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Tech for Business Growth in the New Year

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

“Recession is over, and the light is clearly visible at the end of the

tunnel”

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“The recession was like a blessing in disguise, because we managed to get the

best deals and discounts in our IT purchase”

“We learnt that IT contracts should be framed to give you sufficient

flexibility to scale your IT infrastructure upwards or downwards based on market

conditions”

The above are some learnings that CIOs of leading Indian enterprises shared

with us at the recently concluded PCQuest Infrastructure SummIT, our annual

event on IT infrastructure planning and management. Our theme this time was

technologies for business growth, wherein we identified the technologies that

are going to become important for CIOs now that the global economy is slowly

limping back to recovery. Most CIOs who attended the event clearly recognized

the changing economic environment and were keen to find out which technologies

would become relevant for them going forward. Our event was aimed at providing

the answers, and our story this time, is an extension of that to share the

knowledge gained during the event with all our readers. We'll start off by

identifying the key trends and technologies that are going to take center stage,

followed by a drill down of specific technologies in the pages to follow.

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Good bye traditional IT infrastructure



Any IT infrastructure comprises of four basic building blocks-client, data
center, the web, and the communication backbone. Two other elements are

essential besides these-security and managed services. These are not building

blocks, but crucial aids to the four building blocks. For instance, you can't

afford to run any of the four building blocks without securing them. Likewise,

given the shrinking IT budgets, and the challenges of hiring and retaining

manpower to manage your IT infrastructure, CIOs often resort to managed

services. Today, you can outsource just about every part of your IT

infrastructure to a managed services provider.

What's important is to realize that during the recession, significant

developments have happened across all these areas. These developments are so

significant that they are likely to change how you'll manage your IT

infrastructure in the near future.

Disappearing PCs, mobile clients



There's a paradigm shift happening in client side computing. It's no longer
about managing a fleet of desktop PCs sitting within the four walls of your

office building. The future is clearly mobile, with most of the client side

computing happening on the move. It started with the exponential growth in

notebooks and cellphones. Now it's about netbooks and smartphones. Moreover,

these devices are becoming more affordable for just about everyone in the

office. So what you now have to worry about is how to manage your growing mobile

workforce, supporting them no matter where they are, and securing the data

that's on them. Some other technologies like SSDs (Solid State Drives) will

become cheaper and more widely available, making your laptop or netbooks even

lighter, better performing, and with greater battery backup.

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Data centers



When one hears the word data center, only one word comes to mind-virtualization.
Clearly, virtualization technology has completely changed the way data centers

are designed and managed. It's not just about server virtualization, which is

possibly where the paradigm shift started from. Today, you can virtualize just

about everything--storage, network, or even your applications. What's important

is to understand what each type of virtualization does to choose the right one

for your business. We've covered server and storage virtualization extensively

in the past, and you can dig through our online archives to read about them.

Network virtualization can be internal or external. The latter is an old and

familiar concept, which is what traditional VLANs in network switches offer you.

The former, viz internal network virtualization is new, which stems from server

virtualization. Since you have multiple virtual machines running on a single

server, they don't need the NIC to communicate with each other. They can bypass

it, thereby considerably increasing the speed of communication between different

virtualized applications.

Lastly, application virtualization can be of two types-streaming and desktop.

In the former, all your desktop applications reside in the data center instead

of being installed on individual machines, and are streamed to users. In the

latter, the entire desktop moves into the data center and is accessed by thin

clients. App virtualization can help control software piracy, and in managing

your desktop fleet.

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All said and done, the benefits of virtualization remain the same-better

utilization of hardware, greater energy efficiency, and much better

manageability. A few technologies that are helping bring virtualization in data

centers are green IT, multi-core CPUs, and blade servers. These would allow

greater server density in lesser space. So clearly, these technolgies combined

with virtualization are likely to completely change how data centers would be

designed and managed in the near future.

The Web



No prizes for guessing the most important trend on the web-it's cloud computing.
Instead of having your own IT infrastructure, you can have everything run from

the cloud remotely. This includes applications (SaaS), complete software

solutions (PaaS), or simply borrowing any amount of compute power to run your

own custom applications (IaaS). So whether you're an enterprise looking to

reduce the cost of running enterprise apps, or a software developer who doesn't

want to invest in licensing expensive development and testing platforms, or even

a service provider who doesn't want to invest in expensive servers and compute

power, cloud computing has something for everyone. It's like spare capacity just

waiting to be utilized.

Another trend that's going to be significant next year is Rich Internet Apps,

also known as RIAs. These will allow organizations to make their web based apps

far more graphically rich and meaningful. So a manufacturer for instance could

provide 3D models of their products on the web, to allow their customers to get

their real look and feel.

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Other trends worth watching out for include the HTML 5.0 and CSS3, both of

which will allow developers to create far more feature rich web sites than ever

before. Lastly, the web is in the process of transitioning itself from 2.0 to

3.0, something also known as the Semantic web. This will make the web far more

intelligent.

The Communications Backbone



If the web becomes more feature rich and graphically intensive, and clients
become more mobile, they would obviously require more bandwidth to stay

connected. The current 1x data cards for instance, will just not be able to

handle the load. That's why 3G data cards, which were introduced this year, will

become far more popular next year. Plus, 3G on the mobile should also become a

reality by next year, but it may not get mass adoption until we see some

applications emerge for it. More enterprises are likely to go the unified

communication way next year, thanks to the umpteen different communication

channels existent in enterprises today that are difficult and costly to manage.

The stepping stone to UC will of course be VoIP. Video will play a more

significant role as more enterprises are likely to deploy more video

conferencing equipment next year to control travel budgets.

Security



With your users going mobile, and all your applications moving into the cloud,
data will no longer be confined to the four walls of the office. Information

security would therefore gain prime significance next year. How do you protect

all the data residing on notebooks, netbooks, mobiles and smartphones of your

users? As more transactions move online, it will become important to secure

them. Moreover, as your data moves into the cloud, how do you ensure that it

remains safe? In an information security survey conducted by PCQuest recently,

data loss prevention technologies were on top of the purchase list of most CIOs,

followed by hard disk encryption, USB port locking, security policy compliance,

and multi-factor authentication.

Besides information and logical security, physical security will also become

important, and intelligent IP Surveillance will become more popular.

In the pages to follow we talk about many of these technologies in more

detail.

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