Weekly IT Highlights on Virtualization, Analysts, DevOps, and trends for Cloud and More
As Friday comes around, we want to recap some of the best stuff we read this week on Virtualization, Analysts, DevOps and trends for cloud. Enjoy!
4 steps to reducing IT complexity
By Nigel Fenwick
Many CIOs are caught in the middle — stuck between competing demands from the CFO to reduce costs and from the CEO to increase innovation. In fact this is a topic which often comes up in our strategic planning workshops with clients. The challenge is to find a means to achieve both goals simultaneously. Here are four steps you can take to achieve just that.
Why Your Enterprise Private Cloud Is Failing
By James Staten
In looking at the organizations who are having success with their private clouds, their approach is completely different. And usually starts with a different person in charge — a developer or architect who approaches the cloud, not from the infrastructure up, but as a service. And they start their service definition with the public equivalent. The approach: How can I deliver the same value and experience of the public cloud from within our own data center? Those who have had the most success with this approach have also started with a complete Infrastructure as a Service or Platform as a Service solution, rather than trying to build one up from a virtualization foundation.
DevOps Is Not an All-or-Nothing Proposition
By James Turnbull
DevOps is not a fad for Internet companies. It's a way of working that can make organizations more productive and employees happier (and it doesn't look bad on a resume either). It's easy to look at a traditional IT org chart and say DevOps isn't for us. But if you look deeper, you'll find that there are at least some ways you can move toward a more collaborative, productive, team-based way of working. Once you do a few of those experiments, DevOps fever is likely to spread across your organization.
Do DevOps tools really exist?
By Alan Sharp-Paul
So when you next think about what "DevOps tools" are available ask yourself how they support collaboration. There will be exceptions but in most places the DevOps toolset will be enforcing pre-existing silos because the user base for each one is too narrow. I would never suggest dumbing down these tools to ensure broader usage but they shouldn't be walled off. When the information these tools store is open and available, when everyone can contribute to it then DevOps magic will just start to happen.
5 Reasons Why Virtualization Could Turn into a Nightmare Without Configuration Management
By Sasha Gilenson
EvolvenStatus quo policies and procedures for IT infrastructure are significantly impacted with the implementation of the first virtual machine (VM) host. Yet many IT professionals still believe that they don't need to address their IT configuration management processes and technology for their virtual infrastructure.
IT Change Management, Incident Management and the Unintended Consequences
By Sasha Gilenson
EvolvenMany IT groups are in recovery mode, where they are maintaining their current environments based on limited budgets. Since departments are strained for resources, IT professionals need to maintain their complex organization even if staffing is an issue. The variety of applications and technologies comprising IT environments have thousands of individual configuration parameters. It used to be that you could just ask the IT manager about the system – the IP address, software installed, or patches – and he could answer off the top of his head. IT administrators aren't like that today. Today's level of complexity, makes it very hard to maintain a sense of control. Yet you are still being held accountable for thousands and thousands of configuration parameters.
IT Deserves More Credit for Driving Business Agility
By Mike Vizard
Now a recent survey of 100 IT executives at the recent Application Architecture, Development and Integration (AADI) Summit conducted by Serena Software, a provider of application lifecycle management (ALM) software, suggests the next step is really aligning the way the business is managed to the simple fact that IT is becoming more agile - See more at: http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/it-unmasked/it-deserves-more-credit-for-driving-business-agility.html#sthash.DX0VZYgj.dpuf
Slow IT
By Rob England
(The IT Skeptic)With the idea of Slow IT, I'm saying can we all just calm down a bit and let a little reason, considered reflection, and - *gasp* - actual testing and proof trickle into our IT strategy and planning. We need to understand how fast individuals can absorb change, and just as importantly how fast organisations can change their strategy, structure, process, and practices.
Top 10 Practices for Effective DevOps
By Scott W. Ambler
Technology infrastructure platforms such as operating systems, application servers, and communication services often provide monitoring capabilities that can be leveraged by monitoring tools (such as Microsoft Management Console, IBM Tivoli Monitoring, and jManage). However, for monitoring application-specific functionality, such as what user interface (UI) features are being used by given types of users, instrumentation that is compliant with your organization's monitoring infrastructure will need to be built into the applications. Development teams need to be aware of this operational requirement or, better yet, have access to a framework that makes it straightforward to provide such instrumentation.
Power100 Top IT Management Analysts
By Sasha Gilenson
EvolvenCheck out our POWER100, a handpicked list of analysts focused on IT Management. These analysts have a tremendous influence on the IT Management segment and on IT in general.
Build analytics into processes to achieve "intelligent business operations", Gartner advises
By Kane Fulton
Real-time analytics and extreme collaboration will be incorporated into business processes by 70% of the "most profitable" companies by 2016, research company predicts
Time To Rethink Your Monitoring Portfolio
By John Rakowski
HOW MANY monitoring technologies have I got?! This is a common reaction and you are not alone. It's a problem of siloed I&O teams and what has happened is that the network monitoring team has bought their own solutions, the storage teams their own solutions and so on. The problem is that if you want to achieve benefits of APM, Business Service Management (BSM) or in a general sense, unified monitoring and management, you now have the potential problem of integration.
Road ahead for enterprise business applications
By Thiru Vengadam
The key to the success of these would depend on the simplifying and streamlining application maintenance and management for situations where multiple installations of enterprise business Applications are operated in the same data center, private or public cloud. - See more at: http://www.dqindia.com/dataquest/column/175350/road-ahead-enterprise-business-applications#sthash.QHkGZ4wO.dpuf
Is your IT ops management in chaos?
By Sasha Gilenson
EvolvenSurvey reveals that the IT operations tools most organizations rely on are generally considered ineffective, and most of the processes used are labor-intensive. How can IT operations management be more effective?
