Scary Things

While I was away, a friend did something scary to my dog.

Halloween may be over, but the memories of my costume clad colleagues will last. In the spirit of the season, I've put together a Top 10 list of scary things that keep CIOs up at night along with my humble suggestions for how to keep these scenarios from unfolding. Here are the first five:

1. Data Theft
   Avoid that nightmarish CNN moment when you have to share with the world and your customers that their data may have been lost in a recent break-in. With Sun, even if you lose a drive, you won't lose the data.
2. Integration Hell
   Keeping the business competitive depends on integrating new technology, but budget and headcount increases to do the integration work are not an option. The Java Composite Application Platform Suite, takes advantage of SOA integration with a standards-based platform, allowing you to preserve existing IT investments and easily integrate new technology in the future.
3. Access Lock Out
   As employees are hired, change positions within the company or depart, serious lag time in updating employee access to applications, databases and other resources halts productivity and could be a compliance risk. Leveraging the industry-leading identity management capabilities found in Sun's Identity Management Suite, management of identity profiles and permissions across the enterprise and beyond your intranet can be done securely and efficiently with automated user provisioning and identity auditing.
4. Snail-Paced Servers
   Servers slow to a snail's pace, dragged down by the morass of legacy systems used throughout the company, requiring inordinate amounts of the IT staff's time pinpointing the source of network latency. Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), a key feature of Solaris 10, enables administrators, developers and IT service personnel to observe, debug and tune system behavior in real-time. Solaris accelerates performance on x64 and UltraSPARC, and over 790 systems from firms including HP, Dell and IBM.
5. Boxes, Boxes Everywhere
   Business demands for compute power are growing exponentially, but my datacenter is reaching capacity. Container functionality in the Solaris 10 Operating System enables secure, software-isolated applications to be run on a single system allowing businesses to easily consolidate servers and make their datacenters more efficient. If you still need more capacity, check out Sun's datacenter-in-a-box Project Blackbox, for optimized space, performance, and energy efficiencies in a self-contained unit.

There are plenty of things that scare the heck out of us year-round in the IT world. Together with my costumed coworkers, we are working hard to make the this world a little less scary for our customers. Stayed tuned for part two.

Posted at 03:59PM Nov 03, 2006 by Peder Ulander in Sun  |