Doing more with less

As the public sector cuts start to bite across the board, VitAL Magazine editor Matt Bailey speaks to West Lancashire Borough Council chief executive Bill Taylor MBE and finds out what one council in North West England can do with its IT in order to meet the challenge.

It is certainly a time of upheaval, uncertainty and change for all who work in the vast interconnected organisation that is the UK’s public sector. Central Government is wielding the axe, about to make swingeing cuts across the board. And in spite of assurances that certain areas will be ring-fenced and protected from the chop, all levels of Government, both national and local will see their budgets cut while still being under pressure to deliver the same or better service than before. Clearly, IT will play a major role in squaring this circle.

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Greening the enterprise

Kevin T McDonald, Washington USA-based senior information technology analyst and cloud strategist for ICF International Inc offers his perspective and strategies for greening your business.

The planet has entered a new era where everything is on-demand. The public and private sectors are all in, with YouTube videos explaining everything, from how to play jacks to the intricacies of the tax code. Social media, Blogs and Tweets flood the ether around the clock, requiring massive amounts of energy in support.

Organisations are becoming more dependent on these information services and the density of the information stored is increasingly skewed to voice and video. This means the storage and energy required to support data is growing at a rate that greatly outpaces any previous projections. In this environment, managing information systems has never been so challenging. With this growth of energy use, IT has taken centre stage in carbon reduction and sustainability. This deluge of data is stored somewhere and with this growth comes responsibility.

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Entering the cloud

A timely and detailed guide as to how to embark on a cloud project, what to consider and how far to commit. John Rollason of NetApp heads into the cloud.

Cloud computing is a reality, and it’s a force that I believe IT professionals need to come to terms with quickly. The economic motivation for cloud is high; business need for speed and agility is like never before, and the technology has reached a level where it makes prudent investments in cloud services not only possible but fast and easy.

The cloud is here and it won’t go away, but what is it really, why should organisations use it and what are the risks? If you live in a corporate IT organisation, responsible for IT infrastructure, what factors do you need to consider?

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What to do when you’ve been hacked

As recent news reports prove, the problem of hacking is not going away, if anything it is increasing. Steve Smith, managing director of Pentura offers advice on what to do if you’ve been hacked.

When your business discovers it has been hacked there are different mentalities on how to deal with it; for the Private Sector organisations the most important thing is to detect when a network or system has been hacked. Once an attack has been detected it then becomes important to identify the extent of the compromise, isolate any compromised networks or systems and contain them to stop the attack effecting other networks or systems.

National security organisations may decide to take an altogether different approach and once they are satisfied it is being properly risk managed, let the attack continue in order to monitor its movements, understand how it is working and what specific information it is targeting. They may argue that in some cases immediately isolating a malicious attack may mean that they are unable to understand the full extent and modus operandi of the attackers, strategically useful to prevent future attacks.

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ITIL: after two decades of use and abuse, what next?

Brian Johnson, one of the original architects of ITIL and worldwide practice manager for CA Services, charts the history of ITIL, takes stock of its impact and asks where to next?

It was back in 1986 that the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), a concept that has now become one of the most widely accepted approaches to IT service management (ITSM) worldwide, was started in the UK by John Stewart. It was based on the idea that spending on IT infrastructure management in government was too high and that a method to establish best practice processes for IT service management would be of benefit. The underpinning concept was that people would become ‘portable’ in the sense that everyone would manage the infrastructure in the same way and streamline processes, thereby increasing efficiency and (eventually) driving down cost.

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