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BIaaS Sparks More IT Consulting Requests
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE TEAM IS GEARING UP FOR EXPANDED ROLE
As IT launched the initial pilot programs several months ago to test our new Business-Intelligence-as-a-Service offering under our recently unveiled IT-as-a-Service model, some couldn’t help but wonder what it would mean to the traditional Business Intelligence IT team.
BIaaS enables EMC’s business units to rent space and capabilities to conduct their own data analysis projects with full access to EMC’s previously highly-restricted corporate data bases.
Would giving business units the ability to do their own data analysis and reporting mean that our BI team that had always done such reporting in the past become obsolete? Would we become glorified system administrators, sitting idle as the business units went about their data analysis business without us?
Cloud-to-Cloud Messaging Has Arrived
HOW WE BUILT THE NEXT GENERATION OF INTEGRATION
BY BILL REID
As EMC puts the finishing touches on a new, SAP-based Enterprise Resource Planning system further optimizing its cloud infrastructure, we’ll soon be unveiling another innovation in the way we integrate applications and data in the cloud. It’s called the Common Integration Cloud (CIC,) an integration platform that will serve as the gateway through which all data is exchanged between the ERP platform and the rest of the enterprise.
CIC has been under development for the past two years, paralleling EMC’s ERP replacement project called PROPEL. As part of the PROPEL effort, we went through and identified all the applications across the company that needed to send data to or pull data from the new ERP platform. In that inventory, we identified more than 450 different point-to-point interfaces exchanging data with our legacy platform.
In fact, between the various technologies and vendors that often have their own proprietary systems, we had been working with just about every kind of integration middleware and platform you could possible use. That meant coping with multiple “stove-piped” skill sets, multiple costs and a system that was a major challenge to manage.
We faced a decision. Either rewrite all 450+ interfaces and continue to deal with this complex, customized and unscalable environment or come up with a new, simplified approach that would scale to meet the future needs of our business and support the cloud platforms of tomorrow.
From Virtualization to IT-as-a-Service:
BRIDGING THE GAP TAKES NEW TECHNOLOGY AND PROCESSES
BY MIKE NORRIS
So you’ve virtualized nearly 100 percent of your organization’s IT infrastructure which means you’re ready to transform your IT operations to an IT-as-a-Service model, right? Well, not really. There is another transition you must make to bridge the gap between a highly virtualized environment and ITaaS.
EMC IT defines IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) as Optimizing IT Production for Business Consumption. Many of our previous blogs have discussed the need to transform IT’s business and operating model to operate more like a service provider. That requires business model evolution and shifts in the skill of the people in the IT organization. These topics address the business consumption aspect of ITaaS. Optimizing IT production implies that there are additional opportunities to increase the utilization of your IT infrastructure beyond virtualization.
First, despite high percentages of virtualization, many IT organizations are still managing discrete groups of virtual machines that aren’t pooled together in a cloud ecosystem. The groups of virtual machines or clusters of servers running virtualization software may or may not be optimally configured and contain excess capacity needed to meet peak loads or anticipated growth. (Read more about EMC’s Server Virtualization)
So the next step in your journey to the cloud (and ITaaS) is addressing how to move workloads between those virtualized environments to fully balance utilization across your infrastructure. This migration from a clustered infrastructure to a cloud infrastructure allows you to leverage your virtualized environment further still to gain more savings and flexibility.
It’s A Different IT Security World
TO CATCH A CYBER THIEF: FIGHTING SECURITY THREATS IN REAL TIME
By Ramesh Razdan, Senior Director of EnterpriseServices and EMC Distinguished Engineer, and Steen Christensen, Director, Information Security
Like just about everything else in today’s socially networked universe, enterprise IT security has evolved dramatically in recent years. Security teams are charged with safeguarding vital information in a world connected by a continuous and rapid exchange of an ever-expanding deluge of information. And among those logging on are a growing number of cyber criminals launching continuous and sophisticated threats to organizations worldwide. Investigations have become extremely complex with the need to be able to analyze data with context and speed.
No longer can organizations rely on traditional perimeter security and firewalls to protect their vital information assets. Nor can they effectively combat today’s sophisticated cyber criminals by analyzing threats after the fact. In fact, those that think they can in today’s complex cyber world are just sticking their heads in the sand.
Thankfully, Big Data tools and platforms have evolved to meet these new threats head on, armed with real-time data gathering and high speed security analytics.
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A Watershed Year for Data Migration: Keeping the Lights on in Transition
When it comes to moving a live data center that is supporting a nearly $20-billion corporation, things change daily. So even though the team overseeing EMC Corporation’s transfer of data to a new data center 600 miles away spent 12 months in a discovery process to hone our migration strategy, the process is still a bit of a moving target.
With so many moving pieces, the fact is—as the saying goes—you don’t know what you don’t know with this kind of project.
One of the challenges to keep in mind when migrating to a data center like this is that it’s not just for today. The capital investment is huge, and migrating a data center takes months of planning and many more months to implement.
Nonetheless, we have achieved great success in data migration from Westborough, MA, to our new Durham, N.C., data center in 2011. We are primed to complete the migration process by September of 2012.
Capitalizing on Cloud: Preparing People and Processes for IT’s Organizational Challenge
IT TRANSFORMATION
Cloud-enabled services are the next wave transforming how businesses capitalize on information technology, and that in turn drives the next evolution in the processes, roles, skills, and structure of IT organizations—the evolution to IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS). Today’s CIOs must exercise extraordinary leadership to make the transition and unleash new business value.
Learn how to make the ITaaS transition in this paper by Howard Elias, EMC President and COO of Information Infrastructure and Cloud Services, and Sanjay Mirchandani, EMC CIO and COO of Global Centers of Excellence.
Building the Framework for ITaaS: New Architecture and Infrastructure is Taking Shape
By Ramasundar Ramani and KK Krishnakumar
The concept behind IT-as-a-Service is to let business units order what they want through a central service catalog portal and let IT use more standardization and automation to respond faster and more efficiently. To enable this seamless, self service, we have had to put together the right tools necessary to make it all happen smoothly, from the first portal click to the provisioning of the service to the final user invoice.
Prior to IT-as-a-Service, if an individual employee or someone within a business unit wanted to order a service, they needed to call an ‘agent’ from the Business Technology Group in IT, fill out a form or pursue the process via the IT Central web page. From there, product managers and developers would need to get involved to deliver the service. Now, EMC IT has built a private cloud and is currently populating it with services, allowing business unit users to navigate through the service catalog portal and order a service.
We have been assembling the tools to achieve this end-to-end process, using a combination of readily available tools on the market and our own development expertise and technology. The goal over the next few months is to create a seamless process for this new user-focused IT delivery model. But longer term, we will be forging the framework for a new way of doing business in IT — one with increasingly stringent service level expectations for agility and efficiency.
IT-as-a-Service Program
How Will CIO’s Meet Growing Security Threats
BUILDING TRUST WHITE PAPER EXCERPT
When it comes to protecting enterprise data, CIOs and CSOs are at a crossroads. The complexity and prevalence of security threats continue to grow, bolstered by consumer IT and mobility. The open nature of IT has paved the way for far more sophisticated attacks – beyond conventional credit card data theft to multilevel attacks. Information security executives face perhaps the toughest challenge of their careers.
The business requires and expects total freedom and choice in technology, yet risks come from any number of places: users at their desks, users working from many different mobile devices and unsecured networks, and users downloading applications at will from the Web. Corporate integration with social media sites provides a new path for malware to the network – not to mention privacy risks and even identity theft. Hackers still have many more opportunities to grab enterprise data and are getting smarter by the day. Given the pace of change in our Web-based mobile world, who knows what next month will bring?
In this interactive white paper from CIO Magazine and EMC, learn how tightening the relationship between CIOs and CSOs will help create trust, the foundation of business relationships today. Embedded videos feature Art Coviello (RSA Executive Chairman), Sanjay Mirchandani (EMC CIO), and Dave Martin (EMC CSO), and a quick survey provides benchmarking between CIO peers.
Read the White Paper
Harnessing Big Data with BI-as-a-Service
Big Data doesn’t do your company much good if those who know your business best can’t harness it to unlock its value.
EMC IT’s soon-to-be-launched Business-Intelligence-as-a-Service (BIaaS) will provide that access to business groups across the company, along with a cutting-edge set of tools to help them probe trends and explore hypothesis on a whole new level.
BIaaS will soon be among the catalog of services available via the new EMC IT model, IT-as-a-Service. Basically, it will enable EMC’s business units to rent space and capabilities to conduct their own data analysis projects with full access to EMC’s previously highly-restricted corporate data base. (They will, of course, need to have proper security clearance and also approval from their controller.)
BIaaS will provide users with an analytics solution based on EMC’s Greenplum Unified Analytics Platform technology. The platform will be populated with a copy of existing corporate enterprise data to which the user can add additional data sets and manipulate it to explore trends or test theories. Think of it as having your own analytics sandbox on top of EMC’s enterprise data assets.
The BIaaS platform is architected so that we can allow the users the freedom to explore, mine and manipulate the data in ways that we could never allow on the mission critical Global Data Warehouse.
This new window on business intelligence has tremendous potential for greatly expanding EMC’s ability to effectively mine its Big Data. BIaaS is currently being piloted by several business units and is scheduled to be generally available by the end of March.
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