Vista does not improve tax payers' welfare
Neil Street
With reference to
"
Lack of apps delays council Vista roll-out", I find it rather
disturbing that a local government organisation should be
considering such a move in the first place. Newham, after all, is
one of the poorest boroughs in the land, and Newham Borough
Council's job is to provide decent services to people who live
there.
I would suggest that Newham's decision to be an early adopter of
Vista has much more to do with its relationship with
Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft than it does with providing quality
services to the good people of Newham.
Richard Steel's comment that there was insufficient planning is
astounding, as well as being an admission of the manifest
incompetence of his own office. Surely, when you put yourself up as
an early adopter of a new technology, planning is even more
important than normal.
I would like to ask Steel what the productivity gains that he
expects from Vista have to do with providing a decent living
environment for the council tax payers of Newham. They need housing
and education far more than Windows Vista.
App virtualisation can ease website
pressure
Alun Baker,
Managing director, EMEA DataSynapse
The failure of Northern Rock's website under pressure is the
second incident in as many months to demonstrate that online
service provision is often not as resilient as it should or could
be.
Karl Flinders rightly points out that the episode shows
"
how critical it is for businesses to ensure their websites continue
to perform during unexpected peaks in demand". In August, Egg
was the victim when Cable and Wireless' network went down for
nearly 24 hours and customers were unable to access their accounts
through the site.
Many organisations will have contingency plans in place, but in
exceptional circumstances they do not stand up. No one predicted
the Northern Rock crisis, so one could argue that it is
understandable the system collapsed. However, technologies exist
that make this an outdated assumption.
Yes, you can have web accelerators and timing systems, but this
is a distraction rather than a solution. Yes, you can add extra
capacity, have dual-site contingency, a multi-server infrastructure
and monitor online activity to anticipate possible stretch demand
levels, but what happens when the stretch is too much?
Organisations need to be building an on-demand infrastructure
that is flexible enough to withstand unprecedented and
unplanned-for levels of pressure.
And this is where application virtualisation, which places the
emphasis on application performance and provisioning, comes into
its own.
By simplifying infrastructure management, IT departments can
respond with real-time solutions to mission critical problems,
ensuring consistent service provision and, most importantly,
protecting the brand. In today's unpredictable world, the ability
to react quickly is key.
Asset management can track carbon
footprints
Robin Martin, Managing director, IBM Maximo
Companies are increasingly aware of their carbon footprint and
are taking steps towards reducing their impact on the environment.
I believe that significant reductions in carbon emissions can be
achieved through the maintenance, and indeed, the management of an
organisation's assets.
Investment in technology to track the performance of assets can
highlight areas of inefficient energy performance, thus
demonstrating the optimal time for assets to be repaired or
replaced.
There are two core ways in which asset management can help
companies deliver positive environmental results. From a reporting
perspective, tracking information related to carbon emissions,
energy consumption and performance, and their environmental impact
will be increasingly important, as organisations look to include
environmental issues in their annual reports.
Second, asset management can help businesses demonstrate what
they are doing to actually reduce that impact through best practice
and processes.
Technology is one of the most sustainable routes to decreasing
the environmental impact of industry and the assets it uses.
Unless companies know exactly where they are in the journey from
an environmental footprint perspective, then surely they cannot
gauge whether they are making any improvements?
Unquestioning security spend must be reined
in
Earnie Kramer, managing director, Lightspeed Systems
(Europe)
Businesses cannot afford to unquestioningly invest in security
technologies that deliver no return on investment or tangible
business value.
Gartner's comments at the London IT Security Summit are another
timely reminder that IT security spending is getting out of control
and must be reined in.
Despite an escalating year on year spend on security products,
breaches and incidents continue to increase. As organisations
create a highly complex infrastructure of point security systems,
they are in danger of losing control.
To be frank, the majority of security installations in place
today are an accident waiting to happen.
It is only by monitoring actual network activity that any
organisation can develop the security controls - and systems - that
truly reflect business risk.
Isn't it time to call the security industry's bluff and deliver
a network security system that actually protects against the real
business threats?