The more some things change, the more they stay the same. Let’s take the example of IT and business challenges. Over the years, we’ve seen a wide variety of changes in both IT and business. In IT, we’ve seen organizations undergo an evolution from mainframes to minicomputers to PCs to the Internet and beyond. At the same time, organizations have undergone a wide range of business changes and challenges-from economic evolution to globalization.
Although the hype has been around for a while, we’re really still just at the start of Web 2.0—especially when it comes to enterprise applications and enterprise infrastructure components. I believe that over the next few years we’re going to see some significant changes in how both enterprise applications and enterprise infrastructure components are designed and deployed.
A key driver for these changes will continue to be the evolution of mobile platforms, the need for greater user interaction and control, and on-going changes in user interface approaches.
It’s always been hard to escape risk. Almost everything an individual (or company) does involves some level of risk–often times multiple types of risk. Of course, over the years, the types of risk that we face (both as individuals and as corporations) has changed.
That’s where risk management comes in. For large companies, IT risks have to be managed on a global scale. To do this, organizations need to ensure that there’s a common set of minimal controls that are observed across the company or globe. Then, individual departments or geographies add to extend these controls and risk management strategies by defining ones that are appropriate for their situation. It’s important to make sure that there’s flexibility built into your approach for risk management, since having a one size fits all approach is generally not a true reflection of the enterprise and is typically not realistic or achievable.
Storage area networks have been – and still – are big thing in business. Over the past few years organizations have had to find ways to add more and more storage to their IT environments as new applications come on-line and as new data sources such as Web storefronts have added massive amounts of potentially valuable data to be analyzed. As a results, organizations have invested in more and more storage capability-from larger servers to storage area networks that can connect different types of storage into a unified data network for use by a wide variety of corporate applications or users. Because of the continuing need for greater, faster, more efficient and manageable storage options, business storage solutions are going to continue to be a big area of investment for organizations over the next five years.
But it’s important to recognize that we’re not just going to see this type of focus and growth in the business sector. We’re also going to see it in our homes and personal lives. Over the next few years, the variety and types of significant storage devices we use in our personal lives will increase dramatically-from multiple, different portable storage devices, to ones for use in our cars, to ones connected to our TV and digital media centers, most households will have a variety of new storage devices with new features.
And, okay, so we may not exactly see the same thing-storage area homes-happening in the home that we’ve seen happen in business-storage area networks-but we will see a similar growth in the use of different data storage options to serve and ever-widening array of personal (and home-office) storage needs.
In fact, storage in the home and small office is a incredibly fast-growing area. Some research estimates say that there’s now as much storage in the home as there is in business. Since 2003 the growth in home storage has actually outpaced the growth in business storage. Those are two very interesting statistics that show potential of the role of home storage and digital content management as consumers dramatically increase their storage capacities. First, they indicate a massive opportunity for hardware vendors to design, build and market a variety of personal and small business storage devices for more individual or family use. Secondly, just like google and other consumer-oriented technologies that have changed business user expectations, I believe that this upcoming massive shift in consumer storage devices will also alter business user expectations on storage.
Consumers are essentially gobbling up storage faster than businesses are. When you stop to think about it, it’s not surprising, given the huge growth in digital cameras, the move to DVRs and digital videos, digital music (from MP3s to downloadable iTunes movies, TV shows and music), and more.
We can see the impact of the direction of this trend in some of the recent announcements by companies like Seagate and Maxtor, at January’s consumer electronics show in Las Vegas. For example, Seagate announced the introduction of its Maxtor® BlackArmour™ storage solution, a 2.5-inch consumer-friendly, portable AES government-grade encrypting external storage device that makes it simple for consumers (or business users) to securely and easily take their data with them. With hardware-level encryption, the device is designed to keep content locked even if it’s lost or stolen. Although these types of technologies have been around for years, what’s amazing is that you’ll get 160GB of portable, secure storage for a retail price of $149.99, all from your local Staples or electronics store.
Another interesting part of their announcement was the introduction of Maxtor Central Axis software, a software solution that enables users to remotely connect, access, upload, and share content on a Maxtor Shared Storage II drive, networked on your local home network-without breaching network firewalls. In effect, consumers and home office workers now have an easy way to share and access files remotely while maintaining a high level of security.
I believe that over the next few years we’ll see a huge change in the types and volume of storage devices that standard consumers are using in their homes. We’re going to see both a diversity of applications-from hard drives designed to move movies or music to automobile playback systems to home office storage, backup and remote access. In any case, a great many of these changes in the consumer storage technology landscape will undoubtedly filter back up to the enterprise, affecting the design, deployment and use of future business storage technologies for years to come.
These days, everywhere you look there’s more and more information bombarding us. Our email inboxes are flooding over, blogs, websites and RSS feeds provide a constant stream of updates, and new social networking sites such as twitter.com even allow your friends and family to track every movement you make – from running out to Starbucks to kicking back and watching the latest thriller on DVD. No matter how you slice it, the general public is exposed to a whole lot more information today than they were ten or twenty years ago.
Of course, it’s the same for businesses – only it’s worse. As I’ve explored in previous columns, today’s businesses are consuming, generating and repurposing huge amounts of data these days. And it’s not just coming from traditional order entry-type applications or individual users. Today, organizations have to deal with a wide range of data sources that are constantly delivering new information. The range is almost endless-it could be financial market data, network events, application data, RFID or sensor events, Web/click events or just about anything else. The effect is the same-many organizations need a proactive way to analyze, process, and act upon this ever-expanding volume of information flowing through the company from a myriad of (potentially time-critical) sources.
Over the years, the view of what IT was (and is) has expanded. Initially IT was a mainframe computer, a few programmers, and batch programs that generated reports for a limited number of internal employees. Then it was mainframes and terminals, with applications that handled the most mission-critical (or at least computationally-critical) portions of a company’s business process. These were used by even more employees. Then, over time, IT evolved to mini-computers with many users, personal computers for all employees and now Web- or Intranet-based solutions intended to be used by employees, partners, customers and just about anyone else.
At the same time that this expansion has been happening, there’s been an expansion of the notion of the role of applications, as well as an expansion of the importance of application management. For example, initially, applications were managed centrally, but over time organizations have either stopping managing them (remember client/server?) or invested in IT-oriented solutions that can now package, deploy, and manage applications across a wide range of systems and users.
Sometimes people can look at something and come to completely different conclusions. Take my ten-year-old son. To him, if he has to do something (or if he’s required to do something) it’s not worth doing. He can always think of something else that’s more interesting or more worthwhile.
However (perhaps just because I’m a parent) I believe the opposite. That just because you have to do something doesn’t mean that it’s not worth doing. In many cases, the things that we’re required to do can end up being very beneficial for us. It’s just that it’s not always obvious how they’re beneficial.
I believe that the same thing principle operates when it comes to compliance, IT compliance and auditing. By now everyone’s aware of the impact that regulatory and industry requirements have had on just about all sizes of organizations. And while the majority of regulations and compliance requirements apply to public companies, in many cases even private companies have been swept along on the compliance tide. Over the past few years, all types of organizations have had to implement a wide variety of compliance-oriented tasks, steps and processes to help them define, document and manage data and processes.
Doing performance management correctly is like trying to get my kids to wash their hands. Sure, I can create a process or rule for it: When our hands are dirty, we wash them. Then I can ensure that the components of the process are available and responsive: There’s soap by the sink and the hot and cold water turn on easily. But even when I’ve set everything up, and have the metrics established (we need to wash our hands daily!), how can I be sure that they’ll be achieved? And if they are achieved, are they being achieved correctly?
For example, it’s pretty easy to identify when my older son isn’t meeting our performance goals: His hands are clearly filthy. But it’s a bit tougher with my younger son: He did wash his hands. But did he use hot water? Did he use soap? Did he actually scrub for a reasonable period of time (or did he simply pass them under the water)? It can be hard to tell. I’ve also discovered that there’s usually no adequate feedback mechanism to help me identify when there are user or system problems. For example, we can be out of soap for days in their bathroom and I’ll never hear about it. Or they may decide on their own to use one of those liquid hand sanitizers instead of actually washing their hands. It’s hard to know sometimes.
The point is, even with the right process (or application) and tools, the effectiveness of the result really depends on actions of the users. If there are user failures (like failing to report missing soap, using cold water, etc.), then the resulting process is going to be ineffective.
As I will explore in my next column, it’s the same with enterprise performance management and an organization’s applications. When enterprise applications like SAP, Oracle or Seibel aren’t being used effectively and efficiently by users, the business results will suffer.
One solution to this problem is putting solutions in place that can collect and manage information not only on your applications, but on the user experience of the users using those applications. Let’s look at what that means.
Of course, you’d want to start by collecting traditional application management-related information like response time and availability. You’d also want to know the transactional response times-for example, how long does it take the application to respond after the “enter” key is pressed? But-and here’s where it starts to go beyond traditional management solutions-you’d also want to know how long it takes for users to navigate through the application screens.
Are they spending too much time on difficult to navigate or complete screens? Of course, you’d also want to collect information on which applications (and transactions) what people are using. It would also be helpful to collect information about quality of the users’ experience and any errors in the infrastructure or application, whether they’re cause by the user or by something in the IT environment. For example, perhaps users are getting errors trying to connect to certain applications or databases, but such errors aren’t getting reported.
For many organizations, SOA is a not a done deal. Even when there is a strong technical commitment to move an organization’s IT infrastructure in an SOA-direction, there can remain many questions and challenges.
Like it or not, many of today’s organizations have to plan for audits – in some cases once a year, in other cases on an on-going basis. Of course, meeting compliance and auditing requirements takes time, resources and money. That’s why many organizations have started to look at the effectiveness of their compliance and auditing strategies, with an eye to streamlining and automating processes and simply making audits less painful and costly.