One of the perks of working for CA Technologies is the ability to work from home full-time. I’ve been doing this for almost a year now and while I don’t miss my old commute hour-each-way commute, I sometimes miss the people. (No offense to my dog, Henry, who is great company here at the house.) Thankfully, there are a number of tools and technology to keep me connects with my colleagues around the country. We use Microsoft Communicator for instant messaging and I can dial into the corporate phone bridge without looking at the keypad, both of which I rely on for the connection to the outside world. But sometimes you miss actually seeing people.
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Quantifying business service performance can represent a bit of a challenge for IT organizations supporting sophisticated environments and relying on external service providers in part to deliver IT services to end users and customers. The Service Measurement Index (SMI) could be the answer for high-tech organizations struggling to understand how services perform across hybrid cloud environments. The growing popularity of cloud computing and the trend toward sending services outside of the company is causing some to wonder how they can gage performance off premise. Some companies are opting to develop private clouds, others rely mostly on public cloud offerings, but many are choosing the third option: hybrid cloud environments. That means not only are IT organizations providing business services across an internal infrastructure, but they are also depending upon third parties to deliver services to end users and customers. While there may be obvious operational, cost and other benefits, monitoring and measuring the performance of these services across disparate environments could stump some IT leaders and prevent them from realizing the full value of cloud services. This problem certainly isn’t new, even if it is taking a fresh form under the cloud moniker. Applications teams have long worked toward better understanding application performance, in particular, from the end-user perspective. Efforts put into measuring how an internal user might encounter an application versus someone logging in remotely help those teams design better applications. And network teams would have to determine how an Internet service provider impacted the speed of the network across multiple locations from the local-area to the wide-area network. These types of measurement efforts and performance metrics now must be applied to the cloud.
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New applications bring the promise of increased productivity, happier end users and better business benefits.  But if the new app stalls on the network, IT managers will only be hearing about the problems the technology causes. Casey Louisiana, sales engineer at Network Instruments (a CA Technologies partner), meets with customers regularly as they work to deploy applications and keep the network running smoothly. He says there are a few common situations that happen frequently, which could be easily avoided. Here he offers a few fixes for these often overlooked areas when rolling out a new application. Configuring Quality of Service Often when IT departments are looking to add, say, voice over IP, to their application mix quality of service sometimes becomes an afterthought. With different management metrics for traffic (for instance, voice and data behave differently) and various prioritizations for some application traffic, IT managers don’t always configure routers, switches, servers and the like to optimally handle the traffic.
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Public relations professionals, marketers, journalists and spammers? While social networking platforms have become ubiquitous in the personal and now professional realms, the reality of social media still has some folks associating legitimate work for unsolicited junk being forced upon them. IT Organizations Should Adopt Social Media Recently I encountered a bit of hostility on an internal social networking platform when sharing a link to one of the several blog posts on Service Assurance Daily. I was called a “serial pest� for incessantly posting my own agenda, and the comment sparked a bit of discussion in which many agreed my contributions to the group were annoying, without value and unwelcome. The original comment also inspired others to defend my right to post to the group and even generated extremely supportive statements regarding the parameters of my job and the value of the information I shared. Having been writing publicly for some 20 years, my skin is well beyond thick enough to take such comments and I was not personally offended. I am well aware not every person that sees a Twitter update, LinkedIn post, Google+ share or Facebook status from me finds the information useful or interesting. (There are many that do, fortunately for me.) Still I was a bit surprised in this era of social media and virtual workforces that someone would find it appropriate to suggest another individual didn’t have the same rights to post information to the group. It seemed the equivalent of telling a co-worker providing a status report in the conference room, “Be quiet; no one cares about what you do.�
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Dell Monday announced it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire for an undisclosed sum Wyse Technology and its “cloud client computing� technologies. The pending acquisition would extend Dell’s desktop virtualization capabilities and strengthen its cloud strategy, according to a press release. Can Hardware Vendors Make the Switch to Software? Dell intends to use the Wyse Technology purchase to offer customers “tailored solutions to meet their needs.� Specifically, Dell plans to tap into Wyse’s thin client technology to extend its own desktop virtualization offerings. Wyse also offers cloud software that provides management, virtualization and mobility capabilities. The Wyse portfolio includes thin, zero and cloud PC clients with management, desktop virtualization and cloud software for desktops, laptops and mobile devices.
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CA CTO: Don’t Just Complain About the IT Skills Crisis, Do Something About it ComputerworldUK reported on the e-skills Information Technology Management for Business (ITMB) degree program in England, with commentary from CA Technologies CTO and e-skills advocate Colin Bannister. He says, “The success of the degree is down to it filling a gap in the market for graduates that understand both business and technology.� Case Based in China Puts a Face on Persistent Hacking The New York Times technology section shared the details of a hacking case based in China that points to the persistent number of attacks originating in China and targeting other countries. The article also includes data from a report by Trend Micro, which has offices in Tokyo. Apple’s War on Android Despite a large technology partnership, Apple and Samsung are battling it out in court, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. While products like the iPad and iPhone depend upon Samsung parts and Apple is Samsung’s largest customers, the two vendors continue to go to court over what Apple calls copycat products.
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Consumer-driven IT is here, and a majority of CIOs recently polled either already offer a mobile application or plan to do so in the coming year. According to data collected by Robert Half Technology, 27% of some 1,400 CIOs polled said their organizations already offer a mobile application. Another 22% reported that they plan to offer a mobile application in 2012. The survey, conducted by an independent research firm, asked CIOs about their plans to offer mobile applications and also revealed that 43% don’t intend to develop or provide a mobile application in the next 12 months. Nearly 10% weren’t sure of their plans. Planning to offer mobile applications introduces its own problems to the organization, CIOs say, with concerns ranging from cross-department collaboration to in-demand skills sets. When asked what the greatest challenges IT teams encountered, 29% said collaborating across departments. Twenty-eight percent pointed to finding and hiring IT professionals with the necessary expertise as their greatest challenge. Nearly one-fifth said that keeping the application up-to-date was the biggest hurdle, and 16% reported that getting approvals from the app store posed a problem.
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Cisco Wednesday announced its intent to acquire ClearAccess for an undisclosed sum to enhance Cisco's network management capabilities. The buy, according to a Cisco press release, would enable the network equipment maker to offer service provider customers technology to provision and manage residential and mobile devices. Can Hardware Vendors Make the Switch to Software? Cisco’s purchase of ClearAccess, based in Vancouver, Wash., would include the company’s software business and talent, while the company’s hardware line, Smart RG Gateways, will continue on as SmartRG. The network management capabilities in the ClearAccess software, Cisco says, will help Cisco to offer its service provider customers capabilities to better deliver, manage and monetize their services. "The ClearAccess acquisition reinforces Cisco's commitment to service providers by accelerating software architectural advancements in mobility, cloud and managed devices, and video," said Jamie Lerner, vice president and general manager, Cisco Network Management Technology Group, Service Provider Applications, in a Cisco press release. "ClearAccess provides a critical technology that will advance Cisco's mission to offer service providers a complete set of tools to manage their networks, within the home and across any connected device, amid the ongoing proliferation in network traffic."
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Guest Blogger Kate Brew manages product marketing activities for the Anue Systems Net Tool Optimizer (NTO) product line at CA Technical Alliance Partner Anue Systems. Capturing packets is the surest way to have complete information for incident investigation and remediation. However, it is unlikely that you will want to capture every packet in your network. Wouldn’t it be great if you could use information from current network behavior and only turn on packet capture at the time and place where suspicious behavior is occurring? Well you can, with a solution from CA Technologies and Anue Systems. Read more about Triggering Packet Captures from CA Spectrum  Anue offers a network monitoring switch, which is an emerging technology that provides visibility into the network to deliver high-quality performance, security and compliance monitoring. The product delivers traffic from multiple SPAN/TAP access points in the network to packet-based monitoring and security tools (for example, network recorders, IPS/IDS and protocol analyzers). And it handles the scarcity of network access points (SPANs and TAPs), providing aggregation and surgical filtering to ensure the delivery of the right data to each monitoring tool.
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Recent data points to an alarming trend in the technology industry: lack of end-user education. For instance, the threat of malicious attacks remains, but recent research that nearly 40% of data breaches are caused by negligent employees. That is just one of the results of the 7th annual Ponemon Cost of a Data Breach report. According to the report, “39% of organizations say that negligence was the root cause of data breaches� followed closely by more than one-third reporting malicious attacks as the primary source of data breaches. This study is based on actual data breach experience from 49 U.S. companies from 14 different industry sectors. The report, focused on security, made me consider other recent data that pointed to challenges IT managers face when implementing new technologies, such as video. According to the Network Instruments 5^th Annual Global State of the Network Study, more than half (53%) of the 71% of some 163 network managers polled that indicated they were deploying video technologies now and in the coming months said the lack of user knowledge and training was a significant challenge for them.
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Technology jobs often aren’t lacking in areas such as Silicon Valley and New York City, but new data from online tech job board Dice.com shows that other metropolitan areas are becoming hot spots for tech pros as well. In its March Dice Report, the technology career site details those cities that are showing growth in the number of available jobs. Depending on the area, the impetus for the growth varies. For instance, the report states that the oil and gas industry’s strength in the Houston area is contributing to the 37% year over year growth in tech job postings. And cloud and virtualization technologies are driving the growth in Portland, Ore. The jobs are hitting the country’s heartland as well with cities in the Midwest and the South also showing notable growth. “It’s important for tech professionals to remember with growing opportunities comes expanding options – if you’re willing to be flexible about where you live,� Tom Silver, senior vice president, North America, at Dice, said in the report. “Consider going for that promotion, asking for a raise or changing it up and finding that new opportunity.�
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In a recent blog entry, Harry Quackenboss from Layerz NGN makes some interesting and apropos points regarding the present and evolving world of Software Defined Networks and Software Driven Networks (both use the SDN acronym for now) and OpenFlow. The issue is there are many problems that can be solved with these technologies, and in some cases, the same problems can be solved using more than one technology, which brings to mind the proverbial “you can skin a cat in different ways� situation. Let me spell things out a bit, which hopefully can clarify things by explaining why SDN (and Software Driven Networks) represent a critical paradigm shift in the software application and network technology industries. First, it might be controversial to say this, but there are really no use cases in this space that I can think of or that have been discussed recently that cannot be solved using existing mechanisms versus Software Driven Networks (SDrN), and in a subset of those cases, Software Defined Networks (SDN). Of course with that in mind, please also remember that given enough thrust just about any pig can be made to fly! What is, however, important about SDrN is HOW it solves (or proposes to solve) these problems and how quickly it can solve them in terms of real operational and application development time. Take the basic premise of OpenFlow itself: on its surface (at least for now) it amounts to what is really just static routes/forwarding entries. We already know how to manipulate/provision/interact with those constructs in existing devices today using interfaces such as CLI, XMLConf, SNMP, etc.  Why don't we just use those things and call it a day? Simple. Where things differ is how applications interact with those components today versus how you need to interact with them -- especially in a hyper-virtualized environment that not only needs to be brought up quickly, but also needs to change frequently. These environments also contain orders of magnitude more components than a traditional non-virtualized environment. What is important is what network devices and service points provide to the applications and at what rate of speed you can interact with them.
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