According to the industry analysts, experts and professionals, some of the changes and novelties introduced in the last few years are set to become actual trends in 2012. Influenced by the ever-challenging economic climate, disillusioned yet careful outlook on industry best practices and need to obtain measurable efficiency from any IT project, these are the five key areas that will acquire growing importance next year:
1) Larger use of non-desktop-based applications
This is due to of a growing need for mobility and flexibility. Users need to be able to work while travelling, from an...
Posted in IT Support on 01 December 2011
There are many exciting directions a career path can take when one works in the IT field. This is not exclusive to skill development or career advancements within the same company or field. Many IT people with in-house experience at some point choose to ‘move to the dark side' and embrace the world of consulting. It can be a positive change for a Service Desk-bound professional to finally be able to get to the clients directly without all the layers of sales people, and be able to make good use of the inside knowledge they acquired by advising companies in different fields and with di...
Posted in Infrastructure on 27 October 2011
As the business world lies in fear of a double-dip recession, companies are advised to ‘think smart' and try to find a way to profit from further economic downturn and not to simply aim to survive it. Or, if they are struggling, to have a ‘rescue plan' in place that will spare them from drowning in debt or sinking altogether. As a consequence, mergers and acquisitions flourish remarkably in times of financial difficulties, and can be a way to gain during a tough spell - either by buying or joining with another business and expanding or by selling up before collapsing completely....
How to prioritise IT projects and budget spend?
As a result of the recent financial crisis, the constant fear of a double dip recession or, at the very least, an uncertain and unstable economic climate where long-term commitments are not convenient any more has led organisations to become more careful with where they spend their money and what they want for it. This means that it is now even more difficult for the IT department to convince Financial Directors to invest in their projects or assign a bigger budget to them - the finances always seem to be needed elsewhere as a priority. And e...
Good sense and demonstrable results make a winning proposal
Things have significantly changed since the recession affected companies' budgets and made them re-think their needs and priorities - something IT consultancies have to take into consideration when proposing their services. ITIL, once a priority within many corporate IT strategies and individual's personal development plans, is no longer regarded in quite the same way.
‘ITIL is dead' and other similar statements have been circulated in past months within the IT press. But this is not exactly the case: it's not that ITIL is...
Posted in IT Support on 26 September 2011
Plan-Net has issued a new white paper that guides IT professionals through the essential steps needed to perform a Service Transition with successful results.
Whether the IT Support model is to be transitioned from in-house to Co-Sourced, Co-Sourced to fully Outsourced or in-house to Outsourced, this white paper outlines each important stage of the process, whilst also providing the reader with some tips and further insights into the matter.
This white paper, written by Pete Canavan, Head of Support Services, was conceived to help with the growing need for organisations to change the way ...
The value of consultancy in Service Management projects
For many organisations, expenditure towards IT is often a sticky subject - there never seems to be a big enough budget for IT related projects. This is especially true when these concern Service Management. Whereas it is easier to justify spend for hardware or software that needs to be updated or refreshed, Best Practice has always been more difficult to sell to the CFO.
This hasn't always been the case. A few years ago, before the credit crunch, many organisations invested in ITIL training and qualifications for their own internal p...
The more pessimistic of us would say that the development of ITIL V3 must have been rushed to have missed some of its more beneficial "Best Practice" rules in the transition. After 4 years the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) are updating it to ‘resolve errors and inconsistencies in the text and diagrams and review processes to make training and understanding easier'. It is not out of order to ask ourselves a few questions such as: did they not peer review or audit the publications before going to print, then? Has it really taken them that long to read it all?
In any case, since t...
Posted in IT Support on 26 June 2011
‘Stay local, act global' is the new mantra for IT departments
With companies becoming increasingly international and IT support more and more remote, the IT Service Desk finds itself dealing with a user base that often extends to an EMEA or global level. The idea of outsourcing to a service provider seems now more than ever a convenient and cost-efficient solution to many organisations - in fact, the IT outsourcing industry in the UK is now generating over £40 billion a year, accounting for 8 per cent of the country's total economic output, an Oxford economics research recently...
Posted in IT Support on 20 June 2011
Thanks to Best Practice frameworks, technological progress and improved knowledge of the potentials of IT, a lot can be done nowadays at Service Desk level to reduce cost, speed up operations and improve service quality - all things that can contribute to achieving business success. However, Service Management initiatives such as role changes and redistribution, adoption of new tools and technologies and the implementation of new processes to follow may not always be welcome by who in the end has to accept and embrace all these changes - Service Desk staff. Do you take into consideration wh...
Have you ever found yourself in that situation where you look all over the place for your glasses, until someone tells you they are on your head? When it comes to IT, it can be difficult to see what is wrong with the system you are using and how it can be improved when you are directly involved in it. In these cases, an external view would be helpful - and it is also beneficial when you don't have the time or resources to maintain up to date knowledge of your sector's latest developments or have little experience of alternative environments and IT systems and the benefits they may bring. Th...
As with many other new technologies, financial organisations have been among the most keen to embrace desktop virtualisation. The main reason this particular technology is being largely adopted by the sector is because it suits the need for easier mobility: thanks to VDI, users can access their desktop from any PC with an internet connection, making it easy to access large amounts of data and heavy applications from a light mini netbook while travelling and even making it unnecessary to carry a laptop around when visiting another office.
But although for many this is a good enough reason a...
Posted in IT Support on 11 May 2011
IT support staff are for many companies what vegetables are to your body - essential elements for efficient functioning and critical to avoid major failures. Exactly like cultivating your own greens, having an in-house IT team may give you a sense of trust and control unlike other solutions. However, it is also expensive and time-consuming, therefore not always convenient.
A ‘home-grown' solution may suit larger organisations that either have the need to train analysts to use their self-developed software, have security or strategic reasons to have total control over the IT departmen...
Most organisations nowadays have heard about the benefits of implementing an IT Service Management Best Practice framework, such as Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (CobiT) or the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). More than half have implemented some of the core processes, mainly Incident, Service Desk and Change Management. A good number of them believe the discipline has brought them some benefits, but many are also disappointed that they haven't achieved the results they were aiming for.
There are two main reasons for this. First of all, as a...
The principles behind ITSM Best Practice have a very clear purpose: they allow organisations to follow the most efficient route to effectively solve an IT-related incident, without wasting unnecessary time, effort and financial resources. Incidents are normally prioritised based on specific criteria, and clear processes are set out and must be followed both by end users who experience an incident and Service Desk analysts who deal with it.
If this is the theory of Best Practice, in reality things are a bit different. Prioritisation based on incident features, in fact, often struggles to ov...
The latest version of VMware's VDI product, View 4.6, was released several weeks ago with a few new features, most notably PCoIP tunnelling - or more accurately View security servers that actually understand and accept the PCoIP protocol. This is a feature that was sorely lacking in the last revision and will help bolster the PCoIP vs ICA argument in favour of PCoIP, helping to ensure those environments that rely more heavily on their WAN infrastructure. It also guarantees a much better (although still not perfect) end user experience, especially for CAD users and those using graphic design...
As organisations look to embrace the cost-efficiency opportunities deriving from new technologies and services, there is a lot of talk about the benefits, risks and possible ROI of the blanket concept of ‘Cloud computing'. However, it is still unclear how using Cloud services will affect the existing network infrastructure and what impact it can have on IT support roles and the way end users deal with incidents.
The effect on an organisation's infrastructure depends on the Cloud model adopted, which may vary based on company size. For example, small organisations which are less worri...
According to recent data, the private sector lags behind with regards to data protection, while public sector organisations lead the way. David Cowan explains how firms can improve their IT security and avoid losing money, clients and reputation.
A recent survey commissioned by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) revealed that there is a remarkable difference between the public and private sector's approach to Information Security. The data contained in the research carried out by Social and Market Strategic Research (SMSR) showed that, in fact, the public sector was much more awar...
Posted in IT Support on 15 February 2011
How to create cost-efficiencies in the post-Spending Review scenario
After the announcement of 25%-40% budget cuts last year, it is reasonable to expect IT to be one of the departments to suffer the most in public sector organisations. However, cuts in IT support and projects may bring inefficiencies and disruptions, which can then lead to real losses and increasing costs. More than ever, CIOs and IT Directors at public sector organisations are taking various options into consideration, from quick-fixes to farther-sighted ideas, trying to find a solution that will produce savings without ...
Posted in Infrastructure on 23 December 2010
This is the end of a tough year for many organisations across all sectors. We found ourselves snowed-in last winter, were stuck abroad due to a volcano eruption in spring, suffered from the announcement of a tightened budget in summer, and had to start making drastic cost-saving plans following the Comprehensive Spending Review in autumn. Data security breaches and issues with unreliable service providers have also populated the press.
Somehow the majority of us have managed to survive all that; some better than others. As another winter approaches it is time to ask ourselves: what helped ...
Posted in IT Support on 17 December 2010
Do you have a people continuity plan for your IT Support?
Business resilience and continuity planning is becoming more and more important as organisations increasingly understand its value and the position IT has in achieving it. However, in Business Continuity Management not all elements are given the same significance. Many organisations focus on securing their data with constant back-ups, others are more concerned with minimising email or server downtime - but the measures taken might not be so effective if there is insufficient support staff to deal with them. How many organisations ha...
Posted in IT Support on 30 November 2010
High-value users downtime costs firms thousands an hour
High IT availability is nowadays vital to the majority of organisations across all sectors. For the financial sector, so heavily reliant on IT, it is ever more crucial that the business-critical systems work at maximum efficiency and that any downtime and disruptions are minimised. To high-value users, delays, an inability to access data or email and lack of business continuity in any other form have an overall cost that cannot be ignored, especially in an unstable economic environment such as the one we are currently experiencing. If...
Posted in IT Support on 24 November 2010
With the retirement of version 2 of ITIL, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, organisations across all sectors are considering the implications of this change and whether they should think about a possible move to version 3. A reoccurring question is about not just the value of moving towards a V3 aligned approach, but also querying the overall value of the ITIL discipline itself.
There are many doubts regarding the Good Practice framework which is one of the most widely adopted worldwide, and it is not only the CEOs and financial directors who question its effectiveness, RO...
Posted in IT Support on 25 October 2010
Many organisations are moving to a ‘best of both worlds' between insourcing and outsourcing - Managed Services.
Efficient management of IT Support has become a crucial issue for organisations across all sectors. It is being increasingly recognised not only as a means to improve the whole business, but also as an instrument to create strategic advantage and added business value.
Many organisations identify two distinct types of management options for their IT Support - controlled and visible in-sourcing and the apparently cost-efficient outsourcing. But for organisations dealing wit...
Posted in Infrastructure on 19 October 2010
Recently-launched Metro Bank has made headlines these last few months for more than one reason: it is the first high-street bank to launch in over 100 years; it follows a retail store model, offering longer opening hours and no weekly closing day; and virtually all of their IT is outsourced to a Managed Services provider.
The news of a bank outsourcing its IT does not come as a complete surprise, as many banks outsource certain functions such as software development, IT Support etc. There are elements of novelty in this choice, though - for instance the fact everything but security and the...
Since the news came out that the Office of Government Commerce stated in a report by the Office of Public Sector Information they had ‘no policy remit' to produce and develop the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) methodology, various articles and blogs have been written declaring the ‘death of ITIL', or at least of the discipline as we know it.
This has been interpreted by some as an intention to drop official support due to lack of interest, since ITIL is admittedly not one of the OGC's core responsibilities. Critics believe the move will make ITIL an even m...
Posted in Infrastructure on 04 October 2010
As virtualization technologies become increasingly popular, more and more businesses are thinking about using cloud computing for Disaster Recovery. Experts in the field believe that there are many advantages in embracing this solution - however, there are also some potential threats that need to be taken into account.
In order to consider cloud computing services, organisations need to evaluate the potential risks to their Information Assets and, in particular, how a 3rd party supplier will affect the Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability of their data.
Here are five tips on how to...
Posted in Infrastructure on 27 September 2010
As a legion of hybrid laptop/tablet devices are thrown into the market, riding the wave of the trendy but not-so-business-friendly iPad whilst trying to overcome its limitations in a bid to conquer a place in the corporate world, a few thoughts come to mind as a reflection on the future of business mobile computing.
Tablets in their pure and hybrid forms have been around for several years, but it is only recently that they have reached some sort of success thanks to the right marketing, targeting and perhaps timing. Perhaps they could only be accepted as the natural successor to smartphone...
Just one. But this is not a joke.
A simple mistake caused by the recipient auto-complete function within an email client resulted in Gwent Police committing what has been referred to as the first major UK data security breach since the new regulations introduced by the Information Commissioner's Office came into force in April this year. What is of particular interest about this case is that a breach of this scale (10,000 records) and gravity (the data leaked involved personal and sensitive information) occurred within a police environment which allegedly had strict policies and procedures...
Posted in IT Support on 01 September 2010
The term ‘commoditisation' seems to rear its head whenever there is a perceived trend for technology to become standardised and, however unlikely it is to become prevalent, there are often many positives that can be identified from its methods. After all, standardisation should mean technology becomes more affordable and reliable in the first instance and easier and cheaper to support once implemented. However, when this trend spills over into IT Support and Service Delivery, then the positives become much more difficult to identify.
Its stealthy advance into the marketplace is under...
Picture the scene: your organisation has decided to improve its IT department through the introduction of ITIL Best Practice. Some external consultants from an IT service provider came in to do a review and mapped out the project. They then implemented the agreed Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) processes while delivering awareness sessions to various members of staff. Perhaps you even got a few of your people v3 qualified. At last, your Best Practice project has been delivered and has finally gone live. But what now?
The Service Management experts are long gone and you...
A Plan-Net survey found that 87% of organisations are currently using Exchange 2003 or earlier. There has been a reluctance to adopt the 2007 version, often considered to be the ‘Vista' of the server platform - faulty and dispensable. But an upgrade to a modern, improved version is now becoming crucial: standard support for the 2003 version ended over a year ago and much technological progress has been made since then. It seems that unconvinced organisations need some good reasons to move from their well-known but obsolete system to the new and improved 2010 version, where business co...
Posted in IT Support on 14 July 2010
No matter the economic climate, or indeed within which industry they operate, organisations are constantly seeking to lower the cost of IT while also trying to improve performance. The problem is it can often seem impossible to achieve one without compromising on the other and in most cases, cost cutting will take prevalence, leading to a dip in service levels.
When things get tough the popularity of off-shoring inevitably increases, leading many decision-makers to consider sending the IT Service Desk off to India, China or Chile as a convenient solution financially - low-cost labour for h...
Posted in IT Support on 11 July 2010
Service Desk efficiency starts from support staff
IT Service Desk efficiency is vital for any organisation to conduct successful business operations, regardless of the sector they operate in. However, many IT Service Desks are far from cost-efficient and still have much work to do in order to reach their full potential. Inefficiencies and excessive costs might be the consequence of one or many factors, for instance the various Service Desk software applications do not fully integrate with one another or there are a lack of clear procedures for change management. But purchasing the latest t...
Posted in IT Support on 24 June 2010
There has been a lot of hoopla in the press in the last couple of weeks regarding Apple overtaking Microsoft's place in the sun. Various commentators have declared that Apple is now the biggest technology company in the world, implying that whilst it is going from strength to strength, Microsoft has become yesterday's news.
The term "biggest", however, is rather ambiguous - what metrics are used to measure it? Most commentators seem to base their claims solely on figures such as their relative Market Capitalisations (or worth). From this point of view, Apple is leader as its Ma...
Organisations across all sectors have more than realised that the unstable economic climate has brought along an increased need for flexible solutions, not only in the case of downsizing but in upsizing the business as well. While some companies are still struggling with budget cuts, others are looking at growth or re-expansion in the near future; regardless, both have reason to consider an improvement of their IT Service Desk with the help of the right service management solutions, in order to obtain a number of efficiencies.
An efficient service desk can reduce IT-related costs, improve ...
"Free as a bird, is the next best thing to be," sang the Beatles. This is what modern workers want more and more: they want to be able to work while commuting, on a business trip and at home, even in the middle of the night or at weekends.
Naturally, the need for greater out-of-hours and out-of-office accessibility to work resources has grown with the development of new, smaller and lighter devices that are constantly coming out and gaining ground in the market.
With the choice getting wider by the day, professionals, who are getting more and more tech-savvy, want to be able to have their...
Apple CEO Steve Jobs recently announced the start of a new, post-PC era, declaring that Tablets such as the iPod might be replacing PCs just like 'old trucks were replaced by modern cars'. Microsoft's Steve Ballmer reacted by saying that PCs are undergoing many transformations and tablets are just one of the experimental forms we will see, adding that the PC market has still a lot to grow.
As an experiment Keith Smith, Senior Consultant and Adrian Polley, Technical Services Director take the sides of Jobs and Ballmer to discuss the two different viewpoints.
Are Tablets the future?
It's...
Posted in IT Support on 15 June 2010
IT professionals can learn from the tough times.
As the UK officially leaves the recession, although, it must be said, staggering instead of marching triumphantly, the IT job market seems to be coming back to life, but with a substantially changed face. IT professionals looking to get back to work after they were made redundant or to make that career move they postponed while things were tough, should take this opportunity to learn from the past twelve months and make a more informed choice when choosing their new employer.
As IT Support and Managed Services acquire larger space in the UK...
Choosing more than one supplier is necessary until a time when cloud computing comes of age.
Virtualising servers, purchasing space in data centres and utilising applications hosted and managed by third parties can have some undeniable advantages: they can increase efficiency, decrease IT-related costs, allow greater mobility and also represent a greener alternative for organisations. But as the popularity of cloud computing grows, so do concerns regarding the unclear implications of the new technologies. If the initial worries were mostly about security of data stored at a provider, now a...
As the Treasury announce cuts amounting to £6.25bn, £95m of which deriving from a reduction in IT spending, attention is once more directed towards outsourcing as a means to reduce IT expenditure. But Information Technology stores and processes large amounts of personal, sensitive and confidential data, and when it comes to the public sector it can have a very high level of sensitivity, hence a lot of trust is bestowed upon personnel that have access to it. It is already difficult to place confidence in in-house staff, due to the high number of data breaches that are perpetrated...
Posted in IT Support on 06 May 2010
Budget reduction teaches organisations to prioritise - a lesson to be learnt not only by the public sector.
The recently announced budget has not been kind to public sector IT, just as expected. Large cuts mean that most technology projects will have to be shelved, but this does not make the level of performance the sector is craving for impossible to be reached - on the contrary, budget reduction is the kind of incentive that drives organisations to prioritise and to seek efficiencies, focusing more on operational, rather than capital expenditure. This does not apply exclusively t...
Posted in IT Support on 03 May 2010
The importance of IT, just like that of public transport, seems only to be truly appreciated when it stops working properly and stranded users are left to reflect on the value of a more efficient system. The IT quality issue can become particularly important when inefficiencies and disruptions not only slow down the system and create delays, but get in the way of business operations or, even worse, cause losses. As many organisations might have unfortunately already experienced, an extra minute of downtime might lead to money loss, system malfunction can cause loss of data and lack of prope...
Posted in IT Support on 27 April 2010
When a press release was issued a couple of weeks ago announcing that Microsoft's IT help desk, desk-side services, and infrastructure and application support were to be managed on-premise by Infosys for its branches across the globe, it caused a lot of controversy in the media.
Outsourcing frequently provokes strong opinions, and whilst it is often accepted that outsourcing catering or cleaning is a sensible move, outsourcing IT is often seen in a different light. There can be a supposition that the company in question has somehow lost control of what it is doing and is embarkin...
Data collected through a survey carried out by IT Services provider Plan-Net has shown that 42% of UK businesses are planning to roll out Windows 7 in the next 18 months. However the survey, of 100 IT decision makers in City-based businesses of over 250 users, discovered that 24% are waiting until 2011 to roll out the new OS while only 18% are either in the process or plan to start the transition in 2010. With only 6% of the surveyed organisations already using Windows 7 and a further 8% not making the leap for 2 to 3 years, a stunning 24% are not thinking about rolling out Windows 7 at all...
It looks like NHS trusts are starting to realise that Information Security is not just a matter of using complex passwords, locking drawers at the end of the day and installing the latest firewall and antivirus solutions. The Information Commissioner has been particularly critical of the NHS in the past due to a high proportion of security breaches as a result of inadequate Information Security controls and staff awareness programmes. The result has been an NHS wide initiative to ensure all removable media including laptops and USB drives are encrypted. However, this may not be enough. As r...
Life in Venice doesn't stop every time it floods. People roll up their trousers, pull on their wellies and still walk to the grocer's, go to work, grab a vino with friends. And when it's all over they mop the floor, dry the furniture, and go back to their pre-flood life. How do they do it? They choose not to have carpet or wooden flooring, keep updated on water level and have a spare pair of boots right next to the door. This is called prevention.
When it comes to faults in IT systems, both common and rare just like flooding can be, prevention is not better than cure - it is the cure, the ...
Posted in IT Support on 22 March 2010
If we look at the number of organisations outsourcing their software development, IT service desk or WAN support to India and other cheap-labour countries, offshoring nowadays seems not only convenient and straight-forward, but as easy as abc. But what the media doesn't seem to cover is an issue that is not at all uncommon: it hit Barclays, Quark, Dell and a large number of other companies - what happens if all is not well and you have to take the offshored back in-house?
The phenomenon has already been dubbed 'backshoring' in the US, where 30% of Fortune 500 companies have experienced it,...
Posted in IT Support on 10 March 2010
Slowly recovering from the crisis and with a more careful eye to the unsteadiness of the market, many organisations across all sectors are considering ways to make their IT Service Desk more cost-efficient, but some ideas decision-makers might have could be partially or totally wrong.So if you are thinking any of the following, you might want to think again:"Our Service Desk is costing us too much. Outsourcing it to [insert favourite low-cost country abroad] can solve the problem."Although outsourcing has it advantages, doing it off-shore is a huge investment and has a lot of hidden co...
Posted in Infrastructure on 17 February 2010
After 3 years in beta, Microsoft is expected to launch System Center Service Manager (SCSM) sometime this year. Long-time Microsoft watchers will know that the company often "drip feeds" new markets with product information before products are ready as a way of generating interest. This has the added benefit, from Microsoft's perspective, of creating uncertainty and potentially delaying buying decisions for competing products. But a 3-year beta is unusual even for Microsoft, and is largely explained by the company deciding that the product needed a ground-up rewrite after feedba...
Posted in IT Support on 15 February 2010
Off-shoring of IT services and especially Service Desks is gaining popularity as Financial Directors continue to reduce IT spend and headcount. But before a decision as crucial as this can be taken it is important to assess the potential short, medium and long term impact on the user community and ultimately the bottom line.
Although the Service Desk is just a component part of IT as a whole, it remains the 'face' of IT and in most cases, the measurement point of both user perception of IT effectiveness and impact on the user's ability to carry out his or her job. A good or bad Service Des...
Posted in Infrastructure on 11 February 2010
The latest Gartner predictions state that by 2012, 20% of businesses will own no IT assets. Is IT following the paths of cars and mobile phones and will we end up leasing it?
It is actually not difficult to imagine. The growth of utility computing means organisations are already purchasing software and storage on demand, leaving its management to a third party. They don't only do it because it is convenient economically speaking, but for a more important reason - it spares them from the responsibility of managing something that is not the main function of their business. As the trend grows...
ITIL v2 and v3 have been peacefully coexisting since the release of the new version in 2007, but with the forthcoming phasing out of v2 starting this year, many organisations are starting to plan their transition towards v3. It is always hard to switch from the comfort of a widely-practiced and familiar method to a new version of it, and although most organisations seem to understand the tangible benefits of the enhanced discipline, the question remains: where do you start?
The problem, in fact, is often not why but how to carry out the transition - moving your organisation from oper...
Times are tough, purse strings are tight, so CFOs play it safe when it comes to their IT spend. A cautious approach is typically adopted and only technical projects which are deemed 'essential' actually see the light of day until confidence in the market is restored.
This is all well and good, but problems can arise when examining just what many of them consider to be essential. Deciding whether to roll out 400 new PCs, switch to Windows 7 or implement Citrix is on the face of it a simple decision, in terms of Finance. Is it essential to keeping 'the wheels on' and are you doing it for the...
'I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.'
With this quote, ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius gives us an important insight into learning: lectures go in one ear and out the other, Power-Point presentations make things ring a bell, but the only way to truly learn something is through active practice.
You don't learn to ride a bike by reading the instructions booklet, do you?
This is exactly the principle of Experiential Learning in delivering ITIL-related awareness and training.
Decades ago learning equalled plain knowledge absorption. Now Montessori schools...
Posted in Infrastructure on 11 January 2010
Virtualisation seems to be the hot word of the year for all businesses large and small, and as everyone seems to concentrate on deciding whether VMware is better than Microsoft HyperV, often driven by the media, they might overlook one of the major pitfalls in moving to virtual - the lack of forward planning.
Many organisations invest only a small amount of money and time investigating solutions, but choosing one which is tailored to the business rather than investing in the coolest, latest or cheapest product on the market can save organisations from the illusion of cost-effectiveness.
T...
Posted in Infrastructure on 08 January 2010
Enjoy playing human Tetris on the tube at rush hour? All the hot, sweaty physical contact; the effort in pushing your way out, slowly, uneasily; people in your way, blocking you, breathing on you.. Of course not. You just wish you could share the carriage with three friendly, quiet companions and kick the rest of the lot out, bringing a small selection of them back in only when you need an extra chat, some heat in the carriage, specific information they might have.
If you imagine the tube situation to be your IT system, then you get a first glance at what Cloud Computing is about.
&...
Posted in Infrastructure on 17 December 2009
Those of us old enough still remember the advertising slogan suggesting that 'no one ever got fired for buying IBM'. And it was largely true. Many IT managers spent a lot of money on IBM systems as it appeared a risk free option - even if they were not always convinced it was the best solution for the business.
The sentiment is not confined to IBM of course. More recently you could easily replace IBM with names such as Microsoft, Cisco or Dell, for example. The problem is that it is there are usually too many options available. And the same is true when it comes to virtualisati...
Posted in Infrastructure on 15 December 2009
Many of you who have visited an exhibition featuring modern art will know what I'm talking about: you stare at a tiny, coloured dot in the middle of a huge white canvas, and think 'This is art? Says who?' Who decides which pieces of modern art fetch millions at auction and which are consigned to the scrapheap?
The answer can be found with no single person. It is, in reality, a combination of influences. Hype generated by perceived experts, the media, even the public at large play a part as a 'crowd sourcing' entity the makers of Twitter could only dream about. Of course, this situation isn...
Posted in Infrastructure on 03 December 2009
2012. If you take the legend behind this year's Hollywood blockbuster of that name to hold some truth, we're in for a bumpy ride in a couple of years. Ok, so the major cities of the world are unlikely to disappear into gaping chasms but the Mayan prophecy used as inspiration for the movie which predicts the occurrence of an unspecified major change in 2012 might not be so unbelievable when it comes to IT.
Of course, that isn't to suggest anything of the apocalyptical nature seen in the big-screen blockbuster is likely to occur, but from an IT point of view at least, 2012, and the period le...
Every so often a multinational corporation with an image to protect or a public sector organisation that the public are supposed to trust find their lackadaisical approach to information security horribly exposed. The media kick up a stink, various experts are wheeled out to pass comment and we all gasp in horror at the weighty fine imposed - or in the case of the public sector, look on disapprovingly as they humbly promise never to do it again.
Then, after they stump up the cash, all is quickly forgotten until the next time. The question we have to ask, given the propensity for carbon cop...
Most will know what has befallen HSBC in recent weeks, for those who don't, the bank's seemingly wanton data loss culminated in a £3.2 million fine, along with a well deserved hammering in the press.
Of course, it could have been a lot worse. The fine itself was reduced from £4.5 million by the FSA as HSBC did not contest the ruling and in all honesty, either amount is small change to an organisation of the size of HSBC. In fact, for HSBC a data loss like this is not quite the catastrophe the media might be making it out to be. Talk of their customer base deserting them in drov...
During the boom years, there was a dangerous precedent for implementing best practice disciplines such as ITIL without stopping to consider why. Conversely, perhaps the only positive our industry can take from the current economic climate is that most have now been forced to recognise how crucial it is to demonstrate return on investment from every IT venture.
Looking back, it is perhaps understandable that so many were caught up in the furore surrounding ITIL. It has made its name as the industry standard for best practice for good reason and there are many benefits that can be had from a...
Windows 7 came firmly onto the radar last week as Microsoft made Release Candidate 1 available for general download. In doing so, they're following a new path - firstly by making a Release Candidate so publicly available and secondly allowing people to use it unfettered until 1st March 2010. That's a long time for a free (albeit non release) operating system. Many IT departments will view the release with mixed feelings. On the one hand, it gives even less reason to consider a move to Windows Vista, but on the other reinforces the fact that Windows XP is mortal and entering its twilig...
An interesting article on the BBC website today which shows how critical a good security culture is to an organisation. An external consultant, through social engineering techniques and bags of confidence managed to gain unauthorised physical access to a company's premises and from there, very quickly, access to sensitive documents. He then repeated the feat at the BBC's request, and this time gained access to user accounts and passwords just by pretending to be an IT support engineer.
The episode is enlightening. Everyone assumes the Internet is full of bad people, and therefore the...
So the first in our series of seminars on Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is nearly upon us and working through some of the demonstrations with the Infrastructure team has thrown up some interesting topics for discussion. Here at Plan-Net we have the benefit of seeing the ways in which VDI is revolutionising the delivery of IT Support first hand and some of the developments we are witnessing will have a resounding effect across the full spectrum of service delivery.
A perfect example of this is the newfound ability to re-image a desktop that VDI brings. For those Service Desk per...
There seems to be an article on Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) in every industry publication I read at the moment however I have yet to read anything that addresses one of the biggest issues on the table - namely, what it means to those tasked with supporting the desktop environment on a day-to-day level.
The Service Desk will change, that's a given, and with it, the people who work in IT Support must change too. A properly implemented VDI environment means a drastic reduction in desk side visits which will surely have an effect on 2nd line Support in its current form. Though it migh...
ITIL is currently undergoing something of a renaissance in popularity. Renewed interest in the framework is almost certainly being spurred by the buzz surrounding the launch of ITIL in its third iteration. And whilst v.3 is still an unknown quantity and will inevitably be prone to some initial teething problems, I firmly believe that the refreshed best practice framework will be at least as successful as its predecessor. This success is likely to be predicated upon the increased focus placed upon ROI and justifying the value of the service desk and investment in the service desk to the boar...
Posted in Infrastructure on 18 February 2009
It has been difficult to pick up an IT magazine recently and not find any number of stories on virtualisation. Whilst ‘virtualisation' seems a rather nebulous term that's easily adopted by vendors trying to spruce up their existing product line, its also true that it is starting to play a major role in infrastructure strategies - a trend that will only continue.
Anyone who has some interest in the virtualisation story will be familiar with VMWare; a company that has done more than anyone to push the topic up the corporate agenda. After an IPO last year, the company currently has a ma...
The problem with most security companies is they are very product driven - you name your security problem, and they can sell you a product to fix it. Whilst it's always tempting to think that you can fix a problem by buying something from a catalogue, the reality is often very different. Take the current hot potato of regulatory compliance, e.g. Sarbanes Oxley. If you believe the marketing, you can identify any number of products which will solve your SOX problems for you, which completely ignores the fact that compliance is all about opinions - specifically, convincing the relevant auditor...
Posted in IT Support on 10 January 2007
With the economic upturn driving increased IT investment, how can organisations overcome inflexible outsourcing contracts or internal headcount freezes to guarantee service levels and avoid compromising business integrity?
Co-sourcing is the flexible, cost-effective alternative which enables organisations to flex up or down IT support services in line with business needs.Over the past couple of years, as any IT Manager can attest, costs have been squeezed. The result is that most operations are running at zero spare capacity - support staff illness, for example, can seriously compromise th...
