SDA India Magazine (Digital Edition)
Volume 09, October 2007
ITIL Plus COBIT: Formula for Success in IT Governance
By Peter Hill, Ken Turbitt
IT professionals face the challenging, but necessary, transition to IT management based on business priorities. ITIL and COBIT are complementary methodologies that put you on a fast track to applying IT, not just to support business goals, but also to drive them. While ITIL promotes alignment between the services delivered and the needs of the business, COBIT provides the framework for goal setting and measurement. The article discusses how ITIL and COBIT let you increase the quality of business services you deliver while lowering overall costs.
Set Your Sights on IT Service Management Excellence
By Ken Turbitt
The ISO 20000 standard allows enterprises to demonstrate to customers, investors, auditors, and other stakeholders that it operates with business integrity and security and fosters a culture of continual quality improvement in IT Service Management (ITSM). For enterprises in which quality IT services are essential to business success—for example, financial services, utilities, and health services—it is proof of a well-managed IT environment. Whether your enterprise needs to seek certifi cation or not, ISO 20000 is a standard that’s well worth understanding and leveraging as a guide for implementing ITSM best practices, as the article explains.
Getting More than You Paid For: Implement COBIT to Achieve Regulatory Compliance
By Cindy Sterling, Chris Williams
By establishing and implementing controls, processes, and technology with multiple regulations in mind, you can build a strong foundation that permits you to exploit the commonalities among the regulations that apply to your business. Because of its wide scope and its risk reduction and control assurance, COBIT offers an effective means of establishing the controls you need for regulatory compliance. The article explains how you can leverage the COBIT framework to minimise the time and money required to comply with a broad range of rules and regulations.
CIO Watch: Seven Steps to Successful Change Management for the Data Center
By Kia Behnia
What’s the best way to approach change for the data center? Do you have a formal, documented process supported by automated tools that allow you to implement change without disrupting critical services? Or, do you have a jumble of siloed management tools and manual approaches that too often result in failed changes, major outages, reduced employee productivity, and the risk of a tainted company image and financial loss?
Blading A New Trail
By Ng Song Wah
Small and large organisations alike are harnessing new capabilities and features in blade server technology to centralise and simplify their IT environments. What customers want in any server are scalability, versatility, performance, availability, easy serviceability, simple systems management and deployment, as well as cost savings. The article explains how blade server architecture offers all this and more.
Intelligently Managing Information and Storage Assets
By Steve Widen
Businesses are constantly looking at lowering costs, mitigating risk and improving service levels, to operate at peak efficiency. From an information management perspective, these goals translate into efficient utilisation, secure management of data and storage assets, and close alignment of storage architectures with business needs. The article exaplains that by defining and implementing an intelligent storage management strategy, IT organisations can successfully cope with the growing volume and complexity of enterprise information—while controlling the capital costs and management burdens associated with storage infrastructure. Intelligent Storage Management assumes continual re-evaluation and thus enables organisations to better manage storage operations and infrastructure to meet the changing needs of the business environment.
The IPS Imperative in the New Network Security Landscape
By Tony Teo
Network security is a constant battle for network administrators, a zero-sum game that gets tougher as networks get increasingly complex. Already, attacks are getting more sophisticated, and as more of business moves online and internal processes are tied together, the cost of an intrusion jumps dramatically. The result is that more operations, employees, and profits are going to be affected. The article discusses why an Intrusion Prevention System should be an essential part of the security strategy for any networked business.
Thin is In…Again
By Joergen Jakobsen
Rapid scaling up of functionalities and capabilities has seen companies across the breadth of industries adopt thin client solutions. Today, thin client infrastructures is ideal for organisations that are looking to substantially reduce operating expenses, undertake PC hardware and software upgrades, and consolidate their IT infrastructure. Thin clients deliver a high-level of availability as well as broad application support. Most signifi cantly, thin clients provide solutions for enterprises concerned about data security and virus threats as well as software and regulatory compliance. The article talks about why Thin Clients are a technology whose time has come.
Delivering Applications with Confidence
By Peter Pritchard
IT organisations recognise that there’s significant value in testing applications early and often. The challenge, however, has been to fi nd the right tools and methods to enable developers and development teams to test early and often, without negatively affecting developer productivity or investing excessive time and resources in such proactive testing. Continuous Integrated Testing, or CIT, is an alternative to the traditional approach to unit and functional testing. It allows organisations to better align the development and testing organisations to deliver high quality applications effi ciently. The article details the benefits that CIT can deliver and how to implement a CIT approach to gain development and QA efficiencies.
News & Trends
By SDA
Oracle Boosts Identity Management Portfolio with Bharosa Buy
Amazon Invests in DRM-Free Digital Music Site
Metastorm Acquires Proforma Corporation
France Telecom Expands India Presence with GTL’s IT Services Unit Buy
Datacenter Vendor Consolidation on the Rise: HP Buys Marc Andreessen’s Opsware
Indian Outsourcer Mastek Acquires Vector Insurance
Yahoo Escalates Online Ad War, Invests in Indian Ad Company Tyroo
Reliance Communications Dials Yipes
Google Acquires Hosted Security Firm Postini