Blog Archive | Quest Technology Management

What to Look For in IT Operations Analytics Capabilities

In my last post, I discussed how IT operations analytics can transform the masses of IT performance data into insight that provides broad, cross-tier network and infrastructure visibility so that …

Issues may be proactively recognized and resolved before they affect your business
Future capacity and provisioning requirements may be anticipated
A performance baseline built from multiple metrics can be established, reducing the time, money, and headaches associated with planning and deploying new projects, such as cloud deployments or virtualization.

But how should you go about choosing an IT operations analytics solutions? This is worth paying attention to, since such solutions are new, called by a number of different names (though likely not for long) and are available both as appliances and cloud-based services.

Tim Burke

Ecosystem or Feudal System?

Game of Thrones recently kicked off its fourth season. And as a devoted fan, I cannot help but see the similarities between the battle for control of Westeros, the Iron Throne and the capital city, King’s Landing and the current gamesmanship developing in the IT Channel for control of the end-user experience, the IT infrastructure backbone, and the datacenter.

Much like the Channel, Westeros the fantasy realm of the HBO hit show, Game of Thrones, is made up of different families and kingdoms. For those who remember their Western Civilization courses, it is basically a feudal system under the mercurial rule of a corruptible monarchy, bordered on the north by snow zombies and hordes of non-allied “wildlings” and to the south east by dragons and a very angry ex-pat, who is raising an army to kill everyone back home.

Adam Burke

When IT Performance Monitoring Gets a “Big Data” Boost

No doubt you’ve heard about “big data.” It sounds intimidating, invasive, and, well, way too big. But don’t be fooled — “big data” is going to save your IT infrastructure.

The first thing you need to understand about how this is happening (oh yes, it’s already well underway) is that “big data” is something of a misnomer. What we’re really talking about is analytics — automated mathematical tools that work in real time to sift through untold amounts of regular old data, in this case IT performance data, and produce actionable results that go far beyond legacy monitoring capabilities.

Tim Burke

Capitalizing on Quest’s Investments

With Cloud adoption growing at an incredible rate, leverage the strengths of Quest’s expanding footprint and Cloud services portfolio to extend the value you provide customers and increase your sales.

Stand out from the crowd

Drive more monthly recurring revenue by integrating Infrastructure as a Service, Desktops as a Service, Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity and Co-location services into your customer opportunities with Quest’s recent 120K sq. ft. facility in Roseville, CA and expanding network of global Service Delivery Centers.

Adam Burke

Why cloud DR pays off in a mission-critical IT world

Not so long ago, the best way to assure your organization would survive a major disruption involved building — and continuously paying for — a dedicated recovery site. Like so many early-generation IT solutions, this one was unaffordable for most smaller businesses.

Happily, the very technologies that generate disruption-causing complexity (see my last post) also provide the kinds of cost-effective capabilities, such as real-time replication and managed disaster recovery services, that today’s heavily mission- and business-critical IT environments require.

Tim Burke

When It Comes to Security, Know Thyself

“If you don’t understand the risks, you don’t understand the costs,” security guru Bruce Schneier advised during a TED talk.

He was discussing security in the abstract — but it got me thinking about IT security in particular and the difficulty many executives face trying to determine if their organizations are safe from cyberattack.

The problem is that these conversations nearly always turn technical. Soon, a flurry of technology acronyms — confounding but apparently reassuring — begin flying around the room.

And, reports Schneier, it works. People, he says, will “respond to the feeling of security and not the reality.”

So what can a CEO do to understand the reality of security risk and grasp what the actual cost of security failure might do to the organization?

Tim Burke