Cloud Computing Isn't Necessarily For Everyone

from the down-to-earth dept

For quite some time, there's been a lot of buzz over cloud computing -- with people arguing over what the "cloud" is exactly and how it actually changes anything. Simple online file storage is even discussed as some kind of revolution -- and Google is getting some undue publicity for Google Docs now that users can upload any kind of file to it (up to 1GB, that is). Obviously, there is plenty of potential behind cloud computing, but it may be hard to live up to the hype.

So it's interesting to see a CTO (who should have every reason to promote cloud services) say that some applications won't go to the cloud. Apparently, the IT infrastructure supporting large manufacturing plants will "never" move to the cloud. Additionally, the regulatory headaches in the financial industry will probably prevent some financial applications from running on external data centers, too. But it looks like any other application that can have a web interface is fair game for cloud computing.

Are there any other applications that you wouldn't want to put in the cloud? Or will all but the most critical (or maintenance heavy) applications eventually be cloud-based?

Are IT Failures Costing $6.2 Trillion Per Year?

from the um,-no dept

I'm always quite skeptical about huge numbers that come out of studies, such as the "losses" claimed by the entertainment industry due to piracy. So I was pretty skeptical of a story (found via Slashdot) claiming that IT failures cost $6.2 trillion per year worldwide. If true, that would be a staggering figure. I have no doubt that IT "failures" are costly, but that number seems extreme. Just glancing over the report itself, it's definitely not based on any kind of stringent methodology, and seems to count any IT project failure as a total loss, and then adds in "indirect costs" which sound suspiciously like "ripple effects" which, as we've demonstrated before are actually ways to double- or triple-count the same dollars over and over again. It seems that many others see huge problems with the original report as well, even to the point of suggesting that its orders of magnitude off.

While the debate rages on over how to properly count the "cost" of such failures, I'm beginning to wonder how useful such a number is. Isn't a more useful discussion on how to prevent or minimize the impact of any such failures? The aggregate number may look good in being able to see some big number, but aggregate numbers can hide important details inside. For example, back in the early (and even late) 90s there were lots of reports about how computerizing your business was not shown to have added any productivity. A poor conclusion from this was that computering your business was not a smart idea. But the problem was that this was aggregate data. It failed to realize that many, many businesses had boosted productivity through the use of computers, and many of the large failures that wiped out the aggregate "gains" were from a few big businesses that did a really poor implementation. It didn't mean that computerizing was necessarily a bad idea, but that some of the biggest early players just did a bad job of it.

So, if we're going to be discussing IT failures, why not step away from that aggregate info and try to focus in on ways to actually minimize the impact of whatever IT failures might occur?

Filed Under: costs, failures, it

IT Job Satisfaction Hits 10-Year Low

from the survey-says dept

The Corporate Executive Board released the results of its job satisfaction survey for 2009 which included about 10,000 responses from IT workers. According to 2007 figures, 12% of surveyed IT workers said they were "highly engaged" and willing to put in extra effort for their jobs -- a number that has dropped to about 4% in mid-2009. According to the CEB, this is the lowest level since it started doing the survey a decade ago. The survey's conclusion has made it into some headlines, where the stories predict that when the economy recovers, these unsatisfied IT workers will begin to change careers -- or at least change their employers.

There are lots of possible explanations for this drop in IT job satisfaction, and it seems that many anecdotal stories point to the lack of expected rewards for putting in extra hours. A mid-2009 survey reflects the mood of employees who have seen co-workers retrenched and employees who see their workloads increasing but no sight of increased wages in the near future. Add to that, plenty of IT workers complain about being treated poorly and taken for granted. However, declining job satisfaction has been on the radar for years -- so these survey results should not be an enormous surprise. The questions to be answered should be how to tell if this is really a problem, and if so, what are the possible solutions.

On the horizon, there are forecasts of increased IT hiring in 2010 which may help relieve some of the stresses that the recession has brought upon IT industry workers. But as the economy recovers, should IT workers aim to work for themselves as contract freelancers to increase their job satisfaction? (You can't complain about the boss if you're self-employed.) Will job satisfaction simply bounce back in proportion to the health of the economy? Will large corporations be forced to change their management policies in order to retain employees? Will unions for IT workers form? If you can read the tea leaves, let us know what you think in the comments.

IT Security Is Getting Better... And More Complicated

from the better-is-hard dept

Here's my outlook for 2010. First, in general, security will get much better -- but the challenges for IT managers will also get much more complicated.

The year ended as Barack Obama finally selected his own cyber-security czar -- but that's just part of the federal government's plan to modernize its role in the security of the internet. In October, the Department of Homeland Security opened the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center, promising "a 24-hour, DHS-led coordinated watch and warning center that will improve national efforts to address threats and incidents affecting the nation's critical information technology and cyber infrastructure." And meanwhile, the Pentagon has even established a new Cyber Command.

But the federal government has been also leading the push to protect private information. Back in 2006, the Office of Management and Budget mandated that government agencies encrypt all the data on that's stored on mobile devices. And more than half the states in the country have beefed up federal privacy laws with their own new state privacy regulations... But ironically, one of the biggest factors in improving security may have been: dramatic news stories about weak security. In 2007, there were 800,000 social security numbers that were stolen when a 22-year-old intern lost a back-up tape he'd stored in the back of his car -- and a few weeks later, data was also stolen for National Guard soldiers in Idaho. Later that year, the security administrator at the Oregon State Treasury joked to me that some organizations were implementing stronger security protocols simply because "People like to stay off of the front page!"

I've wondered if there might be fewer breaches at datacenters in 2010 as an indirect result of the financial bail-outs in 2008. Public anger is high, and it's being directed at nearly every institution in the financial industry. So it's the worst possible time to have to explain to customers that your data's been breached -- and I predict managers will take data security much more seriously. And if not for their customers, then for potential business partners -- since the obvious result of the financial crisis has been mergers and acquisitions.

I predict IT managers will face a more complicated environment -- partly because of the growing adoption of mobile devices. The popularity of the iPhone has spawned high-powered competitors like the Android, and more and more end users are going to have them. But if the future is mobile devices, that means more users trying to connect to the corporate network with unpatched and potentially virus-infected personal data accessories. If you don't have a good network access protocol, you'll be facing a whole new class of threats -- and users also need to be educated on the dangers of using their new mobile devices to transport sensitive work data out of the office. The growth in mobile devices may also lead to a great emphasis on encryption -- to protect data from the careless habits of end users. But IT managers also need to focus on network access control, to deal with threats that arise when those same users try to re-connect!

Five Things To Watch For In 2010

from the open-the-pod-bay-doors,-HAL dept

Heading into 2010, there are five things to watch which will dominate the field of technology. There are some significant issues which have developed in the last few years, and 2010 will see these come to a head, if not a resolution.

The Cloud
As we head into 2010, the cloud will continue to dominate the scene of technology. This will be hastened by the development of mobile devices. Its real traction will depend on the accessibility of wireless and broadband services. At the end of 2009, urbanites are enjoying the availability of low cost broadband services, while rural area still struggle with getting access to affordable high speed internet. Secondly, the cost and terms of data plans hold back the development of additional technologies and services.

Net Neutrality
Internet providers continue to test models of making money, and 2010 will see the rise of not-so-good models, and government stepping in and drawing some clear lines of authority over service providers and how services are provided.

Access to Broadband
As various European countries toy with plans to combat piracy by using 3 strikes type laws, the United States will look towards drawing bright lines of whether access to the internet is a luxury or necessity. Falling with the latter, the US will need to make significant investment in infrastructure to ensure rural areas get access to reliable low cost internet.

Privacy
A perennial issue, privacy will continue to top issues of 2010. As users become more aware of how their information is used and shared and the value of their information, they'll become increasingly fickle about companies which abuse their good will.

E-books
2009 saw the rise of the e-book, while 2010 will see that field broaden initially with the cream rising to the top. The market will face many of the issues which music has been facing of the years, ownership, distribution, resale rights and DRM. We will see some companies moving to more proprietary formats and locked down systems, forcing users through their channels to access or add data to their readers. However, those companies which embrace open accessible formats will gain broader acceptance by users, though may fall afoul of publishers. The seeds of these issues have been sewn in 2009 and 2010 will see them blossom.

2010 promises to be an exciting (and interesting) year in technology. We will see whether grass roots efforts can beat out the strength and money of the telecom companies, and whether privacy, openness and accessibility really are important to users.

Facebook's Dyno -- Real-World Benchmarking For Web Apps

from the measurements-matter dept

As forward-thinking tech companies sometimes do, Facebook VP of Technical Operations Jonathan Heiliger has opened up a bit and shared some of the inner workings of Facebook's data center. To handle around 350 million users and the 25 terabytes of data per day that's generated by them, Facebook has over 30,000 servers and is adding about 10,000 more servers every 18 months. Given this scale, monitoring data center performance is a critical operation for the social networking giant, and it's developed its own benchmarking software it calls 'Dyno' (after the Dynamometer that performance car tuners use) to help optimize its applications and hardware output. Heiliger's team at Facebook has written up a brief whitepaper on their server monitoring accomplishments, concluding that other data centers would also be wise to have Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in mind before deploying new software or server infrastructure. That's not exactly a world-changing revelation, but publicizing this peek into Facebook's operations serves to improve the company's overall reputation and might provide signals to hardware vendors about where real-world improvements actually appear.

The downside to this exposure is when you operate a massive data center, the responsibility to reduce waste appears to grow with the number of servers you use. Environmental concerns are raised when inefficient operations are centralized and possibly controlled by a single organization. So Facebook's data centers are subject to extra scrutiny for its programming efficiency, especially when some programmers claim that 75% of Facebook's servers could be eliminated by switching from PHP to C++ to generate its webpages. Presumably, if such huge savings were really practical, there would be more demand for more efficient programming tools and programmers to implement them. Will assembly language programmers come back into fashion, or should all PHP coders really start brushing up on their C++?

The Next Big Innovation Will Start Out Looking Like A Toy

from the and-will-be-dismissed-as-such dept

One of the key points to understand in Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma is the idea that the "new thing" that hits the market often gets dismissed early on by the legacy players as not being good enough. Chris Dixon has taken that concept to a different level in predicting that the "next big thing will start out looking like a toy." It's a good way of thinking about it, because it really frames the level of dismissiveness that many have towards disruptive innovation. It's not just that they think it's "not good enough," but that it's so pitiful that it's only real purpose is to be a toy. But former "toys" can turn out to be much more over time. This isn't to say -- of course -- that all things dismissed as "toys" will actually become disruptive innovation (that would be a logic failure), but it does mean you shouldn't so quickly assume that every "toy" will never amount to anything else. It helps to look at who's doing the dismissing and what motives they might have -- while also looking at the adoption curves and usage of the "toy" in question.

Filed Under: innovation, innovator's dilemma, toys

Physical Security For Data Centers

from the let's-get-physical dept

The physical security of the your Data Centre often appears to be a simple and obvious exercise in management. When evaluating the requirements and conducting the analysis, physical security appears deceptively straightforward compared to the technology and plant issues. Often we find an older male, typically ex-military, who has spent time in the security industry -- maybe even with some time in an IT Team -- and learned some understanding of the technology, and then put in control of physical security.

Their experience equips them to prepare, layout and consult on plans for the cameras, electronic locks, security rosters and patrol rotas, ram defenses, crowd-charge barriers and customer identity issues. They can setup lines of command and control where each element of the security team understands their roles and responsibilities, and the escalations, and the documentation of all of these procedures. And the ongoing auditing of all these processes.

However, technology professionals are mostly not the type of people who take directions well. Their free wheeling, lateral thinking capabilities means that they are always looking for ways around the system. Implementation of physical security often assumes that approved users will behave is the correct manner and observe the rules and guidelines that have been laid out for them.

While it is possible to demand that IT workers observe the rules and place employment restrictions to enforce them, this is usually poor practice. Your IT people are often creative and highly self-motivated and this can easily create resentment, workflow restrictions and poor productivity.

The real answer is to take the time to understand the workflow of your operational staff and find ways to integrate the security process into that workflow. The typical "father knows best" view of the physical security officer needs to be overridden and replaced with an integrated view of physical security that includes the customer needs.

For example, the process of delivering new equipment to your Data Centre's dock, unpacking and movement onto the Data Centre floor for installation should be seamless and smooth. Security procedures should be integrated into the accounting and audit processes, not be a separate procedure by different staff.

Failing to get such fundamentals in place will cause tension between the Data Centre customers and the Data Centre operation that always leads to management problems that need addressing on an ongoing basis.

Who Says Data Centers Aren't Cool?

from the a-little-visual-porn dept

Ah data centers. They may seem like a rather boring concept, but Data Center Knowledge recently put together a rather long list of some of the coolest data center video tours including Google's infamous data center: As well as a "James Bond" data center buried 100 feet beneath Stockholm in a former military bunker, with backup power from submarine engines and which has waterfalls and a glass-enclosed conference room that appears to "float" above the colo floor. I have to admit, suddenly data centers seem a lot cooler. Anyway, those are just the top two. The Data Center Knowledge link has a bunch more.

Filed Under: data centers

A Look At The Data Center That Crunched Avatar

from the behind-the-scenes dept

You don't often get to see the details of a massive data center. The companies that run them tend to keep things pretty quiet, as they view the datacenter as a competitive advantage. Thus, what happens in Google's datacenters remains mostly a mystery. And yet, it seems that the folks at Weta Digital, famous for providing the computing horsepower behind major Hollywood blockbusters like Lord of the Rings and now Avatar are apparently willing to open up a bit and provide some details about its setup. What struck me as interesting wasn't so much the hardware specifics, but how they had to switch from the industry standard cooling system of raised floors and air-cooling, because the machines were too close together to get the necessary bandwidth. So, instead, they went with water-cooled racks. Water-cooled data centers have been increasingly common over the past few years (and were typical with many old mainframes), but they're still a technology that not all data center operators are comfortable with, and which many still think create more problems than they solve. So it's always interesting to see another one in action.

At the same time, as neat as it is to read about Weta Digital's massive computing power (which apparently represents one of the 200 largest "super computers") in the world, I'm still left wondering if the trend -- even for amazing movie effects -- isn't moving away from such massive data centers. We're seeing more and more what can be done on the cheap. And, no, it doesn't come close to matching the stunning effects found in the blockbuster movies that Weta works on, but it does have all the symptoms of a classic innovator's dilemma scenario, where the new stuff isn't "as good" as the old stuff, but is improving at a faster rate, and quickly reaching a point where it's "good enough" at significantly lower price points.

Given the regular discussions around here concerning movie budgets, where do people think the technology is headed for movie special effects? Will it always be run in giant datacenters, or is there a place for making high quality (even blockbuster-type) films on cheaper hardware?

Filed Under: avatar, data centers, movies, special effects
Companies: weta digital