Notes from the Consultant's Jungle

I was having a drink with an old friend of mine, who is a very prominent and globally sought after risk management professional, and we got around to talking about Disaster Recovery Planning Software.  I asked him, “have you ever found one of those that you like?”  His response was not positive. Quite often, I [...]

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This morning I was reading a short piece by Gary Beach, Publisher Emeritus of CIO Magazine in which he asks if he’s “certifiably nuts” for encouraging broad-based, state-administered technology certification programs.  The short answer from me- no, not really.   I would though, like to support the spirit of Gary’s call with my own encouragement.

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I’ve just returned from a meeting in Washington, DC in which we were assessing training material for certification on the new BICSI data center design best practices.   Along with the fact that I’ve been approached lately with a number of site security assessment requests, it was interesting to review the guidance on data center [...]

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As a part of the enterprise IT assessment process, and as a component for articulating the rationale for elevation of IT service capabilities to achieve alignment of IT with the strategic goals of the business, a description of the current level of IT maturity is a beneficial measure. ISACA is a global provider of information, [...]

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Our regular readers will understand that we do not routinely report on vendor-specific industry events, but because of the increasing presence of virtualization as a foundational component in enterprise IT architecture, this week’s VMWorld in San Francisco is hard to ignore. In a press release, VMware revealed a roadmap that is focused on IT services [...]

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We are working on a book about one of our favorite topics: Data center tier models, availability, and the alignment of business with availability requirements.  We plan to cover the models that enjoy the most mind-share, as well as models that are not talked about nearly as much, but yet are very relevant to the [...]

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As someone with a strong operational ethic, one of my pet peeves is the colo site that resembles a monthly self-storage facility.¬† I’m referring here, to allowing (or tolerating) tenants storing boxes, material, and debris in their cages. A colocation facility that has cardboard and other such material in customer cages shows very poorly.¬† That [...]

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In my classes at the university, I sometimes give students a project to create a malware pet shop or malware zoo.¬† The purpose is to make the students more aware of the “biodiversity” that really exists out there in the malware world.¬† We also often talk about the increasing use of malware and other network-based [...]

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Confusion Persists Through several posts on this blog, we discussed the many aspects of confusion around the term, “Cloud Computing.”¬† After attending this year’s Cloud Expo in New York City and seeing the same three-layer stack (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) slide in fifty half of the presentations, I have to conclude that confusion still exists in [...]

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A quick perusal of a typical contemporary IT project portfolio will show a strong representation of projects dependent upon, or directly related to the data center.  Changes in the growth and scale of data processing, applications, content storage, data communications, risk, compliance, and maturity of IT governance are all in some way connected to the [...]

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