Savvy organizations, HP among them, are turning to preventing attacks, rather than just detecting them and remediating them.
The high cost of unwanted intrusion and malware across corporate networks is well known. Less talked-about are the successful ways that organizations are thwarting ongoing, adaptive and often-insider-driven security breaches.
Companies are understandably reluctant to readily discuss either their defenses or mishaps. Yet HP, one of the world’s largest companies, is both a provider and a practitioner of enterprise intrusion detection systems (IDS). And so we asked HP to explain how it is both building and using such technologies, along with seeking some insider tips on best practices.
Monetizing Cloud Services Brokerage | Part 3
In a previous blog on Cloud Services Brokerage (CSB), I promised to return briefly to the topic of CSB monetization.
The term CSB can refer to both to the activity of brokering cloud services, or to the software application (or suite of applications) used to manage that activity. The activity of brokering cloud services can be carried out within an enterprise, as an internal support function, or performed as a paid-for service by a third party. So just to be clear, the discussion in today’s blog is all about the monetization of CSB as a service when provided by a CSB service provider.
The scope of CSB need not be limited to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). To provide a complete cloud service, a broker might also offer IaaS and/or PaaS. The CSB service might also include desktop tools to help the customer, and also some good old-fashioned consulting.
2014: Customers Rejoice in the Year of Service Personalization
As we enter a new year, it is time to look back over the past year and resolve to improve upon it. In 2014, we will see more service providers resolve to add more personalization in enterprise technology. Below are seven predictions about what will drive this trend toward personalization.
The Internet of Things turns into the Internet of Agents. M2M connections and multi-agent systems will result in an increasing number of highly personalized, value-added branded services. The latest Gartner forecast for the Internet of Things (IoT) predicts that by 2020, there will be $309 billion in incremental revenue opportunity for IoT suppliers, mostly in services. Everything-as-a service (XaaS) will lead us toward more complex services, more bundles and more options. Individual users will use agents whose sole job is to create functional services for individuals, out of everything available in the connected service universe. As we move closer toward XaaS, we will become familiar with the concept of “agents” in the delivery of those everything services via SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. Agents can reside as modules within SaaS service offerings or they can be tools embedded in the service provider infrastructure or operating systems. Agents can exist in cloud-connected devices, or in the management software within the evolving smart device ecosystem. Any service delivery platform (SDP) can contain agents that add functionality to the supported services by collaborating with other agents on other platforms.
Defining Requirements Leads to Successful IT Projects
By Erin Marandola, Contract Administrator, PMP
Simply stated, a successful IT project is one that is completed on time and within budget. But, how do we get there, and why are there so many project failures? From a service provider’s perspective, a successful project avoids scope creep (the project getting out of control), which adds cost, time and risk. The successful project should also avoid gold plating (the addition of unintended added features to the final product of the project). These pitfalls can be easily avoided. In this blog, I’ll review how properly defining requirements can contribute to a thorough, well-thought out Statement of Work, and lead to a successful project.
If there is a mutually agreed upon Statement of Work outlining the project scope, deliverables, acceptance criteria, and assumptions, each party should have a clear, equal understanding of the project, right? Not exactly. A key factor in project failure is neglecting to exhaustively define and document project requirements within the Statement of Work. When we withhold information, assumptions are made. Since we don’t all think the same way, this can lead to the service provider believing certain terms and conditions are true, while the customer believes otherwise.
Looking back at my career, a few project failures come to mind. In one case, there was a different perception of what was considered in and out of scope between various parties. For example, the Statement of Work said “Eight (8) hours of post-implementation support.” The customer assumed the provider would provide support to end users, but the provider assumed the support would be at the system level and provided only to system administrators. In another case, assumptions were made while scoping the project and writing the Statement of Work, but they were never documented and validated by all parties. This resulted in an engineer arriving onsite for an Exchange upgrade, only to realize the project could not be completed based on conflicts in the client’s environment. It was assumed the customer had a Disaster Recovery solution in place that would support the upgrade, but that was not the case. Had the requirements been documented, this would not have happened.
Register for our upcoming webinar to learn more about project management best practices
To create a comprehensive Statement of Work, we need to methodically define requirements. The most crucial ingredient in defining requirements is the stakeholder, defined as anyone with a vested interest in the project, or anyone that will be impacted by the project. Stakeholders should be included in meetings where scope and requirements are being defined. They can open our eyes to the impacts the future project will have on the organization, environment and processes. They can also help define what the business and functional requirements are, and what constraints might hinder project objectives. Additionally, stakeholders help define what assumptions the project team is working under and how project success will be measured. The benefit of stakeholder involvement in defining requirements is the collaboration – the stakeholder meetings facilitate consensus amongst participants, ownership, and buy-in in the project. The collaborative approach allows stakeholders to assess multiple options to reach the project goals and mutually agree upon the best fit.
Once the requirements from the stakeholder meeting are defined, progressively elaborated and documented, a Statement of Work can be created incorporating the feedback. Prior to mutual execution of the Statement of Work, it is crucial that the service provider and customer review the document together to ensure both parties understand the business need, desired solution, assumptions, and scope of work. The Statement of Work should be updated as appropriate based on feedback from the review session(s).
In summary, defining requirements early on is essential in keeping a future project on track, in scope and in budget. Stakeholders are an invaluable resource in defining requirements. Defining, documenting and incorporating requirements into the Statement of Work results in a document that is clear, through and easy to manage to, helping to avoid some of the pitfalls we earlier alluded to. Best of all, defining requirements leads to a project that meets the true needs of the organization. If you’re looking for more information around IT project management, our VP of Project Management and our Director of Project Management are holding a webinar on January 23rd to discuss the benefits of creating a Project Management Office.
Internet of Things – IoT
This phrase “Internet of Things” is making big rounds these days, specially this week at CES (Consumer Electronic Show), Las Vegas. Not sure who came up with this, maybe Cisco in one of their self-serving predictions of the enormous growth of devices connected to the Internet (from about 10 billion today to 50 billion by 2020) and hence the need for their networking gear. John Chambers will elaborate this opportunity at CES in a keynote speech tomorrow. Gartner puts the number of connected devices at fewer than 30 billion, but sees $309 billion in additional revenue for products and service suppliers by 2020.
“The Internet Of Things” is the next big market for Cloud
In recent years two technologies have combined synergistically, the cloud and mobile. Without the cloud many of the mobile apps we have today would not exist. They rely on the existence of powerful cloud-based syncing and storage technology to provide a compelling cross-platform user experience. Cloud-based notifications are an essential part of the mobile ecosystem. Without cloud compute, devices wouldn’t be capable of tasks that require advanced processing like speech recognition and image manipulation.
Mobile devices are growing ever more powerful, but they still lag behind desktop and server hardware in processing power and storage, so in order to provide the experience that users expect, a symbiosis has developed between mobile devices and the cloud.
But mobile is just the beginning. As processors become ever smaller, cheaper, and more powerful, they are finding their way into objects that were not traditionally “intelligent.” The smart toaster is something of a …
The Internet of Things Is Coming to a Home Near You
Over the course of the past decade, there’s been a lot of hype pertaining to the_ Internet of Things (IoT)_ and how China leads the U.S. in this technology — yet many who are active on the Internet are still unaware of its existence.
In its simplest form, IoT is an evolving wireless network of objects and devices that will eventually all be connected with each other. Using RFID, Bluetooth, GPS and other emerging semantic technology, and working in tandem with cloud computing, Web portals and back-end systems, in essence our “things” will be be able to “talk” with each other.
The Internet of Things and DNS
When we talk about the impact of BYOD and BYOA and the Internet of Things, we often focus on the impact on data center architectures. That’s because there will be an increasing need for authentication, for access control, for security, for application delivery as the number of potential endpoints (clients, devices, things) increases. That means scale in the data center.
What we gloss over, what we skip, is that before any of these “things” ever makes a request to access an application it had to execute a DNS query. Every. Single. Thing.
AppZero 2013 State of Readiness for WS03 End of Support Survey Results
Microsoft has announced that Windows Server 2003 will hit End of Support (EOS) on July 14, 2015. Over the course of 2013, AppZero undertook the first “State of Readiness for Windows Server 2003 End of Support” Survey in an effort to assess how serious this event is to enterprise IT pros.
AppZero surveyed Fortune 1000 IT professionals at a series of industry events to assess their readiness for the impending end of support of Windows Server 2003. Results show that IT pros are evaluating their options which range from accepting the risks of running on an unsupported operating system to upgrading all of their servers to moving to the Cloud, and lots of other choices in between.
Can the Cloud Do ‘In Perpetuity’?
Cloud computing is great, right? As a way to get something up and running quickly, affordably, and with a minimum of fuss, it can rarely be beaten. But some of the most compelling attributes of the public cloud are best suited to ephemeral or (relatively!) short-term use cases. You can spin up a cloud server in minutes. You can scale a cloud-based application to cope with the peaks and troughs of demand. You can control all of this through a web console, with no more than a credit card and a laptop. Silicon Valley, SoMa, Silicon Alley, Silicon Roundabout, Silicon Allee, Silicon Wadi, Silicon Forest, Silicon Welly, and the Silicon Bog (only one of those was made up, I think) are full to bursting with bright young things building exciting new products (and silly photo sharing sites) powered only by the cloud and expensive coffee. And then you have government, private, and commercial Archives, with an over-riding imperative to keep stuff for a very, very long time. These Archives clearly can (and do) use cloud computing in the same ways as everyone else. They use clouds to cost-effectively transform data from one format to another, they use clouds to stream […]