VitAL Digest 2011 by 31 Media

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A vendor perspective of current IT management processes

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/ February 2011 Volume 4 : Issue 3 : January

IT E & SU SK IS DE OW E IC SH RV RT SE PO P SU

mod ern busi ness Insp iratio n for the

VitAL : Inspiration for the modern business

for the modern business VitAL : Inspiration

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Inspiration for the modern business Volume 4 : Issue 5 : May / June 2011

Inspira tion for the moder n busine ss Volume 4 : Issue 5 : May / June 2011

Moving to the cloud

The human factor

Striking a balance

A communications revolution in the workplace

The way forward?

Open source

Volume 4 : Issue 5 : May/June 2011

Social networks

Volume 4 : Issue 5 : May/June 2011

3 : January/February Volume 4 : Issue

individual Cyber-crime targets the ation right Getting the work/life equ

Shared services

The rise of Google Apps

A panacea for the public sector

2011

ITIL: What’s missing? Learning to lead IT l ria eu en pr re Filling in the service management gaps nt E Gill Grav tial

ess poten Unleashing your busin ITY: 22-25 ROLLING THE COMPLEX FEATURE FOCUS: CONT

FEATURE FOCUS: TACKLING CHALLENGES OF THE MODERN IT WORLD: P32-35

es says it’s time for IT to take cont rol VISIT VITAL ONLINE AT: WWW.V ITAL-MAG.NET

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Leader W

e’re approaching the ‘silly season’ when trivia rules. Or is it simply that anticipating imminent holidays, enjoying the break and, on returning to work, falling into that post-holiday reverie, our minds take a well-earned break from serious stuff? Far be it for me to puncture that euphoric cloud of summer but if you want to gather information before and after the holiday – not ‘during’ – this year’s VitAL Digest is the place to start. During the dog days of summer when, at any time, a quarter of your staff and a quarter of your customers’ people will be away, you’ll be able to step back and review the bigger picture. You might, as Tony Probert suggests, cast a constructively critical eye over your processes before you pile in more powerful technology. Or, perhaps, as Steve White suggests, you could wonder whether, without people barking in their ears, engineers will complete their job sooner and better. Join Steve Connelly and Steve Ingall to look beyond ITIL and Six Sigma and wonder whether an Agile approach will bring out their best for you. Or follow Steve Lawless’s advice and think about what you really want from your next ITSM tool. And if Cloud performance has been troubling you, Nigel Hawthorn has some words of comfort. While you’ve got the time, we’ve got the information. Enjoy your summer.

Contents 52 Making the RITE Decisions Technology cannot heal organisational maladies, as Tony Probert makes clear: but the right technology using the RITE information can help to build on success.

54 Thinking Correctly Under Pressure When things go wrong you can either waste time by shouting or, say Steve White and Andrew Vermes, you can create a culture in which the job gets done.

56 Agile meets ITIL Steve Connelly and Steve Ingall consider how ‘Agile’ relates to the well-established comfort zones of Service Management frameworks such as Six Sigma and ITIL.

58 Buying an ITSM software solution If you’re buying something as important as an ITSM tool, says Steve Lawless, don’t just ‘kick the tyres’; instead properly evaluate what your money will be buying.

John Hancock, Editor

60 The benefits of WAN optimization to business applications in the public cloud Whereas the Public Cloud once had performance problems, Nigel Hawthorn now believes that technology advances have put those concerns in the past.

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Making the RITE Decisions Tony Probert, European managing director at Cherwell Software cites the changes necessary before IT will be of use for survival in the new economy

hat would be the ‘holy grail’ for real change in the realm of Information Technology? It would be to enable management to harness the necessary information to proactively make the right business decisions – at any time, from anywhere – and thereby truly align IT with business objectives. Is there any hope of this? Are there any external factors today to give us optimism that real change, from an IT services and support context, is possible? Yes there are, but of course it won’t be easy. Too often, IT ‘change’ is defined as spending money on new technology and hoping it will solve organisational problems. It won’t. Before any technology is considered, the people of the organisation must understand and be passionate about its underlying corporate mission, strategy, and specific objectives. To attain that vision, you’ll need to understand and implement appropriate processes. Note that you do not need to invent entirely new processes, any more than you need to invent a different type of hammer to build a new piece of furniture. Rather, you need to choose from the toolkit of tried and true business processes that already exist, selecting and customising them for your organisation. Only then should you look at technology that facilitates your vision and your processes – and does not just collect data for data’s sake. The required elements to drive change involve; People. As a first step it is necessary to change the culture; to remove people who are resigned to the status quo and replace them with people who have well defined roles, who are empowered to do their jobs and who are accountable for results. All effective change in any organisation starts with having the right people in place, both management and staff, who ‘buy-in’ to the mission. The point here is not to suggest replacing all those who have not bought in to the company strategy. In fact, it is the job of management to inspire its team regarding

52 VitAL : July / August 2010

its mission, to build an environment of trust and mutual respect and to establish a clear set of reasonable objectives. However, change must start with people who truly believe they can make a difference. The correct people with the requisite competencies and passion must be identified and trained. If there is not buy-in from the people regarding the mission and goals, the best processes and technology in the world will not help. Processes. Utilise ‘outside eyes’ (internal or external) to evaluate every process in the organisation and provide an objective assessment as to what value any particular process brings to the stated end goals. Such an external assessment will generate recommendations for improvement without prejudice. Without an objective, unbiased evaluation of which processes and systems were broken, no one will tell the emperor that he has no clothes. Since the arrival of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®), there is no longer an excuse for IT management not to embrace and implement a set of processes that represent industry good practices. ITIL today is the most widely recognised and accepted IT process management framework in the world. These processes promote a quality approach to achieving business effectiveness and efficiency in IT. ITIL also focuses on aligning IT services to business requirements; a goal that will gain the needed respect from the business units. Technology. Once people and processes are evaluated, only then should technology be deployed to complete the virtuous circle. The identification and removal of business silos with improved systems integration is critical to preventing key tasks, activities and data from falling into the proverbial black hole. Once you know what information needs to be tracked that is important to the overall business objectives, i.e. the key performance indicators, technology can make a difference and can enable real change. The next step is to make that information available to the right people at the right time. www.vital-mag.net

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Once you know what information needs to be tracked that is important to the overall business objectives, i.e. the key performance indicators, technology can make a difference and can enable real change. With today’s technology, business unit managers can utilise smart phone or tablet technology to proactively receive, and then act upon, the right information; at any time, from anywhere. We are in the midst of a technological wireless and real time data revolution. This enables people with sound processes to make the right business decisions. Organisations must no longer collect data for data’s sake, nor even for information’s sake. In order to make right, or ‘RITE’ decisions, management must have data and information that is: 1. Relevant to the mission, strategies, and objectives of the organisation; 2. Integrated across all department ‘silos’ and geographic locations; 3. Timely, so that the issues can be addressed and resolved before they become crises; and 4. Efficient, so that with the mounds of data, organisations can manage by exception www.vital-mag.net

and the automated best business processes can be enforced. Finally, data should be used to act, to analyse, and to continually improve. There should be relentless follow up and continual measurement. Measuring results based on clear goals and objectives, in real time, can be achieved with today’s technology. Once clear objectives are established, the right technology can make the difference between limping along and accomplishing key business goals. The implementation of proper people, processes, and technology to make the RITE Decisions has always been important, but during the next decade it may be the mandatory holy grail of survival. Change comes from within, and all the technology in the world will not help a dysfunctional organisation. Gandhi once said, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world. VitAL www.cherwellsoftware.com July / August 2010 : VitAL 53

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Thinking Correctly Under Pressure New neuroscience research reveals, say Steve White and Andrew Vermes, Senior Consultants at Kepner-Tregoe, fresh wisdom for IT Support Functions

Steve White

Andrew Vernes

“WHEN WILL YOU GET SERVICE RESTORED?” shouts the Senior Vice President again, cutting across the technical discussions on the bridge call, for the second time in five minutes. “The service restart will take forty minutes” replies the Senior Technical Lead. “YOU HAVE TO GET IT BACK IN TEN!” When managing a business-damaging incident, it is clear why representatives from ‘the business’ behave the way they do – behaviour which (depending on the prevailing culture of the organisation) can range from reasonable to psychotic. When critical systems go down and affect the minute to minute revenue streams, even for a minute, financial losses can be huge. A strong IT tech support person will rightly say, “calm down and let us get on with our work”, but few will have the strength and experience to handle sustained aggression from the business side. We know from analysis and experience that the normal response – jumping to cause – costs more money, reputation and time than calmly working through the evidence. But there are two other crucial factors interfering with good sense under pressure – biology and psychology. Given the external pressures, there are four key drivers to effective performance that consultants at Kepner-Tregoe have defined and revised: • Predictable performance – how we use our brain and skills to create the circumstances and environment that people need to handle complex problems under severe time pressure; • Infrastructure – the tools and systems we use to enable exemplary support; 54 VitAL : July / August 2010

• Feedback – the learning and improvement loop; • Right channels – making sure we have effective communications in major incidents. Many people believe that coping with emergency situations is a matter of in-built character, somehow genetically determined. Use of advanced brain scanning techniques has in recent years allowed researchers to find out what‘s really happening in human brains when people are put into stressful situations, and what stresses trigger the strongest neural responses. Knowing these triggers and reducing them can have an immediate benefit to personal health and business performance. Brain Hardware is wired for two kinds of response – Threat and Reward. Threat is an easily triggered response which takes resources from the prefrontal cortex; it inhibits complex problem solving and drives a survival instinct. Reward releases dopamine, improves collaboration and increases the quality of rational thinking.

The SCARF Model The triggers for the ‘Threat and Reward’ response are based on a surprisingly small number of stress factors; these five (the SCARF Model1) exert the strongest influences on individual performance: Status is about relative importance to others. Certainty concerns being able to predict the future. Autonomy provides a sense of control over events. Relatedness is a sense of safety with others, of friend rather than foe.

Fairness is a perception of fair exchanges between people. Five things to do that will help: 1) For managing status anxiety: filter out threats: many companies now operate two simultaneous bridges; Technical and Management. The people fixing stuff should be protected from disturbance and left to get on with what they do best. Management need to handle the legal, political and reputational implications of the outage. The flow between the two channels has to be managed carefully, and that means keeping progress visible for all. Make the current status of the incident readable and distributed – so that someone can read the current status and not interrupt the bridge with ‘what’s going on?’ 2) Certainty through process: making your recovery and resolution process visible and in recognisable small steps is important. If senior people – and clients – can go and look and see that you’re making progress that will tend to ease the shrill demands. Practice on the easy: if your current case records look rather scruffy, how likely is it that crisp clear reporting will suddenly get done in an emergency? Get folks to use good quality consistent troubleshooting on everyday cases, and they’ll be better able to handle the tough ones. The best people are often hidden away. Some years ago a colleague in KepnerTregoe ran a project in a manufacturing plant. Tracing faults was often hard since operators tended to tweak their machines all the time, and figuring out what change related to what fault was nigh on impossible. www.vital-mag.net

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prior to the recovery action which you may mandate, but leave the details up to the incident managers.

Except for Colin. Colin made constant little notes: “10:43: ring former out of alignment. Turned adjuster one quarter turn clockwise. Product all OK.” People with an eye for detail are safe hands in tough times. If you are familiar with Kepner-Tregoe’s rational leadership processes you will know how useful it is to have a structured method for working through both complex and simple problems. Every incident has a natural process, and it isn’t trial and error. Keep the list of issues, impacts and consequences visible to all, as well as the investigation and resolution actions. When we read Major Incident process guides, we too often find them focused on who calls who, and not enough about how the incident needs to be progressed to ensure a quality outcome. Creating this path is one of the key things we can do to use the SCARF model, since having a recipe www.vital-mag.net

for success is an important way of increasing certainty. This also allows the visibility that management and regulators expect. When using a clearly described method, with visible stage gates, people apply their creativity when it matters most, and their analytical skills where they are needed, giving them the opportunity to make a contribution, visibly. 3) Autonomy is cemented by making sure that the boundaries are there, and everyone knows what to do when they reach them. For example, in most incidents an accurate time for the start of the symptoms is important for diagnosis and decision making. You can leave engineers free to decide how they get this information (log files, user experience, downstream effects etc.), but get it they must, and at a gallop, if recovery is to be effected quickly. There are other steps, such as a careful risk assessment

4) Relatedness helps the incident handling process, and not just in major incidents. This was recently illustrated by a change we made to case escalation in a client. Instead of just filling in the severity rating according to predefined criteria (Impact 1-4), Tier 1 engineers were instructed to describe in words what the problem was like for the users (all forty outbound mortgage staff unable to process applications). We found higher Tiers (2 and 3) much more responsive when the situation was clearly explained to them. 5) Fairness can be lost if the ‘messenger is shot’. People shout at doctors treating their relatives, even though the doctor is not at all responsible for the disease in question, and are doing their best. Expecting teams to perform well when the solution is outside their control is one of the biggest mistakes. Blaming folks for factors beyond their control doesn’t enhance performance, and loads unfairness. Recognising teams appropriately for their contribution is important in building an environment that encourages predictable performance. “I DEMAND THAT SYSTEM BACK IN TEN!” I understand your concern, and I hear that you want it back in ten minutes, but that’s not how it works…” VitAL www.kepner-tregoe.com David Rock www.your-brain-at-work.com/ files/NLJ_SCARFUS.pdf 1

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Agile meets ITIL ‘Agile’ methodology doesn’t replace but rather enhances the way that IT Services are managed say Steve Connelly, service Management Consultant and Steve Ingall Head of Consultancy at iCore

common question in Service Management circles recently asks; “How do we demonstrate the real value of Service Management without it just seeming like bureaucracy?” To address this challenge, iCore has been researching the use of ‘Agile’ methods to bring ‘stuffy’ ITIL processes to life for customers.

What is ‘Agile’? ‘Agile’ is a methodology most likely to be employed in the strategy or higher level design phases during the lifecycle of a project. Although it is here that it is most highly visible and recognised in the industry with the associated project management exams, certifications, and professional bodies, it is also relevant further down from these strategic levels. It is important to recognise that ‘Agile’ techniques are not just reserved for use at a low level coding stage or as a project checkpoint method; as a methodology ‘Agile’ has grown well beyond its humble origins in the software development world. ‘Agile’ techniques and methods can and should be adopted at different levels of an IT operation, and at different stages of the service lifecycle to obtain maximum business benefit.

‘Agile’ Service Management As already stated, many organisations are already using ‘Agile’ techniques and methods in day to day project management, 56 VitAL : July / August 2010

and iCore’s research indicates that ‘Agile’ is also being utilised in operations; however, this is not branded as ‘Agile’ per se. Indeed, the phrase ‘Agile’ Service Management is thought by many to be an oxymoron; however, if we think of real world examples, it becomes apparent they can co-exist. If your service managers, incident and problem teams meet up early every morning to discuss the previous day’s issues then they are conducting a ‘Stand-Up’ meeting in ‘Agile’ parlance. If we take the key Service Management discipline of continual service improvement as an example, the benefits of the ‘Agile’ approach can be understood more clearly. Picture a service improvement or review meeting being held with ‘Agile’ in mind; the meetings will be short and regular, and business involvement is encouraged alongside the IT teams, which will of course ensure that any pain points will be brought to the table, and any limitations must be understood by both sides. The collaboration is regular and tends to be face to face; there is reduced need for ‘phone and email traffic exchanges and both sides are up to speed on the latest progress of service improvement activity. The improvements will be heavily prioritised according to business objectives, and accountability is assigned to action the improvement; little time is wasted on duplication of effort; and resource is not deployed on less business critical issues. www.vital-mag.net

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Once a critical issue is identified and agreed, the next iteration or meeting will analyse the improvement options and identify the appropriate solutions. These can then be implemented and the overall time taken will be dramatically reduced compared to having less frequent, structured Service Reviews. In a Major Incident Review meeting, much time can be used up discussing technical issues and focusing on who was to blame. ‘Agile’ methodology removes this burden and focuses solely on how the team can quickly respond to the business requirements around restoration of normal service. The establishment of the root cause of outages in the organisation will be improved by establishing small, business focused, fast acting working groups to target areas causing most pain to the business. ‘Agile’ techniques also lend themselves to several of the common root-cause analysis methods, such as the Pareto (80/20) principle and the analysis of pain value experienced within the business. These tie in well with the ‘Agile’ ethos of tackling the most important issues in the quickest manner to derive maximum benefits. Business processing requirements change quickly and how IT responds is an on-going challenge. Rather than an ‘Agile’ approach clashing with Service Management and Governance principles of control and risk mitigation, ‘Agile’ can be used in the change management process to ensure fast, reliable and appropriate assessment of change and implementation, making the process more efficient: also, an inefficient change process will very quickly be revealed if you apply ‘Agile’. Now let’s turn to the CMDB dilemma; a tough nut to crack! Using an Agile project approach to defining, building and establishing the CMDB and the subsequent processes for introducing, updating and disposing of CIs, will make the impossible seem possible. The ultimate objective is broken down into more manageable pieces and value is derived from the delivery of a useful section of the CMDB in a realistic timescale.

Are you ready to be ‘Agile’? Indeed, iCore believes any process in place in an organisation could be subject to adopting and adapting ‘Agile’ techniques. It is not about recreating processes, rather about making them work more efficiently on an operational level by changing behaviours and working practices of the people involved. Service Management processes must be subject to continual improvement, and the ‘Agile’ approach to process development means that www.vital-mag.net

processes would be kept up to date and fit for purpose by those involved. It seems a logical and sensible approach that the relevant core processes are identified in order of importance to the business and implemented within timescales that make a positive difference to the business as quickly as possible. ‘Agile’ methods may not work well within every organisation, and the suggestion would be that the techniques should be applied only where they are most relevant, just like other Service Management frameworks. Daily face to face meetings for example might not fit in with geographical limitations, or the structure and culture may not lend itself to this collaborative approach. Indeed many individuals and teams may not be able to dedicate the resource required for this approach. Regular involvement with the business can often lead to a situation where no real end goal is achieved and those involved lose momentum. Service Management frameworks are often seen as cumbersome or bureaucratic obstacles, and perhaps the development of more ‘Agile’ Service Management is more in line with the current themes of running the organisation in a lean, efficient manner. ‘Agile’ principles applied to any Service Management process can add value as they have a shared objective; to consistently deliver valuable service to the business. This is fundamental to ITIL, CMMI, Six Sigma and all other Service Management frameworks. If this is kept in mind throughout the IT organisation, including senior management, day to day efficient operation and of course continual improvement of the service provided, then the resulting service will be much more closely aligned to the business and consistently deliver value.

If your service managers, incident and problem teams meet up early every morning to discuss the previous day’s issues then they are conducting a ‘Stand-Up’ meeting in ‘Agile’ parlance.

Don’t ask ‘Why?’ ask ‘How?’ iCore take the principles of ‘Agile’ into all of our Service Management engagements, whether those are process design, interim management or service improvement. We have also applied the principles to our standard ITIL v3 process models to indicate where ‘Agile’ methods will add value and demonstrate the benefits of a structured service management approach. iCore’s new Agile SIP Workshop will help you and your organisation rapidly identify the important issues that need to be addressed urgently. VitAL For more information contact iCore at sales@icore-ltd.com or call us on 0207 464 8883 www.icore.co.uk July / August 2010 : VitAL 57

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Buying an ITSM software solution An ITSM tool can be a powerful business asset but Steve Lawless, CEO of Wendia UK believes buyers should ensure that they get the right one

ver many years training people in Service Management, I have regularly been asked “Can you recommend a good IT Service Management tool?”, and my response has always been “What do you want it to do with it, and how much money have you got to spend?” That response is often greeted with a glazed expression. I suppose I could have just named half a dozen popular software tools, but would that really have helped them? I often explain that it’s like buying a car; you have a limited budget, and usually some very basic requirements like number of seats and engine size. The trick is then finding the right make and model at the right price. Unless you are a seasoned purchaser of cars, the vast majority of people often only undertake a single 10 minute test drive, are easily influenced by a slick salesman’s patter and normally forget to ask about servicing costs and intervals and the cost of spares. Unfortunately we don’t often make very good purchasing decisions.

Getting started There are now over 300 offerings on the ITSM tool market and you are certainly not going to look at all of them; so what do you do? You could ask for personal recommendations, you could search on the internet, you could attend an annual trade event like ‘The Service Desk Show’, you could raise an Invitation to Tender (ITT), you could look at the Pink verify website or you could look at ads in popular Service Management magazines like VITAL. Okay let’s look at the options: Personal Recommendations, no two recommendations will be the same. You are looking at personal choice typically based on 58 VitAL : July / August 2010

experience of one or two tools, maybe clouded by personal experience of how well they were taught to use the system or a reflection of process issues. You could obviously ask a lot of people, but who’s judgement do you trust most and why? Search on the internet, and you’ll find loads of vendors, that is if you can be bothered to look beyond the first page: why not try http://list.ly/list/Cy-itil-tools for a more or less complete list based on popularity. Attend Trade Shows, and you’ll find lots of vendors, all spending lots of money trying to attract you to their stand. Do you look at all the offerings on all the stands or just the biggest or busiest or the ones that give away freebees? Produce an invitation to tender (ITT). You may have to do this if you work in the public sector, but be prepared for a lengthy and expensive evaluation and selection process. The likelihood is that you’ll receive at least 20 to 30 submissions. Look at the Pink Verify website, if you value functionality, then this is the place to start. It lists the tools in order of functionality, but not all tools are listed. Looking in Magazines, this may be a good starting point, but at the end of the day and advert is an advert. By now if you are really serious about replacing your existing ITSM tool you should have initiated a project and have an agreed budget with some timescales and some resourced pencilled in.

Differentiating between the tools By following one of the methods above you probably now have a short list, or maybe www.vital-mag.net

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even a long list of tools in which you are interested. Now, how do you differentiate between them? •Y ou could hold a ‘Beauty contest’ and choose which looks the nicest, or you could look at what your business actually needs from an IT Service Management toolset. I’m not talking about just technical functionality; I’m talking about true business requirements, the ROI and TCO of the tool, long term supportability, scalability to grow as the business needs grow: and is the vendor committed to improve their offering? •Y ou could ask for a demonstration and a price quotation. In which case how are you going to evaluate the various demonstrations? •Y ou could ask to be allowed to play with it for a while or how about a free 28 day trial? In all honesty would a car dealer let you play with a Ferrari, when you’ve only just passed your driving test? Could you really get the best out of a Ferrari or just scare yourself half to death? •W hat level of functionality do you require? What is the scope now and in the future? Is it just Incident, Service Requests and Change or do you need Financial and Resource Management to allow you to cross charge and manage resources using the tool. Step 1) Perform a Requirements Analysis; Step 2) Design the processes; Step 3) Toolset evaluation; Step 4) Toolset selection.

Requirements Analysis If you are looking to procure a tool that is ‘fit for purpose’ and ‘fit for use’ you should at the very least categorise your functional, technical and business requirements using the MoSCoW method. Categorise requirements into those you simply ‘Must’ have, those that it ‘Should’ have, those that it ‘Could’ have as long as it doesn’t preclude the Must have and Should haves, and don’t forget those which it ‘Won’t’ have now but you ‘Would’ like some time in the future. Is a SaaS option on your shopping list? If so you need to carefully consider the long www.vital-mag.net

term cost of ownership versus a perpetual licence option. Typical advertised advantages of SaaS (from salesmen and marketing): •G ood if you cannot afford to buy install and maintain the software; •D on’t require specialised IT skills and capabilities; • Rapid elasticity, add more capacity easily; •R educe Total Cost of Server Infrastructure ownership; •Y ou can shift your spend from Capital expenditure to Operational expenditure. Some typical disadvantages of SaaS solutions (from techies and dissenters of SaaS solutions): •S ecurity/Privacy/Data issues especially if hosted abroad; • Regulatory compliance issues; • Off-line Connectivity issues; • Bandwidth issues; • Dependency on existing infrastructure; • Dependency of external consultants; • Vendor lock in; • Long term ownership costs; •C omplex licensing can mean that TCO can be difficult to validate. Okay by now you have documented your ‘true’ requirements, now what are you going to do with this 100 page document? Use it as part of your evaluation...

Design the processes If you recognise that all an ITSM tool does is automate what could otherwise be a manual process then you will understand that good efficient processes are a must. Don’t rush this part of the project otherwise you will cause no end of problems, and additional reworking costs for yourself.

Evaluation By now you should have a short list of vendors to approach, hopefully no more than five. You should also have a list of requirements, and some half decent processes against which to evaluate the tool. How do you plan on carrying out an evaluation? Most organisations approach the evaluation phase based on either a day

long vendor presentation or by carrying out evaluation in a ‘sand pit’ area, or a combination of both. With a thorough evaluation process you stand a good chance of making the right selection decision, but you can improve your chances by talking to existing customers of the tool vendor, maybe a reference site visit and asking them some pointed questions like: • Why did you choose vendor X? • What other tools did you consider? •H ow easy was the implementation, and were there any issues? •H ow easily did the vendor overcome implementation issues? •H ow well do they support you after the initial implementation was completed? •D o you think you are getting value for money? • Would you buy from this vendor again?

Selection As part of your final decision making selection phase you should also consider the following points: •C an the vendor support your current and future Strategic, Tactical and Operational requirements? •H ow long will it take to implement and how quickly do you want results? •H ow many resources will it take to make the tool work? •H ow many tools and utilities do you want to integrate with or replace? •H ow much do you want to fight with technology integration challenges? •D o you want to fight with the tool to make it work, or deliver operational value to your company? •H ow far can you configure the tool until you end up customising and then find out you can’t upgrade without costly rework or consultancy fees? Ultimately the choice is yours, and hopefully you will end up with the right solution for you and your vendor. After all you will both be looking for a win-win relationship. Good luck with your selection. VitAL www.wendia.com July / August 2010 : VitAL 59

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The benefits of WAN optimization to business applications in the public cloud By Nigel Hawthorn, Vice President EMEA Marketing, Blue Coat Systems

AN optimization is a solution that started to become widely adopted when companies began centralising applications, pulling servers out of branch offices and running everything out of a large regional data centre or corporate headquarters, including file storage and email. Once this happened, the application response time for branch office employees became a big issue. In some cases, an enterprise application might take 45 seconds or more to respond every time the branch user pressed a key; in fact, it was not uncommon for a process that used to take five seconds take two to three minutes. This not only reduced employee productivity, but also undermined business operations. A branch office employee might require information to assist a customer immediately, 60 VitAL : July / August 2010

therefore a two to three minute delay could cause an order to drop or create a high level of customer frustration. WAN optimization addressed this problem by accelerating remote file and email access for users in branch offices and making enterprise applications run faster. In a sense, WAN optimization made data centre consolidation possible, because it solved the resulting problem of slow or broken applications in branch offices. Data centre consolidation is now moving on to a new phase. Companies are increasingly looking to cloud-based applications and services in their efforts to drive down IT costs and add flexibility to the IT infrastructure. In particular, Software-asa-Service (SaaS) is gaining popularity for a â&#x20AC;&#x153;pay-as-you-goâ&#x20AC;? style of application cost and www.vital-mag.net

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By addressing the issue of latency in the cloud and breaking down the barriers to public cloud access, businesses can better understand and embrace cloud computing, along with the opportunities it presents.

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vastly simplified rollout and scale. A key issue to adopting this approach, however, is in how to ensure proper performance for businesscritical applications. Traditional WAN optimization is based on applying acceleration and optimization technologies between two points – a data centre where the application or data resides in a branch office where a user is located. This means that in the public cloud, it is not possible to deploy a WAN optimization solution, since your company does not control or manage the infrastructure. While this may be possible with a private cloud environment – perhaps cloud-based storage or backup – it is not with applications, such as Salesforce.com. In order to overcome these specific challenges and address the performance issues associated with public cloud-based applications, both internal and those beyond the IT department’s reach, WAN optimization is now able to accelerate applications and content from the public cloud with a single appliance in a branch office. Rather than relying on a symmetric deployment of appliances between two points, the solution is asymmetric or “one-sided”. For businesses that adopt cloud-based applications and struggle with bandwidth and latency issues, this development is hugely advantageous, as users can access the applications they need to at optimum speed, and the corporate network can cope. With so many businesses moving to the cloud, performance is now a significant concern, and new devices that can enable them to drastically magnify the bandwidth for new web applications, large video file and dynamic Web 2.0 content, are increasingly necessary. By addressing the issue of latency in the cloud and breaking down the barriers

to public cloud access, businesses can better understand and embrace cloud computing, along with the opportunities it presents. A one-sided WAN optimization device that functions in the public cloud essentially provides IT administrators with an element of control over the applications across the corporate network, as they do not need to worry about what is going on at the cloud provider’s end. This means that those companies that were previously nervous about taking the leap now have a clearer pathway to effectively and safely implement new architectures in the public cloud. With the rise in online video streaming, advanced WAN optimization solutions can also prevent video floods from overtaking mission-critical applications while, at the same time, scaling the use of internal and web video across the distributed enterprise. WAN optimization solutions that include stream splitting for live streams and stream caching for on-demand content, can ensure users receive a high quality video experience without consuming WAN bandwidth beyond that required to serve the first viewer. This is available for Microsoft, real, Flash, Silverlight and HTML5 content. Whilst concerns in embracing the cloud were once centred on security, organisations should not forget the performance issues that could result from accessing public cloud applications. WAN optimization has moved with the times and evolved to meet these challenges, and one-sided asymmetric solutions now enable business applications accessed via the cloud to perform as they should. VitAL www.bluecoat.com July / August 2010 : VitAL 61