Quest Blog | Quest Technology Management

Virtualization, cloud services make a new network/app management world

In my last post, I pointed out that today’s speedy, low-cost connectivity is impacting network and application management. This time I’ll concentrate on the other significant trend changing network and application management: Virtualization and cloud services.

Today’s datacenter environments are not only quickly becoming hyper-connected, most have also undergone at least some degree of virtualization and use of cloud services. The combination results in new kinds of business applications and, ultimately, a new kind of network infrastructure that exhibits…

Greater traffic volume, notably storage traffic
A shift in traffic flows from top-down/bottom-up to peer-to-peer, server-to-server, and virtual machine-to-virtual machine (now as much as 80% by some estimates)
Increasing amounts of synchronization and replication data across the network
A flatter network hierarchy

Tim Burke

Security Risk and Reward

Market experts love to talk about Information Security. And why wouldn’t they?! It is a beautiful market of evolving requirements and according to a new report by Global Industry Analysts , it’s projected to surpass $125 billion by 2015.

Market research and revenue projections aside, what does the growing need for security practices at all levels mean for the Channel? What does it mean to the SMB space? Even large enterprises get breached, and they’ve invested billions of dollars in information security and have CIO’s and Directors overseeing teams of security admins, network security professionals, and quality control processes for application delivery.

Threats can come from any level, Cisco projects that 50 billon devices will be connected to the Internet of Everything (IoE) by 2020. Applications, email, networks, remote workers, Cloud hosted databases. If your clients’ business has touched the internet, it’s likely that automated malware and botnets are searching their systems for vulnerabilities. The motives behind these infected emails, watering hole attacks and zero day threats are not always known until it is too late. Corporate databases are breached, users personally identifiable information (PII) is lost and regulators penalties and damaged consumer confidence is inevitable.

Adam Burke

Fast, cheap connectivity opens up network/application management options

As 2013 begins, I notice plenty of commentary about mobile devices but less talk about the implications of mobility and other current events on business network and application monitoring and management requirements.

I see two key trends impacting network and application monitoring and management in the coming year: Fast, cheap connectivity and virtualization/cloud services . In this post, I’ll focus on the first of those — connectivity, which is most apparent in the current push toward (you guessed it) mobility.

Chicken or egg: Mobility ↔ connectivity
These days, your employees’ desktop functions are shifting to increasingly powerful mobile devices . At the same time, cloud services make the connectivity of those devices pretty much ubiquitous. So the value of much of your traditional infrastructure diminishes because it costs too much, is too complex, takes up too much space — and, too often, it doesn’t get the job done anymore.

Tim Burke

Cloud-Reluctant Customers: Do You Walk Away?

Thus far, much of cloud computing has been “coin-operated”. Put in your quarter and out comes X amount of real-time data storage or Y period of email service, forms analysis, payroll processing, etc. The payoff: An affordable OpEx transaction that instantly delivers. So easy, so hassle-free — as long as you “fit in the box” of offerings available from the Cloud Provider

Adam Burke

Cloud Computing best practice: Always monitor your Cloud services

In order to know whether your Cloud provider is meeting the performance and availability parameters set out in your service-level agreement (SLA), you have to be able to monitor your Cloud services.

While you might not need or care to see detailed reports about the performance of your provider’s various infrastructure elements (VMs, storage, etc.), since this information doesn’t really provide a sufficient view into overall Cloud performance , you can and should seek information from your provider regarding application and/or workload performance.

Tim Burke

CEOs in the Crosshairs

When it comes to security breaches, CEOs stand in the crosshairs. More than their IT staffs, it’s a CEO who’ll take heat for a breach that exposes customer data or endangers relationships with business partners.

So, unlike plenty of other IT issues that don’t require C-level attention, information security ranks right up there alongside financial issues as something with which CEOs need to be familiar. Yes, information security can be daunting, but so are financial statements — and CEOs have to sign off on those.

Where to start? Here are three questions every CEO should be able to answer: Do you know who your security expert is? Do you have a security policy? Do you understand how it’s implemented, managed, enforced, monitored?

Tim Burke