In the connected, “always on” world, big news and current events can unexpectedly tax the ability of even major online players to handle radical traffic spikes. To take just one example, when Michael Jackson died, search queries for the departed star surged so rapidly on Google that folks over there actually mistook the activity for an automated attack.
While your organization might not be a Google, and you might not be managing an operation like YouTube, which currently handles 11,574 views per second or a billion views a day, chances are that your business does require more and more flexibility with regards to IT infrastructure and the services it provides to both internal and external customers.
Thankfully, given the state of technology today, you don’t have to maintain a data center or a server farm large enough to handle crazy peaks, but which otherwise sits idle and drains resources. Instead, you can create a hybrid infrastructure that leverages the cloud, virtualization, and SaaS models to ensure that you have the capacity you need when you need it, without having to carry the cost when you don’t.
Indeed, you can buy flexibility, but it costs more than money because said flexibility simultaneously requires that you surrender a certain amount of control. The cloud, for instance, offers you limitless scalability on-demand. However, making the cloud part of your infrastructure means that jobs you once ran on machines in places that you owned (or rented) now run somewhere “out there.”
This poses a problem because, frankly, today’s IT manager needs to exercise ever stricter control over IT systems and resources. In order to stay ahead of increasingly sophisticated security threats, you need to know who is looking at what data where, when they are looking at it, and whether or not they should have access to it in the first place.
To remain in compliance with continually proliferating regulatory requirements, you need to create detailed audit trails and these trails need to cut across all physical, virtual, or cloud computing environments
In other words, IT management has become a great balancing act calling on us to weigh the efficiencies afforded by flexibility against the real need to maintain security and control at all costs. Which means that the question on everyone’s mind is: “How can I deliver an agile, intelligent infrastructure while minimizing cost, complexity and risk?”
How are you answering that question?
Posted
Mar 02 2010, 01:00 PM
by
FrankDays