I recently had the task of writing an explanatory paper about Good Practice Guide (GPG) 13, a UK-government sponsored piece of guidance around “protective monitoring” – that is, being able…
Selecting the right choice of components for an industry standard x64 server is much more than the speed of the CPU and the size of the hard disk. Virtualisation puts…
Whenever IT best practice for service management gets a mention, we tend to think of Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). A much longer list of them exists, however. Here’s one…
In business, the phrase ‘change is constant’ may be a tad overused but it is nevertheless true in many regards. The response from IT to this change is (ideally) to…
by Jon Collins and Martin Atherton MAIN POINTS CESG (Communications and Electronic Security Group) Good Practice Guide 13 (GPG 13) is increasingly being mandated for organisations involved in UK government…
Virtualisation has become an established trend in the x86 server market and is moving into the desktop and notebook space too. It’s a great tool for providing flexibility, recoverability and…
It’s funny how far mobile computing has come in the last ten years. It enables a flexibility of working that only a decade ago could have been considered by some…
Security has long been the poor cousin of IT. As any security professional knows, the way we have traditionally implemented security is tantamount to a technological afterthought. Through the years…
With the worst of the recession looking to have passed (touch wood), things are looking up and growth is returning, even if it is erratic. Companies are hiring again and…
‘IT governance’ sounds like a grandiose idea, but what is it? In simplest terms, it’s a subset of the (even more grandiose sounding) discipline of corporate governance, focused, unsurprisingly on…
The cost savings and performance offered by server virtualisation can raise unforeseen issues for storage and the wider infrastructure, says research analyst Martin Atherton. Server virtualisation technology is taking hold…
Roughly speaking, availability management is what your organisation does to ensure IT services stay up when expected/agreed – and continuity management is what you do if (nonetheless) something goes wrong.…
By Martin Atherton In the very real world of business IT, the concepts, topics and products marketed and sold in isolation are not generally employed as such in practice. Our…
What does ‘high availability’ actually mean in the context of IT today? We’ve written elsewhere about more general availability and good systems design, but what if you want to assure…
Setting and maintaining desktop policy and provisioning equipment and software sounds like something that should be done once and then left to gather dust while people just get on with…
Business today is a very different beast to that of just five years ago, and a world away compared to ten years back. While some of us are undoubtedly still…
In this three part podcast Jason Stamper, editor at CBR, talks to Jon Collins and Rik Ferguson, senior security advisor at Trend Micro, about the challenges of implementing a holistic…
While the principles of managing a distributed workforce may not have changed much, user expectations certainly have. The webcast considers some common sense lessons and best practice distilled from surveys…
It is great to theorise about all the good things IT can bring. Indeed, a fortunate few have that as their jobs. Just imagine what life would be like, for…
Our research in the IT management domain has helped us establish a few basic truths. Most IT professionals agree that IT does an adequate job of supporting the business across…
While the principles of IT security are relatively timeless and straightforward to understand, technology itself is rapidly evolving. The effect is as if, once every couple of years, we need…
Since its beginnings, unified communications (UC) has faced an uncertain response in the enterprise, with businesses recognising it as a “nice to have” rather than a “need to have”. However,…
Delving around the Web recently, I happened upon a very neat analogy in a couple of unrelated instances that really encapsulated exactly what Unified Communications (UC) had the potential to…
