Links List 01.29.10

January 29th, 2010 by Valerie Barber

So, your CEO/CIO wants to know why you’re not in the cloud. If you are being careful before jumping on the bandwagon, here are five points you may need to draw upon to dampen the hype surrounding the cloud:

1. Not everyone’s in the cloud (yet). Interest is high and there is great momentum, but the numbers show that it’s still in the early adopter stage.
2. Learn first, then deploy. Understand the risks and capabilities.
3. Learn by putting pilot projects in the cloud, offloading some jobs and letting our IT staff get some experience
4. Concerns, including security, reliability and lock-ins
5. You’re already there via SasS

A recent survey shows that 80% of network and security operations professionals feel they are not adequately monitoring network segments, application performance or IT service delivery. Despite heavy investment in monitoring tools, the survey indicates challenges in establishing and optimizing network traffic access, translating into operational risks that will only grow over time. Some of the findings:

• 43% indicated a shortage/inability to share span ports or taps for monitoring tools
• 66% lack sufficient monitoring tools and tools budgets
• 75% reported monitoring tools are not optimally deployed
• 47% reported monitoring tools were underutilized
• 25% reported tools were overloaded and dropping packets

“Nearly a quarter of our research group (24%) reported they either lack the staff to keep up with monitoring tasks or the training within existing staff to keep up with administration or interpretation. This situation results from both current and ongoing budgetary pressures as well as a trend (identified by 62%) of staff moving toward more generalist roles, reducing the availability of technical specialists.”

EMA report “Monitoring Optimization 2010”

Nearly half of the U.S. CIOs surveyed by Gartner expect the recession to continue well into 2010. 23% believe business budgets will stabilize and 26% see some recovery and growth. Just 4% predict revenue growth in 2010 above the levels of 2008.

To counter the predicted decrease in the number of skilled IT workers, Gartner is advising CIOs to recruit from outside the IT team, with more CIOs coming from “the business” and with more “users” taking control of their own delivery infrastructure. Some new roles that Gartner predicts will soon fall under the IT umbrella:

• Litigation support managers who will execute discovery exercises for litigators and mediate between legal and IT departments
• Digital archivists who have expertise to access, appraise and preserve records
• Business information managers who have a combined expertise in business and information management

“Over the next two years, business demand for IT-driven growth and innovation will outstrip the supply of qualified people to fulfill job roles and, as a result, traditional IT tasks are moving outside the IT department.”

Debra Logan, Gartner

A quick factoid: people still use short, simple passwords, almost guaranteeing the success of brute force password attacks. Passwords that were compromised in two breaches (Hotmail and Rock You) were analyzed, revealing that in both cases, “123456” was the most common password along with other common arrangements like “qwerty”.

Thank goodness the Winter Olympics will provide a much needed distraction for NBC at 10PM. Even so, I think this article sums up some solid management lessons that can be drawn from the recent drama surrounding the Tonight Show:

Career progression is crucial to retaining top talent. Employees need opportunities to advance – if not here, then there.

1. Succession planning is important. Figure out who is likely to retire and have someone in mind to train as their replacement.
2. If you’re going to fire someone, just do it already. There’s always the potential that a disgruntled ex-employee will wreak havoc.
3. Don’t trash your employee to others – handle disputes in private.
4. Don’t send mixed messages – show confidence in the new hire by moving the replaced person out of the way.

While we’re on this, here’s an article from 1994 detailing the history of Leno v. Letterman and how Jay Leno became the host of The Tonight Show.

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