Klir Analytics shares IT management advice
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(InfoWorld) - Inspired by the communal wisdom generated on sites like Wikipedia.com, Klir TechnologiesÂ  launched an IT management product Monday intended for system administrators at small and medium businesses. Klir Analytics 3.0 beta allows IT users to publish and share their own favorite fixes, using a software-as-a-service (SAAS) business model. Over time, the most successful software will garner the best ratings, just as the most popular photographs get top billing at Flickr.com, said James Maiocco, Klir's chief executive officer. Klir, of Seattle, hopes to gain the most users at companies that are too small for the Fortune 2000 list, where large corporations get their IT services from long-term contracts with BMC Software, CA, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM, he said. Maiocco is betting that IT managers at small companies would rather get customized service, picking their own products with a buffet-meal approach enabled by Web 2.0 technologies. Using a distributed work model is also more efficient than centralized call centers, since 50 percent of help-desk calls relate to bugs that have already been addressed by patches and release notes, he said. Fewer than 500 people use Klir Analytics 3.0 today, but Klir began distributing a free, entry-level version in August, hoping to enlist 1,000 users and push their results into statistical relevancy. Once that happens, the company will roll out quantitative benchmarking of IT products and services, based on users' reports on applications, bandwidth, networks and servers. Dell launched a similar productÂ in June with its Platinum Plus IT services offering, a dashboard that uses maps from Google Earth to let IT managers track problems and compare their results with other companies. However, Dell's product is for companies with at least 100 servers, while Klir Analytics subscriptions start at $108 per month to manage 10 devices. AÂ closer competitorÂ may be Splunk, a San Francisco company backed by CA whose software lets system administrators search through data on applications, devices and services, then share their troubleshooting advice in a community wiki.
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Organizations face increasing pressures to optimize IT performance while reducing IT costs.  Until now, few organizations had tools to increase Service Level Compliance, adopt ITIL and convince C-level executives that the IT department aligns with business priorities.  Magnum Technologies' Business Service Management whitepaper explores these issues offering client-proven solutions to current problems facing IT organizations.
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IT management? We're listening Reg Reader Studies It won't have escaped your attention that the IT management space is quite a hot topic right now - or at least it is if you listen to IT vendors.â¦
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Analyst says multiple types of software, business controls and processes are key to successful identity and access management.
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IT leaders say success in meeting their CEOs' goals requires their deft handling of human relations.
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Many organizations allocate large resources to implement and deploy packaged ERP, CRM and SCM applications. Now these organizations need to move away from operational efficiency gains achieved and into leveraging their data for performance management and business intelligence.
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This fourth priority&#39;s main focus has been enterprise directories for several months, but for many IT managers, ERP (enterprise resource planning) and open source initiatives are on the horizon.
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Software giant unveils apps for companies with limited IT resources.
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This Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) white paper takes a close look at automated IT management, especially for medium-sized businesses.
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(InfoWorld) - The companies that are having the most success in advancing their data security efforts today are those that are finding a way to protect sensitive information without getting in the way of business users, industry experts maintain. In crafting their data-handling policies and selecting from the multitude of security technologies at their fingertips, those businesses that can foster both ready access to information, along with strong defenses for end-users and IT systems, are making progress the fastest, claim leading vendors and service providers. After years of "throwing technologies" at the data security problem while juggling complex business demands along with external threats and regulatory compliance audits, some businesses are finally discovering that they can simplify the entire process by taking a more comprehensive approach to tailoring their programs to the manner in which their users access, handle, and share information. Even within IT giants like IBM, the struggle to balance security issues with emerging business demands to work with information in new ways hasn't always been approached in this manner, said Julie Donahue, vice president of the security and privacy service in the company's Global Technology Services group. Only through experience and ongoing efforts to constantly rationalize security policies with business demands has the massive firm been able to get a grip on its own data-handling needs, she said. "Customers need to step back and see what their own culture wants. If we locked down everything within IBM, it would be so difficult to manage that we would have a serious management problem, so you have to ask questions around culture before you begin thinking of enforcement," said Donahue. "You have to assess the risk environment and think of this as a holistic problem in terms of how you place bets and need to manage pools of risk, even though that for most CIOs it often feels like you have to spend your time going day-to-day dealing with the crisis of the moment," she said. "You really need to look at where to make the right investments, where to do enforcement, and where to monitor to have a truly strategic view." Donahue said that when IBM was building its security practice roughly 16 months ago, it found that customers were spending as much as 10 percent of their IT budgets dealing with the maintenance and complexity of their data security systems. The only way to reduce the data security management headache is to design an internal framework for managing infrastructure to ensure that investments are being made wisely, she said. In many cases, those companies that are succeeding in that regard are treating their data assets just as they would treat cold, hard cash, the expert maintains. "Companies need to protect their vast ecosystem of data like it is a monetary system, they really have to think about it that way," said Donahue. "It can't be the data center's problem or the network administrator's responsibility alone to protect its security; it has to be everyone's responsibility throughout the entire company." IBM learns about security leaks the hard way As evidence of the types of things that can happen to undermine even a comprehensive security game plan, Donahue pointed to IBM's loss of two backup tapes that contained sensitive information about former employees earlier this year. While the incident was actually related to IBM's provider of backup storage services, the company was forced to pay out roughly $22 million in remediation costs related to informing those people who had been affected and providing credit monitoring services and the like for those individuals, she said. In that sense, companies must also require the highest security standards from their business partners, said the expert. IBM has since written stronger backup-tape handling policies into its contract with its partner as a result of the incident, and Donahue encouraged others to do the same. Phillip Dunkelberger, chief executive at encryption software specialists PGP, said that companies are spending too much time trying to react to data incidents and the individual mandates of compliance regulations while overlooking opportunities to improve data security through smarter process control. Many companies are still too concerned with protecting various endpoint devices and network assets when a more data-driven approach would save them both time and money, he said. "It has to be about the data. Data is very much the currency that people are transacting with, and employees need to be able to get their jobs done, even if that means taking information outside the network," said Dunkelberger. "As complexity grows, things happen -- executives buy iPhones that are essentially 60GB storage devices that run on Open BSD and allow third-party applications," he said. "Defending the device is going to be a losing war, and even if you try to do that, people will inevitably add to the device or change its configuration." While it unsurprising that Dunkelberger advocates the use of encryption as an intelligent way to overcome the complexity of changing IT infrastructure and business demands of defending data, he said that problems are most often related to faulty policies, not the types of technologies used for information protection. The heightened information security atmosphere of today isn't as much a result of the rapid growth of mobile computing or shared infrastructure between companies, but rather an issue of poor data architecture from the top down, he said. "Unless we start having a comprehensive discussion about the defense of data, the problem will only continue to persist, and not just in relation to hackers or compliance," Dunkelberger said. "Everyone has policies, but it is interesting how much intellectual property is being targeted and stolen despite that; more of these attacks are coming, and that will only increase costs and complexity if handled improperly because these are the crown jewels of the organizations that are being targeted," he said.
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Surging data center power usage is building to a potential crisis, but there are many steps that IT managers can take today to start reducing power consumption without making a huge investment -- or sacrificing performance or availability.
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IT managers may want to read and consider the implications of how new rulings set to take effect may impact their organization.
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Knowledge@Wharton goes inside the IT conundrum to examine why capital spending--and corporate confidence--remains low.
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This recent study finds that IT executives are challenged by timeliness, relevancy and sheer access to data when trying to measure the value of application development investments. Only 4% have visibility into application maintenance spending. Are you accounting for 100% of your AD value? Review this report by IDG Research & MKS today.
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Three new software management tools are designed to help businesses keep applications configured properly to avoid snarl-ups.
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This paper explains how the newest offering from Cognos - Cognos 8 Business Intelligence - can help organizations avoid the "Fatal Flaws" of Business Intelligence and Performance Management.  The Cognos Views are not intended to be exhaustive; rather, they are intended to act as an introduction to Cognos 8 BI and a catalyst for further reading.
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A veteran analyst provides some salient advice on getting the next big stock.