The data explosion should drive flexible IT policies

I read a fascinating fact last week. Apparently 90% of the world’s data has been created in the last two years alone.

Incredible. But actually not as surprising as it first appears when you think about the massive growth in online and social networking over recent years. As a widely adopted consumer trend, such technologies have inevitably infiltrated the business world; becoming a highly valuable and living, breathing part of many organisations.

But this data overload presents its own challenges. A recent article in Computer Business Review discussed the needs of a company’s marketing department regarding social media access. The marketing department is often one of the biggest supporters of social media in the workplace; at its most basic level it provides an ideal platform to engage with a wider range of customers and contacts. But at the same time marketing can also be the department with the most challenging task, ensuring the company’s reputation and brand are safeguarded and protected.

Flexible policies combined with security technology can go a long way towards helping address these issues. Overarching stop and block policies for social media not only cut off a valuable way of communicating with customers, partners and, of course, colleagues but it also prevents some departments from carrying out their roles to their fullest potential.

Flexibility is the key to social media success for businesses. It supports productivity, maintains staff morale and also helps ensure that where there are instances of malicious or accidental data leakage, safeguards are in place to protect the brand.

Flexibility is often needed on a department by department basis. Clearswift solutions allow for rules to be tailored right down to employee level and it’s even possible to enable time quotas and rules for specific websites and services. This allows individual departments, such as the marketing team, the freedom to allow communication in precisely the way they need while maintaining administrative simplicity.

If businesses are to capitalise fully on the benefits of social media, they must adopt a flexible policy approach that goes hand in hand with investment in staff training and education around acceptable use and information security issues. Too often, policy is only ever referred to when something goes wrong – when it’s too late. Staff across the whole of the business must be fully aware of policy, understand the rules and, most importantly, why those rules exist.

Nick Peart

Bend or break: CIOs must become more flexible

With 91 per cent of businesses leaders saying security concerns are hindering new technology adoption , it’s interesting to note Gartner’s recent call for increased flexibility and adaptability among CIOs struggling to cope with the consumerisation of IT in the workplace.

As CIOs face mass mobility and a proliferation of employee-owned devices in the workplace, Gartner analysts are saying that, rather than stick your head in the sand and hope the challenges go away, it’s time for companies to accept reality and adapt their security policies to deal with it. Gartner vice president Nick Jones has said that CIOs need to ‘explore new ways to provide, fund and manage mobile devices to allow employees more choice and support BYO (‘bring your own’) programmes.’

Faced with the inevitable, Gartner envisages four possible management styles emerging among CIOs attempting to deal with consumerisation: Control-oriented, choice-oriented, innovation-oriented and hand-off. Of these, the ‘innovation oriented’ approach resonates the most with me: According to Gartner, organisations taking this approach empower users to exercise more control over their devices and applications, using strong policy orientation to ensure responsible behaviour. Business doesn’t wash its hands of responsibility for critical issues; it does, however, foster a usage philosophy under which policy dictates technology, not the other way around.

Education and communication play key roles in achieving this mentality. Rather than operating at a remove from the rest of the business, CIOs should engage with and work with staff, proactively educating them about the risks associated with device proliferation – and facilitating the behaviour changes needed to make things work securely. Blocking won’t make the challenges go away, but will ensure you never really find solutions that work for your business.

Policy, not policing will allow those 91 per cent of business leaders to truly innovate and evolve in step with emerging technologies and services.

Nick Peart

Why AccelOps and Industry Trends

My name is Mahesh and this is my first blog post at AccelOps.  I lead the product marketing and product management functions at AccelOps.

Several former colleagues and friends have asked me “Why AccelOps?”  It is a good question and a simple one to answer.  My passion lies in driving promising products and technologies to mainstream acceptance.  I’ve done this at companies such as HP, IBM and start-ups such as Loudcloud, Collation and Kontiki.  It is exciting to see how AccelOps has leveraged technology and innovation to build an obsolescence-proof cloud generation IT management platform.  Furthermore, I am energized by the enthusiasm of our customers and partners.

Instead of just extolling the virtues of our product I would like to highlight some key industry trends that are driving next-gen thinking on how IT monitoring and management products are built.

1. Virtualization and cloud:  Has created a paradigm shift that invalidates several assumptions built into traditional IT monitoring platforms.  Consider this – change windows are compressed from week/s to hours, minutes and seconds due to vMotion, DRS etc. The high velocity of change and the inherent complexity it creates demands new approaches.  At the least, your monitoring platform must be built for high velocity change.  There are other implications of virtualization and cloud on monitoring platforms, which I will highlight in subsequent posts.

2. Data explosion: Traditional IT monitoring products were created in an era when making management data easily available to and consumable by IT monitoring and management products wasn’t a high priority for device and software vendors.  Consequently, traditional IT monitoring products were optimized to solve the data collection problem.  That’s changed now.  Vendor MIBs readily provide valuable data.  And growing infrastructures and virtualization have resulted in an explosion of data – it is now a big data problem.  As a result, the challenge has definitively shifted from collection to connecting the dots across domains and accurately analyzing it in real-time.  Data analysis is the big problem not data collection.

3. Hybrid Clouds:  Both analyst opinion and customer surveys point to enterprises adopting a hybrid strategy going forward – traditional data centers, private clouds and public clouds.  Three key implications for this are Security, SLA and Scale.   Security needs are pervasive as there is no single “perimeter” to guard.  SLAs need to be maintained and managed across environments and the IT management solution should easily scale to accommodate diverse distributed environments.

4. DevOps:  Is an organic movement that is bringing together development and operations teams to improve agility and reduce problems during hand-off from one group to another.  As this movement goes mainstream it will have profound impact on IT Management tools.  IT operations tools will not only provide data and statistics but also enable collaboration across IT teams to achieve superior results.  I am a huge believer in DevOps and a previous blog post on the stages of DevOps evolution can be found here (http://bit.ly/rqAZ2O).

http://www.accelops.com/blog/?p=436

AccelOps Achieves 350% Growth in FY11

SANTA CLARA, CA--(Marketwire - Nov 7, 2011) - AccelOps, Inc., the only provider of end-to-end monitoring solutions built for virtualized cloud-generation data centers, finished a strong fiscal year 2011 growing bookings 350 percent and more than tripling its customer base across multiple sectors including Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), financial services, healthcare and manufacturing.


AccelOps is ramping up to meet fast growing market demand. The company has expanded into a new, larger facility, and has expanded its sales and channel presence in the U.S., Europe and Latin America.
In fiscal year 2011, AccelOps won industry awards based on competitive benchmarks by independent third parties, including Frost and Sullivan's Global New Product Innovation of the Year Award in Enterprise and Service Provider Infrastructure/Cloud Monitoring. AccelOps was also recognized as one of CRN's Top 20 Cloud Software and Apps Vendors of 2011.
"The AccelOps platform is resonating with our customers and that is driving our strong financial performance," said Elie Antoun, president and CEO of AccelOps. "Our customers want the advantages of virtualization and cloud computing and are turning to AccelOps for a management system to get the complexity under control so that they are able to do more with fewer resources."


About AccelOps
AccelOps provides industry's first IT management software that monitors performance, security and configurations -- key interrelated metrics in dynamic virtualized data centers. Based on big-data scale-out architecture, AccelOps automatically analyzes and makes sense of behavior patterns spanning server, storage, network, virtualization and applications to rapidly detect problems. AccelOps works across private clouds, public clouds and traditional data centers to bring proactive and comprehensive service health visibility. For more information visitwww.accelops.com.

Had to Pause Angry Birds to Forward a File to my Boss

Walk around any organization today and you will see people using the newest and coolest PCs, smartphones, and tablets. It’s not just the normal suspects that love the IT gadgets. It’s everyone from the CEO to the summer intern. Even my mom got an iPad and is getting in on the action.  It’s so easy to download emails and send photos to relatives. She takes it with her everywhere—even work. Everyone loves these devices at home and work because they’re easy to use. I suspect employees will be taking their devices on upcoming holiday vacations.

The problem that IT managers have is identifying the line between personal and business computer use. We know it has been blurring for years, but today it’s practically gone. The availability and variety of powerful mobile devices, along with the simplicity of adding apps, and cloud services has increased the distortion between personal and business use more than we ever imagined.

A new study sponsored by Unisys found that 40.7% of the devices used by workers to access business applications are ones they own themselves, including home PCs, smartphones, and tablets such as the iPad. Nearly 10% reported using their personal tablet for work—a device that did not even exist just 15 months ago.

With this in mind, most IT managers and CIOs are well aware that we’ve turned a page and there is no going back.  The real question is, how can organizations cope in a world where the line between a personal and business computer is “cloudy” at best? The answer is identifying security issues and managing enterprise data.

Accellion provides the kind of enterprise solutions that offer the control and flexibility that IT needs, while keeping users happy with easy-to-use file sharing and collaboration applications that can be accessed anytime, from anywhere. And if you have employees like my Mom, who bring their iPad to work, you’ll be glad you invested in securing your sensitive enterprise data.

For the most up-to-date news and information about this Accellion, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Content for this post is excerpted directly from the IDC iView 2011 Consumerization of IT Study: Closing the ―Consumerization Gap, July 2011, sponsored by Unisys. The multimedia content can be viewed athttp://www.unisys.com/iview.

Good fences make good neighbours

It’s not that long since I wrote a blog post bemoaning Australia’s privacy laws as ‘toothless tigers’, pointing to our country’s lack of mandatory disclosure legislation as an ongoing challenge for information security. As such, I welcome Home Affairs Minister Brendan O’Connor’s recent announcement that disclosure and privacy reforms could be fast-tracked - if the department was presented with evidence that enterprise information security was inadequate. For all that, I’ll be keeping the bubbly on ice for the time being...

While I do welcome the prospect of reforms that feel like they’ve been in the discussion stages forever finally seeing the light of day, you have to question the adequacy of a process that calls on those with the most to lose to own up to their failings so you can expedite the process by which they’ll be penalised.

The Australian Law Reform Commission first published its recommendations for data breach notification legislation back in 2008. And with public consultation for the privacy reforms ending on November 3rd, it’s hard not to be cynical and wonder whether we’re looking at another long period of talk with little in the way of action. Meanwhile, SC Magazine reports that security specialists claim the scale of Australia’s data theft problem goes well beyond anything our government or even the local media know about.

Australians were first asked to consider whether privacy was a legal right back in 1937. On that occasion, Chief Justice Latham said that “Any person is entitled to look over the plaintiff’s fence and to see what goes on in the plaintiff’s land. If the plaintiff desires to prevent this, the plaintiff can erect a higher fence.”

All well and good when few homes had even a telephone, but in a digital age, it’s increasingly difficult for individuals to erect higher fences around all the personal data they’re obliged to submit for even the simplest of day-to-day tasks. Financial services verification routinely involves the furnishing of further identifying details, from passports to driving licences, place of work, payroll numbers, even your mother’s maiden name. And while logic says the onus for building adequate fencing around that data lies with the organisation that holds it, the law suggests otherwise – and the absence of any clear mandatory penalty underlines a highly unsatisfactory state of play.

While we’ve been strolling towards a solution, it’s not only technology that’s outstripping us; other countries and regions such as the EU and US have implemented some major changes in recent years, where prompt responses and fines for data breaches are the standard minimum requirement to keep organisations of all kinds on their toes.

Data breaches are, sadly, inevitable. It’s impossible to prevent an employee from accidentally leaving sensitive paperwork on public transport, for example. But there are still some practical solutions. In the first instance, it’s important that legislation is in place; after that, it’s ultimately up to businesses to take responsibility for themselves by taking practical steps to educate employees and create visible security across the organisation. Businesses should apply visible security strategies, informing users of policies, using tools to remind staff of what constitutes a breach and enabling managers to get a better handle on their data and where it is.

Businesses in Australia are playing their part, but more certainly needs to be done when it comes to legislation and education. As of April this year, twice as many breaches were reported compared to 2010. The law needs to be reinforced and reviewed to accelerate post-breach actions so that companies can take responsibility and put solutions in place. The time for talk has passed.

Phil Vasic