Today’s hyperconverged technologies are here to stay it seems.  I mean, who wouldn’t want to employ a novel technology approach that “consolidates all required functionality” into a single infrastructure appliance that provides an “efficient, elastic pool of x86” resources controlled by a “software-centric” architecture?  I mean, outside of the x86 component, it’s not like we haven’t seen this type of platform before (hello, mainframe anyone?).

What do you think of when you hear the term Help Desk?  Is it a room full of technicians with noise-cancelling headsets, logged into an IT Service Management (ITSM) system, talking with their hands and guzzling Red Bulls?  In your vision, do they appear haggard, glassy-eyed and stressed?  Do they participate in the corporate culture, or languish in that basement call center the rest of the company thinks is some super-secret laboratory?

The build-operate-transfer model is about taking the concept of a long term outsourced service, traditional in the Managed Services space, and addressing it in a way that allows the customer to get value out of the services at the end of the engagement. It's also a way to address challenges within the IT operational team that feel like their services are being replaced by outside services.

I recently gave a webinar on deferred maintenance and how you can learn to “escape” the risks of postponing routine maintenance activities from one of the great masters of escape, Harry Houdini. You can listen to the webinar on-demand here. First, a little Houdini background. Harry started his career working the local nightclub and circus circuits, where he developed both his act and his showmanship skills. He then went to Europe, where he utilized his mastery to get longer bookings and build his reputation as an escape artist. Once he established mastery over one type of escape (for example handcuffs), he would add elements to that trick to keep his material fresh and extend his reputation. He moved on from handcuffs to chains and straightjackets, then to jailbreaks, underwater escapes, etc. Each time he re-invented his routine, mastering each of the individual aspects of the entire performance. Now you may be asking how a magician from the early 1900s can offer any insight into how to keep your modern, 21st century IT platforms healthy and available. Well, through my own version of creative magic, let me show you…

How can IT Departments balance control and agility in today's IT operational reality? For decades, IT Operations has viewed itself as the controlling influence on the “wild west” of business influences. We have had to create our own culture of control in order to extend our influence beyond the four hardened walls of the datacenter, and now the diaphanous boundaries of the Cloud. Control was synonymous with good IT hygiene, and we prided ourselves in this. It’s not by accident that outside of the IT circles, we were viewed as gatekeepers and traffic cops, regulating the use (and hopefully abuse) of valuable IT resources and critical data sets. Many of us built our careers on a foundation of saying “no,” or, for those of us with less tact, “are you crazy?”

By Geoff Smith, Senior Manager, Managed Services, GreenPages-LogicsOne

By Geoff Smith, Sr. Solutions Architect   The term “Shadow IT” has gotten more and more people thinking about the challenges we all face as we try to reign in our IT management and operations.  Recently, I caught a few minutes of the movie The Matrix…now, that movie is a bit of a visual trip, but once you get past the effects, the underlying dilemma it presents is intriguing.

By Geoff Smith, Sr. Solutions Architect It is inarguable that change is sweeping the IT industry. Over the last five years a number of new technologies that provide huge technological advantages (and create management headaches) have been developed. We have attempted to leverage these advances to the benefit of our organizations while at the same time struggling with how to incorporate them into our established IT management methodologies. Do we need to throw out our mature management protocols in order to partake in the advantages provided by these new technologies, or can we modify our core management approaches and leverage similar advances in management methodologies to provide a more extensible platform that enables adoption of advanced computing architectures?

By Geoff Smith, Senior Solutions Architect As this is the last entry in the Mind the Gap blog series, I wanted to tie up all of the loose ends from the previous posts. In those, I’ve asked all of us in IT to break out of our comfy IT management “snuggies” and look at how our world is changing. In the past, IT has been the gatekeeper to technology for the business, mainly because we were the only people who lived it every day. That is no longer true.