More PCs, more servers, more software to patch, more data to store, and growing network complexity means your business's information technology environment is tougher and more expensive to manage than ever before. This paper considers important system, network, and data management issues and what you can do to ease the burden.

Cost-Effective Data Storage Solutions

Even smaller companies are seeing their data storage needs explode by as much as 50% to 100% per year.5-1 Depending on the nature of your business, there are a number of ways you can meet your burgeoning data storage needs. To ease storage management hassles, you may want to venture into some sort of networked storage alternative (see the sidebar at right entitled Data storage solutions: options).

To figure out what's best for your business, you'll need to ask and answer these questions:

• Is the data critical for continued business operations getting backed up in a timely and reliable fashion? If your overnight backups can't be completed overnight, it's time to rethink your whole process.
• How much care and feeding do data backups take? If they consume more and more administrator resources, it may be time to centralize and automate your backup activities.
• Do you have some storage devices that are overloaded while others are mostly empty? This signals a need for network storage.
• What kind of data performance do you need? If your data can't be accessed quickly enough by the staff who need it, you may require highly-available storage.
• Can your business afford to lose all its systems and data? Doubtful, so you need a disaster recovery system that replicates essential data and applications offsite.
• How much data storage will your company require over the next few years? Probably much more than you thought you'd ever need.

Patching and Updating Your Software -- Shortcut to Security

One of the most effective ways to protect the systems and applications on which your business depends is to make sure your software is up to date, since unpatched software vulnerabilities cause a majority of viral and worm-based security breaches.5-2

Fortunately, there are some actions you can take to ensure that your software is patched and updated in timely fashion:

• *Conduct an inventory of your servers and PCs, assessing potential vulnerabilities.
• Compare software version numbers, note which service packs have been installed on which devices, and check for previously installed updates.
• Do a patch dependency analysis so you know the prerequisites and corequisites of each patch.
• Establish appropriate administrative roles for patching, restricting the ability to patch based on responsibility.
• Determine your patching priorities and patch first those systems that are most business-critical.
• Check with your software vendors to see if they have established software update and patching programs.
• Consider automating your patch management processes so you can deploy patches as fast as possible, monitor them, and detect changes.
• Make sure your patch management automation can test patches and roll them back if necessary, since patches for one product can conflict with other software.

Why Software License Management?

Chances are that someone in your company is doing something with software that is illegal or dangerous to your corporate health. What's more, lack of awareness probably means you're spending more on software than you need to -- as much as 30% more by one estimate.5-3

Here's what you can do:

• *Conduct an annual, companywide software inventory/audit using an asset management tool so you know what you've got -- how many licenses? what for? where are there gaps? what is not properly licensed? where can you take advantage of volume licensing programs? what should be removed?
• Create companywide software standards, including a list of supported/acceptable software, and a policy stating that all software on your systems is company owned and that illegal or potentially dangerous software is forbidden.
• Educate employees about the dangers and penalties of software piracy and have them sign a software usage agreement to ensure they accept your policy.
• Centralize software procurement processes and buy only from reputable software vendors. If possible, establish a software controller function with responsibility for your firm's software inventory and license agreements.
• Monitor your software assets and uninstall anything that's outside of company standards.
• *Develop a software purchase plan that anticipates future needs and budgets for them.
• Maintain a software library that includes agreements, licenses, and software media.
• Develop software disposal processes that meet software license requirements -- and don't forget to remove software from storage media before it's surplused.
• Do selective ad hoc audits -- especially if your company is experiencing something unusual, such as large-scale development projects, high employee turnover, etc.
• Document everything, notably your company's software standards, purchasing processes, and its asset and license tracking systems.
• Talk to your company's lawyer if you have software licensing questions or issues you can't answer.
• The benefits of implementing software licensing management will pay off. Using the right tools to manage your software assets means you'll be able to:
• Know what software you have, who's using it, and whether the applications supported are being used effectively;
• Develop and implement software procurement policies that keep your business more secure; and
• Reduce software maintenance costs.

The result: you'll spend less on software; you'll be able to track its usage and intervene when it's misused; and you'll be able to plan more effectively for future needs.

Crossing the PC-Macintosh Divide

If your business uses multiple types of computer systems -- a mix of both Windows-based and Macintosh desktop systems for example -- then you know how frustrating it can be to move data between platforms or enable them to share network drives or printers.

Indeed, many people simply recreate data and content rather than try to move it from one desktop environment to another. Similarly, companies often duplicate equipment rather than struggle with sharing printers and network drives among their PCs and Macs.

Your employees no longer need to waste time on such tasks. Today, there are many low-cost, easy-to-implement products that are available to make short work of PC-Macintosh compatibility. So before you buy that extra printer or start someone re-keying, research the various PCMac cross-platform integration tools. It will save time and money.

Moving Beyond Manual Desktop Migrations

Even if everyone in your business uses the same kind of personal computer hardware and software, each of those desktop systems is unique. Not only do end-users maintain unique content -- documents, address books, web page bookmarks -- but each one also has modified hardware and software settings to suit individual blends of job requirements, personal needs, and personality.

Thus, when it's time to migrate to new operating systems, applications, or hardware, doing it quickly and cost-effectively has been a challenge for both end-users and the IT staff they turn to. One estimate puts the minimum cost of manual migration at over $200 and as much as seven hours of a technician's time per desktop. So what can you do?

Tips and Tactics to Ease the Migration Pain

Here are some suggestions:

• Develop a comprehensive migration process that identifies the migration tools to be used and defines what needs to be migrated -- operating systems, system and application settings, and data files.
• Make sure every machine and system has a unique identifier.
• Deploy migration software that can automate major portions of your migration process -- including extracting and storing each user's "PC DNA," creating an "image" (or "clone") of each user's desktop environment in a new operating system, applying appropriate applications and patches, and placing each user's PC DNA onto the new desktop.
• Create templates that enable (and control) customization for individuals as well as departments and even your entire organization.
• Implement advanced data collection capabilities so data can be found regardless of its location, and its retrieval controlled by file type.

Meeting Enterprise IT Challenges: Business Modeling Can Make a Difference As the world gets more and more complex, ensuring that your information systems, networks, and databases can effectively support your business gets more and more difficult. But competitive necessity demands that your company embraces new technologies and adapts to ever-shifting risks, more geographically dispersed resources, and shorter and more iterative development lifecycles.

Time for a Paradigm Shift

Successfully dealing with these challenges requires something of a paradigm shift -- from a focus on distinct and separate applications fulfilling isolated departmental requirements to a focus on the whole enterprise and the strategies and IT architectures that can integrate and streamline its parts.

Thus the goal of enhancing total business value and efficiency drives operational -- and IT -- choices and adaptations.

Business modeling software can help you take the first step toward making the changes your business needs. By combining modeling of data logic and processes, business modeling software provides:

• Visibility into the conceptual, logical, and physical elements of your enterprise, including your data and how, when, and where it's used; and
• Ability to generate enterprise models -- including risk management models -- that can be used to improve IT architecture and performance, optimize business processes, and tie together business requirements and infrastructure management.

The view of your organization derived from business modeling can help you assess the risks, costs, and benefits of the changes you make and avoid expensive mistakes.

When processes are defined, managed, and optimized in this way, a company can reduce project cycle time by more than 30% and cut application defects by more than 50%, according to estimates by The Software Engineering Institute.5-4

Well-designed business modeling can do these things for your business:

• Pinpoint and communicate business needs accurately across the enterprise.
• Verify that appropriate processes are in place to achieve desired results.
• Spot gaps, missing steps, and breakdowns in process/data interactions.
• Identify required resources, capacity, potential bottlenecks, and costs.
• Verify time-to-value or cycle Time.
• Use concurrent process and data integration to develop more effective solutions.
• Achieve faster time-to-market.
• Improve cost management and avoidance.

Where To Begin

Here are some suggestions about how you can prepare your business to take advantage of today's business modeling tools:

• Create a logical data model of your business. This means mapping logical data to your physical databases and any enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications.
• Build a process model that describes (logically and physically) where your data is used. This means you'll have to associate your data with your business processes so that you'll be able to visualize information flow, business rules, decision logic, process sequences, and time relationships -- an effort that may involve business process modeling as well as workflow and information flow modeling.
• Launch more detailed analyses of costs, process and data design optimization, cycle times, and architectural concepts

A Positive Bottom Line

Doing business in the 21st century requires a set of tools different than anything the world has ever seen before -- computers for many employees, task-specific servers, multiple types of networking devices, data storage equipment, and a wide array of software -- all to support your company's ability to acquire, analyze, understand, and protect the information that has become its lifeblood.

For even the largest organizations, putting all these technologies and capabilities together in a cost-effective and productive way presents a serious challenge.

But it is, for companies of all sizes, a challenge made much easier with the right combination of data storage, software, desktop management, and business modeling tools, which together can save your business plenty by protecting your data and applications, reducing your IT costs, easing upgrade hassles, and helping you streamline your entire business operations.

Endnotes

5-1 Are big storage solutions right for small businesses? smallbusinesscomputing.com, April 2004 5-2 Patch deployment best practices in the enterprise, Robert Frances Group, CSO magazine, October 20035-3 Are you on top of your software licensing? Financial Executive, June 2004.5-4 Process Maturity Profile of the Software Community, Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, March 1999

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