Doing Business in Real Time
About this Blog:
The global economy has a life of its own, it lives in real-time, and we are all part of it. Hello brave new world.
Cloud Computing and the Fist of Innovation
“The credit crunch and liquidity crisis will make the invisible hand of economics the visible fist of innovation.” This comment from a thoughtful colleague brought several loosely related ideas into much clearer alignment. It comes from Michael Bogovich, an international program manager at Abbott Laboratories.
His comment came up in a conversation we were having about the effect of technologies like cloud computing, software-as-a-service (SaaS), server virtualization, and open source software. Michael was commenting on a feature interview I did regarding this subject for a show called BetterManagement Today. Depending on your beliefs, this interview is 21 minutes of either brilliant insights or else tragically misguided opinions (here’s the link; the button labeled “Feature” takes you right to my interview). Michael and I both believe economics is once again driving a big change in the way companies use and pay for computing and application system resources.
Historical Analogy Sheds some Light on What’s Happening Today
My hometown of Chicago is the birthplace of the modern steel frame skyscraper and when those first skyscrapers were built around the turn of the last century they had big electric power generators installed in their basements to provide light and power for the people who worked in those buildings. Then during the 1910s owners of those buildings started shifting away from their internal electric generators and relying instead on the public power grid provided by electric utility companies.
Imagine the debate that happened between those who thought they would be better off and more secure by keeping the power generation function in-house and those who thought it would be more cost effective to shift that function to outside vendors. I imagine it was probably the finance guys (those heartless penny pinching sons-a-guns) who kept pointing out that the electric utilities were able to deliver electricity at lower and lower costs per kilowatt hour as compared to the in-house guys. I imagine the in-house power guys countered with the argument that relying on outside utilities was a performance risk and a security risk. How do we know if outside utilities will deliver reliable power, and what if someone cuts the power lines to our building?
But alas, money talks, and by the late 1910s the power utilities were the clear winners of this debate. So here we go again. As we head into the 2010s the arguments and concerns are in many cases so similar to the electric power debate of a hundred years ago that all we have to do is substitute computing power for electrical power and the rest is pretty much the same. And it’s clear which side is going to win (hint – they’re the heartless penny pinching sons-a-guns).
Cloud Performance and Security Concerns are being Addressed
As it was a hundred years ago, the two main concerns in today's debate revolve around issues of performance and security. Because of the opportunity created by current economic imperatives (credit crunch and liquidity crisis) there are lots of technology vendors busy creating products to address these performance and security concerns. In the last few weeks I’ve spoken with a couple of these vendors. One vendor addressing performance concerns is Nimsoft and a vendor addressing security concerns is Cisco.
I spoke with Gary Read the CEO of Nimsoft a company that makes performance monitoring tools for cloud computing and SaaS environments. Right from the start his company has designed their performance monitoring products to address cloud and SaaS environments; they are not repurposing older tools built to monitor performance on internal LAN/WAN networks.
During our conversation an interesting fact came up; Gary
Previous Post: Another Story about Elegantly Simple Technology Solving Complex ProblemsNext Post: Stafford Beer’s Viable Systems Model: Foundation for Business Agility
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
