Making IT work as One

How does my company stay efficient while we’re using technologies around interoperability? How can innovation help my business?

Top business needs:

• Reduce cost
• Manage complexity
• Mitigate risk

Mixed IT environments are a reality for almost all organizations. Different environments, architectural strategies, desktop profiles, etc. There are benefits to having mixed source environments, although homogenous environments are ideal. On average 46,000 hours in an organization are spent on Sarbanes-Oxley standards.

Some considerations to make IT work as one:

• Strategy
• Solutions
• Ecosystem

Strategy

Actionable strategy is key. The emergence of three silos (applications, systems and infrastructure, and operations) are now moved into one. There is a lot of pressure to make these pieces come together.

Solutions

You need focused solutions to solve problems today while keeping an eye to the future. There are three main needs: the data center, end-user computing, and identity and security. This is also what is the most important to the market right now. The end goal is the agility of the data center.

Data Center Challenges

• Create an agile IT infrastructure
• Address power and space constraints
• Deliver performance, security and availability
• Manage hardware, software and labor costs
• Meet service level agreements

Data Center Solutions

• Workload management - green IT and server efficiency, unified physical and virtual environment
• Virtualization and Consolidation - business continuity and disaster recovery
• Enterprise Servers

End-User Computing Solutions

• Collaboration
• Enterprise desktops - Novell uses Linux and Open Office, interesting to note
• Endpoint management

Identity and Security Challenges

• Minimize risk, uncertainty and policy violations
• Provide timely and secure access to information
• Ensure, document and prove information security
• Reduce the cost of proving compliance
• Reduce the cost and complexity of governance

Identity and Security Solutions

• Identity and Access Management - user provisioning, role management, access management
• Compliance Management - Audit, Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC), IT controls automation, Security, Information and Event Management (SIEM)

Ecosystem

The ecosystem is powerful. Companies should challenge partners for innovation and interoperability.

Community Innovation - open source and open standards

IT Landscape - Mixed IT Environments

• Consulting, systems integration vendors
• Application vendors
• Systems software vendors (Novell)
• Hardware, network vendors

How does your ecosystem help your company? How do your partners help? What is their role in the industry to help you? How are all the vendors in the industry helping you?

An interesting blog post this morning discusses the obstacles and implications of this kind of technology, in part quoting a recent New York Times article —

In short, we need a log-on system that relies on cryptography, not mnemonics. As users, we would replace passwords with so-called information cards, icons on our screen that we select with a click to log on to a Web site. The click starts a handshake between machines that relies on hard-to-crack cryptographic code.

An obstacle to this kind of system are the current initiatives toward Open ID and single-sign on services, strategies that are backed by large industry players such as the Equifax, Google, Novell, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. In the open ID system, you would log in to a session on the web with one password, which would be accepted by any application/account supporting the open ID infrastructure.

To me Open ID sounds like a step backwards, toward less security…
then again, I would think that encrypting everything could also make your system run significantly slower, and that it wouldn’t prevent all the risks either…