AKIBIA'S PRACTICAL GUIDE TO ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY
Why HP is Worried about Third Party Maintainers
Thursday, March 04, 2010
Recently HP’s anti-third party maintenance data sheet crossed my desk. Why is a multi billion dollar hardware behemoth worried about third party support providers? The fact that this datasheet even exists is proof that a large number of forward-thinking, innovative companies are looking to third party maintainers for customized, high-value, lower cost data center support services. In fact, more than two-thirds of all companies leverage a third party maintainer for IT support today.
Has the Sun Set on Flexible Support Options?
Thursday, February 18, 2010
As the dust has settled on Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, some interesting questions remain for companies thinking about their support options.
You Inherited Your Cisco Infrastructure, But Do You Know Why You are Still Buying It?
Thursday, January 28, 2010
All too often companies say “we are a Cisco shop” in answer to discussing alternative solutions to core switching, routing, branch office switches and wireless networking. While Cisco is a good product and worthy of investment, why are so many companies not even considering alternatives at all?
Your Workers are Surfing While Snacking on a Big Mac - Time to Revisit Managing Your End-Point.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
The availability of wireless networks has proliferated in our society to the point where even at your neighborhood McDonalds you can get online. 27 million people eat at one of McDonald’s 30,000 restaurants per day so chances are high someone on your team will connect in from McDonalds often. With this increased Wi-Fi availability, comes greater requirements for organizations to secure and protect the end-point.
Ensuring Security in the Virtualized Environment
Friday, January 08, 2010
With virtualization more and more prevalent in your IT infrastructure, this is a good time to ensure your virtualized environment is meeting the same high standards for security that you have set for your non-virtual infrastructure.
Monitoring Via the Cloud
Monday, December 07, 2009
Akibia has suggested before on this blog that many of the solutions that vendors bill as Cloud Computing offerings, fall short of the cloud in some way. There are three basic tenets to a cloud solution – infrastructure, application and access. Few cloud computing solutions on the market today actually achieve all three. Some that do are email and calendaring, CRM software as a service, and remote monitoring.
Sun Makes More Changes Amid Uncertainty
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
As we await the European Union’s ultimate decision on the Oracle acquisition of Sun, a number of questions exist making customers uncertain of buying new Sun products or maintaining existing Sun relationships. With Sun and Oracle unable to give clear answers regarding the acquisition close date, how the server group will be integrated in Oracle and what will happen to Sun’s support team, the outlook is murky. As a result many of the prospects Akibia speaks with are evaluating ways to migrate off of SUN platforms and to more stable server and storage environments. There is much speculation concerning which competitor will benefit the most from this move away from Sun – some say IBM and HP according to this Wall Street Journal update.
Sky High Cloud Chatter
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
Cloud Computing continues to be one of the top trends in terms of discussion and chatter in 2009. Many analyst firms are predicting that spending on cloud computing will far out pace spending in other IT sectors as the economy continues to recover. Forrester Research states that cloud computing should be on every enterprise’s three year roadmap. Not surprisingly, many IT vendors are announcing their own Cloud Computing solutions.
Improving Vulnerability and Patch Management
Thursday, October 15, 2009
If you are a resource administrator, then you probably spend too much time responding to new vulnerability reports and patching systems. For the security folks, you probably spend too much of your time tracking down the status on remediation and trying to qualify new vulnerability notifications. So how can we manage this better?
A Couple Quick and Easy Green IT Steps
Monday, October 12, 2009
Last week Akibia’s team was busy attending some of the premier industry events, including AFCOM’s Data Center World down in Orlando and an ASCDI event in New York City. Both were great events and featured a number of compelling topics for the data center – from cloud computing, to virtualization to strategies for green IT.
