What’s Keeping the Government Up at Night?

Posted on February 15, 2012 by Sean McDermott

Recently at a local event, AFCEA DC took a poll and asked one questions, “Which area of emerging tech below will be more important to your Department, Command, Service, or Agency?”  Click here for the results.  While not scientific, there is some interesting information to be gleaned.  This survey included 2,845 votes.

Of the Top 10 of ideas voted here’s how they ranked (based on number of Top 10 positions):

  • Mobile (4)
  • Cloud (3)
  • CyberSecurity (2)
  • Collaboration (1)

Slicing it another way, looking at each of the Top 10 from a function area yields interesting results:

  • Security related (5)
  • Management (3)
  • Data Integration (2)

Like any poll, data is open to interpretation.  However, mobile is clearly on the minds of Government executives, and how to secure and manage them.  I believe similarly that Government executives are intrigued by the promise of Cloud, but still are wresting with security, management, and data integrity questions.  Clearly industry is not doing enough to answer these questions, as this data is very similar to comments I heard from the Government Information Technology Executive Counsel (GITEC) Summit in 2010.  Expect to see collaboration move up in the polls over the next 12-24 months as more companies and Government agencies get more “social.”

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“In” with Cloud Management for 2012

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Mafa Amr

With the start of a new year came a plethora of stories written about what the hottest trends will be for 2012.   I think we can all agree that Cloud is most definitely “in” for 2012 and, in fact – as hot as ever.  But what aspects of the Cloud are we going to hear the most about?

I have read several articles on the subject, and appearing near the top of many of the lists is the “hybrid cloud.”  I’m sure that there will be many enterprise shifts to hybrid clouds, but what we continue to hear from companies is that they still need help determining the best direction for them based on their particular requirements, and that the biggest driver continues to be ROI.  CIOs are no longer just focusing on making sure the network is up running or just managing servers and desktops.  Focused also on driving revenue, CIOs are wearing many hats and are very involved with both the internal and external business.  In general, IT organizations have been tainted by taking too long to roll out services that cost too much, so now they must figure out alternatives and adapt to the increasing demand.  This is where Cloud comes in.  So, how do they get to the Cloud and use the best tools to manage the Cloud?

The best place to start is by making sure that the services needed are clearly defined.  That seems like a very simple concept, but identifying and qualifying the types of services needed is pivotal in the move to Cloud.  A service catalog is an excellent tool for IT organizations to use and measure objectives, but that service definition must be the starting point.  Once the services are defined, you can then catalog them and begin defining the processes.

Cloud Management will be “in” for 2012 and “out” will be the management of the past, that of managing servers, routers, etc.  Moving forward will focus on management of the services in the Cloud and not the hardware on-site.  We all want to keep up with the times, but we also need to be wise in moving to the Cloud.  Don’t skip the upfront planning – define both services and processes that are important to your specific needs.

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IT Process Automation’s Impact on Organizations Operational Environment

Posted on January 27, 2012 by jcarrion

When we think about IT Process automation it’s important to consider the impact it can have on an organizations operational environment.  We see the same basic issues in many companies.  The market is still in the early stages of IT Process automation (aka, Run Book Automation, Orchestration) adoption, but we are seeing trends:

  • Patching (server or cluster)
  • Alarm Remediation
  • Server Decommissioning
  • Server Positioning

Patching (server or cluster) is one of the most common automations that we implement process automation.  We find that most customers struggle with the labor required to patch, as well as the maintenance windows for patching.  In addition, recording patching updates and keeping records for compliance associated with patch, particularly for audits and security is very time consuming.   A misunderstood fact is that one does not have to automate the entire patching process right out of the gate.  We have worked with many customers to automate the entire patching process, but have also implemented partial solutions to be used as building blocks, allowing for quicker ROI and immediate wins for many customers.

Alarm remediation, another popular focus, allows us to respond to nuisance alarms before alarms are reported to the NOC.  Many alarms that come into the NOC are either transients or Tier One alarms that can be cleared by running simple scripts.  The automation tool can perform diagnostics and triage of alarms, open and document trouble tickets, execute external scripts, and notify end-users of the services affected.

Server decommissioning, or reclamation of assets, is a significant problem for IT shops including both physical and virtual assets.  This is a fairly quick automation to implement.   The cost of physical assets that are left in operation in the data center is simple to calculate and includes such things as the cost of power, rack space, stranded hardware, hardware maintenance, and software licensing.  With virtual assets capacity management and performance are also key costs that need to be accounted for.

Server provisioning is the ability to automate the provisioning of physical or virtual machines and is an area where much can be gained in time savings, as well as operational performance.  Though gains can be significant, this automation tends to take longer to implement, predominately due to the multiple organizational groups who need to be involved in provisioning of an asset.  Similar to patching, many organizations begin by automating a piece of the provisioning process that is tightly definable and grow the automated process from a very measurable and impactful starting point.

Whether it be patching, alarm remediation, server decommissioning or server provisioning, the impacts of IT Process Automation are significant.  Automating IT processes ensures consistency, reduces nuisance alarms in the enterprise, and allows far greater compliance and more accurate asset management.  Similar to patching, many organizations begin by automating a piece of the provisioning process that is tightly definable and grow the automated process from a very measurable and impactful starting point.

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Cloud for the Non-Techie

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Sean McDermott

While I’m pretty sure that my family has no idea what I or Windward do, I’m 100% sure that they have no idea what Cloud Computing is.  Occasionally they see what I’m reading or overhear a phone conversation and give me that “deer in the headlights” stare. Once I tried to explain it to my 13 year old.  After a few minutes I asked her if she understood  what I was saying and she responded, “I was, but then you got all echo-y and far away.”  Ah, the wit of a teenager.

The other day I was flying AirTran and picked up their in-flight magazine “Go”.  Low and behold, was an article by Alex Williamson called, “Clearing up the Clouds.”  Problem solved, a lay-mans description of Cloud Computing.

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Microsoft Beefs Up Private Cloud with System Center 2012

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Sean McDermott

As reported by Wired today, Microsoft Pitches Private Cloud to IT with System Center 2012.

Microsoft’s System Center 2012 is available today as a Release Candidate, the last milestone before a final release. Along with Hyper-V and Windows Server, the upgraded System Center forms the key building blocks for Microsoft’s private cloud strategy, providing management tools for desktops, mobile devices, both physical and virtual servers, and a mix of resources across private data centers and public clouds such as Windows Azure.

This is a very interesting product suite now that Microsoft is officially looking at Systems Center for Private Cloud management.  System Center 2012 is the first time Microsoft is releasing a fully integrated suite of tools for the provisioning, management, and automation of private clouds.  Clearly Microsoft sees the opportunity and is making investments along the lines of BMC, HP, CA, and IBM and their private cloud management solutions.  While Microsoft is focused on Microsoft specific products, such as HyperV, Microsoft desktops and servers, and enterprise applications (Exchange, Sharepoint, etc.), Windows Mobile (or ActiveSync), and Azure, expansion to other areas may be around the corner — perhaps driven by their customer base.

If Microsoft officially starts supporting VMware, Vblock, NetApp, Unix systems, Zen, and other technologies, their expansion outside of the traditional Microsoft datacenter starts to get very interesting indeed.

All this is good for enterprises.  Competition drives innovation, as long as all the vendors execute on their strategies.

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Avoiding the Traffic Jam: Embracing Cloud with Organizational Change

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Michele Darwin

Cloud computing was everywhere in 2011 as companies continued to seek ways to reduce IT costs while improving productivity. For many, it was seen as the hottest trend of last year, and has been embraced by companies of all shapes and sizes, including the federal government. But embracing or accepting cloud computing will not be without challenges and one of the biggest challenges I expect to encounter revolves around organizational change. Let’s face it—change challenges the best of us. Adding to this challenge is the fact that organizations are expected to manage new technology with processes and systems that already exist.

I just spent the holiday vacation with kids home from college and with them came their cars. What’s the challenge with that, you ask? I’ll give you one: parking. This one little change to our daily routine had us spending a lot of time moving cars around to get out the one we wanted to drive, searching for keys to move a car we did not need at the time. Adding to the challenge was the fact that the driveways in our neighborhood are in the back of the house; the neighbors’ cars made the simple task of getting out of the driveway feel a bit like a traffic jam.

We were forced to look at the needs of everyone and develop a plan to make the entire process more efficient with the current infrastructure (the driveway/garage space) we had available. What does my parking dilemma have to do with forward thinking IT leaders? It means that IT leaders will need to align behaviors, culture, organization and technology in order to meet business missions and goals, much like I had to align my kids’ parking needs with my own existing parking structure. Better decision-making across the business will drive better choices and produce better outcomes. If you’re interested in optimizing costs for delivering and supporting IT, then all aspects of the business need to be evaluated for cost-saving opportunities, from consolidating infrastructure to streamlining processes, to automating key functions and managing vendors.

Smart companies aren’t going to wait to embrace the concept of service-centric IT. Instead, they are going to push forward to align technology with their businesses using a strategy that clearly defines business needs and aligns processes, organizations, and technology. The end result will be measurable improvements across the enterprise.

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Don’t Miss Your Exit – Embrace the Change

Posted on November 20, 2011 by Alan Dudash

We have all been there – your organizational change project has finally gained traction, the “nay-sayers” have quieted and the organization is beginning to actually use the new workflows for the major business processes.  There are rumors of accolades and awards and you are actually thinking that you may be able to take some well-deserved time off – maybe even really go somewhere.  Visions of palm trees and grass skirts fill your mind as you explore the possibilities.  That is, until the phone rings.

On the other end is a user that is complaining of tasks that are not included in the workflow and how these missing tasks are significantly impacting the processing of work through the organization using your workflow.  How can this be?  The workflows were designed with care and you made sure that EVERYONE was in agreement that the processes addressed all the needs of the business.  But before you start poring over old status reports and e-mail to verify that you had not missed anything, let me remind you of the one ultimate business truth…

Business changes – constantly.

The best-designed processes will fall out of synch with business – be it because of new product offerings, new technologies or new methods of performing the work.  Soon after a new workflow is implemented, changes within the organization will necessitate changes to the business process workflow.  This is the reason that I stress the importance of implementing process change using a workflow management system (see Operational Maturity – One step at a time).  To many executives, process documentation is considered “shelf-ware” that provides little to no value to the organization.  But by instantiating the business process into a workflow management system, the organization is forced to use the process.  And once the process is actually being used, the process documentation becomes a useful reference for the overall process flow.  Change is inevitable and you should always develop a change process as part of any organizational change project.  This change process includes not only the identification and qualification of the change, but also includes the oversight and governance bodies that are needed to balance the need for change against the disruption of the business.

But as anyone who has had any exposure to ITIL or other process frameworks has noticed, Change alone does not meet the business need for process change – it is ALWAYS bundled or “joined at the hip” with Release.  Change and Release share the responsibility for process change – Change identifies the NEED and JUSTIFICATION for a change, as well as the identification of the STAKEHOLDERS and PRIORITY of the change within the business, while Release manages the PACKAGING of the change, the IMPACT of the change on the overall business and the COORDINATION of the change implementation into the production environment.

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Cloud and Higher Level Education

Posted on November 17, 2011 by Michele Darwin

You hear so much these days about the rising cost of college – but how much does an education really cost the average undergrad (or their parent)?  Like many questions, the answer is “it depends” and requires an understanding of the real value – or relative worth – of a college education.   We must think the same way when we ponder about Cloud.  What is the real value of Cloud Computing?   Is the real value the ability to operate IT with fewer dollars or doing more with less?  Is the real value of higher education the ability to make more money in the future?  Or, is the true value of both the increased ability to be innovative thinkers and change the future?

Cloud certainly has the potential to reduce costs while delivering IT services more efficiently.  But Cloud has an even more promising future to promote innovation.  Ideas are the products of innovative thinkers and in order to meet the ever changing demands of the business IT infrastructure, IT leaders need to be open to defining new strategies, leveraging existing systems and technologies, as well as take time to fully understand how the key capabilities function within their emerging Cloud Computing strategy.  These leaders are able to do this with because their IT environments become more agile as the traditional inefficient and costly infrastructure is replaced with the strategic role and competitive advantage of Cloud Computing.

Like high school students visiting colleges and universities around the country, companies need to find the best fit for their Cloud strategy and Cloud Management.  IT leaders must develop and drive a vision that fosters the transformation to Service-Centric IT to help design, build and operate highly efficient IT services in the Cloud and ensure that these services are tightly aligned with the business objectives.  This alignment is where the real value lies and will allow your company to capitalize on the many benefits of Cloud.  Vision, and strategy are investments in the future that will certainly pay off with the proper leadership and the realization that when we collectively respond to new challenges with a desire to realize the true benefits it is well worth the investment.

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Clouds Bumping Up Against the Mountains

Posted on October 25, 2011 by Sean McDermott

InformationWeek Government posted a very interesting (albeit brief) article in last week titled How to Build a Government Cloud.

So infrastructure services on Apps.gov–virtual machines, storage, Web hosting–aren’t exactly the on-demand, subscription-style services that come to mind when we think of the cloud. Is that good or bad? Let’s just say it’s different. While the ability to bid on “micro spot instances” on Amazon may appeal to startups, that may not be a viable approach for the feds.

This is a great of example where technology must match up with the business.  The Government has a very different business model than that of private industry and the feds are required to go through more hoops to ensure that public funds are spent wisely. Some may say this bureaucracy is the very issue with Government efficiency, but that’s another debate.  The real story here is that technology can change an IT landscape, but in different ways for different landscapes — such as Government and private industry markets.  Don’t be surprised when we start seeing similar roadblocks in the private sector, especially highly regulated markets like financial services, healthcare, etc.

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IT Orchestration – A Real World Tree House? (Part 2)

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Phil M

… continued …

What makes an orchestration safe, flexible, and adaptable?  Increasing safety, what IT formally calls “utility,” often requires us to leverage the basic features of products or processes and to forego the more advanced features.  Why? Because the basic features are more mature and are less likely to change, thus breaking our orchestration.  Basic features are also more likely to be useful in more than one orchestrated workflow.  If an advanced feature is a critical enabler, then many times we can recreate it using the orchestration tool.  Or perhaps we build the workflow to use the advanced feature and with the understanding that we may have to change it sooner rather than later.  Flexibility and adaptability are facilitated by not only considering the current state of the environment, but also analyzing the environment for likely future configurations.  This projected future state is valuable knowledge when building resilient orchestrations – trees generally grow up toward the sun, and systems generally mature to support commonly-accepted IT principles or practices.

One of the most common questions we at Windward hear from prospective customers is, “Where do we start with orchestration?”  In most instances the best answer is to start with the highest value paths.  Begin with one basic orchestration that will either save time for workers, increase accuracy of some function, or will shorten fulfillment time for some common request.  If we want to get fancy, we can also consider whether a potential orchestration can be used in multiple workflows, however we don’t have to think that deep the first time around.  This approach requires us to understand how our systems are utilized to deliver services to our customers.  Yes, analysis will be involved; we mustn’t assume that a utilitarian construct requires no forethought.  Once we understand the problem we want to solve, then we move on to our familiar approach of establishing a baseline, organizing stakeholder inputs, formalizing requirements, designing the solution, etc.  Build one path/orchestration at a time.  Design our paths with re-use in mind.  In general, construct re-usable paths earlier and special-purpose paths later.

The benefits to the organization of this approach?  By beginning with low-hanging fruit, we enable the IT department to demonstrate value to its customers quickly while gaining time to grow internal competency with the orchestration tool.  We also learn how orchestration projects differ in execution from other types of IT projects – and they are a little different.  And we benefit by allowing the orchestration products to grow in maturity, so that we can build next week’s path using a table saw instead of a hand saw.

Once a few orchestrations are in place, it’s very rewarding to stop and just observe what we’ve built.  See the elegance in the utilitarian solutions, watch the little lights flicker, and wonder what we might do next with our big magic boxes.

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