Looking back… and forward

This year has not been easy for many. By all accounts it has been a polarised recession: some of the largest companies have fallen, while for others, business has been booming. The stock markets plummeted only to rebound; organisations have offered themselves up for sale and then decided, actually, they could go it alone; redundancy [...]

Infrastructure convergence – the two sides of the coin

Let’s be fair – IT isn’t the only industry fraught with jargon, but it can certainly hold its head up high among the leaders of the field in terms of gobbledygook. The minefield of acronyms we all have to suffer is worsened by the astonishingly bad practice of overloading individual, sometimes quite innocuous words and [...]

Towards dynamic systems management methodologies

I do take my hat off to the people who first put together the IT Infrastructure Library, which (like the end of the cold war) celebrates its twenty-year anniversary this year. It’s one thing to learn, both on the job and with little support, the ‘golden rules’ and best practice principles of any discipline. It’s [...]

Virtualisation and security – the two-edged sword

All new innovations in IT are a double edged sword – with the benefits come challenges and unintended consequences. Not least server virtualisation, which does have a number of security advantages over running software directly on servers. While it’s worth considering these, it’s also worth weighing them up against the challenges, particularly given the relative [...]

Virtualisation – The State of Play

I presented this at an IBM-hosted event a couple of weeks ago. Enjoy.