Tag Archives: compliance

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Service Assurance In The Cloud

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How do you provide service assurance in your virtualized data center or cloud?

Read any blog, online article, or hard copy publication about the IT industry and you will likely see much about the future of IT. But, it is the every-day challenges and victories that often determine success in the long run.

While the industry considers more logical abstractions to further loosen the ties between business processes and physical infrastructure, IT management needs to assure ongoing application availability and performance in virtual and cloud deployments with a high rate of data growth. IT needs solutions that provide a complete picture of data center health across compute, network, and storage.

The just-announced EMC Storage Resource Management Suite provides service assurance from application-to-storage by monitoring and reporting on availability, performance, and compliance. It combines EMC storage management and analysis with technologies from the recent Watch4net acquisition to ensure application consistency in dynamic data centers. Continue reading →

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3 Not Always Obvious Reasons to Replicate

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How is replication relevant in today’s world of virtualization and cloud computing?

Since the dawn of the information age, replication for disaster recovery has been business as usual for the data center.

In more recent times, many business intelligence tools have emerged that also use replication. But, these processes are relegated to the night shift, meaning done outside of the normal business day.

Fast forward to today and this approach doesn’t stand up to the 24×7 mentality of the modern world and the global, virtual data center.

Add to this never-sleep mentality, rapid data growth and new uses for (big) data warehouses and you can see the need for replication technologies that push the boundaries of data recovery and also feed the analytics engines that drive business intelligence decisions.  

Getting there means embracing the not always obvious reasons for replication and retooling and re-organizing to deliver self-service models and to scale.

Key to a successful journey is taking an application and replica management approach to replication. Continue reading →

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5 Steps to Improving Your IT Infrastructure Compliance Strategy

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Want to keep your sanity—and your job?

Of course, you do. But, managing your IT infrastructure holistically is not an easy task! Ensuring everything is always under control and meets regulatory requirements is even more difficult.

What you need is an effective approach to governance, risk management, and compliance or GRC.

More than just another acronym, your IT GRC strategy is your hall pass to staying out of trouble.

And, because your IT infrastructure compliance strategy is part of your overall IT GRC, it’s critical to address the internal complexities brought on by today’s dynamic physical and virtual data centers with both new technologies and new ways of doing things. Continue reading →

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On the Road to Delivering IT-as-a-Service

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What if you could deliver IT-as-a-Service?

Last time around, I discussed the challenge facing data center managers when it comes to responding to internal customers and standing up new services in virtual environments and cloud deployments.

The key takeaway being that IT departments need solutions that provide speed to service, service assurance, and compliance.

Address these areas and you solve the IT management challenge to delivering IT-as-a-service (ITaaS). Continue reading →

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The Management Challenge

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Virtualization is good. But, how are you going to manage this dynamic environment?

Managing the virtual environment and its new infrastructure is critical to continuing the journey to the Cloud and to delivering IT-as-a-Service. But, there is a growing gap in IT infrastructure management cost and time spent and what needs to get done. This should come as no surprise since IT budgets have mostly gone to maintaining the old, not building the new for what seems like an eternity.

To net it out, the old silo approach to IT no longer applies. It’s now all about how to stand up services quickly. Continue reading →