If you curse your "tier-one" IT management solution as too cumbersome, too complex, and too expensive, you're not alone. In arecent Gartner study that declares the "Big Four" -- BMC, CA, HP, and IBM -- increasingly vulnerable to SaaS (software as a service) and open source alternatives, surveyed users gave their vendors mostly C's and D's, and a good number of incompletes.
If Werner Heisenberg had pursued business analytics in the early 21st century instead of quantum physics in the early 20th, he might have struck on a different uncertainty principle: If your analysis and decision-making capabilities don't keep pace with the explosion of critical event data across enterprise networks today, soon you won't know the state of your business, the direction it's heading, or how fast it's getting there.
For managers of enterprise datacenters, the endless stream of security patches from Microsoft, Oracle, and other software vendors (not to mention open source projects) has been a prime source of frustration. For Blue Lane Technologies, it has provided a golden opportunity.
Lots of companies these days are stretching their hardware and energy dollars by consolidating print, file, DNS, and Web servers on virtualization platforms such as VMware. But not many companies boast of running their entire production infrastructure on virtual machines. An exception is Arvato Mobile, a division of Bertelsmann that builds mobile solutions for network operators, media companies, and Internet portals and delivers digital entertainment content to consumers around the globe.
You have dozens, maybe hundreds, of operational data sources spread among multiple business groups and locations. If only you could get a clear, consolidated view across all this information at once, you would gain a better understanding of what's working and what's not -- in sales, customer service, manufacturing, you name it. The cure to this common problem involves a fundamental decision: should you consolidate all your data onto a single database platform, or implement a federation solution that allows you to query all your data right where it is now?
In an effort to thwart never-before-seen attacks, anomaly-based intrusion prevention systems shun the use of signatures and instead apply fancy algorithms to distinguishing illegitimate network traffic from legitimate activity. In the case of the V-Secure IPS, those techniques include comparing the behavior of individual connections to accepted protocol standards, comparing general traffic characteristics to baselines of normal behavior, and using fuzzy logic to determine degrees of anomaly and make blocking decisions in real time.
In one way, John Steenson's job is not unusual. Like other CTOs, he worries about finding good IT help for his company, Intira Corp.; he must keep on top of new technology advancements; and he needs to make sure his mission-critical e-business applications are running smoothly. But the difference for Steenson is that if he hits a snag in his infrastructure, it can take down not only his network but also the networks of his clients: the major Fortune 500 companies that pay Intira to host their e-commerce Web sites, business extranets, and secure intranets.