Managing infrastructure can be like refereeing a children’s football game. Things change fast, you’re surrounded by clamouring voices expressing different needs, and while you pay attention to the offside rule, another problem springs up outside your line of vision. When you’re dealing with competing needs, it is near impossible to make strategic decisions, or to spot new opportunities. Little wonder, then, that using infrastructure as a service (IaaS) that is managed by someone else seems appealing. IaaS can be an excellent solution, and one that saves the sanity of the IT department in much the way the final whistle saves the patience of the football referee. IaaS has matured at much the s
I was privileged to be in Singapore this week attending an IBM workshop on their excellent B2B Integration portfolio - think EDI, managed file transfer, secure proxy and other unexciting but desperately important components of your IT environment. Safe to say I didn't expect to laugh during the session. Part way through the first day, though, and Don Davis, who heads the channel for IBM in this area, quoted Tom McLaughlin, the SVP and director of Technology Management Services at Wells Fargo Bank in the US. Tom sees FTP servers as the cockroaches of the IT landscape because, "it hides in the dark corners of the organisation" and they are "hard to kill". How funny, but how true. Most organisa
Whether you’re big or small, international or local, selling widgets or selling ideas, you’re probably in the most exciting - and terrifying - time of your business life. Competition is coming from new directions, and emerging so fast you barely have time to blink. If there’s one thing you need, it is focus. So, should you be spending time thinking about the mechanical side of IT? Yes and no. We’re not going to tell you there’s a simple answer here, but then again, if leading a business was easy, wouldn’t everyone be doing it? There are, of course, a lot of considerations. Technology giant HPE’s Technology.nxt report asserts that ‘Rates of change in technology and business are outstripping o
