Technology Transformation : Delivering to-day's business value

Biometric authentication will augment current EMV chip card - "I see" series

2016-12-28T13:01:00.000-05:00

I DECIDED TO PUBLISH WHAT “I see” IN THE TECHNOLOGY SOLVING OUR CRITICAL ISSUES. SOME OF THEM MAY BE ALREADY IN THE LAB AND SOME ARE NOT. THIS IS THE FIRST ARTICLE IN THIS SERIES

I see…

We will see biometric authentication integrated into today’s EMV chip as next step of evolution in – credit card payment system security.

I see an opportunity to further secure existing payment system by adding another layer of security. If we integrate biometric authentication (Fingerprint) technology with the current Chip Card (EMV - Chip and Pin) then Debit / Credit /ATM card will be more secure. Current EMV – chip and PIN card protects identity theft only. There is no security at card owner level. Anyone can use the physical card because there is no security at card owner level. The biometric authentication (fingerprint) technology is now very matured, so it can eliminate this security gap by adding an additional layer of security to the current EMV (Chip and Pin) cards. If we integrate the capabilities of both technologies in the future debit/credit/ATM card, we will be able to protect our card from the wrong person or agent. Addition of biometric/fingerprint to EMV – PIN and CHIP card will give us an extra protection. Integrated chip solution will allow only the right owner to use his/her card. It will eliminate many business processes that providers, merchants, and card holders currently going through. The new chip card will also reduce operational expenditure.

This is just my thought. I assume this thought may be already in some OEM’s Lab and they are developing the new authentication chip, new process flow, and creating a prototype.

Making IT system highly secured and resilient

2016-08-22T16:07:00.000-04:00

Recent news – Oracle systems hacked, Delta system down, Amazon system outage are becoming very common news. We have all the technology and solution to avoid these situations.

IT security and business continuity has always been a concern for IT professionals. Worldwide political events, privacy concern, regulatory demands, external attacks, corporate financial crises, and identity theft have contributed to making security management and systems resiliency a boardroom level priority. Enterprises want to make their IT Infrastructure resilient and they also understand the need to maintain service levels to satisfy today’s dynamic business. Maintaining a secured and highly resilient system needs innovative thinking.

We will notice Business continuity of most enterprises focus upon a defensive resilience posture, it consist of three building blocks – Recovery, Hardening and Redundancy – these are widely recognized as vital ingredient for successful business continuity plans. A defensive posture is useful in protecting the organization and its revenue streams but it does not directly help the bottom line.

An offensive resilience posture also consists of three building blocks, which are focused upon improving the organization’s competitive position – Accessibility, Diversification and Autonomic computing. In practice these building blocks can be used all together or in various combinations depending upon need. For example diversifying operations might allow hardening to be limited other than at sites where critical applications and data reside. The resiliency building blocks are illustrated diagrammatically bellow.

I consider business resilience encompasses business as well as IT and it can be thought of as spanning six discrete layers: Strategy, Organization, Process, data/application, technology and facilities/security.

Strategy includes:

1. Governance Strategy

2. Financial strategy

3. Continuity strategy

4. Communications strategy

5. New product/services strategy

6. Risk management.

Organization includes:

1. Roles

2. Responsibilities

3. Structures

4. Skills

5. Cross-organizational cooperation

Process Includes:

1. IT Process

§ Change management

§ Problem management

§ Incident management

§ Availability management

2. Business Process

§ Sales Order

§ Financial

§ CRM

§ Claims processing

§ Business controls and System Management Process (IT Infrastructure Library)

3. Cross-Functional Process

§ Business Continuity

§ Quality Management

§ R&D

§ ERP

Applications and Data include:

1. Data security

2. Data storage

3. Application architecture and design

4. Backup and recovery

Technology Includes:

1. Hardware architectures

2. System software

3. Middleware

4. Networks

5. Delivery channel

6. Disruptive technology

Facilities and Security include:

1. Physical and logical security

2. Safeguard access

3. Power protection

4. Environmental considerations

5. Security Architecture of the Systems / IT Infrastructure

This model itself is scalable and can be applied to an enterprise, to an individual location, a key business process or IT system. Clearly, a number of lower level considerations embedded in each layer. For example, the Facility/Security layer should consider various aspects of physical and logical security, power protection and environmental consideration. Business Resilience achieve by implementing continuity, availability, security, recovery and scalability spanning and supporting six discrete layers outlined above combine to deliver Business resilience.

Developing technology strategy to support today's dynamic business environment

2016-08-02T14:43:00.002-04:00

Developing technology strategy for an enterprise become more and more complex. Today’s dynamic nature of the business, rapid change of technology, frequently evolving new technology solution making strategy development an on-going effort. Enterprises are monitoring and revisiting strategy and technology road map periodically and modifying accordingly. Even strategy development for next couple of years is a big challenge for enterprises. Architecture thinking and decisions are playing a pivotal role. As always business drivers are the fundamental driving force behind all Architectural Principles, Policies, and Decisions. Innovative thinking is essential for all architecture decision, well thought-out principal and policy can help the enterprise to protect their IT investment. Architect needs to take a holistic look while validating the motivation and implication of all decisions.

If we take a simplistic approach in developing strategy for today’s environment, we will find Market trend, Global Technology Outlook, Customer centric design, and innovative ideas – use cases are major influence factors when we establish a business vision. Similarly we see business needs to consider business innovation, new product, new business model, and business processes to augment current or adapt a new business line. Following self-explanatory picture depicts a strategy development approach in today’s environment.

Infrastructure architecture is the paramount issue for all business leaders to accommodate disruptive technology such as Mobile, Cloud, Internet, and Analytics. These technologies need robust infrastructure and well thought out underpinning hardware, software, and right technology solution. Digital business imperatives are pushing enterprises to modernize their infrastructure and new architecture for applications. New generation mobile application, Internet of things (IoT), network-speed computing, and high performance enterprise will require maximum efficiency, agility, and speed. Innovation across the entire stack can only help to capture the business growth opportunities created by the new technologies. Therefore business will be transformed by these system improvements, like transition from reactive to predictive analytics, from static to streaming data, from real to virtual prototypes, from batch to interactive computing. Aggregation of compute intensive, application-specific appliances and storage sub-systems, optimized network, along with middleware and system software will provide compelling differentiation in the new paradigm.

Anticipating those changes strategy development process need to go beyond traditional development process. Enterprise can be in advantage position by utilizing wealth of information, capturing opportunities created by moving from fragmented global footprints towards true global integration. Enterprises need to think, how they should adapt to the expectations of its new clients and the ever faster pace of change that it brings?

NOTE: For detail method and technical paper please contact me.

Third Dimension - in Strategy and Roadmap

2015-07-24T14:19:00.000-04:00

Incorporating Technology Outlook is an essential step in establishing IT Strategy for any organizations in today’s rapid changing business and technology landscape. Considering technology outlook in architecture development method can eliminate many risks and also can protect investment because of dynamic nature of today’s business. It is surprising to note that most methods do not incorporate Technology Outlook.

Enterprise has multiple line-of-businesses, therefore when we are thinking about strategy we need to know the business goals for each LoB along with their respective visions. Each LoB establishes their own goals based on market situation, market trend, and most of all they want to position themselves ahead of their competitors. These business goals are also need to align with the overall enterprise’s business goals. Establishing a strategy is a true art of employing stratagems towards the goal of the enterprise and can be accomplished by adopting a holistic approach. Therefore understanding enterprise’s goal, vision, and mission is an essential step in developing strategy that can fulfill overall enterprise’s goal. In today’s dynamic environment Technology Outlook plays a very critical role, I call it a third dimension. To establish a strategy, typically we consider where the enterprise is today and where they want to go by enabling capabilities that enterprise does not have. We align IT transformation to business requirements. This process primarily focuses on business, current architecture, technology, people, and processes to find the gaps. It is a two dimensional approach. Architectural thinking and architectural decisions should also be influenced by the Technology Outlook or the Third Dimension. We design blue print and the road map based on target architecture, but without considering the third dimension the strategy may not be effective for a future date. We must know how much today’s architecture decision will be able to sustain the future changes due to continuous innovation of new technology and customers’ demand.

The third dimension needs substantial research and trend analysis. If we look back we see the change in –

1) Foundation – Transformative Enterprise Computing

a. New emerging applications require substantial improvements in system characteristics such as performance, power efficiency and cost/performance.

b. Solution-optimized systems support aggregation of compute intensive, network optimized, application-specific, storage sub-systems, together with middleware and system software.

c. Capturing the growth opportunities require fundamental innovation across the entire stack.

d. Business has been transformed over time because of system improvements. Like transition from reactive to predictive analytics, from static to streaming data,

2) Foundation – Security,

a. We see multitier containment security has emerged to complement perimeter based security architecture.

b. The vulnerability and threat landscape is changing

c. Rapid growth of information volume and fast adoption of new technologies making traditional perimeter defense obsolete.

d. Far field fraud detection technologies providing early warnings about security breaches and fraudulent transactions before such incidents emerge to complement existing near field techniques.

Similarly we find rapid change in Business Decision category

3) Business decision – Digital Economy

a. International and national government introduced new regulation and monitoring policy, therefore financial firms implement mechanism to comply transparency and reporting.

b. Mobile Financial Services and expansion of mobile banking changing the concept of interactions of customers with the financial institute.

c. Transparent Securitization

4) Business decision – Data for smart decision

a. Although analytics technology has a proven and growing ability to create value from data, new technology made the data usable for all decision makers, not just analysts.

b. Huge amounts of heterogeneous data of variable quality require better tools to identify data that is relevant for smart decision making.

c. Database technology has moved from traditional to new paradigm of data management using hardware and software integration techniques, fabric based computing model. Data access and storing techniques leveraging new technology that include operating systems, memory utilization, faster access path.

d. The ability to pull value from massive amounts of data and respond to real-time information is becoming a crucial competitive differentiator. Value is realized by making smart data-driven decisions.

We also see the revolution in quality of services and customer experiences.

Therefore, without considering technology outlook in defining strategy, deriving Road Map and Architecture Blue print from this process may not help an enterprise to move in the right direction. So our challenge is:

(1) Integrating Technology outlook into Strategy development

(2) Strategy that will satisfy today’s need must accommodate tomorrow’s new technology.

(3) How we synchronize and integrate Business Architecture, Information Architecture, Technology Architecture, future technology, and potential new computing model in this innovative dynamic new business world

(4) How will you deliver strategy while protecting client’s investment and without reworking on any component of the framework.

(5) How SOA implementation strategy can support future technology.

Value of Pattern in Fabric-based computing model

2012-07-25T12:43:00.001-04:00

Almost two years back I wrote a small column about the value of pattern in Architecture Design, this is now more relevant in today’s fabric-based computing (FBC) model. IBM and Oracle have already adopted fabric-based computing, I am sure other vendors are also in the market or will adopt FBC model soon. Architect will now have to include pattern analysis in their architecture designing method. If we cannot establish the pattern correctly we will land up into old stove-pipe scenario. Pattern and non-functional requirements will be the standard for Architecture Design work for the new FBC model.

Pattern are not something new, it is around for a long time. Pattern landscape encompassing both structural architecture and behavioral architecture will help to determine the right configuration of FBC model. Please stay tune for detail on Pattern Landscape design.

Social Media - a pradigm shift

2012-06-04T17:28:00.000-04:00

Social Media - a pradigm shift

Social Media has changed the Business Model for most enterprises. Business leaders are realizing that it is not possible to cut cost and grow the business at the same time by simply doing the same thing again and again. They are seeking new ideas and want to unlock new source of values within and outside their organization. They realized that they have to do new things that can produce different business results. Successful enterprises are making innovation their top priority. They understand that innovation is the only way to create sustainable competitive advantage in today’s changing world of new economy, and rising global competition. Enterprises are embracing new technology and new way of thinking. The Social Media Technology is now matured and has established itself as one of the incubators of innovation. In the past, businesses leaders felt they have to create everything themselves. Today, social media technology has changed the way we used to think and do our businesses. It is helping enterprises to harvest innovation and uncover vast resources within the enterprise. The new technology showing us new forms of collaboration are possible—within a company, between companies, with online communities of experts and even with countless unknown individuals around the world. Employees can share ideas and work on projects with unprecedented ease. Experts of same or related subject area can team with those of another company. The open source software movement has delivered powerful operating system LINUX. This is just an example, it shows how widely distributed communities can come together virtually to create and improve products. Enterprise can engage with the entire networked world to learn, to capture feedback—or to turn their customers into co-creators, sharing thoughts and Ideas. No matter which financial metric is used—revenue growth, operating margin growth or average profit over time will sharply increase by adopting social media and strong collaboration. Collaboration optimizes human side of the processes. It also shortens business processes cycle time. Most important of all it makes the human resources more productive and innovative.

Social Media is in the core of Social Business. It helps the enterprises become more innovative, helps to unlock untapped resources for better business outcome, revenue growth and increase in productivity.

Successful colaboration strategy

2011-12-01T18:06:00.000-05:00

How to increase employee productivity and grow business is the biggest challenge to the CEO, CFO and CIOs in today’s globally integrated business environment. Complex global economy, diverse types of users and usage are making these tasks more challenging. If we look closely, we will see collaboration technologies optimize human side of the processes. It also shortens processes cycle time. Most important of all it makes the human resources more productive and help to control cost. There are four types of users namely knowledge workers, task workers, power users, and data entry. Knowledge workers and task workers get maximum benefit out of collaboration. Enterprises are deploying collaboration tools to Partners, Customers, Knowledge workers, and task workers. Collaborative tools shorten processing cycle as well as unblock processes. It removes error through group activities, it also increase participation to an activities at global level. Overall it generates better business outcome. It drives overall growth of an enterprise, creates a culture of innovation, and helps to control cost. An open platform for collaboration should be built using flexible and open programmability technology. A successful collaboration must develop efficient means of working, it should create a culture of innovation, and helps innovate through collective talent. Collaboration also leverage and preserve tacit knowledge, establish strong relationship with business partners and customers. It should be an accelerator to business growth and control cost. Collaboration solutions can be categorized in to three areas: Collaborative environment, Collaboration enabled business processes, and role based portals. Successful integration of team collaborations, portals, messaging, communications, and social networking are the key to the successful implementation of collaboration. If we consider each collaboration capability component as a service and use service oriented architecture approach and select right products and delivery models to a business that best suited for them then it will add real value and will be considered as successful implementation of a collaboration strategy for any firm. Product agnostic thinking is the key. There are many products and tools available in the market place. It requires right approach and right viability study.

Third dimension in developing strategy

2011-06-28T17:53:00.002-04:00

Strategy is the art of devising or employing plans or stratagems toward a goal according to Merriam Webster dictionary. In any organizations there are multiple business areas and each business area will have multiple line of businesses, therefore when we are talking about strategy we need to know goals for each line of businesses (LoB) along with that of Information Technology. Each LoB will establish their own goals based on the market situation, market trend, and most of all how to position themselves at competitive edge. These LoBs goals are also need to align with the overall enterprise’s business goals. The establishing a strategy is a true art of devising or employing plans or stratagems towards the goal of the enterprise and can be accomplished by using a holistic approach. Therefore understanding company’s goal, vision, and mission is an essential step in developing IT strategy that can fulfill overall enterprise’s goal. Most consulting companies have created practices /offerings and developed competency specifically to support their clients in developing a strategy. Each firm has their own techniques and method to establish strategy. Most of us consider relationship and alignment of Enterprise Strategy with Enterprise Architecture, but the most critical piece I see missing everywhere, which I call the third dimension, the Technology Outlook or the new technology. We consider where the enterprise is today and where they want to go. Based on target architecture we design a blue print and road map without considering the third dimension that is technology outlook, new technology that will affect the future business. How do you know how much your today’s architecture decision will affect due to continuous evolution of new technology? The biggest challenge I see:

(1) Integrating Technology outlook into Strategy development

(2) Strategy that will satisfy today’s need and will accommodate tomorrow’s new technology.

(3) How will you synchronize and integrate Business Architecture, Information Architecture, Technology Architecture, future technology, and potential new computing model in this innovative dynamic new business world

(4) How will you deliver strategy while protecting client’s investment and without reworking on any component of the framework that you develop using this strategy.

(5) SOA implementation strategy that can support future technology.

We need a pattern based approach that can satisfy all these questions and factor-in all five challenges.

For technique paper and approach please contact me. I will be happy to discuss further and will provide you the intellectual capitals that I have created for strategy and road map development.

Technology outlook a paradigm shift

2011-06-02T16:30:00.002-04:00

We are in the midst of transformation phase of information technology. Enterprises are shifting their focus on digitizing their enterprise. As the economy goes more and more digital managing the value created by the digital economy becoming more and more challenging. We see emerging mobile financial services, mobile banking services using non-banking infrastructure like the merger of super telecom technology with banking services. Enterprises are becoming more and more dependable on data, as the data transforming enterprise to smarter decision. Enterprises are digitizing their enterprise to increase service quality as well as increase in revenue growth. Definition of IT transformation has changed to digitizing enterprise. Cloud Computing has transformed the old IT architecture into new paradigm. Near Field Communication (NFC), Unified Threat Management (UTM), next generation firewall, Cloud computing, web services, and Service orientation immensely contributed to this new business process landscape. This is not new news, but most enterprises are started realizing the value of new generation information technology.

It is very clear that the technology is blending with the business to support dynamic nature of the new economy. The mobile web is now matured, the rise of social networking, globalization and the availability of global resources as well as the onset of real time data streaming and access to information are changing the traditional datacenter concept. These are all becoming interconnected and the advancements in technology are driving this at a greater speed. One new approach that is helping to address these issues is Cloud computing. We see this trend as one that will greatly change the way people acquire, deploy and manage IT services.

Therefore the scope of IT Strategy and road map has been extended. The following picture depicts the logical view of the new landscape of enterprise information technology services and delivery model. This highly integrated, flexible, real time interaction, and catalyst for rapid innovation are enabled by architecture design style and cloud computing infrastructure.

Physical consolidation, virtualization of server, storage, network along with right provisioning and workload management technologies can be leveraged to accomplish an optimized and efficient underpinning cloud computing infrastructure. Therefore, augmenting existing strategy and road map may suffice to fulfill the current transformation need. But delivery channel and web component need significant architecture work. That includes social media strategy, collaboration, governance for the new added fabric, and security. For detail approach and how to create a measureable and actionable road map for this transformation please contact me. I will be happy to provide you all relevant artifacts and reference materials that can be used as a framework and reference architecture model.

Business and Technology become more and more entwine...

2011-05-11T14:22:00.007-04:00

Correctly speaking, IT is aligning with other Line of Businesses of an enterprise to achieve IT’s contribution level to the overall enterprise objective. IT is just like any other Line of Business. Remember Business is not IT’s customer. "Business is a customer of IT" is an old concept. To make simple I will refer IT LoB as IT and other LoBs as Business.

Business and Technology become more and more entwine. IT is trying to align with the business, but it is become more and more challenging, because enterprises are expecting IT to take lead in IT and Business convergence process.

So, we need to focus on business side design and processes. While analyzing the business issues, it is essential to tighten the linkage between Technology and the Business, specifically integrating the IT with business to support today’s business need. The dynamic nature of the business implies rapid change. For business leaders, the impact of change is profound. They must contend with an increasingly diverse set of emerging competitors, an unpredictable socio-economic environment, and an increasingly demanding and fickle customer set. In addition to all of these challenges, they must meet the expectation of financial markets that their organization will deliver consistent growth in profitability, despite the dynamic environment in which they operate. The characteristics of the IT operating environment must create superior competitive capabilities and will be able to focus on defining and managing their differentiating capabilities. The environment needs to build flexible business and technology structures to allow IT infrastructure to be more responsive to market changes – and do so at lower costs in near real-time. This can be accomplished by creating enterprise architecture using TOGAF framework. It will be most effective, proven and efficient approach. We will discuss starting from Business Architecture, Phase B of TOGAF.

Most enterprises have representative business processes and design, but elaboration of corresponding business architecture may not exist. It will be appropriate if the enterprise adopt a two prong approach. Implementing such architecture will create competitive advantages for the organization and enable it to realize operational efficiencies and overall improvement. Careful orchestrated Enterprise Architecture design will pay back. Business Architecture is not a waste in a project. A typical business reference model (BRM) uses a three tiered hierarchy with Business Areas at the highest level, followed by Line of Business and finally business sub-function. One should review business process and design when working on each tier of BRM and design a cohesive Business Architecture. Designing Data Architecture using Data Reference Module in conjunction with Business Architecture will pay off in the long run. Analyzing Business context for data categorization and analyzing data element for data structure need business architecture documents as input. Compromising BA documents is not a good idea. Go to Basics… Business Architecture, Data Architecture, and together with Use Case documents can help to create an underpinning system that will pay back and truly eliminate the complexity. Following picture depicts the flow of BA, UML diagram, and then uses these artifacts as an input to Information architecture. For detail explanation and white papers please contact me.

Business Architecture Components

Reference use: Open group and TOGAF .

So, you design cloud infrastructure using SOA design style and adopt web service as your preferred implementation model

2011-04-25T14:02:00.004-04:00

Figure 1

Cloud Computing, Service Oriented Architecture, and Web Services, all are here and these three are the major contributors to the new IT Trend. Cloud computing is emerging as a big market opportunity. Vendors are coming up with various products and solutions to acquire market share in the Cloud computing. Now we have many options to select a cloud computing vendor based on our specific needs. According to a recent report top ten vendors, who are providing cloud computing services and products are listed in this site. They can enable your cloud infrastructure through providing services, products, and solutions. But you should make your own decision where and how you want to move forward with new IT trend. In this article I will focus on cloud computing, SOA, and Web Services to provide some food for thought in decision making process.

Many enterprises are already started investing and some are in planning phase. Biggest challenge is how to implement these technologies or transform existing infrastructure and operating environment into new paradigm of computing model. How to do the transformation of existing infrastructure? In this column I will first explore what SOA, Web services, and Cloud computing are? Is there any synergy among them? How they fit with each other? Then we can create a strategy to adopt SOA, Web services, and Cloud computing to transform existing IT environment into new generation of computing model. It is important we must know what they are. So, we will be able to make right decision.

Service Oriented Architecture or SOA is a design style and it is existed for some time. Design style is always built upon a set of principles which governs its characteristics and use. SOA has the following characteristics: encapsulation, modular, loosely couple, separation of concerns, composability, and single implementation. Does it sound familiar? Is this not similar to object oriented design? Is not SOA an evolution of object oriented design? Answers to all these questions are “YES”. Therefore, SOA is not new to IT Architecture domain, rather, evolution from object oriented model. Like any other design style, SOA also benefited from the lessons learned from its predecessor design style. SOA style of design offers several benefits to an enterprise, like it can reduce product development life cycle, increase business responsiveness, and agility. These business benefits are tremendous in today’s dynamic business environment and new economy. IT community also benefitted through SOA adoption. As SOA design style helps to build services once and use multiple times, it promotes process consistency. SOA design style standardizes integration and reduces solutions complexity. Therefore, SOA is a design style that provides benefits to both business and IT Communities.

Web Services is a technology that follows the SOA style of design. SOA and its underlying principles have existed longer than Web Services. Web service is the instantiation of service oriented architecture, it use open standard, interoperability, and asynchronous implementation of decoupled systems. Therefore, it is a preferred technology choice for implementing SOA. On the other hand there are many web services implementations that are not SOA, like connecting two heterogeneous systems directly together. Web services have three components, Service requester, Service provider, and Service registry. They perform Bind, Publish, and Find functions.

In my previous article I discussed cloud computing in detail. Infrastructure service is most critical in cloud computing environment. It can help enterprise to scale up to massive capacities. Elastic characteristic of cloud computing can provide on-demand resource provisioning. This eliminates over-provisioning when used with utility pricing. It also removes the need to over-provision in order to meet the demands of millions of users. All are achieved at infrastructure and middleware services layer. Underpinning technologies enable all these capabilities. Cloud computing benefits to small and medium-sized businesses who wish to completely outsource their data-center infrastructure, or large companies who wish to get peak load capacity without incurring the higher cost of building larger data centers internally. This is a very important decision point.

So you create cloud infrastructure using SOA design style and adopt web service as your preferred implementation model. Now the most challenging part is decision. We have many scenarios, many data points to consider, which is the right for your company? So on and so forth. Each components of the logical view (Figure 1) of the new IT environment need proper evaluation. Many questions need to be answered. Making right decision is the key to the success of your target Enterprise Architecture.

Inside cloud computing

2011-03-31T14:49:00.004-04:00

Recent study by Yankee Group revealed, by 2014 cloud computing will be $42B market. Much is being talked about cloud computing. Some people believe even today, it is hype, because it uses already established computing technology, others think it is disruptive trend representing the next level in the evolution of the internet. Few years back in Web 2.0 Expo a question was asked “What is cloud computing?” The answers were captured and uploaded in the YouTube by Joyent, very interesting video. We learn cloud computing definition from users’ perspective; it delivers services to the consumers in a simplified way. As an user you do not need to know how you are getting the service. But the enterprise adopting cloud computing model need to know the detail about: cloud computing architecture, what are the requirements, how to develop, how to implement, what are all benefits, so on and so forth. Here I will look into the basics of cloud computing from a very high level.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provides somewhat more objective and specific definition as depicted in the following picture:

Let’s focus on Cloud computing characteristics, we see, cloud computing architecture has two distinct domains that enable cloud computing. They are Infrastructure, which is comprised of Network, Server, Storage, and Software. Infrastructure which will provide on demand self service capability, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured services. Network component of infrastructure will provide broad network access. Other domain is the end user, who will use the cloud services.

Infrastructure – On demand Self service: IT Infrastructure needs to provide secured computing resources 24X7 with five nines availability, and should be resilient to enable cloud services. A virtual platform is ideal to provide computing power.

In the Cloud computing era business resilience has moved us from the sense of reacting to recover from an event to becoming impervious to the event. Business continuity focus upon a defensive resilience posture, it consist of three building blocks – Recovery, Hardening and Redundancy – that are widely recognized as vital ingredient for successful business continuity plans. A defensive posture is useful in protecting the organization and its revenue streams but it does not help the bottom line that will support cloud computing environment and overall business growth.

Three further building blocks that support an offensive resilience posture, which are focused upon improving the organization’s competitive position in the cloud environment – Accessibility, Diversification and Autonomic computing. In practice these building blocks can be used all together or in various combinations depending upon need. For example diversifying operations might allow hardening to be limited other than at sites where critical applications and data reside.

Business Resilience should encompass: continuity, availability, security, recovery and scalability spanning and supporting six discrete layers to support on demand self service for greater QoS to the end users.

IT Infrastructure – Rapid scaling: Scaling an IT infrastructure means managing the performance and capacities of each component within the infrastructure. The basic objectives of scaling a component/system are to:

Increase the capacity or speed of the component.
Improve the efficiency of the component/system.
Shift or reduce the load on the component.
Improve overall customer experience

Increasing the scalability of one component, the result may change the dynamics of the entire site service; thereby it is moving the bottleneck to another component. The scalability of the infrastructure depends on the ability of each component to scale to meet increasing demands. So we need to take a holistic view of the IT Infrastructure that include server, clustering, network, storage, workload, and understand the application environment.

Infrastructure: Resource pooling is more about computing resource management to support 24X7 and 99.999 availability. This can be accomplished by adopting virtualization technology. Server, storage and network virtualization can support computing resource requirement more efficiently, but to have optimum computing resource and cost/performance perspective it is essential to do right provisioning by adopting just-in-time approach. Remember most virtualization solutions are not efficiently provisioned and adopt just-in-case approach.

To enable measured service an utility computing services require. The utility computing system (also referred to as a utility system or simply a utility) is a system that can automatically create and manage multiple utility computing services (utilities services, for short) on a shared infrastructure. The infrastructure consists of pool of hardware resources, such as servers, storage, and network appliances, as well as software resources, such as operating systems, middleware, and applications.

Utility computing services is the “pay-as-you-go” model. To implement this model, one needs a flexible way to meter the services and resources being used. The UMI (Universal Management Infrastructure) architecture, designed to provide common functions that are needed by most, if not all, of the utilities in a utility computing system, includes a critical metering function. The architecture of the metering system is hierarchical and highly flexible. The metering service architecture should include how UMI's metering service function is used in the context of utility computing services, for collecting and storing metered data, computing service metrics (which are useful to the data-consuming applications), and feeding the metrics to various consumer modules (e.g., for accounting and billing).

Infrastructure: Broad network access can be accomplished by augmenting existing typical resilient network topology, like point to point connections, mesh configuration, ring configuration, various fiber transport to support failover, through newer trend like Yankee Group’s Anywhere IT approach.

We need to do lot of work to support the cloud computing model at infrastructure level. Eliminating detail foundation work may deliver Cloud computing for the enterprise faster, but at some point need to take a holistic look and assess the total need to support cloud computing. I am creating a detail approach and reference architecture to enable enterprise cloud computing for our clients. Please contact me for the artifacts. Before closing this article I would like you to think … how SOA, Web services, and Cloud computing fit together?

Merging EAI, EII, and ETL initiatives can add more values and it is economical

2011-02-07T12:49:00.017-05:00

Last August I discussed about enterprise application integration to address CEOs challenge and pain points. Simplification and Sustainability were the two major concerns for most CEOs in 2010. I think this issue will remain for the next couple of years until enterprise IT environments are fully integrated. We need to have a single virtualized platform that provides the technical underpinning of the system. This should be architected from the ground up as a modern, open, web services, services-oriented platform. The platform sits on top of the existing infrastructure investments and provides one single solution for any business person. Therefore, the magic word is Integration. Adopting right techniques for the integration will be the key to success in the new economy. Platform requires providing universal capabilities to deliver targeted information to knowledge workers, decision-makers, and other business folks in the organization whenever and wherever they need it. These capabilities enable users across the organization so that regardless of where individuals sit.

Now the challenge is how to make the architecture simple. Most enterprises are struggling to simplify their IT Infrastructure, too many applications, too many systems. Some of them may be redundant. They are not integrated. At the same time business areas trying to unlock the business value of the information for competitive advantage. Business Executives are facing tremendous challenge the information they are getting cannot be trusted because of silos information, or provide miss information due to volume and variety they are having, or reading wrong information due to dynamic nature of the business. Therefore most IT Organizations are facing three major issues:

(1) Applications need to be integrated at enterprise level

(2) Information need to be integrated and consistent throughout the organization

(3) Information must be trusted across the organization

The best way to approach these issues to look into all three problems are at the same time. Because if we visualize a typical information architecture framework we see three unique services we need in the information integration layer to deliver trusted information on a single glass pan and among others services they are:

(1) Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) service,

(2) Enterprise Information Integration (EII) service,

(3) Extract Transform and Load (ETL) service,

and their unique capabilities in combination address those issues.

For application-to-application integration EAI will provide message-based, transaction-oriented, point-to-point or point-to-hub brokering techniques, EII will provide optimized & transparent data access and transformation layer providing a single relational interface across all enterprise data, and ETL will help set-oriented, point-in-time transformation for migration, consolidation, and data warehousing. The common thread “Transformation” related to data may confuse us. But all three are unique and we need to have all three to create a robust platform to address integration of applications, to provide trusted information, and to provide require business intelligence. This will create a robust foundation for Business Intelligence service. Looking only to integrate applications is not the right approach to solve BI issue. Furthermore if we think about the use case for EAI, ETL and EII, we will find they define what they do with the data, how they move it and where, and the structure of the entities they work on. Only EAI or only EII or only ETL cannot support CEO’s objective or solve CEO’s pain points. Moreover you will miss the opportunity to explore EII and ETL scope, and improving the data quality at enterprise level. For detail approach and road map please contact me.

IT Modernization strategy

2010-12-08T16:07:00.001-05:00

Service Oriented Architecture is here, Web services is become a leading technology choice to use for implementing SOA. We see web services is the most promising instantiation of service oriented architecture due to the use of open standards, asynchronous processing of decoupled systems, and of course a strong drive towards interoperability. The new trend of architecture style and computing model can be implemented very easily. But how we can get most out of the software and hardware assets that enterprises have invested thus far? Many organizations are started new endeavor of modernizing their IT. I will try to explore the most challenging areas that enterprise needs to work on. I think major challenge that enterprise will face:

Leveraging existing and use new talent.
Using existing codes in new ways and aligning them with the business rules.
Changing processes to accommodate new technology
Code modernization
Simple and complex Multilanguage source code analysis.
Architecture and design modernization.
Compiler & IDE strategy – Distributed application development.

In summary people process and technology modernization is the core of IT modernization. Therefore IT modernization should be undertaken as a strategic vision and where the new initiatives should adopt new technology. IT Strategy and road map development need an agile approach and the biggest challenge is how to execute IT Modernization tasks most cost effective manner and without disturbing day-to-day businesses. I have created a detail white paper and a technique paper to help my clients to transform their IT into new paradigm. Please contact me for the white paper on this subject.

Cloud computing model has created a greater challenge for IT Security professionals

2010-11-03T17:33:00.002-04:00

Cloud computing model has created a greater challenge for IT Security professionals. In this article I am exploring various aspects of today’s security solution. When considering security solution we cannot separate IT Security from Business resiliency. How we can make IT environment secured resilient in cloud computing environment? Business resilience has moved us from the sense of reacting and then recovering from an event to becoming impervious to the event. Business continuity focus upon a defensive resilience posture, it consist of three building blocks – Recovery, Hardening and Redundancy – these are widely recognized as vital components for successful business continuity plans. A defensive posture is useful in protecting the organization and its revenue streams but it does not directly help the bottom line.

An offensive resilience posture also consists of three building blocks, which are focused upon improving the organization’s competitive position – Accessibility, Diversification and Autonomic computing. In cloud computing environment these three components are become more critical, as we need to add security. In practice these building blocks can be used all together or in various combinations depending upon need. For example diversifying operations might allow hardening to be limited other than at sites where critical applications and data reside. Business resilience encompass business as well as IT Operations and it can be thought of as spanning six discrete layers: Strategy, Organization, Process, data/application, technology and facilities/security. We need to consider all six services layers.

Developing a security system model is the first step of architecting security solution. Common Criteria are considered to be the description of the complete function of the security system model. Common Criteria provide a taxonomy for evaluating security functionality through a set of functional and assurance requirements. The Common Criteria include 11 functional classes of requirements:

1. Security audit

2. Communication

3. Cryptographic support

4. User data protection

5. Identification and authentication

6. Management of security functions

7. Privacy

8. Protection of security functions

9. Resource utilization

10. Component access

11. Trusted path or channel

These 11 functional classes are further divided into 66 families, each containing a number of component criteria. There are approximately 130 component criteria currently documented, with the recognition that designers may add additional component criteria to a specific design. There is a formal process for adopting component criteria through the Common Criteria administrative body, which can be found at: http://csrc.nist.gov/cc/

The Common Criteria functional criteria are re-aggregated by adopting multiple steps that include removing the class and family structures. An analysis of the 130 component-level requirements in relation to their function within an NIS solution suggests a partitioning into five operational categories or security sub system:

Security audit subsystem:

Solution Integrity Subsystem

Access control subsystem:

Information flow control subsystem:

Identity or credential subsystem

To design this complex security systems need a robust method and security and business continuity group need to work together to architect the secure solution that can sustain today’s cloud computing environment.

Taking infrastructure optimization and virtual world of computing to the next level.

2010-11-01T14:41:00.000-04:00

Computing is no longer for the computers, more than half of the world Chips are used by the consumer electronics gear. Object-to-object connectivity has increased tremendously and will grow more. Number of object and devices connected to internet will grow astronomically. Primarily shrinking (nanotechnology), thinking (smart technology), tagging (Radio frequency), and feeling (sensors) will lead the IT World to the new world of innovation. The way we Manage information, work with the information, and delivering/capturing information is rapidly changing. We see financial sectors are transforming their information delivery model to a new dimension, competing to capture more customers by delivering superior quality customer satisfaction. Enterprises are delivering information through multiple channels like Branch, Call center, Electronics, Self-service, and through multiple devices. Multichannel delivery solution module creating opportunity to transform existing architecture into SOA based Architecture and enjoying SOA’s benefit.

Enterprises are changing their work environment to become more productive, utilizing in-house skills and talents more effectively. Delivery channel is now encompasses rich collaborative capabilities, flexible and open programmability platform, and integrated users’ experience. Most companies have at least 15 different collaborative capabilities. The scope of architecting delivery channel module has expanded and become more challenging. Responsibility of Enterprise Architect has increased they need to map delivery channel module appropriately with the TOGAF framework (assuming TOGAF as a standard frame work), need to enhance governance model, need to integrate multi channel delivery, need Information integration, and hardware/software solution evaluation and adoption.

Optimize delivery channel and delivering consistent information is the biggest challenge. Enterprise Information Integration and channel infrastructure integration will play a big role in optimization outside data center or infrastructure domain. If we take a look into capital market business model, they have typically sell side, buy side and trading exchange. We see primarily six patterns in all the three hubs. Access Integration, Application Integration, and Collaboration, so on and so forth. Optimizing each of these patterns can help to save tremendous amount of cost. Contact me for detail about optimization and its implementation.

Banking Industry - Channel integration is the answer to the high quality customers’ experience

2010-10-19T14:33:00.000-04:00

World’s leading banks are competing to deliver top quality customer experiences. They are striving to deliver their products faster, low cost, and with higher quality of customer experiences. Cloud computing and SOA infrastructure are adding more value to the transformation of client experiences. New paradigm shift will have many positive impacts on channel infrastructure and delivery model design. Delivery channels in Banking industry have Self service, Branch, Electronics, and Call Center in one end and products like Deposits, withdraw, loan, etc on the product side. Of course there are multiple sub-channels under each major channel. Unfortunately lack of integration across channels is causing tremendous frustration and bad quality of experience to the customers. Customers are experiencing many touch points with the Bank for a single business process thread that are creating lots of opportunity for integration. If we create a use case model of customer interaction we will see the amount of time, money both bank and customers are spending are significant. It will reveal un-integrated line of business creating fragmented customer interaction. Vendors are coming up with many products to improve customer satisfaction. We need products but products come after completing the required operational model. Multichannel Architecture, Transformation to SOA, and information Integration are the major challenges to the IT. For total solution with road map to accomplish target objectives and vision with new computing model and technology require for this transformation. For the techniques paper on this topic please contact me.

Five New Technologies That Will Change Enterprise Computing

2010-10-07T16:07:00.000-04:00

Five New Technologies That Will Change Enterprise Computing

Enterprise Architecture - Delivering values and ROA

2010-10-04T17:10:00.000-04:00

Enterprise Architecture should not be measured by ROI, rather be measured by Return on Assets (ROA). I think all of us will agree on the Gartner Analyst’s comment. Now the question is how will you measure the return on assets? We should not consider only hardware and software assets. We need to consider the information and intellectual Capitals too. How efficiently we are utilizing our server, storage, network, software, and communication engineering systems? How much the fusion of business and IT helping the enterprise to meet the ever changing demands and supporting growth? Is the IT department is flexible enough to support the business needs within a short time? Enterprise Architecture and its creators add values by delivering key work products like IT Strategy, Roadmap, enablers to achieve superior competitive capabilities, and creating solutions for those questions. These values are difficult to measure. To find out the value of ROA in a measureable unit, we need to adopt well defined value matrix for each EA work products.

Return on assets (ROA) can be measured by calculating values for the work products by allocating appropriate waightage to the each Architecture design work product, and asking the questions about purpose of each work product and if not available scenarios. Various sub-products come out from the primary work of EA effort like: impact analysis of the various components of the systems, these add to the overall value chain of EA. The decision of what architecture work products require will not be the same for all enterprises. Selecting right architecture work products is a key to the success of overall EA program and establishing its value chain.

Using right tools and right templates for creating Architecture design work is equally important. Industry standard tools like TOGAF Architecture Framework, Templates, and Architecture Development Method will help in creating right enterprise architecture that improve your ROA. The picture at the top of this article depicts a conceptual view of an EA framework and deliverables using TOGAF, COBIT, and ITIL. If you like to have a technique paper on Delivering EA values please contact me.

IT strategy to deliver cloud computing values

2010-09-30T15:06:00.001-04:00

In my earlier article “IT Strategy to deliver cloud computing values” (http://nandiamit.blogspot.com/2009_04_01_archive.html), I mentioned I will discuss about approach of implementing cloud computing at enterprise level. Here I would like to discuss about potential stapes or approach to implement the cloud computing. According to IDC in 2010 about 14.4% of Enterprise’s IT budget allocated for private and/or public cloud computing. So enterprises are already started working on or planning to transform their IT infrastructure into cloud computing model. National Institute of Standards and Technology, Information Technology Laboratory has already defined Cloud computing as a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.

Business challenges and IT priorities are the two major factors that will set the direction of the cloud computing initiative for most enterprises. Mapping enterprise’s characteristics like competing on time to market and quality, with business challenges like must keep space with rapid change in market place, and with IT priorities like non functional requirements are the best place to start. Cloud computing from architecture perspective has five distinct layers: Infrastructure Services, Platform Services, Application Services, Business Services, and People Services or Standard Internet Services. Most enterprises do not have any distinct layer definition or supporting structure. Now the question is do we need to work on this area to adopt Cloud computing model. I will say you do not have to but keep the big picture in mind and create a tactical plan for immediate steps that will help cloud computing implementation.

Therefore, we should first complete the mapping of business challenges and IT priorities. Create all architecture documents as a next step. Challenge comes when you have to make decision about application migration to cloud computing model. Output of Analytic Hierarchy Process of all potential applications can help to make decision about application identification and migration strategy. Please contact me for how to develop IT Strategy, road map, and identifying projects for transforming your enterprise into cloud computing model.

Products selection comes after completing SOA design work

2010-09-22T16:50:00.002-04:00

Choosing right SOA vendor/products is very challenging and difficult task. Implementing SOA products is not implementing SOA, because you cannot buy SOA. As we all know that SOA is an approach and style of architecture design. Enterprise needs to separate architecture design from the implementation. We need to remember architecture is product agnostic. Productivity, agility, responsiveness, software reuse, and easy to support business growth are among the benefits that an enterprise gains through successful adoption of SOA at enterprise level. Enterprises set its business objectives and technology objectives. SOA helps to achieve the objectives through its service orientation approach. As mentioned above the principles of the service oriented architecture design style or characteristics are modularity, loose coupling, separation of concerns, encapsulation, and single implementation. These characteristics make the IT Environment agile, increase responsiveness, and focused. Therefore, IT environment can sustain change and dynamic nature of today’s business world. The SOA style of design provides several benefits to an enterprise that include both IT and Business community.

Implementation of SOA at enterprise level should be done in small steps. Implementing at single LOB at a time may be easy and less complication. Think about big picture and execute at smallest level.

Primarily SOA should be implemented in an organization adopting an approach that most appropriate for the organization. This can be achieved by creating an Enterprise Architecture framework using TOGAF, FEA, FSAM, and existing EA or any other framework. Creating Governance module upfront can make the process easy. Using COBIT, ITIL, and existing Governance module may be the right approach for most organization to create a new Governance module that support SOA.

Selection of the right software, and hardware should be done after creating a operational module. Selecting products or using existing products are the real challenge in this step. Most vendors try to sell their SOA supported products in very early stage of Architecture Design Cycle. Enterprise needs to go through product selection process carefully and select the right one for their enterprise as specified in the Architecture document. At this step they need to map the products with their physical operational model.

In summary do not select the products before designing the architecture. You design a SOA and then map products to the operational model. If you have any questions please call me.

EAI and CEO Study - an Architect's perspective

2010-08-26T10:39:00.000-04:00

Two keywords “Complexity” and “Sustainability” came out from two different 2010 CEO study one by UN Global Compact-Accenture and other one by IBM. CIO/CTO can address these two issues from multiple areas. I think Application Integration is one of the hottest areas which are very complex and most enterprises are spending lot of money and time in business applications support. Cloud computing model can encapsulate the operation complexity, but sustainability and cost containment can only be achieved by addressing the vexing issues. I am exploring EAI in this article.

In most organization applications are running in silos or partially integrated, they are yet to achieve fully integrated systems. Therefore, they are missing numerous opportunities to help their business growth. IT is trying to come out of silo scenario in their IT operation environment for some time through optimization, virtualization, systems integration, etc. programs. Unfortunately even today, most of the IT department facing the challenge of making their IT operating environment simple, and how to support their business to sustain rapid changes and dynamic business environment? This article will give an overview of EAI which is one of the topics of my white papers series that address the pain points of those areas relate to the keywords “Complexity” and “Sustainability”. .

Enterprise Application Integration is a subsystem. It is not a core business function but enable the interaction between multiple business applications that can be one or more integrated business systems, components, external business partners systems, and other business unit systems to provide one or more business systems. EAI architecture defines a framework to:
• Facilitate interaction between endpoints
• Enable distributed operation of business components
• Insulated end points
• Provide an infrastructure that is scalable and extensible
• Explore to use the existing infrastructure services
• Enable reuse of end points
• Enable phased approach to implementation
• Enable easy maintainability

In almost every case, an EAI subsystem will be implemented using packaged integration applications. As a result, product selection plays a central role in the specification of an EAI architecture. This paper focuses on the preparation of the conceptual EAI Component Model. Architecture design should be carried out within the scope of total system development, and with respect to the related EAI techniques.
Prior to initiating product selection the component model need to be elaborated to a specification level. Both product selection and component model specification need to be well documented. The only EAI unique aspect to specification of the component model is the use of the EAI Attributes Blueprint as the consolidated source of parameters for the model.

The EAI Conceptual Architecture should be expressed through a number of work products like Architecture Decision and Architecture Model in the context of enterprise’s EA blueprint, and its Component Model diagram. To develop the EAI architecture five basic steps need to be followed:

1. Make initial architecture decision
2. Identify EAI services
3. Create multiple nodes or partition the systems
4. Identify EAI categories
5. Apply the architecture pattern

In this white paper I have provided an approach to the creation of a conceptual level system component model specific to EAI and other sub products require to implement EAI in a complex IT Environment of an enterprise. Please contact me for the white paper.

The Value of Pattern Analysis in IT Architecture design work.

2010-07-07T12:21:00.000-04:00

Christopher Alexander, an architect noted for his theories about design, and for more than 200 building projects around the world. Once he said - “Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.” Of course, he said this about building and towns. But this is true for any design work that includes IT. We see this quote in many IT architecture articles and books. It is true for our everyday life, in music, in creating mold, so on and so forth. In architecture design methodology the value of pattern analysis is tremendous. In designing IT Architecture from scratch or to redesign an existing system the pattern analysis can save tremendous amount of time and money. In service oriented architecture design work we often decompose business process to its coarse grain level to identify a service. When identifying and naming each business process service we are following design pattern concept. Most of the time we do not call it a pattern analysis, but we do pattern analysis. Making pattern analysis as a separate step like use case design modeling or component design modeling, etc., we can get enormous benefit. True value of creating once and use multiple times can be optimized through Pattern Analysis. It gives a structural approach to create right number of services for your architecture design work. Implementing pattern analysis while doing architecture work and how to get maximum value from this work is one of our unique capability. For detail information please contact me.

Virtualization is incomplete if you do not do provisioning, because they are complement to each other.

2010-06-10T14:02:00.000-04:00

Workload management, virtualization, and provisioning work together and enterprise can be benefitted by considering provisioning and workload management services at the same time when undertaking a virtualization effort. An architect must include provisioning and workload management services when they are architecting virtualization. Most company focused only on server virtualization as their virtualization endeavor. But the enterprises cannot get the maximum value of optimization through only virtualization, that too only server.
Virtualization improves the utilization of IT resources, information, people assets because it allows you to treat resources as abstract entities, accessing and managing those resources across your organization more efficiently, by effect and need rather than physical location. Virtualization provides ways to abstract physical resources so they can be accessed as a pool of logical resources. Enterprise Architect needs to provision Server, Storage, Network, and Web Services virtualization when undertaking any virtualization effort. Focusing on a single component can be expensive; implementation can be done in various stages but overall architecture design need to be considered taking a holistic view while designing Enterprise Architecture.
As I mentioned earlier virtualization provides ways to abstract physical resources, but if you do not optimize your resources real value of virtualization cannot be realized. Policy-based orchestration is about providing an end-to-end IT service that is dynamically linked to business policies, allowing the ability to adapt to changing business conditions. Having each individual element of an IT system respond to change is a great start, but in the end, to truly be an on demand business requires orchestration of the automation of multiple elements of the systems so that the entire IT infrastructure is responding as it should to changes in business policies or conditions. For example, if a customer’s order entry application suddenly experiences a surge in load, just allocating more CPU may not be enough; it may also need additional storage, more network capacity, and even additional servers and new users to handle the increased activity. All of these changes must be orchestrated so that the dynamic allocation of multiple resource elements occurs seamlessly.

Orchestration enables data centers to move from just-in-case provisioning (providing enough resources to fulfill peaks in IT infrastructure demand, which typically results in low resource utilization) to just-in-time provisioning: automating the infrastructure and executing configuration changes in a repeatable manner, eliminating human execution errors. A typical example of a data center running three applications, in which one application needs additional resources to attend to user demand, while the other two have enough or even extra resources allocated to them. Traditional, manual provisioning practices do not make it practical to move resources from one application to another to meet short-term peaks in demand. Instead, we engage in what we call the just-in-case provisioning cycle: If you look carefully, virtualization and provisioning are complement to each other.

Benefit of virtualization and provisioning flows ultimately to Workload Manager. workload Manager and system provisioning work together. System Provisioning monitors workload across a set of provisioned devices. Enterprise Workload Management (eWLM) is one example of a monitoring technology that provides a basic infrastructure for monitoring and managing a collection of heterogeneous distributed servers.
Workload Management refers to any subsystem that provides functionality to distribute workload across resources within a system or across systems within a network. Within a system, these are usually provided by operating system services, and manage processor, I/O and memory resources according to task priority, resources requested, available resources and other scheduling rules. Higher level OS facilities (e.g. LPARs, Process Resource Managers) may also be available to limit and/or dedicate specific resources to specific tasks or task environments.

A successful EA design should encompasses Workload Management, Provisioning and Virtualization.

Business Resiliency in today's IT World

2010-06-10T14:00:00.001-04:00

Business resilience has moved us from the sense of reacting and then recovering from an event to becoming impervious to the event. Business continuity focus upon a defensive resilience posture, it consist of three components – Recovery, Hardening and Redundancy – these are widely recognized as vital ingredient for successful business continuity plans. A defensive posture is useful in protecting the organization and its revenue streams but it does not directly help the bottom line.
An offensive resilience posture also consists of three components, which are focused upon improving the organization’s competitive position – Accessibility, Diversification and Autonomic computing. In practice these components can be used all together or in various combinations depending upon need. For example diversifying operations might allow hardening to be limited other than at sites where critical applications and data reside.
Business resilience encompass business as well as IT Operations and it can be thought of as spanning six discrete layers: Strategy, Organization, Process, data/application, technology and facilities/security. Please contact me for more information.