Category Archives: Application ILM
Seven Essential Best Practices For Data Center Consolidation
Data center consolidation is much more than physical movement of servers and infrastructure. In fact, the facility costs and power savings are just the tip of the opportunity. The biggest benefits come from using the consolidation initiative as a catalyst to rationalize the application portfolio, archive inactive data and establish one version of the truth for the data that is left. (more…)
The Future of Applications (2): Lowering Costs and Complexity
This is my second blog in a series on the subject of “Informatica & Applications”. You can read my previous blog here:
It’s strange how IT has become so complex. When we started out so many years ago computing was the answer to everything. It was going to make us more productive and was going to allow us to spend so much more time with our loved ones. Do you remember that time when people said “we’ll have a paperless office, and we’ll be finished by 5pm.”?
I wish!
The Future of Applications: From Sustaining to Enhancing to Transforming
People often say to me “you’re the ETL company – how’s it going?” With pride I reply “yes we were, but now we are a Data Integration company offering technology that helps companies with a variety of their business critical systems – particularly applications”.
This focus on “Applications” often surprises people and that is why on September 21st Informatica is launching a global marketing campaign looking at the role we play in relation to business critical applications – yes … those applications that automate business transactions and are critical to the success of every organization.
Please register today to join us in our opening webinar event that is hosted by InformationWeek. Click here. (more…)
Data Masking Can Avoid A Data Breach
On Friday June 10th USA Today’s front page had an article about companies being required to report data breaches entitled: Citigroup latest to report data breach.
This was on the heels of Citigroup’s acknowledgement a day earlier on a major data breach of customer account information that occurred. Thus far in 2011, there have been 251 reported data breaches, which is on track to meet or exceed last year’s total of 597 data breaches. The article went on to reference a recent survey by Symantec and the Ponemon Institute which included 51 data breaches and indicated that each data breach costs an average of $7.2 million, and the costs continue to climb. (more…)
My Dry Cleaner Rocked My World: A Loyalty Lesson For Big Companies
Shocked! I was simply blown away the other day by the most unlikely of companies – our dry cleaners.
Here’s what happened:
I went in on Saturday to pick up my dry cleaning. This establishment is owned and operated by a family. I was greeted by the mother/owner who asked how my wife was doing. I told her it was the day of her baby shower so I was staying away and running errands. She asked me to hold on for a minute and disappeared only to return with a bag in hand and said it was a gift for my wife.
My Dry Cleaner Really Loves Me!
She told me that last time my wife was in, she noticed that she was pregnant and looked up our last name on several registries, found an entry and bought something off it. (more…)
Application Discovery – Fact Or Fiction
Informatica has been involved in many high value application consolidation projects and naturally our perspective is all about the data – we are interested in its quality, its lineage, its size and shape and how it correlates from one application to another. We provide a range of services to help our customers with this. This is all very important but we also need to think about the larger picture: the application servers, the database servers, shared infrastructure and storage.
Automated [IT infrastructure] discovery is a kind of holy grail – the idea is that you detect all of the servers and inter-server communications happening within a data centre, and somehow you can auto-magically infer business applications and services and all their dependencies. As is so often the case the reality is somewhat more complex – what you actually need to do is then apply lots of filters and human refinements to remove a vast amount of noise so that you end up with a useful and usable model.
Informatica + Symantec = Shrink Big Data + Shrink Big Backups
Earlier this month, during the 2011 Symantec Vision Conference (Las Vegas, NV), Symantec and Informatica announced an exciting new partnership to help customers rein in data growth and ensure compliance across all enterprise data. Symantec will resell Informatica Data Archive, Informatica’s database archiving solution to Enterprise Vault and Netbackup customers. By combining database archiving with Symantec’s market leading data protection, email and file archiving solutions, customers can now implement a universal approach to data archiving that spans structured and unstructured data. (more…)
Cloud Data Integration For Hybrid IT
Today we made a significant announcement regarding our cloud strategy under the heading of “Cloud Data Integration for Hybrid IT”. Exciting! We sent out various official communications such as a press release, a list of partner quotes supporting the launch here, YouTube videos showing the new release in action and a link to a launch webinar on 5th May here. I wanted to give you my perspective on why I think this is such a big deal … (more…)
Your Biggest IT Security Nightmare – Non-Production Data
Everyone is worried about data security and privacy as they should be; for data to be trusted, users and management need confidence in not just knowing that data is correct, but also in knowing that it is secure and that access is permitted only in controlled situations. There is no shortage of security disaster stories, but I’m not worried about production data since it is at the heart of application management disciplines which, while still not perfect, have had 50 years to mature. This perspective is stated succinctly by Ronald Reagan when he spoke about the economy and said “I am not worried about the deficit. It is big enough to take care of itself.” (more…)
The Secret To Retiring Applications – Flawless Data Validation
Applications are retired (sunset or decommissioned) when they become dormant or read-only. This occurs as a result of mergers and acquisitions or through modernization efforts and is a natural part of Application Information Lifecycle Management. While the applications may be no longer needed, the data they contain cannot be discarded. As a result, many organizations have hundreds, even thousands, of defunct applications that are consuming budget dollars, taking up data center space, complicating IT management, and generally just getting in the way. The challenge is getting rid of applications without getting rid of the data which is tightly coupled to them. (more…)
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