Recessions are about as appealing as a root canal; but they do force us to
think differently. Now that the recession is official, it's an ideal time to
explore how virtualization and cloud computing can help "recession-proof" IT
by transforming yesterday’s costly and rigid computing model to one that
puts costs under control and sets applications free.
The National Bureau of Economic Research recently declared that the U.S. has
been in a recession since December 2007. The news would be darkly amusing if
it weren’t so utterly painful. But now that the recession is official, this
seemed to be the ideal time to explore how virtualization and cloud computing
can help recession-proof IT. Consider the following four tips:
1. Virtualize infrastructure to increase capacity utilization.
Traditional server infrastructure tightly couples applications to hardware,
wasting compu... (more)
While SOA has traditionally had something of a data obsession. While the
focus has been on service-enablement of structured and transactional data and
processes, documents and document-centric processes have been conspicuously
absent from the SOA agenda. With structured data in order, organizations are
now beginning to take a closer look at the role of unstructured assets as
part of SOA.
The domains of documents and data have long been two worlds divided. Data is
stored in relational databases, mainframe systems, and data warehouses.
Documents are kept in content management syst... (more)
2009 is shaping up to be an "interesting" year.
What makes 2009 interesting - rather than good, bad or indifferent - is the
daily conflict between hope and despair for those on the good side of a bad
trend. Like bankruptcy attorneys or pawnbrokers, some find themselves buoyed
by a down economy, becoming only more relevant when the pressure is on to
conserve.
In the world of IT, perhaps the best examples of counter-recessionary trends
are virtualization and its close cousin, cloud computing - both trends with
direct cost benefits. When the economy contracts, the pendulum swings fr... (more)
Enterprise IT organizations are in the midst of deep and lasting change.
IT used to be your cable company: It held the local monopoly for IT services.
The wait you experienced was a frustrating, but necessary part of your
relationship with enterprise IT. You had no choice.
But with the rise of public cloud services like Amazon EC2, business lines
now have a choice.
Why wait months when minutes will do?
That question will ultimately cause application owners to vote with their
feet, as demand follows the path of least resistance to the public cloud.
That is, unless IT leaders can t... (more)
Let's face it - 2008 was a real slog. Even the most wide-eyed optimist would
agree that this was one year whose end was long overdue. Of course, ringing
in the New Year doesn't somehow wash away what has become a fairly deep
recession, but it does symbolize the fresh start that I think we're all
looking for right about now.
Doom and gloom may be the currency of trade these days, but I would argue
that there are important lessons to be learned from this and any recession.
Nobody enjoys a down economy, but it may be comforting to remember that
recession is a natural part of the bu... (more)
Jake Sorofman is chief marketing officer of rPath, an innovator in system automation software for physical, virtual and cloud environments. Contact Jake at jsorofman@rpath.com.
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