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If you produce data, you need to store it somewhere and if you produce lots of it, the storage resources management issues becomes pivotal to your IT success, in this area.

Companies of all sizes seek to make the most of their IT investments, including storage, while keeping new spending in check. Depending on which company you ask, between 33 and 70 cents of every dollar spent on hardware goes to storage so working on allocation efficiency towards optimum distributed storage system use is just good business sense.

Also, storage is rapidly outpacing servers as the biggest user of power in the data centers so that could eventually impact negatively on the carbon footprint and infrastructure utility costs.

Could something as straightforward as storage resource management (SRM) be the answer to the storage woes IT has to contend with on an ongoing basis? Since lots of companies have urgent needs when it comes to storage, let’s hope the following mini-guide will come in handy.

Here’s how to get your storage sprawl under control by doing your homework pertaining to the following four strategic areas:

Policy management

• Make sure to map business rules pertaining to data storage;
• Report on and forecast infrastructure trends;
• Impose process conformance within your network as changes occur.

Data management

• Manage data provisioning and protection services based on business criteria such as hosting costs, protection, preservation and retention;
• Apply mechanisms for intelligent data movement over time to achieve utilization efficiency.

Capacity management

• Manage existing capacity to achieve allocation efficiency before buying more;
• Monitor data growth trends;
• Impose simple hierarchical storage management capabilities and data protection process monitoring.

Configuration management

• Emphasise hardware asset discovery and configuration;
• Interconnect (server / storage) mapping and optimization;
• Set up status monitoring, maintenance and trouble shooting facilities.

In theory, SRM is supposed to give us clarity and visibility into what we currently have at our disposal, storagewise, so we can manage it more efficiently. The real progress is made, however, when combining SRM with data management (enforced by comprehensive company policies) that leads to more effective storage management.

In other words, like many other things in a company, it’s about teamwork and communications between the team members because otherwise, the data growth issue may quickly get out of hand… and way over-budget.

Saving money over storage hardware purchases will make any IT decision maker a darling with CFOs but let’s not forget there’s a lot of work to be done before getting there. Provisioning, deduplication and virtualization must all be explored, understood and properly implemented to optimize a company’s storage resource management.

Remember that you can’t manage what you can’t see — that’s especially true when it comes to storage so start digging and you’ll eventually become an “SRM hero”.

Tags: srm, storage resource management, storage, storage policies, data management, data centers, capacity management, servers, hosting costs, data growth, infrastructure trends, status monitoring, maintenance

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In mid-May of 2008, just a few weeks back, HP’s CEO Mark Hurd announced an agreement to buy EDS for $13,9 billion and stated that it fulfills their strategic objective of expanding in the services area.

This is major news because this agreement means that HP’s and EDS’ combined revenues reaches a whopping $38 billion a year, a bit behind IBM at $54 billion but clearly ahead of Accenture at $21 billion.

According to the merger plan that’s been released, EDS CEO Ron Rittenmeyer will lead a new organization called “EDS — an HP company” and report directly to HP’s Mark Hurd. EDS will still employ 210,000 people but Wall Street is abuzz with rumors of downsizing.

While HP’s IT services unit was already managing P&G’s global consumer products’ tech operations (a 10 year, $3 billion contract, started in 2003), EDS brings blue-chip customers to the table, such as American Airlines, Bank of America and Royal Dutch Shell.

So EDS’ vast vertical and operational expertise which is especially strong in the financial services, health care and government sectors could finally help HP break into the IT services major leagues. The biggest threat to the success of this deal might come from HP’s somewhat “computer and printer” culture that’s still (proverbially speaking) lightyears away from SaaS, cloud computing and other new-wave IT trends for which EDS has proved to be more comfortable with.

HP hopes that with EDS now on its team, big multinationals will look to outsourcers more often to collect, secure, integrate and deliver software and other IT resources over the web.

Of course, the future will tell if giant system integrators, like HP’s newly acquired EDS, will still be required at a time when the SaaS and cloud computing super-efficient duo are removing complexity from many IT activities, across the board.

Tags: hp, eds, operations, merger plan, it, it services, saas, cloud computing, outsourcing, it resources

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It seems new rules from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will require large publicly held companies to adopt the Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) by December 15th, 2008, for all the financial documents they file with the agency.

Being the financial reporting version of XML, XBRL allows for standardized accounting data to be tagged and retrieved more easily as documents can be mined for data without calling up entirely.

So the SEC is basically requiring big changes from large publicly held companies because their PCs aren’t fast enough to process large documents, errr… while that may hold true, the main reason has to do with the structured way in which the XBRL data is stored.

SEC 10-K annual reports and other documents that use XBRL can be read by software, screened for specific data and then, reorganized into new reports. For investigators and investors looking to quickly search for less common financial data such as “assets held for sale”, the XBRL tagging does wonders.

The new SEC requirement affects “large accelerated filers” which likely includes the majority of the Fortune 500 — 75 companies, including Ford, GE, IBM, Pepsi, United Technologies and Xerox already use XBRL.

Once XBRL has become a standard way of making SEC reports, the mandate is expected to be phased in for smaller publicly held companies. Furthermore, the FDIC and the central banks of the European Union have already adopted XBRL in their reporting.

While the XBRL requirement might seem somewhat steep for large companies, it’s probably a good thing since it’ll be easier for investors, including large retirement fund analysts, to finally be able to quickly compare several companies using very specific variables.

For the financial publications’ readers, this means that the financial reports, in the years to come, might yield significantly more comprehensible information that’ll likely be useful when trying to understand what’s happening in a company where an investment is being considered.

Tags: xbrl, xml, sec, fdic, european banks, financial reports, reporting, standards, compliance, mandate

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Networked multifunction printers are the norm, nowadays, in offices and home-offices across the world.

Priced to pleased and loaded with popular features, they’ve come to be seen as the discreet yet efficient office multifunction sidekicks that sit politely in their place, waiting to receive new jobs, over the network.

What almost everybody forgets it the security risk networked printers represent. Combining several functions in a single unit, including fax, copy, print and scan, these devices are likely to be compromised by hackers.

Since nobody pays close attention to these seemingly mundane devices, they can easily be hacked under the IT Surveillance Team’s radar which, typically, has other (more pressing) threats to deal with, namely on the web server front. In the case of multifunction printers, the attacks are as likely to come from inside the office as from the outside world, which add to the severity of the security risk.

What’s the big deal if the networked printer secretly slides under a hacker’s control?

Well, for one thing, the hacker could view, collect, steal or distribute everything that goes through the device. Imagine your competitor electronically getting all your latest business proposals — that would surely endanger your entire company.

The following types of attacks are most likely to occur within the realm of your office’s multifunction printer so make sure to learn about these attack scenarios:

• DoS - Specialized malware can be programmed to crash printers and scanners, therefore disrupting paper-based business operations.
• Code execution - Hackers can exploit vulnerabilities to load a rootkit into printers, thereby hijacking all documents passing across the network (not just the compromised device).
• Document spying - Featring built-in network, fax / modem and LAN / WAN capabilities, there are a variety of ways to smuggle the stolen data out of an organization, once it’s been captured.
• Credentials theft - If users need to enter a password for certain operations, such as scanning to email, an attacker can capture user names and passwords to gain further access to network resources.

While they may look harmless, modern multifunction printers aren’t dumb machines anymore. IT Admins need to pay attention to these devices’ vulnerabilities and weaknesses to be in a more favorable position where they can apply patches and, at the very least, prepare comprehensive risk-management strategies.

A word of caution also to the multifunction printers that can be accessed through an online authentication interface, through any web browser. Though this system is remarkably convenient for end-users, such authentication methods can easily be bypassed to launch commands which may completely hijack the device.

If you’re serious about closing all prime networked entry points for hackers, perhaps ou should also include all multifunction printers connected to your network.

Tags: network, printers, hackers, hijack, devices, business, authentication, security

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While making the wrong long-term plan could drive someone right into a proverbial brick wall, the dangerous habit of overly relying on short-term thinking to decide anything and everything can turn into equally catastrophic failures.

At the very least, resorting to short-term thinking for business management can be quite stressful as the lack of solid longer-term thinking sets the stage for a stressful work environment where everything seems to hang in the latest decision needing to be made.

For instance, look at how many business decisions are being made just to pump up the current quarter’s results. Worse yet, consider the legions of C-level executives who bend over backwards to tie in short sighted money deals with ever more capricious investors. The short-term thinking pitfalls are obvious, in today’s business environment, hence the importance of learning to recognize it in order to properly manage it.

Short-term management has upsides which, among other things, helps the company move swiftly when market changes occur but the downsides are way more risky as they could bring down the whole organization into a sort of vortex made strong by countless small mistakes adding up into a much larger “situation” that ends up spinning out of all control (and endangering everybody’s job).

Short-term thinking paves the way to exciting business management times as everything is up for discussion on a regular basis but that’s the kind of mindset that people who like to plan far ahead feel uncomfortable with.

The holy grail isn’t just short-term or just long-term, it’s about balance — a sort of comfort zone for decision making where the latest “trends” don’t necessarily wildly skew everything that was already planned ahead.

If anything, perhaps this article will help you realize how foolish it can be to jump head first in the latest media spin only to find out, a little later, that the spin had more to do with hot air than anything else.

So take your time. Think. Decide better and elevate yourself over the often risky pool of trends and media spins that , unchecked, can scrap a well laid out plan in favor of an impulsive and frenzied scramble for sudden (and usually largely irrelevant -or- unnecessary) reorganization.

Life is much better for those who manage to escape the short-term thinking roller coaster.

Tags: short-term, long-term, management, business, decisions, media spin

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