IMF Web Forums Update

March 9th, 2010 by May Advincula No comments »
Please join us this Thursday for:


Managing IT Costs Through Service Catalog 
Nick Schneider, Consultant at NewScale 
Thursday, March 11th 
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm Eastern
 
The Service Catalog is the heart of the Front Office of IT which enables key Front Office processes such as Service Portfolio Management, Demand Management and Financial Management. Together these capabilities enable an organization to experience a broad range of benefits from rationalizing services to optimizing demand to controlling service consumption and managing fulfillment. This session will explore these concepts in more detail with practical examples.

Click here to login to our website to register for this event!


More upcoming discussions at the IMF

Rebuilding Enterprise IT at Jewelry TV 
Chris Meystrik, VP of Technology and Chief Architect at Jewelery Television
Thursday, April 15th
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm Eastern 
 
After joining Jewelry TV,  Meystrik’s goal was to rebuild the enterprise computing environment  specifically around growing JTV’s business.    Meystrik strategically focused his efforts on ensuring the Business Strategy was understood by IT and that the IT Strategy was understood by the Business.   Jewelry TV has grown from a 5 Million per year business to a 500 Million dollar business, growth that was enabled by the linkage of IT’s strategy to that of the business. During this Web Forum, Meystrik will walk us through the strategy and success of rebuilding the enterprise IT environment  to enable the phenomenal growth of the business.


Business Intelligence Increases a Corporation’s Brand Equity 
Munu Gandhi, Division VP at ACS, a Xerox company
Thursday April 22nd
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm Eastern 
 
The drive to build greater brand equity is top of mind for CEOs, CIOs, CMOs and their board of directors. The CEO, CIO and CMO need to ensure that all functional areas of the business, including partners and suppliers are working together. They need to ensure that all functions and external partners understand their customer and consumer and are utilizing the gained knowledge to develop the right products and services, and deliver those products and services through the channels their customer/consumer demands. A key business solution that CEOs, CIOs and CMO’s have continued to utilize and expand on to achieve these goals is Business Intelligence.
 
IT Security: Segregation of Duties 
Paul Moran, Information Security Analyst at Automotive Resources International
Thursday May 6th 
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm Eastern US Time Zone
Over the last few years, a greater emphasis has been placed on separation of IT duties across all IT functions, especially security.  Most organizations are now realizing responsibilities must be assigned to individuals in such a way as to mandate checks and balances within the system and minimize the opportunity for unauthorized access and fraud, among other things.  But, how does a security organization do this while ensuring all security needs are met and the process runs effectively and efficiently? This presentation will discuss the benefits and challenges created by these separation of duties, as well as how their organizations have addressed security issues.

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 to login to the website to register for IMF Events!

 Not a member? Click here to learn about IMF or contact us at 770.455.0070 or by clicking here.

 

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A look into enterprise e-mail solutions

March 9th, 2010 by May Advincula No comments »

Oftentimes costs are a major driving factor in decisions to move to different enterprise solutions. According to an article by Jonathan McCormick and Daniel Riley for Network World, businesses are actively searching to find more manageable and cost effective e-mail services.

 

Their article debate highlights the features of Google’s Gmail and Microsoft Exchange. McCormick, chief operating officer at Intermedia and an advocate for Microsoft Exchange, pointed out his reason why the platform was the best out of the two. His list of explanations included:

 

·        Ease of migrating existing e-mail data, users, contacts, and more.

·        Certified 24 hr. support for the tools (Blackberry & Microsoft software)

·        Business-class reliability

·        Control over the environment

 

Meanwhile, Riley, Vice President of Services at Isos Technology acknowledges the criticisms around the Gmail platform and provides his list of supporting points for Gmail which included:

 

·        Gmail and its apps platform costs less on a per user basis.

·        Innovation factor- more than 40 new features were added last year.

·        Support is available for critical issues and escalation needs through a support call line, large online community of users, and apps that offer direct channels for support.

·        Claim that lack of support for mobile devices is quickly diminishing.

 

Click here to read “Tech debate: Google Gmail vs. hosted Microsoft Exchange” in its entirety.

 

In a recent IMF connect, a member discussed their organization’s migration from Microsoft to a web mail solution.

*Company name has been removed for privacy.

Company A Background:

Company A has 8,000 Domestic Users with various chapters that utilize Google or Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS.) The enterprise is structured in chapters similar to a franchise. Some of these chapters use Google’s platform and others use BPOS- which is a web solution that easily integrates with outlook exchange locally.

Key drivers for transition included:

  1. Cost Saving and
  2. Scalability (platform that will take all systems in to one environment)

Transition Approach:

The transition is currently being implemented and will be completed through a segmented approach (i.e. chunks, tiers). Both Google and BPOS provided for self transition solutions.

  • Google has a self transition/migration tool for outlook that allowed the user to migrate the files (PST’s)
  • Dual Solution: Google and Outlook. but eventually folks just stopped using outlook since it was too confusing
  • Training: Web based and very self directed – it brought mixed results as some folks needed more hand holding

PST Files

  • There has been implementation of a “purge rule” which means that all mail cannot be kept for longer than 12 months.
  • Google allows for 25 Gigs per user (pooled)

Major Challenges that Company A faced included:

  • Lack of confidence in the new tool
  • Fear of Security “in the cloud”

To address the challenge of confidence in the new tool, Six to eight months prior to migration there was communication centered around the tools, its benefits, trends (i.e. where the next generation will be: the cloud) and why a migration was going to be implemented. To address the fear of security “in the cloud,” an “evangelist” of the transition in the field was created and the vendors were leveraged to engage with other users. There was also communication about successes experienced in other companies.

According to Company A “The best thing that we did was having the business own the project People on the project team were from the business.”

 

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Security concerns with cloud computing

March 5th, 2010 by May Advincula No comments »

Cloud computing has become a frequent topic of discussion in the industry as individuals and organizations alike wish to eliminate the uncertainty surrounding the concept. Many of the concerns associated with the cloud infrastructure centers around unease with how to effectively handle security management.

 

Tim Greene reported in an article for Network World on Thursday that former National Security Agency technical director, Brian Snow, stated at the RSA Conference that he does not have any trust invested in cloud services.

 

The article states that though Snow recognizes that the cloud infrastructure can deliver services that can be securely accessible by customers. However, vulnerabilities still arise in the shared nature of the environment.

 

The article highlights that users commonly accept known flaws of commercial applications and security products. Greene compares that instilled trust to the trust that Wall Street investors had before the downturn of the market in the last year. Vulnerabilities should be corrected before the first sign of attack.

 

Related IMF Report: Dale Seavey, “Cloud Computing”

 

At an IMF web forum, Dale Seavey, Director of Architecture Design and Engineering at Cisco IT offered insight into cloud computing. “It is part of the responsibility of IT professional’s to take away the veil of uncertainty around the cloud concept,” Seavey said.

 

At Cisco, Seavey and his team are responsible for setting the computing direction for the IT organization for the next three years and putting actions in place that will help them accomplish the initiatives they have established. The three fundamental design pillars determined by the group include:

 

1)      Immediacy

2)      Smaller computing platforms

3)      User experience being key while computing environment and platform are irrelevant.

 

In his presentation, Seavey discussed the history behind Cisco’s email architecture, defined the cloud concept, and offered his predictions on the future of cloud. Seavey defines cloud as an evolution of technologies, or an updated computing paradigm that is a massively scalable and elastic environment. In reference to security for cloud, Seavey states that we are still in the infancy stages of this technology, but maturity and eventual reduction of threat will come.

 

Seavey and his team’s predictions include the idea that the desktop will become irrelevant, the user experience will come through a browser with shared services, software needs to work in a distributed environment. What this means for Cisco and other companies is that organizations will be less likely to implement software without a consistent look and feel, more inclined to look at other desktop operating systems, applications will become more cloud compliant, and the idea that systems who utilize shared elastic services will be implemented.

 

To read this report in its entirety, please click here.

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