Bladewatch.com

HP

PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct. 19, 2009 – HP Enterprise Services today announced Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications has signed a five-year technology outsourcing services agreement designed to reduce costs and further increase flexibility with a standardized technology environment.

Under the new agreement, HP will provide infrastructure management services that include Sony Ericsson’s global server and storage environments. Additionally, HP will continue to provide global service desk for employee technology and application support. HP also will continue to host and operate Sony Ericsson’s SAP enterprise landscape and databases.

HP will deliver these services from a combination of Sony Ericsson locations and HP global delivery centers.

It’s always interesting to see these kind of announcements, to understand what range of services are being provided as part of the outsourcing agreements. Outsourcing elements of the IT service can be a great way of transforming service delivery, lowering cost or achieving investment through the outsourcing vehicle, I wonder going forward if we might not see more of these kind of agreements, do check out the announcement.

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Finjan

Finjan Inc., a leader in secure web gateway products and the provider of unified web security solutions for the enterprise market, today announced the launch of its Vital Cloud and Vital Cloud Hybrid. These enterprise web security solutions address the needs of enterprises as well as Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs).

More and more enterprises are becoming “borderless”, with an increasing number of remote workers and branch offices. As a result, companies turn to cloud-based web security to cost-effectively protect their users and data everywhere. Companies realize that they need to maintain full control of their web security and policy both on-premise and in the cloud.  They also demand that corporate data remain within the corporate boundaries and is not stored in the cloud for privacy and regulatory compliance reasons.

Very cool, anything we can do to meet the changing nature of our businesses whilst ensuring that we have a stable and secure platform for business has to be a good thing, I’m off to check out more.

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Business Wire

SAN JOSE, Calif. — October 20, 2009 — LogLogic®, the leader in log and security management solutions, and the Ponemon Institute, a privacy and information management research firm, today announced results of a national survey of healthcare IT security professionals that shows patients may be surrendering their privacy as the $2.5 trillion medical industry – prompted by federal stimulus funding– pushes to accelerate the pace of digitizing health information records.

According to the October 2009 Ponemon report, Electronic Health Information at Risk: A Study of IT Practitioners, 80 percent of healthcare organizations surveyed had experienced at least one incident of lost or stolen electronic health information in the past year – four percent had more than five patient data breaches. More than two-thirds of these healthcare organizations had already digitized at least a quarter of their patient records and a third had digitized more than half.

Check out this article talking about health care and IT security, a topic of conversation that has been under much discussion here in the UK anyway. The challenges of not only converting existing data to digital media, but to ensuring that access to that data is only viewable by approved persons or organizations is equally a problem, not to mention the process/security issues around enabling access where necessary but not exposing the organization or the personal data to necessary risk. An interesting article, do check it out, I’m off to read up more and check out the reports you can view about the issue.

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Oracle

• Paris Gallery, the leading luxury retailer in the Middle East, has implemented Oracle® Retail and Oracle E-Business Suite applications to help support aggressive growth strategies and enhance service levels across its store and distribution network.
• The Oracle Applications are expected to provide a unified view of all merchandising, supply chain, store and back office operations across its 60 stores and three distribution businesses in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain, helping Paris Gallery to derive more value from the business.
• With a premium assortment of over 800 luxury brands within opulent shopping environments, innovative retail concepts and high standards of service, Paris Gallery’s use of Oracle Retail applications is supporting its drive to offer customers the best mix of global brands at the right price and in the right quantities.
• Paris Gallery chose Zensar Technologies to provide consultancy and implementation services for the Oracle applications in a three-phase programme.

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I was having a chat with a rather skeptical colleague about cloud computing, it’s always interesting to see what people are thinking and talking about in the cloud space, his views were basically:

“Cloud, that’s just a rebrand of the cost center, instead of being Windows server or Architecture, I’ll be the Windows cloud or the Architecture cloud, complete nonsense and a great way of making money…”

Viewpoints that I can see are set to raise a few eyebrows amongst many of the vendors we’ve spoken to at bladewatch, at that point he asked me what I thought and this point I apologize for what could be seen as a rather long answer. But before we begin, let me say that I support cloud, but cloud for the business, not the IT and let me begin.

In the large enterprise let us take martinsbank inc, based in the US with branches throughout the US, with offices in London, Paris and Tokyo, there will be a range of teams with a range of standards, procedures, purchase agreements and rules. New York say might be the head office, so New York will dictate to London, to Paris and Tokyo, the further geographically you are from head office, in effect the more freedom you have. “You’re using driver pack version 8.25 right?” asks New York when speaking to Tokyo, “we are”, but no one’s going to fly over and check, very few are going to discuss technicalities and there’s always the that’s on the top of our list of priorities, we’re getting around to it.

With this in mind this is how I see cloud working from an IT perspective, we change IT towards a component and serviced based model in which each region might have an area of excellence, an environment where we can reduce duplication where necessary, centralize the core and have regional teams which are component parts of their central teams. So if we take a step back from complicated speak towards real life. At the moment, Martinsbank has:

• Four Windows/Unix, Networks/Storage, IT purchasing, IT Service Delivery, IT Helpdesk and application support teams
• All will have different ways of doing things, different procedures, different processes and standards – just try it ask for two servers to be built, one in New York and one in Tokyo, they’ll be different but the same, oh New York upgrade the firmware and install Tivoli, but Tokyo use Arcserve and don’t “do that firmware stuff”
• Each region might have it’s own variant of application and sets of infrastructure, so we have 12 SMS servers, three per region, and more for each of the branches in the US
• A user moving from one region to the other becomes a world ending experience, they’re different domains, they might use different email/file and print services which aren’t compatible
• The billing is done on a regional basis in a monopolistic style, yes you could take your DL380 and move it to Paris to save on hosting, but we both no you wont so £500 for hosting your server please
• The whole IT platform is billed from the ground up, and is in nature responsive not customer driven and centralized – by that I mean, there’s often a lack of consistency and dialogue between IT regions and teams let alone commercially, which can affect responsiveness and your cost base – Windows 2008 wow, but we need it adapted for four regions, so we’ll have a Windows design team.
• What we need is an IT cloud with regional representatives. A scenario in which we establish the core standards and deploy/use IT like we would our documentation or branding standards. If we’re going to take IT to the next level, both in terms of operational responsiveness, of dynamic computing and in cost, we need to re-brand using cloud and re-structure to do so.

If we’ve got all our best storage guys in London, why can’t London be the storage cloud with a few good people in each region to do the operational support, the on site stuff, the onsite representation and branding but have a strategic vehicle for delivery from London with an infrastructure to match? London does storage and printing, Paris does Application development and support, New York does the Windows and Unix builds for each region and Tokyo can do the middleware and database clouds. So each region has a core area of excellence, a core cloud which it then ‘sells’ on or provides to each business unit or region, you buy your Wintel capacity from New York (or wherever is cheapest) but the design, the branding and the standards follow throughout the enterprise?

So if I log a call that TYKS0923 is down, a call goes to regional support and if they can’t fix it, global support, or anyone who has access can? Where we move from compartmental markets where I sell you hardware or services, to a service delivery based IT business for your business. You want grid, not a problem, our grid guys are in Tokyo, but Mike here runs the grid in the UK and can onboard and represent you, and support the grid cloud.

We need to step away from thinking about cloud in the traditional sense and work out how it would/could work in our business. So rather than have four teams for Wintel, can we not have one which does follow the sun support, delivery and design? Can we not have one team which spans the globe, spans the business and works as a team, so that if New York is down, fine London are still in the office, I’ll call them.

If we take this to the fullest extent, could we not have a follow the sun support team, application and virtual infrastructure/data center where we abstract the applications from the infrastructure and move the workload, the business around the business need, power cut in New York, not an issue, run of our cloud in Tokyo whilst we’re offline.

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Finextra

Global spending on information technology is in for its worst ever year but things are looking up, with growth expected to return in 2010, according to research firm Gartner.

Tech spending in 2009 will be down 5.2% on the previous year but Gartner is predicting a 3.3% bounce in 2010 to $3.3 trillion. However, the market is not expected to recover to 2008 levels before 2012.

Peter Sondergaard, global head of research, Gartner, says: “2010 is about balancing the focus on cost, risk, and growth. For more than 50 per cent of CIOs the IT budget will be 0 per cent or less in growth terms. It will only slowly improve in 2011.”

An interesting article, we’ll need to see what happens, certainly the market (in IT) seems to be stabilizing and I wonder if this is not the beginnings of a new period of growth as businesses realize new opportunities, complete mergers and acquisitions or look to seeing how they can use technology to reduce costs.

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Virtual desktops remain a topic of interest for me in several ways, I’ve seen the challenges with desktop virtualization both from a technical and a process based viewpoint. In terms of process the challenges tend to be around the marginal direct and indirect cost to the investment and space in the data center that might be needed to host user data/virtual machines – the olden days “leave me alone, it works”, until we can combat that with real innovation and improvements in delivery that will continue. At this point I’m not complaining about the technology as much as the process, in the enterprise, the multinational, they might say “there’s your virtual machine sir”, great the user replies “how can I get Project, and a more memory”, oh fill out a new call and purchase request for software licenses and memory. The same process we might have on the physical desktop and often it can take so long to get everything in place that it never gets of the ground. For a virtual desktop we need to effectively ‘just switch’ bringing on new user groups starting one at a time, the receptionists that book in people downstairs that only need Outlook and Internet Explorer to the room booking system, to the facilities guys that need a few easy applications and Office. Once that’s done we can move on to IT, to specific user and business groups – the traders might not have a virtual machine for their main pc, but could they not be ‘given’ a free virtual machine for their Email/browsing on a common network and put all their super fast, super low latency applications and trader desktops on the trader rendezvous enabled network?

But before as we’ve mentioned many a time, please have the pre-answers (these are off the top of my head)

• But I need admin rights – fine for what applications, for what activities related to your job, limiting the ‘signing of the form’
• The memory/disk/specific user issues that you might expect, but I want PaintShop Pro – how do we package/deploy it in the virtual world
• What about physical devices/multiple screens or printers, I use my LaserJet III to print and what right have you got to say it’s not supported
• The issues relating to billing/cross charging and support – how much does the virtual machine and thin client cost against a physical pc – a service company might provide a physical PC with Office and Windows (including the hardware and support) for £600 or so a year – with all the bits we need for a virtual machine what’s the per unit cost including the servers, software and everything else
• What platforms are supported – can we provide NT/Linux/Windows XP/Solaris? You’d be surprised what some support teams might have
• Who owns issues and what’s the escalation path – as a trader I know I just call Trader support, but I’m not waiting in a queue of seven escalation paths to have my virtual machine rebooted
• Are we abstracting the user from the hardware or virtualizing to thin clients and providing a virtual experience?
• What features are included – rollback/backup of your desktop, we can do it in the virtual world so why are we not?
• Crucially who’s the yes or no man – we need someone high up who can overrule or reboot people when it gets emotional – “but I’m happy with my Dell Optiplex 110 running NT4″

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Network World

Citrix on Monday said its latest desktop virtualization software will give users access to high-definition desktops from any location and from just about any device, including PCs, Macs, thin clients, laptops, netbooks and smartphones.

Citrix is betting that Windows 7 will drive a new wave of desktop virtualization adoption, and is releasing XenDesktop version 4 to take advantage of these expected new users. The latest version offers a range of server-and client-side virtualization options, including offline desktops hosted in local virtual machines; desktops hosted on blade PCs; hosted desktops based in virtualized servers; and hosted shared desktops.

I wonder how far we can take this, and if we follow this concept if we can slowly de-construct the elements of the IT service that the user needs, is it a desktop they need? With this in mind how could that change our IT spending at work and at home – is it a desktop my wife needs or a screen which runs a virtual machine on my Mac Pro to browse the web?

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I was having a chat with a Beatrice, she’s started work at a smaller business in the North of England, she reminded me about an important statement for all those new and existing server owners/administrators, I’ll let her email speak for itself, I’ve removed any references to the company involved:

I’ve been here a few weeks and I keep coming across servers that have been up for over a year or so, that ‘work’ but as soon as you try to log in to them, or do anything they seize and end up needing rebooted. Avoiding the conversation about security patching, what’s your view on server uptime and rebooting?

This morning we had to reboot our web server as it got slow and was out of memory, so the web site was down for about 10 minutes because we hadn’t rebooted it for nearly a year out of hours.

Regards

Beatrice

If you speak to a Unix or Linux guy they tend to love to mention the lack of reboots, the industrial strength of their operating system, the number of actions that might require a reboot in Windows and in some respects they’re right, but at the same time just ask them how many servers they have that no one can remember rebooting and are therefore too scared to do so in case it doesn’t come back.

Having abstracted ourselves from the Windows vs Unix conversation, I’ve always thought a server should be rebooted every few months, to clear down the memory, to maintain service and to apply drivers/firmware/layered component updates. Can we leave a Windows server online for years, absolutely, but we’d be missing security patches, and we run the risk that the server becomes unhelpful at the point at which you need to use it. We need to change the mindset from olden days of how long has the server been up for, too one about scheduled downtime windows during which IT can action best practice support and maintenance, (planned or unplanned), it’s only by maintaining the systems properly that we get the best efficiency and delivery from them, and as I like to point out to users/colleagues we can either reboot it on Sunday when it’s not in use, or mid Monday morning during trading because there’s an issue.

With the Microsoft security patches being released every month, there in theory shouldn’t be servers that are up for more than a few months, this is good for IT and the end user community, granted there are 24/7 businesses, 24/7 systems, but regardless of the platform, we need a window to do much needed maintenance to keep the system operating as expected, to prevent the world ending scenario “… apologies, our computers are down can you call back to order later?”.

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Finextra

US broker-dealer Commonwealth Financial Network has been fined $100,000 for failing to insist its registered representatives maintain anti-virus software on their computers. The failure led to an intruder gaining access to the firm’s Intranet, accessing customer accounts and entering unauthorised purchase orders worth over $523,000.

According to an SEC cease and desist order – first published by ZDNet – an intruder used a computer virus in November 2008 to obtain the login credentials of a Commonwealth registered representative.

Some time later that month, the intruder used the login credentials to enter Commonwealth’s Intranet site and view information on how to execute trades.

An interesting article to read illustrating how a lack of process and technology has resulted in this company being fined by the SEC. It’s the boring stuff that really does matter and I know as a ‘server guy’ or dare I say it geek that matters and underpins your business. By the boring stuff we mean things like:

• Secure passwords which change regularly
• Service accounts which separate an application, an administrator and support team roles
• Screen savers with password locks
• Anti virus software that is patched, up to date and supported, that’s scanning what it needs to and is configured to your business
• Firmware/drivers and security patches which can affect the reliability of your system and prevent unexpected behaviour or security risks
• Secured shares with groups so we can manage from a top down approach
• Where possible applications which separate roles so we haven’t got central points of failure/exploit

It could happen to any business and I suspect that if you took a walk around any city there would be potential issues that could be identified on any system, with that in mind we need to cover the basics as best as we can, sign of the risk where the risk vs cost/business interests might be acceptable and do the due diligence part to provide an industrial strength, scalable and adaptable platform.

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