Disaster Recovery High on List of IT Pros’ Concerns, Study Finds…..

As an IT professional, what would you say are the top three concerns that keep you awake at night? According to the results of a recent survey, your peers listed security, downtime (disaster recovery), and talent management, in that order.

Considerations for Maintaining Critical Business Continuity

The survey was commissioned by Sungard Availability Services, a cloud computing, disaster recovery, and managed hosting services provider based in Wayne, Pa. I had the opportunity to discuss the findings with Ric Jones, CIO at LifeShare Blood Centers, a blood donation services provider in Shreveport, La., that’s a Sungard AS customer. Jones ranked disaster recovery ahead of security on his own list of concerns, but he indicated that the two are inextricably linked.

“Disaster recovery is extremely important to the success of LifeShare Blood Centers. If the primary data center in Shreveport experiences downtime for even a few hours, it disrupts the nonprofit’s ability to collect the data needed to gather and distribute critical, life-saving blood supply,” Jones explained.

BMC Engage: Defending IT in an Increasingly Digitized Cloud World

I’m starting to feel like a coast-to-coast ping pong ball because this week I am in Orlando at BMC Engage 2014. BMC is undergoing a transformation that, to a certain extent, mirrors the transformation that IT itself is undergoing. It is shifting from being a firm that was largely known for providing management services on mainframes to a firm that is enabling ever more socially engaged services across a variety of platforms, the cloud, and for users that are increasingly on a new class of mobile devices.

The turnaround for BMC is proceeding very well. It now has the resources to do a major show like Engage again, and the size of the audience at this event is in line with the groups that firms like IBM, HP, and Microsoft attract. This post is on the opening keynote.

BMC’s Turnaround

The keynote opened with a review of where BMC is. It is now private and doing so well that it has been able to increase its investment in the business by $120M. It has reorganized to focus the efforts of the firm on innovation and customer success, and done a major executive change-out, attracting top names from a who’s who of firms in the IT space. In effect, BMC is from top to bottom about as close as you can get to a new company.

Era of Digitalization

The industry is in its third age. The first age was craftsmanship (mainframe/terminal), the second age was IT industrialization (client/server/LAN/Internet), and the third is digitization. Digitization is basically virtualizing the real world in data. Elements of this have social aspects; they increasingly reside on cloud resources, and they create massive repositories (Big Data), which in turn are turned into actionable information (analytics).

Information Technology

When people hear the words “Information Technology,” the first things that come to mind are computers and the Internet. It may also bring up words like “network,” “intranet,” “server,” “firewall,” “security,” as well as more arcane expressions such as “router,” “T-1,” “Ethernet,” or the mysterious and exotic-sounding “VoIP” (pronounced “voyp”). In fact, information technology is all of these things, and more. It’s hardly new, however. Information technology is as old as the brain itself, if you think of the brain as an information processor. As far as I.T. being a science, even that goes back as far as the earliest attempts to communicate and store information.