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Stay up to date on the latest IT and data management information from EMA, including Webinars, Radar Reports, white papers, impact briefs, advisory notes and more! Select your preferred reader by selecting an icon on the right. Current Feed Content:Unified Endpoint Management: The Convergence of Enterprise Requirements for Supporting PCs and Mobile DevicesPUBLISHED: Thu, 23 May 2013 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Steve Brasen The broad adoption of mobile devices in the performance of business tasks has fundamentally altered the IT requirements for ensuring employee productivity. Users now demand access to critical business application at any time, at any location, and on any device. Unified endpoint management solutions deliver common IT services to multiple devices securely and with minimal administrative effort. To help identify the IT services that are most advantaged by a unified management process, EMA performed primary, survey-based research involving more than 500 business professionals that actively use smartphones, tablets, laptops, and/or desktop PCs. In this EMA research report, key findings on each device platform are compared, including current and future device adoption, device application uses, practices in data loss prevention, security and compliance, desktop virtualization, and the breadth of enterprise support provided. EMA Radar for Application-Aware Network Performance Management 2013: Illuminating the PipesPUBLISHED: Fri, 26 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Jim Frey The days when network managers could simply be concerned with interoperability and uptime are long past, and the focus has turned towards recognizing and eliminating performance degradations. This demand has also elevated and coalesced specifically around gaining a direct understanding of how applications and services -- the life's blood of IT-enabled organizations -- are performing from the network perspective. Management products that address these objectives are known as Application-aware Network Performance Management (ANPM) solutions, and are increasingly becoming essential tooling for enterprise network management and operations teams. For this EMA Radar Report, focus was placed specifically on core capabilities and features associated with the needs that network engineers, managers, and operators have to recognize, characterize, troubleshoot, and communicate details of how applications and services perform as they transit the network. Three common use cases -- capacity planning, sustained monitoring, and troubleshooting -- were examined in detail for solutions that are based (at least in part) on inspection of network packets or collection and analysis of flow records such as NetFlow, IPFIX, and sFlow. A total of 24 ANPM solutions were reviewed in detail and ranked according to solution impact, resource efficiency, and vendor strength.
DevOps for a New Millennium: A Lifecycle Perspective Supporting Business Growth in an Altered EconomyPUBLISHED: Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Julie Craig This April 2013 report highlights "real world" DevOps as it is practiced by modern companies. It utilizes a combination of EMA Research, DevOps vendor information, and customer case studies to drive home the fact that DevOps has evolved to be far different in practice than is typically presented and generally understood. During the depths of the "great recession" -- the years between 2008 and 2012 -- hard economic times drove a new pragmatism. Previously content with recouping the costs of enterprise management investments within two to three years, customers demanded payback within 6 to 12 months. Limited budget dollars were spent on investments with near-immediate Return on Investment (ROI). Cloud, wireless, and virtualization grew accordingly, as businesses became more adept at using technology to reduce costs. Not coincidentally, Agile development and "DevOps" became hot topics. Both satisfied two key requirements that surfaced during the recession: budget maximization and the "need for speed." Industries and regulatory requirements were changing so quickly that software Development and Operations teams were hard pressed to keep up. The "DevOps" term is used to describe the process of managing the handoffs necessary for Development and Operations teams to work in a collaborative manner. DevOps promises to introduce agility, repeatability, quality, and governance into application delivery via collaboration between the two key teams responsible for the overall process. Today, we are emerging from the economic "dark ages." Agile development practices have become the de facto standard for software development. However while the benefits of Agile have been proven many times over, many IT leaders still have their doubts about DevOps. A primary reason is because traditional DevOps thinking focuses primarily on the Testing through Deployment stages of the application lifecycle. Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has been researching the growth of both Agile and DevOps practices for several years and found that DevOps has evolved as a far more cross-functional, collaborative, and lifecycle-focused activity than traditionally understood. It now spans the application lifecycle versus being confined to a "point in time" handover of responsibility at deployment. This paper describes the "new DevOps" in more detail, and illustrates these points with research, end-user case studies, and vendor input.
EMA/CXP Research Report: The Changing Role of the Service Desk in the Age of Cloud and AgilePUBLISHED: Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Dennis Drogseth In Q2 2012 and Q1 2013, EMA and CXP in France joined in a unique research effort focusing on the role of the Service Desk in the age of Cloud and Agile. An effective service desk can no longer be a separate kingdom devoted to reigning in operations and providing a primarily reactive foundation for dealing with customer complaints. As this research shows, service desks are undergoing pressures to become more diverse and better integrated across a wide range of technologies, in which automation, mobility and enhanced visibility and analytic insights can more proactively complement and inform on traditional ITSM processes. Quantifying Data Center Efficiency: Achieving Value with Data Center Infrastructure ManagementPUBLISHED: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Steve Brasen Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solutions, such as those offered by FieldView Solutions, facilitate substantial opportunities for improving IT reliability, performance and cost effectiveness. By evaluating the environment improvement results of actual FieldView customers, EMA has gauged the level of efficiency improvements that can be expected with the introduction of DCIM processes. In the white paper, EMA reveals the detailed results of the research and identifies expected saving in energy consumption, carbon generation, and the total cost of maintaining data center facilities and operations. Taking Big Data Beyond the HypePUBLISHED: Tue, 09 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Shawn Rogers There is more than one way to execute against the challenges and opportunities of Big Data computing. Big Data lives within the enterprise on a variety of platforms that reach beyond Hadoop and other popular Big Data frameworks. Innovative companies are strategically deploying Hybrid Data Ecosystems that provide flexibility, better economics and faster performance against todays widely varied data sources. This EMA paper explores the Hybrid Data Ecosystem and how it supports Big Data across multiple platforms. Setbacks Help Us March Onward: Unified Data Integration Platforms Power Business InnovationPUBLISHED: Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: John Myers As we move into the new Big Data Revolution, the pace of innovation in business, and the importance of a flexible and agile approach to support that change, will increase at a rapid pace. Data integration organizations and IT departments will be at the leading edge of this change. They need to learn from the "series of experiences" from earlier projects and keep "marching onward." The lessons from innovations in other industries will have particular relevance in the new Big Data Revolution. Business stakeholders, in Marketing, Customer Care and Sales, will expect more from their technology partners. Those stakeholders and Finance teams of the CFO's office will push for faster solutions, reduced cost of ownership and lower implementation risks. VDI Impact on Networks and Network Management: Challenges, Successes, and Best PracticesPUBLISHED: Wed, 03 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Jim Frey The allure of hosted desktop solutions is strong and growing. These solutions offer compelling advantages in data protection, user mobility, and managed support. But a successful deployment of hosted desktop approaches, such as the most recent iteration known as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, or VDI, requires not only the procurement and deployment of software licenses and careful planning around back-end systems and storage, but also careful planning and execution within the network realm. This is necessary in order to assure that session quality tolerances and constraints can be met, both initially and as scale is achieved. Interestingly, but not all that surprisingly, networking professionals are often not involved in the planning of VDI deployments, though they are most certainly held responsible if something in the network causes VDI experience to fall below expectations. They are also expected to take the lead when troubleshooting of performance issues is needed. As with any relatively new technology, IT must learn from early experiences in deployment and adjust plans and practices appropriately if long-term success is to be expected. This research report looks in detail at the emerging impacts and concerns that the deployment of virtual desktop infrastructure solutions are having across all lifecycle phases of planning, deploying, monitoring, and troubleshooting enterprise IP networks. The final results and findings of this report should serve as a source for establishing and tuning enterprise network management tools, technologies, and practices plans to reduce operational risk and assure optimal return on investment in the highly visible, strategic technology that VDI has become within so many organizations.
Powering Analytics with In-Memory Database Management Systems Comparative Analysis: Kognitio Analytical Platform, SAP HANA and Oracle TimesTenPUBLISHED: Wed, 27 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: John Myers The features and functions of data management platforms in general, and database management systems (DBMS) in particular, are changing quickly. Over the past five years, the data management industry has seen the traditional relational databases lose market share, innovation credentials and presence among implementers as a "top of mind" solution. Among the technologies challenging traditional relational platforms are analytical databases, NoSQL data stores such as Apache Hadoop, and in-memory database management platforms. Each of those solutions brings a unique value proposition to the world of data management. Analytical database platforms bring the power of analytical processing that challenges traditional relational database management systems for complex ad-hoc queries. NoSQL platforms, often open source technologies, bring an economical solution that challenges the capital investment business case for traditional data stores. In-memory data management platforms bring simplicity of design by putting the data alongside the CPU in main memory. In addition, in-memory database platforms bring a superior speed of response when workload is freed from the "mechanics" of accessing information on disk, rotational (HD) or solid state (SSD), as part of query processing.
Aligning Network Management With Converging Operational Priorities Cisco Prime InfrastructurePUBLISHED: Mon, 04 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Jim Frey The age of cloud and virtualization is spawning renewed focus on networking, increasing the demands that networks be highly resilient at all times. While advanced features within network technologies clearly play a role in meeting this need, advances in network management technologies and practices are also an essential ingredient. This has driven demand for converging and integrating network management tools and functions, to pave the way for better awareness of the role that networks play in the organizations they are designed to support, and also for improving efficiency and accuracy in planning and operations. In this Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) whitepaper, the essential drivers and requirements for converging, unifying, and aligning network management are examined, and the newly updated Cisco Prime Infrastructure management solution is reviewed in this context. EMA Radar for Private Cloud Platforms: Q1 2013PUBLISHED: Wed, 27 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Torsten Volk This ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES (EMA) Radar Report analyses the marketplace for private cloud technologies from a customer perspective. Therefore, the only vendors included in this report are the ones with a sizable number of production deployments. In the end, EMA reviewed and empirically compared the 13 leading private cloud vendors in terms of "Solution Impact" -- features, architecture, and integration -- and "Resource Efficiency" -- time, effort, and cost. In order to ensure an "apples to apples" comparison, there are two Radar charts, one for solutions that focus on lightweight IaaS-centric private clouds (Abiquo, Citrix, Egenera, Embotics, Morphlabs, and Nimbula) and another for much more comprehensive, application-aware private cloud platforms (ASG, BMC, CA Technologies, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, and VMware). Innovation in Cloud AnalyticsPUBLISHED: Wed, 13 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Shawn Rogers Cloud computing delivers an array of enterprise value impacting capital and operational costs. As the sector has matured more companies are crafting solutions that leverage the core competency of Cloud computing to deliver better analytics. This EMA white paper highlights the cloud solutions of Teradata and provides details on how each delivers cloud value to end users. What You Should Know About Licensing for Network Monitoring SolutionsPUBLISHED: Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Jim Frey Network monitoring systems are a must-have for organizations of all sizes. When evaluating alternative solutions, focus is often placed on comparing features and ease of use, but understanding the total cost of the alternatives is very important. The core licensing structure, whether it be device-based, port or interface-based, or measurement-based, can have a big impact on license costs up front and over time, as well as on the administrative workload for maintaining the solution in production. This EMA paper reviews the essential components of network monitoring tool costs, compares several licensing model approaches, and examines Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold as an example of a solution that uses device-based licensing. Seven Best Practices for Network Management - How HP Intelligent Management Center Supports Effective Planning and OperationsPUBLISHED: Tue, 22 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Jim Frey With networking becoming an increasingly critical component of IT infrastructure for connecting physical, virtual and cloud-based resources with users/customers, networking planning, engineering, and operations pros need to raise their game. This includes recognizing how to evolve network management best practices and how network management tools can be best deployed to help improve operational efficiency, communicate within and outside operations teams, reduce operating risks and ensure optimal resilience. This white paper examines seven areas currently challenging network managers and the best practices that are emerging as a result, and further assesses how the Intelligent Management Center solution from HP aligns with those practices to enable success. Achieving NAC Results: Essential Implementation, Process and Control ConsiderationsPUBLISHED: Thu, 10 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Scott Crawford Business wants more fluid access to data while IT organizations must maintain security. As the diversity of users and devices, and the variety of access and multitude of threats to network resources and sensitive information have grown, so has the need for more flexible and automated ways to effectuate security policies, controls and enforcement. Rarely is this need more keenly felt than at the network endpoint, where people, technology, information assets and requirements for security and compliance meet most directly. IT consumerization and "bring your own device" (BYOD) trends have brought these issues to a head, forcing IT organizations to rethink how to enable and secure the use of managed and personal mobile devices to further business advantage. These factors have given rise to Network Access Control (NAC) solutions for enabling a proactive approach to managing network admission and endpoint compliance risks. Today's NAC technologies are delivering that promise for many -- provided that organizations understand the considerations for a successful NAC deployment and how to recognize solutions that can address their requirements, not only to meet the needs of protecting the business, but to enable its people to continue to work efficiently. In this paper, EMA examines the fundamentals that yield an informed approach to selecting and deploying NAC. Considered will be how today's approaches offer the means to identify and authenticate endpoint devices and offer a wide range of options for pre- and post-admission policy definition, enforcement and remediation that enable organizations to find the right balance of accessibility and security that best fits their needs. The essentials of NAC functionality are described, along with key considerations for implementation that can produce more effective NAC results. Three enterprises that have adopted the ForeScout CounterACT solution are offered as examples of successful NAC deployments. They illustrate how comprehensive device discovery, real-time endpoint monitoring, flexible policy definition and effective control compatible with existing infrastructure answers many of the most critical requirements for guest management, endpoint compliance, mobile security and protecting sensitive information assets.
Demystifying CloudPUBLISHED: Tue, 08 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Torsten Volk Narrowing and ultimately closing the gap between enterprise IT and the business has been a core challenge for decades. Private cloud is the "delivery vehicle" that ultimately will enable enterprise IT to bridge this divide and equip the entire organization with the agility and efficiency required to better compete in the marketplace. This Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) research report examines how small, medium, and large enterprises across industries have implemented private cloud technologies to deliver business value. Observing the roles of IT operations staff, application developers, and business stakeholders throughout this process provides a unique perspective on customer requirements and challenges. Cloud today constitutes a central platform, where IT operations staff provision building blocks (software and hardware), which then are consumed by application developers and business stakeholders. The more easily developers and line of business staff can take advantage of these building blocks, the better they will be able to turn IT into a competitive differentiator for the entire organization. While a growing number of application developers and business users are taking advantage of cloud today, there are still significant roadblocks on the journey of turning IT into a true differentiator. The study found a surprising lack of integration of private cloud technologies with existing IT management systems. This deficit can quickly lead to technology silos, where private cloud adds to the existing datacenter complexity instead of providing a consolidation and unification layer. For a significant share of enterprises, the lack of private cloud integration planning has led to budget overruns and longer than anticipated durations of private cloud implementation projects. As a result, ease of use and ease of implementation are todayís core requirements when it comes to evaluating private cloud technologies. This EMA research report identified security, storage, and a general lack of datacenter automation as the critical challenges of private cloud. The ability of private cloud vendors to help customers overcome these challenges will be key. Further lessons from this research are: - Multi-hypervisor strategies are real and fueled by private cloud adoption - The public cloud constitutes the third most common hypervisor and must therefore be governed by the private cloud - Workload portability and cloud bursting are becoming more and more critical - Converged infrastructure is becoming more popular as a foundation for cloud The Demystifying Cloud research project provides guidance to organizations considering the purchase of cloud technologies, by allowing them to learn from the lessons of enterprises that already have been through the initial release of their private cloud deployment. Private cloud technology vendors may find this research interesting, as it will help them better understand customer pain points and therefore provide inspiration for their product roadmap.
Closing Critical IT Security Gaps for More Effective DefensePUBLISHED: Mon, 07 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Scott Crawford In the last few years, the scale and sophistication of IT security threats have grown at an explosive rate. Organizations have to contend with industrialized attacks, which, in some cases, rival the size and sophistication of the largest legitimate computing efforts. In addition, they also have to guard against a more focused adversary with the resources and capabilities to target highly sensitive information, often through long-term attack campaigns. Regardless of their origins, today's attacks are succeeding far too frequently -- and one big reason is the limitation of legacy security tools. Modern attacks may leverage several techniques in multiple phases. Traditional technologies often lack integration and insight across these phases, exacerbating exposure to these types of attacks. Defenses that must depend on what they already know may also fail when they cannot recognize a previously unknown attack or threat vector. To confront continuously evolving threats, defenses must leverage more effective insight into attack behavior, when it is actually observed. In this report, EMA examines the underlying causes of the failures of many existing security technologies, and how these technologies must evolve to overcome them. FireEye is highlighted as an example of a vendor that has pioneered an approach to breaking down many of the gaps left open by traditional security defenses. With an insight-driven approach that integrates analysis of threat behavior across multiple vectors, including Web, email, and files, FireEye technology is featured as a pioneering example of security technology designed to better address the nature of today’s complex threats.
Using Converged Infrastructure Management to Optimize the Planning and Operations of Cisco EnvironmentsPUBLISHED: Thu, 03 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Jim Frey The steady convergence within IT infrastructure and IT operations organizations is fueling a drive for tightly integrated, converged infrastructure management options. But even as infrastructure convergence takes place, the pace of technology evolution and introduction has not slowed. As such, management approaches must keep up with significant rates of innovation and change. This EMA whitepaper focuses on the intersection of these two forces and how two IT industry leaders, Cisco and CA Technologies, are working together to optimize converged management in key areas of technology change and convergence, such as Voice/Video/Data, the Wide Area Network, and the datacenter. Simplifying IT Risk Management in Converged InfrastructuresPUBLISHED: Wed, 02 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Scott Crawford Virtualization has transformed IT as few technologies before it. In order to take advantage of the many benefits of virtualization, many organizations are also moving toward converged environments. While their computing, networking and storage resources are virtualized, they are still running on a physical infrastructure. This virtual and physical infrastructure consolidation can lead to significant security, compliance and IT risk management concerns. EMA Radar for Advanced Performance Analytics (APA) Use Cases: Q4 2012PUBLISHED: Tue, 11 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Dennis Drogseth Advanced Performance Analytics (APA), as Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) defines it, brings real-time or near real-time "big data" to IT operations, architects, service managers and even applications development, as well as IT executives and non-IT business stakeholders. A record twenty-two vendors are included in this industry assessment. They are: AccelOps, AppFirst, Appnomic Systems, BMC, Compuware, eG Innovations, eMite, FireScope, Fluke Networks, HP, IBM, Interlink Software, ManageEngine, Neebula, Netuitive, OPNET, OpTier, Prelert, Quest Software, SevOne, Splunk, and Zyrion. EMA Radar for Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM): Q4 2012PUBLISHED: Tue, 11 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Steve Brasen Although only fully defined in the past few years, Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) has been broadly accepted as the primary method for achieving effective and efficient IT implementations, operations, and management processes. The ability to leverage analytics and detailed modeling capabilities to provide real time visibility across complex IT ecosystems enables organization to optimize a variety of critical infrastructure support elements, including energy efficiency, heat distribution, space management, network connectivity and system performance. Of the hundreds of solutions on the market claiming these capabilities, only a handful have been identified by EMA to deliver full DCIM support. In this EMA Radar Report, seven of these leading DCIM solution sets have been reviewed and empirically compared across a broad range of measurements that identify product strengths and overall cost efficiency. Participating vendors include Cormant, Emerson Network Power, FieldView Solutions, iTRACS, Modius, Nlyte Software, and Raritan. The Mandate for Unified Network Management: What it is and Why You Need itPUBLISHED: Fri, 07 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Jim Frey As the world of IT converges, within the data center, within networking technologies, between voice and data, and in more ways to come, it is also appropriate to examine how management tools and technologies can also be converged in order to best meet the needs of IT planning and operations. Within the scope of network management, this means adopting products that integrate or unify management capabilities, features, and functions. Though many network management product choices may sound similar on paper, there are distinct differences that should be understood. This white paper examines the business and technical demands behind unified network management and what is truly meant by and possible via a unified network management approach. This paper also examines an exemplary solution offered by Entuity, including case examples of how the solution has been deployed as unified network management within live production environments. Beyond the Next Generation: Putting Advanced Network Security to WorkPUBLISHED: Tue, 27 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Scott Crawford A number of network security technologies have arisen that claim to be the "next generation" of network defense -- but what does this concept actually mean? In the view of Enterprise Management Associates analysts, the term has become marginalized by technologies that pigeonhole capability into silos of functionality such as firewalls or intrusion prevention systems. In fact, in EMA's view, the common requirements of application awareness, deep inspection for deep understanding of network content and behavior, and a "data-driven" approach to security that demands the ability to both generate and consume sources of intelligence, are leading to the increased convergence of network security capabilities. Driven by demands to unify and extend protection across a broad spectrum of threats, EMA sees in this trend the rise of Converged Network Security (CNS) systems that integrate a wide range of capabilities and break down silos in network defense more than ever before. In this report, EMA highlights specific examples of the ways in which these converged security systems put today's more advanced capabilities to work in practical application. The IBM Security Network Protection XGS 5000 is profiled as an example of this trend, delivering not only intelligence-driven, application aware defense against a variety of threats, but also the extensibility required to equip today's organizations to confront whatever may come tomorrow.
Technology Product Management: The Missing LifecyclePUBLISHED: Mon, 19 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Charlie Betz, Former EMA Analyst IT services and assets have well understood lifecycles. However, the technology products that underpin both services and assets are often poorly understood. IT product retirements and accompanying upgrade cycles are often unexpected and disruptive, affecting areas as diverse as architecture, human resources, security, engineering, and operations. Ultimately, the technology product lifecycle profoundly influences IT service delivery, yet this influence is indirect and requires careful management. Clean master data is a must; too often, vendor products are known by different names across functional areas. IT vendor management, IT human resources, IT architecture, and IT security may know a given product by four different names, weakening the organization's ability to effectively manage its suppliers and its IT estate. BDNA provides a solution to these challenges, offering both a high value master data catalog and the ability to translate and align your data with this catalog. BDNA's master data catalog, Technopedia, provides a clean data set representing hundreds of thousands of IT products, functional categorizations, release and retirement dates, and much more. This vendor and product master data is difficult for even the largest IT organizations to develop and maintain. With such a trusted source, the overall IT product lifecycle can be managed as an integrated, end-to-end process.
Why You Need to Consider Privileged Access Management (and What You May Not Know About It That You Should)PUBLISHED: Tue, 13 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Scott Crawford Access controls that define a specific set of privileges linked to individuals have become well accepted as a fundamental security practice. Why, then, are these same principles so rarely applied to the most sensitive access of all: administrative accounts that enable fundamental control of IT? This distressing situation is more than a paradox. The abuse that poorly managed administrative access make possible has led to incidents having a real impact on organizations worldwide. In this report, Enterprise Management Associates examines some of the most common excuses organizations give to justify this oversight. Among these are concerns that privileged access management (PAM) solutions are too complex, disruptive, or poorly fitted to business requirements. EMA counters this concern with an examination of the ways in which modern PAM solutions are transparent in deployment, providing the control and monitoring capability organizations need to bring privileged access in line with accepted management practices. Organizations should gain a new appreciation for the value of flexibility in policy control and comprehensive reporting that not only closes one of the most egregious IT risk gaps in many organizations, but also delivers value beyond security or compliance alone.
EMA Radar for Integration Technologies for Hybrid Cloud: Q4 2012PUBLISHED: Fri, 02 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Julie Craig Today's companies are increasingly "integrating the Cloud". SaaS to SaaS, on-premise to SaaS, and multi-platform integrations are commonplace. This EMA Radar examines the technologies companies are using to accomplish these integrations, as well as the scenarios, roles, and processes that are driving this evolution. This research represents a new "take" on integration that goes beyond traditional on-premise integration products in terms of versatility and ease of use. Readers should note that this is less a head-to-head product evaluation than a buying guide aimed at helping companies make product choices that are in line with their specific requirements. The products in this paper are diverse, yet share common functionality addressing hybrid Cloud integration and governance. For example, they vary considerably in terms of the types of integrations and platforms they support, ideal users, breadth of technology coverage, manageability, and cost efficiency. What they do have in common is that they provide the underlying "glue" supporting hybrid Cloud implementations in a variety of permutations. While most focus on data- or application-level integration for Software as a Service (SaaS), several also have some level of support for Platform as a Service (PaaS) and/or Infrastructure as Service (IaaS) integrations as well. The goal is to enable readers to make more informed choices in developing a "short list" of vendors to evaluate, regardless of what types of Cloud integration projects they have in mind.
Big Data Comes of AgePUBLISHED: Thu, 01 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Shawn Rogers In the Information Technology (IT) industry, 2012 has been the year of Big Data. From a standing start toward the end of the last decade, Big Data has become one of the most talked about topics in IT. There is hardly a vendor who does not have a solution or, at least, a go-to-market strategy. Beyond IT, even the financial and popular press discusses its merits and debates its drawbacks. And yet, the debate of exactly how to define Big Data remains. In this joint study between EMA’s Shawn Rogers and John Myers, and 9sight Consulting’s Dr Barry Devlin, respondents clearly indicated that their Big Data solutions range far beyond social media and machine-generated data to include all types of traditional transactional business data. The Role of Collaboration in Business IntelligencePUBLISHED: Wed, 31 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Shawn Rogers "Two heads are better than one." It may be an old saying, but it is still true today. In today's fast paced, economically challenged environment, making better decisions is not just a "nice-to-have," it is vital to the very survival of businesses. Collaborative Business Intelligence is a relatively new concept in which the two technologies of Business Intelligence (BI) and collaboration are beginning to merge in support of a new and improved decision-making environment. This research is authored by Dr. Claudia Imhoff of Intelligent Solutions, Colin White of BI Research, and Shawn Rogers of Enterprise Management Associates. Realistic Security, Realistically Deployed: Application WhitelistingPUBLISHED: Thu, 25 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Scott Crawford Historically, IT defense based on so-called “blacklisting” has focused largely on the threat. Today, the volume, variety and sophistication of attacks highlights the limitations of such approaches, leading many organizations to consider alternatives. In contrast to blacklisting, a whitelist philosophy focuses on recognizing legitimate functionality, and monitoring, containing or preventing all else. This sharply reduces the possibility of successful exploit, inhibiting functionality not previously recognized or allowed. As realistic as the whitelisting alternative may be, many legacy approaches to application whitelisting have failed to embrace a similar degree of realism in their implementation and deployment. They may have inhibited organizations with needless blocking of allowable functionality. They have often been too limited or cumbersome in the ways they implement policy. The scale of some of these technologies has fallen short of enterprise demands. Today, that reality has changed. In this report, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) identifies three key aspects of today’s realistic application whitelisting technologies: • They deliver a high degree of transparence, introducing little or no disruption in deployment and administration. • They provide significant flexibility in policy definition and control. • They can scale to meet the demands of the largest, most complex and highly distributed organizations, backed by the high-performance resources of cloud-based reputation analysis. Bit9 Parity is examined as an example of today’s application whitelisting that offers a more realistic approach to threat defense, delivered by a technology platform that embraces these three essential aspects of realism in deployment and administration.
Real-time Application-Centric Operations Visibility With NetScout's Approach to Service Delivery ManagementPUBLISHED: Thu, 11 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Jim Frey While IT enables organizations in many ways, delivering and supporting applications is broadly considered the most critical aspect of IT operations. A clear shift towards applications-centricity within operations is occurring, paralleling (and in some cases accelerating) a redefinition of roles, responsibilities, and objectives along service-oriented lines. These changes fundamentally alter traditional infrastructure management goals, requiring everyone in IT to expand awareness of and put their functions in context to how successfully applications and services are being supplied and delivered, both initially and on an ongoing, sustained operations basis. While many management products and technologies attempt to address the need for application visibility and context, some are more up to the task than others, and some are able to address a broader range of uses and roles than others. This EMA whitepaper examines the move towards application/service performance visibility within IT operations and in particular the network-based delivery of those applications and services and the role that network-based visibility can and should play. It also introduces the nGenius Service Assurance Solution and the nGenius Service Delivery Manager, a real-time service delivery performance monitoring solution offered by NetScout, and reviews the experiences of three IT organizations that have deployed the solution in live production environments. Ultimately, the paper assesses the ability of a network-based, application-aware performance management approach to provide both the depth required for definitive top-down troubleshooting as well as the business-relevant real-time insights needed for converged operations monitoring and support.
EMA Radar for Enterprise Network Management Systems (ENMS): Q4 2012PUBLISHED: Wed, 03 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Tracy Corbo The term "network management" encompasses a broad range of solutions from single point products to element managers to large enterprise-class solutions. For the purpose of this report, the term Enterprise Network Management Systems (ENMS) includes network-centric management solutions that are used by large organizations -- operations and engineering teams to discover, monitor, assess, troubleshoot, and generally maintain highly distributed enterprise networks. For this Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) Radar Report, the focus was put specifically on core capabilities and features primarily associated with network operations -- need to ensure health and availability of the network. Supporting functional capabilities such as performance monitoring, configuration management, asset management, as well as integrated management of connected non-network devices were also considered, but as non-critical (albeit helpful/valuable) extensions. In this EMA Radar Report, 16 current ENMS solutions coming from 15 vendor providers are reviewed and compared according to a broad range of measures regarding both product strength and overall cost efficiency, as well as in terms of the overall strength of the vendors themselves.
Next-gen BSM: A New Path to Integrated, Service-centric IT Availability and Performance MonitoringPUBLISHED: Mon, 01 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Jim Frey The pinnacle of integrated, service-oriented management strategies is embodied by Business Service Management (BSM) solutions. Such products are intended to bring together a holistic/systemic view of IT infrastructure and services, recognize relationships between collections of elements, and put them into context regarding how they support business activities and processes. Large enterprise organizations have been the sweet spot for traditional BSM framework solutions, but product complexity, integration costs, and services needed for deployment and maintenance have made them impractical for the broader IT community. A new breed of next-generation BSM offerings is arising to provide more cost-effective answers that intrinsically unify data across IT technology domains, lowering both acquisition and deployment costs. This EMA paper discusses the essential requirements for successful BSM deployments, examines how Next-gen BSM solutions differ from traditional alternatives, and reviews a Next-Gen BSM solution offered by Centerity in light of those requirements. Beyond the Next Generation: Meeting the Converging Demands of Network SecurityPUBLISHED: Wed, 26 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Scott Crawford A number of network security technologies have arisen that claim to be the "next generation" of network defense -- but what does this concept actually mean? In the view of EMA analysts, the term has become marginalized by technologies that pigeonhole capability into silos of functionality such as firewalls or intrusion prevention systems. In fact, in EMA's view, the common requirements of application awareness, deep inspection for deep understanding of network content and behavior, and a "data-driven" approach to security that demands the ability to both generate and consume sources of intelligence, are driving increased convergence of network security capabilities. Driven by demands to unify and extend protection across a wide range of threats, EMA sees in this trend the rise of Converged Network Security (CNS) systems that integrate a wide range of capabilities and break down silos in network defense more than ever before. The IBM Security Network Protection XGS 5000 is profiled as an example of this convergence, delivering not only intelligence-driven, application aware defense against a range of threats, but also the extensibility required to equip today's organizations to confront whatever may come tomorrow.
From IT Financial Management to Technology Business ManagementPUBLISHED: Thu, 20 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Charlie Betz, Former EMA Analyst Information technology is under transformative pressure like never before. Tight budgets and economic uncertainty, coupled with trends like Cloud and consumerization, are resulting in increasingly urgent needs for improved IT management at a business level. While mature IT organizations can manage the supply of technology, true IT business management also includes the ability to understand and manage demand in a way that is relevant for the line of business. And the entire process of meeting demand with supply must be translated to objective performance measures, such as cost, process effectiveness, quality of service delivery, or vendor management. Apptio has emerged as the leading provider in the emerging TBM market. Doubling its major enterprise IT customer base between 2010 and 2011, it now has over $101 billion in IT spend under management. Apptio has a number of notable strengths, both in terms of its platform and the applications it has built upon that foundation.
AccelOps Redefines Service Delivery with Unified Security and Infrastructure ManagementPUBLISHED: Wed, 19 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Dennis Drogseth Founded in 2007, AccelOps has developed a solution that combines strong infrastructure, security and service management in a single cohesive package. It is, according to its own words, helping to "change the narrative around IT infrastructure monitoring" and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) away from point-tool deficiencies towards a more integrated, and ultimately service-aware vision. AccelOps also does this by delivering fast time to value, and in a manner supportive to the habits of many IT practitioners in both the NOC and the SOC, who are often perplexed by many purportedly "advanced solutions" that end up sitting on the shelf due to complexity and lack of role-aware support.
Quest Foglight: An APM-Centric Approach to Managing NetworksPUBLISHED: Tue, 18 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Jim Frey IT exists for one purpose; enabling the business. Ultimately, IT must ensure that critical business applications are performing optimally at all times. To do this requires constant and ongoing planning and monitoring of both the business applications and the infrastructure that they depend upon. Critical business applications might include online retail, customer service, online banking, B2B logistics and ordering, voice/email communications, etc. The infrastructure that enables these applications includes databases, messaging middleware, virtualization, operating systems, processing hardware, storage, and the network that connects everything together. Every IT organization will tell you that as organizations expand and application architectures become more sophisticated, virtualized, and hybridized, the performance of the network has never been more important. And yet, network operations often remains disconnected from application management viewpoints. The business consumes applications, so while collective IT focus on application performance is paramount, the unbreakable link between application performance and the performance of the delivery infrastructure demands that these two viewpoints be brought together. This EMA white paper reviews the challenges associated with finding the best means for application performance monitoring and management (APM), and investigates the role that network monitoring can and should play in a successful APM strategy. Further, the Quest Software Foglight solution is reviewed in light of its ability to bring network management visibility and intelligence into the APM fold.
EMA Radar for Next Generation IT Management Solutions: Q4 2012PUBLISHED: Mon, 17 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Charlie Betz, Former EMA Analyst Information technology management in large enterprises typically has two centers of gravity: project management and operations management. In IT, project management is primarily concerned with systems development and integration (construction), while operations management focuses on the day to day running of systems. However, project versus service management are no longer comfortably segregated niches. In the past year, EMA has briefed with multiple project portfolio management and IT service management vendors, and has heard consistently that: * Project vendors are being challenged to add service-desk like ticketing functionality * Service desk vendors are being challenged to add project management capabilities. In response, a number of IT vendors are bridging both sides of the divide. All the major IT management vendors are at least increasing the integration between the different components of their suites. Of interest for this EMA Radar Report, however, are systems which support both project and service management upon one common architectural platform, with integrated resource management. A number of vendors, including some from the Professional Services Automation space, meet this requirement.
What Makes CMDB Deployments Work in 2012? A ServiceNow ColloquiumPUBLISHED: Mon, 17 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Dennis Drogseth In mid-year, ServiceNow hosted a colloquium on What Makes CMDB Deployments Work in 2012? EMA chaired the discussion between two ServiceNow CMDB deployments. One involved a large, global manufacturer, and the other a mid-tier financial services company, both headquartered in North America. The interactions were documented and a summary of some of the key perspectives is presented in the Q&A below. Enterprise Class Ubuntu Management with Canonical LandscapePUBLISHED: Thu, 13 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Steve Brasen Traditional management practices for enterprise support of Ubuntu systems principally rely on scripts and manual processes for provisioning, patching, security compliance, and maintenance. Increasing complexity in both business requirements and infrastructure configuration has challenged organizations to meet business goals with these antiquated processes. Custom scripts, for instance, may need to be updated every time a change is made to the environment or system failures and performance degradation could occur for which the root cause is difficult to detect. This EMA white paper explores how enterprise-class automation, such as Canonical's Landscape, works in concert with industry established best practices to facilitate significant performance enhancements, operational cost reductions, and an improved work experience for Ubuntu administrators.
How Quest Makes User Experience Management a Reality: Three Case StudiesPUBLISHED: Tue, 11 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Dennis Drogseth EMA's extensive research on User Experience Management (UEM), User Experience Management and Business Impact: A Cornerstone for IT Transformation, August 2012, revealed that UEM is a multi-faceted requirement that includes performance management, business impact, end user productivity, and even insights into application design and usage. The interviews in this EMA white paper with three Quest customers underscore UEM's diverse appeal, its essential values to IT, and Foglight's proven versatility in supporting the multiple faces of UEM. Dell KACE Systems Deployment Appliance vs. Symantec Ghost - Choosing an Enterprise Deployment SolutionPUBLISHED: Thu, 30 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Steve Brasen Imaging point products, such as Symantec Ghost, have dominated the deployment market space for the past decade. Challenging that popularity are new integrated deployment solutions, such as the Dell KACE K2000 Systems Deployment Appliance, that promote provisioning features beyond traditional imaging functionality. In this report, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) compares and contrasts the core architecture, functionality and costs associated with Ghost and the Dell KACE K2000 Appliance to help quantify value achieved in the two deployment solutions. IT as a "Business Within a Business": Vision, Financial Processes, and SystemsPUBLISHED: Wed, 22 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Charlie Betz, Former EMA Analyst IT can and should be run as a business within a business. This approach solves problems such as demand management, business alignment, cost control, funding for innovation, and transparency. However, running IT as a business requires both fundamental shifts in how IT is managed within the corporate operating model, as well as attention to certain very specific planning and forecasting processes. N. Dean Meyer Associates Inc. (NDMA) has been researching the most challenging aspects of running IT as a business for many years, and in particular the changes required in IT financial practices. They offer the FullCost method and tool for business and budget planning. Imbedded in FullCost is an advanced service cost model. IBM SmartCloud Application Performance Management for Dynamic and Cloud InfrastructuresPUBLISHED: Tue, 21 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Julie Craig This EMA paper discusses the challenges of managing applications in highly dynamic IT environments such as public and private Clouds. Modern enterprise applications are engineered for agility and are frequently deployed over elastic IT infrastructures. The benefits of virtualization, public/private Cloud, and hybrid deployments can include flexibility, efficiency, and business enablement. However, these benefits come at a price. Multiple factors, such as varying workloads and "just in time" provisioning, introduce risks to quality of service. Performance and availability can be compromised, particularly when IT organizations lack Application Performance Management (APM) solutions designed to support dynamic infrastructures. IBM SmartCloud Application Performance Management (SmartCloud APM) is engineered to support the most demanding, complex, and mission critical applications on the planet, regardless of deployment methodology. This paper details the reasons why it is important for today's management toolsets to support Cloud and similar dynamic infrastructures, and highlights IBM's answer to the challenge of building service assurance into complex application ecosystems.
How eMite’s “BI for IT” Revolutionizes IT Service and Application ManagementPUBLISHED: Tue, 07 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Dennis Drogseth eMite is a small but quickly rising star in service management, with a strong footprint in the Pacific Rim and a growing number of customers globally. The company's bread-and- butter customers are enterprises and service providers seeking a truly cohesive approach to service management without the hardships traditionally associated with platform-centric deployments. eMite's Service Intelligence Platform (SIP) has a versatile agent technology for managing applications and infrastructure, but delivers unique strengths in onboarding other pre-existing third-party solutions. This versatility is characteristic of a design point that combines "big data" back-end analytics with real-time insights into service and application interdependencies, as well as native CMDB support -- both internally to SIP and through integrations with federated CMDB sources. Best Practices in Lifecycle Management: Comparing Suites from Dell KACE, Symantec, LANDesk, and MicrosoftPUBLISHED: Fri, 03 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Steve Brasen Given the complexity of today's dynamic IT infrastructures and the broad range of management disciplines necessary to support them, choosing a lifecycle management solution can be a difficult and bewildering project. To assist in the evaluation of automated lifecycle management platforms, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has conducted a side-by-side functional and financial comparison of solution suites from four of the leading vendors in this market space: Dell KACE, LANDesk, Microsoft, and Symantec. Key best practices in lifecycle management are explained and used as a framework for identifying critical points of comparison and a detailed financial evaluation goes beyond just license costs to help determine total cost of ownership of each platform. This EMA analysis includes a comparison of over 45 features across seven key areas -- Discovery, Inventory, and Asset Management; Bare Metal Provisioning; Software Distribution; Security and Patch Management; Configuration Compliance and Remediation; Process Automation and Service Desk; and Interfaces and Reporting. Enhance Your VMware Environment with IBM SmartCloudPUBLISHED: Tue, 24 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Torsten Volk Introduction: The Importance of Cloud Based on a recent research study by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), the core reasons for the enterprise to consider private cloud solutions are agility, reduced CAPEX and OPEX, performance, resiliency, and scalability. These factors translate into two distinct economic arguments: IT Services as a Strategic Differentiator The ability to rapidly deliver, manage, and modify new IT services allows the organization to leverage IT as a strategic differentiator. Being able to adopt new business applications faster than the competition enables the enterprise to better compete in todayís highly dynamic marketplace. Resource Optimization Over-provisioning and under-provisioning of storage, network, and compute resources are ever-present challenges in todayís data center, leading to significant waste, as well as performance and reliability problems. Providing end-users with the exact required resources is key to getting the most out of every IT dollar spent. This means that resource provisioning and lifecycles have to be centrally managed, based on consistency, performance, compliance, policy, and security guidelines. The Core Components of Any Cloud: Virtualization and Management To deliver the economic advantages of the cloud to the entire organization, there are two core components required: virtualization and management.
User Experience and Business Impact Management: A Cornerstone for IT TransformationPUBLISHED: Sat, 21 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Dennis Drogseth In May of 2012, EMA surveyed 202 respondents on User Experience Management -- which was defined to include Customer Experience Management and Business Impact -- insofar as it resulted from end-user interactions with IT services. The research followed prior EMA research done in Q4 2008, "Quality of Experience: the Ultimate Collaboration - How Real Deployments are Succeeding and Why." The results showed that business impact, customer experience and user experience were indeed a continuum, while also reinforcing a continuity in terms of the rising importance of UEM with the earlier 2008 research. In both research projects about three-quarters of the respondents felt that UEM (or QoE) was becoming more important for their organization while only a scant 2% (in both cases) felt that it was becoming less important.
Transitioning to a Mobile Workforce: Key Support Consideration for Enterprise Mobile DevicesPUBLISHED: Fri, 20 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Steve Brasen Enterprise reliance on mobile devices to drive workforce productivity and business profitability is not only increasing, it is accelerating. To remain competitive and achieve organizational goals, enterprises must adopt mobile solutions that extend business services to a mobile workforce and ensure their devices are reliable, effective, and secure. IT organizations, however, are challenged to add support for a number of new mobile platforms and meet emerging mobile requirements without substantially increasing operational costs and complexity. This EMA white paper provides actionable information on how to transition to an effective mobile support platform and includes key considerations for establishing a strategic mobile management plan. Too Critical to Fail? Apica WebExcellence Suite Offers Capacity Planning and Performance Optimization for Business Critical Web SitesPUBLISHED: Thu, 19 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Julie Craig This March 2011 EMA White Paper profiles Apica WebExcellence, an innovative web performance suite from Apica Systems (www.apicasystem.com/). Hosted in the Cloud, but with optional on-premise agents, Apica WebExcellence addresses the Application Performance Management (APM)-related challenges of developing, testing, and monitoring modern web applications. Apica also has innovative service assurance features that will likely be of interest for companies with "can't fail" applications. The WebExcellence suite consists of three integrated Cloud services -- LoadTest, Performance Monitoring, and WebOverload -- which are targeted directly at assuring application performance. WebExcellence spans pre-deployment development and live production testing, encompassing both real-time production monitoring and protection against peak traffic loads.
Integrating Applications Across the Cloud: An Industry SurveyPUBLISHED: Mon, 16 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Julie Craig This is the full version of a survey-based research report published in 2012 and entitled "Integrating Applications across the Cloud: An Industry Survey." The survey was conducted during Q2 of 2012. Throughout 2011, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) extensively researched Application Performance Management (APM) solutions for Cloud services. Survey-based research focused on application architectures, among other topic areas, since choosing the "right" APM solution requires a clear understanding of the anatomy of the application to be managed. The analysis process revealed startling statistics about the extent of Cloud integration: * Nearly 50% of companies had deployed tiered transactions spanning public Cloud and on-premise computing environments (one form of "hybrid Cloud") * 35% had integrated (or were in the process of integrating) multiple Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. The findings made it clear that companies are integrating into the Cloud with increasing frequency and sophistication. They also suggested that one 2012 research focus area for EMA's APM team should be Cloud integration. This paper is EMA's initial foray into the topic of "Integrating the Cloud." The topic is important to the larger APM discussion because integrations have a major impact on end-to-end application performance. It is also important because virtually "everything is integrated to everything" these days, in companies of every size. This report details the integration use cases, product requirements, challenges, and stakeholders within organizations that are "integrating with the Cloud." An EMA Radar Report, to be published in the fall of this year (2012), will focus on integration products and their Cloud-related capabilities. While Cloud integration has become a significant driver for product choices, it has also generated a host of challenges related to designing, deploying, maintaining, and managing integrated Cloud environments.
Automating and Orchestrating the Third Era of Enterprise ITPUBLISHED: Thu, 12 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Torsten Volk After the passing of the mainframe era and the age of distributed computing, today we are at the beginning of the third era of enterprise IT. This third era focuses on delivering business services in a more efficient manner and is highlighted through three key trends: Cloud, Big Data, and DevOps. Cloud, Big Data, and DevOps all focus on leveraging IT to make the organization more competitive through increased agility and efficiency. The third era of enterprise IT is characterized by a radical focus on utilizing this agility and efficiency for eliminating the traditional rift between IT operations and business process requirements. Ultimately, business stakeholders investing in IT resources are not interested in technical reasons for why a certain IT service is not attainable. For the overall organization to be more competitive, IT must help align business processes with market requirements more quickly and at a lower cost than the competition. Cloud, DevOps, and Big Data initiatives all have grown out of the need to address the rising number of interdependencies between enterprise applications along with the ever increasing amount of data that those new systems collect. Yet all three of these initiatives can exponentially add to the complexity of the infrastructure needed to facilitate the demand for agility. For IT to reliably execute business workflows, these interdependencies must be managed end-to-end across the traditional automation domains, including workload and run book automation, virtualization management, managed file transfer, and application process automation and release management. Automation today can be seen as the "glue," tying together a rapidly growing number of business applications and aligning these applications with their respective business processes. Therefore, it is essential to implement a platform that can provide cross domain automation, instead of following the traditional siloed approach of deploying a myriad of domain-specific automation solutions.
Business-Driven Identity and Access Management: Needed Now More than EverPUBLISHED: Thu, 05 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Scott Crawford Identity and access management (IAM) has long been the first line of action to assure the availability of IT resources to those who need them, and protect the business from those who don't. This has led to significant expenditures on IAM projects in the enterprise -- and yet many of these costly projects have failed to meet expectations. Why? In EMA's view, a good deal of the reason is because many IAM technologies were created to serve IT rather than serving the business. Identity and access provisioning is a prime example. Provisioning technologies automate activities for creating accounts and assigning access privileges. Unfortunately, the processes they implement were often invented by IT to solve IT problems of automating access controls and reducing the cost of user support. What legacy approaches often overlook is one important fact critical to success: Business stakeholders have the context to make access decisions, and are ultimately responsible for making thoughtful and defensible access decisions. Information security and business risk management teams carry significant responsibility for administering strategic security initiatives as well as tactical policies and controls. To do this effectively, however, IAM solutions must become business-driven, automating proven, reliable processes that enable informed access decisions with minimal impact on the business professionals who must make them. This distinction is key to simplifying deployments, reducing IAM costs, and improving outcomes in balancing security and compliance objectives with business goals. In this report, EMA explores what today's forward-looking IAM technologies have learned from this evolution, with solutions that emphasize a business-driven approach. Aveksa is highlighted as an example of a vendor who has recognized the important distinctions between business logic and application integration flexibility needed in today's solutions for automating identity and access governance and protecting business assets more consistently and effectively from today's access risks.
Identity and Access Intelligence: Transforming the Nature of Enterprise SecurityPUBLISHED: Thu, 28 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Scott Crawford Today’s technology landscape is transforming the concepts of business IT prevalent only just a few short years ago. With this transformation, however, has also come an equivalent transformation of risks. Threats have exploded, from mass malware and "industrialized" attacks, to the long-term actions of the more adept adversary. Within the organization, sensitive assets can be exposed to variety of risks, from errors and oversights made by well-meaning individuals, to those who exploit trust for personal gain or malicious intent. These factors have led to an increased focus on identity governance to assure consistency in defining roles and delegating access privileges -- yet there is a higher business demand still. Intelligence is needed into how IT's transformations impact the nature of how roles are defined and access is provisioned, managed and enforced. When coupled with defense, identity and access intelligence couples a richer concept of identity with context-based access control and greater visibility into the nature of interactions with IT and the precious assets under its management, across all security domains. In this paper, EMA describes the nature of identity and access intelligence and the factors that are driving this important aspect of security evolution. In examples that highlight the ways in which this trend is taking shape, EMA illustrates how identity and access intelligence is becoming a central focus of security essential to defending sensitive assets and assuring that the IT investment enables the business and those it serves.
The Journey to Private CloudPUBLISHED: Thu, 21 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Torsten Volk Based on a recent Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) research study, the main reasons for adopting cloud computing, mentioned by 52%-62% of respondents, were as follows: a) Agility: Accelerating service creation and provisioning b) Performance & resiliency: Improving the performance and resiliency of business services c) Resource optimization: Reducing operational and capital expense Respondents mentioned a vast variety of enterprise applications -- e-mail, CRM, VDI, custom applications, ERP, accounting, HR, telephony, and even mainframe-based application services -- when asked what they were planning to host in the cloud. This response illustrates the importance that most companies place in the adoption of a cloud model. Organizations are looking for faster and more agile IT delivery models that help strengthen their positions in the marketplace. In today's relentlessly competitive markets, the ability to rapidly build and provision well performing and resilient business services at a reasonable cost can be seen as an essential strategic differentiator for the entire enterprise.
Cloud Management: The Service Catalog ImperativePUBLISHED: Wed, 20 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Charlie Betz, Former EMA Analyst Enterprise IT is in the middle of an historic transition, from a largely on-premise model to a mixed model with increasing dependence on Cloud services, both on and off premise. Corresponding changes in IT management approaches and capabilities are needed in turn. The service catalog is a critical first step for IT organizations to become more business and customer focused and service driven. A service catalog enables all areas of the business to have a consistent, precise view of all IT services and the business services they support. It is the single entry point for defining available services (IT and non-IT), publishing those services in a service catalog and automating all forms of IT service requests. Combining service catalog and request fulfillment automation capabilities is critical for efficient IT management. It is especially important in Cloud environments, as the promise of Cloud requires agile yet rigorously accounted for provisioning and configuration. Consumerization further increases the pressure, "raising the bar" of user expectations for frictionless and highly usable platforms.
Integrating Software Asset Management Tools into the IT Management ArchitecturePUBLISHED: Fri, 15 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Charlie Betz, Former EMA Analyst Software asset management (SAM) interacts with and depends on a variety of other IT management areas. An effective SAM capability must operate as a subsystem of a larger IT management system. Understanding the capability architecture of SAM is helpful to the practitioner: * Different vendors sell tools supporting various combinations of SAM capabilities, and a reference model is helpful for developing an acquisition and sourcing strategy for SAM and related tools. * Data required for SAM is also required for other IT management areas. Without an architecture defining systems integration, effort may be wasted in maintaining and reconciling duplicate data. * Understanding where various capabilities are weak and strong for a given enterprise is an essential input into investment strategy. * Integrations can represent key opportunity points for improving governance and control. Consider carefully whether your SAM implementation is duplicating services available elsewhere in your environment, and also whether new SAM infrastructure might provide services useful to other areas.
EMA Radar for Workload Automation (WLA): Q2 2012PUBLISHED: Tue, 12 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Torsten Volk The EMA Radar for Workload Automation -- created to assist IT professionals in selecting the right Workload Automation (WLA) products -- is based on the following key criteria: 1. Cross-Platform Job Scheduling - creating workflows across multiple platforms and applications. 2. ITSM Integration - orchestrating ITIL-based process inputs and outputs 3. Resource Optimization - dynamic resource allocation and load balancing 4. Business Integration - linking IT services to business requirements, business impact analysis 5. Predictive Analytics - dynamic thresholding, impact analysis, heuristic monitoring, etc. You will also learn how the following 13 vendors rank in this new Radar Report: * Arcana * ASCI * ASG * BMC * CA Technologies * Cisco Systems * Flux * MVP Software * Network Automation * ORSYP * Stonebranch * UC4 * Terma Software Labs
Service Center Control Desk: IBM Consolidates and Advances Its IT Service Management OfferingsPUBLISHED: Fri, 08 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Charlie Betz, Former EMA Analyst In the spring of 2012, IBM launched a comprehensive re-thinking and refresh of its IT Service Management offerings. The IT management products formerly known as Tivoli Service Request Manager, IT Asset Management and Change Configuration Management Database have now been combined into a single product, IBM SmartCloud Control Desk 7.5. The products span advanced support for IT and intelligent asset management, change and configuration management, service request management and service catalog, along with Cloud delivery options and built-in support for automation beyond traditional service desk workflow. The Rise of Data-Driven SecurityPUBLISHED: Wed, 23 May 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Scott Crawford Information security has long been hamstrung by obstacles unknown to many other aspects of the enterprise. Businesses may be able to measure sales performance or better understand competitive factors and customer preferences through data mining or other analytic techniques. Security, however, often wrestles with the unknown and struggles with a daunting array of exposures and threats. How can we do better? There is one thing that would help immensely in answering that question: data. Accurate and timely information that illustrates how and where attacks as well as defenses succeed, highlights where they fail, and clarifies where response can best be improved. Security technologies that employ this data directly in defense. Management strategies better informed by data-driven insight. In this landmark study of interviews with practitioners pursuing these initiatives, documentation of emerging data-driven approaches, and a survey of 200 organizations worldwide, EMA finds that the rise of data-driven security is more than a trend: - 58 percent of organizations of 1,000 personnel or more indicated that they collect 50 gigabytes or more of log and event data each day. 15 percent gather more than 1 terabyte daily - At the same time, 73 percent would collect more security-related data, or a wider variety of data, if they could make use of it. Clearly, these organizations see an opportunity in large and fast-moving volumes of security data. - To capitalize on this opportunity, 38 percent are currently expanding their investment in better security data management and analytic technologies. Another 40 percent plan to expand this investment in the next 1 to 3 years. - 50 percent report that they are already employing enterprise data warehouse technology to at least some extent in support of security efforts. 26 percent report the use of NoSQL and Hadoop environments. Another 28 percent plan to evaluate Big Data environments for security data management. The data explosion is just as real in security as elsewhere. In this report, EMA explores how data-driven security is evolving – in security tactics, security management and strategy, and in the data sources fueling these efforts. For many enterprises, data-driven security has become a mainstream focus. Many more organizations, regardless of size or capability, stand to benefit as data-driven security exerts a transformational influence over security technologies, services and practices emerging today, and evolving tomorrow.
Unified IT Demand ManagementPUBLISHED: Fri, 18 May 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Charlie Betz, Former EMA Analyst IT staff juggle multiple priorities: adding new functionality, troubleshooting and restoring service, and participating in the many forms of continuous improvement seen in enterprise IT. These multiple kinds of work frequently have no overall prioritization. Recently, the concepts of "unified demand management," "single queue," "single funnel," "common work management," and related terms have emerged in IT management. This unique survey research questioned 150 randomly selected IT respondents, including a high quotient of IT executives and presents insights on: - The widespread problems IT practitioners face with prioritization across different kinds of demand - How the role of the PMO is eroding - What IT practitioners actually mean when they say "Demand Management" - What IT practitioners want from a unified demand management solution Identifying and Tracking Applications: A Detailed LookPUBLISHED: Mon, 07 May 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Charlie Betz, Former EMA Analyst One of the most challenging aspects of IT management is defining IT services. Unlike a computer, a rack, a chair, or even a well defined vendor software package, IT services often have blurry boundaries, and yet there is substantial value in identifying them. Without a list or catalog of what IT provides to its business partners, it is difficult to justify IT budgets and align IT activities with business drivers and value. In this paper, EMA discusses how to define applications, how to manage their identifiers, how to maintain application data, and how to reconcile disparate application portfolios. Making your Investment in an Executive Dashboard Count: What to Look for and WhyPUBLISHED: Mon, 07 May 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Dennis Drogseth This brief EMA report offers IT and business executives, as well as IT managers and directors, insights into what their peers are seeking in Executive Dashboards in connection with the delivery of critical IT business services, along with how, where and why Executive Dashboards are most effective in achieving value. It also leverages data from EMA research on behalf of CA Technologies to support recommendations for evaluating Executive Dashboards targeted at measuring the operational effectiveness and business impact of IT business services. Assuring Converged Infrastructure: Converged Management Strategies for Cisco UCSPUBLISHED: Thu, 03 May 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Jim Frey Converged infrastructure solutions are one of the hottest new answers to the ongoing challenge of establishing architectures that can deliver new applications and services in a flexible, cost-effective manner. These solutions pre-integrate traditionally separate elements such as networking, compute, and storage, and are especially intended to provide an optimized platform for server virtualization, Enterprises and service providers are finding such solutions to be ideal for hosting virtual desktops, rich media, web infrastructure, and more. But with the advent of converged infrastructure comes a new mandate and opportunity -- to converge traditionally separate and distinct management tools and technologies so these new infrastructure solutions can be monitored in a systemic, proactive, service-oriented manner. This EMA paper examines the most common forms of converged infrastructure solutions and the related need for converged management solutions. It then examines the CA Technologies solution for converged management of Cisco UCS, a fast-growing example of converged infrastructure. The Trusted CMDB: Data Quality and GovernancePUBLISHED: Tue, 01 May 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Charlie Betz, Former EMA Analyst The Configuration Management Database is a central capability for large scale IT management. It integrates the most critical IT data for operations and planning purposes, and provides context for understanding the broader landscape of IT management information. However, like any data-intensive production system, it suffers greatly if its data is perceived to be inaccurate. In turn, shortcomings in this information can translate to higher costs and risk for the enterprise. EMA has covered the concept and evolution of CMDB since 2003. This research has shown that CMDB/CMS investments have brought significant benefits across a wide range of use cases including IT financial and asset management, change management, incident and problem management, operations management, and even IT portfolio management. However, while very real benefits have been achieved, the CMDB is a complex, integrated system presenting various challenges and there are a number of ways it can fail, including poor data quality. Blazent offers a unique quality assurance capability for the CMDB to increase trust in and value of this critical IT system.
A CIO's Guide: Building Business Trust with Application Performance MonitoringPUBLISHED: Mon, 02 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Julie Craig This EMA paper describes key steps that CIOs can take to ensure business relevance in this age of disruptive technologies and evolving "best practices." Taking into account the high stakes and complexities surrounding the delivery of modern applications, EMA sees leading edge management solutions as being a key to harnessing disruption to deliver business value. Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solutions provide a fundamental foundation for delivering high quality modern applications. They enable IT organizations to capitalize on disruptive technologies by delivering innovative, business-differentiating services. The Industrialization of Fraud Demands a Dynamic Intelligence-Driven ResponsePUBLISHED: Thu, 29 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Scott Crawford As criminals have discovered the profitability of attacks against information systems, the impact of fraud has grown. Adversaries have discovered the lucrative nature of harnessing cyber threats. Their innovations have made it easier to steal from a wider range of victims. This has spurred the commercialization of crimeware and services -- which, in turn, has given rise to specialization, competitive pressures, and other factors that illustrate how fraud, abetted by cyber crime, has grown from the unrelated activities of a few into an industry in its own right. This industry has produced a level of automation and sophistication in fraud techniques to rival those of the legitimate business world. The commercial-grade packaging of complex threats makes it possible to readily convert personal systems into pawns that facilitate fraud, often unbeknownst to their rightful owners. Large-scale systems management capitalizes on the ability to harness entire networks of compromised hosts whose masters often avoid detection and defeat through highly nimble evasive tactics. The net result: an industrialized threat that has real impact on businesses worldwide. In this paper, EMA explores the response organizations must marshal to stand up to the threat of industrialized cyber crime. Coordinated strategies embracing multiple tactics to limit exposure and improve effectiveness are now mandated by guidance such as that of the US Federal Financial Institutions Examinations Council (FFIEC) and other regulators worldwide. The RSA Identity Protection and Verification Suite is highlighted as an example of such a coordinated approach.
Closing The Loop for Effective Network Operations Management: Cisco Prime Assurance ManagerPUBLISHED: Tue, 27 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Jim Frey Networks have never been more critical to the smooth flow of IT operations than they are today. Making sure networks are both available and performing expectations is an absolute essential. Networking pros have long turned to management tools and technology to help them with this, starting with solutions that are used to deploy their networks and then often turning to a completely separate set of tools that are used for monitoring them. But many are reevaluating such separation and looking for solutions that can bring together these two sets of capabilities and a fully integrated manner, adding performance and availability monitoring on top of device and network element management. Such integration represents a path towards responsible, reliable assurance of the network's role and function in serving the organization. This paper reviews Prime Assurance Manager, a new integrated monitoring solution offered by Cisco Systems, and assesses the ways in which it can be used to achieve true network assurance. You Bet Your SaaS Security is Important: It's Needed In More Places Than You Might Think, But New Technology Can HelpPUBLISHED: Mon, 26 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Scott Crawford In study after study, EMA research consistently indicates that data security is one of the top -- if not the top -- priority for the enterprise today. Regardless whether the subject is cloud computing, mobile device management or "Software-as-a-Service," security -- for data in particular -- is often the number-one concern and priority for EMA survey respondents worldwide. This poses distinct challenges for the providers of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). A big advantage of SaaS is that it offloads the often substantial demands of application and data management for the customer, extending the reach of applications and delivering ease of administration and use through a hosted approach. But without adequate protection for the data managed within these third-party environments, customers may be reluctant to consider a SaaS offering. Often, the scope of data requiring protection may be far more than SaaS providers imagine. The breach of SaaS customer data -- which may include email messages and addresses, personal history or other information beyond account numbers alone -- has already and often unexpectedly resulted in real monetary damage and brand degradation for organizations worldwide. To answer these challenges, SaaS providers need data encryption solutions that are comprehensive yet straightforward and efficient to deploy and manage. They must assure customer confidence without interfering with SaaS availability, functionality or performance -- thus demanding a transparent approach. For the SaaS provider, this may also demand compatibility not only with traditional databases often found in SaaS environments such as PostgreSQL or MySQL, but also with so-called "Big Data" and "NoSQL" data management platforms such as Hadoop, Cassandra, MongoDB and others. In this paper, EMA explores the capabilities of the Gazzang Encryption Platform. SaaS providers will gain an appreciation for the real range of exposure they face from unprotected information and the values of a transparent, easily managed and affordable approach to data encryption that delivers assurance, enhances customer confidence and protects profitability.
Cloud Architecture and Strategy: Critical Success FactorsPUBLISHED: Mon, 26 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Charlie Betz, Former EMA Analyst Cloud computing may be a logical culmination of IT trends decades in the making. However, it is here today at a scale and with business implications requiring new kinds and levels of skills on the part of IT organizations. Enterprise Architects are trained in whole systems thinking and are well suited to lead the complex, cross-functional analysis required for an enterprise to get maximum value from the Cloud. IT Optimization through Predictive Capacity ManagementPUBLISHED: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Torsten Volk Virtualization, cloud, and the resulting IT-as-a-Service paradigm constitute the core elements of the new role of IT within the enterprise. No longer is IT regarded as a cost center, but today is seen as a strategic differentiator, supporting and enhancing key business processes. Allowing business stakeholders to take advantage of more and more IT infrastructure elements in a self-service manner has led to a proliferation of virtual and physical infrastructure. Each additional infrastructure item comes with increased CAPEX and OPEX attached. Overprovisioning is often used as insurance against performance problems and downtime, as conventional methods of capacity planning are too static and costly to calculate the optimal balance between load balancing and adding new infrastructure components. To resolve the issue of overprovisioning, capacity management has to replace capacity planning. Capacity management is based upon three core elements: empirical analytics, policies, and planning. If all three aspects are taken into account, the enterprise benefits from a dynamic capacity management solution that provides specific data center sizing instructions that are founded on future business and compliance requirements. The capacity management solution also exchanges information with other enterprise systems, such as service assurance, workload automation, data center orchestration, and composite application development. Due to this central importance, capacity management should be regarded as part of the backbone of corporate IT, helping the enterprise resolve its most important IT challenge of optimizing resource utilization, while at the same time guaranteeing application performance.
Complete Visibility: Converging Performance Monitoring for Advanced Services & InfrastructuresPUBLISHED: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Jim Frey Network operators face daunting challenges in keeping up with growth and complexity within the managed environment -- a situation aggravated by IT transformations towards service-centric operations that ratchet up demands for high performing, flawlessly available networks. In January 2012, SevOne released version 5 of its Performance Appliance Solution (PASTM), furthering its scope of capabilities for delivering solutions to these challenges via integrated, highly scalable infrastructure performance management. This EMA whitepaper reviews the demands and requirements for integrated performance management in light of current major trends and evaluates how this most recent release of SevOne's performance monitoring solution aligns with those needs. A New Visibility Architecture for Managing 10G, 40G and 100G NetworksPUBLISHED: Tue, 06 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Jim Frey Convergence is happening across IT, within the infrastructure, in the endpoint, between apps and communications, and more. The list goes on and even includes most aspects of infrastructure and security management, except when it comes to visibility tools. Application-aware packet inspection tools are an essential element in network and security operations and are growing in popularity and number because they deliver highly granular visibility. And yet, each time one of these systems is deployed, it requires another access point, more rack space, and in most cases yet another stream-to-disk packet storage array. The capital and operational costs of this status quo approach continues to mount, while a major technical hurdle looms. The mainstream adoption of 10G Ethernet, with even faster 40G and 100G networks not far behind, is causing packet analysis products to either wilt under pressure or require expensive upgrades and retrofits. This EMA whitepaper examines how convergence can and should be applied to packet-based monitoring, and further considers how Endace Systems has addressed this challenge and brought a unique, scalable and compelling alternative approach to bear.
Delivering Cross-Domain Change Management with ITinvolvePUBLISHED: Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Dennis Drogseth This EMA whitepaper introduces the ITinvolve for Change Management solution. In EMA's opinion, ITinvolve for Change Management is designed to be a perfect complement to industry advances in discovery, application dependency mapping, CMDB/CMS solutions, advanced analytics in performance and trending, and other areas of technology focus. By leveraging a combination of object-modeling for context and impact analysis, with Social IT for stakeholder and executive interaction, with a core, self-populating knowledgebase for trending, analysis and governance, ITinvolve is providing a compelling new facility for actively managing change by optimizing and sharing tribal knowledge with minimal technological complexity and administrative costs. Network Management 2012: Megatrends in Technology, Organization, and ProcessPUBLISHED: Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Jim Frey While many in the IT sector might consider enterprise-class network management to be a mature and stable science, with little to improve or change, recent tectonic shifts in IT technologies and architectures, including Cloud and server virtualization in particular, are combining to force a re-assessment of that position. These shifts bring with them new demand and expectations for network capacity, performance, and resilience, and once again are returning the network to a position of essential enabling prominence in IT strategy. Behind all of this change can be seen a subtle yet unmistakable trend of growing operational convergence and consolidation, with networking pros and network management systems seated in the front row and, increasingly, leading the charge. This EMA research report looks in detail at six major areas of change and evolution affecting network management, including cross-domain operations, expanding use of packet inspection management technologies, performance diagnostics, WAN optimization, and the growing direct and indirect impacts of server virtualization and cloud services. In order to set appropriate context, the report also examines the influence that broader IT and organizational priorities and projects are having on network management strategies, as well as consequential emerging requirements for network management products and solutions. The final results and findings of this report should serve as a source for establishing and tuning enterprise network management tools, technologies, and practices plans for 2012 and beyond.
EMA Radar for CMDB/CMS Use Cases: From Database to Federation Q1 2012PUBLISHED: Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Dennis Drogseth This EMA Radar is a follow-on to the EMA report: EMA Radar for CMDB/CMS Use Cases: Innovation Through Diversity, June 2011. The earlier radar featured eleven non-platform-centric vendors to show how CMDB/CMS technology is diversifying to address new requirements for dynamic currency and more advanced support for analytics and automation. This EMA Radar, with its nine participants, includes BMC, CA, HP and IBM and targets in particular the move towards a federated system anchored more in a service model than in the physical CMDB, itself. Five of the vendors with broadly defined use cases and some platform-like capabilities have also been included in this EMA Radar. They are, in alphabetical order, ASG, Axios Systems, iET Solutions, LANDesk and ServiceNow. These companies can also provide continuity, and a point of comparison in positioning across both Radars. Optimizing Cloud for Service DeliveryPUBLISHED: Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Dennis Drogseth Optimizing Cloud for Service Delivery reflects the more advanced position of cloud adoption patterns today. While it still addresses core drivers, objectives, and obstacles as they are evolving, Optimizing Cloud makes what may well be the industry's most granular assessment on how management technologies and cloud accelerants (e.g., converged infrastructure) are being combined into successful clusters or footprints. Indeed, just as there are many different types of clouds in the skies -- from cirrus, to cumulus, to nimbus to combinations such as cumulonimbus -- Optimizing Cloud for Service Delivery begins to shade in a meaningful taxonomy of technology patterns, organizational focus, and cloud success. This EMA research report is sponsored by: Gale Technologies, IBM, Keynote, Nimsoft, Zenoss. EMA Radar for Application Performance Management (APM) for Cloud Services: Q1 2012, 18 Cloud-Ready APM Solutions Available TODAYPUBLISHED: Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Julie Craig This 2012 EMA Application Performance Management (APM) Radar explores the challenges of managing applications hosted in the public, private, or hybrid Cloud. It focuses on the issues IT organizations are encountering in terms of managing Cloud environments and provides in-depth analysis of solutions that can help solve them. Cloud is changing the structure of IT organizations and making inroads on traditional on-premise application hosting models. This, in turn, shapes design decisions and product investments by APM vendors. EMA sees this as an early-stage market with vendors adding Cloud-focused products and features at a furious pace. In developing this Radar Report, EMA engaged eighteen top providers of APM solutions in a detailed analysis of the scope and capabilities of their offerings. These solutions represent a rich cross-section of the IT management tools landscape, ranging from small to very large, from pure software to appliance- and SaaS- based, and from point products to extensive multi-component/multi-function suites. EMA's intent in producing this report is to give businesses seeking Cloud-ready APM solutions a starting point from which to develop a "short list" of potential solutions, based on their own specific requirements. Although this is still an early market, the vendors included in this report all have distinctive capabilities for managing private, public, or hybrid Cloud environments, and can deliver significant value to companies of virtually any size or in any industry.
IBM Endpoint Manager: Reaping the Benefits of a Unified Approach to Security and IT Operations ManagementPUBLISHED: Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Scott Crawford Today's endpoint management challenges have rarely been greater. Enterprise IT is undergoing a generational transformation as mobile devices -- those owned by the business as well as personal devices those brought into the enterprise -- and "smart" systems of all kinds are overhauling long-held understandings of what "personal system" means. With the rise of virtualization and Cloud computing, the notion of where the endpoint may be found now includes third parties in addition to on-premises environments. IT innovation is not the only challenge facing endpoint management. Attackers recognize that the endpoint is often the weakest link in security strategy, where the challenges of highly distributed management coupled with often inadequate security coverage increase risk. The sheer growth in the volume and sophistication of threats amplifies the need for more effective security, at the point where IT intersects with human factors most directly. Endpoint management systems are often the first line of defense when it comes to vulnerability remediation -- yet the silos that keep security and IT operations technologies from responding effectively make it difficult for organizations to mount a proactive defense. They also create needless redundancies and gaps in mismatched coverage. Paradoxically, some of those who have the greatest resources for tackling the problem often suffer the worst, stymied by the inability to scale an effective approach. In this report, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) examines IBM Endpoint Manager as an answer to these problems. Two successful customer use cases demonstrate the efficiency of IBM Endpoint Manager that enables a striking degree of scalability for some of the world's largest, most complex IT environments, while also successfully scaling down to small and medium-sized organizations. Businesses will gain an appreciation for the benefits of an approach that offers both greater efficiency and effective control over one of the most dynamic landscapes in IT: where the changing nature of the IT endpoint meets today’s security challenges head on.
IT Optimization through Workload AutomationPUBLISHED: Thu, 19 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Torsten Volk Workload automation (WA) has developed from an isolated discipline, focused on the static scheduling of batch jobs, to a central and proactive backbone for today's service-oriented approach to enterprise IT. Workloads are now part of the enterprise service catalog, working together with capacity management and process automation solutions to make existing applications run more efficiently and accelerate the delivery of new enterprise software. The rise of the cloud opens up a new realm of possibilities to WA. Private, public, and hybrid cloud solutions are new options for processing enterprise workloads in a more efficient, flexible, and reliable manner. Dynamically shifting workloads to the place where they can be executed best at any given point in time constitutes a significant step toward IT resource optimization. WA can no longer be seen as a commodity, but constitutes a strategic asset. The CA Technologies Automation Suite has all the components required to harness WA as a true differentiator for the enterprise.
FireScope Stratis Harvests Cloud's Flexibility to Deliver Business-Aligned Service ManagementPUBLISHED: Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Dennis Drogseth FireScope's latest solution, FireScope Stratis, takes full advantage of cloud capabilities for dynamic self-configuration and tuning. Arguably, it does this more thoroughly and more pervasively than any other service management solution in the industry in addressing top-down executive concerns for business impact in both service performance and infrastructure optimization. As far as EMA has seen, FireScope has also delivered the industryís single most innovative application of cloud-related technology to support the broader requirements of Enterprise Management to date.
Interlink Makes Business-Aligned IT Real with Automated Service IntelligencePUBLISHED: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Dennis Drogseth With Automated Service Intelligence (ASI), Interlink brings its core BSM foundation into a more business-friendly way of combining present, past and likely future insights into operations and business outcomes through a single, cohesive solution set. ASI delivers a clear and well-directed set of reports and insights on such factors as service health, historical norms, and current and future performance. And it does this with easily deployable capabilities for real-time analysis and reporting to create what it calls "intelligence solutions" optimized to individualized business models and IT environments.
Enterprise Ready Intelligent Capture: How Financial Organizations Drive Efficiencies by Making Critical Improvements to Paper-bound Processes and WorkflowPUBLISHED: Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: EMA Staff
The financial services industry has always taken a lead in leveraging technology to drive efficiencies. However, the sheer volume of paper and electronic documents is threatening to overwhelm even the most forward thinking organizations. Mortgages, policies, applications, loans and statements create a torrent of paper that can challenge any enterprise. Inundated by paper documents, electronic forms and the problems of processing them, public cases of banks losing documents, sending incorrect documents, or mishandling loan data are on the rise. Financial services organizations often find that their process-reliance on paper (physical or electronic) encourages inefficiencies, heightens compliance risk, and hinders customer service. Organizations looking to leverage capture technology in departmental, centralized or distributed implementations should consider the attributes of Enterprise Ready Intelligent Capture in their strategic planning efforts. Enterprise Ready Intelligent Capture: How Government Agencies Succeed in Making Critical Improvements to Paper-bound Processes and WorkflowPUBLISHED: Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: EMA Staff
Whether at the federal level, state, or even county or township, government finds itself on the front lines of a raging battle to understand, manage and process paper documents. Tax returns, health records, social services cases, DMV applications, and land records create a torrent of paper that can challenge any organization. Overwhelmed by paper documents, and the problems of processing them, government has earned a reputation for spending too much on processes and delivering too little services in return. Government agencies often find that their process-reliance on paper inhibits optimum efficiency, increases compliancy risk and hinders service. Agencies looking to leverage capture technology in departmental, centralized or distributed implementations should consider the attributes of Enterprise Ready Intelligent Capture in their strategic planning efforts. Enterprise Ready Intelligent Capture: How Global Transportation Organizations Can Make Critical Improvements to Paper-bound Processes to Achieve Competitive AdvantagePUBLISHED: Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: EMA Staff The transportation industry is inundated with document driven processes and is struggling to manage ever increasing volumes of paper and electronic documents more efficiently in order to maintain mission critical service levels. Manifests, EPA forms, bills of lading, and purchase orders create a torrent of paper that can challenge any transportation firm, and that's before a shipment approaches an international border. Overwhelmed by paper documents, and the problems of processing them, there are logistics companies that have turned away additional business, because they simply couldn?t keep up with the paperwork. Transportation organizations often find that their process-reliance on paper inhibits cash flow, encourages inefficiencies, and hinders customer service. Organizations looking to leverage capture technology in departmental, centralized or distributed implementations should consider the attributes of Enterprise Ready Intelligent Capture in their strategic planning efforts.
SAP-on-Demand: An Innovative, Efficient and Secure Cloud ERP SolutionPUBLISHED: Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Charlie Betz, Former EMA Analyst Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions constitute the most important and strategic IT systems run by modern enterprises. Cloud platforms offer many benefits for ERP solutions including usage-based billing, best-in-class management, high availability, and ease of platform upgrades. HCL is entering this market bringing substantial expertise as a SAP solutions consultant with SAP-on-Demand (SAPoD) -- an HCL offering that should be considered by any enterprise turning to Cloud options for their core ERP needs. Workload Automation: The Heart of Enterprise OperationsPUBLISHED: Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Charlie Betz, Former EMA Analyst Workload automation, or enterprise scheduling, is an essential capability for large IT organizations. Many IT workloads make operational and economic sense when run periodically. Designing, executing, and monitoring such workloads requires an appropriate software solution. Modern workload automation products extend traditional "job scheduling" capabilities with event-driven approaches and additional value-adding capabilities such as integrated file transfer and application-level integration. Skybot Software is backed by Help/Systems, LLC, an industry leader in automated operations and job scheduling since 1982 with its products for the IBM i (System i, iSeries, AS/400) systems. This depth of experience is clearly visible in Skybot Scheduler, an enterprise-capable and highly cost-competitive offering for distributed systems scheduling.
Multi-Layer Performance Management: Co-Deploying ExtraHop Networks and NetScout Systems SolutionsPUBLISHED: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Jim Frey As part of an effort to align with business priorities, the focus of IT operations is shifting steadily and deliberately towards application performance. Performance monitoring and troubleshooting tools are essential elements in this endeavor, and those being deployed to leverage the network viewpoint can supply direct application awareness and transaction visibility. Along the way, many IT shops have found that the best answer involves the use of a combination of tools to meet the complementary needs of top-down, application-oriented performance monitoring with deep packet inspection forensics. This EMA paper examines three case examples where ExtraHop Networks solutions have been deployed for real-time application performance visibility and triage alongside NetScout Systems solutions for forensic analysis of complex performance issues and behaviors. HP Service Health Analyzer Brings Predictive Control to Real-time Service DeliveryPUBLISHED: Mon, 05 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Dennis Drogseth With the introduction of HP Service Health Analyzer in November, 2011, as a part of HP's BSM 9.1, HP further strengthens its leadership position. Service Health Analyzer was entirely designed within HP Labs working with Research and Development. It is optimized for cross-domain analytics. Rather than being a monitoring tool itself, SHA can take data streams from multiple sources and apply advanced, predictive algorithms in order to alert to and diagnose potential problems before they occur. Such assimilative analytics are a natural fit for HP's assimilative BSM architecture -- and bring many benefits. Architectural Foundations for Next-Generation Service Design and Delivery: A Look at BMC's Atrium in Market ContextPUBLISHED: Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0700AUTHOR: Dennis Drogseth EMA research and consulting has for years confirmed that more progressive IT organizations are seeking core investments to assimilate, analyze and automate capabilities across multiple sources, including multiple brands, rather than a single vendor's "Santa's bag" of tools with little architectural consistency, inconsistent functionality, and often poor levels of integration. Current technology trends such as cloud services and technologies, SOA, and Web 2.0 ecosystems are only accelerating this trend toward cross-domain awareness with a focus on selective relevance and actionable, dynamic information. This report looks at the high-level, core foundations of "next-generation" service management architectures, along with their benefits and design components. It then highlights BMC's Atrium Platform as the single most visible expression of this new architectural perspective in the industry today. EMA Radar for Application Delivery Controllers and Load Balancers: Q4 2011PUBLISHED: Tue, 25 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Tracy Corbo Long before VMware made the term "virtualization" a common, almost ubiquitous term, early Load Balancers (LBs) were busy abstracting away client requests from physical servers, creating a set of "virtualized servers." The first generation of network-based load balancer solutions were application neutral -- their primary function was to ensure that traffic reached its final destination and that the traffic was evenly distributed across multiple servers. An Application Delivery Controller (ADC) can be considered the next generation load balancer. Load balancing remains a core component of today's ADCs, but their functionality has expanded to include other features such as application acceleration, compression, caching, SSL offload, and application layer security, to name a few. In this EMA Radar Report, 12 current providers of ADC/LB solutions are reviewed and compared according to a broad range of measures regarding both product strength and overall cost efficiency. Cloud Management Begins with IdentityPUBLISHED: Tue, 25 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Scott Crawford Businesses are increasingly turning to cloud-based alternatives to on-premises IT such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications to better manage the IT investment. But when multiple services are adopted without weighing what it takes to manage them efficiently, the promise of the cloud may become lost in costs and burdens that actually increase, rather than go away. Few domains illustrate this better than access management. Each cloud-based SaaS application may require its own usernames and passwords. This fragmentation not only increases the burden on individual users, it also increases security exposures and adds to IT management overhead when user management is scattered across applications outside the business. Centralized access management that extends single sign-on to hosted applications is one way to tackle this issue -- but how often is it as easy to adopt and use as the SaaS applications that it supports? This is only one of the management questions facing businesses that turn to the cloud. How are cloud-based resources actually utilized? Which SaaS applications are most successful for the business, and which are under-utilized? Which SaaS or cloud investments could be better applied elsewhere? In weighing these concerns, businesses should recognize the opportunity a centralized access management solution presents for optimizing cloud resource management. If all roads to the cloud lead through access management, why not use this bridgehead to gain greater insight and control for more effective cloud management? In this paper, EMA explores this question and examines Okta as an example of centralized, multi-tenant identity and access management that offers new answers. Okta enables businesses to extend their existing investment in common access controls such as Microsoft Active Directory to hosted, cloud-based resources. It also provides insight into cloud application usage, embracing a wider range of IT Service Management values than centralized access control alone.
Videoconferencing Impact on Network ManagementPUBLISHED: Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Jim Frey Video is one of the fastest growing types of traffic on enterprise (and service provider) networks today. And while streaming video is driving the greatest total volume of growth, the most sensitive portion of video traffic is that which is part of live interactive videoconferencing. This emerging technology -- particularly when utilizing high definition video and audio, such as telepresence -- has the capacity to radically transform business communications, cutting both cost and time from work processes, saving travel expenses, and promoting more effective collaboration among workers both near and far, even across the globe. What makes videoconferencing special in the eyes of networking professionals is that in order to assure reasonable levels of real-time video and audio quality, session traffic must be assigned high priority and given preferential delivery rights over non time-critical traffic that will be sharing the network delivery infrastructure. In this Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) Research Report, the direct impact that videoconferencing systems and services are having on all manners of network planning, operations, and troubleshooting are examined to identify current best practices. Current levels of technology adoption are checked to provide context, and organizational responsibilities are also studied to shed light on how organizations are dealing with the technology at various stages of the lifecycle. Finally, insights are presented on how organizations have changed their management tools to accommodate videoconferencing, along with a number of case examples of relevant vendor technologies as well as direct practitioner experiences. Enterprise Mobile Device Management: How Smartphones and Tablets are Changing Workforce IT RequirementsPUBLISHED: Mon, 17 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Steve Brasen Today's dynamic workforce is more mobile than ever before. The explosive adoption of smart phones and tablets -- most notably Android, Blackberry, and Apple iOS platforms -- has broadened the effectiveness of professional workers to remotely support business requirements, improving productivity, streamlining communications, and increasing opportunities for revenue generation. As the reliance on mobile technology has grown, however, new challenges in the management of portable devices have also developed requiring unique approaches to device provisioning, maintenance, security and problem resolution. Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) conducted primary research involving extensive independent surveys of both mobile device end users and IT managers responsible for supporting mobile endpoints. Collectively, the two sets of survey data deliver a comprehensive cross-section of enterprise mobile device use and requirements, and EMA's in-depth analysis delivers insightful predictions of the direction and impact of mobile device management processes and solutions. Cloud Business Intelligence and Data Management as a ServicePUBLISHED: Mon, 17 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Shawn Rogers Cloud computing has caught the attention of CIOs worldwide. Early adopters of the technology cite reduced capital expenditures, lower operational costs and fast implementation times as the critical drivers for exploring the technology. Cloud computing has found early enterprise traction through IT driven projects such as data storage, test and development environments, Website hosting, and production databases. These projects are now giving way to business driven initiatives. This Global Research Study delivers insights on adoption, challenges and over all market outlook on business intelligence, data management and data integration in the cloud. Business Intelligence for the Business of ITPUBLISHED: Fri, 07 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Charlie Betz, Former EMA Analyst As continuous improvement techniques supported by data warehousing and analytics become dominant influences in today's business landscape, the idea of applying them to IT is gaining traction. While data warehousing is an IT service, typically applied to domains such as sales, supply chain, and customer relationship management, it also can be applied to the "business of IT" itself. IT is a significant center of sustained, integrated operational and economic activity in many businesses, and is an entirely suitable subject for data warehousing. It is surprising that data warehousing, a capability typically run by a central IT organization, has been so long in coming to the service of the CIO. This paper considers the application of data warehousing to enterprise IT management, including data warehousing basics, the IT data warehouse vs. the CMDB, continuous improvement for IT, IT metrics, IT management dimensions, ETL, and future trends. HP has brought forth a strong offering in this space, and stands alone among its competitors in fully embracing the potential of business intelligence and applied analytics in improving IT management. IT organizations seeking to create strategic business alignment, establish a performance driven culture, and drive continuous improvement of IT management should evaluate this product as a unique enabler.
EMA Radar for Client Lifecycle Management: Q4 2011PUBLISHED: Tue, 04 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Steve Brasen Essential to the success of nearly every modern day business are the personal IT resources relied on by their workforce to achieve day-to-day business requirements. How well these systems perform directly impacts employee productivity and, by extension, overall business success. Client Lifecycle Management (CLM) encompasses the processes employed to achieve all desktop and laptop support requirements from initial deployment through final retirement, including asset management, systems deployment, application management, patch management, configuration management, endpoint virtualization, automated power management, and security. To assist enterprises in the identification of value solutions in the CLM market space, EMA has researched the most popular and comprehensive solutions available today. Models and evaluation criteria were developed and ranked separately for two distinct size categories: Small and medium business (SMBs) -- identified as those with less than 10,000 supported endpoints -- and enterprise class businesses with greater than 10,000 supported endpoints. This research provides the definitive ranking of the CLM market space and offers clear, side-by-side comparisons of the leading automation solution suites available today. Evaluated vendors include: Absolute Software, CA Technologies, Dell KACE, FrontRange Solutions, Hitachi Data Systems, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Kaseya, LANDesk, Microsoft, Novell, Numara, and Symantec.
IT Financial Management in the Cloud EraPUBLISHED: Sun, 02 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Charlie Betz, Former EMA Analyst IT Financial Management is a long standing discipline in enterprise IT management, yet remains challenging. The complexity of translating raw cost and usage data into business meaningful terms has been difficult in distributed environments. Virtualization and cloud computing only increase the challenge. IT financial management ultimately requires sophisticated integration of IT management platforms to provide the required transparency. ASG has established new capabilities here with its recent acquisition of PS'Soft, including IT contract and asset management, service request management, supply chain management, and more. Available via both traditional on-premise as well as SaaS delivery, ASG's offerings should be considered for their breadth, integration, and low TCO.
Unifying Data Encryption: Liberating Transparent Encryption for Any PurposePUBLISHED: Wed, 21 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Scott Crawford With the growing emphasis on the need to protect sensitive data, encryption has become a focus of interest for organizations worldwide. Yet data encryption has long had its challenges in deployment -- challenges compounded by the many silos that characterize data encryption today. Transitioning workloads to cloud computing environments poses an additional barrier. The protection of data is one of the highest priorities for organizations weighing cloud alternatives. This limitation frustrates many organizations that see the potential cost savings, performance capabilities and dramatic scalability of Infrastructure- and Platform-as-a-Service environments, but cannot feasibly consider these alternatives owing to data security concerns. Gazzang ezNcrypt offers a solution to these concerns. With a simple deployment as a transparent encrypted filesystem, ezNcrypt makes data encryption available to a wide range of Linux applications, regardless whether on-premises or deployed in the cloud, using process-based access control that eliminates interference with the normal functions of applications or authorized access to sensitive information. In this paper, EMA explores four use cases for Gazzang ezNcrypt deployment, including: the protection of FTP data, security for sensitive configuration data or functional code, compatibility with NoSQL environments that demonstrate ezNcrypt's ability to "future-proof" applications, and protection for database structures as well as for the data within.
Demystifying Middleware for DevOpsPUBLISHED: Wed, 21 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Julie Craig This September, 2011 White Paper discusses Nastel's release of its first "freemium" solution, AutoPilot On-Demand for WebSphere MQ, a product ideally suited for DevOps and QA testing teams. DevOps is a hot topic right now, and for good reason. Today's application environments have become far too complex to deploy and manage with silo teams and stand-alone tools. Instead, they require coordination and collaboration across virtually all silos, and this is typically accomplished with teams of senior specialists with skill sets spanning Development and Operations. Tools play a key role in DevOps, as the right tools can be a bridge supplying a "common language" across teams with diverse skill sets and "technology languages." The factor that is often overlooked in DevOps discussions is the fact that people and skills aren't enough. In today's fast-paced technology environments, processes and tools are equally important. The right tools enable specialists from a variety of technical backgrounds to find common ground by giving them a common view of the application they are supporting. Nastel's premium AutoPilot M6 APM solution is used by the world's largest companies to strategically manage the performance of mission-critical tiered, integrated applications. On September 17, 2011, Nastel is releasing its first "freemium" solution, AutoPilot On-Demand for WebSphere MQ. This is a production-grade tool that is available free of charge for use by Development, Operations, or DevOps to test WMQ-based applications. This is the first in a series of "freemium" toolsets, with solutions for log analysis, Java, .NET, and other technologies on the drawing board. This paper describes the new product and its value proposition and positions it in an industry in which middleware management tends to be an afterthought.
File Integrity Management for Today's Data Center: Change Control Optimized for Physical, Virtual, and Cloud EnvironmentsPUBLISHED: Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0600AUTHOR: Scott Crawford One of the most important disciplines for managing a wide range of IT risk is the control of change. For many organizations, file integrity monitoring (FIM) has become a centerpiece of change control, monitoring and alerting organizations to changes in sensitive IT resources, and informing a more effective response with granular detail regarding what, when, and where change occurred. This, in turn, has led to a general consensus on the need for FIM adoption, from recommended security standards and practices to regulatory mandates that require its use to protect sensitive information. Standalone file integrity monitoring tools, however, may require organizations to embrace an additional management platform with its own requirements for expertise in deployment, operations and maintenance. Trend Micro answers these concerns with the integration of essential file integrity monitoring with its Deep Security solution for physical, virtual, and cloud servers. This integration combines the FIM capability many organizations need -- and which many regulatory requirements demand -- with extensive server security technology that recognizes the unique requirements of virtualization and the cloud. In this paper, EMA explores the values of Trend Micro Deep Security for delivering essential FIM capability with server security that answers these requirements, extending thought leadership that continues to set Trend Micro apart in technologies for securing the modern, virtualized data center.
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