As we look ahead to the Shiny New Data Center of the Future (SNDCotF) we have to focus inevitably on the cloud that lies beyond it, and its potential to be the overflow resource pool of anyone experiencing transient load increases (incidental, occasional, one time, or cyclical). Already small companies are able to take advantage of storage and processing power available in the data centers of Amazon, Google, and others. They can scale up quickly, briefly, and dramatically.

But, can they monitor what they do?

Many new technologies or paradigms, like unified communications, converged networking, service-oriented architectures, and server virtualization, disrupt IT organizations and processes by undercutting the premises on which those organizations or processes were predicated.

In our research on enterprise virtualization use, we have heard many a server admin, data center director, and service engineer complain that as they have virtualized servers, it has gotten harder for people to find things when they need them.

"To a person who has only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." This is the worst-case version of the unitasker's dilemma: when your tool only really does one thing, then you have to look at the world from the perspective that function embodies, and anything that doesn't fit (however badly) you have to ignore.

With all credit to Alton Brown, guru of the kitchen, for the headline, I salute the spirited tradition of reuse in IT.

It's not all about security, it's not all about events, it's not all about compliance. All those things are critically important to IT, of course, but even more fundamental is the task of keeping things running. All those other things depend on this one. System logs reveal a wealth of information about normal (and aberrant) operations, but they don't cover everything.

A typical evolutionary path for event and log management in an organization runs like this: paleolithic admin uses just eyes and brain to review logs, looking for evidence of misbehavior, misconfiguration, and mischance; crafty neolithic admin cleverly adds scripts to the mix and automates as much of the review as possible; later, the tools come from others rather than being made by his or her own

When I was going over the parallels between the numeric-control vs record-playback (NC vs RP) machine tools, there was a significant point of dissimilarity that was glossed over: machine tool inputs are known. The variable there is what you want to make with the material, the genius of the trained master being in how best to get from untouched stock to finished product.

When I was a graduate student in the history of science, one of my favorite books was about the development and deployment of numerically controlled (NC) machine tools. What stands out in memory after all these years is that NC machine tools did not develop "naturally" -- they were not brought to market by companies as a result of organic development in the space.

Preliminary analysis of the data for Nemertes forthcoming Security and Information Protection benchmark shows that approximately 63% of participants want to deploy (or more broadly deploy) technologies that they felt they could not, for security reasons. Of those, half named wireless as the technology in question, and over a quarter named collaborative tools, especially IM.

We asked IT executives in our current benchmark, Security and Information Protection, which were the regulations, laws, or industry practice standards with which it cost them most to comply. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the preliminary data show that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is leading the pack: 87% of participants who answered this question cited it as one of their top 5 (and often as number 1). Next most frequently cited was HIPAA, named by 62%, followed closely by California SB 1386, at 50%.