We are a few years into this whole Cloud thing now and I’m surprised by how people still talk about it as a Cure All, some sort of silver bullet, conflating Cloud as a Service Delivery model with all sorts of things like collaboration, increased productivity, analytics – analytics?!, and a new model for application development.  Wow, where can I get some of that?  How much would you pay for such a wonder drug?  You need only open an industry rag, scholarly journal, or turn on the TV to get blasted with some of this hype.  At least I haven’t seen a “To the Cloud!” commercial in awhile.

I think we need to be much more precise in how we talk about Cloud because all of this squishiness is not only misleading, but it distracts from how we should be designing and adopting solutions that use this service delivery model.  And let me once again beg for a new moniker for this service delivery model, I’m so over Cloud.

Cloud is often conflated with filesharing and collaboration in the consumer marketplace, take a look at Apple and Microsoft’s work in this space.  At least with iCloud you could say it is a collection of services delivered via the Cloud service delivery model, varying from information synching across devices to device finding.  I never could figure out what Microsoft was selling with it’s commercials.

Maybe I’ve just spent too much of my life as a service management bigot, but looking at Cloud as a service delivery model, while not perhaps the best answer, is one of the more clean ways to think of it.  It’s stuff like the conclusion to Andrew McAfee’s quite good piece in the Harvard Business Review, “What Every CEO Needs to Know About the Cloud” that causes confusion: “Cloud computing offers advantages in, at a minimum, productivity, collaboration, analytics, and application development”.  What?!  How does Cloud computing do that?  Cloud as a service delivery model can make consumption of collaboration services, or analytics services, or access to application development environments easier thereby leading to enhanced productivity, but someone needs to design the services that deliver that.  Those services are finally showing up in the wild, but many of them aren’t enterprise strength yet.  It’s comments like these in management journals C-level executives read that set a huge expectation gap and are adding to the tension between IT and the Business.

The expectation on the business side of the house is that Cloud holds the answers to solving many problems or concerns that companies are facing today: flexibility; agility; time to market; time to value; and lower costs.  These are huge expectations, and the business is looking at IT and are wondering why they aren’t delivering all of these things now, pointing to articles and commercials promising that these benefits are already here.  I firmly believe that IT needs to become a Service Provider to the business or the business will find new Service Providers to replace them, but hype and imprecise language does not a Service Provider make.  EMC IT has spent the last two years transforming itself into a Service Provider and transparently publishing its services and comparable services available from other providers, an informed consumer is much more likely to make a good choice.

For Cloud to succeed as a service delivery model there must be services readily available, not just consumer strength ones, we need enterprise strength.  They are being built, and as McAfee noted and EMC IT has shown companies should be building some of these services themselves and leverage the delivery model to drive out cost, improve adoption, and increase agility.  There are many upsides to Cloud as a service delivery model, let’s not muddy the water by conflating Cloud with the benefits that services delivered via Cloud can provide if properly designed, implemented, priced and delivered.

There’s been a lot of interest in converged infrastructure platforms by IT organizations, and these can be a great foundation for a cloud infrastructure across the enterprise. However, our experience working with clients on realizing their converged infrastructure suggests that you need to think about this not just as a technology deployment, but also a catalyst to transform to a cloud operating model.

If you’re going to meet business expectations for improved IT agility, you’d better make your processes as agile as the technology can support. What does all this mean? And how can you leverage converged infrastructure to achieve such an operating model?

I recently did a 20 minute slidecast with Rich Brueckner of Inside-Cloud, and we discussed best practices for realizing converged infrastructure and the drivers for it.

Take a look/listen and let me know what you think:

Go Big or Go Home, seems trite, but it is applicable to IT transformation.  Companies that are successfully adopting cloud technologies are taking a transformation approach, not a technical project approach.  The larger the scale of the program the more traction they are getting across the enterprise, business and IT.  For too long virtualization has been conflated with consolidation and that’s been one of the sticking points when it comes to trying to get the business and application owners to buy in to change.

Getting the business to buy in to ubiquitous virtualization and cloud technologies and services requires marketing to them in terms that are meaningful.  The message for too long has been, “Allow us to virtualize your tier 1 apps so we can continue to consolidate the environment and drive down cost”.  That’s not a particularly compelling message to the business, and in fact you may not always drive down cost for that particular mission critical application.  What most business process and application owners do find compelling are improvements around agility, service provisioning, availability, performance, transparency of costs and other service level attributes.  It just so happens that these benefits are realized by virtualizing infrastructure AND implementing other cloud hallmarks like automation, orchestration, process redesign, self-service, aggregated service definitions and so on.  Virtualizing workloads and consolidating infrastructure solves IT problems, making it easier to request, consume and predict costs for IT services solve business problems.

Being able to deliver on these promises to the business requires a program at an enterprise level with full executive sponsorship that will mature people, processes and technology at roughly the same pace.  Metrics need to be defined and agreed upon at the outset  and a dashboard or marketing campaign needs to be put in place to drive workloads to the target architecture.  Another key sticking point is taking the Field of Dreams approach to Cloud implementation, just because you build it doesn’t mean they’ll come.  We’ve all experienced something like designing what we in IT think will be the killer app or service to offer to our users only to have it launch and fizzle because there was no compelling reason to use it.  It’s not enough to build the baseball diamond, you’ve got to build it, turn on the lights, put up some billboards on the highway, make sure that people who’ve been there tell their friends how great it is, use some incentive pricing, give out some free tickets, set up a bus service to the field and so on.  Marketing, incentive pricing, service definitions that are compelling to the business, overhauling how they interact with IT, and implementing self-service where appropriate helps to drive workloads to that new target architecture.

There are plenty of benefits to IT to this approach as well.  You can make that new interface to the business look highly flexible and have lots of choices, there could be three or four selections plus a custom service, lots to choose from as a business or application owner.  The difference between those services might be that the highly commoditized cloud delivered ones are provisioned in a day and the custom one is provisioned in 6 weeks.  Suddenly the desire for that highly customized architecture gives way to “good enough” and wicked fast.  It may not always be their wallet you’ll have to appeal to, and that actually gives IT more options.  So, what are you waiting for?  If you’re going to change, Go BIG or go Home, your customers and your staff will thank you for it.

Steve Herrod’s super session was one of the things I enjoyed most about this year’s VMworld.  Not only were the technologies and ideas that were introduced inspiring and where I was hoping to see VMware head but there was real passion for making content accessible evident throughout the entire presentation.  VMworld coming so soon after the great one day class from Edward Tufte really increased the impact of the message.  I had been thinking of content in terms of Big Information, of how do we present information to people, how do we share and collaborate etc.  Steve’s presentation pushed that point even further, it’s all about the content really, the receptacle that it’s delivered in is irrelevant, it could be a briefcase, or a Ming vase, all the end user cares about is what’s in it.  Just take a gander at Vincent Vega there staring at Marsellus Wallace’s soul, the briefcase isn’t what was cool in Pulp Fiction, it’s what was in it.

One of the great things about the commoditization that is occurring right now in the end user compute space is that people are demanding what they want be delivered to whatever device they have handy at the moment.  I access my email and calendar via a MacBook Pro, an iPad and an iPhone depending on what I have near me at the time.  There are some things that I have to go to my MBP for every time, whether I like it or not and boy do I want that to change.  What we saw on September 1st is a direct response to that desire on the part of end users.  Virtual phones, HTML5, virtualized apps and desktops, and new ways to collaborate and share files, messages and ideas are where VMware is going and it’s all divorced from the container it is being delivered in.  What could be more exciting, and more scarey?

I took time out a few weeks back to attend Edward Tufte’s One-Day Course on “Presenting Data and Information” and learned several new things and had several ideas reinforced by the methods and examples that Edward used. One of my favorite things that Edward brought up was encapsulated in this quote: “These are largely solved problems (displaying information); don’t get an original, get it right”. This of course immediately brought to mind the dreaded “Not Invented Here” syndrome and led me to think about how often I’ve encountered this in the IT world. On the other hand, innovation is terribly important and we take it very seriously at EMC - so how do you find the right balance of “solved problems” and innovation?

The point of Edward’s observation was that we often spend a lot of time focused on the container that we’re putting something into rather than the content. I’ve certainly been guilty of this while twiddling with a PowerPoint presentation at 3am in the morning changing fonts, colors, and finding stupid art that all really had nothing to do with what the presentation was trying to say. It was a real wake up call as was most of the content of Edward’s great essay “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within“. So, what’s this got to do with IT? Well just like I get caught up futzing with PowerPoint fonts I’ve also been guilty of over-engineering IT solutions as an engineer and architect, and I know I’m not the only one. From trying to make components do things that they aren’t necessarily good at, e.g. let switches switch and routers route, or not accepting a solution because it only does 95% of what I want, even though the remaining 5% is largely icing on the cake not core functionality, or writing a message queue from scratch because hey, it’s cool. Focus on the content, boy that strips away a lot of the nonsense, doesn’t it?

When we were designing the Vblock a primary driver was to limit the non-recurring engineering that IT shops have to do. There is very little value in your engineers validating that NIC A works with Firmware B on Switch C when installed into Motherboard D and so on. And guess what, you’ve got to start that whole process over again when Firmware B’ comes out. The value is in having your engineers focus on the content, how do you integrate the solution into your security, BC\DR, compliance and monitoring infrastructure and policies. This is largely true of most stack solutions of course, I just happen to think the Vblock is more vanilla, more flexible, and what not, yeah, I’m a bit biased. You can extrapolate that thinking up to what runs on the Vblock, either from a software suite perspective or a development framework and so on.

Taking Edward’s point a bit further, the content is where you should focus your innovation. For EMC that content is our products and solutions and that’s where our Innovation Showcase helps us shine. If we spent a ton of time innovating on developing a kickass CRM system from scratch we wouldn’t have a ton of ROI to show for those efforts. If you’re a financial services company your content is how you get your customers to interact with you in new ways, how you get new products that are compelling to them in front of them, and how you ensure their information is secure and yet still useable. IT systems are enablers of these things, but they’re not the answer per se. I’d often hear, “If I install XYZ solution I’ll have a cloud, right?” in the early days of this whole cloud transformation movement. Hardware and software, IMHO, do not a cloud make, you need the processes, and policies, etc. to bring it all together. A solution like the Vblock is a cloud accelerant in my opinion, its goal is to help customers focus on the content. The best clip art and slide transitions aren’t going to get your point across, it’s all about the content.

I’ve been interviewing several people to lead up the Virtualization group of my organization lately and one of the candidates asked me an excellent question, “Well, what do you mean by Virtualization?”. Very good question, am I talking about VMware, the hypervisor, virtualized infrastructure, what? Apparently I’m in a heretical mood these days because my answer was, “No, I don’t mean any of that, I don’t want to limit it to that. When I talk about Virtualization and what I want this team to focus on is bigger than that. Virtualization to me is technology enablement allowing IT to run the workloads you need to where you want to.”

That distinction is important to me, and more importantly my customers. They NEED to run particular workloads in order to keep the doors open, to support the key processes required to run their business. They WANT to run those workloads where it makes sense to from an availability, or performance, or security, or even functionality perspective. Where they want to run that particular workload might change based on market conditions, or price of energy, or where the user has moved to, or because the security profile associated with it changed. It’s all about mobility. Now I know, technically, that doesn’t only require virtualization, and in some cases doesn’t even require virtualization, but that’s what customers are looking for, that capability. Virtualization used to be about consolidating many workloads onto one physical machine to optimize utilization of resources. That’s that first phase that many refer to on the journey to Cloud, consolidation of workloads. It’s an interesting concept to the CFO and CIO and in many instances the CISO, it’s not all that compelling to an end user or a line of business.

In my Cloud Heresy post I posited that we need to solve the business’s problems, this is a part of that. The key attribute of virtualization that’s getting the most traction with IT’s customers is mobility, sometimes referred to as agility. It’s about more than the hypervisor, but that’s the start. Why wouldn’t you put a hypervisor on every physical system? Why chain yourself to a machine, the overhead associated with the hypervisor isn’t that much any more and the benefits to agility, recoverability, &c. associated with it would outweigh the added cost in my opinion. Virtualized networks, storage, changing the perimeter for security from the network endpoints to the hypervisor are all components of enabling mobility in your enterprise. So, that’s the charge I’ve given my new Virtualization lead, continue to build out offerings and delivery capability to enable workload mobility for our customers.

On an unrelated note I was interested to see a cool new infographic from VMware about how vSphere is everywhere. I’m not sure I would’ve released all the information they did on it as some simple math reveals an interesting point. Two pieces of the graphic are below:

So there are 20 million VMs on vSphere, that’s awesome!

And there are 798,000 vSphere admins, outstanding!

Ooooh, wait a minute, that means each admin is responsible for an average of 28 VMs. Hmmm, that doesn’t sound so great. Let’s assume that 50% of those vSphere admins are geeks who have the certification but aren’t necessarily using it as a part of their job. Well, that still leaves an average of 56 VMs. Either we’ve got way too many admins, or we need to continue to push for more virtualization in our environments, or vSphere admins are managing many, many physical systems or other things in addition to their VMs. Would be interesting to find out more.

I’m about to commit a bit of cloud heresy as a technology guy writing about cloud and claiming that it’s really not all about hypervisors, automation and orchestration. Sure, you need a measure of these components in order to be able to deliver on the cloud vision and model efficiently, but does that really solve the problems that are driving the consumers of IT to try and skirt enterprise IT and give their dollars to the public cloud? I think the number of services being consumed that are called cloud but really aren’t and the amount of cloud washing going on in the marketplace clue us in on the fact that it’s not the technology per se that is driving the consumption of cloud. The key thing I am hearing from my customers, and more importantly their customers, is that what is driving people to consume these services, some of which are actually inferior from a service management stand point to what is already offered internally, is the ease of consumption. Consumers are voting with their dollars for quick provisioning, knowing what they’ll pay and the levers that effect that cost, and transparency around what they are getting and using.

Now, I’m not saying that technology isn’t a key play in enabling IT to deliver quick provisioning, transparency and chargeback, but the key to being able to do these things is service management. I often see companies get bogged down in the mire of trying to get the level of virtualization in their environment up over 80% citing cost savings, power savings, improved agility and other IT-focused hallmarks as their reasoning. Virtualization is suffering from over-exposure and the difficulty that enterprise IT has in putting the benefits in terms that are meaningful to their customers. Telling an application owner that you want to virtualize the servers she’s on so that it’ll be more efficient or so that it can be consolidated on hardware with other workloads, or because you have an MBO metric keyed on % of the environment virtualized isn’t exactly compelling for her. I think I’ve mentioned before that any transformation is as much about marketing the change as it is about actually executing it. Don’t even get me started about trying to convince her to take downtime so that you can install new tools for automation and orchestration so that the operators can be more efficient and effective. These reasons are definitely compelling to the operators, they just aren’t to the consumer.

When I ask consumers of enterprise IT what bothers them about dealing with IT the answers invariably come back that the hardware, software and support seem to be very expensive, it takes a lot of work to define and implement what exactly it is they want, and they’ve got to fill out all manner of forms and get approvals from a host of managers and potentially need to petition purchasing before they can finally get what it is they want. And then, when they do get it, they’ve got to integrate it all together, install software, hope that they requested enough resources, move things from dev to test to pre-prod and finally production and hope that their equipment isn’t “borrowed” for the latest emergency request in the process. Consumers of enterprise IT have gotten spoiled by iPads and Android phones and DVRs and services that allow them to consume huge amounts of data to any end point that they want at any time. They then come in to the office where their department is charged tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars for IT services delivered within the next few months. Let’s just say there’s a growing expectation gap there.

So how do we solve these sorts of problems? It’s not through trying to virtualize every workload in the environment and automating and orchestrating every process or activity. That’s seen as fixing your problem and not my problem by the consumer. The organizations who have been most successful in this transformation are those who start by sitting down with their customers and defining with them the services they actually need. These are what I call “consumer” or “aggregated” services that combine hardware, software, tools and processes to deliver something that is meaningful in business terms. It could be a development environment for 10 people that is available for 6 months that includes archiving, backups, filesharing, virtual desktops for access to the environment, source code management, &c. It may be the provisioning of a new employee with an email account, access to the knowledge management systems, enrollment in direct deposit, order of a laptop and software, a soft token, &c. These services need to be disaggregated into their core components, mapped to reference architectures, have service levels and operating levels defined and agreed to, priced, codified in a service catalog and published via a portal for consumption.

Once the portal is open for business you can use demand, release and capacity management to prioritize what gets automated and orchestrated rather than trying to do it all at once. Don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good, incremental progress during transformation is sustainable and improves your relationship with your customers. You don’t need to define every service you’ll ever offer right up front, pick partners amongst your customers and start with them, do some “consumer” services and some “operator” services, spend some time thinking about how this will be marketed and presented to your customers and then execute ruthlessly to deliver.

Start solving customer problems and the perception and expectation gaps are going to start closing. If you limit the scope of the services out of the gate it is still possible to give greatly improved provisioning times without tons of automation and orchestration, but if you’re able to build all of this on a pre-integrated target architecture you will certainly have a leg up and be solving your problems and theirs at the same time. The target platform these services will be run off of doesn’t need to be wholly integrated into every system and tool that already exists in the environment, as long as you are meeting your security and compliance requirements and you map out the interdependencies and relationships the environment can be somewhat separated. The goal should be to continue to move more and more of the environment into having pre-defined services consumed via the portal run off of the cloud or cloud-like architecture and to continue to improve the maturity of that internal or private cloud as you understand how your customers are consuming the services. More to come on these ideas . . .

With apologies to Chuck Hollis at EMC and James Governor at RedMonk I decided to take a crack at this whole “Why Applications are like fish and Data is like Wine” meme by extending it to posit that Information is like Cognac. Now, I’m not usually one to kick a dead horse but I think that all the talk of Big Data has maybe obscured something that I view as a problem with Big Data: knowledge workers don’t consume data, they consume information. I see Big Data as a problem quite frankly, and the IDC Digital Universe Study put it in context. If Big Data is the problem, Big Information is the goal, and to get there we need automation and analytics. So if you’ll bear with me I’ll share how I think Information is like cognac.

Cognac is made of wine, and not just one varietal or vintage, it is a carefully crafted blend, cared for and created layer upon layer to produce something otherworldly when done correctly. Cognac is crafted by real artists, masters who guide the spirit through it’s distillation and aging, they understand how to bring together the different grapes, wines, cognacs to deliver something that is greater than the sum of its parts. Information is like that, it takes in data, from many different systems, formats, time periods and through analytics is able to give the engineer, scientist, executive, whomever something meaningful and beautiful out of all that chaos. Knowledge workers and data scientists are like those artists who blend the cognac.

I was lucky enough to take a class on Knowledge Management ten years ago while I was pursuing my Master’s degree and it’s one of the classes that’s really stuck with me. One of the most intriguing concepts we studied was the Wisdom Hierarchy, which is sometimes referred to as the DIKW hierarchy: Data; Information; Knowledge; and Wisdom. Data is the raw material that this framework is built on, but ultimately the more data you have the more that stands in your way to true knowledge. Information in this system is Data + Analysis, something that has meaning attached to it. Data in and of itself isn’t really useful, Information however is, hence Big Data is a big problem, or in the very least a big distraction.

So, IDC tells us that Data is doubling every two years, it’ll be 50X what it is now in 2020 while IT Professional ranks will only grow 1.5X. So clearly we will need much more automation in our infrastructure and data management tools. We will definitely need a lot more automation in our analytics systems in order to be able to turn this huge pile of data into something useful. The number of files, or objects or containers that all this data is stored in will increase by 75X, so our solutions will need to be automated, adaptive and federated. And that’s just to turn all that data into information. Really what we want to create is Knowledge, and as someone who is engaged and enthusiastic about this space we eventually want to spread Wisdom throughout our enterprises. To enable that we’ve got to make it a lot easier to create new applications and ways of sharing not just the Information but the context and insight that makes it Knowledge. This is part of the point of Chuck and James’ posts, Applications, like fish, are best when fresh and up to date, long requirement definition and software development lifecycles pretty much guarantee that many applications are rather stinky upon arrival.

But wait, there’s hope! There are many, very cool efforts and initiatives underway to deliver on this. I’ve been very impressed with initiatives in this space from GreenPlum, R, NoSQL, Tableau and many others to make data more pliable and easier to turn into information. I am admittedly biased, but I think that what EMC’s Intelligent Information Group is doing with Documentum xCP and its Application Composition tools is outstanding. Also, I was lucky enough to attend the Data Scientist Summit in May and the work that companies like Via Science, Kaggle, 23andMe, Code for America, and Factual is really inspiring and mind blowing.

So, Big Data, Big Information, whatever we want to call it, color me all in, this is going to be a wild ride, and hopefully we’ll all get some wonderful cognac out of it. Cheers.

IDC Released their 2011 Digital Universe Study and the results are pretty amazing: data is doubling every two years! This is the fifth year that the IDC has released this study and each year I continue to be surprised by the results, just when I think things have started to reach terminal velocity around data growth they accelerate more. Currently data growth is outpacing Moore’s Law, suddenly the phrase Big Data just doesn’t seem to cut it any more. There are all sorts of findings in the study and the repercussions for our industry will require many changes.

I recently wrote here about the need for automation in security, and Christopher Hoff has suggested some practical ways to get started here and has started an initiative around Security Automata here. This is one of the ways that the growth of data is impacting security, the very framework for how we approach protecting assets needs to change in light of the deluge of data.

Another interesting finding had to do with the anticipated growth of data versus the growth of the number of IT Professionals, I think the image below sums it up rather nicely.

Over the course of the next 9 years data will grow 50x and the number of IT Professionals is expected to grow only 1.5X. Now that could sound like there’ll be good job security for IT folks, but this is a scary finding! If we don’t immediately change the way we manage our environments we aren’t going to be able to keep the best and brightest in our industry, much less be able to meet growing customer expectations around agility, flexibility and added value. The rise of consumer technologies that allow end users to have ready access to large volumes of data at an end point of their choosing has lead to an increase in end user expectations in the enterprise. This trend is only going to continue. So, higher expectations, larger amounts of data and only a marginal increase in the number of professionals curating this data sounds like a recipe for trouble.

Another interesting finding of the study is that during this same period the number of files\objects that this data is stored in will increase 75X. Not only will we have much more data but it will be spread all over the place and replicated and acted on by a number of collaborators, &c.. Thankfully it seems like object-based storage finally has some very good solutions that can readily scale to help meet these problems. We will however need engineers and architects who can help write and enforce file and object policies as a part of a holistic GRC approach to ensure that all of this data and its containers are manageable, secure, compliant and stored in the most cost efficient manner for their class.

There are many warning signs associated with the findings in this study, but it also highlights many opportunities for innovation, new career paths and smarter thinking about how we create, curate, share and protect our data.

Recently there’s been some chatter about the role of automation in Security and whether it is appropriate or not as a business strategy much less a security strategy. Jeffrey Carr states that EMC’s wrong that automation is an efficiency and security necessity and that you shouldn’t automate because “An automated solution will never stop a customized attack because the attack was designed to circumvent it!” (his emphasis). First, if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last twenty years you should avoid absolutes when talking about security. Second, not automating something because someone may develop a solution to defeat it is like not brushing your teeth because it may not prevent all cavities. This seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Jeffrey seems to conflate EMC recommending automation in security as a necessity for efficiency’s sake and abandoning all other security policies and methods. It certainly makes for good headlines, but I don’t think that people would read the three articles/whitepapers quoted and really think that EMC is going with an “automation is everything” approach.

I do agree that an automated solution won’t protect against a customized attack designed to defeat it, that’s pretty much what I call self evident. To claim this is what EMC is calling for, well that’s the very definition of a straw man argument. Automation is a necessity for efficiency’s sake as well as security’s sake. Back in 2003 I was involved in the design and provisioning of a new data center for a financial services customer. The security and system administration teams turned on just about every last bit of logging, intrusion detection, firewalling and every other policy they could think of to create a secure environment. They redirected all logging to one system to do correlation and analysis and turned everything on. Before there was 1 test/dev, much less production, workload running in the data center they had generated 1TB of alerts and logs in the first three days. Now imagine there was no automation in place, would you really want an administrator or engineer to eyeball 1TB of raw data to figure out if there was a REAL event?

As the amount of data we create grows the amount of automation required to successfully manage the environment must grow. Nearly every industry that’s come before us has implemented automation to ensure that their most talented people are focused on the activities that add the most value to their business rather than mundane, trivial tasks. The auto industry went from handmaking every car to utilizing robots for the majority of assembly. Physicists back in the day used to sit under trees and write page after longhand page of tedious mathematical equations to explain the world. Now we have colliders to help us understand the universe around and within us. When I was a physics research assistant and student back in 1992 I visited Fermilab and one of their researchers shared with me that every run of the accelerator produces enough data to require 50 man years of analysis. These guys were the original data scientists if you ask me.

One of the key philosophies I have about IT, which you can extend to pretty much any business process, is that you want to focus the bulk of your resources on as little as possible in the environment. That is to say, if you treat everything like it is the most important thing you have then nothing is really important. Your most stringent policies, your most expensive hardware and software, your most valuable engineers and architects are more effective and provide more value if they are focused on what is truly most valuable to your business. Now, clearly, I can’t claim credit for this philosophy, commonly known as the 80-20 rule or the Pareto principle, although I like the term “the law of the vital few” best, but I try to extend it a lot further into IT and the enterprise than many of my peers.

Automation is a necessary component of IT management with TB and PB and ZB of data in our data centers, thousands of mobile workloads thanks to virtualization, fat pipes, multiple hot data centers, follow the sun (or moon) policies, 24/7 employees all over the globe, and customer expectations for near instantaneous response to every request. Oh yeah, and hundreds of thousands of hackers and script kiddies out there ranging from merely annoying to outright malevolent testing the perimeters and policies of just about every enterprise and citizen these days. We can’t handle this all manually, but the trick is applying automation where it makes sense from a cost, functionality and security perspective. It may not be the silver bullet but it is an important tool in the toolbox, one you, and more importantly your high value engineers and administrators, don’t want to be without.