System iNetwork

January 29, 2008

Trending the "S" Words: 2008 May Be Better Than You Fear

Because it's January and everyone’s still in the "Best of '07/What’s Hot in '08" mode, I thought I'd take a look at some trends in the three perennial "S" issues in the System i market and IT in general: spending, security, and storage. Although the sources of information come from outside our market, for the most part these definitely apply to the System i.

Despite being largely conducted before the latest U.S. recession scare became vogue, AMR Research released its annual report last week on IT spending for SMBs. AMR's encouraging word is that 64 percent of SMBs say that they plan to increase IT spending in 2008, by an average of 5.3 percent. Plans are evenly split between companies wanting to fund applications that simply help them run their businesses and companies that want applications to support innovation and spur growth. The largest single application type being planned, cited by 18 percent of respondents, was customer-management applications, with business-intelligence and business performance-management apps second and third. If SMBs hold to just half that growth, that will still be progress.

Security is an ongoing concern for everyone. Amplitude Research is a Florida survey research organization that formed a 10,000-member IT panel in 2002 divided evenly between C-level execs, developers and database administrators, systems and network administrators, CEOs of small technology companies, and other IT professionals such as tech support specialists and intranet managers. A survey of 350 members showed that in 2007 two-thirds reported at least one unauthorized intrusion into company systems, 52 percent of which involved "sensitive" or "highly sensitive" data that might have been lost.

What’s interesting to me is that aside from well-publicized disasters such as the U.K.'s National Audit Office losing two CDs containing personal information of more than two million families last fall, you don’t hear much about data losses except for a few specific horror stories. However, when people participate in a survey in which they don't have to publicly identify their company and suddenly two out of three are admitting a problem, doesn't that smack of a dirty little secret nearly everyone's sharing without admitting it?

Not saying it publicly to avoid panicking the shareholders combined with lots of back-patting about how strong System i security is seem to conspire to create an "it isn’t really happening here" mentality among too many in our market. System i security is good, but it’s not perfect. Strong compliance products, encryption algorithms for databases and backup media, malware protection, and intrusion-prevention solutions should be high on everyone’s investigation lists for 2008. Already having one type of solution doesn’t preclude the need for the others.

I know I'm covering familiar ground so far, but there's another aspect to this that not everyone seems to grasp yet. Cool stuff that's still mostly on the System i horizon, such as social networking software and wikis, as well as great concepts such as enterprise search, and the growing use of such personal conveniences as smart phones in a business setting, all have their own security vulnerabilities. Social networking sites are starting to have trouble with identity theft of their members. Wikis are a great way to share information, but they're vulnerable to the same kinds of information-sharing abuse as uncontrolled FTP. Enterprise search lets employees find data they need but sometimes lets them see too much confidential data because maybe someone doesn't understand all the settings as well as he or she should. Smart phones can be lost as easily as a set of car keys, but they contain a whole lot more information that is protected from unauthorized viewing . . .how? If your enterprise wants to employ one or more of these new technologies, particularly if you don't already have your other security holes plugged, you're just going to add to your enterprise's vulnerability (and you thought just implementing them at all would be your problem).

The great news is that you don't have to invent security solutions for the devils you already know. There are System i products that meet all the conventional problems already out there. it's just a matter of finding enough money in the budget for problems this important.

Is it true that storage is like chocolate because you never have enough of either? Perhaps that's why my doctor limits me to 1 KB of disk, but 2008 may be a better year than most for getting more of what we want for places to tuck in our data. IDC , a large IT industry-analysis company, has made some sweet predictions for storage. Aside from a surprisingly small 60 percent growth prediction for storage demand (I for one would have expected it to be more), IDC forecasts the beginning of widespread adoption of online storage services such as online backup, archiving, and replication.

Sending (encrypted!) backups across the Internet does seem like an economical idea, doesn’t it? In addition, IDC thinks the price point for solid-state disks is going to come down enough to make that option attractive, virtual servers are going to get hotter, and more vendors will tempt SMBs with servers with integrated backup software as a one-stop shopping answer to storage. These are the highlights of an IDC paper, "Worldwide Storage 2008 Top 10 Predictions: New Paradigms" (document 209796 on their website), but you’ll have to buy the report to read the rest. However, storage-as-a-service and all-in-one storage servers seem like opportunities to make money in the System i market, and though virtualization is only here for the Windows side of many enterprises, that’s strictly a temporary roadblock.

One final piece of good news for IT people: there’s a new way to laugh at yourself and with those around you, available starting this week. That’s Heroes Happen Here, a daily, web-based comic strip that launched Monday. Designed for IT developers and other professionals, it combines humor and a story line about four software developers who chase down a rogue computer virus while doing their regular jobs and trying to maintain personal lives. Readers can subscribe via an RSS feed to get daily installments, and author Jordan Gorfinkel, a former editor for DC Comics, says he'll follow the Dilbert example and accept ideas for future storylines from his readers. The strip is jointly sponsored by Microsoft and Seagate to “demonstrate their respect and appreciation for the IT community.”

2008 may not be as bad a year as some fear.

Posted by at January 29, 2008 4:36 PM