Nemertes Research analysts contribute regular columns to a variety of publications. Links to indexes and feeds are provided below:

• Best Office Best Practices, Network World - Robin Gareiss - RSS Feed
• Collaboration Loop Blogs: Irwin Lazar, Collaboration Loop - Irwin Lazar
• Eye on the Carriers, Network World - Johna Till Johnson - RSS Feed
• No Jitter Blogs: Irwin Lazar No Jitter - Irwin Lazar
• Security: Risk and Reward, Network World, Andreas Antonopoulos - RSS Feed

Most IT staffs are aggressive - and the branch is getting much attention!

Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter, By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 02/20/07

As I mentioned last week, companies that have embraced the concept of a “virtual workplace” most commonly have what they classify as bleeding-edge or aggressive IT cultures.

Why power consumption is on the rise

New Data Center Strategies Newsletter, Network World, 2/27/07

One of the most striking changes in data centers has been the increase in power consumption over the past three to five years.

When we looked at consumption per rack, we used to see an average of 1.5 kW to 2 kW. In our data center benchmark in 2006 we measured an average rack consumption of 6 kW. Some organizations define a “standard rack” as one that can support up to 8 kW of equipment draw. With a threefold increase in just three years, many data center managers are beginning to wonder: where does this end?

Network World: Security: Risk and Reward, By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Network World, 4/5/07

It used to be that computer attacks were perpetrated mostly for fame and recognition. In the last five years the motivation behind the majority of attacks seems to have shifted inexorably from fame to fortune. Parallel to this shift we are now witnessing the emergence of a new attack economy, an efficient multilayer marketplace for information security attacks.

Carriers are struggling to realize new technologies' promise
Business Communications Review, April 2007

By Irwin Lazar, Principal Research Analyst and Program Director, Collaboration and Convergence, Nemertes Research.

Read The Article

If Ethernet Is The Answer, What Is The Question?

  By Sandra Gittlen, Newsfactor.com, 04/11/07

Many companies' data center responsibilities are broken out piecemeal, but experts say that companies embracing New Data Center technologies, such as blade servers, grid computing and virtualization, will succeed by consolidating the management of all critical functions into a single role. Using these advanced technologies begs for someone capable of bringing an integrated, holistic approach to data center architecture and design, says Johna Till Johnson, Network World columnist and co-founder of Nemertes Research.

The Importance of Logs

New Data Center Strategies Newsletter  By John Burke, Network World, 02/20/07

There’s good news and bad news about data center security, according to Nemertes’ just-published “New Data Center” benchmark.

First, the good news. Almost 80% of enterprises (both large and small) have a data center-specific security policy defined, and of those with policies, more than 80% regularly test compliance with them.

Eye on the Carriers By Johna Till Johnson, Network World, 2/15/07

I’ve spent a lot of time in this column detailing how IT executives need to manage their carriers. Now it’s time to turn things around, and talk a bit about what carriers owe their customers.

It’s not that complicated. Providers of any sort of service -- from housecleaning to application hosting to bandwidth provisioning -- should adhere to a common set of basic principles. Here they are:

Organizations with ‘Bleeding Edge’ IT staffs experiencing the most branch growth

Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter, By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 2/13/07

Companies that have embraced the concept of a “virtual workplace” tend to have self-proclaimed bleeding edge or aggressive IT cultures. This underscores the tight link between a successful IT strategy and a flourishing virtual workplace.

Network World Editorials  By John Dix, Network World, 03/22/07

In a recent study about spyware by Nemertes Research, Senior Vice President Andreas Antonopoulos was surprised to find that 16% of the companies examined were not concerned about the threat.

Suspecting that was because they were small companies, he dug deeper, but found they were some of the largest companies analyzed. He also discovered why they weren't concerned: they spent 6% to 8% of their IT budgets on security, twice what the average company spends.

Web optimization starts from inside the data center

New Data Center Strategies Newsletter, Network World, 2/13/07

Network architects are spinning new patterns in data centers to support remote users. Increasingly, WAN connections provide the structure to deliver corporate applications to users from servers distributed across the enterprise - and in some cases, the globe.

The move from a LAN to a slower-speed WAN, coupled with increases in server performance, means a higher proportion of application response time comes from the network. Web browsers deliver most corporate applications by opening a connection to receive the main page, and opening each subsequent image (or frame) on the page in the order it appears in the Web page. The resulting staggered delivery of pages, unnoticeable in the LAN environment, becomes annoying across a WAN.

Eye on the Carriers By Johna Till Johnson, Network World, 2/8/07

There’s a geek version of the question, “What is the meaning of life?” It’s this: “Why do some technologies take off while others fail?”

More specifically, what are the essential characteristics of successful technologies? And why does anyone use new technology in the first place?

I’ve focused a lot of my career looking for answers to these questions, and here’s the short answer: pain.

Collaboration Loop, By Irwin Lazar, 2/28/07

The number of branch offices continues to increase, creating more IT challenges

Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter, By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 2/6/07

It’s no huge surprise that with a relatively healthy global economy, we’re seeing corporate expansion. I’m not talking about the $36 billion profit Exxon recently reported. I’m talking about the expansion of the size and number of branch locations.

The data center is the new castle, and the botnet hordes are coming for it

New Data Center Strategies Newsletter, By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Network World, 2/6/07

One of the main findings from Nemertes’ security research in 2005 and 2006 was that the security perimeter is eroding.

With all the connections to partners, suppliers and customers and all the mobile workers, it was almost impossible to define a clear perimeter outside the data center. So the data center has become the retrenched position for most security defenses. The data center has become like the castle keep: a central hardened tower, the most defended area and the location of the most prized possessions.

Eye on the Carriers By Johna Till Johnson, Network World, January 31, 2007.

At last week’s Vista rollout, Steve Ballmer reportedly remarked that the Internet “wasn’t fully developed” in 1995. That sparked an interesting dialogue among many of the IETF luminaries, who had researched and developed the Internet in the 1980s and early 1990s. Their point: since most of the key specs were in place by 1995, Ballmer’s comment was inaccurate.

Network World: Security, By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Network World, 3/5/07

Looking at the development of different technologies in the last two decades, I am amazed at the vast difference between how a technology was first envisioned and how it ended up being implemented.

You start with a tightly coupled, hierarchical, centralized design by committee. Invariably, an august organization is chosen to run it: a phone company, the postal service, the government, a big vendor. Examples of this type of design are: X.25, X.500, X.400, PKI and Microsoft Passport (Windows Live ID). The design languishes for years while politics and control issues prevent its implementation. Then some organization, committee or coder takes the original design, strips it down and implements it as a more loosely coupled, decentralized, ad-hoc version. See IP, SMTP, DNS, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, the Web and OpenID.

Telecommuting benefits employees and employers

Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter, By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 1/30/07

Telecommuting can be a luxury or a curse, depending on who’s talking. Many companies (ours included) view telecommuting as a benefit to employees. But it’s also a benefit to the employer—if managed properly.

True, there are people who simply don’t want to work from home—or worse, those who think they can work from home but simply can’t. I’ve worked from home full-time since 1991, and I’ve had dozens of my staff work from home in that timeframe.

SLAs for hosted, managed and co-located data center services

New Data Center Strategies Newsletter, By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Network World, 1/30/07

Almost 10% of participants in Nemertes’ data center research cited outsourcing data center facilities as one of their most important funded initiatives.

Over the last five years, the cost of building data centers has increased quite dramatically, mainly because of the increased power and cooling demands of dense platforms such as blade servers. So naturally, many businesses have decided that data centers are too complex and too costly to own, even if they are necessary to have.

Eye on the Carriers By Johna Till Johnson, Network World, January 24, 2007.

If you’re like a lot of folks, you’re probably thinking IPTV is just a tad overhyped: Service providers from AT&T to BT to India’s Reliance Infocomm have announced IPTV initiatives. Market researchers Dittberner Associates forecast an IPTV services market of $12 billion in 2013, an increase from virtually nothing in 2005 (now that’s a long-range crystal ball). And Microsoft has been investing heavily in the technology — a sure sign that the hype-fest is at its height.

Does it take 200 products to secure the enterprise?

Network World: Security, By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Network World, 2/13/07

Visiting RSA '07 last week, I tried to embrace the fact that this security conference is no longer an insiders' gathering, and tried to put myself in the shoes of a newbie to figure out what I should pay attention to in a new security job. The first mistake I made as a newbie was to wear new shoes: ouch. The second was to try to take it all in. If you accept the premise that security should be holistic and not about silver bullets, then the RSA show floor was big bucket of silver bullets. Hundreds of features disguising themselves as products, loudly touting the latest scare: “Did you know there are ogres lurking in this obscure part of your infrastructure? Anti-OGRE!” It was difficult to see what the big new theme for security is in 2007.

Collaboration Loop, By Irwin Lazar, 2/5/07

Last week Skype introduced new features for its “Skype for Business” offering designed to make Skype manageable in a business environment. Do these tools finally give the green light for widespread enterprise deployment? Well….the answer is a decidedly “maybe”.

Skype initially announced its business offering last year, which was designed to let small groups centralize billing for Skype-to-PSTN connectivity services (SkypeIn/SkypeOut). With last week’s announcement Skype adds management and configuration tools, enabling Windows network administrators to use the Windows Installer to centrally deploy Skype and disable unwanted features such as file transfer capabilities (no such capabilities yet exist for centralized control of Mac or Linux clients). In addition, Skype announced enhancements to its business control panel, further improving centralized account administration capabilities.

Microsoft, Nortel’s branch device has potential, but it’s not the first

Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter, By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 1/23/07

The CEOs of Microsoft and Nortel last week provided a further glimpse into some of the fruits of their partnership during a press conference in New York. One of the products they promised was a branch office appliance that combines VoIP and unified communications capabilities.

Things to consider when leasing data center equipment

New Data Center Strategies Newsletter, By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Network World, 1/23/07

Many of the IT executives I speak with lease their servers from one of the big server vendors. With a bit of careful planning they can use the lease to manage technology refreshes on a two-year basis, thereby always staying one step ahead of technology obsolescence.

Eye on the Carriers By Johna Till Johnson, Network World, January 18, 2007.

One of the toughest challenges facing IT executives is how to plan for technology that hasn’t been invented yet. Companies generally stress the need for IT to think more like a business, which means crafting long-term strategic plans demonstrating how, say, IT will positively benefit the company in 2011. The gotcha is that engineers can’t always know what products and services will be available in 2011— much less how they’ll affect the company.

Liquid cooling systems

New Data Center Strategies Newsletter, By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Network World, 1/16/07

The upcoming final volume of Nemertes' data center research looks at the facilities challenges in the data center. Power and cooling were clearly the “hot” (pun intended) topics for this year.

We’ve discussed strategies for both power savings and cooling in this newsletter. One question we are often asked by our clients is, “Are servers going to keep getting hotter?”

Can We Ever Really Get Away?

Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter, By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 1/16/07

Last Fall, I found myself comfortably floating in the Caribbean in an effort to get away from work and distractions to focus on our family. A cruise ship sounded like a good idea.

The last time we set sail in 2004, there was limited Internet access in the cruise ship work area located in a remote spot on the ship. The ship charged about $4 per minute for access, so it’s no surprise the computer lounge was empty most of the time.

Daylight-savings rule changes are just one issue

New Data Center Strategies Newsletter, By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Network World, 1/9/07

As Microsoft launches Vista, many news organizations are speculating about how quickly (or slowly) companies will migrate to Vista. Back in the real world, however, there is no shortage of decades-old legacy systems that companies are either reluctant or unable to migrate to newer platforms and operating systems.

Pushing notion of a win-win deal, though questions about how many times you should go back to the table

Eye on the Carriers By Johna Till Johnson, Network World, January 11, 2007.

IT executives are more focused on the branch than ever, so what can you expect?

Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter, By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 1/09/07

I’m anxiously anticipating these next few weeks because I’ll be doing one of my favorite tasks as a research analyst - crunching data.

Two colleagues and I just wrapped up detailed interviews with more than 100 IT executives, gathering about 200 data points on the virtual workplace from each person. Yep, that’s 20,000 data points - and that doesn’t even include the correlation analysis!