IT Roadmap

Virtualization - The Paybacks Have Impact

Desktop virtualization can create business value by improving the ability of organizations to manage their desktop environments, according to research firm IDC. Such moves, the firm adds, enable organizations to reduce desktop total cost of ownership (TCO), while enhancing security, availability, and agility.

IDC contends organizations can maximize the return on investment (ROI) associated with deploying desktop virtualization by:

• Focusing on the agility and flexibility that centralized virtual desktops can enable. The most successful desktop virtualization deployments are used to improve the flexibility and agility with which IT can respond to the needs of the overall business and tend to be deployed in instances where traditional management platforms are less effective, such as call center environments and offshore locations.

• Understanding the limitations of desktop virtualization. Centralized virtual desktops (and server-based computing as a whole) have specific limitations that will affect the ways in which the technology can be most effectively used. Those interested in leveraging desktop virtualization in their environments must fully understand those limitations in order to understand how and to whom an organization can best apply the technology.

• Providing sufficient time for piloting and testing. Organizations must set realistic expectations regarding the time it will take to deploy their environments because this will have an impact on the success of any project. Because desktop virtualization is relatively new and lacks best practices, pilots will need to be extensive in order to ensure that transitions to production environments occur smoothly.

Perhaps the most interesting finding in the report is its analysis showing that the cost of a desktop client falls dramatically as you factor in issues such as IT labor.

Hardware and software, according to IDC, "represent less than 20% of the cost of keeping an employee client enabled. The IT labor associated with installing, administering, and supporting the client represents over 80% of the annual client cost per user. And [desktop virtualization's] effect on reducing that labor requirement offers compelling arguments."

As the IDC analysts see it, desktop virtualization client users "require less than a third of the labor that users armed with traditional PCs require. Our studies showed that users enabled via [desktop virtualization] required 67% less support and administration labor than traditional PC-enabled users — $425 per user per year in IT labor versus $1,298."

Cloud is Not a Matter of If, But How Much and How Fast

During the last 18 months, Cisco has been conducting customer round tables and research to uncover the themes driving enterprises to transition their network storage and compute infrastructures to the cloud. One of Cisco's forecasts, based on this information, is that 15% of IT workloads will migrate to a cloud-based infrastructure by 2013.

In this video, Chris Osika (Senior Director of Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group Sevices Provider Practice) shares 4 emerging themes in relation to the cloud:

In summary, the four themes are:

1. Sheer Impact. In the past, it could take up to 45 days to provision a server. Now, companies are reporting an hour or less with data center virtualization. That's a pretty dramatic change.


2. Organizational Change. Companies are addressing the need to re-align in a functional way to take advantage of of virtualization and cloud. When they do so, they are able to enact a fully holistic business transformation.


3. The Ability to Flex. Virtualization with cloud computing not only allows companies to flex compute and storage resources, but to flex the network to reap rewards of economy.


4. Virtual Desktops (VDI) Enter the Discussion. Whereas in the past, the discussion of VDI was limited, it's now included in conversations about the impact cloud computing can have on the overall enterprise.

Do these themes ring a belll with your company? What other themes do you see emerging  in relation to accelrating your company's presence in the cloud?

Collaboration is the New Normal for Business

Dynamic collaboration across enterprise and inter-enterprise boundaries represents "the new normal." Organizations are now challenged to work closely with suppliers, partners and contractors to deliver their offerings in today's high velocity markets.

"Web 2.0 tools such as video portals, podcasts, blogs, wikis, and discussion forums are changing the way in which information is created, published, managed, and consumed," according to a recent report from Cisco. "Technology advances and the need to work outside of normal business hours and locations fosters an increasingly mobile and distributed workforce. A flood of new devices and applications is entering the corporate IT environment as employees elect to merge consumer-based tools with standardized communications."

As organizations grapple with global value chains, information overload, and more mobile workforces, they are challenged to embrace and integrate new collaboration capabilities.

"As the number of intra- and intercompany stakeholders increases, the number of collaborative tools and communication formats increases," states the report. "In other words, the scope of collaboration must be broadened. It must combine document- and text-centric collaboration — such as email messaging, instant messaging (IM), team workspaces, and conferencing — with voice, video, and context to fully support the needs of the business."

Cisco contends that enterprises will need to recognize several key principles as they implement collaboration technology and infrastructure in the coming years. Among them:

• An interoperable, open architecture: As collaboration increasingly occurs across organizations and with people on the move, it is no longer a given that IT can control the devices and applications used in collaborative sessions. Today’s environment requires an interoperable, open architecture that allows for any device or application to use a core set of collaborative services.


• Secure inter-company collaboration: Organizations will increasingly move from collaboration within functions to intra-company collaboration to inter-company collaboration. In this environment, securely enabling collaboration with partners, suppliers, and customers as if they were behind the firewall is fundamental.


• Flexible deployment models: IT requires the flexibility to adjust to a dynamically changing business and technology environment. Enterprise and IT architects do not make decisions in the context of on-premises versus on-demand, but seek to couple the robustness, security, and performance of the enterprise network with the openness and flexibility of collaboration through the cloud.

Strategic planners in IT need to ensure they construct a core foundation that supports a rapidly evolving set of applications — one that also optimizes the various media types that comprise today’s collaborative experience. They'll need an open architecture that secures collaboration and supports multiple approaches to deployment.

6 Levels of Opportunity with Virtualization

It's easy to get lost in the world of virtualization. After all, the word is increasingly being applied to all sorts of situations and applications.

Recognizing the problem, Daniel Kusnetzky of the 451 Group has created an accessible framework that sorts out the various layers of virtualization that deserve our consideration. Each level of the model represents a different opportunity to implement virtualization.

According to Kusnetzky, virtualization can be applied to address "performance, reliability/availability, scalability, consolidation, agility, a unified management domain or some other goal." As he explains, each level offers different benefits:

• Access Virtualization — hardware and software technology enabling just about any device to access just about any application. While the application can see the device, the device knows how to display it. Special purpose hardware may be necessary on each side of the network connection to enhance performance, enabling many users to share a single client system or allowing a single individual to see multiple displays.


• Application Virtualization — software technology enabling applications to run on many different operating systems and hardware platforms. This usually means that the application has been written to use an application framework. It also means that applications running on the same system that do not use this framework do not get the benefits of application virtualization.


• Processing Virtualization — hardware and software technology that hides physical hardware configuration from system services, operating systems or applications. This type of virtualization technology can make one system appear to be many or many systems appear to be a single computing resource to achieve goals ranging from raw performance, high levels of scalability, reliability/availability, agility or consolidation of multiple environments onto a single system.


• Storage Virtualization — hardware and software technology that hides where storage systems are and what type of device is actually storing applications and data. This technology also makes it possible for many systems to share the same storage devices without knowing that others are also accessing them.


• Network Virtualization — hardware and software technology that presents a view of the network that differs from the physical view. So, a personal computer may be allowed to only “see” systems it is allowed to access.


• Management of virtualized environments — software technology that makes it possible for multiple systems to be provisioned and managed as if they were a single computing resource.

While these technologies have been available in various forms for almost three decades, they are now widely available for industry-standard applications. Such availability is clearly contributing to the ongoing wave of virtualization that is transforming IT.

Cross the Border Between Consumer and Business Technology

One border that remains to be crossed is the border between consumer technology and business technology. But it's a barrier that will be crossed one way or another — sometimes against the wishes of IT policy makers.

"In the enterprise, there is growing demand for the acceptance of new computing tools — both hardware and applications — that first gain their popularity in the consumer space before being pulled into the business organization by employees," writes Tom Gillis in his book Securing the Borderless Network.  "Industry analysts generally recognize this trend as the consumerization of IT."

The positive side of this trend is that it represents opportunities to enhance the user's experience and productivity while driving down IT costs for certain applications. The trouble with this trend is security. How do organizations protect their users, their networks and their data when endpoints are beyond control?

The biggest driver of consumerized IT today is the smartphone. Handheld devices are increasingly powerful and the array of applications now available on them continues to explode. Indeed, the smartphone may be the primary computing device of mobile users in the borderless enterprise in the coming years. This raises the challenge of how to secure them and other forms of consumer IT.

"Desktop virtualization is a big part of the answer," contends Gillis. "It is a powerful tool that helps business and personal computing coexist on a single device. The concept is that consumers can have any device they want... But when the time comes to access company data, they must switch to a virtual desktop."

Such moves create a virtual environment in which policies can be rigorously enforced. Every connection can be scanned, logged and analyzed to ensure these policies are followed.

While Gillis acknowledges that the virtual desktop concept will take several years to implement effectively with emerging smartphones, he sees several meaningful steps that can be taken toward this destination in the meantime. He points, for instance, to the convergence of SSL VPN technology, advanced web security, and hybrid-hosted security solutions as a key enabler of secure networks.

While acknowledging that virtualization is only one facet of the security challenge ahead, he emphasizes that there is no holding back the flood of demand that will come from users to integrate business and personal technology. Fortunately, smart enterprises will also have the tools to protect their networks.