramatically improve your TCO: VirtualizeIT (Sep 08)

IT organisations are still grappling with the legacy of the IT explosion of the 1990s, which has left them with high costs, slow response times, and inconsistently managed infrastructures. Today, IT organisations that want to give their enterprise competitive advantage need to: drive cost out of their infrastructure through more efficient use of resources; respond faster to business needs so projects get to market more quickly; increase the consistency and predictability of operations; meet the business’ return on investment criteria; meet the demands that a business has during the next 5-10 years; have a scalable and flexible solution; increase application availability to 99.999%; simplify the infrastructure; deliver a consistently good performance; and centralised systems, data and infrastructure. Businesses nowadays face many pressures to provide, implement and manage best practice solutions to leverage optimal value within the business. Whether a business is a Tier 1 Global player or Tier 4 UK based regional business, the fundamental problems remain the same – though on different scales.

The importance of 'know-why' in IT: C&C Technology Consulting (May 2008)

Know-why is, in essence, a very simple concept. Think of it as the companion to ‘know-how’. Where know-how is about IT expertise and technical competence, the capacity and ability to plumb things together and build systems to a set project plan, know-why concerns itself with providing a vision and context for that activity: Why are we doing this? Why are we doing it this way? Why does it work for us at both a macro and micro level? Too few IT projects are ever fully justified with a business case; too few have a calculated rationale that embraces benefits, critical success factors and return on investment (ROI); too few assess cultural impact or communications needs; and too few make an effort to look at the bigger picture, focusing instead on the narrow world of implementations and operations. That gives an immediate and unhelpful imbalance, with the weight tipping down at the know-how end. And the inherent danger of imbalance is that it erodes the value of IT.

Virtualisation & disaster recovery: Double-Take Software (October 2007)

Virtual server technologies provide companies with the ability to do more with less, enabling the consolidation of data and applications onto a single server. The result is reduced costs, simplified IT management, and minimised space requirements. The need to protect these virtualised systems is paramount and in situations where companies are looking to reduce the costs associated with disaster recovery planning, virtualisation can enable easier recovery without a great deal of additional cost. Double-Take from Double-Take Software delivers enterprise-class disaster recovery and high-availability solutions for cuttingedge virtual environments. Double-Take is the industry-leading replication and availability solution that offers local and longdistance protection against most any outage, from a failed power supply to a regional disaster.

Mastering the basics of self-service: FrontRange (August 2007)

The dawning of the age of the internet saw the advent of immediate access to information of all kinds and a growing expectation that immediacy should be delivered across all areas of communication and transaction. This new outlook on service delivery has caused a significant shift in the way that support centres are viewed. No longer is it enough to offer pure issue resolution and service requests, service desks now need to be delivering proactive communication, solutions to frequently asked questions, instant update capabilities and immediate resolution. In addition to this, customers have become more aware of the different services they can expect and call volumes have soared. In the past, increasing volumes of work led to a requirement to add more staff. Today’s cost-conscious environment means this luxury can rarely be afforded and would still not achieve the desired effect. Customers are no longer focused on functionality alone; equally important are the options they have in accessing information and how that information is presented.

FrontRange Foundation: FrontRange (August 2007)

A real-time enterprise and the ability to have accurate and accessible information from your service desk are desires expressed by IT managers worldwide. Despite the challenges, realising this vision has its obvious advantages: operational inconsistencies are eliminated and users gain real-time access to accurate IT information. Bottom line, the entire enterprise becomes more responsive and competitive. The challenge exists in creating an environment that can integrate information across all users and functional roles of the service desk as well as with legacy and third-party data sources to create a complete 360-degree view of the IT organisation.

The roadmap to virtual infrastructure: VMware (September 2006)

Virtualisation provides opportunities to reduce complexity, improve service levels to the business and lower capital and operating costs to provide and maintain IT infrastructure. Over the past five years many organisations have specifically deployed VMware infrastructure software on industry-standard systems to significantly reduce their hardware, data centre and operational costs – many report 70-80% cost savings, and six-month ROI periods – while achieving unexpected gains in operational flexibility, efficiency and agility. To date over 1 million server workloads have been virtualised on this infrastructure. 90% of our customers are now rolling out this infrastructure for production usage, and over 5% of them standardised on a VMware environment for industry-standard workloads.

Data centres – understanding the issues: Simon Barnard, Molex (June 2005)

The term ‘data centre’ usually conjures up an image of a high-tech IT environment, about the size of a football pitch, full of equipment from a vast array of vendors and with enough air conditioning to keep the occupants of the London Zoo penguin enclosure happy. In fact, the term applies to any space specifically allocated for cabinets or frames, housing network equipment that is either a source of services to other network devices (typically distributed over generic cabling), the receivers of services from an external telecoms network (such as a PABX or ADSL connection), or a source of services to an external network (typified by data hosting facilities). People also generally assume a data centre is a multi-client environment, with services to maintain that environment provided by a third party. The term is, however, equally applicable to the main communications room within an end user’s internal network. In other words, a data centre may be a server room, an equipment room or a co-location facility.

The management of security risks in IS: Philippe Bouvier (low res) (May 2005)

Given the large number of information system security measures that exist, organisations find it more and more difficult to distinguish which measures should be granted priority in order to mitigate their information system risks. How do organisations know if the security measures present in their information systems are compatible? What are the steps that should be taken to increase the level of security? What can be done to better protect against incident or malicious activity? How can attacks, or incidents, be more easily discovered? What actions should be taken in the event of an attack? How can information systems be returned to normal operating activity following a disaster?

The management of security risks in IS: Philippe Bouvier (high res) (May 2005)

A vote for virtualisation: PMP Research (May 2005)

As demand for enterprise-wide information services continues to soar, organisations are turning to new technologies to help manage their costs and reduce systems complexity while meeting the ever expanding needs of the business. One of these technologies is virtualisation – a method of monitoring and optimising computing resources designed to maximise the use of existing and new IT assets, reduce the complexity and cost of systems management, and ultimately assist in the creation of an IT infrastructure that can support ‘on demand’ computing. This, in turn, will deliver the benefits of an IT environment that can change quickly and dynamically in response to the needs of the business.

Protecting the organisation from attack: Dr Raghavan, Tata Consultancy (Feb 05)

It’s now a well-acknowledged fact that security is NOT an IT issue in isolation. The point is that today businesses have to deal with two conflicting realities: on the one hand, we are dealing with an increasingly global economy, giving rise to benefits such as, for example, 24/7 business and the opportunity to adopt global sourcing practices – which in turn bring cost and quality benefits. On the other hand, however, we have to live up to the realities of a world afflicted by security threats that arise from religious, cultural and economic differences. From a business perspective, the only way to address this dichotomy and to protect business intelligence is to adopt a rounded approach to security. This means more than focusing on the systems that store data – it means taking a considered and focused look at the people that create and handle it. After all, most security breaches occur from within the organisation.