A guide to defining the IT influencer

Looking for those people who define IT trends and evaluate products? In the mire of the online "swamp," it's difficult to define who matters within IT. Here are some tips on how to do it. 

Influencers, simply put, are those whose ideas and accomplishments go beyond being inspiration. They provide new ways of solving problems. They define trends, services, and evaluate products with the expertise that inspires trust. 

In the mire of the online "swamp," it’s difficult to define who matters within IT. The benefit of today’s social media landscape is that no matter who they are, once you identify an influencer you have the opportunity to engage, seek feedback/insight, and converse with them about the products and services they cover.

The value in this engagement can manifest itself in many ways, from direct influence into a service you or your company offers to simple conversation about predictions within your field. Influencers also can shape the buyer’s decision and because of this, any input into the product or service being created or advanced should be highly valued. The challenge for anyone interested in finding the right person is weeding through all the “pretenders” who portray themselves as titans of industry. Below is a criterion for defining influencers within IT.

Activity

Most influencers are active on all channels within media. Most favor a specific medium (their site, Twitter, Google+, etc.) but usually they are everywhere. Look at their channels and the content being shared.

Here are just a few questions to ask when looking online:

• Are the channels industry-specific?
• In social, are they getting shared and retweeted?
• Do their summations reflect new ideas and directions within their field?

Influencers regularly attend conferences and/or speak in front of groups related to their industry. They also usually own a site/blog and write…a lot. Their articles can be found in tweets, posts, and other forms throughout the online world. With each post, look at the comments. Are there any? What is the page rank of their site and how many subscribers do they have? Finally, does the particular person add value to the industry conversation? You can measure this in the comments, tweets, and overall engagement where you can see the dialogue going on about a particular topic. 

Example in Cloud Computing: Adrian Cockcroft, Cloud Architect at Netflix:

Mr. Cockcroft managed a team that implemented a scalable cloud based personalized web page and algorithm platform and is one of the main reasons why Netflix is so amazing. He has a large following on Twitter, is constantly invited to speak at IT events, and writes articles pertinent to his audience.

Consistency

Influencers never stop because the passion that drives them is directly related to the customer experience. In your evaluation of who to connect with, do the people you’re considering consistently speak, write, blog, contribute, and participate in social sharing? Their expertise is the result of their passion, so look for evidence of said passion when you evaluate who to follow.

Example in Solid State Storage: Duncan Epping, owner of yellow-bricks.com and Principal Architect at VMware:

Mr. Epping is consistently active on all social channels (11,983 twitter followers), is regularly asked to speak at conferences and is a prolific writer about the happenings of his industry. He is a true expert.

The golden question

Influencers regularly ask the question, “What is good for my followers?” This means that they only share what will empower those that listen to them. Gone is the time when those with influence are measured simply through social media metrics and online popularity. The rate at which technology changes requires those within to be sharper and ahead of the next big change. It’s about spreading the knowledge, making the job easier, and sharing new ideas which change not just how we see the product or service, but the world as whole.

Why everyone wants a private cloud

Concerns about security and control make the "private" cloud a more palatable model for many companies. How sound is this kind of thinking? 

“We’re going to the cloud for VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure), and we’re going to have our own cloud,” said an IT manager of a one-man shop (himself) at a manufacturing company with 20 employees.

The manager and the CEO of the company believed that they could implement their own private cloud by using a “cloud in a box” solution for office applications that would save the company money in the form of fewer license fees for office software. The way that they planned to implement the project was by relying on the cloud equipment vendor that had sold them the solution to provide both implementation and system-tuning expertise and support.

For these managers, there were also the benefits of “bragging rights”—because it’s popular today to have a cloud of your own, no matter how small you are.

The question is, why?

Inevitably, fears about the security of applications and data are the first things mentioned when the alternative of going to a public cloud comes up.

However, for many small companies with limited IT resources, data and application security have always been lax, even when they are running their own internal IT operations. Many of these companies routinely accept the downtime brought on by a denial of service attack (DNS) or the loss of data that is suffered when a system unexpectedly goes down.

So given this, why is it so important to have your own private cloud?

Some speculate that organizations have been developing their own IT infrastructures for years, and that these infrastructures have been used and continue to be used to host business critical applications for the organization. In addition, organizations, regardless of their size, like the idea of data sovereignty, where they can keep business critical data internally, without exposing it through widely available public interfaces that characterize the public cloud environment. Finally, businesses are aware that they must satisfy regulations and regulators, especially if they are in industries like finance or healthcare.

Still other companies are uncomfortable at relinquishing control of the information lifelines of their businesses to outside vendors, even if they are convinced that their data is absolutely secure. In back of this is a concern about control—and a fear that a breakup with a cloud vendor could lead to major risk and disruption for the business as it struggles to re-insource data that it should have never outsourced.

The truth is, we all understand that cloud is here to stay and that it will continue to make inroads into data centers and IT infrastructure. But what we don’t know is where the inevitable “pushbacks” are going to occur down the road.

“When you’ve been in IT for over thirty years, you see a lot of changes in thinking—and invariably, thought cycles reverse and “old thoughts” resurface in new ways,” said former and now retired CIO for Caterpillar, John Heller. Heller was talking about the days of centralized computing in the 1960s and 1970s which then gave way to decentralized, distributed computing in the 1980s—and then once again returned to centralized computing with the growth of virtualization in the 1990s and 21st century.

Consequently, it isn’t too far-fetched for organizations to hedge against the turns that technology thinking  takes—and to embark on their own cloud journeys with the desire to understand fully what cloud is all about and how it works, regardless of how small they are. For most companies, this means engagement with a private cloud.

Enterprise architecture

Enterprise architecture (EA) is the process of translating business vision and strategy into effective enterprise change by creating, communicating and improving the key requirements, principles and models that describe the enterprise's future state and enable its evolution.[1]


Practitioners of EA call themselves enterprise architects. An enterprise architect is a person responsible for performing this complex analysis of business structure and processes and is often called upon to draw conclusions from the information collected. By producing this understanding, architects are attempting to address the goals of Enterprise Architecture: Effectiveness, Efficiency, Agility, and Durability.


Relationship to other disciplines

Enterprise architecture is a key component of the information technology governance process in many organizations, which have implemented a formal enterprise architecture process as part of their IT management strategy. While this may imply that enterprise architecture is closely tied to IT, it should be viewed in the broader context of business optimization in that it addresses business architecture, performance management and process architecture as well as more technical subjects. Depending on the organization, enterprise architecture teams may also be responsible for some aspects of performance engineering, IT portfolio management and metadata management. Recently, protagonists like Gartner and Forrester have stressed the important relationship of Enterprise Architecture with emerging holistic design practices such as Design Thinking and User Experience Design.[14][15][16] Analyst firm Real Story Group suggested that Enterprise Architecture and the emerging concept of the Digital workplace were "two sides to the same coin."[17]


The following image from the 2006 FEA Practice Guidance of US OMB sheds light on the relationship between enterprise architecture and segment (BPR) or Solution architectures.

Managing enterprise risk in a new era of security threats

Take a holistic approach to securing information, applications, devices and networks.

A holistic approach to enterprise security

Get started today:

• Read HP’s “Rethinking Your Enterprise Security: Essential imperatives to consider” white paper (PDF, 1.4MB)

The pace of change is always accelerating—consumer and professional lives have become one and the same. Governments and enterprises must meet citizens’ and customers’ rising expectations in an instant. Technology is the answer, but also introduces new forms of risk.

You have to take risks to get ahead in an Instant-On world. But risk has to be balanced with proper controls.

Enterprise security is more than just perimeter security

The challenges facing chief information security officers (CISOs) today are more complex than securing the organization’s perimeter. This is thanks to consumerization, mobility, the cloud, cyber threats and the rise of social media. The Instant-On Enterprise needs a new approach to enterprise security. It must address information security management, security operations and discrete security capabilities for different areas of the organization.

While evolving business models, technology advancements and the changing workforce provide opportunities for growth, security threats continue to multiply. Threats are becoming more sophisticated and more expensive. C-level executives certainly have security on their radar. But they aren’t always certain that their organizations are managing risk effectively.

Rising cost of cybercrime

The Ponemon Institute found that the median annualized cost of cybercrime incurred in 2011 reached $5.9 million.¹ This represents a 56 percent increase from the median cost reported in 2010.²

The longer it takes to resolve a cyber attack, the higher the cost. In 2011, Ponemon found that the average time to resolve a cyber attack was 18 days, with an average cost of nearly $416,000. This represents a nearly 70 percent increase from the estimated cost in 2010.

Wanted: A new approach to enterprise security

The Ponemon research and another recent study both support the need for a new approach to enterprise security. In July 2011, Coleman-Parkes Research surveyed 550 senior executives worldwide. On a 1-10 scale, 46 percent of senior business leaders rated enterprise security 8 or above as a priority for 2012. (Fifty-six percent of tech executives gave it 8 or higher.)³

But those surveyed were not always confident that they were taking the right steps to mitigate risk. Less than 30 percent said they were “very confident” that their organizations were well defended against mounting threats. And almost 1 in 4 executives indicated they had experienced internal breaches. Twenty percent experienced external breaches. More than 90 percent of all cybercrime costs were attributed to malicious code, denial of service, stolen devices and Web-based attacks.

See how HP Enterprise Security solutions protect Paul McCartney’s priceless collection

A holistic approach to enterprise security

Managing risk is a core requirement for the Instant-On Enterprise. But because enterprise security has traditionally been a project afterthought, many organizations are stuck supporting a patchwork of unrelated security products and uncoordinated processes. This is problematic from a maintenance point of view, of course. Worse, the new breed of cyber threats targets the holes between point products, and the gaps between disparate processes. It’s no longer good enough to secure things on a project basis.

The Instant-On Enterprise relies on technology to innovate, maintain agility, optimize all systems and—of course—manage risk.

HP Enterprise Security Solutions provide a clear framework and layered system of defense. HP recommends a sustainable approach to securing your enterprise across data, applications, devices and networks. This approach encompasses four phases:

• Assess your enterprise risk tolerance profile, compliance requirements, operational requirements, organizational capabilities and resources.
• Transform your organization’s ability to move from a siloed, fragmented approach, to a more holistic, integrated and automated approach.
• Manage security in the most cost-effective way possible, adopting best-of-breed security technologies and flexible sourcing models.
• Optimize by continually monitoring the environment to proactively implement operational and process improvements.

Assess your security situation

The HP Enterprise Security Discovery Workshop helps you assess your environment and identify your biggest security challenges and organizational risk tolerance. It also pinpoints where you are in the security maturity model. Ultimately, HP helps your enterprise articulate a transformation plan to achieve a secure enterprise. Find out more.

Transform your approach to enterprise security

HP technology can be pivotal in helping you transform your security environment. The HP Security Intelligence and Risk Management (SIRM) platform is an advanced integration and correlation engine that looks for threat patterns across hundreds of input sources. That means log files, application security intelligence, firewall and intrusion detection and protection services data.

New and enhanced HP solutions that play a role in the transformation phase and are part of the SIRM platform include:

• ArcSight Express 3.0: Helps detect and prevent cyber threats through the advanced log analysis, correlation and reporting powered by the CORR Engine. CORR expands the number of events processed per second by 500 percent,⁴ resulting in faster analysis and detection. It also expands the amount of data storable and searchable on each ArcSight appliance by 1,000 percent⁴. This, in turn, reduces costs.
• HP Fortify Security Center: Provides the means to identify and remove application vulnerabilities from the outset.
• HP TippingPoint Reporting and Archiving powered by Logger: Provides a complete picture of HP TippingPoint IPS activity in your environment so you understand your security status and threats at all times.

Manage enterprise security

Three solutions factor largely in the management phase of the HP approach to enterprise security:

• HP Security Information and Event Management Services: Provide the full correlated security event handling capabilities of industry-leading HP ArcSight to the market as a multi-tenant service. Get more information.
• HP Enterprise Cloud Services for End Point Threat Management: Delivers anti-virus and anti-malware capabilities to secure desktops, laptops and servers, reducing security risks and securing vulnerable end points. Find out more.
• HP Application Security Testing-as-a-Service: Closes security holes in the application layer.

Optimize enterprise security to become Instant-On

Securing your enterprise is not a do-it-once-and-you’re-done undertaking. You must implement the right combination of solutions and services. Then you want to optimize your security posture to ensure continued risk management, compliance and data protection.

HP Secure Boardroom gives your organization a comprehensive view of the overall security and risk programs. You can drill down into specific security controls and functions. HP Secure Boardroom offers you an unprecedented view of your organization’s security situation so you can make strategic investment and management decisions that lower total enterprise risk. Get more information.

HP can help your enterprise manage risk sustainably and holistically—putting you that much closer to becoming an Instant-On Enterprise.

Realizing an Instant-On Enterprise!

Why an Instant-On Enterprise?

Instant-On Enterprise concept by HP is brilliant and started in the right time and is heading toward the right direction. Traditional enterprise are seen as slow behemoth monsters that are,

1. Slow to respond to customer needs
2. Slow to respond to current market needs
3. Slow to respond to changing business requirements
4. Have to go through layers of bureaucracy for doing trivial things

… and I bet you can fill a lengthy and exhaustive list with a short amount of time. Things that everyone come to know and taken to be facts of life during their 10 – 15 year tenure. Often these are credited to necessary operational overhead for doing something. Selling a product, a step in the manufacturing process etc…

With the wide spread of Internet, the younger generation with very low attention span- Gen Xers if you will, have grown in numbers. It has become so large that traditional enterprise cannot ignore it. The amount of sales/money/customers they loose every time due to operational overhead is simply not acceptable anymore.

What is an Instant-On Enterprise?

So how can enterprises leverage advancements of technology to make their business processes, IT infrastructure, operational costs for optimal levels? As I see it, this is where HP has defined an elaborate vision with the Instant-On Enterprise. Let me quote the five critical success factors that the Instant-On Enterprise defines,

Flexibility	The Instant-On Enterprise runs on applications and services that are always available and can easily adapt to new opportunities.
Automation	The Instant-On Enterprise must rapidly and reliably scale technology resources up and down to meet changing needs. It neither over- nor under-provisions.
Security	In the Instant-On Enterprise, assets, resources and information are closely guarded to manage risk and protect innovation. They are protected against failure.
Insight	The Instant-On Enterprise harnesses the power of information to help executives make better decisions. It protects information and delivers it in accordance with enterprise needs.
Speed	The Instant-On Enterprise selects the best delivery model for the solution—the delivery model that provides the right outcome, in the right time frame, at the right price.

Jumping the curve

There are a number of barriers that you have to consider in depth when trying to choose a path for making your business processes efficient. The key decision is to choose the right technology. Choosing the right technology is not an easy task. Consider the following points before you make an enterprise wide technology decision,

1. Based on open source and open standards. Open source is not hobbyists for anymore. A large number of critical business functions runs on top of open source software. When making a choice you have to make sure the stability and adoption of a particular piece of software. There are many open source alternatives for any given problem. Choosing open source alternatives is not simple anymore.
2. Business friendly license. Make sure to choose software components that have business friendly open source license. Where if necessary you could build upon and sell your solutions without having to reveal the source. If you don’t have such requirements, great!
3. Flexibility and performance. The solution that you choose should be able to configure to your business requirements without having to write copious amounts of custom code. Having to make changes to the core of the software in order to support your simple requirements is cumbersome, hard and time consuming. Time you can use to improve your business. As your business grows, software components that you choose should be able to handle demanding business needs. Shouldn’t disrupt your day to day operations while handling demand spikes and general increase of traffic.
4. Ability to use only those features that you need. No more. No less. Even though you have infinite resources (thanks to Amazon for example) at your disposal doesn’t mean that it’s ok to run bloated software with several hundred features that you’ll never need. You should be able to run with only the features that are absolutely needed for your scenario and discard/turn off all other features.

How to implement an Instant-On Enterprise?

Did the last section sound as if it’s a pipe dream? Couple of years ago it would have been, yes. Let me show you how you would go about implementing an Instant-On Enterprise. Infrastructure as a Service providers like Amazon EC2 are too low level when it comes to having an Instant-On Enterprise. Yes, it’s a critical part of this solution but you need a high level platform which operate on top of this elastic infrastructure.

WSO2 Stratos is built to answer exactly that. Hosted version of WSO2 Stratos is called StratosLive. Most of the corporates doesn’t like their private information lying around in public servers. If it’s the case, you can download Stratos and host it inside your corporate data centers.

Now let me revisit HP’s critical success factors again and show you how Stratos helps to achieve those.

Flexibility	Each service in Stratos (Application Server, Enterprise Service Bus etc…) can be configured to work in a cluster of nodes. Each cluster can be configured through a load balancer. Load balancer itself can be configured with a fail over setup so there are no single point of failures. In StratosLive (the hosted version of Stratos) WSO2 ESB is configured to act as a software load balancer. This allows your services to be always available. With a straightforward programming model, supported by Eclipse based Carbon Studio, your applications deployed in Stratos can be modify/deploy/debug with ease allowing you to incorporate new requirements.
Automation	Stratos have auto scaling logic built in. This will seamlessly spin up new nodes when the load increases to your services and will terminate and decrease the number of nodes when the load gradually decreases.
Security	You can take advantage of number of different security mechanisms to safeguard your data as well as the communication that happens between your services deployed in Stratos. Identity Server supports single sign-on, OpenID, SAML2 and XACML for fine grained authorization policies. Stratos have a built in XACML editor for novices who are not well versed in XACML to define XACML policies. Also, you can take advantage of WS-Security when talking between your applications
Insight	The Business Activity Monitor collects and show information relating to your applications and services. Using the extensible framework, you can define your own user interface to include KPIs that interests you
Speed	The installation takes minutes. Deployment of services takes seconds. If you don’t like to install at all, that’s all fine too, the entire platform can be accessed through StratosLive!

Tools needed for building an Instant-On Enterprise is right there. StratosLive has a free plan for you to play around and make yourself comfortable. Also has paid plans with differing SLAs for serious business usages. You don’t have to spend your time and money to buy some fairy tale big vendors usually preach about. You can play around with the entire platform and start building the bits and pieces you need for your enterprise. For free!