IT infrastructure white papers

Today's distributed and dynamic enterprises rely increasingly on 24x7 access to a growing set of mission-critical business applications and sensitive data. These applications and data are more distributed than ever: they can reside in corporate datacenters, remote offices, and/or on user computers. In addition, overall data volumes are growing rapidly in every industry segment, and widespread virtualization means that servers and data are more mobile than ever before. Moreover, IT operations teams are struggling with flat or shrinking budgets in a tough economy. These combined challenges make disaster recovery (DR) planning more difficult than it has been in the past, but they also make it more important than ever.

Disaster Recovery (DR) is a critical component of IT and risk mitigation strategies, and compounded in difficulty by ever growing data volumes, distributed computing, and new technologies. How can you get creative in protecting more data, recovering more swiftly, but also saving some money? Download this essential ESG whitepaper to learn about how WAN optimization can be a key enabling technology in accelerating DR and accelerating savings, too.

By 2014, analysts believe that thirty-five%, or over one-third, of global enterprise IT budgets will be spent on cloud services. While today the percentage of organizations investing in these types of offerings is small, the implication is clear: 'the cloud' is not another industry buzz word, but a broad category which will drive the next phase of IT projects. For IT and business managers already innundated with information about the promise of a cloud centric infrastructure the question is not whether or not to use the cloud, but how.

Study compiled by IDG Research Services, in conjunction with CIO Custom Solutions Group explores how and why enterprises are taking communications into the cloud.

In most organisations, the service desk is the primary (if not the only) point of contact between external customers and the organisation. As a result, many customers form their perceptions of your company based entirely on their service desk experience. That makes the service desk a critical factor for business success. Many companies now have multiple, disparate service desks located throughout their organisation.

If your organisation is like most, the business units are demanding more services as technology becomes even more deeply embedded in the business. Your IT environment is growing more complex as you adopt technologies, such as virtualisation, and integration methodologies, such as service oriented architecture (SOA). And there is always growing pressure to improve service and reduce costs.

Energy costs continue to take up a significant portion IT budgets, and it seems that there is no end in sight. Much of the power that IT consumes is being wasted. Industry experts have reported that the cost of wasted server capacity is more than $100bn per year. Cost is not the only problem. Energy consumption has become a severe constraint on growth. Many IT organisations view Green IT as a major undertaking that involves replacing current equipment with new "green" equipment that has low energy consumption.

Test process assessment can achieve various strategic and tactical objectives of an IT organisation. Assessments provide a methodical way of gathering the pain areas of a QA organisation and developing a practical road map to address these areas. An assessment model provides the framework against which the maturity or the level of capability of an organisation or an entity can be measured.

In the face of economic uncertainty, many companies are tightening their belts. Cost cutting has once again become a top priority, and capital expenditures are decreasing. IT is often included in these cuts. New projects proposed by IT must demonstrate concrete, near-term ROI, or they may be delayed or cancelled.

This case study analyses the benefits and return on investment (ROI) gained by BMC Software from applying IT management software to enable the adoption of a virtualised server infrastructure. Solutions were deployed for x86 architecture servers in the company's Houston production data centre and R&D labs that are used by BMC developers to build the software that BMC sells.